Potalanoa (talking into the night) and conversational transience
I meet all sorts of
educators in the day job, but my opportunities to talk with them for any length
of time are limited. I am a
conversational transient. A conversation started with one educator in one place
is abandoned only to be picked up and carried on with another educator in another place,
before being abandoned, again and again and again. In place and in conversation I am always moving
on; moving on to another place, to another school, to another classroom, to another
school hall, to another staffroom to work with another syndicate, another
department, another team, and another teacher.
I have learned to snatch
opportunities to talk about the things that matter most wherever and whenever I
can. As well as snatching torn corners
and strips of conversation, I rip images of the ordinary from each place locating
them carefully in the corners of memory.
For the ordinary of doing school in one place is the extraordinary of the
next.
The loneliness and lack
of any long term conversation in my daily wandering is disguised for the most
part by a nomadic lifestyle that allows me to embrace the unexpected. No two days are the same. The rhythm of a fresh start to each day is unlike
the rhythm available to me when I was an educator pinned to a thick waxy layer of
institutional belonging. And I toss
between the two – do I want to allow myself to be etherised and pinned and play
where the ongoing conversation is able to be explored in depth or do I want to
keep on living as a conversational transient skittering across the wild uncertain
surfaces of what matters most? It is that old “do I want to be a pet mouse or a
wilding mouse?” thing all over again
Whilst downing a coffee and peeling open the itinerant’s lunchtime muesli
bar earlier this year I was approached by three teachers who wanted to talk about issues I had
raised in the opening keynote. One
wanted to talk further about e-learning through juggling and PowerPoint ,
another wanting to talk about using SOLO Taxonomy in her post graduate research
and a third wanting to talk about parallels between “positive deviance” and the
Tongan Kainga as an approach to creating educational, social and economic success of Tongan's in New
Zealand.
It was the positive deviance conversation that excited me most –
for I was able to re-start a conversation I first started in Artichoke in 2007.
Ever
since I read and blogged about Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
by Atul Gawande
I have looked out for a conversation
about positive deviance – one that could be used to make a difference in
educational policy and programmes. I am
certain you can knock out an edu_ground hog day list, most of us can. Those issues/outcomes that despite numerous
initiatives/ projects/ contestable funding etc we consistently fail to change
in classrooms and schools. Indeed the enduring nature of things we never seem
to fix when “doing school” makes even the most enthusiast educator cynical in
time – or else sees them prone to “this too will pass thinking” behaviour like
becoming educational facilitators or consultants – or adopting other escapology
tactics like applying for study awards – anything that allows them to keep thinking
about school but at a safe distance from the doing of it. If you don't believe me check out the Twitter
stream balance of tweets from educators who have just made “a presentation” to
show someone else “how to do teaching” against those “who are doing the teaching”
and tweet about their classroom planning. I am always fearful that one day we
will run out of the people prepared to keep doing school and be left with those who want to tell us all how to do it.
Gawande’s chapter “On Washing Hands” (describing the
inability of medical institutions to persuade their staff to adopt simple
measures to prevent hospital acquired infections) reminded me of the simple
issues that we never seem to resolve in school.
The Positive Deviance Projects showed
me that this approach can stretch much further than changing hand washing behaviours
in hospitals.
We attack the “unmovables” in education by bringing in
“experts”, “facilitators”, and specially funded research programmes etc into
our schools –But in every community there are certain individuals (the
"Positive Deviants") whose special practices/ strategies/ behaviours
enable them to find better solutions to prevalent community problems than their
neighbours who have access to the same resources.
Positive deviance is a
culturally appropriate development approach that is tailored to the specific
community in which it is used.
By relying on identifying people within a community to
model the behaviours for change, we ensure these changes are doable, manageable
and achievable and avoid charges that so commonly arise when “developed” world’s
institutions see themselves as catering to “underdeveloped” people’s needs. The
results from the Positive Deviance Projects persuades me that we might be
better off looking for and funding interventions that explore “positive deviance”
within a community and within a school.
All of which was why I was so excited when Tofi’a followed up on our snatched lunchtime exchange
by sending me a copy of a recent Masters Research Thesis from Massey University
written by Sione Tu’itahi.
Langa Fonua: In Search
of Success. How a Tongan Kainga Strived to be Socially and Economically Successful
in New Zealand by Sione Tu’itahi is a description of intergenerational positive
deviance and what I have long been looking for.
