"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Roy Amara.
It was a long time ago in tech terms, but last year I sat down with Robert Swerling who looks after mobile startups for Google UK. We're now in an age where Google App Creator (above video) will encourage ever younger developers (i.e. schoolkids) to make mobile applications, as well as an inevitable tipping point coming soon in those buying Android phones that run Google products and those kids' apps.
Here's some of Rob's stats that give me this confidence in believing we need children to be aware of how to create, as well as consume, the apps around them:
These might be read in conjunction with the last stat dump I did in 2008 on the state of Mobile in Asia.
So, if you're going to get students making mobile apps, what would Robert advise the pros, and how might these affect some higher order planning and thinking in your students?
I like Robert. He works for a company known for its constant agenda of change, change in itself and making change in the world. But I like Robert for the realism that he betrays now and then. As he put it:
"A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache."
Quite. Which one have you got?
How do teachers in high schools know where their subject crosses over into another subject area, where learning moments might be better coordinated and more in-depth projects formed? You invite teaching staff to construct a learning wall.
This is a lovely idea coming through from St George's School for Girls in Edinburgh in order to stimulate the kind of cross-curricular thinking that takes place in their junior school throughout the senior area:
There was talk at that time of de-cluttering, of repetition, of excess overload on the curriculum and the need to actually slim that down, so we thought it was a good place for us to start. Ultimately, we came up with this thing called ‘The Learning Wall’. It's based on the capacities from a Curriculum for Excellence - that's the main aim of it, and it was thought that for the personal and social development, the actual student had to be the focus and therefore had to be the main frame of the wall. Each of these represents what one year group does within one subject area. Many departments focused on colour and used colour within the bricks to highlight different skills or different things within what they were doing. It may be investigative, it may be trips, it may be numeracy, it may be literacy - even within a different subject content. They have recognised that there is overlap, they have recognised that there is repetition, they've recognised that we are doing things at the same time and then we've found out we're doing them slightly differently.
Watch the full video above (about 3 minutes) to see how it works.
When we perceive of risk in sharing publicly and interacting online we nearly always risk obscuring huge benefits with our own inflated fear of the unknown. Research shows that digital risks are far outweighed, in fact, by challenges more close to home and school.
Throughout my New Zealand masterclasses we've been exploring notions of risk management, seeking out the means to maintain positive benefits-based risk analysis rather than negative barrier-inducing risk management. When thinking of students sharing out onto the world wide web and not just to their 30 peers in a private learning network, most educators have a twinge of fear.
One of the most compelling cases for this attitudinal shift in thinking about technology, student-led learning and teachers-as-enablers-of-student-projects can be seen in Gever Tulley's "Tinkering School", whose empowerment of very young children with power tools, nails and saws to achieve something spectacular wowed crowds real and virtual at TED:
This innovative thinking on risk is not limited to those reaching the lofty heights of a $6000-a-ticket innovation conference. In North Lanarkshire, Scotland, infants are being empowered in similar student-led, student-designed projects that spawn from often banal-seeming 'inspirations' - the delivery of some sand to the school leads to children as young as four constructing their own machines from wood, metal and other materials:
"Yes there's nails and hammers and saws, but those are the tools that the children need to achieve what they have in mind... The children don't have a risk analysis done for them. They are actively involved in forming their own risk assessment."
Seeing others doing amazing work like this is all good and well, "but what about my school which doesn't think like that?" So, in addition to seeing others undertake positive risk assessment in this way, I pull heavily on the work of Caspar Berry, former child actor turned professional Poker player, advisor to Casino Royale filmmakers and, importantly, not gambler. Caspar is genius at exploring risk through the medium of coin-flips, roulette tables and Deal or No Deal. He knows I rip off his work (with due credit, I must add) and that it has helped hundreds of teachers start to 'feel' risk differently rather than just conceptualising it.
