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Asking how we identify the
future – and how we bring the future into the present form a large part of
current educational discourse – especially those edu_conference keynote
conversations.  

Jensen (Witnessing the Future pdf) cites Serres and Latour and suggests
that “assemblage”, “design”, “finish” and “slickness of advertising” all play a
role in how we identify the future .  

"What are things
contemporary? Consider a late-model car. It is a disparate aggregate of scientific
and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can date it
component by component: this part was invented at the turn of the century,
another ten years ago … Not to mention that the wheel dates back to neolithic
times. The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its
finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it"
(SERRES & LATOUR, 1995, p.45). [1] 

It made me wonder why we
focus so much of our attention on the future, when our educational present
needs so much help.  

Jensen provided an answer
when he identifies the critical shift in the conversation as being the shift
from “"looking into the future to looking at the future, or
how the future is mobilized in real time to marshal resources, coordinate
activities and manage uncertainty" (BROWN & MICHAEL, 2003, p.4).  

So people like us to look at
the future (or at least think we are), because the existence of a
 classroom of the future (or a school of the future) allows resources to
be marshalled.  

Marshalling resources is
high focus activity in education. And it is not just the educational technology
companies that are trying to do this. Monday’s NZ Herald  features a local special education centre that would like to
marshall some resources to keep paying the salaries of two therapists.   

Finding out how to persuade
people they are looking at the future so we can marshall resources would be
useful for lots of people. 

Jensen’s study suggests that
“looking at the future” is all about persuasion and witnessing; and that these
strategies are not as different as you might imagine.  Both are
artificial, constructed situations.

So if you want to marshal
resources in education by marketing yourself as the future you will need to
learn how to play with both. 

When reading
 “Witnessing the Future” I realised that I had never really understood
persuasion – nor did I have any clear measure of how to judge whether
persuasion had taken place. 

In describing “the
procedures and rhetorical strategies” used by a manager to persuade
business journalists that it was “the office of the future”, Jensen argued that
we can tell if “Persuasion has taken place if a second actor follows a first
actor in such a way that the first actor's program is strengthened.”  

So power is understood as a
consequence of an action rather than a cause.

The actions of others make
me powerful.  

I take this to mean that
when I am persuaded to RT a fellow tweetcher – I am enhancing their power. 

Persuasion has occurred
because I have acted in a way that empowers/ strengthens the credibility of a
fellow tweetchers message.  All that “repeating and disseminating” makes
Twitter as much a strategy for persuading other tweetchers as it is a strategy
for informing others. Something already understood by those educators
controlling multiple accounts who regularly re-tweet themselves – an activity I
found bewildering and just a little sad until now.  

So repetition reveals an act
of persuasion; because repetition reinforces the power of the persuader. 
“One hundred million blowflies can’t be wrong” thinking rules Ok. 

NetGen Sceptic’s recent post
describes repetition as a Snark Effect strategy The
Snark Syndrome and the Net Gen Discourse  

In Women and Science: The
Snark Syndrome, Byrne says about women in science:

"By dint of repetition
three times (or thirty), the educational community had internalized an
oversimplified and often unscholarly selection of beliefs and premises which
had descended to the 'everyone knows that…' level of slogan-like
impact."

Thus the Snark Syndrome is the "assertion of an alleged truth or belief
or principle as the basis for policymaking or for educational practice,
although this proves to have no previous credible base in sound empirical
research"

The Snark Effect is the application of the Snark Syndrome to implement specific
educational policies and practices.

The post identifies the
advantages to be gained/ resources that might be marshalled if repetition is
used to persuade educators that the NetGen exists as being related to digital
technology.

“I have lost track of the
number of times I have heard educators repeat the stereotypes about the Net
Generation: short attention span, expert mutitaskers, technologically savvy etc
etc. Countless Michael Wesch-like You Tube videos are circulating urging us to
wake up and change our ways or else risk losing an entire generation of
learners who we are failing to engage. The answer, we are told, is more digital
technology.”

I recognise high levels of
“Snark Syndrome” repetitive NetGen and witnessing the future educational
discourse in Twitter streams, blog posts, newsletters and educational
conference presentations in New Zealand.  And it is working. Resources are
being marshalled through digital technology because of it.

So once we have the
repetition thing going how else do we mobilise the future in real time to
marshal resources? 

 Jensen’s article moves
from repetition to “Tricks of the Witnessing Trade” – many of which will be
familiar to educators who are charged with witnessing digital classrooms
bedecked with wirelessly lap-topped/mobile phoned students.   

Think of strategies of
virtual witnessing, drawing in multiple allies and those courtroom strategies
of highlighting, categorising and undermining.   

The United Spaces manager
persuaded others they were witnessing the future by contrasting what was going
on in the offices with what was happening elsewhere.  He used categories
of social isolation, professional demarcations, stable patterns of work, and
distrust.  The result was visitors “witnessing” the United Spaces offices
as a place of community, boundarilessness, flexibility and trust.  

Interestingly Jensen
identifies that in this case study the most effective strategy in persuading
others (and thus marshalling resources) is to “act like a kite” – 

United
Spaces gains upward drift by blocking and resisting. It works by posing itself
up against something else. Thus United Spaces' source of persuasive power is
that it draws contrasts rather than drawing things together. With its
arrangements of tables and with the rule of sitting at a new place every day,
it has found a way to articulate a number of problems or even absurdities of
"normal work". And like a protest movement, it lifts off the ground
at the moment when it is able to channel diffuse dissatisfaction with the
existing state of affairs into support for a clear rallying point. 

Perhaps our
local special education centre needs to persuade others to witness how it is
“the future” special education facility by adopting repetition and act like a
kite strategies – 

Remembering all the while
that “The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its
finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it"
  

Then it may marshall back
some of the resources that went to those “we are the future / we are creating remarkable futures”
independent schools who swallowed up an extra 35 million dollars in funding in
the last budget.

