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

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

Although it is convenient to blame technology we don’t need technology to betray and manipulate … our words are enough ….

I have been reading The Power of Words   - an article from cj about Fernando Flores, someone I only “knew” or as it turns out “did not know” as the name on the spine of Understanding Computers and Cognition.

Flores works to transform individuals … leaders …..  using “speech acts’ that confront deception.  

“Talk all you want to, Flores says, but if you want to act powerfully, you need to master “speech acts”: language rituals that build trust between colleagues and customers, word practices that open your eyes to new possibilities. Speech acts are powerful because most of the actions that people engage in — in business, in marriage, in parenting — are carried out through conversation. But most people speak without intention; they simply say whatever comes to mind. Speak with intention, and your actions take on new purpose. Speak with power, and you act with power.” The Power of Words

Now Flores technique for exposing the “whale barf” sounds rather like brushing up against a 240V electric fence for anyone accustomed to how we confront individual weakness within organisations in the wobbly isles …

We might not be aware of “the amount of self-deception and self-limitation that we collect in our personalities. “ but when you look at our institutional practice in education in New Zealand it seems plausible that many of us have chosen to remain unaware …  

I guess I could experiment with a Flores-like   “following the script exactly as it is written … “ exchange with the Magnet ….. we have always been pretty frank at critiquing our work  … and pretty good at moving on …  

…… perhaps week four  would be a good time to Flores-explore the “whale barf” …. when we are trapped in the snorting beast on the road to Hamilton … 

…. still the likelihood that she would deposit me on the roadside in Huntly and carry on to do the conference by herself

(or vice versa)

remains

too high.

I am dumping Flores action script in preference for submerging myself in Prune Blogs Other Simulated Worlds  where Alexander Trevi has the most wondrous post exploring the historical photographs of the permanent and temporary exhibits images made available by The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the way in which these simulations are influenced by their place in time

Apparently, dinosaur displays are not entirely the product of accumulated scientific data, of empirical truth. They are cultural artifacts, our “national psychic erector sets which we’ve put together in different ways depending on our mood.”

I figure that despite all our talk about “evidence based practice” … in time we will be able to make a similar exhibit featuring  all the versions of The New Zealand Curriculum.

Source: Artichoke

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:

1. How extensively a system or a technology leverages a set of possible tasks;
2. How well it can be adapted to a range of tasks;
3. How easily new contributors can master it
4. How accessible it is to those ready and able to build on it; and
5. 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…

1. Unanticipated change: innovative output new things that improve people’s lives
2. 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

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

Me
and My School: student engagement survey

This
year we developed and launched a survey tool aimed at finding out what students
in years 7-10 think about their school and their learning. The tool was
trialled on more than 8000 students before we launched it in the third term
this year. Many schools have told us how useful they have found it, so much so
we are looking at expanding it to years 11-13. We hope to have that work in
development next year and an extended tool available in 2010. Meanwhile, the
years 7-10 version will be available again in 2009, with schools able to run it
in the third term. We make it available at the same time each year in order to
ensure the national norms are valid.

 How we understand engagement is something that
I have fretted over before on Artichoke  
… .  

I’d much prefer we put our thinking and energy
into measuring student versatility and control. 
 Engagement is also something that
I doubt can be measured on a survey so I was especially alert to the current enthusiasm
in New Zealand schools for NZCER’s new measure designed to profile  student engagement  –and to listening to how principals are
talking about the use of the NZCER engagement data as an evaluative measure for
school programmes.  

At the NDF conference Seb
Chan’s presentation was on the validity of different measurements of visitor
satisfaction  used to evaluate the success
of the work of Museums.

His
presentation provided much to challenge our NZCER survey measurement of student
engagement used to evaluate the success of the work of schools.

Chan
started by looking at current measures of visitor engagement and how little they
really tell us.

For
example when Chan claimed that changes in the way people interact in online
environments

makes traditional Web analytics and metrics
that museums have used to measure and track success on the Web for the past
decade increasingly inadequate. Occasional user surveys and server-side log
analysis can no longer be relied upon by Web teams to guide them towards making
museum sites more user-centric and effective.

The
 “more
user-centric and effective” bit reminded me of our NZC claim to  “put students at the centre of teaching
and learning".

When
Chan claimed that   

Whilst
basic reporting currently satisfies government and sometimes corporate
benefactors, far more complex analysis is required for museums themselves to
more effectively evaluate and refine their on-line offerings for their users.

I
was interested in how this might also relate to the conclusions gained from a
self report survey on engagement.   