You can get a copy from The Directorate Pasifika@Massey Office, Albany
Campus, Auckland.
The thesis “Langa
Fonua” argues that “to find solutions to the low socio-economic status of
Tongans in New Zealand, research should focus on their demonstrated strengths and positive achievements,
rather than their deficits.” p82 Tu'itahi uses the
Tongan model of fonua – ongoing inter-connected relationship between people and
environment (reciprocity) as the framework for understanding the successful progress of the Tongan Tahi kainga over the last 30 years.
He reveals how migration from a small island in the Ha’apai
group in the Kingdom of Tonga, to the main island Tongatapu to New Zealand. The
United States and Australia was the result of a consistent vision and strategy,
a model that each generation followed that focused on balancing material,
intellectual and spiritual development and contributing to the wider community.
The Tahi kainga worked and studied hard but critical was how the kainga defined
“success” (ikuna) and how this became an influential narrative for the success
of each generation that followed. Success was a holistic construct and nuanced around:
- Spiritual well
being. Mo’ui Lelei Fakalaumalie - Intellectual well
being. Mo’ui Lelei Faka’atamai - Physical health and
well being. Mo’ui Lelei Fakasino - Collective kainga
health and well being. Mo’ui lelei e Kainga - Contribution to
Society. Tokoni ki he fonua
Langa Fonua uses observation,
interviews, focus groups and two traditional Tongan methods of constructing and
sharing knowledge and social realities.
I was quite taken
by these traditional methodologies and how well they expressed what was missing
from the day job.
Potalanoa (talking
into the night) refers to a form of conversation in which Tongan participants
analyse and reflect deeply on a subject or range of topics and issues that leads
to constructing of new ideas or deconstructing and rearranging of existing
ones(Manu’atu, 2000) (Cited in Tu’itahi 2009 page 16)Fakalotofale’ia (creating
within the house) is the in-house meeting of the extended kainga to investigate
perspectives, facts and Tongan socioeconomic realities, and to plan on how to
apply knowledge skills and information for the benefit of the extended kainga. (Tu’itahi 2009 page 16)
Apart from discovering positive deviance research that
could be useful when imagining how best to enhance academic outcomes for Tongan students, the thesis was a
powerful reminder that as a conversational transient in the day job I need to
make more time for potalanoa and fakalotofale’ia
with Artichoke in the evenings.
Source: Artichoke
A Giant Romance of Primitive Life and Unfettered Love.
Whatever happened between “Me” and “You”?
It was easy to understand our relationship in the beginning.
It was what I like to think of as “a giant romance of primitive life and
unfettered love” – a "Me Tarzan, you Jane" kind of thing.
Me: (pointing to herself) Consumer.
You: (he points at her) Consumer.
Me: And you? (she points at him) You?
You: (stabbing himself proudly in the chest) Producer, Producer.
Me: (emphasizing his correct response) Producer.
You: (poking back and forth each time) Consumer. Producer. Consumer. Producer…
With apologies to Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932)
I gave you money for the goods and services you produced – “Me
Consumer, you Producer.”
We still have “a giant romance of primitive life and
unfettered love” but now instead of Me:
(pointing to herself) Consumer….You: (stabbing
himself proudly in the chest) Producer, Producer… there is a Me (producer) You (consumer) kind of thing going on.
Web 2.0 means I produce my own content and you, well you (and the other wannabe manipulators of
the cloud) become the consumer. You don’t
care about the quality or integrity of what I produce it is enough that I
broadcast content, for by taking control of the distribution channels, and
using the information I produce, you profit.
You are Google, Apple, Amazon
… and the rest.
It is a simple relationship where you leverage off my
activity. And the more I/me can produce
the more profit you generate – so
you work hard to make production easy and attractive for me and the students I
teach.
"The more links we click,
pages we view, and transactions we make, the more intelligence the Web makes,
the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off." Carr
2008 cited in Lovink 2010.
In the educational world I inhabit the “me” do not question
your generosity, we do not pause to ask why you shower us with so many
applications and services. We love you big time – we love your work – we love
what you do. In the guise of e-learning
we not only use your production tools, feed your clouds, and encourage our
students to do likewise, we also worship what you provide.
