Donald Clark Plan B

M-learning – be careful – a 7 point primer

2012-01-26T18:23:00.005Z

Warning – market’s a mess

Anyone who says cross-platform, m-learning contentdevelopment and delivery is easy, is lying. A wander round the LearningTechnologies exhibition induced a rash of promises that were at best economicalwith the truth. Mobile leaning vendors seem addicted to the word ‘YES’ in answerto any question. It ain’t that simple. Walk into any mobile shop, such as CarphoneWarehouse and witness a fragmented market. Latency, bandwidth, screen size, methodsof display, methods of input and the lack of universally adopted or agreedstandards – that’s your technical environment. A quick glance will reveal iOS,Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Symbian and Palm. It’s all a bit of a mess.So be careful about what’s phones are promised.

Learning limits

Early research on mobile learning showed something that isconveniently ignored by mobile learning evangelists. Attention and retentionmay be seriously affected by small screen size. Few watch movies, read entiree-books or perform long pieces of linear learning on their mobiles.Moreworrying is research by Nass & Reeves that shows that retention fallsrapidly with screen size. This pushes m-learning towards performance support, recordingperformance and collaborative learning, rather than courses. So be carefulabout what type of learning you want to deliver.

Technical complexities

Most serious developers use a tool that creates core codethen cross-compiles to create native apps across a range of platforms. This isnot easy as these things are difficult to write but the apps will be fast. Avariation is to use a VM (Virtual Machine) which may be a bit slower but givesyou control and flexibility. Or, more commonly, they will create web applicationsas browsers increasingly cope with worldwide standards such as HTML 5,Javascript and CSS 3. So be sure that you understand the means of mobile productionas it will affect speed and options.

Content complexity

How complex will your content be? The three letter word ‘app’covers everything from a simple text feed to complex geo-location, cameraintegrated applications with serious internal logic, interactivity, games andmedia manipulation. This is not easy in web apps, so be clear about the exact functionalityof the apps you want to deliver. You may end up with some very limited options.

Managing through LMS/VLE

You have to consider whether you want integration with yourLMS/VLE such as Moodle, Totara or Blackboard? M-learning isolated from your LMS/VLEmay be difficult to justify and participation in the LMS/VLE functionality maybe desirable. Do you want SCORM compliance?

Performance portal

Do you want the device to control and record performance in more‘learn by doing’ or vocational applications? This evidence may need to be fedinto an e-portfolio. Do you want to use the camera or GPS as part of thelearning experience?

Collaborative learning

Is collaborative learning required? Do you want to integratesocial media into your app? Or does the device already do this through theirnormal phone activity?

Conclusion

Take these seven issues seriously and you’re in a positionto make a serious decision about whether you want to enter the m-learningmarket. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is now happening and would encourageparticipation. But you have to think context as well as content. Mobilelearning may be more suited to some target audiences than others, younger notolder, mobile not static, vocational not academic. Go into this with your eyeswide open or mobile will simply mean they take your money and run.

Lectures selling students short: evidence from 'Science'

2012-01-22T15:46:00.000Z

Academicswill go to any length to defend the lecture (see twitter feed on my Don't lecture me! talk). No matter how much evidence there is to show that it is poorpedagogic practice, they resist the change. Even worse are those on thetechnology side in HE who ignore the arguments. They’re like those creationistscientists who have to reconcile empirical evidence with blind faith. In anycase, here’s another study (yawn) that proves the obvious – lectures areselling students short.

Lecturesv research-based instruction

Inthis study ‘Improved Learning in a Large-enrollment Physics Class’ byDeslauriers, Schelew & Wieman, from the University of British Columbia,lectures were compared with research-based instruction. The study was welldesigned with two large groups (n=267 n=271), one taught using an “experienced,highly-trained instructor” who taught using lectures, the other by a “trainedbut inexperienced instructor” using research-based instruction, based oncognitive science. Both taught an undergraduate physics course onelectromagnetic waves with clearly identified learning objectives.

Higherattention, attendance & attainment

Theresults were astounding. Not only higher engagement and increased studentattendance in the non-lecture group but a massive difference in attainment. Tobe precise, the ‘lectured’ group scored 41% on the test, the ‘interactive’group 74%. Pretty strong medicine.

Conclusion

The excuse is HE that ‘we’ve alwaysdone it this way’ but if other areas of human endeavour were to take thisattitude "in medicine we would still be bloodletting, in physics we wouldbe trying to reach the moon with very large rubber bands" saysWieman. The evidence is overwhelming from Bligh to Mazur – lectures don’t work.So let’s cut to the quick here, we have an entire profession ‘lecturers’ whose job title and practice are deeply flawed. Show me a Professor of Education, especially aProfessor of E-learning, who lectures, and I’ll show you a hypocrite whodoesn’t read the research.

7 reasons why Facebook is front runner in social media learning

2012-01-18T14:24:00.001Z

There’s a lot of talk about social media in learning but where’sthe action? Well, something’s happening in social media and learning, and Facebookis looking like a front runner. I first noticed this through the work of MillieWatts at Richard Huish College (see previous post) and Dr Ray Blunco sums it upin his Social Media in HE’ blog, when he says that the studies he’s run andparticipated in show that “students willoverwhelmingly use Facebook”. Twitter seems to be used less and thereforeless relevant and people don’t normally hang out in formal discussion groups inNing! This has been reinforced by chats with the Facebook folks, who seem to havesome serious plans in this area.

1. Why Facebook? They’re all there.

Interestingly, students argue that they prefer Facebook inlearning because they’re already there and it’s easy to use. Almost allstudents are on Facebook and they’re there all of the time receiving updatesall day long, so you can tap into their daily flow and make learning a part oftheir life, not just a chore through talks, tasks and tests. In fact, many reportthat they already, informally, use Facebook to ask each other questions, make enquiriesabout assignments and generally catch –up. So it makes sense to amplify thatbehaviour.

2. Learning automatically mobile

The fact that students get updates on their mobiles, is of course,an obvious advantage. Learning through Facebook, means for most, automatically engagingin mobile learning. This is a big leap forward, as learners spend a lot ofwasted time being on the move – walking to educational institutions, hangingaround waiting and so on.

3. Facebook - Groups

Let’s dispel the first myth. You don’t have to be ‘friends’ withyour students, or respond to their ‘friend’ requests. You simply become aparticipant in a separate group. So think Facebook groups (not Facebook pages).A formal Facebook group is a private, closed space where you can share, poll,ask questions, chat, share documents, share images and so on. No one else seesthe posts. Of course, you also receive notifications of group updates.

4. Tools (apps)

In addition to the group dynamics, there’s a rack of practicaltools learners can use, as they can be interested into Facebook, including: Blogger(do teacher and student blogs), Slideshare (share slides), YouTube (show videos),Flickr (share images), CITEME (citation tool that finds and formats citationsabsolutely brilliant) and so on. We can also expect to see a rack of apps appearingthat will accelerate this process. ‘Appsfor good’ is a charity that runs courses for students in building apps (checkthem out). This is relevant, entrepreneurial and way beyond what the normaldull ICT curriculum teaches.

5. Facebook for educators

A useful starting point is ‘Facebook for educators’, a well written introduction whichexplains the basics. It has a useful list of the 'Ways Educators Can Use Facebook':

Help develop and follow your school’s policyabout Facebook.
Encourage students to follow Facebook’sguidelines.
Stay up to date about safety and privacy settings on Facebook.
Promote good citizenship in the digital world.
Use Facebook’s pages and groups features to communicate with students and parents.
Embrace the digital, social, mobile, and “always-on” learning styles of 21st Century students.
Use Facebook as a professional development resource.

6. Civil use of social media
The bottom line is that world class institutions, like Stanford,have Facebook policies and encourage its use on campus. In any case using Facebookin schools, colleges, Universities and workplaces allows us to get the messageacross about the safe use of the internet, how to report problems, understandprivacy settings, being civil, how to deal with cyberbullying etc. Using Facebookkills two birds with one stone – the medium is the message, so use the mediumto teach the safe and sensible message.

7. Facebook as professional development

Devote a portion of your next INSET/training day to setting up a Facebookteachers/lecturers/trainers group to share professional knowledge. Surely there’sno better way to learn about the use of social media in learning than to simplyget on and use it!

Lastly a shout for some of the good folk who are working hard to bring you advice, examples and so from the world of social media and learning, like Jane Hart, Jane Bozarth and many others.

Why m-learning changed my life

2012-01-11T13:22:00.003Z

I’m a mobile learner. In fact, I’d say that of all the learningexperiences in my life, m-learning has been the most productive. How so?Learning is a habit (see previous post)and I’ve habitually learnt on the move, largelyin what Marc Auge calls ‘non-places’ – trains, planes, automobiles, buses, hotels,airports, stations. I’m never without a book, magazine or mobile device forlearning. It’s been boosted recently by my new iPOD 6.0, which is about thesize of a watch (indeed it can be worn as a watch) which contains 400+ podcasts.M-learning has become my dominant form of informal learning.

Young people notdriving

Isn’t it interesting that, accordingto the University of Michigan, the number of US 17 year olds with a drivinglicence has fallen from 69% in 1983 to 50% in 2011? Among the severalexplanations for this, is the rise of the internet. The explosion ofcommunication through texting, IM, BBM, chat, Facebook and email, has lessenedthe need for physical contact. Indeed, driving prevents you from being in theflow, as you can’t be online (legally) when you drive. Young people also chooseto spend their money on small, electronic shiny devices, like smartphones, ratherthan large, hugely expensive, shiny, mechanical cars, which they may see as environmentallyunsound. On top of this costs have soared, especially for fuel and insurance.

Non-driver

This caughtmy attention as I’ve never driven a car in my life. Don’t get me wrong it’sbeen more happenstance than moral stance. I’ve lived in cities such asEdinburgh, London and now Brighton, where a car is just not that useful. I’venever really been stuck, in terms of getting anywhere, with just twoexceptions; when I was a student on a campus University in the US and when I workedin Los Angeles. Other than that, my familiarity with public transport, has gotme to some pretty obscure places around the world.

Learning time

By luck this has literally given me years of time to readand learn in the isolated and comfortable surroundings of buses, trains andplanes. I actually look forward to travel, as I know I’ll be able to read andthink, even write in peace (writing this now on a 6.5 hr flight from MiddleEast). Being locked away, uninterrupted in a comfortable environment is exactlywhat I need in terms of attention and reflection. I calculate that over thelast 30 years, of not driving, I’vegiven myself about 20 days a year study time, totalling 600 days, so I’mheading towards a couple of years of continuous learning.

Non-places

It was the French anthropologist Marc Auge in his bookNon-Places, who pointed out that many of us, especially heavy users of publictransport, spend considerable amounts of time in railway stations, airports,hotels and other neutral, non-spaces, in transit to somewhere else. The goodnews is that these places have become havens for learning. I stock up on books,read in the lounge, browse magazines, buy newspapers, and generally see theseplaces as opportunities for reading and refection. Witness the rise of airportbookshops and the commonplace appearance of a Kindle or laptop on trains andaeroplanes.

Conclusion

If you redefine m-learning, as learning on the move and getaway from the idea that it’s just content delivered via mobiles, it becomes animportant part of the learning landscape. So buy a Kindle, iPOD, notepad orload up your phone with content. Or stick to books. The important thing is toget into the habit of learning on the move and see non-places as learning spaces.

More pedagogic change in 10 years than last 1000 years – all driven by 10 technology innovations

2011-12-07T15:42:00.001Z

Pedagogy - one of those words that’s used when people wantto sound all academic. So let’s just call it learning practice. Of one thing wecan be sure; teaching does not seem to have changed much in the last 100 years.In our Universities, given the stubborn addiction to lectures, it has barelychanged in 1000 years. So what’s the real source of pedagogic change?

It’s not education departments who peddle the same old traditional,teacher training courses or train the trainer courses. It’s certainly notschools, colleges and universities which seem to have fossilised practice (tobe fair some old practices are sound). It’s certainly not respected pedagogicexperts. When they do arise, like Paul Black and Dylan William, they’re largelyignored. Here’s my theory – the primary driver for pedagogic change issomething that has changed the behaviours of learners. independently ofteachers, teaching and education – the internet. Let me elaborate…..

Suddenly we had Google, then in the last ten years Facebook,Twitter, BBM, MSN Messenger, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Nintendo, Playstation,Xbox. All of these have had a profound effect on how we learn, through radicalshifts in the way we find things out, communicate, collaborate, create, shareor play. The internet is a pedagogic engine, changing and shaping the way welearn. In this sense, we’ve had more pedagogic change in the last 10 years thanin the last 1000 years – all driven by innovation in technology.

1. Asynchronous – the new default

Educationand training have been tied to the tyranny of time and location. Being able toaccess courses, knowledge and media has been a huge positive flip towardslearning where and when you want to learn. Clive Shepherd believes that the newdefault should be ‘asynchronous learning’ (not realtime) and not thetraditional live, face-to-face, synchronous (realtime) classroom course. Onlyafter you’ve exhausted the asynchronous online options should you considersynchronous face-to-face events. What a wonderfully simple idea, a massive pedagogicshift enabled, largely by online technology.

2. Links – free from tyranny of linear learning

The simplehyperlink encourages curiosity and is a leap to more learning. It has allowedus to escape from the linear straightjacket of the lecture or paper bound text(article, report, academic paper, book). It has led to more meaningful learningexperiences adding breadth, depth and relevance. Links are a key feature ofWikipedia, online content, articles, reports and huge amounts of posts in socialmedia that finish with a meaningful link. This pedagogic innovation has freedus from the tyranny of linear learning.

3. Search and rescue

Google aren’tkidding when they state their mission is to organize the world's information andmake it universally accessible and useful. They are well on the way to doing itand while they’re at it, providing educators with the tools, over and above‘search’ such as Google Docs, Translate, Scholar… the list goes on. They’veeven invested in the Khan Academy. The challenge for every teacher is to askthemselves, ‘Is there anything I’m doing or teaching that can’t be found inGoogle?’ This pedagogic shift means more independence for learners, lessdependence on memorised facts and answers to most questions, 24/7, for free.

4. Wikipedia and death of the expert

Jimmy Walesshould get the Nobel Prize. A crowdsourced knowledge base that is bigger,better, easier to use, searchable and in many more languages than anyencyclopedia that went before. In addition, it recognises that knowledge hasblurred edges, so discussion is available. The 5^th most popular siteon the web, everyone uses it – yes everyone. The radical pedagogic shift is notonly in the way knowledge is produced but the fact that it’s free, seen as opento discussion and debate, and so damn useful.

5. Facebook and friends

SarahBartlett’s study has found that students are keeping Facebook open forcollaboration right up to deadline during assignments. Social media is a way ofsharing experiences and knowledge with a wide range of friends and weak-tie acquaintancesand has changed the way we learn. It allows us to collaborate and accessrecommended links to learning, as well as learning events in the real world.Being networked means living within a new pedagogic ecosystem.

6. Twitter, texting and posting

There hasbeen a renaissance in reading and writing among young people. They text, BBM,IM, Facebook (primarily a text medium), every day, often many times a day. Thisis often done even when they have the possibility of voice (mobile) andface-to-face services such as Skype and Facetime, which they often avoid. Theyare also keenly aware of what channels are archived (text and Facebook) asopposed to discarded (BBM, IM and voice). Far from drifting towards high endmedia, text is alive and kicking.

7. Youtube – less is more and ‘knowing how’

YouTube has changed the way we use video in learning forever. The irreversible change is the idea that a piece of video needs to be aslong as it needs to be, not an overlong, over-produced mini-TV production. Thisis why the 1 hour recorded lectures on YouTube EDU and iTunes U seem so damnawful. Why replicate bad pedagogy online? It also proved Nass & Reeves originalstudy was right that high-fidelity video is not essential. YouTube has shown ushow to do video, keep it short and that we don’t need big budgets to do goodstuff. More importantly, for ‘knowing how’ as opposed to ‘knowing that’, it hasproved incredibly powerful.

8. Games

Games havebrought the proven sophistication of flight simulation into our homes and shownthat failure (abhorred in traditional teaching) is the key to learning.Repetition, reinforcement, deep processing, learn by doing and fine-tunedassessment are all features of gameplay. Games, and console hardware has openedup possibilities for simulations and experiential learning that is alreadyshaping learning in the military and healthcare. The multiplayer dimension isalso changing the way we see the pedagogy of collaboration in learning. Gameplayis just another word for sophisticated, experiential pedagogy.

9. Tools

This is notoften recognised but the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation toolshave effected a considerable change on pedagogy. Word processing has changed,irreversibly, the way we write (reorder, redraft, use reference, citations, spellcheck,grammar check) as well as providing graphics and layout tools. Our digitaldocuments are also replicable and easily sent by email. Spreadsheets have givenus the ability, not only to do formula driven work, especially in functional mathsuseful in business and science, but also driven the easy and flexible representationof data as graphics. Presentation tools have allowed us to present text,graphics, photographs and even video into teaching and learning. Tools, pedagogically,allow us to teach and learn at a much higher level.

10. Open source

Open source in coding led to the idea of open source in toolsand knowledge. From MIT Courseware to Project Gutenberg, huge amounts oflearning have been made available online, across the globe, for free. Freebooks alone have opened up the canon in a way we could never have imagined,fuelling the e-book revolution. In this age of digital abundance, open and freecontent is the democratisation of knowledge. This is truly a digitalreformation that has swept aside unnecessary barriers to access. Pedagogy, inthis sense, has been freed from institutional teaching.

Conclusion

These are ground breaking shifts in the way we learn.Unfortunately, they’re not matched by the way we teach. The growing gap betweenteaching practice and learning practice is acute and growing. Institutionalteaching, especially in Universities is hanging on to the pedagogic fossil thatis the lecture. The word pedagogy has become a hollow appeal for traditional lectures,classroom teaching and summative assessment. The true driver for positive, pedagogicchange is the internet.

21st Century Skills are so last century!

2011-11-29T22:29:00.001Z

The new mantra, the next big thing, among educators who needa serious sounding phrase to rattle around in reports is ‘21^stCentury Skills’. I hear it often, almost always in some overlong, text-heavy,Powerpoint presentation at an educational conference, where collaboration,creativity and communication skills are in short supply. Thank god for wifi!

But does this ideefixe bear scrutiny? In a nice piece of work by Stepahnie Otttenheijm, sheasked (radical eh?) some youngsters what 21^st C skills they thoughtthey’d need. Not one of the usual suspects came up. They were less vague, muchbolder and far more realistic. Rather than these usual suspects and abstractnouns, they wanted to know how to create and maintain a strong digital identity,be nice, recognise what’s learnt outside school, learn how to search use my Facebookprivacy settings. My suspicion is that they know far more about this than we adults.

Collaboration & sharing

Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes –it’s an obsession. They text, MSN, BBM, Myspace, Facebook, Facebook message, Facebookchat and Skype. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there’s Spotify,Soundcloud, Flickr, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and downloadexperiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closelyin parties when playing games. Never have the young shared so much, so often inso many different ways. Then along comes someone who wants to teach them thisso called 21^st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this isbanned. I’m always amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially ineducation, think we even have the skills we claim we want to teach. There is noarea of human endeavour that is less collaborative than education. Teaching andlecturing are largely lone wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges andUniversities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious ofanything produced outside of their classroom or their institution. The cultureof NIH (Not Invented Here) is endemic.

Communication

Again, we live in the age of abundant communication. There’sbeen a renaissance in writing among young people, who have become masters atsmart, concise dialogue. The mobile has taken communication to new levels ofsophistication. They know what channel to use, in terms of whether it’sarchived or not, synchronous or asynchronous. Texts and Facebook comments arearchived, some messages are not (voice and; BBM). You call people,synchronously, when you want them to make a decision. Text is asynchronous,therefore slower, more relaxed. They can also handle multiple, open channels atthe same time. What do we educators have to offer on this front?Whiteboards? Some groupwork round a table? Not onesingle teacher in the school my sons attend has an email address available forparents. I’ve just attended two major European conference where only a handfulof the participants used Twitter. What do we know - really?

Problem solving

Problem solving is a complex skill and there are serioustechniques that you can learn to problem solve such as breakdown, root-causeanalysis etc. I’m not at all convinced that many subject-focussed teachers andlecturers know what these generic techniques are. Problem solving for a mathsteacher may be factoring equations of finding a proof but they’re the lastpeople I’d call on to solve anything else in life. Do teachers actually knowwhat generic problem solving is or is it seen as some skill that is acquired throughosmosis when a group of kids get together to make a movie?

Creativity

Beware of big, abstract nouns. This one has become a cipherfor almost everything and nothing. I have no problem with art and drama departmentstalking about creativity but why does creativity have to be injected into alleducation. Creative people tend to struggle somewhat at school where academicsubjects and exams brand them as failures. When it comes to creativity, my ownview is that the music, drama and other creative skills my own offspring havegained, have mostly been acquired outside of school.

Critical thinking

I have somesympathy with this one, as critical thinking is sometimes well taught in goodschools and universities, but it needs high quality teaching and the wholecurriculum and system of assessment needs to adjust to this need. However, asArun has shown, there is evidence that in our Universities, this is nothappening. Arun (2011), in a study theytracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 studentswho entered 24 four-year colleges, showedthat Universities were failing badly on the three skills they studied; criticalthinking, complex reasoning and communications. This research, along withsimilar evidence, is laid out in their book Academically Adrift.

Digital literacy

Across the Arab world young people have collaborated on Blogs,Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to bring down entire regimes. Not one of them hasbeen on a digital literacy course. And, in any case, who are these olderteachers who know enough about digital literacy to teach these young people?And how do they teach it – through collaborative, communication on media usingsocial media – NO. By and large this stuff is shunned in schools. We learn digitalliteracy by doing, largely outside of academe. To be frank, it’s not somethingthey know much about.

Conclusion

Beneath all this, is there just a rather old, top-down,command and control idea – that we know what’s best for them? Isn’t it just theold master-pupil model dressed up in new clothes? In this case, I suspect theyknow better. There’s a brazen conceit here, that educators know with certaintythat these are the chosen skills for the next 100 years. Are we simply fetishisingthe skills of the current management class? Was there a sudden break betweenthese skills in the last compared to this century? No. What’s changed is theneed to understand the wider range of possible communication channels. Thiscomes through mass adoption and practice, not formal school and university. It is anillusion that these skills were ever, or even can be, taught at school.Teachers have enough on their plate without being given this burden. I’ve seenno evidence that teachers have the disposition, or training, to teach theseskills. In fact, in universities, I’d argue that smart, highly analytic, research-drivenacademics tend, in my experience, often to have low skills in these areas. , formal environment is not the answer. Pushing rounded, sophisticated, informal skills into a square, subject-defined environment is not the answer. Surely it’s our schools and universities, not young people, who need to bedragged into the 21^st century.

Learnt to ride a bike from a single sentence in a book!

2011-11-27T18:48:00.001Z

The Bike, by Robert Penn, is a brilliant paean to the bicycleand it brought back some great memories. Above all it made me think of my late, great,lifelong friend Frank Gormley, who hilariously learnt to ride his bikefrom a book. He came from a large, poor family in Barrhead (or Barrheid as hewould pronounce it) in Scotland and never had a bike as a child. So when hebought one later in life, he couldn’t get the hang of it. Eventually, he wentto the library, found a book and learnt to ride from a single sentence, ‘Turn the handlebars in the direction in whichyou feel yourself falling’. With this one piece of advice off he sailed. Infact, off he sailed, on his own, across Europe and through Turkey. Tragically,he died on his bike, coming off going downhill on his own in northern Spain. I like tothink of him enjoying those last moments with the wind in his hair and the warmsunshine on his face. He was always an independent sort of guy, the sort Iadmire.

Despite the fact that I have fallen off, shattered my wristand lay in agonising pain waiting for the ambulance, needing a full-anaestheticoperation and titanium plate, I also love cycling. Like Frank I took to cycling late in life.In this, my 54th year, I’ve cycled the whole Hadrian’s Wall on a sort of ‘FourMen on a Bike Run’ trip, and loved it. Later in the year we cycled down the Danubethrough vineyards and orchards visiting the castle in which Richard II was held,Baroque monasteries and Vienna. Above all, I love to ride along the sea cliffsof Sussex and in my local woods where for the last two years I’ve seen the seasons change close-up; butterfliesin summer, mushrooms in Autumn, snow and ice in Winter and wild flowers inSpring. I’ve even taken the plunge and bought a mountain bike (Andy tedd wasthe spur for this), and now relish the pleasure that roots, mud and weavingthrough single path routes in Stanmer Woods can bring.

I’m not a road bike sort of person, none of that lycra anddrop handlebars for me. My good friend Ken is such a creature. It’s all sweat,effort and speed for him, on his Harry Quinn frame (rebuilt twice) and Brookessaddle (he’s a traditionalist). I admire this but it’s not for me. I don’tdrive and prefer to avoid the manic world of roads, drivers and cars. When myother cycling mate, Ronnie, asked me what improvement I’ve had on my clock timesaround Stanmer Park, I replied. “Don’t know, as I often stop for a picnic!”

