Michael Gove has unearthed an unpopular policy from 2007 with his plans to ban mobile phones in the classroom from this summer. It's a daft policy, reflecting a small (minority) group's gut feel and no research or reflection, and below is a classroom example showing - simply - why he's wrong to consider it.
We'll no doubt see forthcoming policies banning the use pencils (you can flick 'em across the desk and poke kids in the ribs with them, you know) and we'll stop teaching children how to read the poetry of Wilfred Owen, lest they get upset at the gore of war, despite the fact they see it every night on the television. The rationale for all such anti-mobile, anti-internet, anti-anything policy is "safety", but its implementation creates a false sense of security in school, further growing the bubble in which schooling lives while the real world races by youngsters unprepared to deal with it.
The Scottish Conservatives have this week also revealed where Tory policies actually originate from: circa 1948, I believe (and so do the press). They'd have disengaged youngsters leaving school at 14 years old to learn a trade, despite the fact that in Scottish schools there are already ample opportunities for youngsters to focus on vocational skills, and 25,000 new apprenticeships were announced just before the closing of this Parliament.
A simple classroom example: students know how to harness mobile for learning
Politics over, though (and I've got some inherent biases, like everyone), there's a more serious point here about how wonderful mobile phones are becoming for learning, and how we're merely scratching the computer power they offer. That computing power is often superior to that provided by billions of pounds worth of Dell, RM or other well-known brands of black boxes thrown into schools each year. But the high-computing potential of mobile phones may be lost on Gove and his Ministers, so I'm going to pick a much simpler example.
I've been thrilled with some work I'm doing in Hull this past week, and have seen some stunning enquiry-based learning in the secondary school where I'm working on technology integration.
But it was in a science classroom, with students needing to keep time in a heatloss experiment, where they came into their own. Schools, when I was a pupil in one, invested a relatively high sum in 'scientific' stop clocks - these single-purpose devices come in at about £10/$20. But students have no interest in using these when they have a more accurate stopclock, and a host of other tools, sitting in their pockets. Having cleared it with the teacher, students unearthed a wide array of wonderfully accurate kit: iPod touches, shuffles, iPhones and, in huge numbers, Blackberries (above).
12 minutes to Google, or 40 seconds?
In another area, a student conducted a quick Google search to seek out the image she wanted to work from in a design and technology class. Students in other classes, using laptops provided by the school, took about 12 minutes to get them out, get logged in and get searching. Students on their cell phones took about 40 seconds.
Write to Mr Gove - and your government, too
Doug Belshaw and others have launched an open letter to Mr Gove - and other Education Ministeries, too - to explain why mobile phone technology, far from being banned in schools, must be embraced, and teachers and parents equipped with the intellectual, pedagogical and societal skills to harness their potential with youngsters. I encourage you to add to it.
Most school management teams glaze over when you talk about cloud computing. But if I told you that one science test, administered across New South Wales, was delivered for $199,995 less thanks to being hosted in the cloud for one day, rather than on dedicated servers in the education department, would you be interested?
That's exactly what happened, and it sets on a grand scale why the relatively small student-by-student savings we see from digital material being held on a server farm in Texas, rather than a server in the school grounds or Local District offices, are so important in these straightened times.
Such services might be Google Apps being introduced to schools, and the use of web-based "software as a service" (SaaS) programmes such as Every1Speaks to capture and share learning. If schools can look after these pennies, then tens of thousands of dollars and pounds are freed up for teaching and learning.
Using the cloud to cuts ties with out-of-date learning environments
And as more schools feel tied to wonky learning environments that don't really serve their purposes, feeling tied more to the email services provided therein rather than the learning resources themselves, there is a super opportunity to cut ties and bring in the best of breed in email, shared platforms, communication tools and video conferencing on an 'as-needed' basis. This cuts not only the actual cost of services to near nil, but also cuts the educational cost of students using quickly outdated online tools that a school paid for upfront.