Watching the activities of edu-bloggers and self proclaimed elearning
experts online it is a little like watching the ouroboros consuming its own
tail. In a strange act of self-worship we use your production tools to worship
your production tools. In a testimony of
our faith in you we create edu_blog posts on “Ten best XXX apps for educators”,
we enshrine your apps in purpose built displays and descriptions in edu_wikis,
and we upload video to explain how to use your apps and production tools.
In the educational world we are your fevered but reverent producers.
You, well you must know where you stand in this relationship.
Web 2.0 has three distinguishing
features: it is easy to use; it facilitates the social element; and users can
upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text. It
is all about providing users with free publishing and production platforms. The
focus on how to make a profit from free user−generated content came in response
to the dotcom crash. Geert Lovink MyBrain.net The colonization of
real−time and other trends in Web 2.0
Web 2.0 has changed more than our me you relationship – Web 2.0 has changed me. I am no longer the same me – I am no longer a privileged node in a network – I am no longer
in charge – my me is blurred – With
Web 2.0 I am a me that is part of a
centralised infrastructure that is you –
and you identify me and profit from,
every click I/me make –
With Web 2.0 I am a “controlled and manipulated” me.
With Web 2.0 I am a “commodified” me.
Being commodified is
an odd sensation – it makes me wonder about the temporal me.
Am I more me at some
times than others? And if so when am I most me?
This feels like a vampiric question or even a Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde thing.
With Web 2.0 it seems I am me in the present more than I am me in the past. The information I am encouraged to produce focuses
on knowing me in real time not me in any past time.
You – the
controller of the centralised infrastructure – the clouds and the data streams
– have an insatiable appetite for “the real-time data” me. And this valuing of the
real time data me privileges the present.
The pacemaker of the real−time
Internet is "microblogging", but we can also think of the social
networking sites and their urge to pull as many real−time data out of its users
as possible: "What are you doing?" Give us your self−shot.
"What's on your mind?" Expose your impulses. Frantically updated
blogs are part of this inclination, as are frequently updated news sites. The
driving technology behind this is the constant evolution of RSS feeds, which
makes it possible to get instant updates of what's happening elsewhere on the
web. The proliferation of mobile phones plays a significant background role in
"mobilizing" your computer, social network, video and photo camera,
audio devices, and eventually also your TV. The miniaturization of hardware
combined with wireless connectivity makes it possible for technology to become
an invisible part of everyday life. Web 2.0 applications respond to this trend
and attempt to extract value out of every situation we find ourselves in. The Machine constantly wants to know what we
think, what choices we make, where we go, who we talk to. Geert Lovink MyBrain.net
The colonization of real−time and other trends in Web 2.0 2010 http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-03-18-lovink-en.html
Asking “when am I me?”
makes me realise that as a real-time me, I am an uncomplicated me, a me trapped in the present. This me is a product of a Simon Schama like “machine driven universe”. You know me by my most recent keyboard interactions with the screen
"For if the entire history
of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven
universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not
memory, is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy,
then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction." Simon
Schama Landscape and Memory Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995 http://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Memory-Simon-Schama/dp/0679735127
Who is the real-time
me?
The real-time me is the real “real-time me”. There is no
place anymore for an alternative me; no space for the virtual “real-time me”.
The “controllers of the cloud”, the “new overlords of the distribution channels”,
want the real “real time me”. They have
no time for an alternative me – the Artichoke me, they want only the real me. The new relationship between me and you values
the old order, the existing power hierarchies’ of gender, race and position.
We constantly login, create
profiles in order to present our "selves" on the global market place
of employment, friendship and love. We can have multiple passions but only one
certified ID. Trust is the oil of global capitalism and the security state,
required by both sides in any transaction or exchange. In every rite de
passage, the authorities must trust us before they let both our bodies and
information through. The old idea that the virtual is there to liberate you
from your old self has collapsed. Geert Lovink MyBrain.net The
colonization of real−time and other trends in Web 2.0 2010
And when I give you information about the real time me I
give you control and power. I give you an enduring digital memory of me that
acts as both a spatial and temporal panopticon.
If Orwell was right, and … “Who controls the past controls
the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Then by becoming a producer
in your Web2.0 world I have given you control over my past, my present and my
future.
And I am so excited by the ability to upload my own content
and report on whatever I am thinking or doing in a real time stream of content
that I neglect to interrogate the consequences.
What does it mean when I give up control and power, when I become part
of someone else’s content stream, when I offer all that I do and think as an
enduring digital memory? What does it
mean when I encourage my students to act in the same way?