But even this acceptance that we perceive risk differently from one another even when the stakes haven't changed, isn't enough. So what about the research? What does the research show us about the likelihood of something negative happening online, something serious even? Perhaps if we know some percentages then these facts, along with some great anecdotes, examples and gut feel, can help sway our attitudes, and those of parents, towards setting our web defaults to social. This May's Pew report Cyberbullying 2010: What the Research Tells Us has a US focus, but almost certainly these butterfly wings create winds of recognition elsewhere. From it, we know first of all that...
Library access and cell phone access is particularly important to African American, and to a lesser extent English-Speaking Hispanic students. One quarter of low income teens (HHI under $30K) and 25% of African American teens say they go online most often from school, compared to 15% of online teens overall.
and the most important piece of research for schools shows that...
It would seem that the problems associated with sharing on the web are a) very small in number and b) related to bullying going on already in school. But more importantly, the web provides an environment through which to collaborate that is, in many respects, safer than the physical environments of the school institution. What else have you spotted in this research and how does it relate to your own perceptions of risk?
Image: Page from a school punishment book at TheirHistory, published with Creative Commons permissions.
Will Richardson's blog, of late, has featured dozens of posts pointing out the impending doom one might feel as we realise learners (and tomorrow's workers) need to be self-starting, entrepreneurial people with passions they know how to exploit, but our education systems seem largely incapable of teeing them up for this way of thinking and learning. It's getting harder to see how we can motivate DIY learners. I'm always slightly disappointed that the posts finish just as the thought process should kick into action. There's never an easy path to beat out (or blog out) in changing our systems, it seems. But what if we consider that the problem is not systemic: it's just a challenge with individual teachers.
The notion that the world cannot change, and that we can't change within it, is more widespread than any of us can imagine. This is the fixed mindset, according to Carol Dweck, and it's not just stultifying if you work in an environment where questioning the present and changing things for the future is rare. It's fatal.
Colleagues who had heard Carol Dweck speak at the Scottish Learning Festival raved. They all said to buy the book and get my Dweck fix. If I wanted to understand why any stubborn students, teachers, parents and business colleagues were the way they were, then Carole Dweck's 'discovery' of the fixed mindset and growth mindset would explain all.
First of all, let me get the negative out of the way - this drug was a little too sickly sweet for more than a brief encounter - the writing style is indeed intended to be relaxed, accessible for a parent, coach, business person or teacher - and I think it is - but for me comes across a little too much like a self-referential "our theory will cure your life of all ills" bible.The reason, Dweck asserts, that this fixed mindset is plain wrong, is that humans have for long shown that, with effort and desire, we can turn our hands to pretty much anything. Take a look, for example, at Betty Edwards' Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, to see how people with about as much artistic ability as, well, me at the moment, were able to produce what I would call semi-pro work after merely five days of effort and tuition:
We also know that negative labels harm children (e.g. calling a child 'stupid' will generally reinforce their self-image as being stupid. That is why, in the long term, and certainly in the short term, it's not a great idea for an educator to do this.) Yet teachers use these 'stupid', 'incapable' labels on themselves all
the time. I hear teachers call themselves stupid or incapable almost weekly, without a
thought in the world that this may be causing harm to their own chances
of learning a new skill or approach to learning and teaching.
Since 2005 I've spent most of my time not looking at how young people learn, but at how teachers and parents learn. Or don't learn. Dweck cites one of her professors Seymour Sarason (p.201) -
"There's an assumption that schools are for students' learning. Well, why aren't they just as much for teachers' learning?"
Education has for too long defaulted to secrecy, opaqueness and inward reflection on "what education is". It's time to change that default setting.
Clay Shirky points out in his latest oeuvre Cognitive Surplus that the way startups choose to set their 'default' settings is hugely important in defining how users will exploit the technology. When you buy an iPhone or a Mac the default for seeking out wireless is set for you to open: you constantly search for the means to communicate. I've just helped a chap in Auckland airport to turn on his wireless: the PC on which he was working had its system settings default to 'closed' whenever he restarted.
