Moliehi Sekese wakes up in the morning, packs up her laptop, fully charged, and heads of to teach her students at Mamoeketsi Government Primary School, Lesotho. From the minute class begins that morning, students crowd around her PC, exploring maths, science and other concepts through the glowing rectangle for as long as the charge lasts and then, when it's done, it's done.
Battery life is a perennial laptops-in-schools issue - give the students enough power to get through the day because charging up is so problematic. Cables everywhere, children having to work at the edges of the classroom where the sockets are…
But until last month, Moliehi's battery life issue was critical - she had no electricity at her school at all. Battery life isn't, for her, a mere inconvenience. It is the difference between further entrenching "the way it's always been done" and engaging children in the skills and global view that they can aspire to, given the tools to discover it.
Students have taken their parents' mobile phones to track their research into endangered plant life in their community, sending their teacher reports and updates up to midnight. They have sold sweets and oranges to raise money. What for? A school trip to the internet cafe 15 miles away. They used Moliehe's laptop - fully charged - and a borrowed scanner to grab jpgs of the hand drawn illustrations of the plants they were studying, making campaign flyers in Microsoft Publisher. The locals paid attention, where they hadn't before. Why? They had never seen flyers with ink so bright.
Moliehe is passionate about learning, and technology has engaged her students and the rest of the community in the projects students have undertaken. But it's her attitude to what she and her students don't have that presents a lesson many Western educators, complaining about technology provision or technology policy being a barrier to getting things done:
"It was a joyful experience to experience the unexpected. When the mind is prepared, the moment we are given the opportunity to integrate technology into the classroom. It's not about having 100 computers in the class. We have limited resources and we can do a lot.
"It's all about passion, love of what we are doing and also, we need to share whatever we have.
"Stop blaming the challenges. Use a stumbling block as a stepping stone to success."
See part of my interview with Moliehe in the video, above, or on YouTube.
Christien Meindertsma hasn't stopped appearing in my life for the past ten days. The TED Talk, above, and her appearance in FastCompany as one of the designers set to save the world are one thing. But her compelling passion for labelling what is known about what everything around us might be made from hasn't stopped ratlling around inside my head. Over three years her quest was simple: to find out how pig parts make the world turn, and start getting people to realise what goes into every object around them.
From meat to shaving brush hairs to bullets, pigs are some of our dearest economic assets, and what do they get in return?
More importantly, though, bullets?! Those are just one of the surprising things in which a bit of pork goes a long way. Her wish that we perhaps knew a lot more about the ingredients of the world around us is a powerful one, as only by knowing can we begin to have meaningful conversations about what sustainability actually means.
Stephen Heppell's use of the word "ingredients" is an intriguing one, too, in reference to learning - he, like me, picks up learning ingredients from all over the world and seeks to blend them into intriguing recipes for those who want to have a taste. But what are those ingredients? Is there a list? A handy set of things that tend to go together well? Other things that have been proven the educational equivalent of basil and coffee (try it - it's awful).
While Christien works on pigs, plastics and plasterboard, I'm going to start compiling my own ingredients lists. You can write your own recipe book with them, and wouldn't it be great if every blog post about good or interesting practice also came with its virtual post-it note of "ingredients used in this learning", and maybe that must-have of "if you can't get hold of this ingredient, then try x - it works just as well".
Free and unregulated cycle schemes sound like an impossible nightmare that we could never really make happen: someone will steal the bikes, they'll end up all over the country. Institutions therefore rally around and make it their business, quite literally, to provide secured bicycles for rental so that people cycle more.
It all seems so logical, but it's the kind of (successful but expensive) thinking from an old model of paternalistic "what can your country do for you", while some of the most exciting ideas, web platforms, institutions and technologies in the past five years have been all about "here's a platform, now what can you do for your country/peer group/friends".
I wanted to explore what a new business model around the old problem of bike sharing schemes might look like.
The $10,000 bike, versus the $150 bike
London's "free" bike scheme cost the locals and sponsors Barclays £25m for a programme that will run for x years. The cost per bicycle is therefore £4166. It's been a hugely successful scheme, with its millionth ride clocked up in just 10 weeks, and hardly any have been stolen (the bikes are a good bit heavier than Paris', where nearly 70% have been stolen or vandalised and required replacing).