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has explored some potential responses
to the challenges of this new relationship, the challenges of an enduring
digital memory in “Delete. The Virtue of
Forgetting in the Digital Age”.
The first four chapters of”Delete” book focus on the
consequences of failing to forget. They are well argued and although this is a
topical issue for many Web 2.0 commentators Mayer-Schönberger introduced insights,
ideas and content that were new to me. His
thinking around the role of remembering provided a far deeper analysis and
critique of the topic than Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell managed to collect in
their book “Total Recall – How the e-memory revolution will change everything.” Bell and Gemmell offer valorising description; in contrast Mayer-Schönberger offers critical analysis
of the causes and consequence of remembering everything. How remembering everything overload me with
information, information that impairs my ability to reason, information I would
be better off forgetting.
Delete is by far the more interesting read.
The last two chapters of “Delete” – Chapter V “Potential
responses”, and Chapter VI “Re-introducing Forgetting” best captured my
attention.
Mayer-Schönberger has a useful categorisation of responses
to living with an enduring digital memory.
So useful in fact that I spent a happy hour creating a CMap that used his
classification to explore these in the context creating enduring digital
memories through student eportfolios – an enduring affection of educators and
one that I have been hearing about at edu_conferences since 2002. I could
equally have explored the huge amount of data schools collect on their students
and their families.
Mayer-Schönberger
clarifies that when we increase the amount of information about ourselves and
our students in digital memory we risk:
1.
Loss of control and power over the information we
place online.
2.
Exposing student information and data in a digital
panopticon (both spatial and temporal) where selective pieces of their information
and data are under surveillance to people, and for purposes and times we have
little to no control over.
3.
Overloading with information we are better off
forgetting, information that impairs reasoning.
What I enjoyed most was his interrogation of seven suggested
responses to the challenges arising from the creation of enduring digital
content. My notes describing each of the categories are included below – you will
have to read the chapters to fully appreciate the critique.
Responding to the
challenges of an enduring digital memory
The Relationship
Responses:
Three of Mayer- Schönberger’s responses are based around the
individual and relationships. He explores
ways in which the individual can decrease the flow of information between one
person and another – between me and you. And critiques the potential success of
each.
Responses framed
around
1. Social Norms and
Individual Self Control
Firstly an individual’s power to decrease the flow of
information could arise through mechanisms of social norms and individual self control. Personal behavioural change – Mayer- Schönberger
refers to this as digital abstinence. So once educators and students appreciate
“the implications of abandoning forgetting when digitising information we will
stop providing information to others and digital memory of these outcomes will
cease to exist.
2. Formal Laws
Secondly an individual’s power to decrease the flow of
information could arise through mechanisms of formal laws. These information privacy rights would afford
students “with a legally recognised claim over their personal information,
thereby empowering them to maintain information control on whether and how the information
is shared.” This would include a Purpose Limitation Principle whereby “the
recipient of the personal information can only use it for the purposes to which
you consented and no others”.
3. Architecture
Thirdly an individual’s power to decrease the flow of
information could arise through mechanisms of architecture – through a Digital
Privacy Rights Infrastructure. Mayer-Schönberger argues that a Digital Rights
Management (DRM) infrastructure similar to that developed for information in
the context of copyright (movies, music, games, digital books) is used in the context
of forgetting any personal information.
Your personal data is paired with meta-information about who can use it
and how. Media players check this meta information and refuse to play information
content if usage is not appropriately authorised. Individuals could add meta
data to their personal information detailing who can use it for what purpose
and for what price.
Mayer-Schönberger notes this would require laws to prevent
reverse engineering, requiring surveillance to protect us from surveillance – we
create a panopticon to protect us from a panopticon.
The Cognition, Decision
Making and Time Responses:
Responses framed
around
1. Social Norms and
Individual Self Control
Here Mayer-Schönberger suggests reducing the amount of information in digital memory by mechanisms
of social norms and individual self control. He suggests that Cognitive
adjustment at the cultural level will let us disregard old facts and
information. We will accept that people change
and pay heed to only the recent online.
2. Formal Laws
The formal laws approach could be used to reduce the amount of information in
digital memory if we introduce an Information Ecology that allows for
deliberate regulatory constraint of “what information can be collected, stored
and thus remembered by who and for how long. However, Mayer-Schönberger notes
that recent trends have seen a loosening of existing constraints on information
in digital memory rather than a tightening and increasing calls for
transparency legislation to fight corruption both of which would compromise this
response.
