Digital Britain points to present and past, not future

Digital Britain points to present and past, not future

Here we go, Digital Britain is off the blocks and it’s mostly a tired set of protectionist prohibitions, and potential punishments. Actually most of it has little to do with ‘Digital’ Britain, as it focuses on TV, radio and newspapers. Our Digital Future has been spiked by a bunch of London-based paper and TV folk.

Who’s running the show now?

All the hallmarks of ineffective leadership – two alternating Chairs and a Board of civil servants (oh, and Martha Lane Fox, as Digital Inclusion has been promoted to top spot!) OK, what about the Partner Group? Out of the 11, no fewer than three are Digital Inclusion bods. Talk about overkill, this partner group has so many inclusion experts that everyone else is excluded! Then a TV guy, two sector skills council (we all know how effective they’ve been), three more civil servants, an Ofcom guy and some unnamed person for some quango I’ve never heard of. It’s a sorry lot.

Digital Economy Bill

Impending election, not a chance. A mish-mash of dull radio and TV stuff that is about as ‘digital’ as my granny’s bloomers and of, course, the promise to prosecute real digital users.

Digital Inclusion and Participation

Much as I admire the work of Helen Milner, putting this as the first priority is tragically backward looking. The original report confirmed that huge numbers of people who are not online DON’T WANT TO BE ONLINE. £12 million set aside but most of that will be eaten up by the a new model army of Digital Inclusion professionals. Laughably, Channel 4 are to be asked to lead the charge – a TV channel leading the way – how very British!

Digital Skills

Money will be poured into known and unknown quangos to no good effect. Most of this is far removed from the private sector that knows most about delivery in this area. Skillset – the TV and film mob will be central stage. And guess what the TV mob Channel 4 are leading the charge – again! C4's like a lost abandoned child, everyone fusiing and finding things for it to do.

Current and Next Generation Broadband

Universal Service promise – but this will be plagued by problems, namely, 'Who will pay and by when?' New snappily branded quango “Network Design and Procurement Group”.

Spectrum Modernisation

Arbitration, consultation and harmonisation through Ofcom. Problem here, “"With a Conservative Government, Ofcom as we know it will cease to exist. Its remit will be restricted to its narrow technical and enforcement roles," David Cameron. One concrete idea here, and they’re rare, is the possible support for Broadband on trains and mobile on tube.

Digital Radio Upgrade

This section is the longest but least relevant. Expensive DAB upgrade that nobody wants or cares about – really an excuse for giving yet more cash to the BBC. Since when did radio become a force for digital good?

Video Games

Tax relief for video games companies – no chance as European competition laws forbit it. A ‘usability’ centre – completely unnecessary – good, professional, commercial usability and test centres already exist. I know, I set one up. Then some stupid stuff about strengthening the PEGI system. This became law in June 2009 and has worked fine for years. It's complicated enough as it is, leave it be.

Illegal file sharing

DB turns out to be an analogue wolf in sheeps' clothing, hunting down digital users. Don’t worry, Ofcoms powers will be stripped away by the Tories and this unworkable proposal will die a deserved death. It’s just so unbalanced – no real look at outdated IP laws – just threats by top-down politicians and curmudgeons to kids and students.

Contestable Funding

Amazingly brief sentence on taking some money from BBC to give to locals. What’s ‘digital about this?

Public Service Content

Usual licence fee wrangles on how to split up the analogue pie between BBC, C4 and others – yawn. Digital Britain appears to be one in which we’re still all watching TV and listening to radio.

Independently Funded News Consortia

Funding ‘News Consortia’. Looks like more analogue protectionist rubbish.

BBC/ Independent Production in the Nations

More TV stuff. This time TV production quotas – apparently we need more in regions. Wow, that’s a new suggestion! You try getting all of those luvvies out of London.

National Digital Security

At last, some sensible, hard hitting technical and business-based, internet suggestions. This one section is worth more than all of the rest put together. Unfortunately, no one on the board or partner group knows a damn thing about any of this.

Personal Digital Safety

Fair enough, as long as Reith doesn’t rear his ugly head and the moralisers start telling me what to do.

Online Consumer Protection

Again, fair enough. Online commerce has to be robust.

Digital Government

Weak, weak, weak. Easy for Gov departments to wriggle out of this one. Then an amazing sentence, ‘Establishment of G-Cloud’. What the hell is that! And lastly reference to those unremittingly, backward looking map people, the Ordnance Survey.

Digital Delivery Agency

Having spawned so many units, quangos and bodies in this report, the report then suggests bringing them all together. Why not start off this way? Talk about horses and stable doors.

Other Relevant Activity

Next Generation Digital Test Beds (whatever they may be), Local newspapers, Local Authority advertising, BBC rights. It all ends on a string of bum analogue notes.

