School buildings as influencers of future practice, not responsive to existing practice
Digital land knows no boundaries of space, time or geography. The effect on learning in the past three years, in particular, has been profound, though not necessarily on learning in schools. More have arguably expanded their horizons through 20 minutes of TED Talks than 20 minutes of most chalk and talks or classroom activities.
Apply the principles of digital development to physical learning spaces, though, and we can imagine a totally different means of designing and constructing new schools, where the physical space takes on a role as vital as the technology itself in pushing on teaching and learning practice in schools by leaps and bounds. The moment for this type of thinking is ripe. It is now.
When we moved from Big Things For People to Enabling People To Make Big Things
Until about three years ago it still appeared acceptable for big organisations like Governments and their myriad of flabby institutions to create Big Things That Do Wonderful Stuff For People. It was a world of impressively large contracts, the Adam Smith notion that public services can only be made affordable if centrally purchased at driven-down prices and provided by private companies or grey-haired civil servants with, preferably, more than a couple of decades experience in delivering product or initiative.
Then we ran out of money.
And we started to pay attention to what had been going on out on The YouTubes and The Facebooks.
The internet showed that scale existed best when it came from tiny startups with big imaginations and no experience, given backing by those with the cash to explode their ideas to the big time but without their meddling (sleeping investors with great black books of contacts are the dream ticket in this land).
These billionnaire twentysomethings have shown that the money isn't in Big (Expensive) Organisations (with Committees, Stakeholders and more pdfs of policy than you could ever read) Do Stuff For People. The money shot was in Tiny Groups inventing Platforms That Allow People to Create Great Things For Themselves. JFK was a startup 40 years before his time: It's not what your country can do for you, it's what you can do for your country.
Now, architects, school planners and builders will still make a lot of money for a reasonably long time by procuring large contracts for many schools. But the clever ones will see the opportunity in thinking more like a startup and designing schools that are not designed around how teachers teach and students learn, but around how they could teach and how they could learn. The way architects pose their questions during initial consultations are hugely important. There's a difference between:
"What kind of building would help you teach and learn better?"
and
"What kind of teaching and learning would you like to do, and what things could we help with in making that happen?"
There also has to be a healthy dose of "gifting innovation", in never assuming that every building user or school-goer will know how far they could go. In fact, a good session of Best and Worst is a good way to help drop the "what I think I should be saying" and give way to the "what I really want is" conversations.
This is the kind of conversation that at least begins to turn the table from "let us deliver you a great building" to "let us work together to change the way we teach and learn in this place, with the building as one of its foundations".
They'll also have discovered formulae that permit the space to be changeable, on the whim of its project-based, student-led occupants' ideas, to be a nest-like room for one project, and a pirate ship the next.
The Nest Room at Wieden+Kennedy's office, with its stone-like comfortable sofas: schools could create rooms like this on a whim, to suit the project students have chosen to undertake at any given point. Pic from Tina aka the Swissmiss.
Living Learning Buildings
It takes between 3-5 years to plan and build a new school. That means that the buildings being opened this semester were kicked off in an era that maybe didn't yet know YouTube, and almost certainly hadn't logged into Facebook for the first time. They didn't know what a QR code was or how augmented reality could turn a blank wall into a webpage, into a video or into the view outside. Imagine a school whose best work and most intriguing learning failures could be viewed by passers-by through their mobile phones - a living learning building:
N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.
No, we were designing schools with steel and glass but essentially, by and large, the same spreadsheet-to-foundations layout inside.
The media world has worked out how to harness the user - education's got a thing or two to learn from it
The media world has been able to move from its equivalent of concrete foundations - the broadcast television show - to create new forms of interactive, co-created, crowdsourced- cohabiting with professionally-produced content. Aleks Krotoski's treatment of the BBC's Virtual Revolution is a textbook model of how a professionally produced doc is made better by giving all its ingredients away to the audience/users.
The approach of those schools who are able to "professionally produce" student-driven learning shows the same adaptability of pedagogy, notably from my recent trips in Albany Senior High, Auckland. Gever Tulley's Tinkering School and the kindergarten kids in Lanarkshire, Scotland, are further examples of what's possible when you reverse the point of the professional in the room: the professional is there to "tilt projects towards completion", as Gever puts it, not professionally produce the learning and 'deliver' it to learners:
When Tim Rylands was sitting with his students, rather than leading them from the front, in his immersions into the world of Myst, he was also changing the model into one of empowering the user/customer/learner to create great things for themselves.
And so to schools' physical spaces. This, in too many "award winning" school plans I've seen, is what is considered a must-have:
Even if not laid out in quite as uninspiring a way, the metaphor of this photo stretches into nearly every school and university. It's a space designed for something, but it's not anything that resembles how we really use technology when in the same room as other people. Let me explain.
The Seven Spaces
Matt Locke kicked off with six spaces of digital media that provided a framework for thinking about the media without having to refer to brands (it helps avoid what I call "The Hoover of the Internet" problem when we hear people talking about Facebook, when they really mean social networks, or talking about Google when they really mean... well, it could be anything). Last year, I added a seventh: data spaces.
When we look at the digital media we interact with, with whom we interact in each space and what that looks like in a physical environment, we start to see that these seven spaces provide a fresh format for asking teachers, parents, students and others what they would like to do in a new building, and then design a flow between the right mix of spaces for the projects they will undertake.