3. Technology
The technological
response to limiting the amount of digital content online made me smile. It suggests a Gordon Bell like experience but
with one notable difference the Gordon Bell like content collected is shared
with everyone. So we limit the negatives
of storing content online by increasing the amount of information in digital
memory. This proposal identifies that it
is not digital memory per se that is the problem – it is the selective nature
of this digital memory that compromises us.
“When everything is transparent surveillance loses its power.”
The Re-Introducing
Forgetting Response.
Mayer-Schönberger’s proposal for re-introducing forgetting
by “making forgetting just a tiny bit easier than remembering” is elegant –
both simple and powerful in its scope.
By prompting the user to set expiration dates each time they save and
upload information and information bits – content, detail, comments – to
digital memory they confront users with the problem. I enjoyed Mayer-Schönberger’s
analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of re-introducing forgetting (for
example, it fails to address privacy concerns). When the control remains with
the producer of the content, and we shift the default back from retaining
information forever to forgetting it after different time periods we restore something
of what it is to live well with technology, we restore what it is to be human. We allow a giant romance of primitive life and unfettered love to continue.
Source: Artichoke
If you are someone who likes to count things …
… you will make something of the fact that the word “competition”
only occurs once in the New Zealand Curriculum document.
Or “Why everything you have been told about genetics, talent
and IQ is wrong”
Or “What students are” versus “What students do”
I will admit that I am a bit of a fanboy for the outcomes
based thinking of educationalist and academic John Biggs.
I like using multiple alternative representations when I am trying
to understand new ideas and ways of knowing and Biggs and Collis’ Structured
Overview of Learning Outcomes is a representative framework that is never too
far away when I stumble over something new.
Nudging up against SOLO Taxonomy is “a wash” experience for
most of the educators I work with. Not a
“dry creek bed or gulch that temporarily fills with water after a heavy rain” kind
of wash experience – that fleeting post conference charismatic keynoter euphoria
kind of “wash” – but rather a “wash experience” where the overwhelming simplicity and
power of the idea that washes over you leaves a small load of pigment that binds
to all the fibres in the raw canvas of your experience and learning.
The effect of SOLO Taxonomy on the interpretation of teaching
and learning is long lasting, it pervades your imaginings, and it marks you in
a way that influences all that follows.
My response to nudging up against SOLO Taxonomy in 2003 has been a sharpening of my educative
focus – I now use the coarse focus knob, the fine focus knob and the diaphragm to
explore the fine detail in “What students do”.
To do this I try to be very clear about the;
- Intended learning
outcomes – what I want students to do,
- Learning experiences that will help students achieve the
intended learning outcomes – small steps that help students do, and the
- Self-assessment that helps students determine if what they have
done meets the intended learning outcome.
My attention is distracted every now and again by “What
students are” as is the attention of every policy maker, academic, school and
teacher. The following extract from an
academic’s report to a local school reveals this well.
Traditionally teacher
expectations studies have examined why teachers have high expectations for some
students and not for others. For example, the literature shows that teachers
tend to have higher expectations for New Zealand European students than they do
for Maori (Rubie-Davies, Hattie, & Hamilton, 2006), that they have higher expectations for
students from middle class socioeconomic backgrounds than they do for students
from poorer areas (Jussim, Smith, Madon, & Palumbo, 1998), that they have higher expectations for
boys in maths and science and for girls in reading (Qing, 1999) and that they have lower expectations for
students who have a diagnostic label, e.g. ADHD, than they do for the same student who does
not have a label (Stinnett, Crawford, Gillespie, Cruce, & Langford, 2001). These studies ask the question: what is it
about a student that means their teacher may have high or low expectations for
him or her? Rubie-Davies
et al 2009.
And there is no end to the edu_bloggers whose online musings
reveal their preferred educative focus as “what students are”.
But I am wary when I find myself thinking like this.
“What students are …” encourages us to place students on
some kind of educational continuum, to blur these students across different gross
demographic palettes of age, race, sex, sexuality, physicality, personality,
culture, language, gender, family, class, and locale as explanation.