Here is the blurb from the Microsoft site, as they explain how their Azure service cut the bill:
The New South Wales Department of Education (DET) is the largest department of education in the southern hemisphere. They wanted to improve the way they conducted Year 8 science tests to replicate what students did in the laboratory and believed interactive online science testing could test a wider range of skills than just pure scientific knowledge. However, DET estimated for them to host an online test for 65,000 students simultaneously would require a A$200,000 investment in server infrastructure. With the help of their partner, Janison Solutions, DET launched its Essential School Science Assessment (ESSA) online exam. In 2010, they trialled an online science exam hosted by Microsoft Azure that went out to 65,000 students in 650 schools simultaneously. Paying A$40 per hour for 300 Microsoft Azure Servers, DET estimated the cost of hosting the online exam for one day was just A$500.
Not only that, but the maintenance and robustness of those servers is handled by the experts, rather than an education department, and if more scale is needed, it gets added on without anyone ever needing to know.
It works on a State level. It needs to start working more on a school by school level.
Pic from Sugree
This is one of a six-part series on how to harness data to reveal stories. It represents notes and follow-on links. If you want to take part in an exciting workshop to get your hands on real life data sets, create your own visualisations and learn how to share them, you can join me in Boston at Building Learning Communities for my pre-conference workshop this summer, or ask for it as one of our masterclass sessions. Many of the examples cited are from the information visualiser's Bible, Information is Beautiful: buy the book (in the UK | in the USA) or visit the blog.
Use one chart for a new purpose
Example:
A Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods:
Charts and time
Combine time, bar charts and graphical punch to show impact on complex stories.
Example:
The rising sea levels as they consume cities over time.
Charts and image
Interesting charting effects can be gained by superimposing one chart on top of many, many photos through Microsoft's Deep Zoom Composer software (free).
Example:
Winston Churchill Deep Zoom
Colour swatches
Use the metaphor from pantone cards from the painters' shop, or military ribbon bands, to transfer new information.
Example: Military ribbons as a means to explore the debauchery of rock bands, Information is Beautiful book.
Scattergraphs 2.0
Don't just plot dots on a scattergraph. Plot graphics that make your point.
Example:
Caffeine versus Calories: Buzz vs Bulge
Abstract geneology
Make a family tree to show the relative links between abstract concepts
Example:
A family tree of Britain's musical heritage (Information is Beautiful book)
This is one of a six-part series on how to harness data to reveal stories. It represents notes and follow-on links. If you want to take part in an exciting workshop to get your hands on real life data sets, create your own visualisations and learn how to share them, you can join me in Boston at Building Learning Communities for my pre-conference workshop this summer, or ask for it as one of our masterclass sessions. Many of the examples cited are from the information visualiser's Bible, Information is Beautiful: buy the book (in the UK | in the USA) or visit the blog.
Map overlays
Countries are not all given equal status in the learning we do/did at school. Map overlays show this.
Examples:
Take several of the world's richest and most prominent countries and see how many you can fit into an outline of Africa:
Take four of the world's four richest economies and see how many you can fit inside the richest of all: the United States. (Information is Beautiful, pp.61, 142-3, 202)
Everyone thinks their own country is bigger than it really is. The Brits are as guilty as anyone else. Just listen to the oohs and ahs at these proportionate maps, courtesy of Sheffield-based Alisdair Rae:
The BBC's How Big Really helps people understand the scale of issues around environmental disasters, the war on terror, disease and other global issues, but showing their extent atop the town or city where that person lives:
Real maps, abstract stories
Take a map whose coloration or name markings tell a different story. The master of this was CS Lewis with the maps for the Chronicles of Narnia:
Other examples:
Interactive Diabetes map of America
Flight pattern maps from The Endless City
A world of number ones - every country has to be great at something:
Proportionate Maps
A wonderful collection of maps from the University of Sheffield, UK, show the world map through different lenses to explore global issues. For example, population density as a map is amongst other concepts on WorldMapper:
Mind maps / Organised Mind Maps
Favoured by the Guardian for its coverage of large, complex economy issues, these give a lot of information and show how it relates:
Data is not boring. Data is not something that's just for math or science class, and it's a whole lot more than just being able to create a bar chart. It's about making more than the humble bar chart to start revealing hidden stories, and creating impact in the minds - and hearts - of those viewing it.
Since 2010 we've never had so much publicly available data about the way our lives are run, the environment, our geography, our history… But most of us don't know how to tap into the PDFs, tables, geocodes and charts to dig out the meaningful stories hidden in there. Learning how is one of the key new literacy skills our youngsters will need if they are to be fully participative members of society.