Secret Spaces
Examples: SMS, IM
Think about how you sit when you're texting someone. Go on, text someone now and get someone to photograph you. Now stand up, go for a quick walk around the room, and start looking up a webpage on your mobile phone. Get another photo taken. What do you see? When we're engaged in secret spaces (sending text messages to one other person), as opposed to public publishing spaces (like a webpage or even sending a 'text' to our hundreds of Twitter followers) our body language is totally different.
Therefore the consideration of physical space has to be made. In schools, where are the niche-ing private, secret spaces where we can curl up to text, read a book, perhaps read material that we wouldn't want our peers to see us read (thick books when our friends think it's uncool to read 'proper' books, sex education materials and advice books or websites)? Privacy is hugely important to teens in particular, more than adults tend to comprehend.
Maybe we need to think about temporary secret spaces, like the inflatable igloos of Glasgow's Saltire Centre?
Secret spaces needn't be unsafe, either. Take the most secret space we currently have, the WC, and you can see that, by placing the doors to open into a communal area we turn secret into public swiftly, without compromising either.
Group Spaces
Examples: Facebook, Myspace, etc
Digital group spaces work because they're engaged around one thing, and one thing only: how can we help people to find their friends and engage with them in sharing and conversation? Take Facebook's features, and you'll see that all of them, from the wall of friends' posts on login, to even the advertising, are geared up towards this goal.
Again, in school, it seems like most spaces, indoors and out, are geared up to making this virtual "gathering around the fireside" hard or impossible to achieve. Whether it's the distinct lack of outdoors seating areas that, if they're there, are set to face at opposing angles (and thus de-facilitate conversation) or desk and seating arrangements contrived to make us all face one way, or meet considerable pain in trying to shift things around, or even down to the de facto reasoning given for having 25-year walls separating our classroom spaces, school spaces are generally designed to stop people collaborating or talking to each other.
(image from Gareth Long)
The d.school at Stanford is one place, though, that realises less is more when trying to harness the existing groups and communities in our schools - leave the space as wide open as possible and provide the furniture, objects, lighting or moveable, hanging walls that are required on the side, and on wheels. Take a look at my photo set from an impromptu visit last week with Head Royce School's Head, Rob Lake, as we sought out how his school could change its learning spaces to in turn enable some amazing changes in curricular approach:
Want a wall? Take one. Need to gather folk around? Bring your own seat. Want a 'secret' space in which you can hide a bit? Make one. Need more whiteboard? Paint some. The Glasgow Saltire Centre continues this idea with its on-wheels moveable Palm Tree lighting, moveable inflatable igloos and little niches.
Publishing Spaces
Examples: Flickr, Youtube, Revver, etc
Online, when we publish a blog post like this or put up a photo on Flickr, we're hoping that people might find it. We're publishing, flinging it out there and hoping it sticks. The providers of publishing spaces have, over the years, done as much as they can to help these publishing spaces leak into other spaces, or transgress, so that blog posts are sent out to Twitter with ease, which in turn sends them to my friends' groups on Facebook and into individuals' RSS readers.
In schools' physical spaces, this for me is about how digital artefacts of learning can be shared through the building space, much like in the video above where Tweets from within a building are broadcast to its shell and viewed through mobile phones.
Performing Spaces
Examples: MMORPGs, Sports, Drama
Performing spaces allow people to be someone or something they are not. In World of Warcraft you can be grouping with hundreds of other warriors to win battles of epic proportions, while by day you're a computing science teacher.
In buildings, these performing spaces are traditionally seen as epic concert halls. Stanford's latest addition in the Bing Hall is one such epic extension to the learning environment. But these tend to be reserved for those who are not performing in a way that allows them to be something they are not - these spaces are about encouraging and showcasing those who have already worked out that they can be what they dreamed of being.
I wonder what the opportunity is for transforming learning spaces into temporary universes where we can immerse ourselves in a "imagine if" environment. It could be the nest room example, above, or it might be trying to offer buildings that enhance what great languages teachers, for example, have always done - create a feeling of entering into a parallel, slightly exotic French, German, Spanish or Chinese environment.
When the Bassetti architects gang explained how they created 5, 10 and 50 year walls in their school, each designed in a different way to be altered at those periods, I wondered what this might look like on more of a micro level, within one particular learning space. What are the 6-week, 12-week and one school year learning spaces we want to create for our student-led, project-driven work and what affordances do we require?
Maybe it's about turning school buildings into more of a game, especially for those who are new to them. I wonder what inspiration could fill a school build by drawing on the father who, when refitting his Manhattan pad, placed scores of quizzes, nooks, crannies and secret spaces within it for his daughters to discover their new home.
Participation Spaces
Examples: Meetup, Threadless, CambrianHouse.com, MySociety
MySociety were behind one of the most exciting projects that took place while I was at 4iP: Mapumental drew together every public transport timetable in the UK, every house price and a 'scenicness score' to offer an invaluable service to those seeking to move house for a new job. The video explains:
The last element of this project, the scenicness score, is the one where a participation space was created - that is, the scores were not decided by a jury, they were decided by bored office workers the country over who offered up a segment of their time to participate in the creation of a database of information. The project was actually a reasonably compelling game, ScenicOrNot.