Chan
was an entertaining conference speaker. 
He well exposed the flaws and deceit in commonly used web analytics – “Where
counting has no point” – through “A
Summary Of Old Problems”;

• The Problem With Log File Data,
• The Problem With Page Tagging Data,
• The Problem With 'Unique Visitors',
• The Problem With 'Visits' And 'Time Spent On Site',
• The Problem With 'Page Views'. 

Even
the number of visitors who click on an interactive such as a video talk or
download a podcast was exposed when more detailed analysis shows so few of them
watch the whole video or listen to the whole podcast.  

“In many ways the best measure of the success of a podcast is how much
feedback and discussion it generates. This is far more valuable than the total
number of downloads”.

Of
much more interest to Chan was how we might measure the stuff that really shows
visitor satisfaction. 

If
just turning up on a website was not enough then  ….Seb argued for  third party web metric measures of visitor
behaviour using  RSS feed tracking, comments
on the museum website, but also on other blog posts and comments, tagging and comments
on museum content on Flickr Commons photos and how these are used in other conversations
in communities and blogs,  Technorati
trackback, and Facebook friends, fans and profile comments, gave a better
indication of the success of museums and exhibits and events than number of visitors/page
views.  

He
suggested combining qualitative and quantitative measures when we measure
visitor comments online.  

Again, it is far better to measure interactions – comments, trackbacks
– and then qualitatively assess them. Blogs should ideally be generating
conversation and discussion, and blogs will rank differently depending upon
your choice of what to measure (Chan & Spadaccini, 2007).

Chan
identified these alternative web analytics as a way of collecting “measures of
recommendation” – a kind of “how likely is it that you would recommend [the
company/ experience] to a friend or a colleague? – a broader sense of those net
promoter score stuff.  He suggested that recommendation (and hence
allowing recommendation and sharing) is how we should understand the way people
interact with museums.

It
all made me think of our current excitement in education over measuring engagement.

If
engagement in learning is important then counting the numbers of students who
claim to be engaged in response to questions in a survey will tell us very
little.

We
should look carefully at Seb Chan’s museum analytics thinking and look for
measures of recommendation.

1.  How
likely is it that students would recommend [the school, the teacher, the learning
experience] to others?

2.  How
could we find this out using Web metrics?

My
thinking starts with mentions of learning on student social networking sites, blogs,
Rate my teacher ….

And then

3.  How
could we use technology to allow for/ enhance the conditions for recommendation and sharing of
learning in school?

More reading:

Sebastian
Chan
: Towards New Metrics Of Success For On-line Museum
Projects

Source: Artichoke

It
was liberating for two teachers to go undercover at a conference for uber_librarians,
(e)_historians, anarcho_archivists, web designers and museum_istas.  We spent two glorious and anonymous days learning about knowledge,
ownership, access and authority, NZ cultural copyright, what this means when
things are digitised, quantitative and qualitative measurement of audience
engagement, what website analytics really show, the fabulous  Digital NZ  site with its Digital NZ Memory Maker remix editor and editable Coming Home
search widget and and and …

The
tensions in the discussions in the Owen Glenn Building so often came back to
how we understand knowledge – and the artificial polarising of the
alternatives.  Those traditionalists  worried about digitisation betraying institutional
authority and expertise – and what happens to knowing when we blur the privileging
of particular experiences or interpretations. 
The modernists  argued for the
experiential basis of knowledge – that knowledge is both a social and
historical product stuff, and that digitising can leverage knowledge by opening
access and interpretation to all.

Moore
and Young were helpful in not dismissing those with reservations, or rejecting those
without.

The
neo conservative position may be flawed, but it is not false.  It reminds us that (a) education needs to be
seen as an end in itself and not just a means to an end (the instrumentalists
position), and that (b) tradition, though capable of preserving vested interests,
is also crucial in ensuring the maintenance and development of standards of
learning in schools, as well as being a condition for innovation and creating
new knowledge.  More generally, neo
conservatives remind us that the curriculum must, in Matthew Arnold’s words,
strive to,

Make
the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere!
(Arnold, 1960, p70)

From "Knowledge
and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education: towards a reconceptualisation
by Moore and Young. British Journal of Sociology in Education Vol 22 No 4 2001 p449
and 450"    Thanks
to cj for suggesting this as mind food.

The irony being that different interpretations of "knowledge" means that Arnold's quote could have been a catch cry for either group.

Much
like conversations and claims over how knowledge should be produced or acquired
at an  educational conference, the
conversation over digitising knowledge in the two day NDF conference could have
also been framed by how the various speakers and organisations understood
knowledge. 

