Dolly Parton and the MOE’s Best Evidence Research Synthesis
Given that so much of what “we do” in education in New Zealand is directed by meta-analysis, including all our Best Evidence Research Synthesis reports, reading Gene Glass on “Meta analysis at 25” makes me feel insecure and vulnerable …
For …. much like reading Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect undermined my faith in the Best Evidence Synthesis on School Leadership and Student Outcomes. …. Glass’ meta-analysis critique promises to betray me …
It is important to note here that I don’t know enough statistics to refute Glass. This lack of statistical referencing probably explains why, as I read Glass’ paper, I am reduced to imagining myself Dolly Parton-ised, belting out “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene …I’m begging of you please don’t take my man …”
If I sing loudly enough perhaps I will block the following Jolene thoughts from undermining all the MoE “evidence based practice” “Best Evidence Synthesis” stuff in my mind
Jolene Thought #1: Does the process of selecting and discarding studies as described in the School Leadership and Student Learning Outcomes BES equate to Glass’ censorship by some a priori set of prejudices?
I remain staunchly committed to the idea that meta-analyses must deal with all studies, good bad and indifferent, and that their results are only properly understood in the context of each other, not after having been censored by some a priori set of prejudices. An effect size of 1.50 for 20 studies employing randomized groups has a whole different meaning when 50 studies using matching show an average effect of 1.40 than if 50 matched groups studies show an effect of -.50, for example. Glass 2000 Meta-Analysis at 25
Jolene Thought #2: Is it valid to make inferences from meta-analysis generated “effect sizes” when the nature of the studies used means that meta-analysis must lack both “a well defined population that has been randomly sampled” and “subjects that have been randomly assigned to conditions in a controlled experiment”?
It is common to acknowledge, in meta-analysis and elsewhere, that many data sets fail to meet probabilistic sampling conditions, and then to argue that one ought to treat the data in hand "as if" it were a random sample of some hypothetical population. One must be wary here of the slide from "hypothesis about a population" into "a hypothetical population." They are quite different things, the former being standard and unobjectionable, the latter being a figment with which we hardly know how to deal.
…… If the sample is fixed and the population is allowed to be hypothetical, then surely the data analyst will imagine a population that resembles the sample of data. If I show you a handful of red and green M&Ms, you will naturally assume that I have just drawn my hand out of a bowl of mostly red and green M&Ms, not red and green and brown and yellow ones. Hence, all of these "hypothetical populations" will be merely reflections of the samples in hand and there will be no need for inferential statistics. Or put another way, if the population of inference is not defined by considerations separate from the characterization of the sample, then the population is merely a large version of the sample. With what confidence is one able to generalize the character of this sample to a population that looks like a big version of the sample? Well, with a great deal of confidence, obviously. But then, the population is nothing but the sample writ large and we really know nothing more than what the sample tells us in spite of the fact that we have attached misleadingly precise probability numbers to the result. Glass 2000 Meta-Analysis at 25
Jolene Thought #3: Are the statistical tests used to determine homogeneity in meta-analysis studies adequate for the task?
However, my biggest Jolene Thought Moment came on reading “Another reason why I'm leery of meta-analyses” on the Respectful Insolence Blog (thanks to link from Stephen Downes)
Jolene Thought #4: Are meta-analyses nothing more than systematic reviews of the literature with attitude?
The Respectful Insolence Blog post describes an investigation into the use of meta-analysis in evidence based medicine (EBM), which does not sound all that dissimilar to the use of BES in New Zealand education.
The post goes on to describe an investigation into the meta-analysis of “randomized clinical trials (RCT) and review articles on the efficacy of intravenous magnesium in the early post-myocardial infarction period.”
The investigators found that
The significance of this study is that it doesn't look at differences in the selection of studies for the meta-analysis or the interpretation of or extraction of data from the studies included in the meta-analysis. Every reviewer was given the same package, the same data, and the same statistical analyses of the included studies, thus eliminating this issue. Even given that, reviewers still interpreted the results of the meta-analyses very differently.
