Fear is fungible.
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.
That is, the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not.
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.
That's an important question, because if you want to manage the system, you have to know which one is the cause and which one is the effect. You don't want to be in the awkward position of trying to manage a cause by manipulating the effect. That's not likely to work. So you need to know the direction of the causality. This is much studied, and as usual in social science, it turns out to be a cycle, but one of the arrows is very robust and the other arrow is very weak. The strong arrow is from outrage to hazard perception. That is, for the most part, it is not true that people are upset because they think [a risk is] dangerous; it's much more true that people think [a risk is] dangerous because they're upset.
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
We like our flour canisters larger than our sugar.
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.
Recognising that global warming will make any line based on the watershed of a glacier temporary, the understanding with Austria has for the first time introduced the concept of a movable border. Experts from both sides will be empowered to alter it at regular intervals. Until, presumably, the glaciers disappear altogether. A movable border
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
Two straight lines crossing over in the middle.
The Easter holiday represents a pause, a chance to catch breath and enjoy the texture of my world … I have mostly caught up on promises made and promises broken – and I am at last free to think about some of the approaches to building deep maths understanding and mathematical innovation observed in the secondary schools I worked in this term – and from there the relationship of creativity to educational policy.
I know it’s only an impression but it seems that ever since the launch of the New Zealand Curriculum, we have been awash with calls to “bring back” creativity in classrooms.
I always smile grimly at this quote from Robinson – our adult literacy results – "380,000 Kiwi adults' whose “literacy skills are so poor they would be unable to determine how to use a fire extinguisher from the instructions written on the bottle.” (Prime Minister Helen Clark 2007) suggest that Robinson is not aiming high enough if he wants to lift creative potential/capital through educational endeavour.
Still it seems the “call creative” is the new cry of the educational wild. And it has grown louder and increasingly wilder with our Education Minister Anne Tolley’s call for the introduction of national standards. A call, which despite Tolley’s best efforts, (see Questions for oral answer 9 April 2009 below), is being widely and possibly unfairly represented in New Zealand schools, as a call for the introduction of league tables.
… and it is hard to counter the need for improving the ways in which we understand student achievement given the ERO statement that despite all the measuring going on in New Zealand schools – 56 percent of them were not using worthwhile achievement data to look at their student learning outcomes.
ERO’s 56 percent statistic reminded me of John Hattie’s key question at the end of Visible Learning.
In the New Zealand schools I work with there has been a lot of talk about national standards leading to league tables which if I take taxi drivers as a measure – seems a prospect that bothers educators much more than it does the rest of the country.
There has also been the suggestion that creative endeavour and creativity, which is widely and for the most part approvingly received by teachers, will be lost if we adopt national standards.
To sum up these lunchtime conversations: we have Tolley’s – National standards “a very bad thing – don’t let them in” , Robinson’s – Creativity in classrooms – “ a very good thing – let’s bring it back”
The weird thing about any discussion about “creativity” in New Zealand is not the “let’s bring it back” sentiment – though that’s kind of weird since it never went away in a lot of the places I work – it is the creative conversation default setting.
When you join a conversation about creativity in education in New Zealand – instead of finding yourself interrogating what creativity might mean in 2009, or evaluating how we might judge creative practice in New Zealand classrooms – you end up revisiting the writings of Elwyn Richardson in the 1950’s early sixties.
This default to the activities of just one male teacher and his mostly self described creative practices from nearly sixty years ago makes me suspicious.
I’d like to ask -
Why are we privileging Richardson’s descriptions of his classroom experiences?
Why was it that Richardson was published and promoted and other creative educators didn’t and aren’t?
I ask this because I do not find it plausible that in a culture that is built upon “number eight fencing wire innovation” Richardson was, (or for that matter is), the only educator designing worthy creative adventures in learning in New Zealand classrooms.
I don’t find it credible that nothing creatively worthy was going on in New Zealand classrooms before Richardson, at the same time as Richardson, or since Richardson.
And I also wonder why – if creative teaching did occur in the past and does occur in the present – we don’t we refer to it today? Why we don’t appear to even know about it?
You might jump in here and declare Richardson an iconic educator on the basis of his writings and the memories of teaching colleagues – but it does not explain why in our discussion and commentaries we fail to reference any creative educators before or since Richardson – For instance I have never climbed a mountain but I know the names of more New Zealand mountain climbers than I do New Zealand teachers famous for their creative teaching practice or creative student outcomes.