A bike even featured in a quite unusual family affair. My son's bike was stolen by a bare-chested, tattooed thug, who didn't reckon on him, his brother and mother's perseverance. After driving around Brighton for half an hour, in a long-shot attempt to spot the thief, they did. Gil operated a SWAT team swerve, cornered him on the bike my two boys leapt out recovered the bike, and saw him off (they're both second degree Black Belts in Taekwon Do). As my son said in the article that appeared in The Sun, headlined 'Boys Belt Thief' "My mum;'s quite scary - she's Scottish!"
In any case, whatever your cycling proclivities, gentle rides in thecountry, hard road riding, mountain biking –especially if you’ve ever had that feelingof being king of the world when in the saddle or that rush when you’rehammering downhill, you’ll love this book.

Penn interleaves the history of the bicycle with personal memories(he’s cycled round the world) and his goal of building his perfect bike, onethat will last the rest of his life. For the techies, there’s lots of detail ontubes, spokes, rims, tyres, handlebars and gears. He travels the world, at leastthe US and Europe, to get the perfect components and meets the people who makethem and watches their often hand crafted manufacture.

But the real joy of the book is the sheer pleasure he (and others)get from this simple self-propelled vehicle. There’s nothing like a simple bookwhere the author’s passion for a subject is just overwhelming, especially if it’sa passion you share.

Lessons learnt? It’s never too late to learn, don’t letadversity stop you, teach your kids to stand up for themselves, and (in learning) less is always more (even a singlesentence can teach you a new skill). God bless you Frank.

From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg – scale matters

2011-11-11T10:40:00.001Z

Bend it, shape it, anyway you want it but at some point you have toscale it. At the world summit on education WISE 2011 I heard a lot of talk onscalability. A problem was the failure to address the real meaning of the wordand the various species of scalability. Until we truly understand scalability,education and training will remain the world’s biggest cottage industry.Teachers are not scalable. Classrooms are not scalable. When good practice istied to both of these, it is prevented from becoming scalable. Tied to thetyranny of location and time, learning’s stuck in non-scalable boxes. But guesswhat, technology is scalable. So where do you put your effort and money?

Non-scalable learning

We have physical things, like teachers and buildings that are simplynot scalable. Every new teacher, lecturer, trainer and building costs the sameor similar amount as the previous one. Yet this remains the dominant mantraamong many politicians and educational commentators – we simply need moreteachers, trainers, lecturers, schools, colleges, universities.

Scalable (physically replicable)

Some physical things, like books (everyone forgets these are a form oftechnology) are printable therefore scalable. Moveable type and printing wasthe ‘technological’ Gutenberg revolution that massively accelerated learningthrough scalable learning content. Books are scalable in terms of being cheaplyreplicable.

Scalable (amplification)

Radio and television, as broadcast media are scalable in terms ofreach. In poor countries radio remains a powerful tool for learning, as it wasin the Australian Outback for many years. Similarly with TV. This is ‘one tomany’ scalability.

Scalable (replicable ideas)

Ideas are scalable if they can be disseminated and copied by word of mouth and print. Yetinnovative theory and practice remains patchy if the recommendations themselvesare not scalable. The problem is often the institutional resistance and ‘notinvented here’ tendencies. Education is a slow learner and ideas are not at all viral.

Scalable (digitally replicableideas)

Ideas and content can be massively replicated at little or no cost inthe Zukerberg age. It’s bits not atoms. Digital replication has led to adigital reformation and an age of digital abundance. This is the only real,scalable solution, especially for ideas, but also for content; digitalreplication at zero cost across the entire globe. Even for communication andcollaboration, the other important dimension in learning, the only real scalabilitycomes through technology.

Scalable (digitally replicableand free)

The most scalable ideas are not only digital but free. Wikipedia andMoodle are two good examples. Wikipedia gained its scalability throughcrowdsourcing, Moodle through open source development and community. This is the most bountiful form of scalability.

Mosquitos v Tortoises

Most research projects in learning are non-scalable and have shortlives. The live and they die. Some, however, have the longevity of tortoisesand can live for decades, even hundreds of years. Scalable innovations includeJanet/Superjanet, Open University, University of Phoenix, Wikipedia, Moodle.

What do these successful innovations in learning share? Scalability throughtechnology. From Gutenbeg to Zuckerberg, replication, first at low cost, than at no cost is the key to low cost education and training.

UK e-learning companies in rude health? A rude review!

2011-11-09T12:26:00.000Z

The UK e-learning business remains, I think, in rude health,with predicted growth this year for Kineo, Epic, Brightwave, Line and Learningpool. It's not all been plain sailing, but here’s a gander at the top UK e-learning businesses over the last three years.

Kineo

Kineo has grown every single year sincethe guys set up after Epic was sold to Huveaux in 2005 and have never had any debt.Well that’s not quite true, as they converted their company from a partnershipto a limited company, thereby lending money to themselves, a common tax wheeze,but it’s not really debt in the sense of a liability. It's a good team, led by the force of nature that is Steve Rayson, and they’re going strong onthe back of bespoke work, franchising and Totara. What’s really interesting istheir rapid expansion abroad where revenues across their shared businesses areprobably nearer 15m, making them a salable entity. (3.7 m 2008, 5.2m 2009, 7.1m 2010).

Line

Line have never really been interested in recapitalisingand going for rapid growth, which has kept them clear of debt. However, they have over recent years, strengthened their focus ondefence. Although dropping by a million in revenues last year, again I think they’llbounce back this year on the back of defence work. Piers (ex-Epic many yearsago) has a good team who do good work. (6.95 m 2009, 6.15m 2010)

Epic

Epic declined badly under the weight of a bad loan from the Bankof Scotland to Huveaux, and has declined in revenues every single year since itwas sold it in 2005, when they eliminated the huge cash reserve and started to dropon revenues. Although bought out from Huveaux, they also suffered badly from a talent drain to Kineo, whosemanagement team are all ex-Epic. However, it looks as though they may bebouncing back, with a possible increase in revenues in 2011. They’ve won acouple of large contracts and are dabbling in mobile and Moodle, which is asign that they’re thinking afresh. (6.1m 2008, 5.15m 2009, 5.1m 2010).

Brightwave

Brightwave have also taken senior people from Epic and havea good reputation for well-designed content but seem stuck at revenues moreakin to a lifestyle business. However, Charles Gould, who also worked at Epicmany moons ago, is a smart cookie, and has recently shown more signs ofambition for growth. I suspect we’ll see good growth this year on the back ofthis ambition. Brightwave don’t put out accounts which shows they’re below the£5 million threshold, probably in the £3.5-4.5 million range. (estimates: 3.8m 2008, 3.0m2009)

Redtray

Redtray seem to be mired in debt and have been laying ofstaff. What distinguishes the successful from the non-successful is that all toofamiliar word ‘debt’. To grow by acquisition means taking on debt that has tobe financed at the same time as you try to get efficiencies and revenues fromyour acquisitions. Not easy. (3.75m 2008, 3.66m 2009)

Learningpool

Learningpool have grown steadily since 2007, with a focus ona licensed service to the public sector and they will grow again this year,showing there’s space for sector specialists. Their successful, hosted content delivered via Totara will drive sales this year. (1.23m 2008, 2.07m 2009)

Saffron

Saffron Interactive seem steady at below £2 million and weall hope they’ll remain. a player after the tragic death of Hanif Sazon. (1.82008, 1.8 2009)

Fusion

The irrepressible Steve Dineen’s a trooper and has, presumably,timed out on his non-compete clause and resurrected Fuel as Fusion, with thesame shocking pink corporate palette, and check out the shot of the companymanagement team on their website– it looks like a cheap version of theBullington Club!

Other news includes the sale of Edvantage (ex-Futuremedia).It looks as though Lumesse have bought them for their LMS and tools, so it will be interesting to speak to that other Brighton force of nature Andrea Miles (ex-Epic) to see what the future holds.
Atlas
Specialists in oil & gas, these folks from Aberdeen have shown that sector specialisation has its rewards. However, I don't know them, so will not comment.

Brighton rocks
Brighton remains the epicentre for UK e-learning, withKineo, Epic, Brightwave, Edvantage (now Lumesse) Vivid and many other smallcompanies forming the backbone of the UK industry. Sheffield like to say theyhave the edge but it’s the Kineo and Line satellite production groups therethat keep it strong, showing a degree ofdependence on the south-east.

The new league table should show Kineo and Line (neck andneck finish I reckon) then Epic, Brightwave, Redtray (if they survive),Learningpool and Saffron. I wish all of the above companies well in 2012. Timesare tough but they’re all seasoned campaigners and should do well.

Education’s a slow learner (lessons from WISE 2011)

2011-11-08T15:58:00.000Z

1200 leaders in learning from 120 countries at WISE2011, all flown intoDoha by the Qatar Foundation to shape the future, with a focus on innovation.Did they succeed? Yes and no. It takes more than three days to create anEducation Spring. Here’s my take.

Education’s a slow learner

It may be more accurate to say that education has learningdifficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised,so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in themindset of their institution and horizontal sector. In truth, small pools ofinnovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption.

Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being theanswer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on weresolutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. Theproblem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.

It took a politician, Gordon Brown, to show we educators how tocommunicate, teach, frame a problem THEN a solution. His speech was masterful,laying out the many dimensions of the problem, informing through humour, movingthe audience with heart rending stories then he hit us with a vision, a cleargoal and details on funding. All children in school by 2015, with massiveinjection of funds by the private sector, public sector, religious institutionsand not-for-profits. He put great emphasis on tech companies such as Google,Apple and so on, which was novel.

Generation gap

Few were using Twitter, Facebook was a mystery to most and fewer still blog. The stagewas often filled by older people in dull suits who all agreed with each other,that education was a glorious and great good. If only our leaders could seethis, give us more money, then all our sins would be washed away. But thisdoesn’t wash. Things only sprang into life when we got younger learners' voices, like theyoung Qatari woman who shocked the academics by saying she wouldn’t have gotthrough her medical degree without Wikipedia. She challenged the audience tostep into their local school to see if things have got better (obviouslymeaning they had not).

Real innovators, like Jimmy Wales, were thin on the ground. I wouldhave given him the WISE prize, as Wikipedia is a truly amazing, global,scalable success in learning. He explained that he didn’t have a business planand just got on with the task, “I’m a carpenter not an architect”. A recurring theme of the conference was theundercurrent of ludditism. Even the presenters were at it, with little digs attechnology. We kept hearing ‘technology is only a tool’, ‘technology is notproven’, ‘it’s not the technology its teachers that matter’. Replace the word‘technology’ with ‘books’ and you’ll see how odd this is. Valerie Hannon of the Innovation Unit has continued with thisanti-technology theme in her blog.

Crisis of relevance

The Arab Spring has taught us educationalists a lesson. The heavyinvestment in education, especially universities, is turning out graduates withlow, relevant skills, resulting in mass unemployment. Across the Arab world of85m 18-24 year olds, nearly 1 in 5 is unemployed. The immediate (and it isimmediate) challenge is to develop skills for employment and security. 1 in 4are out of work in Tunisia. In Egypt 34% of young people wait for a long timebefore finding a job. They call it the ‘waithood’ and can be up to 3 years ormore. At 7% of GDP on education, Tunisia is near the top of the league table,so what went wrong? Why has so much money been spent with so little success?Ask the graduates. “No one wants the skills we have and we don’t have theskills they want”. E4E (Education for employment) has a real and relevantapproach where employability matters with application based learning and goodcareer guidance. Employers want real world experience not just paperqualifications, so you have link education to the workplace. With female jobseekers it’s worse , with unemployment at more than 30-35% among femalegraduates.

There was some agreement on the lack of relevant skills, most employersexpressing dissatisfaction with critical thinking, problem solving, teamworkand communications. The system was stuck with memorisation and lecture basedlearning. Professors sell their notes and set exams around the memorisation ofthese notes to increase sales. Asking questions and questioning the knowledgeof teachers and academics is barely tolerated. This is not education, this isprogramming. On top of this there’s a strong stigma against vocationaltraining, especially among educationalists.

Edgar Morin saw modern universities as having failed to respond tomodern times. Their disciplines limit our knowledge and lead to separation. Weneed relevant knowledge, not barren , specialised experts, lost outside oftheir discipline. The proof? The current financial crisis shows this –academics are impotent and lost. They have lost the ability to communicateproperly and come up with solutions.

Educational colonialism

A German Professor of Mathematics told me that he’s just spent 6 monthsin Ethiopia help set up 40 (not a mistype) Universities. He thought this waslunacy. The country has barely functioning schools and they’ve been fed theline that HE is the answer to their problems. What they need, he explained wasmore vocational colleges for technicians and functional jobs, not advanceddegrees. This is the madness of institutionalised initiatives.

All over the Middle East and Africa, western Universities are playingthis game, setting up campuses in education parks. It’s a distortion that theycould do without. It sets the expectation that everyone should become a ‘Doctoror Engineer’. That’s the phrase you hear all the time. No, these countries needfunctioning managers and professionals across a wide range of professions. Onthe same panel, a South African claimed that the country needed ’more postdocs and women inEngineering’ (that old trope). Oh yeah?

I attended a completely sterile debate on University rankings.Despite general agreement that a linear sequence does not statisticallyrepresent the diversity of the institutions or data, and despiteknowing that they don’t represent teaching (yet are used by parents andteachers to choose universities), they are still used by academics who shouldknow better. These are lies told by people who know they are lying. ProfJeffrey Sachs was clear, don't invest in the American model, now driven bygreed selfishness and short-sightedness.

Revolution’s here

The Arab Spring was omnipresent. It coloured everything. Young peoplewant jobs and in the Middle East the current model hasn’t worked. Degrees havebeen commoditised. What people need is jobs. We need to recognise thattechnology played a huge role in the Arab Spring, and if it can help topplegovernments, it can help transform education. The Arab world has one languageand could benefit hugely from an initiative that produced good Arabic content,from the cloud, that was device-independent. If the Qatar Foundation could stepup to the plate on this one, we’d have real progress.

Some voiced the opinion that the Arab Spring is the best thing thatcould have happened for education in the Arab world. It could help elevate theagenda to where it ought to be. Why? Long standing institutions, with scleroticstructures and management, are the problem, with deeply rooted incentives toprepare for a test or get a diploma. So, at the heart of any programme needs tobe the reform of incentives, comprehensive and ambitious reform, not only incountries that have gone through revolutionary change but other countries byproximity.

A deeply depressing incident occurred in Charlie Leadbeater’s sessionon innovation. After a brilliant triplet of innovators who were reshapingeducation by getting it out of the traditional classroom, the Minister ofEducation for Iran swanned in with a posse of henchmen. Or so we though. It wasactually a lackey who read a speech that had numbered goals around setting tensof thousands of Koranic schools and prayer rooms, linking, and I quote‘knowledge to religion’. This cultural engineering is a disgrace. Moreeducation, in this, sense is casting the net backwards.

Out of the box

You must not only think out of the box but get out of the box that isthe classroom. Indeed, the best workshop was on three innovations from India,Denmark and Australia. All three had taken education out of the classroom. Aschool in Denmark, Hellerup Skole, had been built as a ‘house’ then spaceallocated and appropriate furniture bought. In Australia Stephen Harris hadabolished classrooms and reimagined education around different concepts ofspace. I asked him why his kids were still in uniforms and he said, clearlyannoyed, “it’s the legacy of the British public school system”.

I heard of schools under mango trees, walking schools that took placein a different house in the village each day, learning in church halls afterhurricanes that had wrecked everything else, pavement kids in India that hadschool bussed to them as they couldn’t leave their home unguarded. Did you knowthat 50% of all schooling in Afghanistan takes place in tents?

Of course, the real space that has been colonised by learning isvirtual. Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter, Khan Academy,VLEs, OER and a huge number of other sites and tools have created analternative world of learning. Despite WISE attendees being largely lost withtechnology, technology is easily the most important innovatory force inlearning.

Get real

Lifelong learning appears to have been hijacked, at least in Europe, byeducational institutions. I attended a workshop on LL that started with nothingbut talk of Universities and the funding they receive in Lifelong Learning.Until, that is, the audience revolted and pointed out that institutions are thereason why Lifelong Learning is failing. We know that formal and informal mustbe recognised. This is not about schooling, but avoiding the trap thatschooling leads to – that learning must take place in institutions throughcourses, with teachers. One could argue that Universities have little ornothing to do with this.

On the topic of realism, Martin Burt runs schools as businesses. Theschools pay for themselves. Rather than teaching abstract maths they teachbusiness maths. For him this is not a business project but a business. This isinteresting, an appeal that more learning should be REAL and RELEVANT. Until wesee knowledge, skills and learning in context we’ll be stuck in a culture thatvalues the academic over everything else. We know this has been a huge mistake.Vocational learning needs a voice.

Get mobile

Despite the obvious barriers, such as small screens, cost, technicalvariability in devices and basic illiteracy, it’s starting to happen. Mobilesare powerful, personal and portable. The costs are plummeting, with someoperators offering zero rates for educational use. In some countries thecellphone has leapfrogged other technology for the poor.

Dr Maths has been used by 30,000 students in Africa, and elsewhere, todeliver text and tutor support in maths. They bypassed schools and teachersentirely relying on word of mouth. They operate in S Africa and found that evenin the townships mobile ownership and access was pretty much universal. In factit is staggering how much poor people will spend on mobiles – up to 30% oftheir income.

Of course, seeing mobile as just a communication device betweenteachers and learners restricts its primary advantage – scalability. Tutors andteachers are not scalable. I learnt how Twitter was used for language learning(the 140 letter constraint is the trick). Siri offers a breakthrough here withvoice recognition and AI driven coaches, assistants and language learning.

Going online way forward for education says Gordon Brown

2011-11-06T10:10:00.000Z

I slipped into a front row VIP seat for Gordon Brown’s talk at WISE inDoha, Qatar (security were clearly fooled by the Scottish name on my pass). I have to say he was on fire. No notes, just a brilliant analysis of global educationand poverty that captivated the audience and gave the summit wings. Thismay be hard to believe but he seems to have been reborn.

After an endless series of lacklustre educational panellists Brown’sspeech had it all. Millennium goals for 2015 will not be met for another century;children been betrayed. It’s now impossible to meet the Millennium Development Goal to cut infantmortality by half, but, he claimed, the goal on education could be achieved ifwe have focus and will.

Reagan joke

His Reagan joke was acracker. When A Swedish minister spoke on world poverty and education Reaganasked if he was a Communist. He was politely told by his ambassador that theSwedish minister was, in fact, an anti-Communist. “I don’t care what kind ofcommunist he is” said Reagan, “he’s wrong”. The point was that politicians,companies and not-for-profits must all pull together on this one.

Principled
One of Brown’s strengths as apolitician is his principled approach to world poverty and when he tellsstories of his visits to Africa and other countries in the developing world,they’re told with feeling. The evil o child labour where 300 millionchildren working today when they should be at school. We heard of a child bride who died inchildbirth, too young to bear her child, the woman who turned to prostitutionto send her child to school, the child soldiers, a real evil, forced to commitatrocities. Killer facts, for example, a Sudanese girl stands more chance of dying in childbirththan receiving a school education. I spoke to several peopleafterwards who were truly moved by this part of the speech. I was.

He was also brave enough to havea pop at Koranic schools, unusual in an Arab country. But he was right. I hadheard a depressing speech from the Iranian Minister of Education at the summitthe previous day, who had an appalling plan to link education to the Koran, andall knowledge to religion. God save us! Politicians can be bad news and educationis not always a good

Funding
“We must hold national Governments to their promises to provide thefunding both in development aid and of course the funding that individualdeveloping countries’ governments have promised for education in their ownareas,” he said. “And where countriesfall behind, we should be telling them that this is not acceptable because itis not simply about them and their generation – it is about future generations,”what was required, he added, “was aglobal fund for education in the same way there was one for health”. Headystuff.

Online the way forward

Now listen to this, as at this point things got really interesting. Hegave a detailed account of why online learning was essential to his vision. Iwas not surprised at this. Brown was the brains behind UFI, an e-learningcharity I’ve been a Trustee on for over six years. Unlike Gove and co, hebelieves in this stuff. “I want all thetechnology companies, the Microsofts, the Apples, the Facebooks, the Googles tobe involved in this project,” he said. He said he wanted technology to beavailable to the poorest countries. “Ifthey have a worldwide vision, as we have, about the importance of education,then they should, as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet hassaid, make it possible not for 20% of the world to benefit from the internet,but 100% to benefit from the new technologies, including the Web, that areavailable.” The only odd moment was mentioning Simon Cowell. EducationalIdol here we come. This was the really fresh idea, that scalable technologywill, is in the end, the only real global driver in terms of reducing cost andreach. Far too many of the educational leaders at the conference were closetluddites, who can’t see past the ‘we need more teachers argument’. They’reright but teachers are not scalable.

Finale

It took a politician to show theword’s educators how to communicate, teach, frame a problem, provide facts and detail,THEN a solution. His speech was masterful, laying out the many dimensions ofthe problem, informing through humour, moving the audience with heart rendingstories then he hit us with a vision, a clear goal and details on funding. Allchildren in school by 2015, with massive injection of funds by the privatesector, public sector, religious institutions and not-for-profits, all givenwings by technology, mobiles and the web.

Suddenly he’s naming Sartre, de Beauvoirand quotes Camus, "shouldn't we admit we got it wrong" and asks thatwe put it right. Education at that turning point, every child in 21st C shouldbe at school. “When Cicero turned to the crowds in ancient Rome, people said, 'greatspeech'. When Demosthenes spoke to the crowds in ancient Greece and peopleturned to each other, they said: 'Let's march. Let's march for education andlet's march for it together.” At last, a call to action.

Standing ovation then exit stageleft

For me, this was the high point of the Summit. His standing ovation wasdeserved as he had stood up for the poor. Education is not an end in itself, itis a means to an end. He was mobbed as he left the stage and it was a shamethat he didn’t stay to answer a few questions and speak to a few of the peoplefrom the developing world who had clearly been moved by his words. In fact heseemed uncomfortable in the melee and relieved to be rushed out of the sidedoor.

Postscript

I spoke to Charles Clarke afterwards, but he missed the speech due to amisreading of the programme (they are arch enemies, Charles having attempted acoup in 2009) and agreed with Clarke’s point that the focus on primaryschooling was wrong. What we need is focus on vocation education to tacklerelevance and unemployment.

At least these guys have the big picture and vision. I heard nothinglike this from the educational establishment, many who seemed past their sellby date. But my real worry is whether his call for action is realistic. We’rein a recession and finding funds for a fresh push on a reframed Millennium Goalseems unlikely. The idea of a single fund is the only way to solve the problemand as Jan MorganKaufman pointed out view Elizabeth King, the Director ofEducation at the World Bank, we have a fund. Unfortunately it’s too small. However,I hope the golden wind will fill his sails, as it’s such a noble cause.

Flippin’ heck –is the whole of education doing things backwards?

2011-11-01T13:15:00.001Z

The TES has just published an article on ’flipped learning’with views from myself, Salman Khan and others. My first point was that flippedlearning is not new. The Open University has been doing it for over 40 years. “They let you learn in your time through thematerials they provide and the tutors are there to help and close the knowledgegaps”. However, “we have only juststarted to explore this. It is literally thinking outside the box, the box inthis case being the classroom” or lecture hall”.

Out of the box that is the classroom

Additionally I stated that, “we should be taking technology out of classrooms so they can be usedfor their intended purpose – learning”. Why? The classroom is a cramped boxcrammed full of alternatives targets for attention, “an incredibly awkward environment in which to learn because of all thedistractions”. Conversely, “thetrouble with a lot of homework (awful word)…is that kids get stuck because there’s little or no help at home”.So why not flip them and do the straight exposition at home, and formativelearning in the classroom?

Trapped in fossilised pedagogies

The problem is that teachers and lecturers have becometrapped in fossilised pedagogies – quite simply, huge dollops of talking atpeople in the classroom and lecture hall. To be fair, expectations ofinstitutions, expectations of students, job titles (lecturer), buildings, budgetsand quality evaluations, all target the fossilised model. So there will only bechange when there’s a “concerted effortto change the fundamentals…. You have to redesign your course from scratch andnot just add technology. It should be a compulsory part of teacher training touse technology in innovative ways”.

Don’t talk – teach

I’ve blogged on flipped learning before, extolling itssensible approach to the use of technology in learning – DON’T PUT TECHNOLOGYIN CLASSROOMS, use classrooms to teach through formative assessment. Theinternet has given us more pedagogic shift than the entire cadre ofeducationalists over the last century. First text (Wikipedia), thenaudion(podcasts) and then ubiquitious video, along with links and interaction,have all given us the opportutnity to learn the basics online. What we needfrom teachers is teaching – namely constructive feedback.

Flip and force them to teach

To be honest, ‘flipped learning’ is merely a species of‘blended learning’, just one of many possible blends. What makes it such agreat fit in education, is the obsession with the lecture or talking at peoplein classrooms. If you can’t get people to stop reading at you for hours in alecture hall or classroom, and calling it ‘contact time’, do something radical,get them to stop the madness, flip it, and force them to teach.