In school buildings, what might these participation spaces look like? Well, continuing the MySociety fascination with open data, it might be in providing relentless data points where current energy consumption and production of the school can be monitored and added to or acted upon by any student. So far, some schools such as Gullane in East Lothian have got as far as showing the data of their energy consumption and production, but few if any have gone as far as creating a participation space where the community can actually use that data to change their actions or realise the impact of existing actions on the environment through their participation.
Or maybe it's as simple as looking to the creative industries to see the spaces in which they work and how they harness them. When IDEO employees meet to solve a problem, it's not clear where the boundaries of certain space and employees' ownership of that space lie.
And why are we not turning our school yards and grounds into Edible Schoolyards, the ultimate in participation spaces, surely, where we no longer pay for groundsmen to mow immaculate lawns but turn the entire space into a community garden that feeds the school and teaches us all about the sustainability issues of organic food?
Watching Spaces
Examples: Television, Cinema, Sports, Theatre, etc
Finally, watching spaces. These are the ones schools are probably most geared up to at the moment. However, if we change everything about the school from the norm being the front of the classroom to the norm being having no 'front' in the classroom, then we have a wonderful opportunity to really celebrate the great lecture for what it is. TED Talks have proven the global appetite for superb, but short, lectures. And yes, even youngsters are blown away by the performance of an amazing speaker.
By making the norm in schools one of collaboration and teacher as a guide, "tilting towards completion", then we can afford to create genial spaces for lectures, spaces that thrill and delight and celebrate those occasional moments of lone insight that only a real, living, flesh and blood teacher or visitor or student could ever offer.
Changing our approach to building school spaces in this way isn't easy, and it's a real chicken and egg as to "what comes first". The fact is, we need to consider building our bricks and building our curriculum at the same time. We need to be constructing learning walls with our teacher and student peers, but also with our architects and builders. We need to be looking at how our timetables can move from 45-minute, 90-minute or 2-hour chunks into something more akin to the flow we have when in the midst of a longer project (or blog post ;-). How could a building redesign bring us closer to the kind of learning flow achieved at the Stovner school in Oslo with a timetable like this? :
Want to discuss this more? Have a read of The Third Teacher, and visit my friends at Cannon Design, Bassetti, the Academy for Global Citizenship (started aged 23 by the amazing Sarah Elizabeth Ippel) or my own delicious links on building schools.
Tune into our Rebuilding the 21st Century Classroom and Student-led Learning Sessions at Bahrain's The Education Project this coming weekend.
The Tinkering School's Gever Tulley joins me on my panel at The Education Project in Bahrain this week. Tune in Sunday October 10th where I'll be tweeting and hopefully live streaming our panel on how students can lead their own curriculum by playing around, and with another group we'll attempt to rebuild the 21st Century Classroom.
There's an interesting experiment happening on Channel 4 (UK) at the moment, which makes me wonder what learning, schools and teachers might borrow from nearly-now nearly-live interaction between audience (students, parents, community) and "reality subjects" (educators, school management).
The show reveals the life of a score or so of normal people living in Notting Hill are followed each week by the cameras, their week cut up into one hour of docu-drama, and broadcast that night. The difference with most docs is that the flow of the programme, week-to-week semi-live, allows the "characters" to interact with their public, through the online site, Twitter and Facebook, but also through real-life interactions in cafés and the street. It's called Seven Days.
Matt Locke, helping to mastermind the online-TV mix here, noticed something the other night that he'd never spotted before:
About half-way through the latest episode of Seven Days, one of the characters, Cassie, took out her laptop and started talking about how people were talking about her on the show’s website. Sitting at home, monitoring the performance of the site on my laptop, I saw a huge spike in traffic as thousands of other people logged onto the site to see what all the fuss was about. This spike was higher than we’d seen the week before, when the rush of people coming to the site on launch night crashed the servers, and even higher than the biggest peak we saw in the final series of Big Brother earlier this year. We’d clearly hit on something, but what was it?
This is new for television. It's less new for live conferences where panelists interact with audience for real and on Twitter, responding and adjusting as appropriate.
It would be totally revolutionary, and slightly uneasy-feeling, for the vast majority of teachers. How would you react if students were criticising, feeding back or applauding your professional - and potentially personal - life online, raw and ready for you to react to the next time you see them online or in person? For years students have done this behind closed doors, or on the way home.
As we enter an era of online group spaces arguably being the most comfortable fora for young people to discuss their lives, I wonder how this would jar or excite.
Notes from The Education Project, Bahrain, complete with spelling errors, misappropriations and personal bias added without necessarily letting you know. Enjoy.
From the "eminently sensible department" Charles Leadbeater pulled this one from his recent Learning From The Extremes (pdf) travels in response to the feeling (shared) that there is a relentless expectation to import so-called global notions of education and learning to cultures that risk being eroded or lost as a result. (By "global" we often end up actually referring, at best, to North America or, more specifically, the US).
Not only that, but current "global" education trends tend to suggest, according to some in the Bahrain audience, that unity on principles rather than disparate understandings are the most desirable way forward. Here's what Charles thinks is a more helpful metaphor for understanding learning in a globalised world.
We see people trying to adopt national standards in a bid to "bring things together", but what works best is where ultralocal circumstances can be harnessed. In Kerala, India, the most important thing to learn as a young girl is how not to get HIV+, but this is not something you get taught in school. This pull learning is based around learning being pulled in by the learner's self interest.