However,
there were some significant difference between the educational conferences I
get to attend and the NDF08.  The first
thing I realised was that librarians, historians and archivists flock
differently from teachers. They dress differently, they queue differently, and
they question differently.  For example The
NDFers had to be encouraged to take freebies like fractured fragments of greenstone
from the registration desk and ice cream from the Trade Exhibit Area.  And unlike my experience in educational
conferences the end of each keynote and forum session was marked by thoughtful
challenge and critique offered. The NDFers asked difficult questions, provided
intriguing analogies, offered significant alternatives, and contested espoused institutional
values.

The
NDF2008 keynotes were notable for their focus on real achievement.  The NDF keynoters had all done the stuff they
were talking about.  We heard about what
had worked and what had failed; we heard about real outcomes and actual achievement.
There was an absence of all that futuristic visionary rhetoric we have become so
accustomed to in educational conferences in New Zealand; an absence of those paradigm
shift_ers, digital native_rs, generation Y_ers, knowledge is a verb_ers, perfect
education storm_ers, and  guide on the
side_rs.   Conference circuit junkies, (e) learning futurists
and prophets didn’t get a look in at the NDF08 conference. 

 In the opening keynote on Thursday, George
Oates Senior Program Manager, Flickr talked
about “Human Traffic, General Public.”

Flickr has grown to an archive of
over 3 billion photos in just under 5 years. What?!?!? Once upon a time it was just
a start-up with a handful of members. How did it become the world-famous photo
sharing site it is today? By building a passionate community – or, more
accurately, lots of co-existing communities, all bustling around the same
place. What better place for public institutions to share their collections? It
turns out the enormous Flickr community is very interested in The Commons
project on Flickr. The key goals of The Commons (http://www.flickr.com/commons)
are to “firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography
archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these
collections even richer.”

A founding member of the team that
built Flickr, George Oates was the Lead Designer of flickr.com for four years, and
recently moved into the role of Senior Program Manager, leading The Commons on
Flickr. Her keynote presentation at NDF is called “Human Traffic,” about how
designing for community might actually be able to help public institutions can
create digital value through platforms like Flickr, by creating an engaged,
conversational and generous community.

 George Oates described how
Flickr started .. The Origin Myth … and what Flickr is today – five years on.
This thinking about Flickr was very useful for educators thinking about
different ways of doing school and different ways of defining knowledge. Her
keynote was all about conversation, collaboration and contact networks.

George
identified two key ideas learned from Flickr;

People don’t like being told what to do.

People do like to feel that they belong.     

You
could tell in the post keynote conversation as we queued for coffee at morning
tea that in talking about The Flickr Commons, George respectfully disrupted the
ways some in the audience made meaning of their day jobs.  The coffee line conversation was all about the
perceived loss of institutional authority, loss of archival context, the
authentication of comments made, and control over the digital copies shared. Although,
The National Library of New Zealand had obviously thought through all of this
and officially joined The Commons Project www.flickr.com/commons on Thursday
afternoon.

I
took something different from the archivists and their concern over access,
ownership and control.

Learning
how Flickr had designed and then built a community provided an insight for
thinking about new ways of designing learning communities in schools and
between cluster schools. 

It
the success of Flickr (3 billion photos archived in just under 5 years) tells
us anything about human interaction and I think the sheer scale of Flickr means
it does, our challenge is to build flexible places/spaces online and face to
face where we change our current focus on compliance reporting.  If we are genuine in building a learning community
then we need to reduce all the telling people what to do stuff and rark up all
the opportunities for belonging – the contributing and participating stuff.  

I much
enjoyed the opening keynote, I liked the way “historical authenticity” is
understood on Flickr, how it is not the end of the world if something happens that
is not controlled, how the best  protection may well come from proliferation,
how Flickr increases public access to public things, but best of all I liked George
Oates reference to hand crafted objects and Malcolm McCullough

The
handcrafted object reflects not only an informal economy of energy (as opposed
to one of process efficiency), but also pleasure. Its production involves some
play, some waste and above all some kind of communion. P10 Abstracting
Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand 

The quote has such resonance in understanding the work we do in schools with knowledge
building.

so what
happens when we look at student learning outcomes against the criteria for
identifying a hand crafted object and when we can do this using digital
platforms?

Can
we create learning experiences where we scaffold for both an economy of energy
and the opportunity for pleasure?  Where in
planning for a student learning outcome we ask ourselves;

Where
is the opportunity for play?

Where
is the possibility for waste?

Where
is the prospect for communion? 

Source: Artichoke

Source: Artichoke