When apprenticeships go bad (7 fails)

2011-10-28T10:02:00.005Z

When I wasgrowing up in Scotland I knew lots of people on ‘apprenticeships’. My uncle,adopted by our family at 16 (we shared a room), became an apprentice joiner,and went on to work all over the world in Africa and the Far East, eventuallybecoming a Director in the Local Authority. It served him well. But the wholesystem was dismantled by both Labour and the Tories, one seeing it assecond-best, the other killing it off as part of the free labour market. Bigmistake.

I have some sympathy, however, with the current government’s attemptto bring them back. With £1.4 billion of funding in 2011-12 it should have someimpact. But ask yourself a few questions. Do you really know what a modern apprenticeship is? How long does it last? Can you name the politician in charge? Can you name the Minister in charge? Do you know what government department is responsible? This shows the myriad of problems, here's just seven of the 'fails'

1. Brandless

What is an apprenticeship? Well, it’s been widened and dilutedso much that it’s hard to tell. A qualification needs to be a brand that employerstrust. If you simply rebadge short-term, low-level training as anapprenticeship, you do untold damage.

2. Lack of leadership

Ever heard of the National Apprenticeship Service? No?Hardly surprising. The problem is that it falls between two stools, theDepartment of Education, who are too obsessed with schools and HE to manage itproperly and BIS, who don’t have the skills (sic) to manage the process.

3. Wrong people

Only 7% of the recent increase was in 16-18 year olds, thetarget audience for traditional apprenticeships. This is shocking, and a con. Thereason is that most apprenticeships are being mopped up by older people in employment.

4. Wrong level

Apprenticeships are meant to be a clear route to picking upa craft, making you employable. But when they’re stuck at shorter Level 2apprenticeships, they’re little more than mop up exercise for bad schooling.The recent announcement on increased numbers are really just low levelplacements.

5. Lack of quality

Believe me, there will be sizeable fraud and lack of qualityin apprenticeships as employers see it as a shortcut to increased profitabilityand government lack the wherewithal to oversee the process. In its modernreincarnation, it covers too many levels and is still mired in an old mix oflargely discredited qualifications such as BTEC.

6. Cheats

Employers have spotted the weakness. Take your older, low-paidworkers, switch them to apprenticeships and draw down the funding. Supermarkets,like Morrisons, have been shelf-stacking apprenticeships like crazy, with18,000 people over 25 atLevel 2, almost every single one an existing employee.Impact on youth unemployment – zero.

7. Really part of the benefits system

We have an opportunity here to create a vocationalqualification that has a trusted, quality brand, led by a known organisationand targeted at young people at the right level. This should be part of ornational growth strategy, instead it’s turning into a minor arm of the benefitssystem, a half-baked YOP scheme, without the Y.

7 reasons why Siri could be a breakthrough in e-learning

2011-10-19T19:18:00.003Z

I thought the breakthrough in natural language would comethrough games - I was wrong, it’s come through mobile. My son’s friend has anew iPhone and asked, “What is the meaning of life?” It answered, “Chocolate”.Rude requests get “I’m not that sort of personal assistant”. Good to see thatApple still has a sense of humour. But it will be the serious applications thatwill drive Siri.

Voice recognition is not new, Android have had it for ages,but it was seen as something to use when driving. This is a good thing, andundoubtedly saves lives, so on this advantage alone, Siri has a head start. ButSiri is different. It may become as common as people using earpieces, odd atfirst, then annoying, then mainstream. The problem with mobile conversations isthat the person can’t see the environment in which the other is talking, so itgets awkward; secondly people tend to talk too loud as they can’t overcome thenatural brain response that you’re talking to someone at a distance. But thefact that Siri senses when you’ve lifted the phone to you ear is wonderful.

So what’s a natural language interface’s potential inlearning?

1. Talking means better learning

E-learning usually puts something between the learner andcontent – a device. It can be a keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, joystick…whatever. This physical device requires cognitive effort and almost certainlydistracts and diminishes the cognitive bandwidth available for attention andprocessing by the learner. Ideally, there would be no such device. Voice is, infact, how most everyday communication takes place. We see and speak to eachother without any interloper. You didn’t have to learn to speak and listen butyou did have to spend years learning how to read, write and use computers. It’sgood to talk as it’s how we learn.

2. Siri as personal assistant

This has HUGE potential. The problem with much e-learning isthe linear, over-structured approach that lacks the flexibility to respond topersonal learning issues. These may be; getting stuck, not quite understandinga point, needing more information, needing more depth, wanting to know why andso on. The learner is an individual and needs variance in response. Siri mayturn out to be the ancestral Lucy that leads to systems that really do providepowerful, personalised, adaptive learning.

3. Siri as coach

Going one step further, Siri-type coaches may help youresolve things or lead you through a learning process with prompts that suggestalternative sources, strategies and solutions. The Siri voice is already acalm, slightly robotic but friendly, coach-like voice. ‘PersonaI assistant’ isonly one step away from ‘coach’, and I can see it being a coach for real, whenthe software becomes really AI driven.

4. Siri as reinforcer

We’ve known since Ebbinghaus, in 1885, that we forget mostof what we try to learn and that the cure for this rapid and inevitableforgetting is reinforcement and practice. Siri, or sons of Siri, could offerthe promise of prompts, reminders and practice that really does push knowledgeand skills from short to long term memory. It’s something that you carry withyou and ideal for spaced practice.

5. Siri and language learning

Learnosity has pioneered the use of mobiles in languagelearning. You do your homework or assignments as voice and get them gradedonline. Imagine using the language you’re learning and getting immediatedialogue and feedback from Siri in that language. They say the best way tolearn a language is to get a foreign girlfriend, well this is the next bestthing, a personal assistant. Backed up with regular prompts, as in the previouspoint about reinforcement, and you have a powerful, semi-immersive, languagelearning system.

6. Siri and numeracy

Numeracy remains a stubborn problem in education, withmillions failing to pick up even basic skills. Here’s a way of making that dullstuff dynamic. You talk to the phone, and it takes you through maths usingnatural language. You answer with voiced answers. Analysis of your answersprompts positive feedback and a reasonably constructed system will know yourpersonal level of competence, so you don’t get left behind and progress at arate that suits you. Siri, unlike most maths teachers could be an expert,constructive, consistent and infinitely patient.

7. Siri as assessor

Learnosity have already used voice for assessment, but theprinciple of voiced answers, checked by a language recognition system has fascinatingpossibilities in all subjects. It also allows you to assess people who haveproblems with written language e.g. dyslexia or physical disabilities. In anycase, all those written exams taken by kids who don’t use pen and pencils inreal life is rather odd. If you ask someone a question you expect a verbalreply. This could be the answer to remote assessment.

Conclusion

Is this a breakthrough or false dawn? To me it feels like abreakthrough, as it could change a basic behaviour, allowing thedevice to do things traditional teachers do well – talk to you, give youanswers to your questions, help you progress. It’s a breakthrough because it’s part of the consumer electronicsrevolution and hasn’t come from the educational world (where breakthroughs arerare), that means it has a chance of succeeding and becoming mainstream. I'm not saying that Siri in itself is the breakthrough, but it's the hole in the dam for natural language computing. Mostof all, it’s cool and interesting. The Siri sites showing ‘fails’ and Siritalking to Siri, have already gone viral and viral is what we need in learning.

7 compelling arguments for peer learning

2011-10-16T09:35:00.000Z

Learning lurches between extremes: the formal v informal,didactic v discover , self-paced v social, teaching v learning. But is there a bridgebetween these extremes, something that cleverly combines teaching and learning?Over the years, starting with Judith Harris’s brilliant (and shocking) work onpeer pressure, then Eric Mazur’s work at Harvard but also through severalpresentations at a recent JISC E-assessment conference, I’ve been smitten bypeer learning. The idea is to encourage learners to learn from each other. Compellingarguments?

1. Powerfultheoretical underpinning

The bible for ‘peer’ pressure, and why parents and teachersshould know about this stuff, is Judith Harris’s wonderful The Nurture Assumption, the work for which she received the GeorgeMiller Medal in psychology. StephenPinker sang her praises in The BlankSlate, and claimed that she had turned the psychology of learning on itshead. I think he’s right. In a deep look at the data she found somethingtotally surprising, that far from parents and other adults, like teachers, influencingthe minds of young people, she found that 50% was genetic, just a few per centparents and a whopping 47% peer group. The initial evidence came fromlinguistics, where children unerringly pick up the accents of their peer group,not their parents (I know this from experience).

2. Massively scalable

Given the massification of education, here’s an interestingargument. Peer learning may actually be better with large classes, as you havemore scope in terms of selected peer groups. As many struggle with thechallenge of large classes, here’s a technique that amplifies both teaching andlearning. Peer reviewing and learning works because it is scalable, especiallywhen good web-based tools are used.

3. Learning byteaching is probably the most powerful way to learn

Unsurprisingly, to teach is to learn, as peer learninginvolves high-order, deep-processing activity. In fact, the teacher mayactually gain more than the learner. In any case, the peer’s voice is oftenclearer and better than teacher’s voice as they are closer to the mindset ofthe learner and can often see what problems they have, as well as solutions tothose problems.

4. Encouragescritical thinking

You can easily see how peer learning produces diversity ofjudgement. It is this enlargement of perspectives that is the starting pointfor critical thinking and complex reasoning, the very skills that Arum foundlacking in his recent research in the US.. It also increases self-evaluation.

5. Group bonding aside effect

In addition to enhanced social and communication skills,peer groups bond. In one nursing case study at the University of Glasgow, thestudents started off a bit sceptical but soon demanded and volunteeredparticipation.

6. Dramatic drops indrop-out rates

In all the case studies I saw, higher attendance and lowerdrop-out rates were claimed. This is not surprising, as continuing failure anddisillusionment are often the result of isolation and a feeling of helplessnessin learners, especially in large classes and courses.

7. Higher attainment

Mazur has recorded some startling improvements, not only inthe core understanding of physics, but in general measured attainment throughsummative assessment. The peer learning was, in effect, the result of cleverformative assessment. In a nursing course, they experienced better note takingand higher attainment and in a psychology course with 550 students, reciprocalpeer critiques also led to higher attainment.

Problems?

Do students muck about? Apparently not, in the case studiesI’ve seen the groups self-moderate. Indeed, the peer pressure preventsdisruptive and non-participatory behaviour. It becomes cool to participate.

How do you know they’re not feeding each other false things?There’s certainly the danger of the blind leading the blind, but overall, thecase studies show that real growth occurs. There’s real peer pressure in termsof not being exposed and not bullshitting the others. The approaches and toolshelp overcome this danger through the clever selection of mixed-ability, peergroups.

Of course there’s a difference between peer marking and peerreview. Some advise against peer marking as it can be seen as a step too far,peer review, with constructive comments, however, seems to be more powerful.

Peer tools

You don’t actually need any tools to get started. As Mazurhas shown, simple coloured cards that allow students to respond to theteacher’s diagnostic questions can be enough to spark peer group learning. He actuallyuses clickers, with histograms appearing on the screen, but mobile phones areincreasingly being used for this function. However, for more technology-driven peerlearning, Aropa, Peerwise or Peermark can be used.

Aropa is an open source tool from the University of Glasgowthat allows teachers to set assignments then set up peer reviews betweenstudents. You review other students’ work, then receive reviews on your ownwork.

Peerwise is a free tool from NZ that flips assessment andallows students to create questions, share and see answers, a sort ofpeer-based, formative assessment generator. I like this angle as building goodquestions really does make you think in depth about the subject. It’s used byhundreds of institutions.

Peermark allows instructors to write assignments, fromturnitin, the plagiarism folks. You set dates, can see how many assignmentshave been submitted, set how many students you want to review each assignmentand whether you or the students choose what to review, pair up students, addreview questions, reorder them. There's a nice video demo here.

Conclusion

I’m really convinced that this moves us on. We have tobounce teachers and learners out of that mindset that sees teaching as one tomany and adopt the wisdom of the network. Pamela Katona at the University ofUtrecht showed that students are less than satisfied with the teaching andfeedback they receive. So many learners wait too long for feedback, receivecursory feedback, don’t have access to the marking scheme and often don’t seethe final marked paper.

Arum, in AcademicallyAdrift, has presented good research to show that critical thinking, complexreasoning and communications skills are all too lacking in our universities. Sohere’s a technique that moves us on, combing the best of teaching with the bestof learning. All it takes is just that first step towards student interactivityand participation. And, to repeat, it’s SCALABLE, indeed, the more the merrier.

Only one thing lacking in Educating Essex – education!

2011-10-08T12:19:00.002Z

Television has a nasty habit of showing state education asdysfunctional. If you have any doubt about Channel 4s intentions check out the sleazy publicity above. Suggests it's more about Essex Schoolgirls (nudge, nudge) than education. They view schools through a pathological lens, with an unnaturalfocus on problem kids. Channel 4 are obsessed with this approach. Educating Essex, like C4s ridiculous Jamie’s Dream School before it and againC4s The Unteachables before that, area disgrace. This has become a TV genre all of its own promoted by the Tristams;TV types, who, in my experience, largely went to private schools, where problemkids are filtered out of the system.

The makers of this programme certainly lack the objectivityand professionalism of real documentary makers, as they simply select ‘discipline’themes from hundreds and hundreds of hours of tape. It’s yet another example ofa London-based, editorial class pushing their personal agendas. It’s the samewith Channel 4 Learning, who burn millions year on year on dubious games totackle social problems. It’s a patronising view of state education by a bunchof posh kids in Horseferry Rd.

The programme started well but I didn’t expect EVERY episodeto descend into yet another ‘chav-porn’ series of portraits of individualchildren causing havoc in front of the cameras. It’s exactly what Owen Joneswrote about in Chavs, about the demonizationof the state system. There’s precious little coverage of any of the hundreds ofother ordinary children getting on with their education, only insanely detailedcoverage of Sam, Vinnie and whatever lad they’ll choose next week as it makesfor ‘good TV’. Have they no shame?

Where’s the teaching and learning?

In one of the few glimpses (that’s all we get) of actualteaching, we see a teacher make the classic mistake of introducing PI withoutany adequate reason or explanation. The charming young Carrie’s reaction waspained but rational, “What is PI? Where did it come from?.....” Cue thedifficulty of teaching maths. This could have gone somewhere, but it was onlyused as an amusing clip. In fact, look carefully and it shows a typical mathsteacher with his back to the audience simply reading out a Word document from theand e screen, and has failed to break the solution down into stepscomprehensible by the class.

I’d like to know if this absence of teachers and learningwas the result of editorial bias or at the request of the teachers and/or theteachers’ unions. As a governor in a comprehensive school I and other Governorsfaced extreme resistance when we tried to report honest observations from our scheduledclassroom visits. We were eventually told that classroom visits were banned! Ifthis is true, it would be a shame, as I’m sure many of the teachers in theschool are good, inspiring and professional. The problem the programme makersmay be up against is the hagiographic idea, sometimes promoted by the teachingprofession, of all teachers being brilliant and inspiring, when many, like anyother profession, are just average. I would much rather have seen the truth,than this wildly distorted, corridor-only, punishment room view of the school.

Administrators galore?

The one thing you do notice is the relatively large numbersof support staff on camera. This is exaggerated by the angle taken by theeditors (problem kids), nevertheless, from the Head of Inclusion to the pairwho sit in the support unit, the sympathetic Miss Baldwin and Mr Tracey, aswell as Mr Drew and a team who are always in and around his office, it seemsthat teachers and teaching have been curiously erased from the programme. Wesaw a lot of Miss Conway, head of house and PE teacher in the last episode, butwe’ve yet to see any sport or teaching of PE.

Obsession with uniforms?

I really like the Headmaster, Deputy Heads (the legendary MrDrew and Mr King) but shouldn’t they be doing more teaching? An unbelievable amountof time is spent policing school uniforms. Is this really what matters inschools? High school students in Finland don’t wear a uniform and it is one ofthe highest performing systems in the world. Imagine if all that time, effortand money went on education, as opposed to enforcing uncomfortable andimpractical ties and blazers.

They get through the exhausting and difficult days with ahealthy mix of banter and humour. No shots of the staff room though. I wonderwhy! Could it be that these were edited out? Surely we can take some realityhere. These are real people with a real sensitivity towards the children. Thosewe see do really care, we just don’t see enough of them teaching or kidslearning. We’re four episodes in and I have no idea what’s taught or how it’s taught– hopefully the next few episodes will enlighten me.

Facebook saved my sanity - remarkable story of Jan Morgan

2011-10-07T12:51:00.000Z

On September 15 2010 Isaw this appear on facebook:

"hello ,this is Imogen , Jan's daughter , just to warn you if you are meeting up withher or due in work from her or whatever - she is in hospital after a stroke onmonday night so will not be able to do anything for a while."

Jan Morgan, a well known e-leaning professional, had sufferedfrom a stroke. (This message came from her 12 year-old daughter. How brave and mature is that?)

iPhone lifeline

It wasn’t long before the redoubtable Jan started topost from her iPhone in hospital. At first the posts were a little scrambled, andthe spelling amusingly idiosyncratic. But as she recovered the spelling got better, the humour kicked inand she was soon posting about the awful food, asking for all visitors to bringa Starbucks and my favourite, “Nursestelling meboff for playing with my phone too much”. Whatwas interesting was the way the staff kept complaining about her using heriPhone, yet as she says “it is mylifeline and link to the outside world hugely reassuring”. Then this lovelymessage “It would appear that I amsending bizarre messages as my spelling is atrocious and I'm not noticingbefore pressing send so apologies to everyone jan”.

D-Day

Among lots of updates on her progress, including several on theslapstick process of physiotherapy, a genuinely moving moment, “Had a few blubbery moments over theweekend... I miss Imogen, I miss my home and I've had enough of this game can Istop now please? ... But I've made such a fuss about the food and gone onstrike as I just can't face it anymore ...” But D-day was not far off, “20th December -my discharge date... I'mgoing home hip hip hooraaaaay:):):)thank you everyone for your support thesepast 11weeks”. The lack of stimulation in hospital was clearly annoyingher, “Given that the only entertainmentoffered by the hospital is Wednesday "art&craft" classes-currently making Xmas cards and looking like a morning at playgroup or Fridaymorning bingo classes.... Watching kettles boil would provide more stimulation!”

Now if you’re fortunate enough never to have suffered a suddenunexpected deterioration in your health or spent an extended spell in hospital,this was an extraordinary series of posts over several months. Jan is currently writing a book about her remarkable experience. (if there's any interested publishers out there - contact me.) What was fascinating was theway she overcame the isolation of the hospital experience by posting onFacebook. She was humblingly honest, frank and downright funny about her ownrecovery. Listen to this, on hospital food,“Salad today consists of grated carrot, cress - slices of orange andlemons.......truly weird”. We all experienced her progress by proxy and it wasalways fun to see Jan post yet another reflection on her predicament (often inweird spelling). It was truly life affirming. This record, of her posts duringrecovery must be a mine of useful information about the early stages of cognitiverecovery. Then a gear-shift.

“I wenthome this morning:):) gosh! My stomach has been burbling since 6 am and ivebeen shaking - bit like stage fright, a few tears too. I managed the stairsup& down and the front door step. Only need grab rails by front door andadditional support rail at the bottom of the stairs so minimal. I failed on thecoffee test though as my legs were shaking so much I couldn't stand, so Imogenmade instead:)” We were living this realtime journey with Jan,always posting replies, not just out of sympathy, but out of sheer admirationfor her gutsy refusal to get downhearted.

Benefits!

Finally Jan got home and started to adjust to the life she temporarily left. Again her posts were full of laughs as she struggled with the simplest of tasks. But it was her adjustments to the benefits system that were fascinating. The realisation that she had now to survive on a greatly reduced income hit home and I’m sure it was a dose of realism for all of us. Benefit cuts seem very abstract unless you know someone who relies on them. It was a laughable, at times harrowing, description from inside the Kafkaesque world of the DWP, disability benefits, disabled parking permits, phone calls, form-filling.

“Theydon't do home assessments and if I miss the appointment I will need doctorswritten statement saying why! No they cant see the medical information alreadyheld by DWP due to Data Protection... How often is the Data Protection Actmisused and misunderstood ? Meanwhile I stiill only receive £65.45 per week”

‎”... Ihave to have a DWP formal fitness to work assessment - study scheduled myappointment for 8:45 next Thursday, in Birmingham- I was supposed to make myown way there on public transport …I can't even walk as far as the nearest busatop yet.”

Again, it was a window to a world few of us know much about. Thelabyrinthine processes and exhausting complexity of the benefits system was arevelation. Then arranging care and support. How do I find people? How much doI pay?

Scans

In a truly remarkableact, she posted her own brain scan, showing where the artery had burst. This wasmerely another post with a minimum of fuss. I can’t say how much I admired thissmall, matter-of-fact post. It said volumes about her as a person. What we witnessed was her cognitive recovery, day by day, as the spelling got better and the messages more coherent. I have no doubt that the iPhone and Fecebook contributed greatly to diminishing her sense of isolation by keeping her in touch with the outside world. A bolder claim, and one which I hope she discusses in her book, is the claim that it helped her re-learn and recover that much quicker.

Thanks

So thanks Jan (and Imogen), for yourbravery in sharing what was clearly a massively traumatic event in your life. Thanks for your honesty and humour. We’ve all grown through thisexperience.

PS
This was written with Jan's oversight and permission. Here's a message from the lady herself....
"You may say i have been an inspiration or whatever but from my perspective it was you and all my other fb friends sending me messages and just getting on with your daily lives that inspired me to get better - the world was still turning out there and I wanted to be included. One year on and attempting to live on less than 18% of my former income, there are moments when my hospital bubble suddenly seems attractive (apart from the food)"

"Adjusting to my new normality is all an ongoing experience, but this time last year my future was bleak. Now I have a future and it is going to be a damn good one and I'm going to have fun:)"

7 reasons to put heads in 'cloud' e-learning

2011-10-04T14:54:00.001Z

The future has just got kinda cloudy with iCloud and Kindle Fire. Forget the devices, that's just gadgetry.

iCloud not iPhone
Reaction to the launch of the new iPhone4 was muted, as the gadget geeks expected more, but it was the other release at the launch that was far more important, the new version of IOS. Look under the bonnet at Apple with iCloud and you see the future, your content in device-independent cloud services.It is expected (Forrester) that the number using personal cloud services will leap from 65m to 196m by 2016. That's a $12 billion market.

Kindle Fire
Just a few days ago Jeff Bezos launched the Kindle Fire. This is the big threat to the iPad because it's cheap, faster and has its head in the cloud with its EC2, cloud-focused 'Silk' browser that caches for speed. Amazon Cloud storage will come free. Again, it's all about device-independent content through cloud services.

Cloud nine promises

One view of the cloud is that it’s no big deal, thatwe’ve been using online services for yonks, without any fuss. Another is thatit represents the most important shift in IT in the last decade. There’s evenmention of that dreaded phrase ‘paradigm shift’. I’m in the latter camp. Thisis big news in IT and for e-learning there are seven 'cloudnine' promises, seven major wins;

1. Big migration

According to Gartner, this isthe biggest shift in the IT world in the last decade, as IT turns itself upsidedown and flips applications, storage and processing power to the cloud. We’renow seeing a massive migration of e-learning to the cloud. When servers beganto be clustered and virtualised, the real clouds began to form and this has fanned out to;infrastructure (IaaS), platforms (PaaS) and software (SaaS). The game changerwas Amazon, with their EC2 and S3 services.

2. Full scalability

Cloudservices offer contracts that allow you to scale according to actual demand,not forecast guesses on usage. This is important in e-learning, as uptake andusage is notoriously difficult to predict. You can pilot at low cost then scale up over time, in proportion to need.

3. Only pay for what you use

This shift from a fixed to variable cost model, payingonly for what you use, can result in huge cost savings. Learning services tend to be used erratically. It’s the equivalent of switching from usingelectricity generated by your own generator to using the national grid.

4. Buy less hardware

Dick Moore ran Learndirect’s IT for years and knows morethan a thing or two about delivering complex learning services to huge numbersof people, 24/7, at the same time gathering huge amounts of data. He is anevangelist for shifting data to the cloud, virtualising servers, then usingthat acquired storage and bandwidth to deliver your main services - you don;t need to own all your own metal.

5. Buy less software

Like many in the business world, I first saw the realpower of the cloud when I shifted all CRM activity to salesforce.com. Thebenefits, in terms of access and savings, were immediate. It was clear thatsuch a move was necessary to remain competitive and that these SaaS serviceswould mark out the e-learning innovators. But over the last few years more andmore e-learning services and content has been delivered from the cloud.

6. Lowerenergy bills

Hugely efficient data centres, based in cold climates,such as Iceland (the ‘cold rush’), deliver much greener, lower-cost services. Ifyou can wean your IT guys off their old ‘server hugging’ habits, you canbenefit through considerable savings on all that electricity used to run andcool your servers. Then there’s the opportunity to run these services on thinner,less energy-hungry, client devices.