Elgaard Jensen, Torben
(2007). Witnessing the Future [59 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative
Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(1), Art. 1,
http://nbnresolving.
de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs070119 .

Source: Artichoke

I didn’t buy Cyril Taylor’s newly released “A Good School
for Every Child – How to improve our schools” because I wanted to read another book on how to do school better. 

At the moment I drift towards thinking and reading about museums rather than schools
– probably because I am feeling burdened by the narrow perspective of what is written
by people telling us what to do (and not to do) in school.

In truth when you work in a school it often feels like a big
part of the problem is that there are too many people "telling" and not enough people
"doing".

Still I relented and bought Cyril Taylor’s book because of
his background.  All that cover blurb
stuff - Taylor has “served as an adviser to ten successive UK education
secretaries and four prime ministers, both Conservative and Labour, including
Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.”

Given some of the budget funding decisions made by our own New Zealand Minister of Education I wanted to understand the
thinking of a ministerial adviser, albeit one from the UK.

As a litmus test I chose to start with Taylor’s take on “How
information communication technology (ICT) can be used to improve learning.” This
is an area that our minister chose to continue funding through things like the ictpd
cluster contracts.  I intended to to follow this with the chapter on “Why
and how our gifted and talented children should be nurtured” an area where
funding for gifted and talented advisers has been pulled in New Zealand.  

In Chapter 9 “How information communication technology (ICT) can
be used to improve learning.” Taylor asks –

“Does your school have an interactive whiteboard in every classroom?”
This is a revolutionary teacher’s tool which has made obsolete the old school
blackboard with chalk, as well as slide projectors.  Whiteboards can have a dramatic effect in
raising standards. Not only can they show film clips and slides, and enable the
teacher to write electronically instead of using chalk, they are also
interactive with pupils being able to access them through their laptops.“

Given my sceptism over IWB's I immediately wished educational books were displayed in
racks at supermarket checkouts so that I could have done a better flick/scan of
the content before I ordered my copy from Amazon

I don’t know about you but I was underwhelmed by both the
description of use and the claim over outcome for IWBs …. but in fairness to Taylor I continued
reading to see what might be offered in defence of his claim “Whiteboards can have a
dramatic effect in raising standards”.

In defence Taylor argues  ….

“A good example in the effective use of whiteboards is Kemnal
Technology College, an all boys school in Bromley Kent, sponsored by Lord
Harris.  Its outstanding head teacher,
John Atkins, grew frustrated a few years ago with the difficulty in recruiting
good maths teachers and the resulting poor performance of his boys in GCSE
maths.

His solution was to convert, by knocking down the partition walls,
three of his classrooms into one large classroom with up to ninety desks.  He then hired a master maths teacher at a
high salary, plus three teaching assistants. 
Every one of his boys was then given a laptop.  The large classroom was equipped with two
interactive whiteboards.

I sat in on a maths class conducted by the outstanding maths
teacher.  The boys were enthralled by his
teaching skills, received personal help from the three teaching assistants, and
were able to benefit from three whiteboards in front of them, including
learning to solve maths problems.

As John Atkin says: ‘interactive whiteboards means that we can “teach
the way the students learn”’

Despite its incoming 11 year olds having lower than average ability
range, 64 percent of Kemnal Technology College students soon achieved five good
grades at GCSE, compared to its expected results using the Jesson Value Added
approach, of only 54 per cent.  They
achieve 47 per cent including maths and English with a similar value added of
10 percent, and 63 percent of their boys now achieve A-C grades in GCSE Maths.”

Taylor uses the Temnal Technology College results to back
his claim that when we introduce interactive whiteboards into a classroom we
see dramatic effects in raising standards.

I don’t have enough information to tell whether the shifts
from actual versus expected results he details are valid and reliable but the anecdote allows
us to raise a number of alternatives.

For example what if instead
of asking “Does your school have an
interactive whiteboard in every classroom? 
And following this question with the claim “Whiteboards can have a dramatic effect in raising standard”s

He had asked “Does your
school have class sizes of ninety students? 
And followed this question with the claim “Raising class sizes to ninety students can have a dramatic effect in
raising standard”s

What if:

We asked “Does your
school have expert teachers?  And followed
this question with the claim  “Expert teachers can have a dramatic effect
in raising standard”s

We asked “Does your
school have teaching assistants in classrooms?  And followed this question with the claim  “Having
teaching assistants in a classroom can have a dramatic effect in raising
standards”

We asked “Does your
school increase the visibility of presentation surfaces in classrooms?  And followed this question with the claim “Increasing visibility of presentation
surfaces in a classroom can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your
school have triple sized learning spaces?  And followed this question with the claim “ Increasing the physical size of classrooms
threefold can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your
school give every student a laptop? And follow this question
with the claim “Giving every student a laptop
can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your
school change the learning environments available? And follow this question
with the claim “Changing the learning environment
can have a dramatic effect in raising standards”

We asked “Does your school measure teacher effectiveness
through value added testing of students? And followed this question with the
claim “Measuring teacher effectiveness
through value added testing of the students they are teaching can have a
dramatic effect in raising standards.”

Prof John Hattie's meta- analysis in Visible Learning - allows us to critique some of these claims BUT it makes me want to ask yet another question altogether -

Why did Cyril
Taylor prefer to interpret any changes in student learning outcome at Kemnal
Technology College as being causally related to the presence of two (or was it
three) interactive whiteboards when so many other factors are in play?  Why did
he privilege the IWB in all of this? What happens to our common sense thinking
when we get too close to “simmering electrical” technologies?         