Gross demographics encourages us to smear students across a
continuum from; gifted to special needs, engaged to disengaged, 21st
Century learner to 19th Century luddite, digital native to digital
immigrant, male to female, Maori to Pakeha, endemic to introduced, ESOL to
monolingual , pinko grey to café au lait, North Shore to Westie, first born to
last born, extrovert to introvert, kinaesthetic to visual learner, heterosexual
to LGB, endomorph to mesomorph, South Aucklander to South Islander, middle
class to upper class, high decile school to low decile school etc.
This thinking encourages us to set up educational policy and
lobby groups calling for educational funding by claiming that “This group of
students are failing to achieve because they are [insert gross demographic] as
a consequence they have special needs that are not currently being met … and as
a consequence of having unmet needs we need access to [insert figure sought]
from “budget education” to redress the inequality.”
Gross demographic thinking about “what students are” though
seemingly easy to characterise and communicate, pretends to a quantitative reliability
and validity that simply does not exist.
We assume a conceptual stability that ignores the influence of life
world attributes.
The gross demographics of “who students are” is unstable –
it interacts with life experiences, interests and orientations, with values,
dispositions sensibility, with communication and interpersonal styles. This interaction introduces ongoing differences
within the demographic that are far greater than the difference claimed for between
demographics.
There is no gross demographic that determines with any
degree of validity or reliability what a student is.
And thinking about “what students are” involves us in a
second betrayal.
Even if gross demographics could be shown to be stable and
identifiable adopting gross demographics as explanation for success and failure
carries an underlying assumption of blame – it suggests that “what students are”
explains why students fail –
All of this thinking about “what students do” rather than “what
students are” is why I have much enjoyed reading “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics,
Talent, and IQ Is Wrong” by David Shank.
The Genius in All of Us is a book that undermines and
reveals in equal measure. It is a book
that educators and government policy makers should interrogate if they want to
understand why the nature nurture debate is both mis-framed and damaging to the
way we educate young people for achievement.
Shenk’s argument is that current research into the dynamic
interactions that occur between genes and the environment mean that we have got
our notions of “giftedness” and achievement all wrong. He uses research and wide ranging examples to
argue that it is the interaction of genes and the environment (GXE) that
determines who we are, that intelligence and its representation in great
achievement is a process not a thing.
Intelligence is not an innate aptitude, hardwired at conception or in
the womb, but a collection of developing skills driven by the interaction
between genes and environment. No one is
born with a pre-determined amount of intelligence. Intelligence (and IQ scores) can be
improved. Few adults come close to their
true intellectual potential. Shenk 2010 p 29
Much like his previous book "The Forgetting: Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic" (which helped me better understand Alzheimer’s
and other dementia related conditions) Shenk provides extensive support in his
sources and notes section to clarify and amplify his argument. His extensive
note making reminds me of the scholarship of Ivan Illich; it provides a
valuable insight into assumptions and misconceptions made around achievement. "The Genius in All of Us" is a well reasoned and thoughtful book.
Thinking about achievement as a process, and acknowledging
the extraordinary plasticity of our genes interaction with environment, leads
Shenk to make a series of recommendations for parents.
1. Believe each child
has enormous potential.
2. Set high expectations,
demonstrate persistence and resilience but do not use emotional rewards for success
or punishments for failure.
3. Reward persistence
intermittently, develop delayed gratification.
Model self-control and give kids practice.
4. Embrace failure – present, monitor and modulate
challenges.
Many educators are
also parents and would claim they understand intelligence as developmental. Yet the ways we parent and the ways in which we
do school – frame policy and provide programme – betray us. Reading Shenk will
clarify how much of the research we undertake (and the programmes we provide
for teaching and learning) suggest a mind set of genetic determinism rather
than GXE development.
The chapter that captured my interest unpacked the significant
role competition plays in achievement.
I know I generalise here but “competition” is not revered in
teaching and learning in New Zealand primary and secondary schools. We tend to
frame competition as harmful and unnecessary in terms of achievement. You just need to leaf through the New Zealand
Curriculum to see that the notion of competition it is absent from any
recommendations around the effective pedagogies. The notion of competition is
remarkable for its absence.
If you are someone who likes to count things – the word
“Competition” only occurs once in the New Zealand Curriculum document.
Students
learn most effectively when they have time and opportunity to engage with,
practise, and transfer new learning. This means that they need to encounter new
learning a number of times and in a variety of different tasks or contexts. It
also means that when curriculum coverage
and student understanding are in competition, the teacher may decide to
cover less but cover it in greater depth. New Zealand Curriculum p34
Shenk’s writing helped me better understand the flaws in the
arguments that have been used to eschew a competitive culture developing within
New Zealand schools and classrooms.