What a wasted opportunity.

Extreme learning - learn from an autistic savant

Daniel’s an autistic savant, one of less than fifty worldwide that have ‘Savant syndrome’, with unbelievable mental abilities in maths and language acquisition, matched by weaknesses in social skills. In this, his second book, he tries to lay bare the inner workings of his own remarkable mind. What I love about this book is his laser-like attention on the brain, or rather his own brain. Daniel knows a great deal more about learning than most learning professionals because he’s an expert or extreme learner. We, in turn, have much to learn from him.

Extreme learning

Autistic savants, Tammet tell us, are no more than ordinary brains doing extraordinary things through focus and extreme learning. He’s not afraid to attack known figures like Oliver Sachs and Tony Buzan, literally accusing Sachs of lying in an experiment and Buzan of lazy thinking on learning a second language. Theorists who attribute special abilities to savants also come under attack, especially those that assume unproven concepts such as photographic memories and genius-type subconscious ability. He shows that memories and abilities can be extraordinary, but that the techniques are ordinary. We can all learn how to learn better.

Magic of memory

He starts with a tour of the brain, with some interesting references to neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, along with the groundbreaking Pasceul-Leone piano experiment that showed the same levels of brain activity when both playing and simply imagining a piano exercise. In other words we learn by visualisation and mental rehearsal. But it’s his analysis of learning through feedback, the 'power or practice' (this law is ubiquitous) and structured diligent study that impresses.

Memory is explored in detail and it is here that Daniel drills down into his amazing abilities. He has the European record for remembering pi to 22,514 decimal places, learnt Icelandic in a week and has an astounding ability to learn new things. He explains contemporary memory theory, episodic/semantic, observer/field and construction at the point of recall, along with brain scan studies that show a complex process of reformulation, rather than duplication, of experiences. Autobiographical memory is multilayered in years/decades, days/weeks/months and finally in short second/minutes/hours. It’s a fine primer to the basic theory.

The first key to improved learning is to understand and apply the encoding of a learning experience by attending to its meaning. Elaborative encoding must integrate new information with pre-existing knowledge. In other words, you need a comprehension strategy, not just a memory strategy. This is where role playing, the use of our imagination, music (NOT the Mozart effect) and movement come in. Chunking and the visualisation of concrete images encode in such a way that they can be efficiently stored and recalled.

Consolidation is the next key, with sleep being an essential part of the process. It’s better to learn at night before one goes to sleep than during the day, with little chance of consolidation. Retrieval cues through contextual learning are also necessary. Here he has a go at classroom learning (the wrong disembodied context). Cue-rich learning is much more effective than disembodied learning. Forgetting through interference must also be avoided.

World of words

Savants are usually known for their numerical skills, but many have remarkable linguistic abilities. Daniels’s ability to learn a second language is superb. He shows that a second language is stored separately in the brain (except when acquired as a young child) and that one must learn a second language in a different way. He’s full of wonderful techniques based on repetition of sounds, songs, affixes, onomatopoeic words, word clusters, word relationships, pairs of words, nouns with articles and lots of reading, and uses his own experience as a multi-linguist to bring this all to life, with a great description of how he appeared on Icelandic TV and wowed them with his conversational Icelandic, learnt in a week. Language teachers should buy this book for this chapter alone.

Number instinct

We have an inborn ability to do maths, as has been shown by a battery of clever experiments with babies and infants. Born with the ability to recognise quantities between 1-4, and maths, he explains, we simply need perseverance and the simple visualisation of numbers to make it work for your own brain. He sets great store by the ‘languageness’ of maths. He could have gone much further here and explained how this and other practical techniques could be used to improve numeracy in schools. We know where and how learners fail in numeracy but continue to teach them in an abstract and dislocated fashion, leading to puzzlement and an early exit. We know that contextualising and visualising maths through the workplace, shopping and so on, improve learning, but still teach it in dull doses of abstraction.

Light to sight

On perception, he gives a reasonable account of the basics of the psychology of perception with an interesting account of famous Ramachandran and Hirstein’s ‘Science of Art’ paper, where they put forward a neurological theory of aesthetic experience, based on eight universal principles. This caused a stir among those who abhor reductionist approaches to art, but it’s fascinating stuff. The eight principles are; peak exaggeration shift, grouping of similar perceptual effects, isolation of a single visual component, contrast, perceptual problem solving, generic viewpoints, metaphors and symmetry.

