Having blogged some of the key points I picked up from Ken Robinson's The Element, you can hear some of them from the horse's mouth from the film quickly chucked up from last week's lecture at the RSA in London.
In 2007 I was one of a merry band of four geeks and entrepreneurs who kicked off the BarCamp phenomenon in Scotland. Back for its third year now, I'm over the moon that 4iP is able to support an event that can provide the launchpad for new collaborations, ideas and inspiration in the online and mobile space.
The invite is open to the event on March 14th at Edinburgh's School of Informatics' Appleton Tower, and anyone with an interest in learning more about what's going on in the digital space or who has something to share can sign up their name on the BarCampScotland site.
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. In the evening there is a (for some time, at least) free bar and one of the country's best opportunities to network with a wide range of entrepreneurs, startups, coders, creatives and researchers.
The opportunity for learning how Scotland's own technologies and talent can further our ideas is priceless. You can get a flavour for previous events on Flickr. The pic here is from Mike Coulter.
Ken Robinson's "The Element" gets launched in the UK this week. It's a superb tome, and one that every educator, employee or entrepreneur should read, if only to check that they themselves are in the right place personally and professionally. Do your natural talents and passions meet at the same time and place, or are you plugging away at the wrong thing completely? Ken's book contains no simplistic lists of things one must do to survive the 21st century - it's Johnny Bunko for the over-educated.
Update: The RSA have now featured a film of his Element Lecture from February 2009.
Many of the messages will be familiar to those who have viewed his famous TED talk which proclaims, rightly in this blogger's opinion, that schools kill creativity. Why? Here's some of the stimulus from Ken's book along with some of my own observations, thoughts and inaccurate takes on the world of education.
Schools are built for, and in the image of, the industrial revolution
Schools are not only built for an industrial revolution past but also in its image - my first ever teaching placement in the most deprived area of Scotland was marked by every period of learning being 53 minutes long, something more like a chicken processing plant's shifts than a stimulating learning environment, with students batched by age and subject to standardised tests for quality before shipping to the real world. Conformity has thus always had a higher value than diversity. Disciplines on offer are subject to a hierarchy (maths and native language, followed by the sciences with music and the arts chasing the coattails).
Creativity and standardised testing can't share the same bed
We know this set of unchanging givens is killing creativity not just in high schools, though generally to a much lesser degree in primary schools, but also in Higher Education establishments. As the number of school leavers not in employment, education or training (NEET) creates a political headache for governments around the world, they are failing to tackle the continued problem in universities and colleges where the numbers also falling into the NEET category are surpassing the figures for high schools.
From recent personal experience of the 'creative output' of some UK Higher Education institutions I can vouch for a killing of creativity, independent thought and entrepreneurship, as hoardes of undergraduates and MScs fight to conform to what university markers want to see and take advantage of the spread of 'cramming courses' at the expense of pursuing personal passions at their best effort. When working on personal projects that are put forward for commissioning (i.e. asking for several £00,000s from the likes of 4iP) or for national and international media and technology prizes, the constraints of the learning environment ("a one-month unit using only x or y software") are used to justify downright poor propositions. Where's the passion that makes them stay up until 11pm and be up at 5.30am to work on their Big Idea? (These are the times 11 year olds at the New York KIPP schools regularly keep to tackle their learning, something about which they, at least, are passionate).
I said earlier that elementary schools have largely escaped this struggle for conformity, but even this elevated position is being gnawed away by standardised tests and curricula. Nothing in the past three years has made me more depressed about the state of education in England than hearing a young Wolverhampton child, part of a PDA-in-the-classroom project, saying that his prime goal from learning was to "get a five" - I still have no idea what "a five" is, but I have a feeling that it's not something that inspires me.