Over the next series of posts I'll show some ideas for helping students make sense of the world of data around them. In this post, explore some of the rationale behind harnessing data for learning.
There are two main reasons why data has become a hot topic in civic life, and, I think, will become a core area of learning literacies:
Data needs to tell stories with emotional impact, so learn data storycrafting literacies.
Charles Minard arguably created the first visualisation when he placed the entire Franco-Prussian war in a compact infographic, one that helps explain the death due to cold temperatures, trechid river crossings and low morale:
In the last decade we've seen students begin to explore data by converting tables of information into fairly static charts. They can be fascinating - this one explains why the UK was always destined for a coalition Westminster Government.
Recently, Google Maps have made data visualisation something that anyone can do in a few clicks, and create impactful stories of their own. For example, this site makes meaning out a story most people otherwise found hard to connect to: an oil spill in a foreign land means far less than visualising it over your own doorstep:
Over the next five blog posts I'll show how different forms of data can tell different stories, and hopefully offer some inspiration to maths, science and plenty of other subject teachers on how we can move beyond the graph.
This is one of a six-part series on how to harness data to reveal stories. It represents notes and follow-on links. If you want to take part in an exciting workshop to get your hands on real life data sets, create your own visualisations and learn how to share them, you can join me in Boston at Building Learning Communities for my pre-conference workshop this summer, or ask for it as one of our masterclass sessions. Many of the examples cited are from the information visualiser's Bible, Information is Beautiful: buy the book (in the UK | in the USA) or visit the blog.
Proportionate Images
More complex than a proportionate box, and even more so than a circle, see if students can make proportionate shapes to illustrate facts.
Examples:
Relative child poverty by nation
Relative costs of insuring parts of your body (Information is Beautiful, pp26, 60, 151)
Sensitivity of body by nerve endings:
Relative sensitivity/desirability ratio of body parts (note: Not Particularly Safe for Certain Places of Work, but ideal as a starter for ten on personal, social and health discussions):
This is one of a six-part series on how to harness data to reveal stories. It represents notes and follow-on links. If you want to take part in an exciting workshop to get your hands on real life data sets, create your own visualisations and learn how to share them, you can join me in Boston at Building Learning Communities for my pre-conference workshop this summer, or ask for it as one of our masterclass sessions. Many of the examples cited are from the information visualiser's Bible, Information is Beautiful: buy the book (in the UK | in the USA) or visit the blog.
Boxes and Bar Charts
Potentially the most boring of all graphing, these can be really entertaining, shocking or thought-provoking. Or all three. Seek the greatest differences in data to make maximum impact. Seek to overlay boxes where relativity is important, or to lay them side to side where you want to compare like for like.
Example:
Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus explained in a picture
Debtris UK or Debtris USA versions:
Proportionate Circles
Lining up or superimposing circles of proportionately varying size helps emphasise the parts that make up any whole.
Examples:
How you spend your life and The shocking truth of conviction rates for rape in England and Wales (overlapping circles): Information is Beautiful pp.196-199.
The Sunday Times' News roundup of 2010:
Snake Oil? Are natural remedies all they're cracked up to be?
Gapminder
This is a free-to-download application that amasses some of the most authoritative (but dense) information in the world, and helps you spot trends amongst countries and within continents. Look at how Hans Rosling manipulates data to tell stories, in the BBC Clip below, for example, and then set students the challenge of finding their own 'shocking truths' within the available axis:
This is one of a six-part series on how to harness data to reveal stories. It represents notes and follow-on links. If you want to take part in an exciting workshop to get your hands on real life data sets, create your own visualisations and learn how to share them, you can join me in Boston at Building Learning Communities for my pre-conference workshop this summer, or ask for it as one of our masterclass sessions. Many of the examples cited are from the information visualiser's Bible, Information is Beautiful: buy the book (in the UK | in the USA) or visit the blog.
Annotated graphing
Take a graph that would otherwise be a boring squiggle and present us with startling or surprising information as annotated text.
Examples:
Breakups, as monitored through Facebook Status Updates of "… just ended a relationship"
Mountains out of Molehills - column inches presented as a molehill graph.
Contrast image and (in words) story
Images can be used to make us smile, while words portray the deep, shocking truth.