Source: Artichoke

I had an unexpected escape from the day job today – and I
used it to push off from the screen and drift into the ordinary.  I used
it to bump up against the stuff that had not been digitised – to see, hear,
smell, touch and taste in a way not mediated through a screen - to nudge up
against the real.

Escape is best shared.  I persuaded another to cut
loose from what life expected of her for the day and we explored the local as
if we were seeing it for the first time.

Along the way we visited the dementia centre, delivering
impossible cream cakes and an exuberance of flowers; flowers whose colours
cried out “I am haunted by you”.  We hugged and squeezed each of the
dementia centre staff who had helped grandpa; those who reassured him when he
puzzled over the fact that when he drank juice the horizon moved, and juice
escaped out the side of his mouth and rolled down over his chin … and those who flirted
with him when he fancied sex on the glacier …. and then we moved on.

At the Onehunga Mall we called into a local cafe.  We
laughed so much at our grandpa memories that when we drank coffee the horizon
moved for us – and the coffee ran out the side of our mouths and rolled down
our chins. 

Deferring to Kingswellian “We are capitalism made flesh”
thinking  –All that “every moment of waking and sleeping life is shot
through with commitment to the goods and services of the global economy..” we
took our caffeinated and sticky surfaces to those emporiums of feckless
consumerism – the many $2.00 Shops of Onehunga. 

Here we spent up large (but small) on enough froth, sparkle,
glitter and glue to transform fifty self effacing wooden pegs into “off their
faces” narcissistic transgendered celebrities.  We drifted into carpet
overrun warehouses, admired taxidermy wild boar heads and 3m polystyrene Doric
columns in second hand shops, bought charcoal sticks and rolled canvas at an
art emporium and got lost upstairs in the New Zealand section of the “Hard to Find but Worth the Effort” 
bookshop.  

How would you measure the meaning of a day like this? 

In Chapter 5 of Museums in a Troubled World – Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse, 
Jane cites the thinking of Douglas Worts in measuring the meaning of museums. 

Refer: Worts, D.  “Measuring Museum Meaning: A Critical
Assessment Framework.” Journal of Museum Education, 31 2006, 41 - 48 

You will not be surprised if I admit that this captured my
interest - given that any folksonomy of Artichoke would reveal that I am just a
little obsessed with measuring “school meaning”. 

Wort’s CAF framework has three lenses – the individual, the
community and the museum. 

The "community lens" focuses on the creation of
public benefit, and requires that museum staff ask themselves how well their
program(s) will do things like: 

Address vital and relevant
needs/issues within the community.

Engage a diverse public.

Act as a catalyst for action.

Stimulate intergenerational
interactions.

Link existing community groups
to one another.

Initiate or enhance long term
collaborative relationships.

Create partnerships that
empower community groups.

Result in products/processes
that have tangible impacts in the community.  

Jane notes on p 124 that – “this approach is a radical
contrast to the typical Museum programme lens, which consists of questions such
as “How much will it cost?”, “How many people will attend?”; “Will there be a
catalogue?” and “Will there be shop merchandise?” 

I cannot help but think that these community lens questions
might work well with school. 

Many of our schools seem obsessed with measurement questions
such as “How much will it cost?”, “How many students will achieve [insert
sought after qualification]?”; “Will there be media league tables?” and “What
is our point of marketable difference?” questions. 

The alternative - measuring schools through a community lens
-  Chris Bigum's 2004 “knowledge building through identifying local and
community needs” - might give purpose to both our museums and our schools. 

After all, how many of the professional learning
conversations held, and learning experiences planned in our schools, are
measured against how well they …  

Address vital and relevant needs/issues within the community.

Engage a diverse public.

Act as a catalyst for action.

Stimulate intergenerational interactions.

Link existing community groups to one another.

Initiate or enhance long term collaborative relationships.

Create partnerships that empower community groups.

Result in products/processes that have tangible impacts in the
community.

Source: Artichoke

To
allow oneself to be physically re-arranged by another is much like allowing
oneself to be mentally re-arranged by another.  Both require compliance
and conformity, and I guess both require deference to the “power” or
“expertise” of another. 

Physical
rearrangement has its attraction. 

For
example when The Magnet and I became "a living topiary" for a
Wreathed Hornbill, a Malay-Eagle Owl, a Chestnut-bellied Hawk Eagle, a Sulfur
Crested Cockatoo and a couple of Macaws of the Scarlet and the Blue &
Yellow varieties, in the Feathered Friends Photo Booth at the KL Bird Park - we
sat where required, raised limbs as required and were perched upon as required.
 The photo booth attendants had an expertise with arranging birds and
making people into perches that was difficult to fault. The marketing of this
expertise was clearly signposted in the “use your own camera” or “instant
photo” charges at the front of the photo booth. The outcome and the compliance
required transparent.   

I
am less certain about the attraction in mental re-arrangement by another. 
It is more usual to frame compliance and conformity of thought as
indoctrination or an “extraordinary
popular delusions and the madness of crowds, or as a consequence of Keen's “the cult of the
amateur”  .

Our
New Zealand Ministry of Education funded by far the largest number of educators
to The International Conference on Thinking, ICOT09, in Malaysia this July –
reports from conference organisers put the figure at one hundred and sixty plus
educators from "the wobbly isles".  In truth it was hard to
escape the wobbly isle educators dusted over corridors, and conference rooms –
all trying to find stuff to make sense of the New Zealand Curriculum Key
Competency “Thinking” - and to find educators to network with from other
places.   

On
offer at ICOT09 was a continuum of mental re-arrangement expertise - academic
expertise, edu_consultant expertise, edu_marketing expertise and the amateurs
offering classroom educator expertise.  Though the schools’ “thinking
journeys” were often an edu_road-trip better described as a support act for the
professional elite than an amateur’s attempt to make meaning .