7. Device independence

As an added bonus, as we move to an increasingly mobileand tablet driven world, you can support more and more devices. Learning needs to be free,and this means letting it loose on as many devices as possible. The Amazon Firepoints the way to a fast, cloud cached, thin-client device and, in general, cloud-basede-learning accelerates mobile learning.

Education

Many VLEs, from open source Moodle to Blackboard, nowoffer cloud-based services. Google apps, in the form of free email, calendar andcollaborative tools, is being used by hundreds of educational institutionsworldwide, more than 14 million students and teachers, they claim. Monash University (Australia) has invitedover 50,000 students to use the integrated services Gmail, Calendar forUniversity and personal planning (shared) and Google docs. It’s accessible andefficient. The big advantage is the wholescale outsourcing of services. Google alsohave an open source, cloud-based LMS called CloudCourse. You can createcontent, track that content, schedule classes and it’s integrated with GoogleCalendar.

Organisations

Kineo, Learningpool and many others offer hosted cloud-based LMSservices such as Moodle and Totara, with full scalability through Rackspace. Companies,like Edvantage, just sold to Lumesse (formerly Stepstone) have been offering acomplete range of SaaS services for some time, showing that cloud delivery addsvalue. Cogbooks offer a sophisticated, next-generation adaptive learningsolution, that you just switch on from the cloud. Organisations large and smallsee learning services, as something that can be easily migrated, unlike hardcorecommercial, transactional services. And although there’s new distinctions, suchas public and private clouds, the bottom line is that cloud computing is thenext big thing.

Under a cloud of suspicion?

So the cloud on the learning horizon promises a scalableservice with massive savings in cost, a greener service and device independence– what’s the downside? Well, there will be worries about security. This is notto be ignored, as once you’ve shifted your data up and out, it may be subjectedto scrutiny by authorities such as Governments and legal plaintiffs. And whenyou have a breach, you may find yourself unable to have the same level offorensic testing available as you had in-house. Remember that the cloud is notactually a cloud, but a huge data centre(s) somewhere on terra firma, so checkwhat arrangements they have if it gets hit by a tsunami or hurricane. One otherpoint, as Dick keeps reminding me, remember to encrypt your data before sendingit to the cloud, doing it there would be self-defeating. In short, you alsoneed to know what you’re letting yourself into contractually.

Conclusion

Of course, we’ve had our heads in the clouds for sometime, as email, blogging, Youtube, Wikipedia, shared documents and socialnetworking are just some of the cloud services we use without thinking. But as we've seen, there’sseveral new imperatives that push us towards use of the cloud, and surely the saved money canbe better spent elsewhere. This is not cloud cuckoo land, it’s the future.

7 reasons why Kafka would have loved assessment

2011-09-26T17:01:00.000Z

I’m in Praguethis week, speaking to the world’s test providers . Prague was Franz Kafka’scity, whose unfinished masterpiece TheTrial tells of the accusation, arrest and relentless pursuit of Josef K. Hedoesn’t know what he’s done wrong but the whole world seems determined to puthim to trial and find him guilty. This is not far removed from the modernobsession with testing. Young people are in a perpetual world of exams and arenot sure why the world is so determined to accuse them and find them guilty ofnot knowing huge tranches of weird stuff. Here’s just seven Kafkaesque featuresof modern assessment:

Sell ‘cheating’

We tell peopletests are merictocratic but the test community sells ‘tests’ and also courseson how to ‘cheat’ those tests. Companies like Kaplan and others sell expensivecourses that tell you literally, how to cheat. Imagine a business school thatruns courses on banking, and at the same time sells courses on robbing banks!(Then again….) This is immoral and a sign that the tests are not what theyclaim to be, immune from improvement through tutoring and practice.

Mindless maths

We a dull &irrelevant curriculum, teach it badly, test it endlessly and wonder why theyhate it or fail. PISA set the wrong pace, with STEM close behind, sopoliticians have become obsessed with the weird world of abstract maths,despite the fact that the vast majority of students will NEVER use the quadraticformula, surds, trigonometry or any algebra at any point in their lives.Abstract maths is easy to test, so the tests drive the curriculum. The majorityof learners actually need ‘functional’ maths, fit for practical living, not thetiny minority that go on to do STEM degrees.

Summative is too late

The educationalsystem is structured like horizontal layers of impermeable rock. The learnerhas to punch vertically upwards through these strata, with exams at everystratum, designed to halt progress for the majority. This obsession withsummative assessment also means that formative assessment suffers. Teachersteach to the test. In short, we test too late, when the damage is done.

Tests measure failure

Precious fewpeople get 100% in any test, so testing almost always tests below fullcompetence. Why don’t we test until full competence is achieved, rather thanaccepting second-best? This is what simulations and games approaches do andtherefore offer. Why can’t we go for systems of smart, adaptive assessment thatassure competence at every stage?

Test and forget

Most exams testknowledge that will be forgotten within days or at most weeks. Ebbinghausproved this in 1885, yet we still operate a system that follows the ‘cram,test, forget’ method. Part of the problem is the fact that we have abandoned‘learning by doing’. Tests favour ‘knowing that’ as opposed to ‘knowing how’.Imagine an Olympics with only a few medals available for a few, pure athleticsraces and the rest are rubbish.

Luddites

Most tests arestill done using pens. Two points: 1) few students and workers use pens in thereal world, they use keyboards; 2) not giving students the chance torestructure and rewrite essay answers leads students to memorise andregurgitate set essays and answers. Critical thinking through writing is allabout rewriting, so why not give them the ability to word process? We testusing primitive technology that actually stops them from showing competence.

Abysmal quality control

Recent A-levelexams contained impossible questions in a range of subjects from major testorganisations such as AQA, OCR and Edexcel. Their quality control was soabysmal that they hadn’t tested their papers with even a SINGLE student. Theyclaim to have statistically eliminated the problem by adjusting marks. Just howdid they measure the distress and distraction in trying to answer an impossiblequestion?

Conclusion

We test to blame,whether its students, schools even entire educational systems, which at timeshas led to a pathological view of education, and the demonization of stateschooling. There’s so much testing going on, that relevance, innovation,skills, honesty and quality have gone down the plughole. We’re stuck with aKafkaesque approach that is relentless, bureaucratic, accusatory and oftentests the wrong things for the wrong reasons, killing the desire to learn.We’ve turned our children into a generation of Josef Ks.

Higher Education? Myths, mantras, illusions and delusions by Hacker & Dreifus

2011-09-20T11:37:00.006Z

It’s all in the ‘question mark’. Hacker & Dreifus areacademics who have no interest in destroying higher education. They do,however, think it has gone badly wrong, in the US at least, straying from itsreal purpose. Their charge is that Universities have become insular,inward-looking and self-serving, abandoning teaching in favour of research.Politicians, parents, students and external commentators are waking up to theparallel universe that is the modern university, a feather-bedded, faculty culturethat seeks to avoids teaching, with high costs, sabbaticals, endlessconferences and dubious research. Does their analysis apply to the UK? Let’ssee.

Teaching

Their cardinal charge is the high cost students pay, throughdebt, for low quantity and quality teaching. Now that people pay top dollar theyare asking what they get in return. The reality, uncovered in detail, is that academics seek to abandon teaching astheir careers progress. The bulk of undergraduate teaching (70%) is now done bylow paid, part-time ‘contingent’ staff. In some cases foreign students withEnglish so poor they can’t be understood, especially in maths and science (acomplaint I’ve heard many times from students in the UK).

The stronger charge is that academics don’t care much forteaching undergraduates “nor do they feel the need to”. They witness appallingattitudes towards students, and in particular, poor teaching with lowpreparation, poor skills, little eye contact, and therefore little attention bythe class, also a propensity to blame studentsfor lack of attention. Why? Because teaching ability is not valued. Research iswhat leads to permanent employment and promotion.

“Good teaching is only possible if professors are alsoactive in research” is the mantra the hear time and time again. But thepressure to shovel more and more research into more and more journals, withfewer and fewer readers and attend more conferences, with fewer attendees, is aroad of diminishing returns. Research, through the publishing virus, is now areputation and resume issue, largely divorced from teaching. Indeed, newerteaching institutions have massively expanded research, at the expense, theysay, of teaching. This research-led teaching myth also promotes the teaching ofinappropriate, esoteric topics. In short, there’s a need to de-link or furtherdisengage research from teaching.

Having attended both a US and UK universities and seen lotsof academics present, I would say that, if anything it is worse in the UK. Wehave a more reserved culture, where highly analytic researchers find itdifficult to face up audiences. Post-92 we also had a massive uplift in teacherswho do research. I’m not convinced that this has been to the benefit of eitherresearch or teaching in the UK.

Dropout rates

Shocking figures are presented on dropout rates. Estimatesfor those who drop out in the first semester lie between one quarter to onethird of all freshmen. Engineering courses have huge dropout rates, withfaculty holding the view that their job is to ‘weed out’ poor performance, anapproach they refuse to apply to themselves. This lack of interest from facultyastounds the likes of Eric Mazur, a physicist and teaching expert at Harvard,who claims that a meeting on falling teaching standards had the, “lowestturnout he could recall”.

We also have a problem with increasing dropout rates, withhuge variations between institutions, but although less than the US. However,like the US, poor teaching and student experiences seems to be one cause,especially in the newer Universities.

Bureaucratic behemoths

Universities have also loaded up with odd (they give jobtitles), and in their view superfluous, administrative jobs and show that theratio of administrators to students has doubled in 30 years. With these jobscomes office space and buildings, adding significant costs to students’ fees. Thiswar of words between faculty and administrators is familiar in the UK.

Extravagantfacilities

The costs of huge sports facilities and teams, and thedistortions this places on finances and learning are explored in detail. Thisis not such a problem in the UK, but our propensity to throw up buildings, thatare empty most of the time, is just as bad. At least in the US they have morecommitment to summer schools and keeping campuses open for students year round.

Poor performance

Failing academics are almost impossible to fire, so poorteaching and lazy research abounds, with ‘academic freedom’ used as the shieldto defend poor performance. On top of this academia clones itself, leading togroupthink and a lack of academic diversity. Indeed, the evidence they citeshows that an academic, like Ward Churchill, is far more likely to be dismissedfor exercising academic freedom, something well documented by Lionel Lewis’s Cold War on Campus, where Universitiescaved into McCarthyite demands for sackings.

We’ve had no McCarthyism in the UK, but the sclerotic andover-protectionist policies towards faculty staff are possible more entrenched.As the evaluation in the performance in teaching is low, it is never a seriouscause for the necessary weeding and feeding that Universities need to stayvibrant. Even when low research output is delivered, attempts to remove facultyare greeted with hysterical responses e.g. Sussex and Middlesex.

Skewed admission

Lazy admission policies lead to middle-class parents payingfor personal essays (in the UK personal statements). On SATS, the rich paythousands of dollars for courses from Kaplan and Princeton Review to ‘cheat’the exam. Is there any other area of human endeavour where respectableeducational institutions offer courses on ‘cheating’? It’s like a BusinessSchool offering a course on ‘Robbing banks’. (Mmmmm…)

Vocational/academic

The authors unashamedly support a return to a Liberal Artsmodel with undergraduate courses leading to vocational specialisms. They arerather snooty about engineering, MIT and CalTech. Although they have a pop atthe Ivy League and rankings that reflect a “premium on prestige” and brands notteaching and learning. The Golden Dozen in the US come in for some heavyweightcriticism for below par teaching.

This is mirrored in the UK, where vocational degrees (apartfrom medicine) are regarded as below par. On the other hand we have some worthyUniversities, such as Heriot-Watt and Manchester and UCL that still carry thebanner for solid, professional vocational courses. In may ways we’ve neveradopted the Liberal Arts BA then Medschool/Lawyer model from across the pond.That’s to our credit.

Recommendations

They’re a bit lightweight on technology in learning (theycall it techno-learning) but smart enough to see that it’s a solution, with adetailed case study on Humanities 2510 at a Florida College, where the costs have been halvedwith increased attainment. Great to see the wonderful Carol Twigg research(LINK) being used as the inspiration for this course. There’s nothing quitelike the OU in the US, then again, the great failing in the UK was the failureto apply the OU model, even for high-volume theoretical courses, where itclearly works.

“The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed”, saidWilliam Gibson, so price and product are not aligned, so shop around. They namea whole raft of small colleges offering excellent degrees at a fraction of theprice of bigger institutions. Some colleges have simply dropped excessivespending on sports teams and stadia, others are wholly committed to studentsand teaching, not research, even free tuition. Braver still is EvergreenCollege, where grades and fixed curricula have been abandoned; students get along written evaluation.

Good advice in the UK. We have similar snobbishness aroundprestige and brands. The ranking tables are a disgrace, ignoring teaching.This, I feel, is set to change.

Toxic debt &bubble

The core problem is the indirect subsidy of 2^ndand 3^rd rate research. Reduce research and you improve teaching andreduce costs. It’s that simple. So they call for more student-centredinstitutions, less sabbaticals, less research, less administrators, morescrutiny of bad teaching and more leadership. How many people can actually namethe Vice Chancellor of their local University? They have become anonymousapparatchiks, obsessed with research not teaching, building not technology,chasing gongs not glory. Couldn’t agree more.

It’s the debt that’s attracting attention. As costs haverisen by 250% in real terms in the US and much higher levels in the UK, weshould be worried. This has all the signs of a bubble. We have deferred paymentthrough loans (debt) to a generation who may not be able to pay and bankruptcyis no escape. What if these debts turn toxic?

The bottom line is that students and parents are beingshort-changed by entrenched values that have sacrificed learning for research.Academia has adopted the same stance as the finance sector, refusing to holditself to account, adopting a prickly, defensive posture. The worry, for theauthors, is that we’re creating an “indentured educated class”.

This may be less of an issue in the UK, as loans arerecovered from tax with a one third expected loss guaranteed by government(still a loss). But the debt bubble is still a possibility, through acombination of evasion and inability to pay.

In many ways the arguments in this book can be applied to UKUniversities, the notable differences being the US commitment to campus sportand a much larger number of private institutions. I’d suspect, therefore, thatthe debate has already reached these shores with fees looming, as we are nowthird in the world on the cost of Higher Education to students, with only SKorea and the US ahead of us. We would do well to listen to what these researchershave to say.

Brilliant student tool that saves tons of time

2011-09-18T13:29:00.001Z

If I had to namejust one time-saving tool for students, researchers and academics, it would beCITEME, a simple Facebook application. How many hours do students andresearchers waste in, first working out what format should be used forcitations; second writing and formatting them?

CITEME – how it works

Simply type inthe name of the author, title, subject or ISBN and it will drop down a list ofproperly formatted citations, which you cut and paste. It’s that easy. You canalso choose from a range of formats (Harvard, Chicago, APA, Turabian or MLA) asrequired by your institution and/or tutor.

The first problemis that academics are often vague about what format they require from theirstudents. Is it Harvard, Chicago, APA, Turabian or MLA? To be honest it’snit-picking, as the differences between these are miniscule, such as positionof publication date and whether the date should have brackets. One thing you haveto do is check the policy for format.

Saves tons of time

This tool willsave you hours of time and allow you to focus on the content, rather than the searchingfor, writing and formatting of citations. It also means you spend more time learning how to use proper citations.Simply write that essay or paper then go through adding the citations one byone in your chosen format. I’ve yet to meet a student who wasn’t grateful forthis tip.

PS Thanks toMillie thesocialnetworkingteacher, who put me on to this tool.

Recording can improve a bad lecture! 7 surprising facts about recorded lectures

2011-09-17T16:53:00.001Z

Universities churn out lectures by the thousands, yet academics, evenacademics who support the use of technology in education, oftengo completely gaga when you even dare to question their pedagogic worth. ‘Lecturers’will go to any lengths, apart from actual research or data, to defend ’lecturing’,confusing a channel of teaching with learning, and form with function.
You don’t have to know much about the psychology of learning torealise that a series of once-only, delivered lectures is pedagogic nonsense. Welearn next to nothing from once-only experiences like unrecorded lectures.Indeed, everything we know about learning shows that repeated access to contentis necessary for learning.
I am always delighted, therefore, when yet another set of dataconfirms the obvious fact that students gain when they are given access torecorded lectures. In this wonderfullittle study by Pierre Gorrisen, delivered at the ALT conference, they cleverly combined usage datawith some survey and interview data to come to some clear conclusions. Theirstudent-centred approach to the problem is refreshing. So what did theydiscover?
1. Students watch lots ofrecorded lectures at home
Surprise number one; students watch lots of recorded lectures intheir own time. Learners look at content, do what is necessary for learning, reflect,take notes, elaborate and deep process – all the things that are necessary for learning yet extremely difficult, if not impossible, in a long, uninterruptedlecture.
2. No technical problems
Surprise number two; no technical problems. We now live in YouTubeworld where computers handle video and audio with ease. In another ALTpresentation, Dragos Ciobanu, Neil Morris andAlina Secara showed how, at the University of Leeds, they are experimentingwith Adobe Connect Pro. All you need is a URL to access their Adobe Connectroom, and anyone with a laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android device could participate.It’s not just access to recorded lectures that is easy technically, it’s theirdelivery.
3. Watch lecturesmultiple times
Surprise number three; students watch lectures many times. This reallyshould come as no surprise. Repeated, spaced practice is essential for reallearning, deep processing, elaboration and therefore recall. Students, if notlecturers, understand this. When you read an academic text or paper, don’t youread things more than once? Of course you do. That’s how reading works. So whydeliver a lecture once only?
4. Watch <75% of lecture
Surprise number four; they don’t watch the whole lecture. This is interestingas they found that not many students watch more than 75% of a lecture. Why isthis? Well, let’s be honest, most lecturers are not that great at lecturing andtend to have overlong introductions, ramble, go off on tangents and includeinappropriate and irrelevant material. Students are smart, so they fastforward. The standard one hour lecture is artificial time period that hasnothing to do with the psychology of learning and exists only because the Babylonianshad a base-60 number system. Lecturers therefore pad out content to fill the hour.
5. Would like to see ALLlectures recorded
Surprise number five; students want ALL lectures recorded. Damnright. No one would dream of just giving students access to a single recordingof a book or paper. That would be lunacy. So why give them unpublished lectures?They want them to learn and revise for exams. It’s that simple. To deny themrecording is to deny them the opportunity for learning. It’s what they’repaying for.
6. Improves pass rate
Surprise number six; improves pass rates. Now this is important.The researchers claim, although I saw no data in the presentation, thatrecorded lectures increase the pass rate. This was confirmed by studies I’vecited previously from the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Trieste andothers. If true, then let’s just get on with it and record them all.
7. Recording lecturesimproves bad lectures!
Surprise number seven; a recording of a bad lecture can actuallyimprove that lecture….. What a wonderful observation. The fact that you can skip the bad bits, replay and watch it several times actually improve the experience. Now I don’t believe thatlectures should hold such pedagogic sway in education. And even if you were toshow me that lectures were a powerful teaching technique, I’d still claim thatthe majority of lecturers are not up to the task. But if you still insist onlectures, why not record them on this one principle only, that bad lectures canbe improved by recording?

7 ways education contributes to rioting?

2011-08-15T12:06:00.004Z

Many riots take place during the summer months when the rioters are not at school or college. They have time on their hands, are often bored and don’t have to get up for anything the next morning.

The education system, therefore, becomes a contributory factor in social unrest. It is the only area of human endeavour that sticks to a 19^th century agricultural calendar and curriculum, which has several downsides:

Facilities lie idle in schools for months on end – sports facilities, theatres, classrooms – as they are mothballed during long holidays.
Kids find themselves with little to do, especially te poor, who can’t afford holidays and travelling.
The cost of holidays is pushed beyond many poor parents because travel companies push up prices during the school holidays, leaving and poor to amuse themselves on the streets.
The cost of education is artificially high because the capital and maintenance budget is not spent wisely. For months of the year these buildings are largely empty.
Summer is a time for forgetting. We know that the long summer hols set back students, especially those from poorer background with less home support in learning. This in turn leads to low achievement and disaffection.
Pushing irrelevant educational content, such as the more esoteric portions of the maths curriculum, literary criticism and Latin, is a recipe for further disaffection with schools.
The educational apartheid and failure to give vocational learning the status it deserves leads to perceived failure by those who do not have an academic bent, again leading to disaffection.

Now we know that there’s a need for better education and training. Surely we could find a way to add a fourth semester to school and colleges, to make better use of the assets, reduce the cost per student and get on with solving some of the problems in our society. I’ve already blogged a good example of how this could be achieved through practical, vocational, learning opportunities that sweat existing, unused facilities.

Isn’t it also ironic that the rioters shop of choice is JB Sports and their loot of choice sportswear and the irony that these riots took place in the shadow of the Olympic build. The rhetoric is all about participation in sport, yet the youth clubs in these areas are being shut down. This has been a lost opportunity. We could have used the Olympics as a means to create tens of thousands of apprenticeships and encouraged participation in sport through local initiatives. My kids have been training all summer in Tae Kwon do. It’s kept them fit and occupied. Note that this has nothing to do with school and PE – the PE teachers are all on holiday and the school facilities locked up. In fact the classes normally run in my two nearest schools have stopped because the schools are closed! This is madness.

Vorderman on maths – reactionary TV presenter, no maths degree, debt & property scammer advises us on maths!

2011-08-08T13:13:00.006Z

We’ve had an endless stream of ‘I’m a celebrity, let me fix your schools’ types this year; Jamie Oliver, Toby Young, Joanna Lumley, and now, god help us, Carol Vorderman. (Interesting to note that this Conservative supporter wouldn't be allowed to teach maths, as Gove doesn't want teachers with anything less than a 2.2 - she has a third.)

Vorderman – a few unsavoury facts

Just a few words about Vorderman: a) She doesn’t have a maths degree, she has a third class degree in Engineering, b) She acted as a spokesperson for the rogue debt consolidation company First Plus, forced to cut the contract after criticism from the debt charity Credit Action c) She fronted a property company that collapsed leaving many with unfinished properties abroad which they had paid for, d) Sacked from Channel 4 after being seen as a money-grabbing lightweight on £1 million a year, e) After a disastrous appearance on question time, where she spouted extreme right-wing views, Dimbleby said in the Times, “It lasted an hour, this programme...it felt like more to me.” f) she also has a long history of being partisan on educational politics and attacking the Labour Party.

So let’s imagine the following conversation at Tory Party headquarters, who commissioned the report when they were in opposition; “Suggestions to sort out maths in schools? How about Carol Vorderman? Does he have a maths degree? Well no, and we’ll have to hide that fact that she’s encouraged dodgy debt management, fronted a failed property scam and spouts reactionary nonsense whenever possible. But, she does have one redeeming feature. What’s that? She’s ‘rear of the year’. Call her.”

To be fair, apart from Carol, the team is academically sound, and has made some interesting observations and recommendations.

Curriculum

They conclude, that the maths curriculum is a catastrophic, irrelevant mess, geared towards higher advanced maths at the expense of functional maths. I couldn’t agree more. Teaching 14 year olds how to use the quadratic formula and surds is just plain stupid. Roger Schank often asks his academic audiences whether any of them can remember the quadratic formula, and he rarely, if ever, gets a correct answer. Why worry then that, “Only 15% of students take mathematics, in some form, beyond GCSE” as the current GCSE is hopelessly geared towards high-level, irrelevant, abstract maths. I think 15% is reasonable, if not a little high. And if “Nearly half of all students ‘fail’ GCSE Mathematics, why worry, as it’s a flawed, overly-academic and partly irrelevant qualification.

The GCSE curriculum is loaded with esoteric algebra, trigonometry, geometry and number theory that 99% of learners will never, ever use in their entire working lives. Note that this is at the expense of functional maths in two senses, 1) it squeezes practical maths out of the curriculum, 2) it is a massive demotivator, reinforcing the idea among millions of children that ‘they can’t do maths’.

The suggestion that we have a mainstream Maths GCSE that focuses on functional numeracy is therefore wise. This is what I had at school in Scotland many moons ago. I did an O-level in Arithmetic (practical) and another in Maths (theoretical). Makes sense, although I’d reframe Arithmetic as ‘Practical Maths’. Employers aren’t complaining that people don’t have ‘maths’ skills, they’re complaining because they don’t have basic ‘functional numeracy’.

Teaching

At one end of the spectrum the team are spot on – primary school teaching. The teaching of maths at this level is woeful; mostly because the vast majority of teachers have very low numeracy skills, and partly because of poor teaching methods. In the same way that whole word teaching had a catastrophic impact on literacy; ill-informed, half-baked, non-integrated and inconsistent approaches to numeracy teaching have also been catastrophic. There is the recommendation that the teaching be rooted in the real world, through practical tasks – something that’s been recommended for decades but been studiously ignored in schools.

Almost all primary teachers stopped maths at 16

The recommendation of a minimum B pass in GCSE in maths before you’re allowed to teach the subject sounds like a bad joke until you realise that our children are being taught by largely innumerate primary school teachers. It claims that, “Almost all of those on primary PGCE courses gave up studying mathematics at age 16. So, by the time they taught their first classes, they had not studied mathematics to any meaningful level for at least six years.” Only about 2% of primary school teachers have a degree in science or any STEM subject.