Example:
Murderous dictators by facial hair (Information is Beautiful, p.172)
Calligram
Write a text that takes the shape of the thing you are describing, adding proportionality or geography to add another level of meaning.
Example:
The Great Chinese Firewall as shown through websites that are blocked from coming into China and searches that are forbidden within it, in the form of a verbal map.
Proportionate Words
The data cliché of Wordle stops being a cliché when it makes a point.
Try Tagcrowd if you want to delimit the words and have a more accurate representation of the words that matter (i.e. by automatically getting rid of pronouns, articles etc).
Example:
Compare political bias in newspapers by TagCrowding the same story across tabloids, right and leftist papers.
Copy and paste speeches by politicians who speak about the same issues, and see what really interests them: Obama's vision for education:
versus that of English Education Secretary, Michael Gove:
Listening to a presentation in Belfast from m'old colleague Andrew Brown from LTS, he reminds me of this quote from blogger, storyteller and, yes, content-creator Cory Doctorow, pictured:
Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
One of the key points I've been driving in the past year has been the importance of schools providing places for conversations and exploration to take place, perhaps through a design thinking-based pedagogy and process. Such a process takes the onus off the teacher to be the one preparing resources for children, effectively doing the learning for the youngster. Instead, it forces interaction around content, rather than content to be consumed or 'learnt', to take centre stage.
Pic from Joi
This is a summary of the talk I delivered at the Norfolk ICT 2011 Conference, expanding on my TES editorial back in January.
During the final half of 2010, I asked more than 1,500 teachers around the globe two questions: what are your happiest memories from learning at school, and what are your least happy experiences?
When I do the "reveal" of what I think their answers will be, every workshop has a "but how did he know?" reaction. It's more akin to an audience's response to illusionist Derren Brown than to the beginning of a day of professional development.
For teachers' answers are always the same. At the top is "making stuff", then school trips, "feeling I'm making a contribution" and "following my own ideas". Their least happy experiences are "a frustration at not understanding things", "not having any help on hand" and "being bored", mostly by "dull presentations". "Not seeing why we had to do certain tasks" appeared in every continent.
Most of these educators agreed that the positive experiences they loved about school were too few, and were outnumbered by the "important but dull" parts of today's schooling: delivering content, preparing for and doing exams.
But while a third of teachers generally remember "making stuff" as their most memorable and happy experience at school, we see few curricula where "making stuff" and letting students "follow their own ideas" makes up at least a third of the planned activity.
Design Thinking: the creative industries' framework for relentless creativity
Coined by design superstars IDEO, "Design Thinking" in a simple form is a four-part process of thinking and acting that I see replicated in every successful creative company in film, television, web startups or marketing with whom I work. I see it in some of our most creative classrooms, too.
It all starts with a genuine realworld problem that needs solving, not a pseudo-problem of the variety we see in textbooks. For example:
We then follow these four stages of problem-solving:
Immersion
Immersion is not just unleashing youngsters with a sketchbook, or sending them off to Google to find out everything they can on a topic. It's about students working hard to gain empathy with those affected by the problem they've encountered. It's about putting oneself in the shoes of another and capturing all the emotions, feelings, facts, viewpoints possible. This can be done in a huge number of ways, but capturing these insights we must: on digital photographs, cell phone audio recordings or videos, post-it notes, documents...
The most important part is for students not to try to solve the problem, but merely delve into it, and understand it from as many perspectives as possible. It is also vital that the problem comes from the students, as much as possible. Note in this short clip how the 'obvious' learning point of activities around sand is replaced by what the three and four year olds are interested in: the truck that delivers the sand:
Synthesis
Every idea that has been captured needs to be brought together, preferably in a project space, a project corner, so that teams of students can work to find
Look at the IDEO team in action, one week over two minutes, in this clip, and you'll see how a ton of messy, asbtract information comes together into organised thoughts ready for turning into ideas:
The teacher's role in this stage, as in immersion, is critical, but not as deliverer of knowledge. The teacher's role is that of key questioner. Good questioning technique is the most important skill to master to pull this creative process off, and there are some structures you can use to help. The G.R.O.W model and similar coaching models are such frameworks to help frame questions at each level of the project's thinking (short, medium and long-term):
Mhairi Stratton, formerly at Humbie Primary School in East Lothian, Scotland, introduced me to this way of thinking, and she has seen other benefits coming from this way of 'coaching' students to success:
'The whole school is benefitting because the pupils are involving the other class and sharing their learning with them.