What
surprised me and others when we discussed the days programme over Tiger Beer at
the end of each day was the sense that “everyone had something to sell”

It
is not that I am unused to applying Paul (1972)’s key questions to evaluate the
claims made at educational conferences. For example this is one of my
favourites …

Does the acceptance of this information advance the
vested interest of the person or group asserting it? 

It
is a good question to ask about anything you read – offline or blogged online -
by amateur, consultant or academic.

It
is the question that usually allows me to discriminate between the conference
claims made by educational consultants and marketers  and the claims made
by academics. 

However,
in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, during ICOT09, the question didn’t work
so well.  Many of the celebrity academics were conterminous with
educational consultants – both professional elites appeared to be networking to
extend their power and status –  lobbying for invites to the next ICOT
conference in Belfast, and waving their latest book.  Some even offered
autographs.  On some days it seemed more like a trade fair than a
conference.

I
was startled by the celebrity academics who chose to use chunks of their
allotted speaking time for self promotional marketing and I was reminded of the
BBC
“Yes Minister” series  and its cynical take on academics

“The surprising thing about academics is not that they
have their price, but how low that price is.”

 “No one really understands the true nature of
fawning servility until he sees an academic who has glimpsed the prospect of
money or personal publicity.”

By
the end of the week any difference between the ICOT09  conference and the
Petaling St Chinatown marketplace was largely a matter of the air-conditioning.

And
all of it made me wonder;

Is
the marketing of academia something new or just something I had failed to
notice before because in other edu_conferences in New Zealand I have been
distracted by the marketing of ICTs?

Is
the celebrity academic at ICOT09 an indicator of the end of “freedom of access
to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a nonprofit
way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.” Stephen
Downes The Future of Education cited in Unesco Chair Blogs

Is
the validity and reliability of academic research compromised when we make
revenue seeking celebrities of the academics themselves rather than ensuring
free access to their research findings?

And
although it seems that nowadays, at least in New Zealand’s popular media, Paglia
is eminently “ Always loved that” baggable …

As a bonus, here's the
famous 1993 Julie Burchill-Paglia "fax war", in which Paglia
comes off as humourless and smug, and Burchill signs off with the immortal:

Dear Professor Paglia,
Fuck off you crazy old dyke.
Always,
Julie Burchill

Always loved that.

My
experience at ICOT09 means I cannot help but think that in “Sex
Art and American Culture” Paglia buttoned what I observed seventeen years
later

“The
huge post 60s proliferation of conferences, produced a diversion of
professional energy away from study and towards performance, networking,
advertisement, cruising, hustling, glad handing, back scratching, chit chat,
group think.”  Paglia
in Sex, Art and American Culture 1992 p 221

All
of which makes me wonder - will the future with its increasing digitisation of
content make performance over study even more attractive for academics?

 Virginia
Postrel’s NYTimes Review  of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by
Chris Anderson has a passage that explains why this may well be the case. 
  

 Postrel
writes

Faced with collapsing business models, today’s
journalists-in-denial rail against Anderson’s message. Free content cannot be
the future, they say, because content is valuable. Fixed costs must be covered.
We have bills to pay. The problem, they argue, is that we’re giving our work
away.

As Anderson himself says, “I’ve got a lot of kids and
college isn’t getting any cheaper.” His own strategy, one outlined by Dyson way
back when, is to charge little or nothing for his writing and use it to
generate lucrative speaking gigs. “You can read a copy of this book online
(abundant, commodity information) for free,” he writes (not noting that the
free offer expires shortly after the printed book’s publication), “but if you
want me to fly to your city and prepare a custom talk on Free as it applies to
your business, I’ll be happy to, but you’re going to have to pay me for my
(scarce) time.”

So
it seems when the internet increasingly allows everything to be free, the
future will be all about the value we can leverage from time.

And
when time is the new money, the pockets will change

Illich,
prescient as ever, identified the role of “time” and “scarcity” with respect to
consumption a while back [In “Towards a history of needs.” 1977 – p33]

Time scarcity may soon turn into the major obstacle to
the consumption of prescribed and often publicly financed, services.

 Postrel
puts it this way

“Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics,
most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward
zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up
users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content
expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead,
the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer, and the market
ever more fragmented. Any given producer will find profits elusive, especially
since it’s so easy for amateurs to enter the market.”

When
Gertrude Stein claimed “The money is always there, but the pockets change”
she wasn’t necessarily thinking about freedom of access to public goods. 
But it is worth noting that when we make celebrities of academics, we change
the location of the pockets and when we change the location of the pockets we
stand to lose an important freedom.

We stand to lose what Downes describes as the “freedom of
access to knowledge and learning, where these are public goods, created in a
nonprofit way that expects no revenue from their creation and distribution.”

Source: Artichoke

It is worth thinking about the detail in Anne Salmond’s opinion piece in
this morning’s NZ Herald Anne Salmond Open
Entry for Maori a near miss Monday July 6 2009.

In addressing Pita Sharples’
suggestion of open entry for Maori students to universities, Salmond uses
research findings from the Starpath Project to make three disturbing claims about education
in New Zealand.

Claim #1.
 The management of educational data in New Zealand has more to do with the
distribution of resources rather than with tracking the long-term success or
failure of students.

As a result – “schools
are often unaware when bright students begin to fail; or when groups of
students (say, Maori boys) begin to follow pathways that lead to failure and
early exit.”

Claim #2. 
New Zealand educational investment in initiatives aimed at enhancing student
achievement are “largely working blind”.  We not only do not know if the
investment is making a positive difference we also do not know if the
investment is targeting the real problem.  

A result – “leading to
many uncoordinated, short-term initiatives (80 in one school that Starpath
studied) and a failure to identify those approaches that really work, so that
they can be adopted across the education system.”