The death of entrepreneurship
This desire to "get a five" or to gain the best possible SAT test result is based on a wrong assumption, both in the creation of such tests and their perceived value in the wider world, particularly in the growing creative sector (worth £50b a year in the UK). Malcolm Gladwell's (right) Outliers, which I read immediately after Robinson's Element, offers a great counterpart in where creative success comes from in the first place. It explores the element of chance, background and opportunity in one's success, but also the need for a serious superhuman degree of practice at something before you reach the beginning of your prime, somewhere, that is, in the region of 10 years or 10,000 hours of passionate practice.
In the schooling environment we still see in most countries' high schools and higher education establishments, it's rare that the personal passion of a young person is given the chance to steer activity, resource and time in order that they might get close to achieving that 10,000 hours quicker. But it's not all the fault of institutions' structures and strictures.
More often than not, the successful student pictures themselves working in the 'safety' of faceless institutions rather than taking their passions and ideas to market themselves. History shows more entrepreneurs who were not successful students making it in the relative unsupported privacy of their entrepreneurship. Most students fail to realise, as Robinson puts it so well, that a degree these days is not so much a passport to a good job and salary, but a visa, something that needs renewed on an ever more frequent basis. But institutions and Governments are not particularly vocal in promoting this fact, thus encouraging the self-perpetuating myth that going to univesrity is better than going to college which is better than following a passion that, while you're willing to spend every waking hour working on it, might not lead to anything.
What is it that needs to change? Clue: It isn't curriculum or assessment
Nearly every country I've worked in for the past three years, from India to China, New Zealand to the states and provinces of Canada and the USA, from my native Scotland to our neighbours in England and Wales, is fiddling with two things: curriculum and assessment. Technology is often seen as the means of making teaching and learning better. I don't want to tackle here whether it does, but one thing is sure, as Arthur C Clarke (via Sugata Mitra) put it: "If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, then they should." This doesn't mean that all teachers should be replaced by computers, of course. It doesn't even mean that poor teachers should be, really. What it does highlight is that the myth an education system has no poor teachers or even a large hump of mediocre teachers needs to be met head on.
We also need to recognise that, largely, those teachers who use technology the most effectively and lead the way with its use are also, by and large, excellent teachers with or without the technology.
This helps us see what many of us appreciate already: the one biggest element of improving education, making learning more creatively inclined and entrepreneurial, is the teacher. It's not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher's life easier) or even assessment. This is something I've been reporting back from research for two years (and which I've been blown out on more times than I can count). It's not about letting students lead the way with technology and "show us teachers" how it's done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.
No, it's how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.
Yet no national strategy - and I would love to be corrected - headlines pedagogy as the key factor. Think about it: A Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland); No Child Left Behind (assessment: USA); New Zealand's curriculum is about values, competences, subject areas... Also, there's no large educational business à la Pearson that places its centre of gravity around pedagogy forcing the issue with superb pedagogy-based programmes of change, and with good reason - the business of standardised testing, where pedagogy must play second fiddle to cramming and passing the test, is worth in the USA between $1.2 and $5 billion per year per state. How much is teaching the teachers worth? Currently, a lot less.
Fundamental change through Brains Trusts
When I was having a post-panel-session chat with Clay Shirky (I was on the panel and he was the first question-asker of the day) he talked about my current place of employment not in terms of what it was, but in terms of who was in it: "What a brain trust you guys have there", he said. What did he mean? He meant that the organisation employed what it felt were the best people for the job of moving its business forward, and left them to get the hell on with it. The result of feeling that you're part of this brains trust is that you strive more than you ever have to be the best in the world. How many times has someone called the teachers in your school a "brains trust"? Or, for that matter, the management team? Or the parents? Or the students? How many times a day are you aware that you're goal is to be the best in the world?
When we were developing eduBuzz for students and teachers in East Lothian, we centred it around the people, not the platform or the politique of the education authority's management (who, in some schools and particularly in the early days, riled against what we were doing). In a LIFT talk last year, I made the point of saying that its success as a project was probably down to the fact that it offered an immediate change from the importance placed on the school - school boards, school achievement, school councils - and moved it instead onto a level where individuals - people - were the focus. People, not institutions and paper-borne structures, are the sole way to help individuals find their element, nurture it and take advantage of that for the greater good. It's just that most people who have ound their element have had to go and create their own institutions or projects to find a like-minded tribe - education institutions where one is packed away by age and ability, ability determined through standardised tests, are not the place to find fellow tribesmen and women who want to be the best in the world.