It makes me wonder if anyone at NZCER has done a historiography of creativity and creative practice in New Zealand education; has anyone looked at the way creativity has been represented and understood and the way creativity has been written about?
It seems more likely that we have neglected and undervalued the stories and practices of other creative teachers in New Zealand in a way that we haven’t done for mountain climbers both before and after Hillary.
If we did privilege Richardson in the past and if we continue to do so – is this because of gender, or ethnicity, is it simply because our current day commentators are mostly contemporaries of Elwyn, or is it something else?
I suspect we need to clarify “creativity” and to more carefully distinguish creative acts of teaching from creative achievement outcomes if we are to progress.
To ask –
What are the assumptions we make when we identify a teacher and or their practice as creative?
Does creative teaching result in creative achievements by students who in turn become creative adults?
Should it?
Is a measure of the success of a creative teacher the measure of the creative success of their students?
Should it be?
What is the measure of the success of a creative teacher?
Without a measure of achievement success how can a creative teacher who is teaching creatively tell what they are doing, whether it is going well or not, and what they should do next?
Ditto for the student in a classroom with a teacher who identifies themselves as creative or who describes their teaching strategies as those developing creative outcomes.
Who do we judge to be creative adults in New Zealand today?
Who taught the New Zealanders we judge as creative today, and how did they teach them?
What did these creative New Zealanders remember learning from their teachers that they believe enhanced their own creative abilities?
If we accept Ken Robinson’s definition of creativity
Then J.J Thompson must surely have been a highly successful in enhancing creative thinking in the science students he taught
And Bill Manhire - jumps out as a New Zealand educator who is highly successful in enhancing creative writing in the writers he teaches.
.
Perhaps the researchers of a historiography of creativity in New Zealand education could start by asking the contributers to Manhire at 60: A Book for Bill (ed Fergus Barrowman and Damien Wilkins; 2007, VUP) to identify “How did he teach?” – "what were his rules of thumb?"
Those staffroom claims – both simplistic and expansive, that our current educational focus on accountability, assessment and compliance are dangerously hampering the innovative and original classroom teacher need to be more carefully unpacked.
Because I don’t know that they can reliably or validly be used to reject the Minister of Education Anne Tolley’s push for a national standards policy.
Hargreave’s I’m stuck to the floor keynote address at L@S09 - “The Fourth Way” revealed a man and a mind that was funny, provocative and ever so smart – a great pick by the conference programme organisers to launch New Zealand teachers at the start of our school year. His claims over the freedoms and innovation The First Way afforded teachers seem kind of relevant here
“These policies provided unprecedented levels of support for the poor, but they also fostered long term state dependency without providing any real foundation for long term civic engagement. The First Way granted state professionals, including educators, considerable freedom. In education, it fostered innovation but also allowed unacceptable variations in quality.”
Rather like topology we shouldn’t be looking at the objects involved but rather at the ways in which they work together.
Creativity and creative endeavour is advanced by deep learning, and conceptual understanding and if national standards mean knowing what you are doing, whether it is going well and what to do next then it would seem that national standards and creativity may well be two straight lines that cross over in the middle.
One supports the other and X marks the spot.
Source: Artichoke
Kay Ryan on lending a hand with Brazil
The best bit of this wet and windy weekend lies in reading my bloglines and discovering through 3quarks Daily another poet who delights,
Kay Ryan, the new Poet Laureate to the United States.
Already I am marvelling over how much she communicates with so little.
ATLAS
Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can’t
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.
Kay Ryan
Poet Laureate to the United States
You can read a sample of her writing here and check out her reading of “Home to Roost” below.
Source: Artichoke
On the art of dying, shopping in supermarkets and 16 to 19 year olds in schools
There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels.
Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.
”Everything is concealed in symbolism. . . . The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation . . . code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering. . . . Not that we would want to. . . . This is not Tibet. . . . Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die. . . . We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death. . . . We simply walk toward the sliding doors. . . . Look how well-lighted everything is . . . sealed off . . . timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet . . . Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.” White Noise Don DeLillo
This passage aligning the sterility of shopping with the art of dying from Don DeLillo’s White Noise always makes me think of schools … where everything is also concealed in symbolism … where everything is sealed off … and for the most part timeless …. and our OECD stats on 16 to 19 year olds suggest that many of them find “the difference is less marked than you think”
I am still reading Jonathan Zittrain The Future of the internet and how to stop it and am currently enjoying thinking around the ideas in Chapter 4 – The Generative Pattern.
For starters I like Zittrain’s term for the quality of the Internet – generativity.