Salmond also calls for a more
careful monitoring on government funded initiatives that claim to enhance
learning outcomes for Maori, Pacific and low-income students.

Those
initiatives that don't have a positive impact on student outcomes should be
dropped, while those that are highly successful should be adopted across the
education system.

I find it somewhat
disturbing that Salmond feels the need to recommend “dropping initiatives
that don’t have a positive impact on student outcomes" – it suggests
that this is not currently the case. 

If the Starpath Project has
evidence of initiatives that do and initiatives that don’t – I hope they
offered this evidence to Anne Tolley before the recent budget  - and that Anne Tolley respected their findings - so that we can be confident that we are no
longer funding initiatives that don’t have a positive impact on student
outcomes.

Claim #3 – Our
qualification system NCEA is so complex that families cannot make wise
decisions about which courses to study, which educational pathways to pursue.

As a result, “while most
Maori, Pacific and low-income students aspire to gain university entrance (78
per cent in one study), it is too easy for them to find themselves on NCEA
pathways that foreclose this option.”

I will admit to being
attracted to chaos theory, fuzzy logic and ambiguity in what I read but it
unnerves me just a little to realise that the Starpath Project research
suggests the New Zealand Government is funding educational initiatives where
uncertainty of focus and indeterminate outcomes rule.  In truth it is
easier to understand Pita Sharples call for open entry for Maori to
universities if you accept that  the current framing/ educational design
and funding of the MoE initiatives designed to raise Maori and Pacific
achievement is closer to whimsy than anything professionally responsible.

Claim#3
captures my interest this evening.  Our latest budget set aside “$8 million to ensure NCEA
assessment tools are of a high-standard and well understood by teachers.”
Presumably on the basis that teachers understanding of NCEA assessment leaves
something to be desired.  Salmond’s remarks suggest that parents and
students similarly lack the understanding needed to make good decisions about
NCEA assessment.

It all makes me wonder
how we could re-design the NCEA course options available at secondary schools
so that students and their parents would find it easier to make wise choices

There is more to it
than this of course - Any New Zealand student studying for NCEA can relate
instances where they or their friends have been excluded from courses or
dissuaded from certain option lines on the grounds that the institutions deems
the chance of student success unlikely. 

In New Zealand secondary schools the
right to try (and fail) is seldom available.  Like Etruscans divining the
future from the entrails of sacrified animals, secondary teachers continue to
confidently (and perhaps patronisingly) practice haruspicy on the NCEA course
selections of their students.

So parents and
students not only need to understand NCEA well enough to make wise choices they
also need to understand it well enough to fight the institution for their right
to access courses based upon these choices.

Nina Simon in the Musem2.0 Blog has been
looking at ways museums can design recommendation systems for their visitors in
Designing recommendation systems that go beyond “You’ll like
this”  . 

Much of her thinking about
customised museum tours can be usefully transferred to educational contexts –
where museum exhibits become educational options and courses.  For
example Simon’s thinking helps me think in new ways about the design of
solutions to help students and their families make sense of the courses and
learning pathways available to them.

When it comes to museums,
recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized
tour. How can a museum offer each visitor suggestions for exhibits and
experiences that will uniquely serve their interests? There are many lovely
example of museums providing quirky tours based on particular interests. For
example, The Tate Modern offers a set of pamphlets featuring different tours of
the museum based on emotional mood. You can pick up the "I've just
split up" tour and wallow in depression, or the "I'm an
animal freak" tour and explore your wilder side. And the site I Like Museums lets you find whole
institutions of interest based on your preference for trails like "making
things," "nice cup of tea," or simply "pigs."

Salmond's call for more careful monitoring of student learning
outcomes …. 

Above all, the compulsory
education system needs re-engineering. Information systems in
schools should be tracking the educational journeys of students, identifying
the strengths and potentials of individual students (so that they and their
parents get optimal advice), and patterns of success and failure across the
student body (so that initiatives are accurately targeted).

… sounds like it could be answered in part by the design principles in the recommendation system
Simon suggests for museums – one based upon collaborative filtering   (“like the one used to
recommend new songs to you on Pandora or new movies on Netflix?”) –

Perhaps we can design
a platform for the monitoring of individual educational journeys in New Zealand
– one that could aggregate content about the strengths and potentials of
individual students and build it into a Pandora/Netflix like recommendation
system – a system alerting students and their families of the educational
targets to be met and the course options available.

Then the patterns of success data available might allow
students and their families to thoughtfully design learning pathways - pathways
that not only meet their aspirations but also extend them to create
alternative educational reach.

Source: Artichoke

Reading Tactical Media by Rita Raley has provided both an
escape from the tactical activism expected on the domestic front on a sodden 
Sunday afternoon in Auckland and an escape from my current way of imagining the
“future” of school.

I enjoy thinking about the future of museums, libraries and
school.  They are all institutions that
face precarity - uncertainty and challenge - in their current architecture. 

Raley’s critique let me think in a new way about Robert Jane’s questions in  Museums
in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse (London: Routledge, May, 2009) cited in
Pallazo Strozzi Blog 

 Jane asks

If museums did not exist, would
we reinvent them and what would they look like?

Further, if the museum were to
be reinvented, what would be the public’s role in the reinvented institution?

 When I replace [museum]
with [school] I get a much better start point for thinking about the future of
school.

If schools did not exist, would
we reinvent them and what would they look like?

Further, if the school were to
be reinvented, what would be the public’s role in the reinvented institution?

Raley made me realise that whenever I think about the future
of school through questions like Janes  -
there is a unacknowledged sense of a permanence of place or places (real or
virtual) –

If schools did not exist and I did re-invent them - then in my
imaginings I create a spatial identity albeit in some cases a fractured spatial
identity – what I mean is there is a sense of permanence in how I imagine school.  