Food for thought

The second half of the book is more speculative, but no less interesting. He has some insights into the danger of political correctness leading to a stifling of debate, something explored in Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police, where a simplistic morality may limit complex analysis. Urban myths are discussed in terms of their exaggeration, tipping over into scientific urban myths such as the link between MMR and autism. As an autistic person he hates this sort of pseudoscience. But it’s his speculation into the nature of belief, with his admiration for Spinoza’s idea of disbelief involving the rejection of belief that takes him beyond the simple scientific stuff. This guy is one smart cookie.

Information overload

David Schenk’s Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut sees info-glut as a psychological problem. We are immersed in many different flows of information and some psychologists have looked at the effect of this on our ability to concentrate, even sleep. He is also part of the backlash against the common belief that young people can multitask; they can’t, as studies by Marois, Horvitz and Iqbal have shown. This work has considerable consequences for the workplace where recovery times from emails and browsing have been shown to decrease productivity. He also brings in Roberstson’s study on the outsourcing of memory. All in all, he’s not fond of what Rosek called The Cult of Information – he’s an ideas man.

Forgivable weaknesses

The chapter on IQ is an interesting skim through the academic pros and cons of IQ testing, but says little about Daniel himself. In fact the book only springs into life when he’s relating his theories to his own wonderful experiences. The editor could, perhaps, have guided him more in this direction.

PS

On page 176 he claims to ‘regularly spot misspellings and other subtle errors in the pages of a book or newspaper’ yet failed to spot the howler on page 147 where he describes his own number range landscape between ‘2,9000 (sic) and 3,000’. I’m no savant, in fact my wife suggests that this only goes to show shows that my talents are in being a pedant!

(Originally published in LINE’s newsletter)

Fat heads: obesity and technology

Obesity? I personally blame JK Rowling, encouraging all of those chubby little teenage girls to spend hours reading those big, fat tombs of books in the quiet of their own bedrooms. Then there’s the endless, overlong movies, where they sit on their fat butts munching popcorn and slurping coke. Can’t they get out and play or take up a sport? I’m convinced there’s a strong correlation between Harry Potter fanatics and fatness. Show me a fat girl and I’ll show you a reader! Show me a book group and I’ll show you a room full of overweight bods. Now, I’m sure your indignation has been aroused by this rant, but this is the sort of argument that the middle-class, mumsy brigade pull out all of the time when blaming technology for obesity.

I had a weird experience recently when a few members of my audience (all teachers) harangued me over the problem of obesity, caused they claimed, by being online and playing computer games. This is a common comment (rarely a question) at talks I give, and curiously it often comes from people who, for want of a better phrase, are more than just a little bit cuddly themselves. Unfortunately, putting the rap for obesity on technology is all too easy. So let’s chew the fat a little.

Padded out problem
Sure prosperity has led to an increase in obesity, but let’s keep this in proportion. We come across our first problem with definitions of obesity, which are confusing, especially among children. There’s a difference in the literature between being ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ and compounding the two leads to exaggeration. The definitions themselves are variable, complicated by gender differences, growth patterns, doubts over BMI measurements and so on. The whole filed is dogged by a lack of comparative standards.

Interestingly, in looking at the research in this area you do come across some rather wild claims about causality. Suppose a study does show a correlation between obese children and the amount of time they spend online. The causality may be complex. Fat kids may have low social skills, low self-esteem and may use online activity as a way of avoiding ridicule. On the internet nobody knows your weight. In other words internet activity may be caused by obesity, not the other way round.

Evidence
So where’s the evidence that computer activity causes obesity, as opposed to genes, reading, listening to the radio, watching TV, reading newspapers, sitting at a desk at work, sitting in class at school, commuting by train, driving or the most obvious candidate – stuffing your face? Answer – there is none.

In fact, there is neither correlation nor causation. The ‘digital divide’ people tell us that technology is not being used by the lower socio-economic orders, but these are precisely the people who suffer most from obesity. If there was a correlation between obesity and the use of technology things would surely be reversed.

Most of the activity in this area is just noise by people who know little about either obesity or internet usage. Anti-technology moralisers isolating the variable they love to hate.

Computer games and obesity
Playing computer games is not as sedentary as most think. With modern input devices, the Wii, Guitar hero and other games have led to a surge in active, physical gaming. The Wii is the best selling fixed console worldwide and five out of the top ten games in the chart this week are active sports games: Wii Sports Resort (1), Wii Sports (3), Wii Fit (5), EA Sports Active (8), Wii Play (10). It’s a convenient scapegoat for the luddites to blame the medium they hate most. It used to be radio, then TV, now it’s the internet and computers. In fact, given the direct link between obesity and sugar-rich, junk food, it seems likely that TV, where most such advertising takes place, is far more dangerous than being online. Indeed, computer games are now being used to combat ageing, cognitive problems and obesity, with positive results.