"The new skills" of 21st century learning cannot be "delivered", in the same way as we deliver a pizza. They are encourageable, but they're not teachable (EM: certainly once we're beyond the click here, drag there stage).
Instead, new skills are pulled in by learners. In the developing world there's a formula you notice:Education + Technology = Hope
This formula can be seen in India, Brazil and China slums because the education is not pushed, it's pulled. Education based around learning in community centres is cheap and based around interest, and it would be wrong for these countries to seek the expensive models of High Tech High or the Finnish system.But technology is an aspect they have in common: the only thing that is as visceral as drugs to get drugs dealers who run the favela to pull learning towards them, according to one founder of an 18-year-old community centre.
The mistake is if we try to scale industrialised (Western) models when really we're talking about how to spread principles. The Chinese restaurant approach is a desirable one: there are millions of Chinese restaurants and we know what we'll get there, but there is no "Chinese Restaurant" brand.
Another great piece on the notion of spreadability of media, which applies in many respects to the spreadability of learning, can be found in the whopping eight-part post by Henry Jenkins, starting here: If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead.
Pic from Todd
Notes from The Education Project, Bahrain, complete with spelling errors, misappropriations and personal bias added without necessarily letting you know. Enjoy.
Charles Leadbeater opened the first panel this morning by noting that education policy often sets about tackling the wrong problems with a ton of solutions. Instead, he believes, we should spend far more time finding the right problems to tackle.
In questions, an American working at University in the UAE made some interesting remarks about what she considered the main wrong problem we're tackling in education reform:
"Our students are going to the web because that's where the network is. We are tackling the wrong problem. The problem we're trying to solve is making the one teacher in one classroom better. Forget about it. We know that four-teacher classrooms with 100 students, teachers working together, collaboratively, as we expect the students to do, work better than one-classroom one-teacher setups. Teachers are not super(wo)men - they're normal people who, like our students, work better together than on their own."
Pic from GoldenDragon
The chaps at BERG are one team that I'd love to engage on designing what a school space should look like. Not content with reinventing how we might read through touch devices, several months before the iPad was launched, they've now taken the device and shown us that it's not for reading after all - it's for creating 3D light forms that can dance, write and recreate city-scapes before our eyes.
Watch their video in HD to see the finished result of their experimentations, read the blog to see how they did it and see the behind-the-scenes pics on Flickr:
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
Project-based learning, or PBL, that happens in schools nearly always seems to be based around fake problems. I don't know how we manage it as educators, but if we can find a lame problem that needs solving, we'll give it to the students. In turn, we largely end up with students who are happy to play the game of working our fake problems, and even proposing more fake problems themselves.
Design Thinking, the immersion, synthesis, ideation and prototyping process of creative thinking that I've witnessed in the creative industries for the past three years and have, for the past eight months tried to bring to more schools around the world, is about solving real problems. The type that affect real people's lives.
Part of this is to do with the physical space of the learning environment, something we can work on in small steps or in revolutionary renovations and rebuilds, as I described last week. Some of this we can do, though, through our aspirations and subsequent actions.
From the Stanford d.school site comes this story, showing how something as 'traditional' as "studying a book for English class" can be given the Design Thinking treatment and come out a far richer, far more educational and far more useful experience for all concerned:
Her students were reading the novel Monster, by Walter Dean Myers, and their design challenge was to "create a way for inmates to feel more comfortable in their cells." They used details from the book and pictures from the Internet to immerse themselves in imagining what living in a small cell would be like. Melissa gave her students cameras and Andy asked if he could take the camera to the jail where his father was currently serving time and bring back pictures to add to the class observation chart. Andy had not visited his father for quite some time.
At the facility, he was not allowed to take pictures. Instead, he took detailed notes. He also brought the book with him and read to his dad for over an hour. In recounting this story, Melissa said that she believed that Andy just needed a reason to visit his father and felt that he could contribute in some way to him though this project.
Soon after, she noticed that the book began traveling with Andy everywhere. It was always in his hand as he walked through the hallways, replacing his ever-present football. She believed that it became symbolic to Andy, representing a bonding moment between him and his dad, and a connection that he had been he yearning for. The following week, Melissa brought the class to the Elmwood Detention Center to prototype their designs. While there, Andy met Sergeant Liddle ,who tested their prototypes. After his positive experience at the prison, Andy has set a goal to become a police officer. Since that challenge, Andy has not yet been back to see his father and his football has returned to his hand. However, the design challenge became the hub of a wheel for Andy that brought together family, literacy and community.
Picture of the d.school learning space from my visit last week.
If I said that your worst solutions for the challenges you're facing might just be your best way out of a tight spot, would you believe me?
When you ask a room of teachers (or any professional for that matter) to come up with their "best" solutions to a problem you often tend to get great ideas, but not always the best ones. They can be contrived and almost always involve some self-censorship from the team: people don't offer anything up unless they feel, explicitly or subconsciously, that it will get buy-in from the rest of the team or committee.
At a time when education budgets have never been smaller, and are only going to get smaller, this kind of thinking that defaults to the "old ways" of doing things - expensive committees, organisations, meetings, 'experts' - just won't cut it any more.
But ask people for their "worst" solutions to a problem and people tend not to hold back at all - laughs are had and the terrible ideas flow. And while the initial suggestions might feel stupid, pointless or ridiculous to the originating team members, these awful ideas can take on a spectacular new lease of life in the hands of another, unrelated group.