You can see this assumption of permanence – this focus on a
space/place is not mine alone - in the provocative thinking in “Witnessing the future”  – and in  “Just the other day I saw the future
…”    or
school2.0 

It is interesting that our use of media in education is no
different – we seem hell bent on using Web2.0 all that “participatory media” to create
Raley’s “ever hardening totems of identity” – both personal and institutional – We use participatory media like attention whores - creating multiple textured “look at me spaces”.

When I read Raley on tactical media the focus is different –
her analysis is on the “experiential” – the value of tactical media is to be found in its ephemerality.

Media tacticians challenge even the digital preservation
of "the experience" - asking

“How can Tactical Media be preserved and
made accessible without altering the value produced by its ephemerality?”  Politics of the Ephemeral: Rethinking the
Archive  

This made me laugh for this weekend's media details an instance in New Zealand schools where we see the reverse happening –

Possibly
because of our current focus on totemic place in education – our schools are intent
on preserving and making accessible their places and space online.

It seems this extends to making claims over the ephemeral use of
media for conversation.  

The Sunday Herald newspaper headline reads Dio girls suspended for
Facebook comments   –

The irony is that by claiming the right to preserve a
selection of their student ephemeral online conversation (by printing out selected
conversations (from some but not all Dio students using FaceBook) and by handing these
to school authorities); and then by making the ephemeral conversationalists accountable – and by
withdrawing access to learning for those students whose conversations were chosen
to be preserved by printing, the school has effectively preserved, archived and
made the content of those ephemeral conversations accessible to much, much,
much, wider audiences than the students themselves could ever imagine or have intended.   

It makes me wonder if the follow up headline will read “School
stood down for actions that led to the preservation, publication and digital archiving
of the ephemeral Facebook conversations of young people .”  

I am interested in what happens to our thinking about the
future of school if we refuse anything that creates Bourriaud’s “ever hardening
totems of identity” (p13). 

What happens if we imagine “school” as an experience – a
learning experience where learning and the learners themselves are both flexible
and ephemeral like the conversations we might hold when walking across a mall.   

“Future School” becomes an experience where afterwards there
is little material trace – a concept where “living memory” rather than “products
of learning” dominate our discourse.

When school is imagined as “nomadic” experience, then pedagogy
becomes a “deliberately slippery and heterogenous practice”?

Raley describes the categorical unity of tactical media as “disturbance”.  What if we understood “school” as
disturbance?

Citing Geert Lovink and “The Next Five Minutes” (N5M)  festival of media arts and politics - Raley argues that tactical
media is intended to  disrupt dominant
ways of thinking so that critical thinking can occur.

What if we understood “school” as any open to anyone at any
time experience, where critical thinking can occur?

It is this inclusivity and flexibility of tactical media – that
is powerful in reimagining “school” in this way.

Can “school” be imagined as a process – as a “tool for creating
temporary consensus zones based on unexpected alliances”.  

And all this makes me wonder will our future questions about
“school” reject notions of does it work? – or how well have the learners in an
identified  physical or virtual space met
“national standards”? – or Greg’s fear that the place of school might be ladder
ranked in league tables.   

We would ask instead if the experience is virtuous?

 Virtuosity – described
by Virno as “activity which finds its own fulfilment (that is, its own purpose)
in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product or an object that
survives the performance. p29

Does the experience - “future school” - strengthen interpersonal
relationships in society?  

Raley cites Bourriaud who suggests … the role of art is “learning
to inhabit the world in a better way” p27

 So perhaps “future school”
can be an experience rather than a place – and we can understand “school” as we
do art – as something transitory, precarious, and uncertain that helps us learn
how to inhabit the world in a better way.

Source: Artichoke

Pruned Blog’s  "The Crack
Garden"  post captured my attention right from the start –

 “The interventions
into the site of The Crack Garden were primarily actions of removal
rather than the addition of new layers and material. By eliminating portions of
the existing concrete and exposing the soil beneath, potential is released, and
new opportunities for the garden arise.”

“The design is conceived as an intervention that functions
as a lens, altering perception of a place rather than completely remaking it.”

This made me think of “crack learning” and how we might
understand learning based on actions of removal rather than by constantly adding
new layers and materials to our schools, classrooms and students.

I wanted to ask ..

What would happen to learning if we removed "the din"?

“We approach our technologies through a battery of
advertising and media narratives; it is hard to think above the din.”  Turkle, Sherry. (Ed.). The inner
history of devices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. p4

What would happen to learning if we removed the expectation that "progress" requires unrelenting change and innovation  

One of the most critical problems our schools face is … “not
resistance to innovation, but the fragmentation, overload, and incoherence
resulting from the uncritical and uncoordinated acceptance of too many
different innovations” Fullan & Steigelbauer 1991 p197

What would happen to learning if we removed "the rush", if we slowed down, learned how
to see and took time to realise that all things connect?

Crack gardens/learning made me think of a return to; slow pedagogy, to
observation (see think wonder), to Geetha Narayanan like learning spaces
squeezed into cracks between city buildings, to looking carefully at exploring and
knowledge building around the local (existing) rather than all that costly rip
snorting through the screen activity we favour to get to the global, to looking
at ways to discover and develop all learning identities of the child rather simply
addressing learning identities for the 9am to 3pm child.     

And I wondered if the coherence provided by the stripped
back nature of "crack learning" would provide new opportunities for understanding individual
potential.    

Whenever I read the latest policy initiative aimed at
reducing disparity in New Zealand schools I have high apple pie in the sky
hopes … I imagine the MoE policy makers in Wellington as Pratchett’s “great minds”

These are great minds he told himself.  These are men who are trying to work out how
the world fits together, not by magic, not by religion but by inserting their
brains in whatever crack they can find and trying to lever it apart.  p199 in Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

and I hope that this time round we will be brokering
something that makes a real difference to New Zealand’s alarmingly disparate
achievement outcomes.   