Most maths not taught by maths teachers!

Another shocker is the fact that in secondary schools, “24% of all children in secondary schools are not taught by specialist mathematics teachers”. Read that again. Most maths is not taught by maths teachers! However, the team have fallen into the trap of seeing the solution to bad schooling as yet more schooling. Forcing young people to study maths until they are 18 is just plain lunacy. If you haven’t got basic, functional numeracy into your head after 11 consecutive years of maths, another two years isn’t going to matter and the idea of ‘maths citizenship’ is just weird.

Conclusion

The report points out 1) the people teaching maths are by and large amateurs, 2) the curriculum is too esoteric, 3) we need two separate maths qualifications. I agree with all of these findings but we’re chasing moonbeams here. First, the educational establishment is so wedded to dated PGCE recruitment and curriculum practices that it is almost impossible to reform without radical restructuring. You have to get teacher training out of the Universities where it reinforces the old academic model and change the methods of recruitment. Secondly, you have to break the back of the gold standard, A-level mindset, where University entrance is the primary goal of all schooling and everything else is classed as failure. It ain’t going to happen.

Download full report here.

Education at its very best - Brighton Rocks!

2011-08-07T12:13:00.001Z

Rockshop – education at its very best

Last night I saw the fruits of what I regard as an ideal educational experience, run during the school holidays, yet none of the participants or observers would have seen it as ‘educational’ in any sense. Here’s what happens. Seventy to eighty kids attend a five day event called ‘Rockshop’ run by Herbie Flowers, who played with the likes of Lou Reed and David Bowie. He has several tutors who ‘tut’.

Goal driven

On Monday morning they have a goal: write some songs and perform them live, to a paying audience, on Friday night.

Learn by doing

The tutors don’t deliver formal lectures or lessons, they simply facilitate the process, helping where and when they can. The whole point is to learn by doing. The kids learn together, from each other and from the tutors, as they write, refine, practice and perform real songs.

Work with strangers

What’s great is the fact that many of these kids work with people they’ve never met before, which teaches them social, communication and work skills. They learn with and from other people who are not in their normal peer group. They make new friends, in some cases I’m sure, lifelong friends.

Good social mix

There’s kids from a range of social backgrounds; private schools, state schools and kids with special needs who have found they have a talent for paying an instrument, and the whole group clearly support each other (give or take some teenage ‘attitude’!).

Peer learning

There’s classically trained violinists, singer song writers, mouth organists, jazz fans, drummers, base players, guitarists, keyboard players and brass players. And it’s cool if you’re not as good as the others – because they all know they’re there to learn, not to judge. They’re showing each other chords, base lines and twinning up on stage so the strongest can help smooth out the weakest. It’s all good.

Focus

The goal brings focus, so forget about lack of concentration and attention. They’re full on, 9-5.30, then evenings at home. Many even popped out to busk at lunchtime!

Performance

There’s no need for formal assessment as it’s all about real performance. This is what brings out the best in these teenagers is that the pressure comes not from the exam but something they care deeply about, their own performance and competence. And boy did they respond.

Family and friends

Friday night came and a sell-out audience, largely the friends and relatives of the performers, was waiting eagerly – no expectations then! I was particularly impressed by the number of young people in the audience who were there to see and support their friends. My lad had his parents, grandparents, two cousins and a friend watching – that’s pressure. But it was the whole family thing that made it work. Suddenly it was cool to have worked hard and practised. It was cool to learn.

The quality of the songs was outstanding both lyrically and in musical composition. We had jazz, soulful ballads, a sophisticated live, looped composition, rock and folk. And the finale, with all of the kids on the stage rocking out with the audience on their feet, was great. The kids had busked at lunchtime and gave the cash to Herbie and he promised to use it to subsidise the tuckshop!

Share it

But that’s not all. All the sessions and loads of photos will/have been uploaded to YouTube and Flickr. So the show goes on and performers, their family and friends can enjoy what they’ve achieved. It’s also archived for future use.

Conclusion

For some kids, learning is best done out of the confines of school and exams, by professionals with real stature. Herbie’s one of those people, as is my son’s drum tutor Phil and their Tae Kwon Do master, Howard. None of these people have teaching qualifications, but they’re among the best teachers I know. These people have enriched my children’s lives and deserve all the support they can get.

But what really fascinates me is the way in which institutional language and approaches are almost completely absent. There’s no talk of ’learners’ and ‘learning’. No one sees this as a course with lessons, sitting at desks and bells. There’s no ‘teachers’ just tutors who, as Herbie says ‘Tut don’t teach’. And there’s no written exam, just pure performance where everyone walks away with an experience they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, having grown as people, in terms of confidence and competence.

I have to declare an interest here as I’m the Deputy Chair of the Brighton Dome and Festival (a Concert Hall, two additional theatres and England’s largest annual arts Festival). Our wonderful Educational Director, Pippa Smith, supports this event which is run every year. There needs to be more of this during the summer months.

George Siemens - if social media goes so does connectivism

2011-08-02T21:02:00.006Z

So George Siemens has lost interest in social media as “there is no there there” (plagiarising Gertrude Stein). Now I’m not an uncritical zealot when it comes to social media and have spoken out against the hype, but to claim there’s no substance at all to social media is wrong.

First he makes the general statement, “Social media=emotions”. I assume he means that social media only results in the emotional outpourings from the participants. So when I get invites to speak, write, exchange views, follow up links to useful blog pieces/articles/academic papers, read reviews and then go to movies/theatre, share photographs, rediscover old friends and meet up, keep in touch with distant relatives – it’s just a well of emotional mush? What George fails to understand is the fact that the networked world is causally connected to the real world. Real things happen in the real world because we communicate through these networks.

Siemens use of Facebook and Twitter seems to have been limited to, “attending to my emotive needs of being connected to people when I’m traveling and whining”. A bad workman blames his tools and if he sees Facebook and Twitter as ‘posting only’ media, forgetting that there’s groups, messaging and other features that are widely used for practical purposes, that’s his loss.

Connectivism not really there?

I should say from the start that I never bought Connectivism, as it muddles up primitive epistemology, dated social psychology and pedagogy to produce a nexus of thinly connected ideas around an abstract noun. Not for the first time have such vague, unsubstantiated ideas gained currency among educators. For me, the real problem is duplicity. Surely he's thrown out his connectivist baby with the bathwater of abandoned social media. So much for the idea of knowledge existing in the world of real activity by real people. Surely that also means 750 million on Facebook and hundreds of millions of learners on Twitter and other social media. And so much for the whole idea of creating a network for learning – unless, of course, that must mean George’s blog, online courses and speaking engagements. In a stroke Siemens has banished the largest and most potent networks on the planet to the dead zone, and with it connectivism.

Solution?

So what’s his solution? “The substance needs to exist somewhere else (an academic profile, journal articles, blogs, online courses” says George. He means, of course, ‘the academy’, namely academia and academics. George’s problem is to imagine that the academy is the focus of all intellectual and important activity. The conceit is the idea that if it ain’t about institutional learning it ain’t worth it. It’s an academic conceit that we all want to be lifelong learners taking their courses, attending their lectures, signing up for their online courses and hanging on their every word. Most of us couldn’t wait to get out of school and college, and wouldn’t dream of going back. Not leaving school at all is fine, but it doesn’t give you the right to look down upon others just because they don’t write academic articles and aren’t part of those networks. After nearly 30 years in the learning game, I truly believe that little has emerged from academia in terms of innovation, pedagogy and good practice. Indeed they themselves seem stuck in a primitive pedagogy that depends on lectures (which they will defend to the death). Time to move on.

Social media and politics

He ridicules Jeff Jarvis’s comments on the political power of the hashtag but the University of Athabasca ain’t Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen or Syria. Academics like Siemens can afford to disconnect because, to caricature Kissinger, “the stakes are so small.” “The notion of the Arab Spring being about social media is similarly misguided” says Siemens. Well, one can sit in some University somewhere and make these generalisations but YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have, and continue, to play a serious causal role in these revolutions. It's something I'm convinced of after travelling and speaking to young people in these countries. People are dying for their rights and using these media to achieve real political change and it's an insult for ill-informed academics to reduce this to an off-hand comment about it being 'misguided'.

Story

Let me end with a real story about Facebook. Jan Kaufman, a learning expert, had a stroke last year, and we watched with astonishment as she at first typed garbled posts, then over the following year got better by drawing nourishment from her friends on Facebook. She was inspirational and genuinely thinks that social media contributed to her recovery. We, in turn, learnt loads about what it really means to have a stroke, hospital life, claiming benefits and recovering cognitive skills. If George wants to dismiss this as useless ‘emotion’, he’s making a big mistake. It was a genuine learning experience for me, Jan and many of her friends. Social networks are, for him, “void of substance”. I fear, however, that it is Siemen’s arguments that are void of substance.

Learning Technologies & LWF (2+2=5)

2011-07-17T15:26:00.004Z

Graham Brown-Martin & Donald Taylor

I’ve wished for a long time that some of the smaller bodies representing ‘technology in learning’ would get together and, through critical mass, have some political and intellectual clout. So I was delighted to see Donald Taylor and Graham Brown-Martin become part of the same stable. I know both well and the good news is that they are very different people. That, by the way is a compliment, as they’re wholly complementary.

Graham’s game is disruption, debate and discussion. As someone with business background and music industry experience, he brings lots of buzz to events. He’s had the likes of Malcolm Maclaren and Jimmy Wales as speakers, and held juiced up debates with the awful Toby Young and Katherine Birlsbalsing. You get an iPAD (yes an iPAD)included in the conference fee, and he scrapped all that crap, black, canvas bag nonsense.

Donald’s game is calmer and more reflective. He’s more of a charming, James Bond character and a dab hand at getting things done and moving things on, smoothly and without fuss. Learning technologies has managed to outclass WOLCE to become the corporate e-learning conference of the year with quality speakers like Roger Schank. His Learning technologies online community is well respected and supported.

Two plus two equals five

As both are pretty wonderful people, this is definitely a case of two plus two equals five. LWF is an educational entity and Handheld Learning largely attended by educators. Learning Technologies is a corporate learning event attended by Learning & Development professionals. There are a few crossover people, like Stephen Wheeler, but mostly the two sides are like oil and water, despite the fact that the two sides have a lot to learn from each other.

The educators could do with a dose of realism and stop wallowing in the warm sea of useless research grants, European or otherwise. They could also do with getting rid of their petty, anti-corporate prejudices and stop pretending that most innovation in technology and learning comes from education itself – it doesn’t.

The L&D people could do with a dose of educational values, in terms of not seeing vendor-driven models as the only way forward and looking at a wider set of solutions beyond the delivery of ‘courses’. They could also learn a lot from educators about seeing themselves as a profession with status and values beyond employee compliance.

All, in a sense, are trapped in their own particular boxes, classrooms for teachers, lecture theatres for lecturers and training rooms for trainers. All have some really awful theory and practice at heart of their professions. All have an interest in strong, scalable solutions for learning. All have an interest in looking at the spectacular gifts that technology has to offer. I hope, therefore, that this will result in a reboot and uplift of technology in learning conferences.

NOTW just surface story– real story is tectonic shift to web

2011-07-10T11:54:00.004Z

Will Self uttered a word and a metaphor on Newsnight last week that said more than everything else I’ve read on the NOTW/Murdoch farrago. “This whole embroglio is epiphenomenal, evidence of the transition between print and electronic culture, between the two tectonic plates of different media”. Brilliant.

1. Newspapers have been squeezed by drops in circulation, as the young don’t read them (all online) and the old will die off.

2. Newspapers have been squeezed by drops in advertising revenues, it’s shifted online and not coming back.

3. Newspaper and traditional media groups no longer at top of food chain and can’t bully everyone, even politicians, as undermined by web – Wikileaks, social networking etc.

4. Old-school journalists had to start to pay for stories, pay policemen, private detectives, missing new online sources.

5. Old-school journalists trapped in tabloid, print culture and kow-tow to Middle England homophobic, xenophobic, benefit cheat, paedo-bashing, proprietor’s political line.

6. Failed to understand that emails are archived and deletion is not really ‘deletion’, so detectible evidence bites back.

7. Mobiles ubiquitous and easy to access voicemail (they were never’hacked’) through default PIN numbers (that’s what Glenn Mulcaire used).

8. Social media (Avaaz & 360) campaigns amplified OFCOM complaints so that BskyB decision cannot proceed.

There’s much schadenfreude in the rest of the print press about the loss of ‘tradition’, as if the demise of the NOTW were some sort of cultural disaster. I think not. The demise of the tabloids is inevitable as they’re not really newspapers but celebrity mags and rags. All of this is just a suface phenomenon. Actually, to take Will Self’s metaphor further, it’s merely a few volcanoes letting off some steam, while below the surface the real tectonic shift has happened. The print plate is being driven beneath the electronic plate and new virtual mountains being formed. These old media companies forgot that they are in the ‘news’, not the ‘newspaper’ business. That’s why Murdoch could easily sacrifice the tatty NOTW, the shift to electronic media and the web has happened.

Print journalists, the police and politicians have yet to waken up to the fact there's a new game in town and it's online. Stop hiring these old-school media directors like Coulson and Baldwin, they're poisonous and actually don't know how these new media work. It's like watching a bust-up in an old-folks home!

L&D as ‘curators’? Doesn't ring true...

2011-07-06T15:57:00.004Z

Curator? Doesn’t chime

Something’s been puzzling me for some time – the use of the word ‘curator’ for learning bods. Curator, to my mind, suggests someone who oversees a dusty, old collection of curiosities to do with the past; not the exciting virtual, digital and social media world of the future. It doesn’t just doesn’t chime.

From what I gather, these L&D ‘curators’ see their role as selecting digital content. But do we learners need to be saved from ourselves, and the world of digital abundance, by professional L&D people as ‘curators’. They argue that we’re overwhelmed by information which leads to addiction, depression, inattention and loss of productivity. So, in steps the ‘curator’, who doesn’t suffer from these afflictions. He/she has his/her finger right on the pulse and can filter, select and summarise the good stuff on your behalf. It’s like having a super-efficient, digital butler.

L&D and curates’ eggs

Well that’s the theory. In practice, where’s the evidence that L&D professionals, especially trainers, are high on research skills, empirical evidence and solid theory?. You’re more likely to be fed a diet of curates’ eggs - old-fashioned, 50 year old theories, faddish trends, non-empirical, anecdotal evidence and bandwagons. Think learning styles, NLP, Maslow, Kirkpatrick……. If you need to know something do you think “I’ll ask the L&D department” or do you get on Google or seek out an expert?

Coach in disguise

So do you really need someone to regurgitate their choice topics for your digestion? Is this is just the old ‘mentor’ or ‘coach’ idea in disguise, desperately trying to find a cool role in the world of social media. Or is it the antithesis of social learning. I suspect it’s just good, old coaching by the back door. As I’ve said many times, “Get a life not a coach”.

Rather than get a cabinet of curiosities, get the real deal. The filters are already there – just learn a little about efficient searching, feeds, good web sites, reliable academic sources, informative blogs and network with people who deliver the goods. You don’t need an interloper to do this for you.

Millie the social networking teacher

2011-07-05T11:33:00.003Z

Some time back I gave a talk at Richard Huish college in Somerset. Some in the audience were openly hostile to my recommendation that teaching needs to wise up and open up to the use of technology and social media in particular but I also received emails from teachers who apologised for their 'luddite attitude' with the message that they planned to do something. Millie, a teacher in the audience, young enough not to have been infected with the ‘ostrich virus’ popped up a year later, with something extraordinary, social media at the heart of her teaching. Millie sings the praises of the OU, as she dropped out of a more traditional University and found the whole non-lecture based OU approach far more relevant - and it tells.

Millie’s Blog: What I Taught in….

Millie has a blog called What I Taught in Geography This Week. Stephen Wheeler has given a detailed account here of why blogging is such a powerful amplifier for teachers, and Millie is its living embodiment. What better way to interact with her students than to give them what she’s taught online, supplemented by useful videos, links, geography film reviews and relevant books. For teachers and lecturers to simply turn up and deliver verbal stuff in classrooms and not record or and supplement that teaching with useful resources and cool stuff seems odd to me. A blog does nothing but enhance the reputation of the teacher and gives students a second chance to access and use that teacher’s expertise.

Millie’s student Blogs: What I Learnt in….

Her students have responded in kind, creating their own What I Learnt in Geography This Week blogs, contributing content, film and book reviews. One student, who’s applying for Cambridge this year, has used her two year blog as part of her UCAS application, as it shows her deep commitment to the subject. The first line from another student blog says it all, “So I am a geography geek and got added so I can blog too. What can I say, I love it absolutely love it! I'm not really that clever but it doesn’t stop a love I have for the subject, I also study environmental science and geology.” Now I challenge anyone who has doubts about this to read these blogs and say it doesn’t motivate and enhance the students’ learning experience. The very act of writing this stuff gives them reflection, reinforcement and confidence.

Facebook: Richuish Geography

Not content with blogs, although she and her students like them, she set up a Facbook account for her course. More than this, she started to integrate her blog, Slideshare for presentations, discussions (lots on mutual help on revision), Flickr, YouTube (relevant videos) and citeme (pull out a citation in the correct format for research). Closed tutor groups are now being developed.

After a year it’s running at around 13000 page views a month and they’ve only had to delete one comment, which in any case, was pretty tame. And with success in the trial subject, geography, they’re rolling it out to other subjects with Philosophy and Photography up and running.

Coveritlive: online workshops

Millie also used live events through coveritlive. This app runs through the blog and allows a realtime workshop to be run, especially useful for revision sessions. The teacher has complete control over the comments and content and it can be replayed at any time. The –re-exam sessions were well attended, performing the useful function of getting the students to revise through a scheduled event.

Conclusion

All of this was achieved on the back of some visionary teachers, good staff training and the will to help students. As the social media tools took hold they started to move away from Moodle with its log-ons and limited interactivity. My own view is that this supports my last two posts on feedback and good practice in teaching. If, as I believe, teachers often fail students through too much focus on summative scoring and not enough formative assessment through specifically constructive comments, then social media is the way forward. Almost everything Professor Paul Black has to say on formative assessment can be implemented through these tools. Far too long have teachers been stuck in ‘hands-up’ questioning in class, scoring tests and giving vague feedback. This opens up dialogue between teachers and students, especially those who are somewhat introverted in class and who need constructive support and help. Go Millie.

Never praise a child

2011-07-03T19:02:00.002Z

Sounds a bit kooky but this gem of advice, from Professor Paul Black makes perfect sense when you look at the evidence. He is not saying don’t praise your child as a parent. This is advice for teachers when a child produces verbal or written work for feedback.

1. Never praise a child: “Never praise a child, praise what they did” says Professor Black, and by this he meant praise the work of the learner and not the learner. To praise the student encourages two ideas that are powerfully corrosive in learning; a) the idea that it’s all down to ability b) the idea that the ‘teacher’ likes me. Praising the person stops students from trying harder. Learners must believe they can change for the better.

2. Wait 3 seconds: Teachers have been observed to jump in too early when asking questions (less than a second) and rely on ‘hands up’ techniques, which encourages the extroverts & achievers but discourages the rest. Target questions to individuals, then wait, for at least three seconds.

3. Don’t pass judgement: Every answer deserves a positive response in terms of building confidence and not knocking them down. You have to steer between being too dominant and too open, but steering students in the right direction is the real art of feedback.

4. Right questions get right answers: Reflect on the questions you ask. Many questions just fill time or don’t stretch the students or probe understanding. Hinge questions are carefully structured to diagnose students, which is why coloured cards and clickers can accelerate a teacher’s diagnosis of whole class performance.

5. Careful comments: Comments on student work is hard work but some simple rules help. Avoid vague, general, “Needs more detail….expand…add a few thoughts of your own if you can” comments. Be specific about the error and recommend a specific action. A good comment would be, “You’ve used ‘particle’, ‘element’ and ‘compound’ in your answer, look at the glossary in your textbook to see how they differ”.

6. Automate marking: Marking does give learner a rough guide to what they know but those sorts of tests are automated on the web. Why, as a teacher, would you waste your time doing a soulless, mechanical task like marking, when computers do it more accurately and instantly? Leave that stuff to the learner and the web. Mark my words, not my ego

7. Use social media: As everyone wonders how social media can be used in education, some people just get on with it. One is Millie, who uses facebook, teacher blogs, student blogs, slideshare, Flickr, coveritlive, and citeme, to create a real community of learners around her subject. Social media is built around comments andfeedback. This will be the subject of my next post.

Conclusion

Sadly, summative, scored and graded assessment techniques are used inappropriately for formative feedback. With some simple adjustments teaching and learning can become more productive for learners. Black has the experience and evidence to prove this, so isn’t it about time that INSET days focussed more on these practical evidence-based techniques, rather than bogus theory and practice such as learning styles, R/L brain theories, Maslow, learning objectives at the start of lessons, Piaget, Brain Gym…..sorry blood pressure is rising.

7 reasons why 'marking' sucks

2011-07-02T11:27:00.003Z

Delighted to give a keynote alongside assessment guru Professor Paul Black. Inside the Black Box by Black &Wiliam, should be compulsory reading for all teachers, trainers and lecturer, so it was a delight to see him give a masterclass in assessment with solid, evidence-based advice that you can apply straight from the hip in teaching. Marking may do more damage than most educators realise. It is a summative assessment technique, all too often wrongly used in formative assessment.

Terminal. A marked test promotes the idea that it marks an end-point. You’ve passed or failed, a success or failure, bright or dim. Tests are seen by learners as terminal. Far better to deliver feedback in the form of comments that point to improvement.
Mark of Cain. For many learners, marked tests literally leave their psychological mark. That mark, for the majority, is a mark of failure. The mark is seen as a score on fixed ability, fixing in the mind of the learner a view of themselves. It says nothing meaningful about how they can change and improve.
On the mark. Even for high scorers, full competence is rarely the aim, so they see a high mark as ‘having done enough’ and take their foot off the pedal.
Hit the mark. A score, rather than understanding and improvement, becomes the goal. What really counts often can’t be counted and what’s counted sometimes doesn’t count. Numbers are not constructive, they're just numbers.
Black mark. Teachers who use marks as formative assessment should be marked down. The more teachers mark, the less they comment, and it is formative comments that matter to the learner. Formative assessment is all about constructive feedback.
Marked for life. Even on summative assessment, a university degree is no more than a number (1, 2.1, 2.2, 3). So what does that tell you about several years of intellectual effort? Not a jot on any other useful skills or experiences you may have picked up along the way? ‘Predicted grades’ is another insidious practice, that stops students in their tracks. It reinforces the idea of innate ability rather than aspirational learning.
Tests too late. A test at the end is too late. It’s a feature of old behaviourist attitudes in learning and just hammers home the old view that there’s winners and losers. It promotes the idea that you need to pass the text, not master the subject. We need to focus more on formative, not summative assessment.

Black quoted an important study of 132 mixed ability, Y7 students in 12 classes across 4 schools, using the same teaching aims, teachers and classwork. The students were given three types of feedback:

Marks

Comments

Marks plus comments

The ‘Comments' only group had a significant attainment gain with NO gain in the 'Marks' only and 'Marks plus comments’ groups. Increased interest and motivation was positive with all in the ‘Comments’ only group but only positive with high achievers in the ‘Marks’ and ‘Marks plus comments’ groups, where low achievers registered lower interest and motivation. This is, at first, puzzling. Why does more feedback 'Marks plus comments' have such a negative effect? The researchers concluded that ‘marks’ signalled the end of the matter, a terminal test, which stopped learning and further interest.

The message is clear - hold back on marking in formative assessment.

Professor Black’s message was clear. Modify teaching and get off marking and into feedback. the nuts and bolts of how you do this will be the subject of my next post ‘Never praise a child’.

Social media & learning – note taking on steroids

2011-06-20T09:34:00.003Z

With all this talk about social media and learning, we may be missing the essential benefit, which is simple note taking and the sharing of those notes. Social media is notes on steroids.

I’m a note taker, whether it’s at talks, conferences, in margins of books or thoughts captured in my notebook. On top of this I write the equivalent of notes on Twitter, Facebook and longer blog posts. It’s a lifelong habit. I’m therefore astonished, when giving keynotes and talks at learning conferences, to see learning professionals sit there and NOT take notes and worse have no means to take notes.

In addition, articles on ‘learning how to learn’ or ‘metacognition’ often disappoint me, as they seem vague and lack the sort of direct advice that really does lead to a dramatic increase in retention. With this in mind I want to recommend something that I’d put at the top of any list. It’s simple, it’s obvious: it’s NOTE TAKING and its amplification through SOCIAL MEDIA.