But £4166 seems a lot for one bike, with Mayor Boris' £25m giving him only 6000 or so bikes. How much more powerful could things be if we did away with the expensive secutiy measures, expensive (heavy and cumbersome) bikes, big IT that supports such a project (and breaks down) and replaced them with the cheapest bike we can find, no security measures and a good dose of trust in our citizens, providing 163,000 bikes instead?
It wouldn't work here [insert any Western country].
Paris shows us that vandalism and theft of their cute with-basket model was a costly mistake. London has "beaten" its Gaullic neighbour with its highly secure and tech-ed up solution. Countless others, including some who've already tried totally unregulated free cycle schemes, have floundered, seeing all their bikes stolen in months.
But then Mountain View, California, sees its streets relatively free of the automobile (we are in the land of the automobile, after all). Most people opt to take one of the free red-yellow-blue-and-green bikes their main employer leaves unlocked, lying around. Why is Google able to do what entire Governments seem unable to achieve?
Is it cultural? It's partly that, but Google have done something that Governments are notoriously poor at: it's generated the culture it wanted, a culture of mutual respect, a culture of the gift economy, both through its business model, large free lunches and orange juices for visitors, staff and the visitors' taxi drivers, but also through its bike sharing scheme. We'll gift you this bike - and keep replacing them - but in return we ask you not to take us for a metaphorical ride.
And it works. It works, I think, because these bikes are everywhere and they're fun. They've been gifted by a neighbour of yours in the city, not provided for you.
So, if we were to take the Paris or London models, what is the answer to stopping people stealing bikes and having them appear all around the country? I'd argue that if Governments want people to take the bike and not the car, that's no bad thing. In fact, if we can harness thiefs as the distribution network for one bike per citizen, then I'd see more cash heading into the core solution to the problem: more bikes for people who don't yet bike.
As in Mountain View, there comes a point where the proliferation of an idea or an object turns it from scarce valued thing into a commodity. It lets everyone know where the bike came from - it's been beautifully painted in the company colours. Let's get our nations cycling to work (and cycling for play) by making cycling a cheap commodity. We used to give £250 for every child that was born. What would happen if we give a £100 bike for every adult who wants one?
More importantly, though, how could we harness the Google lesson I think I've spotted, in making public services gifted to people, rather than provided for them? What would the social fall-out be in terms of changing this language? What would the advantages be?
Nick Hood suggests that one of the education assumptions we have in the Western world is that education is a right; he asks "what would happen if we said that education was a privilege" or, in Google words, a gift?
Six weeks ago I met Tina Seelig at dinner in Surgeon's Hall, Edinburgh, surrounded by some of the gruesome medical discoveries made over the past 300 years that have helped define modern medicine. If ever there was a dinnertime discussion point about how we build on prior lessons of life (and death), this was it.
We got talking about those life lessons, about how I only worked out I wanted to start my own company about 12 years later than would have been ideal, about how I'd always wanted to write a book ("well, what's the first chapter about?", she asked), and about never getting to the point where you say "I wish I had...".
Tina, in this mini shrink armchair moment, suggested I have a read of her latest book, which I bought there and then on the iPhone and delved into over the course of two evenings.
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 is a gem, and I've bought at least a dozen copies as 'prizes' for people in my seminars this past month. This "Crash course on making your place in the modern world" is a collection of life lessons, examples from Tina's teaching at Stanford University's School of Engineering, entrepreneurship center and d.school, and great techniques for bringing out the best in yourself and the teams with whom you work. Here are some of my favourite elements of the book:
It's a great book, a quick read but one you'll come back to time and time again when you're needing some clever ideas for motivating a group around a challenge, or looking for some insight in where you go next.
Pic from Stanford BASES, permission pending.
Matt Jones' latest 'make' caught my eye: a shipping forecast rosary. I think it's more the nostalgia of finishing my dinner as a child listening to the exotic and far-flung-sounding German Bight and Fastnet, than any Catholic connotations, but it's also how he created it.
Ponoko allows you to submit your design idea and then, choosing from a wide range of beautiful materials and laser etching options, you can have it quoted, built, posted back to you doublequick. It's beautiful, allowing mere mortals like me to have our ideas made. It's CafePress for making things, as mum puts it.