It's the nurturing of the brains trust in one's place of work or place of learning that counts the most if we are to improve learning. Schools are pretty poor at identifying talents that are not testable, yet alone nurturing it (this happens thanks to the actions of individual teachers rather than a systemic ability and framework to nurture talent, in the same way as, say, a broadcaster like Channel 4 does; there, the raison d'être is to nurture alternative voices and new talent, with a budget and infrastructure built more or less solely around this. My own department, for example, manages some £50m of public and private money to nurture new talent in online, mobile and gaming media alone.).
Making sure that our current and future students in schools and higher education establishments are capable of entrepreneurship in many areas of their lives, of coming up with solutions that marry new technology (bringing with it new possibilities we could not have before thought through) with strong understanding of design to tackle issues that really matter is the number one task to ensure that they can fully participate as citizens. Simply providing access to part of that equation is not enough: broadband for all without understanding for all, community without happenstance on a global scale, a child's creativity without understanding of the potential technology brings.
Pic: How Intelligent Are You? | Malcolm Gladwell | C4 Offices
Ken Robinson's The Element | Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers
TeachMeet grew from a meeting of minds around some French food in Edinburgh, during the Spring of 2005. It was the first educational unconference that knew it was one, and continues to achieve as much or more than many 'cons' and 'uncons' that have since followed, relying on a simple set of unbudgeable rules to maintain a high bar of for-teachers-by-teachers structured and unstructured learning, with plenty of fun guaranteed.
I got a lovely email today from our colleagues in Holland, who had attended my first English TeachMeet at BETT in 2008 and wanted to hold one of their own. A year later they have done:
I love it when a good plan comes together. Check out some nice pics, and encourage them to do away with the rows the next time ;-)
The whole country will be connected to the web in 2012 via high speed broadband if Lord Carter's recommendations, released partly today and concluded in late Spring, are taken up. Given our current politique of grand public works to keep the country moving and the view that broadband infrastructure is as important as road and train infrastructure, it seems likely that this will happen.
The hope is that the digital divide will be broken down this way. The reality is that the very real and current digital divide is less finance-based and more to do with other complex often education-related issues, issues that are often linked to standards of living in general in socially deprived areas. The research tells us that people not online at the moment make this choice based on a belief that there is nothing of interest to them. For most people already online this is patently not true. The challenges for this die-hard digitally secluded group are
Laying cable alone will not make a difference to these groups. Schools' continued efforts to raise the media literacy flag's importance against a lot of other more sexy technology policies are required for tomorrow's generations. A lot more is required, though, to work with those who, for the next 40+ years are not in school, and not online.
At Channel 4's 4iP we announced last week that we would be venturing into this very territory, with Talk About Local:
Talk About Local will train several thousand people in 150 disadvantaged places in England to set up locality/community/neighbourhood based websites. The project will use UK online centres as its delivery backbone. Talk About Local will catalyse an online resource and community for people publishing neighbourhood or community websites, so that people can help each other.
Talk About Local is about giving people skills and empowering communities. The project will empower active citizens who already have a burning need to communicate as they campaign for cleaner streets, better schools, activities for young people or put on local arts or organise a village fete. Talk About Local will give these citizens the basic skills to communicate online more effectively and at less cost than using traditional means. By networking citizens together, they will be able support each other in their local activism, as well as on technical publishing issues. This will lead to stronger more effective community action.
Media Literacy is not just about learning how to use the net for the sake of it. The net is fundamentally a tool of and for democracy, to allow people to discover information, challenge authority and be entertained and educated. Talk About Local is one of the many projects 4iP will be commissioning over the next two years or so to make a dent in this huge task, with nearly all the ideas for tackling it coming from the very population it serves - you.