Why take notes? Several reasons:

1. Increase memory

Studies on note taking (with control groups and reversal of note takers and non note takers to eliminate differences) show overwhelmingly that not taking increases memory/retention. Many aspects of increased memory have been studied including; increased attention, immediate recall, delayed tests, free recall, MCQs, remembering important v less important knowledge, correlations with quality of notes and deeper learning. Bligh (2000) has detailed dozens of studies in this area. Wittrick and Alesandrini (1990) found that written summaries increased learning by 30% through summaries and 22% using written analogies, compared to the control group. Why does note taking increase retention? First, increased focus, attention and concentration, the necessary conditions for learning. Second, increased attention to meaning and therefore better encoding. Thirdly, rehearsal and repetition, which processes it into long term memory. All three matter.

2. Increase performance

If you take notes AND review them, you do better on assessments (Kiewra 1989, 1991). Interestingly, Peper and Mayer (1978) found that note taking increased skills transfer and problem solving in computer programming and science (1986). Shrager and Mayer (1989) found similar effects in college students, learning about cameras. It would seem that note taking allows learners to relate knowledge to experience.

3. Detail & structure

As to the best type of note taking, it’s the most information in the fewest words. Students tend to miss lots of important information (even omitting negatives!), with as little as 50-10% of the important points noted. Detail does matter. Research also shows that mind maps are fine for conceptual structure bit not so good for detail. They are also difficult to construct during a lecture. There is also evidence to support the use of colour and/or lines with symbols that have classificatory meaning (EX – example, D- definition etc). In other words, the evidence for simple mind map productivity is very thin. Interestingly small breaks for revision of notes during talks increases performance as does revision in pairs (O’Donnell 1993).

4. Further learning

Notes offer the opportunity for further learning through rewriting. Notes that are spread out so that further work can be included and self-generated questions are also useful (King 1992). This points towards further reflection and study. This is important and leads to my next point that learning can be massively amplified through the use of social media.

5. Tweet it – seed it

I’d contend that the amplification of notes is the best way of using social media in learning. Note taking can be transformed into a social learning experience for yourself and others through social media. Tweets during a talk or conferences session brings it to life, captures the salient points and let’s others know what’s going on. Then there’s the amplification through retweets. In addition, links can be included. But its strength (limited characters) is its weakness, as further exposition is usually needed. Tweckling is OK as long as it doesn’t become useless carping!

6. Blog it - log it

This, I believe, is a far more useful social medium for learning. Blogs are personal voices and it forces you to write a structured and considered piece, enhancing your own learning, as well as sharing that learning with others. In addition, it opens up the discussion for further comments, often further expanding your learning. I find I gain a great deal by reading other blogs of the same event, to capture points I’ve missed. There’s also the bonus of archiving. One has a searchable database of knowledge.

7. Evernote - remember everything

Tools like Evernote point towards single. searchable repositories that work on all of your devices, for the capture, storage, organisation and recall of learning. The fact that people grab web pages, screenshots and photos adds to its richness. On top of this there's YouTube for video capture, podcasts, RSS and chat rooms. All can be seen as expansions of not taking.

Note taking increases learning, results in deeper learning and leads to further learning. Social media is essentially an amplification of this process, it multiplies these effects through both personal and social learning. So in the search for an actual example of social media in learning, note taking has been researched and evaluated to be extremely powerful.

Sexual abuse, e-learning and the Vatican - just plain weird

2011-06-19T15:27:00.002Z

This is Frederico Lombardi (more of him later) and this story is just plain weird. The Vatican sees e-learning as a way to prevent its priests from committing sexual abuse on children. They have set up an ‘e-learning center’ to supposedly protect children and help the victims of sexual abuse. Now, I’ve spent the whole of my adult life promoting the use of technology in learning, but this takes the communal mass biscuit for inappropriateness.

But it gets weirder. This announcement was made at a press conference for a full ‘Conference’ on ‘Sexual abuse on children by clergy’ funded by the Pontificial Gregorian University in Rome. Monsignor Klaus Franzl (not to be confused with Fritzl, the Austrian incest beast) announced yesterday, “The e-learning center will work with medical institutions and universities to develop a constant response to the problems of sexual abuse.” By the way, I wonder how Christian apologists explain the horrors of the Catholic priest rape holocaust or the Fritzl case. If there is a God, he truly does work in mysterious ways. Check out this brilliant denunciation by Christopher Hitchens.

Available in six languages it is supposed to get new guidelines out to Bishops and priests about child abuse. Now in my book, this is not an area that needs ‘guidelines’ but a process of bringing those beasts to justice and helping those who were abused. “We want people to know we are serious about this” says Father Frederico Lombardi. Oh yeah – so you weren’t serious about this before! This was the same Frederico Lombardi who tried, unsuccessfully to protect the current Pope from the scandal. He's the pontiff's PR supremo.

Let’s be clear here, the current Pope, god’s man on earth we’re told, has been complicit personally and institutionally in the abuse scandal. In 1979 a young boy was subjected to sexual abuse by a German priest and the current Pope, then an Arch-bishop, protected that priest, who went on to commit further crimes. The Pope’s brother had to admit that his memory failed him and admitted he knew of the case. Ratzinger was also responsible for obstructing investigation into this criminal activity.

Now if the Vatican had simply funded initiatives and retributive payments to the victims, fine, but this smacks of an on-going PR campaign to dampen down a global criminal epidemic by priests, that should make everyone wary of allowing contact between them and children. I’m with Christopher Hitchens, in ‘God is not Great’ and his chapter ‘Is religion child abuse?’ Ignatius Loyola famously said ‘give me a boy until he is ten, and I’ll give you the man’. How hideously true this turned out to be.

If any lessons are to be learnt from Catholic child abuse, it is that education should remain secular. Education should open up young minds, not subject them to dogmatic closure. This is why I am absolutely against the state funding of faith schools. I do not want tax money to fund schools where the creed supports genital mutilation (both boys and girls), gives priests contact with young children and imposes dogma on impressionable minds.

7 objections to social media in learning (and answers)

2011-06-11T15:24:00.004Z

Social media – I’m a fan. I blog, facebook and tweet daily, and love all of the additional resources and tools. But when an important social and technological phenomenon turns into a bubble of evangelism, we’ve got to handle it with care. I’ll present on the use of Social Media in organisations in Zurich this week, to Directors of many of Europe’s top companies, and explain the upside but it’s just as important to be open about the downside. I agree with the Nick Shackleton-Jones Tweet, “When the tide comes in you’d better don your trunks and not bury yourself in the sand” but it’s also rational, for some, to walk up to dry land to avoid getting wet. Even the Vatican had a Devil’s Advocate department when discussing canonisation, so before giving Social Media the status of sainthood, let’s consider some of the downsides.

Objection 1: Dumbness of crowds

We have ‘constructivists’ who wouldn’t be able to string two sentences together when asked what that actually means in terms of real psychology. Then the woolly ‘social learning’ advocates who see all learning as social (ridiculous) and can’t see that some of it is a waste of time, like going over the top of your head to scratch your ear. Much of my productive learning is completely solitary and I’ve spent far too much time in my life, in wasteful, long-winded social contexts, like classrooms, training rooms, lecture theatres, meeting and conference rooms, learning little or nothing.

It’s a matter of balance, not blind belief in half-baked social theory. We need to see a mix of approaches that include social learning but not to the exclusion of focused, solitary learning. Reading, writing, reflecting and deep processing needs isolation from others, not chattering classes.

Objection 2: Weapons of mass distraction

Employees and learners can get stuck in a tar-pit of unproductivity as social media is sticky, seductive and addictive. Most parents have experienced concern about the amount of time their kids have spent on say, Facebook and Twitter, when they claim to have been studying or doing assignments. At work, it’s easy to avoid doing things you don’t want to do by escaping into social chat.

First, if you’re really that worried, monitor usage, which many organisations already do. That’s fine, as it’s a way of managing excessive use, but it’s far better to police by policy. Simply add a few words to your existing HR policy around the excessive use of social media for non-organisational purposes. In any case, in the end, in the workplace, employees have to be trusted.

Objection 3: Confidentiality, libel & harassment

Many organisations have examples of naïve, even malicious use of social media. There are genuine fears around the leaking of confidential information and reputational damage. In addition, individuals have been libelled and harassed, leading to complicated and expensive HR management issues and court cases.

To be honest, I think the fears are exaggerated here, but they do have to be managed. Again, police through policy, pointing out the dangers of inadvertently leaking information and expected behaviour towards others. To be frank, these four words should suffice ‘Don’t be a dick!’

Objection 4: Non-alignment

In this survey, less than 18% of decision makers at 100 of the UKs top 500 companies (by turnover), thought that L&D was aligned with the goals of the business. It is not always clear that social media solves this problem, as it can encourage divergence of task, as one link leads to another and one is led, not by goals, but interest. This can be worse than simply ‘not seeing the wood for the trees’, as social media can be so random, fragmented, long-winded and unstructured, that it is difficult to square off effort with relevance.

Anders Mørch of the University of Oslo sees this as one of many ‘double-edged’ sword phenomena in social learning. Say what you will about informal learning, there’s still a massive role for ‘aligned’ formal learning. Many things can’t be left to the vagaries of a social approach, as they have to be tackled within a fixed timescale.

Objection 5: Crap content

The mixed quality of user-generated content is also a concern. Even in media sharing the poor quality of lectures on YouTube EDU and other media sharing sites, show that sharing in itself is not always a virtue if the content being shared lacks quality or relevance. Putting one’s faith in user generated content can be a disaster if you’re relying on that alone.

Wikis solve this problem by having a process of communal and tracked amendments, but you need volumes of contributors to raise the quality of the content. Rankings and strong social recommendations by trusted colleagues is another useful control, feeding high quality links and content from outside the organisation.

Objection 6: Redundancy

Many of the productivity tools are here today, gone tomorrow. Some simply collapse, as they have no sustainable way to monetise the product. Some get dropped (even Google products), others get bought by the bigger boys and suddenly disappear or become part of a larger software suite. It can be hard to keep up.

There seems little danger of the major entities, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter disappearing, so these are safe bets. However, it would be wise to regard others as useful even though they are temporary, especially tools such as Doodle etc. Data storage is another issue, however, Google and Apple are as stable as anyone in this regard.

Objection 7: Security

Many organisations, obviously the military, government and banks, but also many other organisations, are nervous about DoS attacks and data theft, and are rightly nervous about unlimited access to social media and tools. Global Corporations are under siege from hacker groups and online organised crime. Even Julian Assange won’t use Facebook as he’s sure the data has already been sucked out by non-desirables. This is not irrational fear, it’s the real deal.

However, HR and training bods should not be making this decision. They need to ask the IT experts about the dangers. This is fair as they wouldn’t be expected to restrict your behaviour in teaching or training. Once a real examination of the issues has been done, it can be allowed. Point to other organisations that have done this and have had no problems.

Conclusion

OK, that’s the Devil’s Advocate stuff over. The reality is the astounding rise of the internet as a social intermediary with social media being the number 1 use of the web, 600 million Facebook users. Potential employees, employees, learners and customers, are using this stuff in anger. The modern executive, manager, teacher or trainer can’t really call themselves a professional without at least a knowledge of social media. You’ve got to play with this stuff to understand its virtues and vices.

You also need to understand, plan and assume its use, for there’s no way that it will not be used. Every one of your employees has a mobile which is a pipe to the outside world beyond your control.

However, it’s easy for academics and advisors who have never really had to ‘run’ an organisation, or take responsibility for real jobs and lives, to get over-excited about their passions. They themselves can be subject to social conformity, groupthink, non-alignment and hype. It’s important that this type of over-optimism is not at the expense of realism.

To be fair, people like Jane Hart, Jay Cross, Charles Jennings and Harold Jarche et al, understand all of this, the danger is the bandwagon effect and evangelistic groupthink, which can lead to the abandonment of good practice elsewhere. Social media is not the answer to every problem, but it’s a undoubtedly a useful and powerful advance in learning.

‘Body and brain’ sensor-based learning – mind blowing

2011-05-28T08:59:00.003Z

Sometimes, something catches your eye, and you feel you’ve just tasted the future. So it was in a military conference in the Norwegian mountains this week. S Korea is developing software and hardware that may profoundly change the way we learn. We’ve seen the commercial launch of some primitive toys using brain sensors (see my previous post) but we’ve yet to see brain and situation sensor technology really hit the world of learning. Learning is wholly about changing the brain, so one would expect, at some time, for brain research to accelerate learning through cheap, consumer brain and body based technology. That has already happened through sensors on games consoles, such as the Wii and Xbox Kinect, but there’s a more serious game on the go, in the land of obsessive gaming (S Korea), that could profoundly change the world of learning.

Body and brain sensors

With the development of an ’emotional sensor set’ that measures EEG, EKG and, in total, 7 kinds of biosignals, along with a situational sensor set that measures temperature, acceleration, Gyro and GPS, they want to literally read our brains and bodies to accelerate learning. It’s an ambitious project that includes an emotional learning index (gathered from experimental data), middleware (device comms, analysis and recognition software), and a personal learning module and along with tools for content development.

Technology driven metacognition

They hope to significantly increase the effectiveness of learning experiences, not only learning about the control of emotion but also a general lift in the effectiveness of all learning, through increased focus and attention, whatever is identified as being the ideal mental and physical state for optimal learning. This is ambitious. It’s technology driven metacognition.

I think there are problems with this approach as it’s not yet clear that the EEG and other brain data, gathered by sensors measure much more than cognitive noise and general increases in attention or stress, and how do we causally relate these physiological states to learning, other than the simple reduction of stress. The mesures are like simple temperature gauges that go up and down. However, the promise is that a combination of these variables does the job.

However, this is the start of an important research journey, where learning is improved by understanding what state we need to be in when we learn. My guess is that will be the opposite of busy social situations such as classrooms, training rooms and lecture halls. My guess is that this will lead to a reversal of the fashionable social learning lobby, and a move toward super-efficient, solitary and simulated learning experiences. As I say, that’s a guess.

Accelerated learning

Whatever the findings, if they’re right about using the causal effect between reading body and brain states to accelerate learning, it will unlock a new era of learning, where the learner will become a super-learner, shortening the treadmill that is school, college and University and making massive gains in learning across your lifetime. It will do for lifelong learning what the jet engine has done for air travel. It will be much faster, cheaper and revolutionary.

What I particularly admire about this approach, is that it avoids all of that weak, often European funded research on 'pedagogy' (see critique), that seems to get us nowhere. This is focused research with a healthy public-private sector partnerships that want real results.

15 reasons to BAN pens and pencils from the classroom

2011-05-17T16:14:00.007Z

1. Too easy to lose

How many wasted hours do learners and teachers spend getting everyone a pen or pencil? They’re thin, narrow and roll unaided, designed therefore, to be lost through any small hole and from any surface. The average person must lose dozens, if not hundreds, in a lifetime.

2. Dangerous weapons

Nothing is more dangerous in classrooms than pens and pencils. They’re used to poke, prick, draw on and even stab others. Empty plastic Bic tubes are also superb pea-shooters. They are, in effect, dangerous weapons.

3. Messy

Pens leak, clothes stain, pencil shavings get everywhere. In short, these implements are a cleaning nightmare. A leaked pen in a pocket or bag can cause havoc, staining clothes, flesh and anything else that comes into contact.

4. Notes

Encourages bullying through notes and a notes culture around going to the toilet (actually walking the corridors or a sly cig), explaining why you were off that day (forged note from parent) etc.

5. Doodling

How many learners doodle the hours away, rather than learning. They'll doodle on paper, books, plaster casts and any available surface, even their own hands and arms.

6. Pen tattoos

A bit extreme but it happens. A compass an ink pen's all you need to get your first boyfriend or girlfriend's name on your arm or those stupid words LOVE and HATE on your knuckles.

7. Limits editing

To NOT allow word processing on writing tasks is to not allow reediting, redrafting, reordering and self-correction, the essence of good writing skills. It actually encourages the regurgitation of pre-prepared, memorised answers.

8. Paper mountains

Keeps schools stuck in a world of paper, which can’t be emailed or easily stored. How many pieces of paper with writing are simply lost, deliberately or otherwise by children at school?

9. Cost of photocopying

Paper, pencils and pens cost money, but that is nothing compared to the cost of printing and photocopying, in terms of photocopying machines, printers and print cartridges.

10. Not green

Paper production, for writing assignments, destroys trees, uses nasty chemicals and if it doesn't end up as landfill. entails difficult and costly recycling.

11. Encourages academic curriculum

Pen and pencil assessment skews assessment towards writing and away from performance. This has led to an overwhelmingly academic curriculum, at the expense of practical and vocational skills.

12. Paper homework

It encourages primitive, photocopied A4 sheets for homework and mechanical 'fill-in-the-blank' assignments, with the additional problem that homework has to be physically marked by overworked teachers. Automated, online homework and assessment is surely superior.

13. Red pen assessment

It encourages teachers to use ‘red pen’ marking, highlighting failure, rather than the generosity of formative feedback. Children learn from failure which is why all feedback should be constructive.

14. Skews assessment

My kids look at pens and pencils as if they’re Egyptian artefacts. The fact is, that pens and pencils, if used in assessments, actually hinder or skew the proper assessment of attainment. Many of these kids write, incessantly on keyboards, not using pen and pencil.

15. Real world deficit

Lastly, when they enter the world of work, if they write, it will be largely on a keyboard. Surely touch typing is a skill worth learning.

This was inspired by Katie Stansberry's original idea

Abandon lectures: increase attendance, attitudes and attainment

2011-05-15T13:16:00.004Z

In a recent debate with Stephen Downes, I spent some time going through dozens of papers and meta-studies showing that the lecture is a largely disastrous pedagogic technique, devoid of formative assessment, diagnosis of student understanding, actual teaching or inspiration.

I wasn’t surprised at the qualitative nature of Stephen’s response, as I’ve heard it many times before 1) that lectures are not about ‘teaching’ but ‘showing practice ’i.e. what it’s like to be a physicist, whatever, 2) some lectures are good e.g. Martin Luther King’s speech etc. and 3) lectures must be good as they’ve been around for so long.

I don’t buy any of these arguments as 1) that’s not what lecturers or students think, expect or require, 2) the fact that a chosen few can do something well (like surgery or any other form of expertise) doesn’t mean that it should be done by everyone 3) slavery was around for millennia but it doesn’t make it right – you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. In any case, I’ll beaver on uncovering the evidence where I find it.

In this week’s Science, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and associate director of science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Carl Wieman, along with researchers Louis Deslauriers and Ellen Schelew, published a paper ‘Improved Learning in a Large Enrolment Physics Class’ that shows improvements in attainment, attendance and attitudes in students when lectures delivered by senior experienced academics are abandoned in favour of approaches where postdocs, interactive techniques and formative assessments are used.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6031/862.abstract

As the authors say, even in good lectures, with good student reviews, student attainment can be poor. So they cut through the qualitative stuff and compared:

1. Control group (267 students) taught by experienced faculty member with years of experience teaching the physics course and good student evaluations.

2. Experimental group (271 students) taught by a postdoc with almost no teaching experience in introductory physics, using proven, researched, learning techniques.

The groups were taught a module in a physics course, in three one hour sessions in one week. In short; attendance increased, measured attitudes were better (students enjoyed the experience (90%) and thought that the whole course would be better if taught this way (77%)). More importantly students in the experimental group outperformed the control group, doing more than twice as well in assessment than the control group.

Academics will go to great lengths to defend traditional lectures, even abuse, (see my Don’t lecture me! ALT talk complete with abusive Tweets). However, there comes appoint when the evidence (surely a fundamental tenet in HE) must win out. This paper points towards something that decades of research have confirmed, that there must be a rethink on lectures. We may then have a chance to dramatically change teaching in Higher Education for the better, also making to cheaper. In other words, get good teachers to teach and let researchers research. The two competences may overlap but they are not congruent.

Is Higher Education a classic bubble? 7 reasons to think so

2011-04-26T13:04:00.004Z

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and first major investor in Facebook, has a track record in spotting bubbles, namely the internet and housing bubbles. He thinks he’s spotted another: Higher Education. But he’s not alone, an increasing amount of commentary and evidence points in this direction. Like the housing market, where people rushed to take out loans (mortgages) based on the belief that the value of their asset will always rise (or at least stay the same), many suffered a shock when the value dropped.

Interesting idea, but where’s the evidence?

1. Blind belief

Criticising Higher Education is like “saying there’s no Santa Claus” claims Thiel. This is a feature of all bubbles, believes Thiel, where ‘groupthink’ takes over and false assumptions become absolute beliefs, and even debate of the negative consequences is seen as ‘party-pooping’.

2. Pricing

Huge hikes in prices for the buyer (almost tripling in UK), now seem unrelated to the real price of the degree. Since ’78 a US degree has increased by 650 points above inflation, compared to the housing bubble at only 50. This is exactly what happened in everything from tulips to internet stocks and housing. There is no compelling evidence that the future worth of degrees will be guaranteed. That’s the mistake made in all bubbles.

3. Unintended consequences

In a bubble, real demand is brutal, and in a buyers’ market may lead to degrees being simple indicators of ‘class’ rather than intrinsic value. In adopting the £9000 (or close) fees, Universities may be creating their own bubble, dislocating cost from real value. Institutional brand ranking, and they are brands (academics & students come and go, and content owned by publishers), may lead employers to dismiss degrees from institutions perceived as second-rate. In short, your degree may become a liability while your debt remains all too real.

4. Student short-termism

Decisions made by young people are measurably short-term, with factors like ‘fun’ or ‘easy’ often playing a part in their decisions. This is a distorting factor, as it over-values some subjects and degrees over others. This generation could become the most indebted generation ever, in a time when debt has been shown to be an indicator of failure. What makes this bubble so dangerous may be naivety.

5. University short-termism

No one could really claim that the huge hikes in pricing reflect corresponding hikes in the value of University tuition. So what’s happening? Universities are complicit in this. They raise prices because they can, without attention to lowering costs through online learning, fourth semesters etc. In fact the quality of tuition may have fallen, with more students and less qualified lecturers, matched by salary inflation at the top, higher numbers of administrators and wasteful capital expenditure in largely empty buildings. I've blogged on this before.

6. Context changes

Just because degrees lead to value now, doesn’t mean they will in the future. The chicken that comes out for its feed from the farmer every day, may suddenly find its neck wrung. When a bubble bursts, the rising tide that raised all ships, suddenly falls, leaving huge numbers stranded. As unemployment rises, a similar effect takes place with large numbers of debt-laden graduates on the market. There is already evidence of graduate wages stagnating or falling.

7. Tsunami of debt

The student debt bubble in the US has reached $1 trillion and raising eyebrow. Delayed payment means the accumulation of huge debts by students, and in this case, ultimately, the bailout would come from the state. Heard that before? In the US SLABS (Student Loan Asset-Backed Security) underpin students loans and have Federal Guarantees. A recipe for a massive default?

Conclusion

The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that Higher Education has become simply an extension of school, but with delayed school fees. Shortly the majority will be moving seamlessly from school to higher education. Many will enjoy the fruits of a meander through University but may (literally) pay a heavy and disproportionate price later. However, as Shakespeare said in The Merchant of Venice, ‘All that glisters is not gold’, and debts, as that great play so eloquently shows, distort human behaviour in unpredictable and distasteful ways. A degree should be seen as more than a fiscal investment, but that does not mean taking ridiculous risks when you’re only 18 years old.

Why Royal Wedding is lethal for young girls

2011-04-17T13:16:00.003Z

When I became a school Governor in a comprehensive school, I was shocked at the lack of educational ambition, among both working class boys and girls, even their parents. It was something that was less obvious in Calvinist Scotland, where I was brought up. I saw, and spoke to, young girls who were infatuated with make-up, looks, fashion and the lethal, mistaken hope that luck, marriage or fate will get them somewhere. They had given up on education as a means of advancement before they had even started. Since then I've been looking for causes.

Rousseau and reading

“Reading is the great plague of childhood” said Rousseau, in Emile (On Education). What he meant was the way the dead hand of a fixed narrative can shape a child’s outlook, not always to good ends. This is a debate that goes all the way back to Plato, who warned that an early infatuation with fiction has its dangers.

There was a vivid illustration of Rousseau’s point on Radio this week, when a smart, young, black, woman author, Michelle Gaye, who’s written a book called ‘Pride and Premiership: from Wags to Riches’ (what a great title), described today’s young women as being obsessed with the Cinderella narrative. She saw the WAG phenomenon, the relentless pursuit of footballers, who would rescue them from their ordinary lives, as a playing out of this narrative. The poor girl gets her prince. It’s a fixed, fictional narrative that drives young girls (and men) to extremes of behaviour, fuelled by a newspaper and magazine industry that has long abandoned serious and real events, for the perpetuation of fairy stories.

Cinderella crushed

The Diana affair was mass hysteria, based around this ‘princess’ myth, albeit a tragic extension to the story, where the princess, being driven from the Ritz, gets smashed to pieces in that most fairy tale of cities, Paris. The crowds, of largely women, that flocked to the streets and laid flowers, were not shedding tears for Diana. They were playing out a narrative that locked them into a fatuous fairy tale. They had never met the woman, and acted upon their anger that the fairy tale had been usurped. It was a cathartic vehicle for their own failed dreams. They weren’t mourning Diana, they were mourning the death of a fairy tale. The story had been hijacked and skewered. Childhood dreams were being crushed.