The results of this clever exercise provide just one more bit of evidence that leads me to believe that meta-analyses are nothing more than systematic reviews of the literature with attitude. That's not to say that meta-analyses of the literature aren't often useful, just as systematic reviews of the literature, are. They are in the same way that systematic reviews are: They boil down a large number of studies and suggest an interpretation. Let's just not pretend that meta-analyses are so much more objective than a systematic review as to be considered anything more. Orac The Respectful Insolence Blog
Gene Glass has a future focused suggestion in his paper – one that in 2008 we would most certainly claim as Web2.0 or even Web3.0 thinking ….. he suggests that researchers contribute to online data archives instead of publishing meta-analyses and or BES studies … it sounds worthy … it sounds like something that just might let me un Dolly myself and stop singing Jolene …
Five years ago, this vision of how research should be reported and shared seemed hopelessly quixotic. Now it seems easily attainable. The difference is the I-word: the Internet. In 1993, spurred by the ludicrously high costs and glacial turn-around times of traditional scholarly journals, I created an internet-based peer-reviewed journal on education policy analysis (http://epaa.asu.edu). This journal, named Education Policy Analysis Archives, is now in its seventh year of publication, has published 150 articles, is accessed daily without cost by nearly 1,000 persons (the other three paper journals in this field have average total subscription bases of fewer than 1,000 persons), and has an average "lag" from submission to publication of about three weeks.
Two years ago, we adopted the policy that any one publishing a quantitative study in the journal would have to agree to archive all the raw data at the journal website so that the data could be downloaded by any reader. Our authors have done so with enthusiasm. I think that you can see how this capability puts an entirely new face on the problem of how we integrate research findings: no more inaccurate conversions of inferential test statistics into something worth knowing like an effect size or a correlation coefficient or an odds ratio; no more speculating about distribution shapes; no more frustration at not knowing what violence has been committed when linear coefficients mask curvilinear relationships. Now we simply download each others' data, and the synthesis prize goes to the person who best assembles the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into a coherent picture of how the variables relate to each other. Glass 2000
Source: Artichoke
How should we understand “Student Silence”?
All this thinking about “Student Voice” as a “good thing” makes me wonder about what our response to a call to value “Student Silence” would be.
To ask ….
How should educators learn to understand “Student Silence”?
I guess the answers will depend in part on what we assume from the silence of others and on how we understand or see “Student Silence” in the context of school.
I think I have seen silence ….. in some profoundly moving and breathtakingly beautiful images in a book about to be published by photographer David Maisel, Library of Dust. Link and exerpt from Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG
In some ways, these canisters serve a double betrayal: a man or woman left alone, in a labyrinth of medication, prey to surveillance and other inhospitable indignities, only then to be wed with metal, robbed of form, fused to a lattice of unliving minerals – anonymous. Do we see in Maisel’s images then – as if staring into unlabeled graves, monolithic and metallized, stacked on shelves in a closet – the tragic howl of reduction to nothingness, people who once loved, and were loved, annihilated?
After all, these ash-filled urns were photographed only because they remain unclaimed; they’ve been excluded from family plots and narratives. A viewer of these images might even be seeing the fate of an unknown relative, eclipsed, denied – treated like so much dust, eventually vanishing into the shells that held them.
It is not a library at all – but a room full of souls no one wanted.
It disturbs to imagine/know that no one “listened to their silence" until Maisel,
… and if he had arrived earlier or later we would never have been able to listen to/ value their silence either.
Ivan Illich allows us to appreciate silence in a different way from Maisel’s photographs and Manaugh's text … his meditation on silence provides some significant new thinking for educators wanting to understand the language of “Student Voice” – (This meditation is designed for a group of missionaries learning Spanish in a way that allowed
them to “attune their ears and open their hearts to the anguish of a
people who were lonely, frightened and powerless”)
“It is thus not so much the other man’s words as his silences which we have to learn in order to understand him. It is not so much our sounds which give meaning, but it is through the pauses that we will make ourselves understood. The learning of a language is more the learning of its silences than of its sounds.”
