Students in schools around the world find that their research, creativity and learning potential is seriously curbed by filtering and lack of use of their own mobile and gaming devices in schools. This comes from research spanning the Americas, brought to my attention by its author, Research Consultant Kim Farris-Berg.
Kim got in touch with me to highlight the research she carried out in the summer of 2008, across the USA and swathes of South America and Australia. Filtering of sites they use at home for learning is the number one obstacle for high school students, arguably those in whom we should be able to place more trust thanks to more time learning about how to exploit the web wisely:
The digital divide between schools and 'real world' is also an increasingly common complaint across communities both well-off and poor:
This would seem to correlate with the completely unscientific but anecdotally true "Friendwheel research" I've often shown in my talks and keynotes, showing that compared to media workers and young people, who connect furiously with one another all the time, teachers and other public servants tend to connect to "the person next door", with relatively little cross-fertilisation across sectors, age-groups:
It's not as if teachers and teaching leaders don't see the potential of bringing in student devices to make up the gap, either:
Education leaders' role in transforming the obvious into the reality
However, one would have to ask why leaders aren't transforming this 'obvious' feel and understanding into action more often. Number one on that list of engagement and learning tools, too expensive for schools and education authorities to buy en masse, would be the plethora of ever-evolving, ever-entertaining, ever-educational (in the right hands) gaming consoles:
We know (mostly) that it's true, that it can have valid effects and, for various reasons including incompetence and ignorance, we don't act. The buck stops, I think, with middle management, with the leaders in schools and in the subject departments in those (secondary) schools. It's not that they are necessarily people who should have acted earlier.
No, I wonder if we're not losing faith in an increasingly bureaucratic group of non-educators who currently run our networked affairs, a group that are increasingly finding their own specialism - technology and network management - eaten away by democratising technologies and the cloud, and by a more enthusiastic, creative and demanding set of users (teachers students and parents) than they, as specialists, will ever be able to support effectively.
The support, like the technology, has to become more crowd-sourced, more with the users than the managers. By failing to move quickly and creatively enough with their technology management, they, like the newspaper business, may soon find their position unsustainable in the larger scheme of things.
It's well worth taking some time out of your day to read Kim's full report, available as a PDF from the tomorrow.org site.
Pic of the groovy MOMA Gaming Console from ViaGallery, with more here.
I've explored before how the number one element in quality education systems is the teacher, according to the growing pile of research. But do parents and the children themselves not have independent roles that, regardless of teacher intervention, have their effect on the course of education's transformation? Of course, they do.
There is, after all, an undeniable role of parents in the faring of their offspring, a role that is often better fulfilled, though not as a rule, in more affluent areas than poor ones, more university-educated communities than not. There are even the first glimmers of this correlation in some maps coming out of the USA, with more, I hope, to follow from 4iP's work in the mapping domain, making English schools maps like this and impenetrable uncomparable Scottish banks of data like this begin to tell the stories behind the data.
We've also seen the importance of parents, top management and full complements of school staff both understanding the point, the issues and the opportunities of using, say, social media in the classroom, or undertaking active learning techniques or coupling them with games technology. The eduBuzz social media platform and community I helped create with David Gilmour in 2005 goes from strength to strength, building an open platform and enticing small passionate groups onto it. To some degree, it has tended to ask for forgiveness later rather than stop trying now, let people in for the richness they have to offer, and rarely chucked - or had to chuck - anyone out.
But eduBuzz moments are in the minority. I don't think parents feel as involved or in control of the more overarching elements of their children's destiny as education policy wonks would have us believe. I also know firsthand how quickly one falls from being "in education" to being "out of education": within weeks of starting work at Channel 4 I was no longer a 'teacher' but a 'media' person (can't I be both?), and I've oft heard the remark of whether someone who's not an active teacher can ever have anything worthwhile to say about education and learning (from consultants to pushy parents...).
We have over the past 10 years talked increasingly of the importance of professionalism of teachers, though the policy-talk has a long way to go before being translated into action in some areas. But, as Julie Lindsay pointed out in a discussion this morning, it's maybe long overdue that we start conferring that same professionalism, with its responsibilities and expectations, on parenting and on young people. For young people, this means caring enough about what they have to say on learning to take major decisions on the back of it. For parents, it means helping parents in parenting as well as giving them a reason to want to think about learning (and not just when their child starts to falter or when they're seeking out a new school).