Frankie Boyle hits a nerve

Frankie Boyle shocked the nation, and shot to fame on the back of one famous joke that hit a nerve with anyone who saw through this nonsense, when he recommended that we celebrate Diana’s death by, “by staging a gang-bang in a minefield”. It was typical Boyle, but clever in its own way, because it is so extreme. It was a disturbing and obscene counterpoint to an equally disturbing and obscene myth. It got 1.6 million hits on YouTube.

When Princes go bad

Prince Charles screwed around with the Princess story, and got burned. He’s now forever a baddy, having shacked up with one of the ugly sisters. That wasn’t meant to happen. It’s not what we wanted. Prince Andrew married Fergie, a puffed up, rouged, pantomime buffoon, and they’re still playing out the Cinderella tale gone wrong. Both have turned into money-grabbing caricatures of a Prince and Princess, and we all shout ‘boo’ when they appear. The youngest has already been written off, after his ‘nazi’ uniform gag. What a lark – eh? They thought they had supressed all that German Nazi stuff when Edward abdicated, then he splashes it all over the forever loyal, Royal, red-tops.

Third time lucky?

Third time lucky the nation hopes. This time it may work, and Royalty will clear away the broken crockery and put a new mug on the mantelpiece for the nation to adore. This time it’s an unbreakable plastic mug, as this Prince is an anodyne cypher of a man, devoid of personality and original thought. He may very well play out his destined role as the quiet actor in this crooked old pantomine. So the fairy tale will continue with the WC wedding. A large section of the nation will, once again, play out their role, resurrecting the memory of Diana and what should have been. The tape is rewound and her bloody death and possible marriage to a dark skinned foreigner, can be erased. England will revert back to buying bricabrac, eating cake, and watching their Cinderella marry her (gormless) Prince, on TV. Once again, young women will be seduced by a dangerous fiction, that if you get a makeover, tan and hawk yourself around the circuit, you’ll find your Prince.

Disneyfication of Royalty

In the second half of the 20^th century two forces united in UK popular culture, Disney and Royalty. Royalty became Disnified, in the sense that the sanitised, feudal idea of a ‘Prince’ and ‘Princess’ was seen as ideal and aspirational. Young women are being seduced by this ideal into believing that it’s possible, when it’s the very opposite. Princes have been replaced by boorish footballers, but it’s the same old myth. Was there anything more depressing than the recent series Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, where the Disneyfication of the wedding reached absurd proportions. The lower the caste in society, the more they hang on to these dreams, as it’s a way of avoiding reality.

Don’t read Cinderella to your children, especially your girls, it’s a lethal cocktail of falsehoods that will do them inestimable harm.

Tony Buzan, true or false?

2011-04-12T10:27:00.003Z

Just finished a fantastically readable book on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein – The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. In addition to scotching the usual myths about photographic memories, it’s a fine introduction to how important memory is, along with the techniques, which anyone can learn, to improve their memories. Foer takes up the challenge of entering the US memory Championships, ends up the winner, and the book is the story of that journey. But the weirdest episode in the book is his encounter with the eccentric Tony Buzan.

I’ve always been suspicious of Buzan’s hyperbolic claims and the fact that his books seem like an endless series of re-treads, so it was satisfying to read that an expert on memory, and others, had similar, if not harsher opinions.

Brain is not a muscle

Foer clearly dislikes the ’brain is like a muscle’ analogy that Buzan trots out, “Buzan’s most hyperbolic claims about the collateral effect of ‘brain exercise’ should inspire a measured dose (at least) of scepticism.” Foer is not alone. Ed Cooke, an English memory grand master, has similar views, “Ah, yes the estimable Tony Buzan. Did he try to sell you that nonsense about the brain being a muscle?...Anyone who knows the first thing about the respective characteristics of brains knows how risible that analogy is.” To be fair, it’s only an analogy, that suggests that practice improves memory, which it does, so I’d let him off on that one.

Self-styled guru

Foer also thinks that Buzan takes the “self-styled guru” thing too far, “he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru”. But it’s the interview that’s most telling. Buzan is half an hour late for the interview (maybe he forgot the time) and Foer damns him with faint praise, “Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression”. Buzan often reminds Foer that he is a modern Renaissance man but all Foer finds is “Buzan’s tidy little narrative”.

Books

When he asked Buzan’s chauffeur (he drives around in an ivory coloured 1930s taxicab) about his boss’s books, the guy's caught off guard and says, “Same meat, different gravy”, and Foer clearly agrees that across 120 books there’s oodles of repetition. Indeed, the competitive memory community contains a great number of people who think he has “gotten rich peddling unscientific ideas about the brain” and that he’s, “a bit of an embarrassment”.

Pseudoscience

What Foer seems to find most annoying is Buzan’s “habit of lapsing into pseudoscience and hyperbole”. For example, “Very young children use 98% of all thinking tools. By the time they’re 12, they use about 75%. By the time they’re teenagers, they’re down to 50%, by the time they’re in University it’s less than 25%, and it’s less than 15% by the time they’re in industry”. I have to agree, there’s a point where credibility gives way to straight sales talk, and that’s a line he needn’t cross.

Mindmaps

He gives Mindmaps an endorsement but rejects Buzan’s claim that they’re the “ultimate mind-power tool” or a “revolutionary system”. I agree with Foer here. I don’t use mind maps, as they tend to limit the way I think, which is more language based than visual. But, like Foer, I agree than the increased ‘mindfulness’ and focus that mind-mapping brings can be useful.

Conclusion

Foer’s book is a rollicking tale of someone with an average memory, who simply set out to show that it can be massively productive through training, and engages with the serious science of memory, along with it’s role in a person’s character, life and learning. If you don’t like the pure science, it’s a wonderful introduction to how the mind and memory works.

Another book I’d recommend along the same lines is Embrace the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammett which I’ve reviewed in this blog.

Diversity training damned in new study

2011-04-11T16:21:00.008Z

Has diversity training become and end in itself rather than a means to an end? The vast amount of time and money spent on diversity training, when evaluated, is found wanting, mostly ineffective, even counter-productive. With evidence from large scale studies, from Kochan, Dobbin and now Kalev, you'd have thought that the message would have got through. The sad truth is that few on either the supply or demand side, give a damn about whether it works or not. It's become an article of faith.

I've blogged about this before, giving both an example of a diversity course I've experienced and a major study from Professor Frank Dobbin at Harvard, to show that diversity training is mostly a sham, a view, I should add, that is shared by the majority of people I've spoken to on the issue.

Massive study – diversity courses largely useless

Most diversity training is not evaluated at all or languishes in the Level 1, la la land of ‘happy sheets’. So check out Alexandra Kalev’s study from the University of Arizona. 31 years of data from 830 companies – how’s that for a Level 4 evaluative study! Her latest study found, after the delivery of diversity training, a 7.5% DROP in women managers, 10% DROP in black women managers and a 12% DROP in black men in senior management positions. There were similar DROPS among Latinos and Asians.

The strength of this study comes from the quantity and integrity of the data. It relies on compulsory federal EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) filings on the number of women and people of colour in management, along with details of diversity training programmes.

Sensitivity training a problem

The bottom line is that the vast majority of diversity courses are useless, especially when driven by HRs perception of avoiding prosecution. The problem centres around courses run in response to legislative and external pressures. Kalev found that , "Most employers….force their managers and workers to go through training, and this is the least effective option in terms of increasing diversity. . . . Forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity." One of the problems, that both Kalev and Dobbin found, was the focus on ‘sensitivity training’ where people are often forced to focus on interpersonal conflict. These were the training courses that produced a backlash, as they were intrinsically accusatory.

Diversity courses are “more symbolic than substantive," says University of California LAW Professor, Lauren Edelman, She independently reviewed Kalev's study and concluded that the problem was training in "response to the general legal environment and the fact that organizations copy one another."

One bright spot was the finding that some diversity initiatives, namely those that were voluntary and aligned with business goals, were successful. This is similar to Professor Frank Dobbin’s study at Harvard, who showed, in his massive study that ‘training’ was not the answer, and that other management interventions were much better, such as mentoring.

Kochan

Thomas Kochan, Professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management’s five year study had previously come to the same conclusions, "The diversity industry is built on sand," he concluded. "The business case rhetoric for diversity is simply naive and overdone. There are no strong positive or negative effects of gender or racial diversity on business performance." The problem, according to Kochan, is the bogus claim that diversity leads to increased productivity. This is simply unproven as there is little or no hard data on the subject. Kochan found that none of the companies he contacted for his study had carried out any systematic evaluation of diversity training. Evidence around productivity is mostly anecdotal and repeated as a mantra by interested parties.

Groupthink

Companies, worldwide spend many hundreds of millions of dollars each year on diversity training. The tragic truth is that most of this is wasted. Groupthink seems to be at the heart of the matter. Groupthink among people who employ and promote people like themselves creates the problem. Groupthink among compliance training companies who simply do what they do without supporting evidence and tout ineffective ‘courses’. Groupthink in HR, who find it easier to just run ‘courses’ rather than tackle real business problems. The whole edifice is a house of cards.

E-portfolios – 7 reasons why I don’t want my life in a shoebox

2011-03-31T10:32:00.005Z

E-portfolios have taken up more conference time and wasted effort than almost any other learning technology topic I can recall. The idea’s been around since the nineties but isn’t it odd that no one seems to have one? Never has so much time been devoted to something with so little real impact. An army of researchers, academics and vendors have been touting the idea that everyone should have a shoebox of ‘stuff’ which they fill up as they go through life as ‘lifelong learners’. Politicians and educators of the ‘control freak variety’ love the idea, but like identity cards, the rest of us seem to be completely indifferent. So why have they not taken off?

1. Uninteroperable

I may have invented a new word here. E-portfolios are largely confined to education, and some vocational adult learning programmes, but the 40 odd mainstream VLEs preclude any real interoperability. Buy a VLE and you’re stuck with their e-portfolio, a specially designed shoebox in a specially designed boutique shoe shop.

2. Institutionalised

Hopelessly utopian, it is the perfect example of something that turns out to be the opposite of what was intended; a shoebox of stuff so attached to institutions that you have to leave it behind. E-portfolios have been institutionalised and therefore rendered useless for students by the very people who are meant to be equipping them for life.

3. Human nature

Human beings do not behave as educationalists would like them to behave. That’s because education has a flawed and simplistic view of human nature (usually behaviourist). Proof of this comes in the fact that they still insist on teaching Maslow in teacher training. Maslow has a simplified and false theory of human nature, so do e-portfolio apologists. People are lazy, procrastinators, messy, change their minds and quite often want to forget what they’ve done. In the corporate world, as they say, HR is neither human nor resourceful, it's a control department. Human nature mitigates against us having our life in a shoebox.

4. People are not learners

People do not see themselves as ‘learners’, let alone ‘lifelong learners’. It’s a conceit, as only educators see people as learners. Imagine asking an employer – how many learners do you have? People are individuals, fathers, mothers, employees, lawyers, bus drivers, whatever….but certainly not learners. That’s why an e-portfolio, tainted with ‘schooling’ will not catch on. By and large, most adults see school as something they leave behind and do not drag along with them into adulthood.

5. Boundary problems

Media are linked on the web and cannot be easily stored in a single entity or within a single entity, so the boundaries of a real e-portfolio are difficult to define, and will change. An e-portfolio would have to cope with my social networks but they are proprietary. Information wants to be free fiscally and ontologically. We want to be part of all sorts of expansive and variously porous networks, not boxed in.

6. Plus ca change

The only thing that will not change is the fact that there will be change. So e-portfolios will be no sooner built than redundant. The technology, and culture around technology, will change. And as these changes occur, e-portfolios will be unable to keep up with the changes. In another sense, people sometimes want change, and don’t want their baggage dragged along behind them.

7. Recruitment myth

I spent a lot of time recruiting people and what I needed wasn’t huge, overflowing e-portfolios, but succinct descriptions and proof of competences. If by e-portfolio you mean and expanded CV with links to your blog and whatever else you have online, fine. But life is too short to consider the portfolios of hundreds of applicants. Less is more.

Let’s get real

Lifelong learning in a shoebox? Justifying e-portfolios on the basis of lifelong learning won’t wash. It’s too ambitious. So let’s get real. I can see their use in limited domains, such as courses and apprenticeships, but not in general use, like identity cards.

Flip the classroom - every teacher should do this

2011-03-17T10:53:00.004Z

Salman Khan was a hedge-fund manager but there’s not a teacher on the planet who wouldn’t benefit from his views on learning. Khan has recorded 2200 educational videos and over million are viewed a month. How did he get started? By tutoring his cousins in maths. Eventually, they told hm that they preferred his YouTube lectures to him in person. From their point of view it makes sense – they can stop and review things when they want, do things at their own pace, do it when it's convenient. More importantly, the very first time you try to understand something, the last thing you need is a hovering human presence or teacher. You need time to reflect, ponder, get to grips with the ideas. I have had exactly the same experience in tutoring in maths. I started in person, migrated to Skype and now favour this more distanced approach, where the actual tutoring is the application, not exposition of the knowledge.

Flip the classroom

Khan’s trick, is something I’ve believed in for years. Don’t use technology in the classroom, use it before and after, outside of the classtoom. Classrooms were never designed for technology, apart, perhaps, for Whiteboards. But the danger with whiteboards is that they reinforce talking at students and ‘lecturing’. Flip the classroom. Assign the short talks for homework, THEN use the classroom for the application of the concepts. The net result is that you humanise the classroom. It becomes a place primarily for learning, not teaching. Simple, but like most great ideas - brilliant.

Flip assessment

He uses another flip technique I’ve always recommended. He takes some of the magic dust from games and apply it to learning. You do short ‘ten in a row’ automated assessments. Get ten in a row right; move on. This simple game pedagogy, along with badges for progress, within a structured knowledge map, allows the students to understand where they are in the learning journey. It also has motivational punch.

For Khan, overall summative assessment is all wrong. It’s too little too late. Individual formative assessment is the true driver in education. Traditional assessment penalises failure and doesn’t expect complete mastery. It fails both failing and successful students.

To this end his whole system relies on detailed formative data for teachers, data that is both detailed and personal. It’s not classroom guesses or waiting until a final test is completed to see how your students are doing. Every student is tracked and the teacher intervenes appropriately. Note that you can only track every student if the system gathers the data online. So learning and assessment have to be done online. Technology is brilliant at tracking progress as teachers are too busy. Free up their time so that the teacher can teach and assign the strong kids to tutor kids who are struggling. Arms teachers with data and they can focus on the progress of all.

The flip has one other major advantage. Flip homework, so that it is done in the classroom and you free teachers from the dreaded marking. They can then focus on the targeted application of knowledge. Traditional classroom teaching becomes homework and homework, classroom activity.

Conclusion

Khan gets it. He understands the difference between learning and teaching, between classrooms and self-paced environments between formative and summative assessment, between scalable and non-scalable components in education,. Most of all he is not encumbered with traditional methods and thoughts about whet education needs to be.

He also sees the global implications of this scalable solution. The flip creates a global classroom and gives access to education for the poor. Watch this and if you're not convinced tell me why.

Leaning tower of PISA – 7 serious skews

2011-03-15T12:06:00.005Z

Like the real Leaning Tower of PISA, the OECD PISA results are built on flimsy foundations and are seriously skewed. Nevertheless, they have become a major international attraction for educators, and have sparked off an annual educational ‘international arms’ race’

In the UK, Gove’s education policy is rooted and firmly targeted at the PISA results. The English Baccalaureate has PISA written all over it. PISA is also used as a political football by d-list celebrities and wannabes, like Toby Young and Katherine Birbalsingh to beat the state system over the head. They stare at the learning tower and swear blind that it’s straight.

Both left and right now use the ‘sputnik’ myth, translated into the ‘Chinese competitiveness’ myth, to chase their own agendas – more state funding or more privatisation. This is a shame, as the last thing we need is yet another dysfunctional , deficit debate in education. Nations have different approaches to education, different demographic and social mixes and different agendas.

The problems in the data are extreme as PISA compares apples and oranges. In fact it compares huge watermelons with tiny seeds. PISA is seriously flawed because of the huge differences in demographics, socio-economic ranges and linguistic diversity within the tested nations. Here’s seven skews as a starter:

Size skew

Shanghai topped the table this year but why was one city from an entire nation singled out? Could it be that Shanghai is China’s flagship city? To compare a set of students from the richest city in China (on average 3 times the national income), that has attracted a high proportion of high-achievers, with a similar sample from across the whole of the US is odd. It smacks of political manipulation by the Chinese. There was also evidence, presented in the New York Times, of student priming. Imagine if the cohort was drawn from rural China? This comparative method will fail as there will be lots of outliers in the data. It is not surprising that small homogeneous cities and states pop up at both the top and bottom of the table.

Immigrant skew

Different tested cohorts have different immigrant ratios. The difficulties that immigrants have with language, social adjustment, school and poverty, is a serious pollutant to the data. . As one would expect, Finland and Shanghai have very small numbers of immigrants in their tested cohorts. It is bonkers to compare cohorts with radically different numbers of immigrant children.

Selective immigration skew

There is another odd skew associated with immigration, namely that for some countries, immigration is controlled, so that only wealthy or smart kids get through. So, for example, there’s only one country in the PISA results where the immigrant students outscore the natives and that’s Australia, where immigration is highly selective. There’s a huge difference between refugee immigration and cherry-picked immigration.

English skew

Associated with immigration, is a curious linguistic skew – the tendency for smart immigrants to migrate towards English speaking nations. This could mean that English speaking nations benefit in the long term from such immigration but show poor short-term results due to high first generation immigration with associated language problems at school.

Linguistic skews

On reading, languages with regular structures are likely to do better than languages which are more irregular. The tests may favour languages with simplified spelling structures such as Finnish. Reading data may also be skewed by reading habits as PISA doesn’t recognise reading on screens. It’s big on books.

Subjects skew

PISA measures academic subjects only, namely maths, reading and science. To be fair PISA have recognised this flaw and are now embarking on a correction process. But is it right to judge education in these subjects only? One need only focus the curriculum heavily on these subjects to do well, which is exactly what many counties do. Dump sport, music, the arts and humanities and you can produce stellar results.

Subject focus skew

Simple differences in taught curricula can also affect the results. In maths, for example, if you have taught ‘series’ theory you will do well in the 2009 results, as a major set of questions focused on extrapolating series in the test. If this is not part of your curriculum, you will score badly.

OFQUAL's concerms

I’m not alone with these concerns. OFQUAL published a Progress Report (International Comparisons in Senior Secondary Assessment ) in February 2011 making similar points.

They listed several major criticisms:

differences between countries’ performance are not that large…usually statistically insignificant
whether or not a country has moved up or down the league tables is not that meaningful partly because the absolute differences in scores between countries are not that great
the constituent group of comparators changes from study to study and from year to year

They point to three major but dangerous assumptions that:

items tested for are somehow an objective measure of what is best
learners undertaking the study are a balanced representation of all learners at that stage of education
learners sampled in each country are equally motivated to perform well in the tests

Additionally, these snapshot studies do not isolate variables and may well be skewed by “factors in the past that no longer apply”, such as “learner performance in an examination may be the result of curriculum developments undertaken” or “investment in education infrastructure some time in the past”. In other words, using the data to praise or blame the current system is unwise.

Gove’s skew

The great danger is that the world skews its curriculum to fit the PISA expectations, just as PISA draw away from their own curriculum tested areas. This has already happened in the UK with Gove’s Ebac.

Gove has specified A*-C passes in five subject areas: English; maths; two sciences; ancient or modern history or geography; and a modern or ancient language. It has all the hallmarks of a PISA-led curriculum.

First it’s far too academic and restrictive. Second, it excludes too many sensible options. But his greatest crime is to have moved the goalposts after goals have been scored. If you change the goalposts so dramatically and quickly, you simply condemn 85% of students as failures (only 15% currently meet the Ebac standard). What’s worse, Gove is applying the measure retrospectively. This is like moving the goalposts at the end of the game and disallowing goals scored. It’s madness. You can have schools with high achievement in Maths and English plummet down the new league tables from near the top to near the bottom, as they haven’t focused on humanities or languages. The consequences of this error could be disastrous as the staff pressures will also be enormous, with thousands of teachers in vocational subjects being rendered useless in favour of history, geography and language teachers. One weird consequence is that a student who does Latin and Ancient History will be judged above those who do Business Studies, Engineering, psychology, a third science and lots of other subjects. It’s worse than bad , it’s perverse. I’m glad my kids are leaving secondary education, as it descends into this backward looking nonsense.

Devil’s in the detail

Politicians and activists distort PISA to meet their own ends. They cherry pick results and recommendations, ignoring the detail. Finland is famously quoted by the right as a high performing PISA country. Yet, it is a small, homogeneous country with no streaming, high levels of vocational education, no substantial class divisions and no private schools. Facts curiously ignored by PISA supporters.

Conclusion

One could quibble with the details of my analysis, but I’m convinced the PISA comparisons are riddled with skews and errors, many more than indicated above. The great danger, and it is already happening, is that people read causality into the data. It’s crap schools, crap teachers, money spent doesn’t matter etc. The scope for false causality is enormous and exploited by politicians for their own ends.

"In the last 10 years we've plummeted in the PISA rankings" heard this before from Michael Gove - he lied. UK results were excluded in 2000 (low response rate) and 2003 as data was dodgy. Only gathered in 2006 and 2009. PISA tests not that important but National tests have gone up - what's happening?

PPS

Late news: Is PISA data fatally flawed?

Sven de Kreiner Danish statistician says PISA is not reliable at all. In the reading tests 28 questions were supposed to be equally difficult in every country. PISA has failed here as differential item functioning - items with different degrees of difficulty in different countries - are common. In fact he couldn't find any that worked without bias. Items are more difficult in some countries. He used his analysis to show that the UK moves up to 8 or down to 36. PISA assumes that DIF has been eliminated but not one single item is the same across the 56 countries.

OECD does not compare over the 10 years. Performance has not fallen, if anything it's flat.

Middle East: revolutions without revolutionaries

2011-03-14T12:08:00.004Z

For those tiresome oldsters who see social media as nothing more than the decadence of youth or a meaningless pastime, recent events in the Middle East should have been a slap round the head. A rack of nations, led by a new post-TV generation who partake in genuine dialogue with each other, really have changed the world, irrevocably.

But what do we mean by a media revolution? It was not, I believe, a revolution caused by social media but a revolution that took place in the age of social media. To put it another way, social media was a necessary condition for the revolution but not sufficient. This is, therefore, not a new media revolution, but it is a revolution without revolutionaries, just the sheer force of mass participation, first in new media, then on the streets. It is, of course, more complex than this, so how did the different social media build into a tsunami of discontent and action?

Stage 1: Blogs (despots despised)

Social media gave young people in the Middle East access to the downside of dictatorships– the nepotism, cronyism and corruption of specific ruling families. These revolutions were first fuelled by bloggers who exposed the excesses of the autocrats, along with their wives, sons and relatives. In Tunisia, Ben Ali’s wife and even her nephews were targeted by bloggers and became figures of hate. The Mubarak’s, Gadaffis, Khalifas, House of Saud and others have been exposed in a similar manner. Even the King of Jordan’s wife Rania is under pressure due to her political interference. It is the dynastic nature of these families that are so resented, with father setting up son for power and significant portions of their nations’ wealth being given to friends and relatives. There is nowhere to hide as wikileaks, foreign publications and outside revolutions leak into their countries.

I also don’t believe that this was a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Social media in this type of politics has a certain causality. First the bloggers, who are real activists, with real voices, reporting excesses and explaining in some depth over a long period, the underbelly of the society in which they work and live. They are often the first to be harassed, detained even imprisoned. They act as the unofficial press as the official press are under state control or operate under fear. At this stage Facebook links back to blogs, spreading the word about who’s hot, what’s hot and channels traffic back to bloggers and blog posts.

Stage 2: Facebook (groups emerge)

It’s only much later, when enough heat has been generated, that Facebook is used as an organisational device. It’s a medium in which protest Facebook ‘groups’ grow around causes, martyrs and events. The role of a martyr kicks in, where the images and reports of a suicide (Mohammed Bouazizi) become triggers for groups. At this point the date of a demonstration, for example, is amplified by Facebook, but another medium takes over.

Stage 3 Twitter (street mob)

Dates for demonstrations become twitter triggers, as in the#Jan25 hashtag for the Egyptian demos. Then, as real events on the street unfold, Twitter kicks in with its real-time feed of events; the violence, deaths, more dates for demonstrations. This is when others outside of the country watch, learn and contribute through internationally known hashtags.

So it’s a cascade effect; blogs are individuals, Facebook groups and Twitter the mob.

Stage 4: Denial and shurtdown (Old minds & media)

The ‘media-gap’ between the rulers and the young they rule is immense. The telephone was a novelty when these despots were young and you can’t imagine that they’ve ever used email, never mind social media. In media terms they are archers in the age of gunpowder. Before television Radio in the Middle East was widely used both to unite and disparage others across the Arab world. But it was within an older oral tradition. Halim Barakat describes this expressive style as rhetorical, aggressive and mocking. We saw this on the TV speeches delivered by Mubarak, Suleiman and Ghadaffi . They were patronising and part of an old media model of broadcasting in an ‘adult to child’ fashion. But the world has moved on and this language seemed patronising and out of touch. Young people saw right through it all, as they have grown up with a different, straight speaking model, that is more dialogue than monologue.