"The Eloquence of Silence" in Celebration of Awareness – A call for institutional revolution 1969.
I didn’t understand the significance of silence in understanding another until I read Illich …
Before Illich I saw student silence as a challenge, silence as a pejorative notion, silence as a communicative pathology, I wanted my students to talk, to discuss, to argue, to debate with each other … I didn’t want them mute …
I guess I had imagined “Student Silence” as failure akin to the interpretation in Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound Of Silence …
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
Understanding silence as a communicative pathology is probably not far off the mark for many of us the context of school. For example, I saw “Student Silence” in school in simple terms … as in there are times to be silent and times to talk …
I think we are encouraged to see “silence” in simplistic terms because our institutional power over students means we indicate these times of student silence and student voice in much the same way we might switch a room light on or off.
For example, there are times in school when teachers expect “Student Silence” and there are other times when teachers expect “Student Voice”. In both cases a refusal to oblige on the part of the student is frustrating to the teacher who is orchestrating the soundscape. To be met with “Student Voice” when you have asked for “Student Silence” or to be met with “Student Silence” when you have asked for “Student Voice” can precipitate a teacher rage out entertaining enough to be worthy of posting on YouTube
Which makes me suspect that when we ask for “Student Voice” and are met with “Student Silence” many of us assume that this “Student Silence” is a failure to communicate that means that students are not thinking (not learning).
For if we saw “Student Silence” as communicating that students are thinking deeply about something (aka learning) then instead of insisting through elaborate questioning strategies on Student Voice we would pause and embrace the silence.
I guess to be fair our response also depends on whether we assume that “Student Silence” indicates that students are thinking/learning about something related to what they have just been reading, watching, doing or listening to (intentional learning outcomes)?
Or whether the thinking/learning is about something tangential to what they have been reading, watching, doing or listening to (unintentional learning)?
Or whether we assume that when students are silent they have disconnected from what they have been reading, watching, doing or listening to and have retreated to a happy/ safer place, daydreaming, woolgathering?
And there are many reasons for students to disconnect when they feel marginalised, or coerced into providing a “Student Voice” that makes them vulnerable if they respond in a way that is different from the norm.
But as Illich’s meditation on silence when learning a foreign language suggests that silence is much more than the Sounds of Silence lyrics indicate. He classifies four forms of silence that missionaries need when learning Spanish … in school we only recognise the first when trying to understand the language of “Student Voice” …. and we do that grudgingly.
[Note to self: suspect there are some analogies to be drawn with Illich’s classification and the rhythm of blog commenting and responding on Artichoke .. all those times when a comment is left in silence while I wait for words that are worthy to sit alongside it. ]
1. The silence of the pure listener.
2. The silence of syntony,”
3. “The silence beyond words,”
The last category is harder to imagine in a school classroom where timetables mean that the time shared in voice and silence may be only 55 minutes … still I will leave it in because some educators work outside of the classroom world of the tame and form different conversations of voice and silence in the world of the wild … where maybe this silence is possible.
4. “The silence of the Pietà”
“The Eloquence of Silence” by Ivan Illich in Celebration of Awareness – A call for institutional revolution 1969. P46 to 51
Source: Artichoke
If only Jane Gilbert had a blog …. and NZCER had a wiki ….
Last week a local principal gave me a copy of Jane Gilbert’s “Progress” in 21st century education? – a New Zealand Council for Educational Research conference paper. In it Gilbert claims that we need to rethink “progress” and think differently about what it is to learn. Apparently schools need to change to better meet the needs of 21st Century Learners and Gilbert postulates this might happen if we;
- build learning capacity,
- develop deeper and richer networks and links for core competencies,
- think together and develop collaborative teams of learners, and
- find ways to ensure that everyone achieves.
It feels kind of strange to be learning about the need to change the way we learn in the 21st Century in a 21st Century conference paper that is accessible only to those prepared to attend the conference or to pay for the print copy of the conference proceedings.