By insisting on a "yes and" approach, rather than a "yes but" approach, a fresh set of eyes can turn these "worst" ideas into the ones that will save money, improve service, or make people happier in the workplace.
On Friday last week I used this exercise with Scottish Borders Council who, like every public body in the UK, are seeking creative ways to maintain the quality of their services for millions of pounds less (they're already top of the charts in terms of their efficiency in delivering the quality services they do). The results were brilliant, and I've challenged the 160 or so leaders, from across education, roads, infrastructure, health, social work etc that I was working with, to share their ideas on a team forum and then put their ideas into action by Christmas. Some of the best worst ideas were:
How one 'stupid' idea could save £12.5m a year
I don't know the precise figure spent on fruit and vegetables, cleaning and gardening throughout schools in the UK, but these ideas, applied nationally, could have a positive effect on what and how students learn, as well as saving at least a few million (window cleaning alone is £25,000 a year in one English borough, which nationally would lead to a saving of at least £12.5m a year).
The inspiration to use this exercise came from Tina Seelig's great book, Things I Wish I Knew When I Was Twenty, a manual if ever there was one of creative ways of getting others, and yourself, to look at your school, business or parenting. Why not try it in your next Council or school session, and see how you can make services better for eveyone for less.
If you have a teacher who doesn't regularly reflect on how they're teaching, why they're teaching that way and who doesn't ask students, colleagues and parents how things could be improved the something happens after about 3-5 years of leaving teacher-training college: the teacher reverts to the way they were taught.
This line of research comes principally out the world of sports coaching, where many papers show that in times of extreme stress or imminent failure, coaches forget the progressive (and otherwise successful) coaching they were taught how to do and instead revert to the way they were coached, anywhere from 10 to 50 years previously.
It was the basis of an exercise I carried out with about 100 teachers on my recent tour of New Zealand, and was inspired after a two-minute conversation in the car home with Derek Wenmoth, one dreich evening in Christchurch.
I asked the teachers in two workshops to take two minutes and write down, without thinking too hard, their best experiences and then, in another two minutes, their least happy experiences in formal education (primary, secondary and further education). We put all their post-it notes on the wall in two columns and then looked for similarities, trends and opposing standpoints.
The convergence on certain themes was amazing. Here are the most positive experiences that came to light, with the most prevalent first:
and, here, the least happy experiences:
You can download the full transcription of their post-it notes here: download Most Happy Experiences and download Least Happy Experiences.
What do we learn from this?
Firstly, I'd argue that all the elements we see in the "least happy" list are observable in most schools at some point in one school semester. There are poor teachers, teaching as they were taught no doubt. They need to found and encouraged/made to reflect on their own experiences as a learner in order to improve their game.
I'd also argue that most classrooms, more regularly than the least happy experiences, exhibit plenty of the top behaviours we enjoyed as learners.
Thirdly, if we reframe the least happy experiences in terms of what remedies we might spot, we see yet more attitudes and policy choices that we've just been too slow and hesitant to implement:
Mathematics consistently comes out as an irrelevant or overly difficult subject to be learning - why are schools still buying in the old media that generates this confusion, and not empowering their own learners and staff to reframe mathematics with Meyer's "Less Helpful" lens?
Teachers who appear unapproachable, not really part of the class so much as a teaching machine - if we move from knowledge transmission models of learning to learning by making and doing, then the role of teacher naturally shifts from site manager to foreman.
Finally, I spot elements that we enjoyed as learners that are still struggling to get prominence in curriculum design and teacher attitudes:
This is a fascinating exercise to do with colleagues at your next whole-staff meeting, as a means of tapping into emotions and stories from their own pasts that help explain why the changes we've been talking about here for years need to happen urgently. And I think that the emotive element of this task is what makes the difference between a staff development day being just another set of things to do (or, more likely, shove into the physical or metaphorical cupboard), and that development day being something that touches at the core of teacher reflection and personal experience.
Try it, and share what your top Most Happy and Least Happy experiences are. Will we match or find different challenges in different regions?
Young people do, and they might just care about privacy more than the adults who care for them. That's what I pick up (with all caveats r.e. my reading between lines as well as on them) from the fascinating research on late teens and privacy that danah boyd has published with Estzter Hargittai:
Overall, our data show that far from being nonchalant and unconcerned about privacy matters, the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent...
...Based on data collected in early Fall 2009, Pew found that 71 percent of the 18–29–year–old social network site users they surveyed reported changing their privacy settings while only 62 percent of those 30–49 and 55 percent of those between the ages of 50–64 had. While Pew’s practice–oriented data do not measure youth’s attitudes towards privacy settings, the findings do suggest that younger users are conscious enough of privacy issues to take measures to manage which parts of their profiles are accessible.
While the paper is concerned with students in higher education, who have by now left the high school nest, I think there are some conclusions that we could work backwards into high school and even primary school, given that many in late Primary / Elementary are already experimenting with Facebook.
Above all, I'm increasingly aware of how little research we have in Scotland, in the UK and further afield into how young people approach social networking in our countries. Most of what teachers and school-based decision-makers here see is based on "assumptions that all users have a uniform approach to the site and how their accounts are set up are incorrect [leaving] certain user populations especially vulnerable."
I've also observed a marginalisation of any institutional action around how we teach youngsters to use social networking sites effectively in a schooling setting, with the shield of school intranets and virtual learning environments as "safe internets" abounding since 2006 (about the same time Facebook went public).