For schools, I think there's something interesting in allowing that prototyping stage to be sped up. All too often, in the areas where we get closest to student-driven learning where we learn by making things, there is no time, space or money for prototyping several times before making the final product. In Craft, Design and Technology classes we prototype in isolation, theoretically, but then the learning we get from uncovering the real object is lost.
I don't think Ponoko is necessarily the answer, but I do love the speed element and the community of makers they're building up to help transform ideas into workable product. There's got to be a learning oportunity in there.
Two education change events in Scotland, within six days, handling some of the core issues we face here, and elsewhere, to make learning relevant, compelling and delightful for our young people. Yet the people who really need to take part in the conversations, parents and classroom teachers, would have been either working or taking a well-earned vacation. Houston, we have a delivery problem. The customer happens to be out.
This is why I've started planning the "Jamie Approach" to educational change, an ode to that faux-cockney who's wowed TED (do watch the video, above, and save a child from diabetes or premature death), brought school dinners to their knees across the UK and has attempted to turn Huntington into the healthiest city in the US.
The challenge with any educational change discussion is that the space in which it operates defines who hears the message and takes part in the converation. I'm a fan of spaces, for digital work or physical environment building.
Where does this education change conversation already take place?
Secret spaces: Educational elites form and use both the secret space of bar-room chat, email and text message to work out what 'they' want out of the system.
Group spaces: Facebook groups, Classroom 2.0... all these group spaces have worked well for the past two or three years in harnessing those who are already bought into the change process.
Publishing spaces: for up to ten years many of us have been sharing our outlooks and ideas in the hope that someone will listen, primarily through our blogs and podcasts.
Participation spaces: other than the wiki, which presents a skills challenge, we've not really capitalised on markets, meetings or events not related to educational change to champion these conversations. Hmmm.... a potential opportunity.
Watching spaces: nowhere has managed to take the debate to the masses, other than the recent US examples of Waiting for Superman and NBC's Education Nation, which have been met with cries from the educational bourgeoisie of being an unfair representation of the profession etc etc etc... But it's still the best way to meet the masses - through the most popular of our glowing rectangles.
I want to take these conversations into the places where most 'real' people, that (I hate the term) "silent majority" who would like to be heard. And I think that common ground, the place we all inhabit at least once a week, is the supermarket.
I could be terribly wrong. I've been terribly wrong in the past. But this feels logical. After all, it's the place where my parents, teachers in a small town school for 30+ years, met most of the parents of their students, ironed out disputes, got feedback on their teacher, received pearls of wisdom on how to turn wee Johnny around. Why can't we consider going back to that village utility of the grocery store or supermarket as the common ground on which we discuss what really matters: how teachers teach, and how learners learn?
I want to see a nation who, weekly, meet at the frozen peas, the stack of bread or the cheese counter, and, through these social objects, start making happen these necessary changes we've all talked about for years.
So, Tesco, Asda Walmart, Sainsbury's... which one of you big boys wants to be responsible for changing the British education systems wholesale-through-retail?
Discussions about how attention, finance and effort get spent on educational technology at a national level in any country all too often get drawn into a "We're right, they're wrong" play-off. It's been hard trying to formulate some thoughts after a meeting I was invited to last week by the Scottish Government. In Scotland, on the back of one day, at least, I felt the beginnings of a crack of enlightenment in some frank, sometimes painful discussions about where Scotland's educational technology line of vision might head in the future.
The discussion was conducted under Chatham House Twitter rules, in that the points from the discussion could be made public, but the person from whom they emaninated not. It meant that we were able to call it as it was, challenge and question each other for more detail. It does, though, make blogging about the experience tricky. I've been stung too often in the past from people with agendas, journalists who want to just make stuff up and those who oh-so-wisely but oh-so-naively believe it, by those who hear but do not listen.
There are some good roundups of the content of the day, and some of the discussions:
Instead of duplicating those points, I think I'd like to dump some perhaps unrelated thoughts that came up through the afternoon discussion I was part of, looking at learning from a student's perspective and thinking about what that might mean for a national technology for learning strategy.