Generativity is a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences.” (p70)
As he notes “Terms like “openness” and “free” and commons” evoke elements of it, but they do not fully capture its meaning, and they sometimes obscure it.”
Zittrain describes the five principle factors at work in generativity as:
- How extensively a system or a technology leverages a set of possible tasks;
- How well it can be adapted to a range of tasks;
- How easily new contributors can master it
- How accessible it is to those ready and able to build on it; and
- How transferable any changes are to others – including (and perhaps especially) non experts
If we accept Cuban’s suggestion that school is a technology (or way of doing stuff) then perhaps we can use Zittrain’s notion of generativity and the five principles as criteria to help us develop more generative ways of “doing school”.
Generative thinking that might be quite useful for those School Plus folk who are charged with writing policy around
…. transforming secondary schooling to encourage young people to stay and complete qualifications, and strengthening partnerships between schools, tertiary education organisations, employers, industry training organisations and non-government organisations to extend the learning opportunities available to students, and to connect young people to their next steps beyond school.
It sure sounds like they are after a system that facilitates changes … that they need a generative system that will provide…
- Unanticipated change: innovative output new things that improve people’s lives
- Participatory input – a life well lived is one where there is opportunity to connect to other people, to work with them, and to express one’s own individuality through creative endeavours
Given that it is likely that it is our existing school systems sterility, has contributed to The Land of Milk and Honey’s distressing OECD demographic for 16 to 19 year olds not in school, not in training and not in employment implementing a transformation towards generativity is no small task.
And in truth we probably need to do all this whilst maintain some measures of sterility within the technology of school …. for as Zittrain notes about generative tools …. they are individually useful but not inherently better than their sterile counterparts … could just as easily be claimed for generative systems – the tools and practices that develop among large groups of people.
Generative tools are not inherently better than their non-generative (“sterile”) counterparts. Appliances are often easier to master for particular uses, and because their design often anticipates uses and abuses, they can be safer and more effective. For example, on camping trips, Swiss Army knives are ideal. Luggage space is often at a premium, and such a tool will be useful in a range of expected and even unexpected situations. In situations where versatility and space constraints are less important, however, a Swiss Army knife is comparatively a fairly poor knife – and an equally awkward magnifying glass, saw and scissors. P73
Just imagine for a moment that you were charged with both developing the programme logic and overseeing the implementation for the following outcomes.
A. Change the behaviours of young people so that they:
1. Stay in school
2. Complete qualifications
B. Extend the learning opportunities available to students by strengthening partnerships between schools and:
1. Tertiary education organisations
2. Employers
3. Industry training organisations
4. Non government organisations
C. Connect young people to their next steps beyond school.
I am puzzling about what will go in all the programme logic boxes …and whether the limitations in thinking through boxes - all that subjectivity in problem identification, policy imperatives, political sensitivities, complexity and heterogenity and absence of an evidence base stuff will mean the whole initiative will be yet another case of “The difference is less marked than you think”.
Source: Artichoke
[Dr. Zoidberg is preparing to look for a mate]
Dr. Zoidberg: How do I look?
Bender: Like whale barf.
Dr. Zoidberg: Then the illusion is complete.
Ken Sane’s Transparency essays provide a fabulous overview
for my start up thinking on “whale barf” in education and “whale barf”
in myself....
Whenever it happened, today, we have entered a period in history that can truly be referred to as an age of simulation, in which advanced forms of fakery and illusion are now dominant elements of culture and society.Transparency
And the Onion Video: “Warcraft” Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing “Warcraft” captures my “where to next ….?” …. imaginings
Problem Based Learning: How can students learn in school that life is a reality to be experienced?
If you ask what students learn when we give them a Problem Based Learning (PBL) “scenario” to learn through, teachers answers are entirely predictable.
In PBL they will tell you … students learn through activities that are interdisciplinary, student-centered, collaborative, and authentic in that the PBL scenarios are integrated into real world issues and practices…. and what they learn … well what they learn through PBL learning experiences is stuff that prepares them for living in the 21st Century.
This is usually followed by a string of process talk that buttons the buttons of authenticating the learning> awakening prior knowledge> strengthening prior knowledge> constructing relevant questions> planning the research, discovering relevant information>constructing the knowledge> new insights and understandings is .
And because of these beliefs discussion over the student learning outcomes in PBL tend to revolve around
What information is given to students in the “scenario”?