John Hughes RIP

Saddened today at the news of Film Director John Hughes death, aged only 59. Ferris Beuller’s Day Off is my favourite ‘school’ film and I’ve shown the famous ‘teaching’ clip from this movie hundreds of times all over the world. It always raises a laugh, because he absolutely nailed the single, most absurd problem in education – boring teachers/lecturers, boring people by just talking at them. Ben Stein (left), a former teacher, plays the role perfectly.

Here’s the transcript:

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the ... Anyone? Anyone? ... the Great Depression, passed the ... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? ... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President [George H. W.] Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. "Voodoo" economics.”

Why my favourite film on education? Well I positively hate the whole private/boarding school thing that has dominated school films in the UK, especially the whole Harry Potter boarding school thing (including the books). It makes me wince when I see adults reading this tosh. I ahve a similar feeling when I see young minds being similarly polluted, but don't those middle-class mums just love this stuff. A tiny number of kids went to these schools, but as our culture is often defined by the people who went to such schools, we get it shoved down our throats. It’s repulsive, unrealistic and divisive.

Ferris Beuller showed school as it really is, OK at times, but on the whole rather boring. My other favourite scene from the movie was the long ‘taking attendance’ scene, again played by Stein, "Beuller, Beuller, Beuller....”. It goes on forever. The empty chair said it all. Bunking off school is likely to have been one of the most exciting experiences in a young person’s life. It was thrilling and the freedom exhilarating. That in itself says much about school.

Sue Palmer - reply to reply

Thanks Sue – good of you to reply to my last post (see comments). So let’s carry the debate forward. I have read Toxic Childhood and 21^st Century Boys. I did so after seeing you in the Brighton Festival two years ago (I’m a Trustee), when I attended and reviewed the debate hosted by Polly Toynbee. I thought then, and think now, that this species of ‘parenting’ literature is ‘toxic’ only in the sense that it is largely middle-class bile. Let me explain.

Toxic prejudices

You claim that you love technology but every single chapter of Toxic Childhood has a go at technology. “At the moment, too much technology is dumbing down our children....if the gap left by preoccupied parents is filled by the fruits of technology, toxic childhood syndrome begins to take hold”. Technology in schools “has made no noticeable impact”. “insidious.. screen-based activity..imagination-rotting, creativity-dumbing”. I could go on.

I’m also not at all convinced on your claim about very young children. The opening salvo in Toxic Childhood is against a teenager you describe, in the Uffizi Gallery of all places, as having, “the multiple trademarks of the brat...Poor child. Poor Parents. Poor Western Civilisation...the whole of the developed world...now teems with miserable little creatures”, and that’s just on the first page! All of this from the observation of a bored teenager in an Art Gallery in Florence! Go to any art gallery and you’ll see bored teenagers – it’s normal. You go on to blame this “epidemic of misery” firmly on the “clash between our technology-driven culture and our biological heritage” calling children “battery children...technobrats”. Difficult to backtrack from your claim that “My research suggests that children’s development in every one of these areas is threatened by the side-effects of technological...TV and computer games at home”. I really winced at your description of working class kids as “pinched and angry, with dead eyes....Their parents, deprived, uneducated, often scarcely more than children themselves...this feral generation”. Then the outrageous, old, racist chestnut “the birth rate among the have-nots is soaring, while among educated classes it is falling...could eventually threaten social stability”. At this point, and all of this is in the first chapter, I thought I was reading a BNP manifesto.

Toxic marketing

You make a great fuss in these books about the “siren call of the marketing men” (sexist or what?) but the opening chapter of Toxic Childhood (in itself a marketing ploy) is titled ‘Toxic Childhood Syndrome’. This is hysterical, and worse, borrows terminology from science (toxicity) and medicine (syndrome) to hyperbolically market your ideas. You are not a physician and hyping this term you’re doing a disservice to language, medicine and psychology. AIDS (Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome) is a real syndrome. You’re ‘syndrome’ is a piece of marketing. ‘Toxic’ infers actual toxicity, again usurping a scientific term for the trite purposes of marketing. In truth, your ‘syndrome’ is an attempt at popularising a piece of polemic.

Marketing seems to be ‘good’ if it’s associated with hysterical parenting literature, but ‘bad’ if it comes from companies selling their wares. ‘Parenting’ literature is marketing at its worst, and ‘Toxic Childhood’ is perhaps the worst example I can think of, exaggerating the case, using pseudo-medical language to blame everything and everyone, especially poor parents, for the ills of society in general.