The experience of reading the conference proceedings was in truth a retreat to a past way of learning. The freedom that comes from living outside of the institution in the day job is balanced by relying heavily on accessing my professional learning online rather than from print sources or from officially sanctioned professional reading circles. My ability to interact with content and ideas in Gilbert's paper seemed limited in some way … In reading the NZCER conference paper I felt like I was practising pedagogical austerity.
So it was ironical to read future focused calls for schools to change “the way they do learning” when the researcher and research organisation calling for change is operating in an environment where;
- content is still centralised,
- communication remains in the form of a monologue with no opportunity provided for online collaborative comment, trackback or conversation,
- learning is all about push over pull, and
- where unlike a wiki document, the learning manuscript is presented in its final form, ensuring that the learning process and editing involved in creating this thinking is not available for scrutiny.
It is a little like the teacher who claims to value discussion and student questioning for learning when talking to other educators but whose educative classroom practice reveals that for their students “learning is listening”.
Our limited access to Jane Gilbert’s paper, “Progress” in 21st Century Education? is worth thinking about.
It is worth challenging why we are so ready to accept espoused values of educational researchers in New Zealand when the integrated or lived values of their institutions are so different. If only Jane Gilbert had a blog…. and NZCER had a wiki…. how different would our learning opportunities be?
My experience working with and in schools in the day job suggests that the ideas in “Progress” in 21st century education?” are dated. Especially the ideas around how to measure the complexity of what a person is able to do in real- world situations. After all Eisner was talking about curriculum connoisseurship over 20 years ago. But I have no easy way of testing these ideas in the context of the paper, and I guess there is often a dislocation between what educational researchers claim is happening in schools and what schools are actually doing…
Many of the educators we work with in the day job would claim that Gilbert’s building learning capacity, developing deeper and richer networks and links for core competencies, thinking together and developing collaborative teams of learners, and finding ways to ensure that everyone achieves, are already with us. And unlike the NZCER conference paper, New Zealand schools are no longer broadcasting their learning outcomes solely through print copies of the school newsletter or at meet the teacher evenings where the teacher shares a paper sample of a student learning outcome with the parent.
A virtual (or face to face) tour of students’, teachers’ and principals’ practice would reveal that primary, intermediate and secondary schools across New Zealand are already building learning capacity, rich networks, collaborative teams, learning through participation and collaboration. And they are using social media with their students, their teachers and their communities to help them do this – including using wikis, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, social bookmarking, tagging, online photo libraries, Diigo, Google docs, Open notebook, shared online calendars, aggregators, RSS feeds etc.
In fact there are so many of these 21st Century appropriate learning conversations going on that I sometimes worry about the adverse influence of social media on the relevance of the local.
I increasingly want to explore Mejias’ question
Does social media contribute to the irrelevancy of the local?
I want to ask
Does social media create learning networks that discriminate against the student's immediate surroundings?
Or in the context of the Auckland ICTPD Cluster Home Group Meetings
Does social media create learning networks that discriminate against an Auckland ICTPD facilitator’s immediate surroundings?
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to claim that in embracing social media … in creating our own personal learning networks (all that Twitter, Skyping, blog reading and commenting, wikis, YouTube and TED talks and or podcasts vodcasts etc) we have increased the irrelevancy of the opportunity to meet f2f to learn with/ from our immediate companions in our local surroundings in a Home Group Meeting.
After all if you consider that the learning networks available to those attending the Auckland Home Group Meeting … they rely largely upon happenstance … who decides to turn up, for how long on the day …. It seems we cannot even count upon the National team members attending given that “This is not a day where the national team deliver content – this is a day for you all to participate and contribute.”
There is an interesting tension here…. in advocating for the increased use of social media for building learning networks by educators we undermine the relevance of the local … the opportunity to attend the Auckalnd Home Group Meeting for building learning networks.
This argument holds even when looking at the “loss leader” … the “outside expertise” attendance enticer…. it seems plausible that the opportunity to learn from/network with the “outside expertise involved in the session” would lose some of its relevance if this same presentation and shared expertise were available online through social media .
All this thinking makes me wonder
How should we re-approach nearness at the Auckland Home Group Meetings?