The pro-Mubaraks used state television, physically guarding it night and day to put their case. When they saw that they were failing they moved from defence to attack, arresting journalists and closing down Al Jazeera and Nilesat for a full 11 days. (There is no love lost between Mubarak and Qatar.) This attack closed down the internet and mobile networks but the web is like water, it just flows round these obstacles, with alternative routes from tech savvy youngsters defying the ban. Twitter activists even invented speech to text technology for Tweets to get round the Twitter ban. In the end Al Jazeera had to use the web to stream live images. This was as much a media battle as a street revolution.

Stage 4: Action (Youtube)

This is when media start to take a back seat and real people take real action to effect change. It has a different dynamic in different countries. Tunisia and Egypt fell quickly with relatively little bloodshed. Libya is already a civil war and a bloodbath. Bahrain is taking longer. Iran literally living on the edge of revolt. Saudi oppressing everyone as usual, but being forced to make reforms, for the moment in terms of bribes. Jordan has already made changes. They are ALL under pressure to change.

At this point YouTube and the distribution of video, and photographs through the whole media landscape come into their own. Even TV depends, at this stage, on activist journalism, to show what’s happening on the ground, as the state can simply control TV channels. However, at this stage, new media is no longer the prime mover, it is in reporting mode.

Media and mediums are the message

Lastly, there’s no social media without a ‘medium’ and in all this talk about Facebook and Twitter, the simple fact that the internet, computers, laptops and especially mobiles, are the real lifeblood of the revolution. The growth of mobiles on the back of cheap tariffs has been phenomenal in these markets. The mobile phone is powerful, portable and personal. It records images and video and can be used to report from the scene itself. Remember that twitter during the Egyptian uprising could only operate once voice to text was available.

The process described above does not apply when social media is shut down, as in Libya. In this case YouTube and mobile recorded video leaked to TV plays a bigger role. We have seen this in Libya and Syria with the astonishing scenes of people being gunned down in Deraa and Sanamayn, where the shooting is seen and heard, then the dead clearly and deliberately shown to mobile cameras. This resulted in even more protests in Homs, Tafa, and astonishingly, as it is near the birthplace of Assad, Latakia. Interestingly, free access to social media has become a negotiating point with Assad in Syria, as it has become one of the key demands of the protesters.

Role of Arabic

Another important feature of the Arab world is it's common language - Arabic. Information needs no translation across the region. News spreads fast, very fast indeed. These countries also have large numbers of nationals from other Arab countries living and working within their borders. In the Gulf states this is acute, with some countries having more foreign nationals than locals. This leads to greater cross-pollination.

Conclusion

I’ve travelled a fair bit in the Middle East over the last ten years, especially in the last year, and what I’ve always loved about the region is the people. Now that those people have been given a voice, through social media, we need to listen, understand and give them all the support they need.

I'm a Celebrity let me fix your education system!

2011-03-04T12:49:00.004Z

I took part in a debate on ‘What should be taught in our schools?’ in London last night - a strange affair. As one tweeter noted “Good split on the panel but audience skewed 80/20 to Eton/Tory/Oxbridge axis”. You could tell at a glance the Toby Young/Katherine Birbalsingh acolytes. Fair enough, it was her book launch.

I was last to speak and was pretty annoyed by Toby and Katherine’s torrent of anecdotes and the usual right wing obsessions with Latin and Shakespeare. But what annoyed me most of all was the assault, by both, on vocational training. You could actually hear the posh voices braying ‘Hear hear’ whenever they launched their petty attacks on kids who were learning how to be hairdressers or work in hospitality.

My response

In any case, this was my response. First, something odd has happened to the education debate. It’s become cool for Oxbridge types to bellow out their superiority (they always mention repeatedly that they went to Oxford or Cambridge) and to see the state system as largely dysfunctional. They start with a deficit model that caricatures students as feral, teachers as feckless and head teachers as foolish liberals. They parrot this pathological view of the state system which is clearly an echo of the ‘broken Britain’ Conservative campaign.

Why does this happen? Because the education debate has a habit of descending into late night middle-class, dinner-party talk; all anecdotes and bitching. As if we didn’t have enough on our plate with the direct assault on the state system by Gove and Gibbs, the debate has been further hijacked by d-list celebrities, wannabes, actresses and a TV chef. The d-list celeb (sorry Toby you’re maybe a C), wannabe (Katherine Birbalsingh), actress (Joanna Lumley) and TV chef (Jamie Oliver), who in turn has rolled in a bunch of minor TV celebs to show us how it should be done. We have nothing to learn from these people, absolutely nothing. Why? Because they are devoid of ideas. It’s all criticism, platitudes and anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is not data.

Toby Young is obsessed with Latin. Once again, he trotted out a set of ridiculous claims and anecdotes about why Latin should be compulsory in schools. But as I’ve posted enough on this subject, with a full set of evidence against these claims, let’s put that to one side. His only other real claim was that Marc Zuckenburg was a classicist and that, apparently, was why he was one of the richest men in the world. Really! Brin and Page of Google and Besoz of Amazon, all went to Montessori schools, do my three entrpreneurs trump yours Toby? This is just crap causality. I repeat, the plural of anecdote is not data.

TV Chef thinks education is a risotto

I also had a go at the the Jamie Oliver nonsense, a TV chef, putting a curriculum together as if it were a recipe for a risotto. (I’ve submitted a brilliant idea to Channel 4; Rick Stein, now he can fillet a good fish, why not have him head up surgery for the NHS?) Was there anything more dispiriting than watching the pompous David Starkey start his lesson by saying to his class, “You are all here because you failed.” Then without the lad saying anything, Starkey pointed to Conor and said, “Come on you’re so fat you couldn’t move… With Jamie’s food there’ll be lots of dieting opportunities”. I would have applauded Conor if he had simply marched up and decked him. “You think it’s funny making jokes about me” replied Conor, rightly seething with resentment. As it was, Conor simply gave as good as he got and after the class was lucid and reasonable. “He didn’t even know my name”. Two girls after the class, got it spot on about Starkey, “He’s a bit rude.” He is more than rude, he’s a pompous, old snob who then had the cheek to write a stinging article about these young people and the state system in the Telegraph, showing his true colour. He had no remorse, because he’s a megalomaniac who can’t teach, “I have nothing but contempt for the new-style head teachers…gives you a sense of why things have gone so wrong in state education”. Typical of Starkey, everyone’s to blame but himself.

Simon Callow gets irony bypass

Simon Callow then threw Shakespeare at them, or rather some confusing and ambiguous questions, that got predictably confusing answers. When he asked them who they’d like to be in life, he didn’t like it when they mentioned Bill Gates and Katy Price. Then, suffering from a serious loss of irony, blamed ‘celebrity culture’ for the downfall in education! He can hold the attention of a paying audience, but not a roomful of kids. He was, well, hopeless. I loved the feisty girl’s final comment, “He can’t help the way he talks”. At the debate last night the headmaster from Winchester was similarly obsessed by Shakespeare. Then in rolls Rolf Harris. Good start but was too busy doing his own thing and didn’t spend enough time with the kids. He just looked lost. Robert Winston took a chainsaw to a dead pig (budget no object in this schools), but the kids saw right through his theatrical antics. Ellen McCarthur, had the advantage of a 30 foot yacht. Now how many state schools have or have access to a yacht? And next week we have Mary Beard, teaching, you’ve guessed it – Latin. This whole idea is way out of hand and nothing to do with the real world .

Inner-city London skews

Toby and Katherine are the poster boy and poster girl for these attacks on the state of state education. Note that all of them, bar none, live and work in London. The only common denominator is this ‘inner-London angst’ that every middle-class Londoner has about schools. But there’s a problem here. Inner London is not representative of the state sector as a whole.

Public and faith schools

First we have the richer kids creamed off into the public schools, second, you have the faith schools, set up to educate the poor, but largely taken over as the sharp elbows of the middle class get to work, even lying about their faith, to get in. So, as the evidence shows, from the LSE and Institute of Education, they achieve what they achieve through selection. Around 65% of Westminster’s secondary schools are faith based but the national average is only 17% and it’s less than 5% in many other areas of England. The net result is extreme social sorting. These are inner London skews.

Editorial class

On top of this we have an editorial class who also live in inner London and have exactly the same concerns. Toby and Katherine have no trouble in getting on radio and TV or into print, because the TV folk and journalists all live in London, and have the same worries about their kids, You can read it between the lines, the barely disguised fear of young black kids and a barely disguised fear of working class culture. In an interesting faux pas, Mary Beard revealed that neither she nor Jamie Oliver had suggested Latin, it was a member of the production team who was an Oxbridge classicist.

We’ve even had Joanna Lumley, only two days ago on the BBC, telling us how to run our schools, her only educational credentials; the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy, a finishing school and ’modelling’ agency for girls. At least it was vocational. This isn’t some ab fab, celebrity author, TV chef debate. It’s a serious business with serious outcomes and needs. And don’t think it’s not having an effect.

Bad news

We end up robbing the Building Schools for the Future budget, launched in 2004, to pay for Toby’s schools of the past. A decision now judged to have been an ‘abuse of power’.

We end up recommending Latin as a compulsory subject in our schools despite the fact that the evidence points to it NOT doing what many claim it does. It doesn’t help you learn other languages, it’s a hindrance.

We end up with a class-based attack on vocational learning, long the great apartheid fracture in the English system, Rather than listen to Tomlinson we relegated vocational subjects to Diplomas and the whole thing collapsed – again. Toby and Katherine regret the fact that we teach vocational subjects in schools. In one disgusting incident Toby had a go at BTECs in hospitality and hairdressing, and oh how the coiffured, restaurant-fed ,well-to-do ladies in the front row laughed and shouted, ‘hear, hear’. It was unabashed snobbery at its worst.

Education policy should NOT be skewed by a self-selecting group of inner London types who have their own idiosyncratic concerns, backed up by an editorial class that has the same concerns. In my lifetime, we’ve seen the creation of the abolition of the 11+, that most brutal of segregation policies, the raising of the school leaving age to 16 (remember this only happened in 1972), the rise in University participation from 12% when I went to University to 45% in just this year, higher staying on rates in schools. We’ve had the Open University, Learndirect’s 2.8 million learners, both offering ‘second chances’. This is real progress. It’s not perfect but it’s progress.

PS To Miss with Love

This was Katherine’s book launch and at the end she read out a strange passage from the book that was a long rambling exchange between her and a pupil, who for some weird reason called ‘Munchkin’. Katherine has a habit of demonising the children she has taught by giving them names like ‘Gruesome’. Those at the LWF conference heard her rant against this particular student for a full half hour. As Stephen Heppell said when he took the stage “I was beginning to feel quite sorry for poor Gruesome”. And that’s her problem. For all her claims to love teaching and the state system, she is, at heart, someone who does a lot of talking and not much listening.

The whole book is written in a faux-novella style, a confusion of fact and fiction (She even makes up a husband in the book, who doesn’t exist in real life.). And maybe this is the problem. Journalists have not warmed to her because she’s so dogmatic and seems to rely on nothing more than autobiographical anecdotes. Like David Starkey, she blames everyone (Fiona Miller got a booting in her speech) and everything but herself for the problems. It wasn’t her fault that the school she taught at imploded, as prospective parents fled the scene after her Conservative Party Speech. The main problem is her outrageous claims that the state system has collapsed, with largely feral children running amok in almost every classroom, urged on by liberal teachers and hapless headmasters. This is so extreme, as to be laughable. But it was a view held by many of the people in the room last night. To be honest, I’m not sure that she’s cut out for teaching. She has this bi-polar tendency to proclaim love in one sentence then follow it up with downright bile and hatred in the next.

Best physics lecturer ever dismissed physics lectures

2011-02-18T16:19:00.003Z

My son, who’s at a sixth form college, attended a lecture today, on chemistry, at his local university and the lecturer's first words were, "This is going to be a bit boring but there we are...." As Callum said, "It was about entropy and it just sort of fell apart". Glad youngsters have a sense of humour! But there’s a serious problem here. These sixth form students were visiting to be enthused about chemistry, not subjected to a third rate lecture.

Richard Feynman

It reminded me of the reflections of that great scientist Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, regarded as a great science teacher. His lectures in physics are still best-sellers. When I gave my ‘Don’t lecture me!’ lecture to ALT last year, several people tweeted claiming that Feynman was the counter-example to my thesis, that straight lectures are largely a waste of time, claiming that Feynman was the ‘man’. Now I actually showed a picture, during my talk, of Feynman and the cover of his book ‘Lectures in Physics’. I did this because he was deeply critical of the ‘lecture’ as a teaching method. It only goes to prove that even academics don’t seem to realise that memory during a one hour lecture starts to fail.

Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!

In his autobiography ‘Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!’ he writes cogently about his experience in teaching Physics to students in Brazil, where he stood up in front of the students and faculty (at their request) and said, ”The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil”. His point was that the students were being taught to memorise techniques and formulae for passing exams, not understanding physics, “it’s not science, but memorising, in every circumstance”.

Lectures on Physics

But it is in the 'Preface' to his lectures, written long after they were delivered, that his reflections on his own work matured. When he arrived at Caltech he was dismayed to find that the students who arrived full of enthusiasm for physics were being bored into submission by ‘stultifying’ lectures. He tried his best, including '3 problem solving lectures in the first year, mixing things up, introducing advanced but interesting content earlier than usual. So what were his thoughts?

First, ”one serious difficulty….there wasn’t any feedback from the students to the lecturer”. This, as a lover of the experimental method, was a “very serious difficulty”. He compares it to an experiment without any measurable output, a complete shot in the dark. And his general conclusions were clear, “My own pint of view is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students….I think the system was a failure.” He quoted Gibbon, “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”. In the end he admits that what is necessary is a more student-centred approach to learning physics through discussion and reflection, “It’s impossible to learn very much by sitting through a lecture”. Incidentally, these lectures are still worth reading, and I say ‘reading’ deliberately because one can stop, reflect, re-read and go at your own pace, a necessary approach to learning physics. The short version 'Six easy Pieces' explains the fundamentals of physics, but the longer lectures are also available.

As Samuel Johnson said, "People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.”

Latin: makes learning a new language MORE difficult!!

2011-02-16T22:55:00.003Z

In an odd article, in the Spectator, Toby Young, who seems obsessed with Latin, recommends it as a compulsory subject in state schools, with a string of ridiculous anecdotes. He describes how a friend used Latin on an easyjet flight to communicate with others on the plane. “If I’m on an EasyJet flight with a group of European nationals, none of whom speak English, I find we can communicate if we speak to each other in Latin,” says Grace Moody-Stuart. (I’m checking the passenger list next time I fly easyjet, just in case there’s a chance that awful Grace sits next to me!) Young even claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that Latin would help inner-city kids speak better as they’d practice unusual word endings!

He does, however, produce one piece of academic evidence, which he claims gives us “chapter and verse” on the subject, a 40 year old study by from the journal Phi Delta Kappan, where a group taught Latin was compared to another similar group and positive effects found.

Latin is not the cause

Of course, he simply trawled back through the literature to cherry pick a study that fitted his case, ignoring the more recent, superior, work In Search of the Benefits of Latin by Haas and Stern (2003) in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

In a review of the literature they found that Thorndike “did not find any differences in science and maths in students who learned Latin at school and those who did not”. And in the Haag and Stern (2000) follow up study to the study quoted by Young, two groups of comparable students, where one studied Latin, the other English, were assessed after two years, “No differences were found in either verbal or non-verbal IQ or grades in German or Maths”. In general they found an absence of transfer effects of learning Latin in reasoning. This had been predicted by Thorndike decades before, namely that transfer needs common ground in the source and target.

Now for the bad news: Latin makes it worse

The problem with understanding Latin is that you need to pay close attention to word endings; case markers on nouns and time markers on verbs. But in English and Romance languages word order and prepositions are more important. Endings play a minor role.

What Haag and Stern found, predictably, was that students who had learned one Romance language first found it easier to learn another Romance language , that those who had learned Latin. But it gets worse, as Latin caused incorrect transfer, such as the omission of prepositions and auxiliary verbs in Romance languages. In other words, learning Latin was detrimental to the learning of the new language.

They took two groups of German students, one who studied French, the other Latin as their second language. Both groups were then given a course in Spanish and the results measured. When the results were analysed by a Spanish assessor (who didn’t know who had taken French or Latin) found no group differences in verbal intelligence.

However, the French students made significantly fewer grammatical errors than the Latin students. As predicted the Latin students wrongly transferred the rules of Latin to Spanish. For example “misconstructions in verbs emerged to be either highly reminiscent of or identical to Latin verbs”. The French group turned out to be much better prepared to cope with Spanish grammar. Psychologically the Latin students had suffered from negative transfer using false friends in their new language. The fact that the grammatical similarities between modern Romance languages are much greater than that between Latin and modern Romance languages, means that the defenders of Latin are flogging a dead horse.

Incidentally, if you’ve heard the argument that Latin helps medical students learn and understand the considerable amount of medical vocabulary that has to be learned in medical schools. This also turns out to be false as shown in Pampush and Petto (2010)

Conclusion

This is not an unimportant or esoteric debate. Our state education system is in danger of being hijacked by minor celebrities, wannabes and TV chefs. Much of the debate is purely anecdotal, and worse, the anecdotal memories of a small clique of inner-London types who want to impose their worries and idiosyncratic ideas on the rest of us. It is important to counter this nonsense with the real evidence. The plural of anecdote is NOT data.

10 reasons to NOT teach Latin (reductio ad absurdum)

2011-02-12T12:42:00.007Z

There’s often a tension in education between the traditional and the progressive. But when the traditional hauls us back 2000 years, we really do need to worry. So, whenever I hear ‘Latin’ recommended in curricular discussions, I want to reach for my pedagogic gun, as it’s invariably subliminal snobbery. The perfect example is the toady Toby Young, who wants Latin to be a compulsory subject in all secondary schools. Yes, a D-list celebrity, who’s made a living from writing about being feckless and hapless, wants us all to listen to his petty, inner-city, London, middle class concerns about the quality of schools in his area. His solution – learn Latin!

Now you have to have some pretty convincing argument to put Latin into your core curriculum, so here goes? I’ll be a devil and advocate.

1. Helps you learn other languages

Sorry, it doesn’t. The metastudy Research and the teaching of English by Sherwin, found that “the study of Latin does not necessarily increase the ability to learn another language… No consistent experimental evidence in support of this contention was found.” The argument runs along these lines, that the Romance languages have Latin roots, so knowing Latin helps one learn French, Spanish and Italian. Now there may be some marginal advantage to knowing Latin before you learn these languages, but only if your Latin is very extensive, and you do Latin before you try the other languages. Why scratch your ear by going over the top of your head? Learners have limited time and that time is clearly better spent on the target language itself. You don’t have to go out with the grandmother to help you understand your wife. This argument is simply a non-sequitur.

2. Cognitive skills

One could argue that Latin teaches one to think. But what does that mean? If it’s true of Latin it’s true of any language, so why not learn one that is at least useful? What special cognitive skill(s) does dead Latin confer over dozens of other living languages or dozens of other analytic subjects for that matter? Stephen Pinker, Harvard’s world renowned expert in psycholinguistics backs this up in The Language Instinct, “Latin declensional paradigms are not the best way to convey the inherent beauty of grammar”. He recommends computer programming and universal grammar on the grounds that they are “about living minds and not dead tongues”. reductio ad absurdum

3. Latin language mavens

Pinker also has a go at the Latin language mavens who want to pointlessly foist Latinate rules of grammar into English. As Pinker explains, this snobbery took root in 18^th century London, when Latin was used as a mark of social class (still true today) and Latin grammar rules were crudely pasted into books on English grammar, for example, ‘don’t split infinitives’ and ‘don’t end a sentence with a preposition’. Latin simply doesn’t allow you to split an infinitive and to stupidly insist that it’s wrong in English, is as ad hoc as making us wear togas.

4. Latin is misleading

It can be argued that learning Latin grammar is simply misleading as there is no real transfer to the target languages, certainly not English, and similarly in modern Romance languages. Latin has three cases, five declensions in nouns and doesn’t have articles. Far from being useful it’s positively misleading. And in terms of vocabulary, one would be far better spending one’s time studying etymology, rather than only one root language.

5. Waste of time

Of course, the cardinal argument against learning Latin is the fact that there’s only so many hours in a day for learning and there’s dozens of other subjects that should take precedence. We have to make choices in learning and this one is irrational. So as we’ve seen, there’s no real argument for learning a dead language on the basis of utility (unless one wants to become an ancient history scholar) as no one speaks the damn thing. tempus fugit

6. Lingua franca of the world - English

Learning a language, to a reasonable level of competence, is as difficult a learning task as one can imagine. This is made all the more difficult in the UK by the fact that English has become the world’s unofficial, and in some fields official, lingua franca. The vast majority of children who take a second language in the UK fail to achieve any real level of competence because it has to be taught in classrooms with no contextual opportunities for practice. Many therefore argue that the global reach of English has greatly reduced the need to learn another language, let alone a dead one!

7. Romance is dead

And why this obsession with learning romance languages over say, German or Mandarin? You are far more likely to hear Punjabi, Bengali or Urdu (the top three minority languages spoken in the UK). I suspect that there’s more than a whiff of snobbery in our selection of languages at school? “Mum - I’m dropping French and taking Urdu”. “You’re what!”

8. Illusion of utility

A GCSE in Latin barely enables you to decipher a few Roman inscriptions and numbers. It will certainly not allow you to interpret the works of Seneca and Cicero. Even at A-level you’d have to be exceptional to get as much from these texts, as you’d get from a good translation.

9. Why not Greek?

Wouldn’t you prefer the riches of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Plato’s Socratic Dialogues and works of Aristotle; a far richer literary and philosophical tradition that the Roman? If so, learn Greek. Our literary, philosophical and political traditions have far more to do with Greek texts than Latin. Graecum est; non legitur

10. Pomposity

The benefits of a ‘classical education’, they say. But is there anything more annoying than those who drop in Latin phrases and confuse erudition with pomposity? I saw that hideous snob Rees Mogg do precisely this on a documentary on class recently and it made me wretch. Enoch Powell was the last politician who felt the need to pepper his speeches with this nonsense. Latin remains the cold, dead language of exclusivity and exclusion. It’s a peacock’s tail, the luxury of being able to ignore utility for superfluous acquisition of a useless and purely academic exercise. It says, subliminally, to hell with vocational subjects, I’m not ‘trade’. The dirty truth of the matter is that Latin has long been used as a marketing device by largely private schools to advertise their posh pedigree and attract parents of a conservative bent to cough up the fees. quid pro quo

Huge study: Do universities really teach critical thinking? Apparently not.

2011-01-19T19:29:00.007Z

Do universities really teach critical thinking? This huge CLA longitudinal study on 2,322 students for four years from 2005 to 2009 across broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, suggests not. Richard Arum of New York University found that they were woeful at critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication. 36% showed no significant gains in "higher order" thinking skill. 45% made no significant improvement in critical thinking.

Best subjects

Students with most gains studied:

Humanities

Social sciences

Natural scie

nces

Mathematics

Students with least gains studied:

Business

Education

Social work

Communications

Some surprises

Extra data threw up some other surprises:

Students who studied alone did better than those who studied in groups

Only a fifth of their time spent on academic pursuits

Over 50% of time spent socialising

Students avoi

ded courses that involved a lot of reading and writing

Timely report

This is a timely report and there has already been much soul searching, as many start to question the real value for money that HE delivers in the US. "No one concerned with education can be pleased with the findings of this study," said Howard Gardner.

It questions the fundamental purpose of higher education, as it has been assumed that these skills were precisely what was being taught. What needs to happen is a re-evaluation of ‘teaching’ in Higher education. Fiscal pressure, along with rising student costs and expectations, will make this happen. My own view is that the lazy ‘lecture’ is the dark secret at the heart of academic teaching. Since Benjamin Bloom first showed the pedagogic weaknesses of lectures in the 50s, we’ve had decades of confirmatory research showing their deficiencies. It comes as quite a shock to lecturers when you subject their teaching method to the same levels of academic scrutiny as their own research. Bligh, Gibbs and Mazur all describe their double standards on this issue.

There is no evidence that the dominant 'lecture' approach to teaching promotes critical thinking. Even Bligh, who promotes lectures makes it clear that it does not and couldn't find a single study that claimed it did. All 21 studies showed that other methods were better. Gibbs confirms this view. Mazur's work in the teaching of physics is also clear on the subject. Significant gains in understanding come from avoiding traditional lectures. This is an important debate, because if I, along with Bligh and others are right, there's a serious pedagogic hole in higher education.

This topic is covered in more detail in my own talk ‘Don’t lecture me!’ and in a follow up webinar from ALT. Richard Arum’s new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press) discusses the report in detail and is published later this month.