Toxic claims: ADHD, Autism

Here’s where things get really ‘toxic’. Autism is NOT caused by emotional deprivation, that much is clear, and to attribute causes at this stage is to move well beyond the research findings. The most promising line of research at the moment seems to be complicated genetic factors (multiple genes), so let’s be sensible. It is a mistake to see autism as a problem that is curable through some simplistic parenting books, it is a lifelong condition not caused by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parenting. It is a downright insult to the parents of children with these disorders to blame them, even in part. Rich or poor they deal with the problem, while schools often struggle to even recognise the issue.

Similarly with ADHD. Genetic factors are clearly involved as shown in twin and genetic studies. More worrying, however, is that the lack of real evidence from brain studies is puhsing many researchers towards a more sceptical stance, looking at over-diagnosis. To blame technol,ogy is simply speculation.

The hysteria whipped up around the MMR vaccine is the most recent example of dangerous amateurs dabbling in areas they know nothing about. Non-scientific populist writing flooded the parenting ‘market’ causing the current problems with measles. Schools (my own included) are still dealing with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, putting other children at risk, because of the so called ‘toxic’ arguments.

Research?

The research quoted in Toxic Childhood is simply one-sided and unrepresentative. In among the cherry-picked reports are lots of secondary and tertiary articles from newspapers (including that journal of fairness the Daily Mail), personal interviews, anecdotal speeches and personal emails. In no sense can this be regarded as a balanced look at the research. To take one of many examples, to exclude Judith Harris, from this debate is to exclude someone who really has done the research on the nature/nurture debate, a serious area of research which you describe in the book as “tediously familiar”. Perhaps the most hyperbolic example of one-sidedness is your description of Laynard’s book ‘Happiness’ as, “surely the most extraordinary book on economics ever written”. Sorry Sue, it doesn’t get into the Top 100.

Technology

I agree that your books are not just about the malign influence of technology, but that’s my field and that’s what I’ve focused on. You do have a go at technology in every single chapter of your book, so it’s not just one small part of the problem. It underpins your whole argument. Even here, it’s all about one-sided. TV, on the whole, is bad for young children, except, of course for the BBC, where you’re an advisor. You can’t have it both ways. You criticise the “glut of TV nanny programmes” but isn’t Toxic Childhood, exactly that in print? The main difference being that only middle-class parents will buy and read your book, which is not the audience you’re aiming for.

Primary teachers

Primary school teaching has been more than guilty of introducing problems of its own into the education of our children. At no point have you really addressed the point that it was educational professionals, advisors and teacher training establishments that caused many of the literacy problems that authors are blaming on ‘screen-based’ culture and other causes. There’s a lot of blame attached to other causes but little thrown at the ‘whole-language’ Taliban, who wrecked the literacy of so many children for so many years. I witnessed it myself with my own children, when spelling remained uncorrected and no attempt was made to explain or teach the underlying phonetic structure of our language. The ‘entire primary teaching profession’ is the very body that delivered the flawed teaching, and some of it is still hanging around in the system.

Sue Palmer - Toxic moraliser

Sue Palmer’s one of those professional moralisers, like Lynn Truss and John Huimphries. Author of ‘Toxic Childhood’, she knows best about what’s good for us and our children. A nosy, nanny keen to blame everything on ‘being online’. She’d love to put all techies on the ‘naughty step’. She has a problem with ‘screen-based culture’ and this would be fine if she didn’t have a whacking big website which advertises her courses, books, CDs and availability as a speaker. ‘Toxic Childhood’ and ‘Detoxing Childhood’ are available on CD, from the website....

To purchase the 'Detoxing Childhood' CD for £12.00 (P&P included) click here

It’s like discovering that your drug councillors is a secret cocaine addict!

The problem with people like Palmer is the discriminatory nature of their technology choices. They love radio, especially Radio 4 and woe betide anyone who criticises their quaint, little, middle-class programmes like the Archers. They have cars, washing machines, mobile phones and so on, but when it comes to other people’s technology choices they get all uppity. She hates ‘screen-based’ culture but will appear on TV faster than a hungry whippet and will prostitute herself to The Daily Mail for any old fee.

Toxic teaching

Sue’s site is full of that ‘angry from Tunbridge Wells’ Lynn Truss stuff about apostrophes and bad spelling. You know the sort of stuff, pictures of greengrocer boards with wrong punctuation. She, of course, has the answer; her very own ‘Phonix’ (sic) course. Now, as Alison Morissette would say, isn’t it ironic, that a literacy teacher is blaming technology for poor reading, writing, speaking, punctuation, spelling and everything else, when it has been acknowledged that her own profession and professional advisers were the major cause of the problem by introducing the crazy ‘whole-word’ teaching method into our schools for two decades. We’re still reeling from the effect.