Notable in the report are some clues as to how we should approach our discussions and learning opportunities around Facebook with young people. Traditionally, in the UK at least, fear has been used as the number one blunt instrument to get young people thinking about privacy. CEOP (the "chop shop") are the UK agency responsible for chasing up and prosecuting instances where children's protection is compromised, yet their voice of "stranger danger" vastly overpowers those that point out the relatively larger benefits of taking some measured risks online.
Let's consider this notion first, as an adult. As an adult running his own company, but also as someone who wants to learn from other's experiences, I have learned and earned more from publishing my mobile phone number (it's +44 791 992 1830) and a safe contact address (i.e. not my home) as well as my general location (Edinburgh, but also other places I might end up day by day through the Dopplr platform).
As a student, what are the opportunities of sharing, though almost definitely not sharing a mobile number? Well, by knowing roughly which network you are part of it helps friends of friends you might socialise or have socialised with outside the structured social spaces one inhabits (school, home life, cliques) to find you and strike up a longer friendship than a happenstance encounter on vacation, at the weekend outing or foreign school exchange. Just an example, of course, which could just as easily have been in the role of Facebook in helping youngsters communicate around their homework or project work of an evening, or the role parents would like Facebook to play in communicating more between school, teacher, students and parents, or the role it might play in sharing learning of five year olds.
Julie Cunningham outlines the hypocrisy of which we're guilty when isolating online privacy in schools without as much effort deemed worth the while offline.
But these arguments, as I say, are all too often drowned out by the far more conservative (and therefore far easier to condone and express in public) attitudes that one should try to limit one's public sharing as much as possible, sharing only with those we know we know we know, the implication having been that we've met them face-to-face. Government officials request features that sound great, like the Facebook panic button, but which actually create more problems for those who really need help. And the argument that employers will not want to see your real life shenanigans online is just too distant a worry for most teens and tweens. That's just not the way the online world works when these youngsters hit late teen-hood and adulthood. We need to educate, not stipulate.
What approaches might work for increasing awareness of privacy management?
One simple approach to helping youngsters get an even better handle on how to manipulate their privacy settings in the way that will best work for them is just to talk about privacy settings. When Facebook prompted their own users to think about their privacy settings with a welcome screen message:
35 percent of users who had never before edited their settings did so when prompted. Facebook used these data to highlight that more people engaged with Facebook privacy settings than the industry average of 5–10 percent (E. Boyd, 2010).
We also learn that “a student is significantly more likely to have a private profile if (1) the student’s friends, and especially roommates, have private profiles; (2) the student is more active on Facebook; (3) the student is female; and (4) the student generally prefers music that is relatively popular (high mean) and only music that is relatively popular (low SD).” Therefore, if we can get friendship groups rather than class groups in school to learn together about these principles,we might stand a better chance of creating a culture of understanding about privacy.
What also shines through this report is that more frequent users of Facebook change their provacy settings more often, engaging more with the concepts of privacy the site throws up:
Avoid fear as a means of making young people think about privacy
The main reason we heartily discourage young people from engaging with those they know they know is fear: fear of stalking, bullying or making friends with someone you've never met face to face. boyd points out the shortfall of 'fear' as a tactic for instructing media literacy in youngsters:
While fear may be an effective technique for prompting the development of skills, the long–term results may not be ideal. The culture of fear tends to center on marginalized populations and is often used as a tool for continued oppression and as a mechanism for restricting access to public spaces and public discourse (Glassner, 1999; Valentine, 2004; Vance, 1984). To the degree that women are taught that privacy is simply a solution to a safety issue, they are deprived of the opportunities to explore the potential advantages of engaging in public and the right to choose which privacy preferences and corresponding privacy settings on sites like Facebook serve their needs best. For example, many young people value the opportunities to participate in communities of interest or peer–based production (Ito, et al., 2009). These communities support a wide variety of public practices — they serve as a distribution channel for participants to share artistic creations or promote their bands; they provide infrastructure for participants to learn about their practice or develop new skills; and, they provide a cohort for collaboration. In interviewing teens, boyd (2008) found that some girls who wanted to participate in these public forums were too scared to do so. Fear paralyzed some girls, limiting their engagement with some of the “geeking out” communities that Ito and her colleagues (2009) highlight. Furthermore, by adopting and promoting a gender–differentiated narrative that focuses on women’s safety matters, core issues about privacy that concern both men and women get overlooked. While our data do not allow a direct examination of these questions, future work should examine the role that safety rhetorics and fear play in online participation and practices.
(Emphasis added)
So what are those core issues about privacy that we might be overlooking in our quest to fear youngsters into a media literate approach to networking?
Photo: Private by splorp, shared, publicly, under Creative Commons licence on Flickr.com
On September 29th I'm hosting a live discussion with GETideas.org to see if we can't get to the bottom of the biggest barrier to educational improvement: what's stopping teachers, en masse, learning explicitly for themselves every day?
I make a big, but I think fair assumption: teachers do not have enough time on a daily basis built in to their day, either through structures or through personal choice to make the time, to reflect on their experience and engage in challenging learning about teaching. And I pitch this against mounting research that shows the best education systems in the world are the best thanks to one key trait: they have the best teachers.