The problem is that different people have very different attitudes
towards competition. In 1938, Harvard
psychologist Henry A. Murray proposed that human beings could be separated into
two distinctive competitive personalities: HAMs (“high in achievement
motivation”) and LAMs (“low in achievement motivation”). HAMs enjoy and perform better under directly
competitive conditions than they do under non-competitive conditions. LAMs dislike competition, do not seek it out,
and are less happy and productive when pushed into it. They do better when pursuing so-called
mastery goals – improvement of a skill in comparison to oneself rather than to
others. P121
In New Zealand these different attitudes HAM and LAM have
been aligned with gender demographics – claims are made that the broad structure
of our National Certificate for Educational Achievement (NCEA) awards removes
competition and as such favours girls (who are represented as LAMs) over boys
(who are represented as HAM’s).
Interestingly Shenk reports research that reveals there is “no fixed male or
female competive biology”.
“In Western societies, a higher proportion of men are HAMs and a higher
proportion of women are LAMs …. this is not universal or genetically
hardwired.” P121
We are once
again betrayed by the ease of gross demographic thinking – Note to self:
I must
remember this the next time gender arguments around competition
resurface in
the media.
A more interesting question is raised by Shenk. It is one I
wish educators in New Zealand had grappled with before rejecting competition
per se.
Shenk asks us to imagine “healthy rivalry”.
“How can we best create classrooms, offices, and communities where
competitive instincts are rewarded but where less competitive individuals also
feel energised rather than suffocated?
His suggestions startled me, they aligned so well with John
Bigg’s proposals for engaging students through constructive alignment using
SOLO Taxonomy. Refer: Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Third Edition John Biggs and Catherine
Tang.
“Not surprisingly, the answer turns out to be making sure
that near-term tasks are clear and meaningful.
If short-term tasks can be made relevant to log term goals, researchers
have found that even LAMs will dive in and relish the challenge. This fits perfectly with Ericsson’s
“deliberate practice” – the satisfaction of working hard to master near-term
goals, learning to enjoy the process rather than focus on the large gulf
between current abilities and the far off ideal. Shenk P122
It is not a contradiction to maintain high expectations of
every student, and to show compassion and creativity for those who inevitably,
do not immediately meet these expectations.
Failure should be seen as a learning opportunity rather than a
revelation of a student’s innate limits.
Shenk P123
Shenk’s solution is for educators to focus on “What students
do” rather than what turns out to be a genetic deterministic based
misrepresentation and myth about “What students are”.
And once we understand “achievement” as developmental rather
than fixed perhaps we will be less bothered by “failure” which we will understand
and more importantly represent to students as developmental.
We should have taken more notice of Heraclitus.
Source: Artichoke
Acting like a kite, witnessing the future and marshalling resources.
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
On Creating A Wasn’t Good, Wasn’t Bad School for Every Child.
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 am haunted by you” flowers and impossible cream cakes.
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
“The money is always there, but the pockets change” Gertrude Stein
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
What can recommendation systems in museums teach us about underachievement in school?
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 In New Zealand secondary schools the
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.
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
If school is disturbance, is it virtuous?
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
Crack learning, the achievement gap and Sisyphean struggle.
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)
|
Socioeconomic |
1st |
2nd |
3rd |
4th |
5th |
|
Low |
329 |
375 |
397 |
433 |
461 |
|
Middle |
348 |
388 |
425 |
467 |
497 |
|
High |
361 |
418 |
460 |
506 |
534 |
|
Achievement |
32 points |
43 points |
63 points |
73 points |
73 points |
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.
|
Socioeconomic |
After 1st |
After 2nd |
After 3rd |
After 4th |
After 5th |
Total – Cumulative |
|
Low |
55 |
46 |
30 |
33 |
25 |
189 |
|
Middle |
69 |
33 |
34 |
41 |
27 |
214 |
|
High |
60 |
39 |
34 |
28 |
23 |
184 |
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.
|
Class |
After 1st |
After 2nd |
After 3rd |
After 4th |
Total |
|
Low |
-3.67 |
-1.70 |
2.74 |
2.89 |
0.26 |
|
Middle |
-3.11 |
4.18 |
3.68 |
2.34 |
7.09 |
|
High |
15.38 |
9.22 |
14.51 |
13.38 |
52.49 |
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