‘Pupils are now identifying what resources they need, and why, and then working out how to source these.
‘This is also having a very positive effect on parental involvement as the pupils are also discussing their learning more at home and often asking them to provide the resources!’
Ideation
Actually coming up with solutions to a problem comes quite late on in the process. In schools, most of the time, though, the problem has been defined by a teacher or a textbook and most learners are thrust into the creative process at this point, at the point when the process is nearly over!
Ideation can be simple brainstorming, or it can rely on a greater box of mental tools to stimulate better, more unexpected, more sustainable ideas. For example:
This kind of pupil-led learning creates entrepreneurial, confident individuals. Professor Sugata Mitra's work shows that children in Indian slums are able to teach themselves and each other when provided with a computer kiosk on a street corner and access to the internet.
Within six weeks of starting my teaching career in the UK in 2002, I was fortunate to take up a spot on a small delegation to New Brunswick, Canada. There, since the 1970s, pupils have been achieving stellar results through experiential, project-based learning in which they have the lion's share of control over what is learnt, with whom and using what resources. And they have done it in a language that is not their mother tongue.
Yet the thought of allowing 30 assorted children at a time - or 90 at a time in the supersize classes I saw in New Brunswick - "free rein" upsets even the most innovative of educators. Far better to set a project theme for them; at least we know we will cover what we need to cover.
Prototyping
On the other side of the world in New Zealand, at Auckland's Albany Senior High School, deputy head Mark Osborne gives his pupils free rein every Wednesday through impact projects. "It can take weeks of discussion, reading and searching, but once you have struck their passion, their eyes light up and you can't stop them," he says.
Pupils have built a VW "Herbie" car, a rocket and a content delivery platform for the school's plasma screen system, inadvertently undercutting the commercial outfit pitching to the local university by NZ$280,000 (£137,682).
As US academic Professor Roger Schank puts it: "There is really only one way to learn how to do something, and that is to do it."
Over in California stands High Tech High, set up in San Diego in 2000 as a charter school. It was created with support from local businesses as an environment that would help fill the skills and attitudes gaps faced by the area's technology industries. Principal Larry Rosenstock believes that until teachers identify their own passions they cannot hope to facilitate the experience for pupils.
Further up the coast in San Francisco, Gever Tulley is developing his Tinkering School, an educational experiment with big ambitions currently acting as a one-week summer school.
Pupils learn by building bridges from dumped plastic bags, roller coasters from old crates or villages on stilts designed to provide secret niches for reading. The ideas come wholly from the seven-year-old collaborators and staff work tirelessly to spot and reinforce the learning opportunities inherent in the build. Elements of physics, mathematics, design, art, music and language are all wrapped in the vital skills of the 21st century for which there is, thankfully, no subject: ingenuity, collaboration, experimentation, failure and storytelling.
Don't think. Try.
Harnessing entirely pupil-led, project-based learning in this way isn't easy. But all of this frames learning in more meaningful contexts than the pseudocontexts of your average school textbook or contrived lesson plan, which might cover an area of the curriculum but leave the pupil none the wiser as to how it applies in the real world.
There is a line that haunted me last year: while pupil-led, project-based learning is noble and clearly more engaging than what we do now, there is no time for it in the current system. The implication is that it leads to poorer attainment than the status quo. But attainment at High Tech High, in terms of college admissions, is the same as or better than private schools in the same area.
The assumption that pupil-led, project-based learning offers less success in exams is a false but persistent one. John Hunter was the anatomist who defined modern medicine because, frankly, no one else had. He had a saying that has since become the mantra of the modern surgeon: "Don't think. Try the experiment."
Innovations in education that engage young people and have the most profound impact will not occur because someone told teachers what to do and how they should do it. They won't come by tinkering with the curriculum or seeking the perfect balance of assessment. The most important changes in learning this decade will come around because someone, a teacher, maybe you, thought that things weren't what they could be and that something new was worth a try. They will get together with colleagues and make time to talk through the possible and seemingly impossible. And then they will go and try it out.
Don't think (too hard). Try.