From the blog post I wrote this week over on GETideas.org:
In the last eight weeks I've traveled on 30 planes. I am well versed in the most disturbing piece of guidance one is offered before take-off: "Make sure you fit your own oxygen supply before helping those around you, including young children".
The message is designed to make us have a mental check against our natural instincts - to help children first - given that if we don't look after ourselves first and foremost we'll not be in a position to help anyone.
I think teachers and schools need the same, regular safety briefing every time we start a learning journey. Teachers need to become much more automatic in their own learning habits before attempting to help youngsters learn for themselves.
In August I asked the same question to nearly 1000 educators throughout Australasia and California: "Is the teacher's job to be Learner In Chief?" The answers were not immediate, nor particularly sure of themselves when they did come. The challenge emerged thus: many of these teachers felt their main job was to teach, and that any learning they might undertake themselves is a rare, added bonus.
I believe the opposite should be true: teachers need to teach less to help learners learn more, and they need to put themselves in the position of learner far more frequently than they currently do.
Do you agree? Am I, Will Richardson, Alec Couros (discussion link) and others giving our teacher peers too a hard time by insisting on them learning how to make challenging changes in their practice? Are teachers learning enough through the occasional conference and chat about their day in the car on the way home?
I'd be delighted for you to join me on 29th/30th September (depending on your timezone) for this genuinely global discussion, normally with teachers and leaders from New Zealand, Australia, Europe and North America, and see what tactics or even strategies we can see emerging around the world to help teachers become the Learners In Chief of their schools.
(Pre-registration is required. Conversation best accessed by telephone (no charge) or Internet with microphone. More information here.).
In 6 minutes 40, the 20 ideas I think will affect educators in a big way in the next couple of years. This appears as part of New Zealand Core Education's EDTalks:
20. QR Codes and other smart mobile means of making the real world expand into the virtual world will become commonplace in the pockets of our students. With Layar you could craft a living history of your school transposed onto existing real-world buildings viewed through a smartphone camera.
19. We will gain a better understanding the hype curve, and what types of behaviour with technology can be spotted along it.
18. This gives us a chance to shorten that lead time to get to the learning quicker
17. Anything 'touch' changes the game, not necessarily because of the device itself but because of the way it affects the design of everything else around us, especially websites.
16. More will leave the desktop and go online, whether it's MIT's Scratch heading online next year thanks to the MacArthur funding we awarded earlier this year, or
15. Making real life products that students can feel, touch and use will be where the best learning takes place. Students will stop "doing" stuff at school and will more likely "make" stuff at school.
14. We'll think about how we build more interaction into our virtual spaces but also our physical spaces.
13. Think how engagement of the senses can do something as simple as encourage people to walk up the stairs rather than take the escalator.
12. The last 30% of our planet will get online in the next year as more of the world, south of the equator, gets powered up and online. This will mean an explosion in connections.
11. These connections will nearly all come from Africa and South America initially - most African countries are at the birth of their internet journey.
10. When we start collaborating with all these new partners at scale, we'll find that the ultrafast broadband of which our schools are so proud will become, rather quickly, slow-feeling.
9. This is especially true thanks to our changing TV habits. We'll be watching more television online than we do on the television, which will contribute to this higher demand for bandwidth.
8. We'll actually watch less television, but all of it online. Television choices will start to be made for us, using algorythmns to work out what we might want to watch based on our friends' and our previous selections.
7. We'll also stop just watching the television, and start interacting even more around it, online more than with the people in the same room as us. Maybe education will have a second chance at getting television use for learning right.
6. Understanding open data will become more important than social media has been in the apst five years.
5. This means, in the next two years, we might actually find ourselves with a teaching population that is more illiterate than the youngsters they are teaching, as this basic skill of understanding complex data is mastered by young people quicker.
4. There will be less money for spending in education, and innovation will start to appear as a result.
3. Open Source technologies will increasingly make us question why we spend so much on corporations' pay-for technology when so much else is available for free from passionate communities of practice.
2. The innovation will start to appear not from big industry making big things that do things for people, but from 'small' people in their bedrooms and startups making things that empower people to do stuff for themselves, and that includes learning.
1. And the people we're empowering will come at all ages, all cultures. The lead time for people to understand how they can become collaborators, makers and doers has decreased from the years and months of the industrial age to hours and minutes for new generations. Just see it in the way my daughter reacted to Skype over four minutes, from horror to fear to curiosity to comfort.
Students who explicitly write down what they think they've learnt, what they didn't understand and what they think they need to know next time tend to perform better as a result. It makes concrete the self-assessment and peer-assessment we know help them perform better over time (cf Inside The Black Box (pdf) for details).
Learning logs were a core part of my classroom practice, having seen the effects they have on improving student performance in the bilingual schools of New Brunswick in my first year of teaching. A student there would write down what they had learnt and what they felt they'd have to learn tomorrow in order to achieve the goals of the project they had set out on. In paper format they were quite tricky to manage, and as students peer-assessed there would be paper flying all over the place.
With the emergence of easier-to-use blogs around 2002/3 I started getting students to keep logs of their learning online, instead, initially using the extra time afforded by school trips, before getting more personal blogs set up to keep track of their learning.
At the same time, Darren Kuropatwa, a maths teacher on the other side of the Pond in Manitoba, Canada, had developed an even more manageable and, I think, even more empowering means of having students think about what they had learnt: the learning scribe.