That is undoubtedly why it was a little discomforting to
read Gladwell's "Outliers" over the weekend. 
Now Malcolm Gladwell has been accused of cherry picking his references in Outliers but I could not help
but be affected by his description of Karl Alexander’s five year longitudinal analysis
tracking the city of Baltimore’s profile of results for 650 first graders on
the Californian Achievement Test math and reading skill exams. (pages 255 to 259)

Reading Gladwell made me fret that all our MoE sanctioned interventions
to reduce our achievement gap are perhaps a Sisyphean struggle – made me think that perhaps we are
doomed to always struggle because in targeting schools we are targeting the
wrong intervention.

As Gladwell frames it, when we have disparate achievement
outcomes from kids with different backgrounds we are tempted to attribute causality
to either

1.  Kids from background
X do not have the same inherent ability to learn as kids from background Y.

2.  Our schools are
failing kids from background X.

This is certainly what has happened in the conversations
about disparity in New Zealand – option 1 – deficit thinking - is rightly rejected
leaving us with option 2 – our schools are failing [insert gender, socio economic
status, ethnicity] students. Our latest solutions to not failing [insert gender, socio economic
status, ethnicity] students is focussing on improving teacher
student relationships, engagement, and feedback.

Gladwell makes me ask … when we focus on reducing
disparity in learning outcomes by changing the stuff happening in schools have we
misidentified the contribution school makes?   

If for the purposes of this post I accept that The
Californian Achievement Test measures something valuable in terms of learning
outcome [and I know this may be unwarranted]  … then using Alexander’s data below I can suggest
that the achievement gap between students from “rich” and “poor” homes is exacerbated
by attending school.

Californian Achievement Test Data from start of school year (June)

Gladwell next reveals additional results from the same CAT
testing carried out at the end of the school year (September) – This testing
that excludes the summer holidays – and allows quite different conclusions to
be drawn about the same group of students.

It seems that by testing at the end of the school year - the
data showing “within school” learning gains between children from low and high
socioeconomic backgrounds are not as “gappy” as we first imagined.

Which causes us to ask is “gappiness” due to what is happening
in classrooms or is “gappiness” due to  what
is happening outside of classrooms?

Is Glawell right?

Should our focus on reducing disparity look at the effect on
learning of time spent outside of school rather than what happens within school?

To ask …Does the break in schooling over the summer holidays differentially
affect learning outcomes for children from lower, middle and high socioeconomic
homes?

Look at Gladwell's data comparing student reading skill test scores
before and after the summer break.

Now Gladwell, using Alexander’s data suggests that ..

 “When it comes to
reading skills poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session.  The reading skills of rich kids by contrast,
go up a whopping 52.49 points.  Virtually
all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the
result of differences in the way privileged kids learn   when
they are not in school.”    p258

Leading me to wonder - Do we simply need to increase the number of days students
attend school to reduce disparity?

Trying to validate Gladwell’s claims led me straight to Hattie’s Visible
Learning meta-analyses where I checked out the number crunching on Summer
Vacations (d=-0.09) p80 and 81.  

Hattie’s metanalyses on summer vacations confirmed that
students “lost some achievement gains over the summer” and that “middleclass
students appeared to gain on grade level equivalent reading tests over summer
compared to lower class students".  And he
also notes that the “negative effect of summer did increase with grade level.”  

However, Hattie doesn’t call this like Gladwell does - he suggests
instead that the magnitude of these effects when compared to other achievement
influences “are minor indeed”

Hattie concludes

“It may be that if teachers were more attuned to the
proficiencies that students bring into their classrooms, then the first month
of the school year could be used to recapture the losses from the school break
reasonably quickly.”

I hope Hattie is right because, whether it is happening within
schools or outside of school over the summer break, we have an awful lot riding
on the inequality we are building into New Zealand society.

Source: Artichoke

I felt like an extra in Richard Scarry’s Busy Busy World yesterday morning.

Filling up with gas at the local garage I shared the forecourt with a huge red fire truck packed with firemen. Given the cell phone risk signs posted all around I was disconcerted to see one of the crew leap down from the truck and start texting in the pump bay.

Lowly Worm insight: The public’s perceived risk of taking or making any calls in a gas station forecourt is less than the actual risk.

Leaving the gas station I went to our local GP to pick up a script for one of the kids living off the corridor, only to be greeted by a laminated notice and a closed door.  To paraphrase - “Before you open door pause and consider whether you are feeling dodgy in a way that could be ‘flu like – if this is possible remain outside and Tom Jones like “knock three times” at a window to alert us inside of your possible H1N1 incubating self outside.”

Lowly Worm insight: The actual risk of catching something serious in GP’s waiting room is high enough to abandon those too enfeebled to knock three times and those too short to reach the window but not so high as to exclude those without the literacy and or the language to make meaning from the text.  [that is the 380,000 New Zealanders without the literacy to understand the instructions on a fire extinguisher and anyone else without the ability to make meaning from English]  

I then visited a friend who had a Richard Scarry “Great Pie Robbery” experience on Wednesday, where all her electrical goods stolen.  The home and contents insurance was up to date, the burglary happened when she was out, the forced windows and doors were quickly repaired and the police visited and detectives Sam and Dudley dusted for fingerprints.  But she feels vulnerable in a place that the week before had been her refuge.

Lowly Worm insight: The actual risk is not important – the perceived risk of Horace Wolf and Croaky Crocodile revisiting the house creates high levels of anxiety and outrage.  