1. Do we need Big IT doing stuff for us, can we just do it ourselves, or is there a sweet spot somewhere inbetween? With me on the day was Andrea Reid, a Quality Improvement Officer from the south of Scotland, and in her summary of the day she quotes one of her students, summing up a latent tension any centralised or national technology initiatives hold:
I was with a group of P7s and part of their group getting over a high wooden wall, with no footholds ( about 12 feet). It was one of those team efforts where everyone had to get to a platform on the top, and I promptly interfered and gave advice. One boy took himself out of the group and wandered off to the side – completely adamant he wasn’t getting involved. Eventually he came over and said to me – “Look when you stop helping us I’ll get involved.” Point duly taken I backed off and he worked with the others to get everyone over in a really fast time. His leadership and collaboration with the others was outstanding. At feedback later his comment to me was "When you learn to trust us to solve our own problems, you’ll find we can do it and even if we can’t we’ll have tried our best". Clever boy, who had been really hard going in class previously – disengaged and hard work. Big lesson for me…
The assumption that Government knows the problems that need solved and then goes in to sort it all out is one that has blossomed in the last dozen years or so. But, as we hit these times of austerity, it's the lack of cash to go around that's forcing (or allowing us to take advantage of) an attitude of "it's not what your country can do for you, it's what you can do for your country".
Does Government not have to think about how it goes about Big IT, and whether it goes about Big IT projects at all? There were as many of us wanting to see an increased role of an open marketplace as having more investment in the state-run Glow learning platform, in a "where would you put your money" exercise.
2. National technology for learning projects that are about connecting learners, parents and schools seem to have forgotten something: Facebook has all the mechanics required to do this, and the critical mass to make discovery of others easier. Facebook might only be useful for the adults and older students amongst our learners, but where it fails, Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin etc come to fill in the gap. Could we not harness the open market better, rather than trying to compete against them?
3. "Safe" is the (wrong) key word of most national learning technology initiatives. In Scotland, the 'safety' of Glow has been over-stated, and has been used as a crux by some to avoid delving into the issues that Facebook and other social networks and virtual worlds bring in the real world, both for adults and for children.
4. No online service should ever be so unintuitive and hard to use that it requires training to learn how to open it, let alone how to harness it for deeper or more collaborative learning. Design is vital, and has been ignored - is still ignored - in national education technology projects. Get BERG to do it right.
5. The underlying problem for national education technology has nothing to do with technology. We're solving the wrong problem by throwing money at training and code, when the real problem lies in collaboration itself. Collaboration across age, stage and school subject gets more difficult from nursery onwards. Nursery is the fragile balance between schooling, play and life-learning that we should struggle to maintain throughout formal education. Until we get to grips with how to better plan learning, particularly in secondary education, then the vast majority of "collaborative" technology is a wasted effort. We should be looking at how we can have more schools consider their curriculum through the lens of a learning wall, how they can generate truly student-led learning.
6. National collaborative technology projects assumed that the gatekeepers - parents and teachers - think sharing is a good, worthwhile activity. Sharing is a good thing, and is the lifeblood of great creative ideas (no hyperlink to prove it - there's a ton of literature and evidence out there; start off with my delicious links if you like). But vast swathes of teachers don't think so. If there are still relatively few teachers sharing on weblogs, for example, it has nothing to do with the weblogs or other choice of sharing tool, and everything to do with their perception that spending some time thinking, reflecting, committing to (e)paper and sharing that with as wide an audience as possible is a futile, useless, time-consuming activity that competes with many others of greater perceived importance. It would be worth £35m working out how to crack that one first.
7. National technology projects have largely failed to delight. The reason games-based learning is so popular in the past four years more than any four year period prior to this is down principally to the exponentially improving field of video game narrative, graphic, motion controllers, augmented reality and storyline. The second key ingredient in helping this culture spread is a committed (but tiny) team of individuals who can help empower teachers to weave their own stories around those video games, and in turn inspire learners to do the same. Had the Consolarium team been peddling ZX Spectrum text adventures in 2010 I doubt there would have been the same excitement and tremendous uptake of a new set of contexts for learning.
Great technology and national condoning and pushing of it have combined to delight.
While social networks, virtual worlds and social media have been delighting growing numbers since 2005, national technology projects have tended to not only fail to condone their use for learning, but to distract potential users - publish here, not there, they try to persuade us. "Facebook is used by teachers for their personal lives, not for learning" I've been told. But I don't play video games to learn, either, yet I and many others are happy to harness them for learning in a different context.