This system had no academic credibility but swept through the system, eagerly snapped up by gullible teachers, and resulted in two generations of poor literacy teaching. Doesn’t she realise that it was education that failed the people who have poor levels of literacy. It was they who were the purveyors of toxic teaching. Thankfully, more experienced teachers and academics put up a fierce battle of resistance. Many deliberately not using these methods in their own classrooms, in contradiction to their school or LEA policy. In the end good sense won out and we went back to a simpler, more sensible approach to learning how to read and write.

Teen report goes bonkers

Some reports are so timely that they become massively viral. This one, based on the evidence of a 15 year-old intern at Morgan Stanley is one such example. Here’s the main points:

More media consumed

Paying more an issue

Advertising is crass

Print, especially newspapers irrelevant, apart from freesheets, like METRO

Mid-range mobiles are good

Comms seen as free – talk using consoles, SKYPE etc

Txting is massive

WiFi more important than 3G

Broadcast radio is dead

Last.fm, (ad fee) & Spotify deliver personalised playlists

Listen to loads of music

Download lots for free

Watch less TV

Hate ads on TV –fast forward

Hate ads on billboards etc

Love support viral marketing

Mostly favourite series or specific sport event

Google is big

YouTube for music/anime

Cinema still popular

Cinema drops off at 15 – gets too expensive

Lots watch DVDs

Everyone has a mobile

Sony Ericsson’s v. Popular

Pay as you go preferred

Txting and calling (not video messaging)

Don’t use phone for email

Email on home computer

Most have PCs, not Macs

Teens hate Twitter

Wiis very popular

Touchscreen is hot

Mobiles that hold lots of music are hot

Portable devices with internet access (iTouch/iPhone) are hot

Really big tellies are hot

Interesting that these rather obvious points should have reached fever-pitch, viral, meme marketing from a report published by a bank. The fact that it was largely compiled by a 15 year-old seemed to have done the trick.

Universities - empty vessels

I’ve been into dozens of Universities over the years, mainly to give talks and lectures, and it never fails to amaze me how empty they are. It’s as if they were test sites for neutron bombs. At one in June, I wandered into three buildings before I could find a living soul who could who could give me directions. The problem is obvious; most of these buildings seem empty because they are empty, most of the time.

Empty and expensive

In fact, even the best rarely reach 25% occupancy per year. University campuses must be the among the most inefficient uses of land and real estate imaginable. Buildings take up valuable land, use utilities such as energy ,water and telecoms and require cleaning, even when empty. They are also, year on year, falling apart, requiring regular physical maintenance Then there’s the administrative costs. It’s all about utilisation. No one in their right mind would design such an inefficient misuse of resources in any other area of human endeavour.

Crops, calendars and capital spend

The problem is the agricultural calendar, but it goes well beyond this. Departmental protectionism demands separate buildings for every department and little in the way of shared resources. On top of all this is the tendency to build to this departmental model, rather than use technology and shared space to encourage cross-disciplinary interaction. The capital spend is departmental and therefore deplorably inefficient. There are notable counter-examples but they are rare. In my home town we have two Universities (U of Brighton and U of Sussex) on the same road but they’d never dream of sharing libraries or anything else for that matter.

Dartmouth as model

I’m rather glad that the Sixth Form and College building programmes have fallen through due to a lack of cash. This will force those institutions to think about the more flexible use of their buildings. This means more use of technology, learning at a distance and sharing. I attended a UK University (Edinburgh) and a US Ivy League University (Dartmouth), and the contrast was startling. Dartmouth has a sophisticated D-plan or semester schedule giving students choices across the entire year. The place was never empty.

OU as model

There is another model here – the OU, perhaps the greatest educational achievement in 20^th century Britain. It has the greatest number of students in the UK but the fewest on campus. Why? Because of its use of technology and novel models for teaching and learning. Have other institutions learnt from this? Have they hell.

Universities run for academics not students

Many academics spend very little time at their universities. Some live so far away that it would be impractical. If I decide to do a course at university in October, I have to wait 11 months to start. In this age of on-demand, timeshifted experience, they’re an anachronism. That they have the cheek to offer MBA courses on organisational issues is a disgrace and then they have the further cheek to demand increases in funding which they squander on what - emptiness.

Coffee - its role in learning as wonderdrug and social stimulus

Drink coffee, stay smart

A breakthrough trial from the University of Florida showing that coffee, more accurately caffeine, both prevents and reverses symptoms of Alzheimers in mice. Sure, mice trials don’t always transfer to humans, but these mice had the relevant human genes transferred. It suggests that caffeine both blocks and attacks the plaque that causes Alzheimers and memory loss. The University of Florida used 55 mice and gave one half doses of caffeine, similar to around five cups a day for humans, and the other half water. What was astonishing is that after two months the dementia mice had recovered their memories and were the same as the mice who showed no signs of dementia. The results were astonishing. What’s more, these mice had a 50% reduction in the beta-amyloid protein, which forms the plaque that causes brain dementia. Human trials are expected soon.