To understand how we use risk management and risk communication, [or how it uses us] I reckon you cannot better reading Max Brook’s World War Z  but reading Peter Sandman  Talking about “Risk Communication Before and During Epidemics” 
provides a framework that has helped me analyse our response to “swine ‘flu”, national testing and all the other stuff that frightens us. 

For example, I didn’t know that “how much harm a risk does” and “how upset people get” has a correlation coefficient of only 0.2. 

Sandman frames these two as “hazard” and “outrage” and goes on to show that

He elaborates on this research to show that “the correlation between hazard and perceived hazard is also very low, but the correlation between outrage and perceived hazard is very high.”

This analysis interests me as I try to understand the high levels of outrage at the Minister Anne Tolley’s suggested introduction of National Standards – outrage that is based on the “perceived risk” of league tables.

Sandman is smart … he knows that correlation is not necessarily causality … but that when it is … then the directionality is contestable. 

And I love the way he explains the negative

If the outrage is the driver … and the hazard perception is the result the message to Anne Tolley is quite clear – introduce communication strategies to reduce the outrage. The message to the NZEI is equally clear – introduce communication strategies that increase the outrage. 

However, it was the second part of Sandman’s analysis that I most enjoyed reading.

Here he talks about how risk management is also used by those with institutional authority to shelter the public from high risk information on the grounds that the ensuing panic will be more damaging than the risk itself.

All those “damage control”, “on a need to know basis” conversations that obscure transparency within institutions

The Argument: If we scare people this fear will escalate into panic.  Panic will exacerbate the situation.

However Sandman counters by arguing that our experience in New Orleans and 9/11show that we overrate panic. He distinguishes “feeling panicky” from “acting panicky” and he introduces a new idea – that of “panic panic”

And this is a problem because in risky situations fear is tolerated, has an “adjustment reaction” which because it is a rehearsal has positive outcomes in terms of appropriate future reaction …

• The underestimation of the frequency with which fearful people rise to resilient, pro-social, and even heroic behavior. We had ample evidence of that in 9/11, and I won't belabor the point.
• The failure to recognize the positive value of fear in encouraging preparedness, vigilance, tolerance of inconvenience and expense, and so forth.

And it seems contrary to what we commonly hold as true - that communication that makes people fearful in risky situations is a good thing.

The bit I liked best was Sandman’s notion that fear is fungible.

Which brings me right back to thinking about  – what are the things that are currently competing for a slice of the fearfulness pie in education?

Source: Artichoke

Michael Doyle often nudges me into new thinking …  Take this thought from his Science Teacher Blog.

Michael Doyle is onto something …. I like thinking about boundaries of all kinds

This morning in Ponsonby Rd I was captured by the number of people I saw balanced on the strip of white paint that is only a few mm thick.  Clutching biodegradable trays loaded with cups of takeout coffee they were watchful in the precariousness of their boundary - waiting for an opportunity to swap their boundary for another albeit more elevated boundary in Auckland City  - the pavement strip. 

Those boundaries marked by white painted surfaces are not protected by armies, but they are marked by agreement and convention. The boundaries of white paint road markings might seem a little different from the boundaries of nationalism but many of the same rules apply –

John Stewart Mill describes it “nationalism” as when

Those coffee clutching pedestrians standing on the painted strip boundary are united by common sympathies that do not exist between them and the motorist barrelling down Ponsonby Rd trying to get to work.  The motorists occupying a different boundaried surface have common sympathies that are not shared with the Ponsonby Rd already at work - office gopher.  

Common sympathies always make me anxious -  they suggest the existence of common antipathies.
Looking at “why we belong” requires us to identify those others that don’t … and this is probably why the boundaries of nationalism make me anxious – as do the other boundaries people use to form collective identity.

I guess I can never escape that boundary ideas  that Tom Lehrer so cleverly captures in Who’s Next.

Those coffee clutching boundary perchers in Ponsonby Rd would have to re- position themselves if they attempted the same activity on the Auckland Harbour Bridge -  The lane boundaries on the harbour bridge are movable boundaries – great hunks of interconnecting concrete that make me think of global warming and those national boundaries drawn across glaciers that are not as immutable as we pretended when we talked about them in school.

All of which makes me think again about the boundaries we have built between individual schools in New Zealand.

In education the boundaries and borders we create with our points of difference, our principals as robber barons, our school based curricula etc allows us to measure what fits and what doesn’t – allows us  to discriminate based upon assessment – both formative and summative – allows us Anne Tolley like national standards – allows us NZEI feared league tables.

In the L@S09 keynote Andy Hargreaves talked about creating “culture of collective responsibility” in education  – a culture based on

Collective responsibility – requires movable boundaries – responsibility without boundaries - it is a novel notion in a world predicated on right indexed to the might of a nation state, right indexed to the “successful school”,  and right indexed to the powerful individual. 

Collective responsibility is a certainly a novel notion in New Zealand education where we are encouraged to identify and market our boundaries with other schools as points of difference, to establish zones and where the NZC sees us exhorted to develop our own curriculum boundaries – aka our own school based curricula.

In such a boundary based educational landscape we should not be at all surprised to see principals talking like robber barons about owning the schools that employ them; to see principals passing around personal business cards that could be mistaken for those of our most entrepreneurial real estate agents; and to see as a consequence of this boundaried thinking - teachers and principals made anxious and defensive by talk about national standards and measurement targets.  

The boundaries of teaching and learning allow us vainglorious ambition but they also allow measures of boundaried accountability –

… and yet it is the wantonness of learning sans boundaries that we need to imagine and make real.

When I imagine learning without boundaries in schools across New Zealand – I imagine that all that collective responsibility will be not unlike lovemaking, not unlike art

So how do we get movable boundaries and collective responsibility in New Zealand education – how do we achieve passionate virtuosity? How do we raise achievement outcomes for all young New Zealanders?

Source: Artichoke