In this podcast series from Alan November, Darren explains the genesis for setting these learning scribe posts up, where one student writes down (online) on behalf of the rest of the class what he or she thinks they all learnt, and what they think they've not understood.
If you've ever doubted how a piece of technology builds upon what we know is great teaching practice, this is it. Harnessing both the online nature of transparent reflection and the constraint of not having a laptop for every child, Darren was able to create a rich experience for every student.
"This is nothing like school. In school everything runs quite smoothly… You learn a lot more [this way]. I never knew how hard it would be to fight for your own job."
These are students talking about a student-driven project around the theme of a soap opera, whereby they had to create a non-scripted soap opera production, with the story of a paper plant about to go bust. It was initiated by the art teacher, but encompassed much of the business, language and creative side of the curriculum. It's fleshed out in the video above.
The genius part is that their art lesson, rather than being a prep for recording the soap opera, became the "art club" of the bust company that in which they were playing their roles. Their choice, not that of their teacher (and, I'd argue, not something that a teacher would come up with in isolation were (s)he to be forward planning like crazy).
Alison Ferguson, the teacher, puts it like this:
"You're not teaching in isolation. You're teaching in a much more natural way, as you would if you were bringing up your own children."
This is part of a series of new videos the Scottish Government have produced to try to help parents understand how learning and teaching is changing to better equip young people for the future. I'd argue that they're ideal for those teachers who are struggling to see what it means, too, and more effective than the thousands of pages of 'guidance' and 'advice' given with the Curriculum for Excellence so far.
My other favourite in this series is Pimp My Trolley, with more on the Learning and Teaching Scotland site.
I hope we can see more of these 'first hand' accounts of what a vibrant learning environment looks like - so much more powerful than the rhetoric or PDF hell we're used to.
We all want a curriculum that ensures the key skills for tomorrow's entrepreneurs and employment are taught and caught, but which empowers children to direct their own learning, don't we?
For the past year I've been part of the Steering Group for the RSA's (Royal Society of the Art, Manufactures and Commerce) Opening Minds Curriculum, a competence-based curriculum that is perhaps finding its moment as "organised education", whereby big institutions that do things for people, are being replaced by organisations that empower people to do great things for themselves:
Opening Minds aims to help schools to provide young people with the real world skills or competencies they need to thrive in the real world. It is a broad framework through which schools can deliver the content of a national curriculum in a creative and flexible way so that young people leave school able to thrive in and to shape the real world.
Opening Minds was developed by the RSA at the turn of the millennium in response to a belief that the way young students were being educated was becoming increasingly detached from their needs as citizens of the 21st century.
It is based on five sets of competencies, including Citizenship, Learning, Managing Information, Managing Situations and Relating to People.What is the impact of Opening Minds?
Opening Minds is now being used in over 200 schools across the country and is growing rapidly. In 2008 the RSA opened the RSA Academy in Tipton which is the first school to be designed around the principles of Opening Minds.
You can get more information on the impact of the RSA Opening Minds Curriculum in this pdf.
One of the reasons I'm particularly fond of this curriculum is its genesis, summed up in the introductory conference video from a couple of years ago by RSA Chief Executive, Matthew Taylor, above, who points out that parents, politicians and even teachers seem to be under the impression that a "bad" school will always be a school for which improvement can never happen.
There has also been a near worldwide acceptance, with the occasional ignorant backlash as yet another test or stricture is thrown in by the politicians, that learning competences is arguably more important than learning 'stuff', and the RSA Opening Minds Curriculum is all about learning the stuff through these very competences that make professionally and personally successful individuals thrive.
Find out more and shape the Opening Minds Curriculum at our October 19 Conference at the new RSA Academy
To help teachers, head teachers and those managing curriculum better understand the small revolution that's been happening over the past few years with this way of working, the RSA Academy in Tipton, near Birmingham, UK, is hosting in its new building a one-day conference. It's a superb opportunity to experience, at first-hand, how Opening Minds works at the RSA Academy and gives you a chance to help shape Opening Minds as it moves forward into its next phase of assuring quality and useful assessment in a school-owned curriculum.
It could be a first step towards having the support and mentorship from successful partner schools in rethinking curriculum and learning across your whole school. This is not an event for an individual maverick to go off and innovate on their own. This is a whole-school innovation process.
The morning will be classroom based, working directly with our Opening Minds Team Leaders and students. The afternoon will focus on how the RSA and the RSA Academy are working together to move Opening Minds forward.
We will be launching the Opening Minds accreditation system and the Opening Minds Award at this conference. These are initiatives which are vital to the future of Opening Minds and we hope you will want to be part of these exciting developments.
The event will be useful for schools already developing their Opening Minds practice; those considering Opening Minds as a curriculum framework; together with those schools who have built up a number of years of Opening Minds experience.
If you would like to attend then register your interest in advance.
The Byte Night Bedtime Story aims to beat the Guiness World Record for the world's biggest crowdsourced bedtime story in history. It's a great way to get students reading an (ever-longer) story and then adding their own 140 characters' worth, without the need to register for Twitter or another service - this makes it ideal for kids no matter how young or old they are.
What's more, you help raise money for Action for Children’s annual charity sleep-out event that takes place in various locations across the UK, this year on 8th October. There's no reason, in fact, why the sleep-out couldn't take place in other countries around the world, highlighting the plight of homeless children and raising some supporting cash in the process.
As of the time of writing you have 18 days to make your contribution to the story.