Coffee and memory

There’s now lots of evidence that coffee improves short-term memory and reaction times by acting on the pre-frontal cortex. Researchers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, in a group of 15 volunteers given 100 mg of coffee then scanned and tested, showed distinct improvements in memory in the caffeine fuelled group, "those who received caffeine had significantly greater activation in parts of the prefrontal lobe, known as the anterior cingulate and the anterior cingulate gyrus. These areas are involved in 'executive memory', attention, concentration, planning and monitoring."

In another French study researchers compared women aged 65 and older who drank more than three cups of coffee per day with those who drank one cup or less per day. Those who drank more caffeine showed less decline in memory tests over a four year period. The study, published in the journal of Neurology, raises the possibility that caffeine may also protect against the development of dementia.

A refined study from the University of Arizona, published a trial in Psychological Science, showed that in 40 participants, given 250 Mg of coffee or decaffeinated coffee, the group that were given caffeine showed no decline in memory across the day in contrast to the decaffeinated group who showed significant decline.

Coffee shops and learning

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, reminded me this morning at the Reboot Britain conference, that coffee shops were the 'social network’ hubs of their day. Long established in the Muslim world, they became the focus for debate and business. Late 17^th century coffee shops charged a penny a cup and were called ‘penny universities’, as they were such powerful places of cross-disciplinary debate. By 1739, 551 coffee shops were open in London, many hives of intellectual and business activity. Edward Lloyd’s coffee shop became Lloyds of London. Jonathon’s Coffee House in 1698 listed stock prices, which eventually became the London Stock Exchange. Similarly in New York, a coffee house became the New York Stock Exchange.
More recently Starbucks and its imitators, picked up on the laptop workers offering free wifi fuelling work with unfeasibly large cups of coffee. They've now become focal points for meetings and working. Many have people deep in though, writing, coding, emailing and doing their jobs, stimulated by coffee and the general social environment of a warn and inviting place. WiFi in coffee shops has given them a real lease of life.

Coffee is cognitively good for you

Coffee has therefore long fuelled learning, whether it be through the direct stimulation of the brain, increasing attention, improving memory, preventing dementia or providing a social context for debate and work.

Why schools are divisive

Community cohesion!

Educational policy makers love abstract concepts, especially if they’re alliterative , like ‘community cohesion’. Schools have been given a key role by the Government and OFSTED, we’re told, in ‘community cohesion’, yet another spurious concept and role to distract schools from the business of ‘learning’.

Any real community facet to a school is accidental. Kids are forced by law to go there, parents meet each other when they deliver and pick up their offspring at the start and end of the day (but at the schools gates-never going inside). In reality, schools are the very opposite of communal and could be described as divisive.

7 divisive behaviours

1. An apartheid runs through the UK system of private/public schools divides sharply along class and socioeconomic lines, separating rich from poor.
2. Another apartheid split is along academic/vocational lines, with Diplomas being branded as 2^nd class A-levels.
3. Faith schools divide communities along religious lines, whether it be Catholic, Church of England, Islam or Judaism. They isolate and separate rather than encourage community spirit.
4. Schools shut up shop for five major periods per year, so they are completely inert in the community for much of the year.
5. Even when open they are largely closed institutions, with little in the way of shared facilities or access by the community.
6. Students have little opportunity to really engage with the community, as schools are places of incarceration. Community work is not a formal part of the curriculum.
7. Schools largely exclude parents from the process of education, keeping them at a distance with ten minutes or so every year.

Community mistaken for disunity

In practice ‘community cohesion’ means yet more over-written, vague policy documents. Of course, what they actually mean by community is the same old diversity agenda. The gathering of endless stats on racism, homophobic behaviour and so on. Community is being mistaken for disunity. Remember that over 60% of the parents and people in the community see school as the place they failed. Look to pubs, clubs, cafes, parks and other places for community, not schools.

Sean Bailey - talking Tory tornado

Shaun Bailey’s breezes into debates like a tornado, turning things on their head and challenging orthodoxies. As the black Conservative candidate for Hammersmith with 20 years experience in working in tough environments, he has earned the right to fight the next election on issues on which he knows a great deal.

He goes for the throats of the teacher unions, blaming them for betraying the students in state education by introducing undemanding environments in schools for the very people that need demands made of them. Unions deliver benefits to teachers, not students and parents. This parental involvement is a common theme among the people he speaks but they are largely excluded from the equation. It all starts in the home – damn right it does, so why do schools ignore or patronise parents so much?