8. National technology projects tend to see decisions made on beliefs and passions, not on transparent data. I want Glow's homepage to tell me:
- monthly unique visitors
- segementation of visitor types: teachers, learners, parents, admins, LTS staff etc.
- number of pages served
- dwell time
- number of unsuccessful log-ins
- bounce rate
- percentage of returning visitors each month
- peak user access times
- key pages served
I then would love to see data-driven decisions taken as to whether certain elements of Glow are working or not, and a weekly or monthly trial of new ideas to see if the public bite. If data is made public then we can see the rationale for decisions, rather than seeing them being made on gut insinct, the legacy of the project's history or who has been involved at any one point. I could ask for that information monthly on a Freedom of Information request. Or we could just see the decision-making process as transparently as it should be.
9. In Scotland we tend to be happy with being the first in the world, not the best in the world. Glow was the first national schools intranet. It might be the last, too. The implication is that an intranet is the best medium through which to connect learners, teachers and parents on a learning journey. Why is it? It may not be.
Is there something less compelling about the International School Bangkok's portal of learning that Jeff Utecht has kicked off, connecting to the world, where every student and teacher regularly contributes their learning to each other (and anyone else who wants to listen in) through freely available and free platforms?
Or what about the part automated, part teacher-produced feedback mechanisms of the Indian Mindsparks platform, letting students learn new concepts and reinforce their classroom learning on their own terms?
Or what about the transformative power of a teacher simply sharing to the world, in the form of video, what he and his students have made over a week: a village on stilts anyone?
Tinkering School 2010 Seniors - Village Building from gever tulley on Vimeo.
By limiting ourselves to promoting so heavily what we were the first to produce we limit ourselves away from harnessing the great new platforms and communities that others have forged and which are quietly thriving.
10. In 2005 there was little truly great content on the web. In 2010 we're spoiled for choice. Having great content was one of the things Glow was sold on - successfully - in the early days. Like so many other things, the world changed faster than we could have imagined. TED Talks alone prove the huge value we place on world class content but, unlike much of its education content provider cousins, TED found a business model that allows it to make this learning material free, joining its closer cousins MIT Open Courseware et al. As YouTube seeks out new ways to let us rent or borrow content as and when we need it, what role is there left for a tiny national schools intranet as the curator of 'quality' content? Can one group of curators, however greatly qualified and localised in viewpoint, beat the cream of the world's global curators?
11. We don't want to consume content. We want to learn through experiences whose context is relevant and meaninful to me. Too many have told me about their Glow training sessions with this phrase: "We were told that 'this is how you put up your PowerPoints or class notes for everyone to see." The fact is, this is not the kind of learning we want. If someone feels that their learning can be swiftly and easily uploaded to a site in the form of a PowerPoint or worksheet then something is wrong. How can an online experience back up and augment the real world experiential learning we see in some of our best schools? How can that experience each child experiences differently be represented, shared and developed after the fact? It's certainly not through document stores and half-empty forums.
12. We want a sense of audience - sometimes that's beyond our class, school or country. The biggest challenge with any national platform is going to be that word - national. Our students are already empowered to go international every time.
The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments from Ewan McIntosh on Vimeo.
Matt Locke originally came up with the concept of the Six Spaces of Social Media. I added a seventh earlier this year, Data Spaces, and have played around with how education could harness these spaces, and the various transgressions between them, for learning.
This short presentation tackles the potential of adjusting our physical school environments to harness technology even better. What happens when we map technological spaces to physical ones?
I've been a Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) for nearly three years now, and have spent 2010 on the advisory board for its Opening Minds Curriculum, which relaunches this year and next with added support for those seeking new models for the new education paradigm.
It is therefore timely, with a first relaunch event this Tuesday in Birmingham of the Opening Minds Curriculum, that Sir Ken Robinson's seminal (but probably not viewed enough in education circles) RSA Vision Talk has been transformed into a shorter RSA Animate sketch.
He delves into the myth of ADHD, the importance of the aesthetic senses, waking up learners to find what they have within themselves, and how we collaborate. Go on. Watch it.