What are you going to do this week to make the web feel more worthwhile to folk in your community? What are you going to do to challenge those who block, filter and avoid the media literacy issue for the sake of expediency or, worse, ignorance? We've got till 2012 to answer. Your time starts... now.
Read the full Carter Report | Pic: I hate networking
The very moment Obama was inaugurated over 1000 images were captured and stitched together to create a navigable, zoomable, flyover-able capture of that second. Microsoft's Photosynth put to practice so we can all say we were there on the CNN site.
John Cleese provides a ten-minute insight into what many of us know already, but fail to acknowledge:
I've consistently found No. 1 hard, No. 2 happens all the time and is why I don't respond well to tight tight deadlines, No. 3 is my weak spot while No. 4 tends only to happen once everything (and everyone else) is satisfied. No. 5 I achieve well and is the reason airplane commutes were invented. No. 6 is harsh on most people I know read and comment on this blog but true for oh-so-many more. No. 7 is proven every day in blog posts from some leaders and educators whose wordcount on 'me' and 'I' is top heavy at the expense of 'you', 'we' and 'us'.
And you?
From Tessy
When bureaucracies kick in the real world stops. Obama started work for proper last week and hit the same problems that teachers, administrators and civil servants hit every day: the technology with which he and his advisers are so fluent, the technology that helped them win the election is blocked and filtered.
What does it mean? According to a fascinating piece in the Washington Post, no Facebook to communicate with citizens including his supporters (apparently 80% of the country at the moment), no outside email accounts or address books to maintain contact.
Officials also hit that well-trodden path of many a creative educator:
Jeff Jarvis makes a separate but related point, based on discussions he had two years ago as Britain's opposition party prepared digitally for an eventual (and as yet unheld) election: if you're going to win democracy with technology, you've got to continue governing with technology.
It leaves an interesting question for Obama in office, but also a question that filters down through the country's schools, hospitals and bureaucracies: if the White House and Downing Street increasingly rely upon social, mobile and gaming tools to survive and carry out their business to their best abilities, when will the obligation hit our other public institutions?
Obama is now the first ever President to have a computer in the Oval Office, in the form of the 'BarackBerry'. He's doing what millions of teachers and students are obliged to do - use mobile devices to circumvent the slow-moving load of bureaucracy.
Is it not time that this question is asked loud and clear and repeatedly by the lobby of millions of vocal teachers already thriving on the web: when can all our public institutions join the free world?
I was thrilled to hear that colleagues in Channel 4's Film4 (well, it's a table with two or three people at Horseferry Road) have had a significant hand in winning twelve Oscar nominations. All year they've been winning prizes for Hunger, and now Slumdog Millionnaire, In Bruges and Happy-Go-Lucky add to that.
Working in an organisation where every week its Chief Executive is able to send emails telling the whole staff of the latest world-class awards being nominated or won by colleagues is, I think, quite rare. But it also has the effect of raising everyone's game. How many jobs have you been in where every week, at least once, you're asking if the project you are thinking of doing or stuck in the middle of has the potential to be world class? Even the lead of Slumdog, Dev Patel, was discovered and had his first acting role on another award-winning production shown first on and made for Channel 4's teen channel E4, Skins.
If only more schools set their ambition levels at that level, not at the vagaries of "excellence" and "21st century", but at "world class". If only more teachers saw their role as contributing to the potential of their students to win the imaginary plaudit of educational Oscars or Webbys in the same way as a Commissioner at Channel 4 looks to make their independent companies' productions become the best in the world at what they do.
It's not that every idea gets there, but one thing is certainly true: We all get closer to world class by consistently working towards that level and being around others who do, too.
The film buffs amongst you might want to read more on the fine heritage of Film4. Meanwhile, I wonder whether anyone would have the guts to proclaim their Curriculum is not one for Excellence, but The Best Curriculum In The World. At least at that point, the goal is clearer for everyone involved.