As a youth worker for 20 years he sees that nobody is being really honest with the kids and parents he knows. Middle class types molly-coddle people which leads them towards almost certain failure. Lay it on the line – tell them and their parents what the consequences of educational failure actually means. Don’t pander to their every cultural need. It’s not about immersing people in the destructive side of their culture – a strong believer in sport and competition, he regrets the culture of dependency that is rampant in his community, making young black kids less, not more, independent. He says to the boys he works with, “I’ll do nothing for you but anything to help you.”

In education he is full on when it comes to classroom discipline and home-school agreements. He sees state sector education as having dropped the ball on these issues. Make sure the parents sign a document making it clear what their responsibilities are. I’m with him here. Our home-school agreement is written in that vague institutional style and says nothing about actual responsibilities. It even includes jargon that only an educational professional would understand. Schools are ‘educational’ establishments, not holding pens. He doesn’t really buy the idea that schools are the key to Community Cohesion and every fashionable social theory that pops up.

Much as I disagree with his politics, he’s a good guy and we need people like him to stimulate an otherwise moribund debate. His straight-talking style and honesty is what’s badly needed in parliament.

OFSTED's own Xena the Warrior Princess

Zenna Atkins is the Chair of OFSTED and a force of nature. A good 6 foot in heels she tells it as it is and isn’t afraid to have a go at all of those educational moralisers who use OFSTED as an excuse for their own failures. Expelled from school with only one o-level, she’s become an experienced social entrepreneur and operator in large public sector bodies. I spoke on the same platform as her at a Channel 4 event this week and she booted things off in fine fashion. You can see her at Portsmouth games just behind the corner flag bad mouthing opposition players.

Don’t blame ofsted

She’s more than a little impatient with teachers and others who simply point elsewhere, usually to OFSTED, when people try to identify weaknesses and improve education. Sure OFSTED has its weaknesses, but who would deny that bad teaching exists, that there are too many people teaching who don’t want to be there and shouldn’t be there, that schools are poorly run fiscally? Are we really saying that they should not be inspected?

Schools infantalise parents

Her second theme was a powerful argument against blaming parents. One teacher in the audience described ‘the prejudice of parents’. The simple fact is that 60% of parents left school with qualifications we regard as being less than satisfactory. School, for the majority of parents, is somewhere they do not want to revisit, as it is where they were marked as failures. She herself describes how she feels nervous when visiting schools and often feels as if she’s being told off in conversations with staff. No wonder parents are not engaged with the education of their children. Schools infantalise parents.

Relevance

Is the curriculum relevant? Not on your Nellie. As an employer she looks for autonomy and whether the students has stuck a paper round, rather than qualifications. So much of what is taught is only relevant to the minority of students. The lack of relevance to survival, never mind employment is astonishing.

Technology

Also an advocate of technology she has no time for those who shilly shally behind excuses for not getting on with the task of using the technology that learners already use in their daily lives.

Fearless

Now here’s why I love Xena. At the end of her talk she rattled out some politically sensitive ideas around ‘kids teaching kids’, ‘ linking benefits to ‘school attendance and performance’, making the money ‘follow the kids’. I’ve never heard public servants speak like this in public and being so unafraid of the press. Xena then shot off for her appraisal, leaving a shocked audience in her not inconsiderable wake.

Give me 10,000 Xenas

We need far more people like Xena on public sector boards. She’s smart, understands her domain, has empathy with the people she’s trying to help, and is vocal. Far too many boards are packed with people who shy way from controversy or contention. We need people who scrutinise, debate and work towards change. In education there are far too many people making decisions on the state sector while sending their own kids private. Far too many who are part of some small network, often ‘London-based’. Then there’s the tokenism of diversity, focusing on equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. The system is atherosclerotic, gummed up with the plaque of tokenism and traditionalism.

£20 million down same old drain

Hope you caught the announcement this week on boosting e-learning. My worst fears about Digital Britain are coming true. Hot on the heels of the retro Digital Britain day and visionless report, we have the first major act and it’s the same old establishment rot.

The Open Learning Innovation fund will team up established laggards with large US corporations to fritter away yet more of your money. Have they learnt nothing from BBC Jam, UKUniversities, NHSU etc etc. Having already poured well over £100 million into these disasters, the powers that be are determined to burn even more of our money.

And it gets worse. It will be chaired by Dame Lynne Brindley, the CEO of the British Library. So the future of innovation in e-learning will be in the hands of a librarian! Don’t worry though, Microsoft are also on the board (yikes!)....and the British Council (why?). Then there’s the good old BBC in as advisors. So BBC Jam has been quietly buried. The very people who frittered away tens of millions in a failed attempt to produce content (while destroying the market) are seen as the best of breed advisors. You couldn’t have gathered a more useless, backward looking bunch of laggards if you tried.