Shirky's (and my) plea would be to set our own personal defaults to social: the benefits of others serendipitously bumping into our content, our ideas and our pleas for help greatly outweigh the perceived risk or inconvenience of 'losing' a piece of ourselves to the vast online wastelands.
For my latest Core EDTalk from New Zealand I was asked to give my own take on ePortfolios, that is, electronic means of students to share the best of their work. Unfortunately, as with all jargon, we bring our on preconceptions to the table of what an ePortfolio is for and looks like. Generally, the teachers and parents I meet believe that they are:
In the above video, I present my own take that they should be:
The elephant in the room, of course, is that most Learning Management Systems on the market these days and being developed by Education Ministries the world over have their defaults set to 'anti-social': private, closed networks that experts and co-learners in the 'outside' world cannot see or interact with. Sure, you can have an open blog that anyone can read and participate in, but you have to flick the switch first to go open. The default position is closed.
The reasons for this are normally noble sounding enough: safety of learners, the perceptions of teachers and parents are currently too 'conservative' (i.e. they didn't learn like that) to 'cope' with the concept of anyone seeing the work of students. Allanah King in Nelson does a good job asking the difficult (and not-so-difficult) questions of Learning Management Systems in this respect in her post: why would a school spend good money on one?.
But the longer teachers put up with these attitudes, rather than challenging them and asking intelligent questions about the balance of risk in not having students share with the world wide web, the longer we do not have conversations with parents, and invite them to spectate and participate in what learning can look like now, then the longer we will continue to do a disservice to the digital footprints, competitiveness and understanding of otherness in our young people.
If you want to see what ePortfolios might look like when we push the boat out beyond simply writing a blog or sharing different media online through Posterous, take a look at my older post on the fascinating eScapes project - I'd love to know what happened to it since these early days, if anyone can help.
HistoryPin lets users see historical photos placed up against current day street views, revealing how much their local area - or historical places - have changed over time.
The online service brings to normal Joes like you and me the power that we've seen demonstrated in the exclusive confines of TED talks in the past. Now, anyone can take advantage of this superb technology, which matches the topography of the photograph with the real world topography from Google Streetview.
I was amused to take a peak at my local area, seeing that the roadworks we've had lengthen our commutes for the past few years were experienced 150 years ago, for exactly the same reasons: building tram lines. (See the pic above, or explore it in HistoryPin).
I've got a pretty long-term fascination with the way Ideo work, simply because their outputs are so fascinating, and the means of getting there more so. I've worked in enough organisations that call themselves creative to know that few match the pace and flow of Ideo.
I've just posted a new piece at GETideas on how we can all prepare for the year ahead, and make sure that we keep on top of things, so that we have more time and energy for more creative practice throughout the year. You can read the full piece on the GETideas.org site and join me for a live phone or web chat this Tuesday to share your own tips.
For teachers, the summer vacation is often seen as the quiet time of
year that they might find a moment, after the sand, sea and switching
off, to start preparing for the year ahead. We can head off potential
problems, the rest brings some of our most creative ideas to light, and
we have that rare commodity – time – to think about how we could best
teach particular areas of work.
School leaders don’t have that
same stretch of time, but with fewer fire-fights to tackle in our
classrooms and schools there is a chance to block out some thinking time
of our own. However, as some of Jim Spillane’s research on principals’ and
Head Teachers’ working habits shows, we can in education spend too much time working alone on the wrong
things.
Here are the headings of my top eight ‘mind
hacks’ that some of the most inspirational and creative
leaders I know have drawn out of their work:
1. Clear your decks for the next year (GTD)
2. One must-do activity a day
3. Set aside "Desk Time"
4. Don't Procrastinate
5. Getting rid of "Extraneous Pillars"
6. Kill assumptions: Only do stuff you want to do
8. Abandon the quest for perfection
You can read the full piece on the GETideas.org site and join me for a live phone or web chat this Tuesday to share your own tips.