What do students infer from the information they are given in the “scenario”
And sometimes but not often enough
What do students assume from the information they are given in the “scenario”
These are undoubtedly worthy questions for educators to explore but I think there are better ones…
I’d like to “lucychili wind” the focus out a bit and look at learning through problem solving per se. To ask what else is being learned through PBL activity?
To ask …
- What information is given to students who learn through PBL pedagogies?
- What do students infer from the information they are given?
- What do students assume from the information they are given?
I think that an inconvenient problem is exposed when we examine the information, inference and assumptions made by students when they are immersed in PBL.
In PBL students learn that:
1. Problems in a lived experience are identified and described by people with institutional authority.
ie The act of giving students the PBL scenario means for students problem finding and problem scoping is something passive, something done by others with institutional authority.
Students must assume that
2. People with institutional authority can reliably and validly identify problems in the lived experience of others.
And although they sit outside the problem framing, and outside the lived experience, students must infer that
3. They can “solve” the problems identified and described by someone in authority in a way that satisfies the perspectives of the person who framed the problem …. the person with institutional authority
And that although they sit outside the problem framing, and outside the lived experience,I suspect that all our talk about authenticity means that in PBL we encourage the belief that
4 They can “solve” the problems identified and described by someone in authority in a way that satisfies the perspectives of the people identified in the scenario.
When we asssess or encourage their peers to assess the outcomes I suspect we tell students that
5. When problems are initiated by others, the problem solving response must fit within the solutions pre-determined by the problem constructor
By that I mean that the way in which the PBL case study is constructed will favour particular solutions – that old “Problems are formulated by people who can envisage a solution”.
Furthermore In PBL we suggest to students that
6. Complex and conflicting lived experiences can be simplified to solutions
And that
7. These solutions can be identified by outsiders … by students (who are essentially coerced into the role of becoming observers of the observations of an institutional observer of the lived experience.)
It is Sponge Bob and Patrick all over again
“You mean to say they’ve taken what we thought we think and made us think we thought our thoughts we’ve been thinking our thoughts we think we thought… You think?”
And it is not as if any of this is remediable by dealing with the different authority structures in PBL and letting students identify and craft the issues and problems they find in a lived experience
We still have the issue that learning through PBL means that student learning is happening in a context that assumes life is a problem to be solved
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” Soren Kierkegaard
8. PBL reinforces the assumption that life is a problem to be solved
For Pita Sharples argument in Speech: Boys in Education Conference – Wednesday 19 April, 2006* in
New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, Volume 3, Issue 1, 3-11, 2006…
If we construct boys as a group of people who lack equality, resources, opportunity, expectations, confidence, talents, achievement, communication skills, literacy skills, support, attention we are forever restricting the discussion to one around negativity, a discourse of disadvantage.
… could be just as easily made for schools whose students predominantly learn through pedagogies of problem based learning
If we allow [those in authority to construct through PBL scenarios the lived experiences of others as experiences] that lack equality, resources, opportunity, expectations, confidence, talents, achievement, communication skills, literacy skills, support, attention we are forever restricting the discussion to one around negativity, a discourse of disadvantage.
All of which makes me want to ask
How can students learn in school that life is a reality to be experienced?
Source: Artichoke
Richard Stallman and how easily we have traded away our freedom to share.
I enjoyed Richard Stallman’s talk on Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks in Auckland on Friday. Nix has gazumped me, her post and the links provided well capture the way in which rms unwrapped his thinking for the audience. I much admired the way in which complex ideas were simplified and framed in historical, legal, economic, political and societal contexts to maximise the connections made. Stallman must have given this presentation many times before, yet apart from a sense that none of the questions asked at the end of the session challenged what he had heard before, he was persuasively passionate in his delivery. Powerful thinking and provocative ideas were shared in a way that made them available for all.
While rms explained that sharing is the basis of society I was struck by the alignment of this insight with our MoE's identification of the key competencies as the basis for learning what it is to be human … all that: thinking, making meaning from language symbols and text, managing self, participating and contributing and relating to others.
Whilst Stallman calls for “sharing” , in New Zealand schools we identify “relating to others” and “participating and contributing” as worthy
But listening to our current arguments over copyright, DRM, A2K makes me suspect that many of us no longer understand what sharing might be …. probably because we have unconsciously adopted the thinking of consumerism and business … we can only imagine living in a society predicated upon consumption and the accumulation of personal advantage/ wealth.