And this in turn makes me suspect that “Progress” in 21st Century education? will end up being an exploration of:
How should we re-approach nearness in our schools?
References:
“Progress” in 21st Century education? By Jane Gilbert Paper presented at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) Conference: Making progress – measuring progress, Wellington, 13 March 2008. p.63-73
URL: http://www.nzcer.org.nz/default.php?cpath=139_133&products_id=2194
Re–approaching nearness: Online communication and its place in praxis by Ulises A. Mejías
First Monday, volume 10, number 3 (March 2005),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_3/mejias/index.html
Source: Artichoke
Student Voice as a “good thing”
If my “good thing” monitor is working then “Student Voice” has been re-branded and re-visioned and we are going to hear a lot more “Student Voice” stuff in the next 6 months.
Calls for educators to listen to “Student Voice” have been with us since Dewey …. This recent promotion of “Student Voice” is probably a response to the collective educational ennui over “personalisation” - the last “good thing” to be broadcast, MoE glossy pamphlet-ed, and edu_conference work shopped and keynoted across the conversational corridors of education in New Zealand.
Much like personalisation (see “Personalisation as education’s killer app” ), “Student Voice” is one of those terms we assume is a “good thing” and as such is a term whose meaning is never interrogated and clarified … we carelessly fling “Student Voice” around in educational conversations along with terms like “learning community” “child centered classrooms”, “inquiry learning”, "engagement, or “relevant and authentic” ….. and we all take different meanings from what is said.
For example, listening to “Student Voice” (all that talking, laughing, crying, yelling, txting and whispering) is one thing …. acting upon “Student Voice” quite another ….
For if we are only charged with listening the first thing you'd want to ask is whose voice are we listening to …
And if we are only charged with listening with no expectation of action, the next thing we might ask is why those students who can see past the personal glory of being the chosen one … the “safe one” invited to represent “student opinion” by those with institutional authority …. would continue to bother to share their voice …
It is a bit like what happens to teachers who are consulted widely by SMT but find none of their suggestions acted upon …
In truth there is a sad irony in hearing all these educators talk about the importance of “Student Voice” when so many of their colleagues work in schools where they lack “Teacher Voice”.
Michael Fielding’s analysis is useful here, and his Framework for Assessing Student Voice pasted below is a great place to start looking at what is really happening in schools who claim to value “Student Voice”
Framework for Assessing Student Voice
To whom are they allowed to speak?
What are they allowed to speak about?
What language is allowed or encouraged?
Why are they listening?
How are they listening?
Are those skills understood, developed, and practiced in the context of democratic values and dispositions?
Are those skills themselves transformed by those values and dispositions?
To what degree are the principle of equal value and the dispositions of care felt reciprocally and demonstrated through the reality of daily encounter?
Who decides?
How do the systems enshrining the value and necessity of Student Voice mesh with or relate to other organizational arrangements (particularly those involving adults)?
Do the practices, traditions, and routine daily encounters demonstrate values supportive of Student Voice?
Who controls them?
What values shape their being and their use?
Who feels responsible?
What happens if aspirations and good intentions are not realized?
Do we need new ways of relating to others?
In response to Fielding’s questions about new structures and new ways of relating to others … I’d say yes, yes, yes …
For calls for “Student Voice” in school, to have any credibility we need to see educational institutions where students are not only participating in the ways identified through the framework, they should also be participating in different contexts …
“Student Voice” should see institutional structures develop where students are participating and contributing as:
researchers,
planners of curriculum delivery,
appraisers of learning, classroom environments, classes offered and teachers,
decision makers on system-wide school issues around finances, budgets, employment, curriculum, pedagogy, technologies, property, health and safety …
advocates
etc etc
And when they participate, students need to see their contributions acted upon.
And even then, if the balance of authority means that what is acted upon is determined by teachers then it would seem fair to challenge the whole notion of “Student Voice” … to ask what exactly are “Student Voices” participating in.
Still this week I am more interested in exploring the other side of “Voice” – in interrogating the many meanings of "Silence' .
and that is making me wonder about how we should understand “Student Silence”….
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
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
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
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
[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
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