Local schools often do a great job in communicating to teachers, if not always at providing platforms that allow them/us/the kids to respond, question and bring to account publicly. But on some of our biggest ongoing education transformation discussions we all have to ask two questions:
Pic: All Rights Reserved: Binxie
One of the things I really do miss about traveling around the world and staying over in kind strangers' houses is the craic that you can have as you talk about the off-conference off-consultancy stuff: music, books, films...
Last summer in Boston, having presented the keynote at Building Learning Communities 08 (this year it's Mssrs Heppell, Weinberger and Benjamin Zander of TED fame), the conference host Alan November had my whole family around at his lovely house in Marblehead, MA, for a weekend of food, drink, fishing and music, along with the Davitts, Torres and Promethean's very own Sonny Magaña. A man of hidden talents, Sonny woo-ed us all with his tunes and charm. Take a peek at the above composition, in HD on YouTube. One memorable moment amongst many.
One of the things I really do miss about traveling around the world and staying over in kind strangers' houses is the craic that you can have as you talk about the off-conference off-consultancy stuff: music, books, films...
Last summer in Boston, having presented the keynote at Building Learning Communities 08 (this year it's Mssrs Heppell, Weinberger and Benjamin Zander of TED fame), the conference host Alan November had my whole family around at his lovely house in Marblehead, MA, for a weekend of food, drink, fishing and music, along with the Davitts, Torres and Promethean's very own Sonny Magaña. A man of hidden talents, Sonny woo-ed us all with his tunes and charm. Take a peek at the above composition, in HD on YouTube. One memorable moment amongst many.
I'm angry. I'm bemused. This is the sight from the school-based computer of one teenager in a Scottish Local Authority as they try to access what is, arguably, one of the best web safety and media literacy sites in the UK, Government and European Union supported and funded. An Education Authority (District) has the site blacklisted as being part of a cult. Uhuh...
The Education Authority hasn't taken the proactive step to make sure this site is free and open to use on its computers, a site that is included in nearly every Government-issued piece of guidance on web safety and media literacy. It's February, more than halfway through the school year, and the issue has only just been noticed. Sites like this form part of an education authority's statutory duties of care to students. Being safe online and being able to access information online is not just an added extra in 2009.
Update: I'm reminded, also, that a summary of reports that was intended to be shared with Local Authorities (I don't know if it ever was), which I produced in my previous employment, included a recommendation from Tanya Byron's report to Government that filtering no longer be done with a top-down approach. It must be collaborative with children, empowering them to take responsibility for their online behaviours (paraphrase).
As such, I'd say this is, or borders on, incompetence. At the very least it's lazy. This is the kind of mistake that shows a systemic lapse in our education establishment's ability to encourage informed and proactive actions from those in educational and technology management. At the very least, I'd like to see that someone, somewhere in the strata of Scottish education management cares enough to make this a rather more public case study of how not to operate. It's only from errors like this that others can learn, after all.
I'm angry. I'm bemused. This is the sight from the school-based computer of one teenager in a Scottish Local Authority as they try to access what is, arguably, one of the best web safety and media literacy sites in the UK, Government and European Union supported and funded. An Education Authority (District) has the site blacklisted as being part of a cult. Uhuh...
The Education Authority hasn't taken the proactive step to make sure this site is free and open to use on its computers, a site that is included in nearly every Government-issued piece of guidance on web safety and media literacy. It's February, more than halfway through the school year, and the issue has only just been noticed. Sites like this form part of an education authority's statutory duties of care to students. Being safe online and being able to access information online is not just an added extra in 2009.
Update: I'm reminded, also, that a summary of reports that was intended to be shared with Local Authorities (I don't know if it ever was), which I produced in my previous employment, included a recommendation from Tanya Byron's report to Government that filtering no longer be done with a top-down approach. It must be collaborative with children, empowering them to take responsibility for their online behaviours (paraphrase).
As such, I'd say this is, or borders on, incompetence. At the very least it's lazy. This is the kind of mistake that shows a systemic lapse in our education establishment's ability to encourage informed and proactive actions from those in educational and technology management. At the very least, I'd like to see that someone, somewhere in the strata of Scottish education management cares enough to make this a rather more public case study of how not to operate. It's only from errors like this that others can learn, after all.