That we can no longer imagine how sharing could or should be the basis of what it is to be human … is pretty frightening
And it doesn’t surprise me that Illich was alert to this
And I think Gatto gets close to the same analysis in the context of schools
And while rms was taking about what it took for something to be free The Four Freedoms – “free as in speech, not free as in beer” I was thinking about what it means to be free to learn in the context of the different ways we design for learning in libraries, museums and schools.
It is interesting to think about how learning available in a library or museum is different from the learning available in school
It becomes more interesting when we do this in the context of learning that respects the learner’s freedom ….
… especially when we frame the freedoms a learner must have through Stallman’s The four freedoms
We believe that there are 4 essential freedoms that a software user must have:
Freedom 1: The freedom to study the program’s source code to learn how it works and make changes to it. You need access to the source code to do this.
Freedom 2: The freedom to help neighbour, by being able to distribute copies of the software.
Freedom 3: The freedom to contribute to community by being able to give away your modified versions of the software.
And Gatto’s analysis of libraries and schools in A Confederacy of Dunces is a great start to this imagining ….
Source: Artichoke
Exploring the Key Competencies through “The Girl Effect”
My world vision is tainted or is it tinted this week … everywhere I look I see the potential and the power of sharing through the lens of the Free Software' Definition of The Four Freedoms
A typographical movie about the powerful social & economic change
brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their
society.Link from Infosthetics Data visualisation and Visual Design
Imagine the discussion and new learning that exposure to the ideas in this movie would bring to New Zealand students exploring the power of sharing
Exploring The Girl Effect through the Key Competencies participating and contributing, relating to others, managing self, thinking and making meaning through the multiliteracies including language symbols and text.
Source: Artichoke
Seduced by the screen: From both sides of the gaze
Thinking about Gaze A: The screen observes us
I am imagining what a digital voyeur would see if they could gaze out of the “screens” in schools across New Zealand at all the student faces gazing in. I am reading “Blown to bits – Your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion” by Abelson, Ledeen and Lewis. It explores the social and political notions of privacy, identity, freedom and who is in control in the digital world. It is an easy read, and full of topical examples that clarify the many provocative issues raised.
The first thing “Blown to bits” made me realise was that I didn’t understand “privacy”.
If privacy is a right that makes society work … then perhaps the lack of privacy in our schools …. might be a wrong that explains why our schools oftentimes don’t work.
Gatto’s seventh lesson taught in school … “One cannot hide”.…. can only be exacerbated by the exhortations of the hawkers of screens for digital learning. Because the adoption of SMS student management systems, learning management systems (LMS) and increasing calls for transparency in school assessment data sharing must increase the panoptic like surveillance of students identified by Gatto.
The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn't likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.
I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework," so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get them into a uniformed marching band.The Seven Lesson School Teacher
So what are the social roles that we limit and exclude when students are learning what it is to be human in an environment that precludes privacy?
Blown to Bits argues that for three important social roles for privacy (p63 and 64)
1. The right of self preservation: the right to keep your adolescent misjudgements and personal conflicts to yourself, as long as they are of no lasting significance to your ultimate position in society.
2. The way society allows deviations from prevailing social norms, given that no one set of social norms is universally and permanently satisfactory – and indeed given that social progress requires experimentation.
3. The development of independent thought – it enables some decoupling of the individual from society so that thoughts can be shared in limited circles and rehearsed before public exposure.
The passage suggests that the institutional structure of a school is designed to deny students the right to self preservation, to make social progress, and to develop independent thought.
Thinking about Gaze B: We observe the screen
This thinking allows me to explore Illich’s claim that objects change who we are.
Brown: So the objects, like a car or even like a school, change who we are.
Illich: Who you are and even more deeply they change the way your senses work. Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia [?], my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. Even if I gaze at you. Even if I enjoy your face. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror. Anybody who says, I want to communicate with you, I say can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are. Ivan Illich with Jerry Brown March 1996
This passage from Illich is one of my favourites … when I read it I always want to switch off the screen and go find a human face that I can gaze at in the way of the old Greeks … Although gazing at someone in a way that “fingers” or “touches” is an activity that would be viewed with enormous suspicion in the culture of the screen. Attempting this with the wrong person is liable to lead to uncomfortable exchanges, complaints to authority or even arrest.
What does an object that captures our gaze (aka a screen) do to us?
Or to ask this question another way,
If the introduction of digital technologies into schools means that students are spending increasing amounts of time immobilised, gazing at the screen … more time in fact than they do gazing face to face with another or gazing at the dirt and the sky, then how are they changed… ?
Source: Artichoke