Best physics lecturer ever dismissed physics lectures

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!!

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 the 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 Kappa, 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, than 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), the assessor 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)

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 seven (six for some) 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

JISC a minute! Why JISC can’t deliver innovation.....

JISCed!

Many moons ago I was contacted by JISC to speak at one of their events, but when I provided the usual biography and picture, they got back to me saying I couldn’t speak as I, “was not affiliated to an educational institution”. I pointed out to the hapless girl on the phone that it was THEY who had asked me to speak. So much for engagement with the outside world. It would seem that not much has changed.

JISC censorship

No surprise this year then, when friend of mine found himself in a similar Kafkaesque position with JISC. They had asked him to speak on mobile learning (he really is an expert here) but when he submitted his abstract they hastily arranged an ‘Elluminate’ meeting, where of a group of 7 JISCers (overstaffed I’d suggest?) began to unashamedly edit the talk. They literally outlined what they wanted him to say. His response: “To which I replied ‘fuck off’” was natural. He explained that he was very busy and wouldn’t become a proxy for their views, and offered to ‘univite’ himself from the conference. They relented and let him speak.

The point of these stories is not to say that JISC is wholly and utterly useless. It’s not. In fact, it has many good people and strengths. It is, however, at times inward looking and sometimes institutionally blinkered, especially on innovation. First, it’s just too big and amorphous. There’s been an army of JISC bods around at conferences over the last few years. Many are pretty good and knowledgeable. Fair enough, as I applaud efforts to get some innovation in FE (which is normally ignored) and HE. Problem is, I don’t see enough innovation in HE and FE. It’s not that JISC isn’t trying to be innovative; it’s just that the model is wrong. They have several things going against them. As one senior FE person said to me last week, “FE and HE don’t innovate because they ’ve never had to”. But it’s really about a fundamentally flawed approach to innovation and cultural change.

JISC and innovation

Look up JISC on Google, and it says JISC - Inspiring Innovation. But does it? The website still has David Lammy as the Minister for Higher education, and there's a feeling that its insularity is a problem. The name's a bit of a giveaway as it has its roots, not in educational innovation but IT; Joint Information Systems Committee.

JISC can’t be the major innovator, as much of the major innovation in FE and HE has come from the outside. The technology is the domain of the private sector, OER is largely driven by Foundations and pedagogy is still, well stuck in the ‘lecture’ driven rut. They mention the word ‘pedagogy’ a lot, then default back to lectures. Try questioning the ‘lecture’ - I did and got crucified at ALT, but when the talk was released on YouTube it attracted lots of positive attention (lesson learnt – get out more).

Large scale institutional change in FE and HE, such as the OU, Learndirect, University of Phoenix, MIT and other innovative organisations, have often come from external sources of inspiration, whether it’s politicians, smart public servants or entrepreneurs. I’m not saying innovation is solely in the domain of the private sector, but it’s certainly not natural territory in the public sector. We need both.

Some JISC innovation projects have to be seen to be believed. Well, maybe not even seen. Take the “Blind interactive simulation cricket user training”. Surely this is proof enough of the second and third rate ‘faux’ research in this area. The project objective is to “create a bespoke digital interactive practice and coaching space for Blind Cricket”. This is ‘donkeypedia’ territory.

People, not processes, innovate

You can look at innovation in technology and education in two ways:

1. Diffusion (nudges, gradualism, lots of small projects, pilots etc.)

2. Disruption (big thinking, strategic change)

I fear that the first has been the model for far too long and has failed in so many ways. Colleges and universities have failed to climb the e-maturity path, share little in terms of best practice and tend to default to traditional, embedded norms.

The second, disruption, is possible, I think, because the political climate wants cost savings. There is the real possibility of reshaping education with increased use of the OU and OER model. This is all about SCALABILITY, whether it’s recorded lectures, online content, alternatives to lectures, a fourth semester, reduced capital expenditure and OER. SCALABILITY is the key term for me, which is why I object so much to the 'it's not about the technology' line. It's the technology that gives us pedagogic scalability. That's what makes Google, Wikipedia, iTUNES U, Youtube, Facebook and OER resources work. We have seen how the OU and Learndirect have positioned themselves as effective and scalable solutions in everything from basic skills to PhDs, yet few in JISC would have the slightest idea of how this is done in a real delivery organisation like Learndirect, as they don’t engage with many outside of FE and HE.

JISC, and others, by definition, can never lead, or even discuss, radical innovation. They are reduced to ‘nudges and pilots’ which fail because there’s no real subsequent sharing and adoption of best practice. There’s no shortage of good of ideas, just a shortage of will and impact. I had a lecture from someone at BIS last week who talked about this very problem. There are lots of ideas but little changes, as dissemination and adoption is weak. He rolled out the usual ‘stimulate, incubate, adopt’ model, forgetting the simple fact that processes don’t innovate, PEOPLE innovate.

What to do?

OK, the times they are a changin’. Has the pressure to innovate arrived? I think so. We have to get the cost side of education down through scalable solutions. That is the realpolitik for the next decade or more. That means radical innovation around scalable solutions, and not some fatuous debate about how many kids on free school meals get into Oxford.

Note, that I’m not saying that JISC should not exist, just that it should be realistic about its role as it is straightjacketed in terms of innovation. There’s a real need for IT support and advice, but not an army of people who inadvertently reinforce the status quo. Grant money can only be claimed by existing FE and HE institutions, and that limits innovation to internal sources. This actually stops innovation. We need to bring together, Foundations, companies, entrepreneurs, politicians, civil servants, FE leaders and HE leaders to tackle the crisis. In many ways I saw an attempt at this at the WISE Summit in Qatar. But trying to do this through JISC is, I fear, ‘doomed to succeed’.

HEFCE review

This review started September last year and is due to deliver Spring 2011. To be honest, the membership of the review group may determine the outcome as it lacks any genione outide voices. Reviews such as this need to have the credibility of objectivity, so I hope they really do show such objectivity, and get over the hurdle of being 'on the inside', the very problem I've highlighted.

OK Jimmy Wales – what's next after Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a miracle and Jimmy Wales walks on digital water. So it was great to both see him speak, and get to speak to him, at Learning Without Frontiers this week. A truly 21^st century phenomenon (started 2001) and thorn in the side of those who think that knowledge is the domain of libraries and educational institutions, Wikipedia is BIG, with over 3.5 million articles in English, appearing in 262 languages (not all are fully populated).What’s more, it’s a fantastic legacy, as important as the publication of any book in history, as it has an astounding past (crowdsourced) and a fecund future, in terms of content, access, growth and impact. So what answers did Jimmy Wales have to the following questions?

How many?

Last month there were 408 million unique users. Think about that for a minute. Only China and India have more people.

Who’s looking at what?

Turns out different countries look at different things. The Japanese are obsessed with ‘pop’. Germans have ‘geography’ as their top topic (should we be worried?) and Spain ‘science and technology’. On the whole, however, pop, sex, history, geography, science and health are the big topics. Did you know that the LOST scriptwriting team had to use LOSTpedia to check when new references came up as the whole thing became too complicated to track?

Who creates the content?

Wikipedians are 87% male, average age 26, highly educated (almost all graduates) and the majority do not have a partner or children. Jimmy described them as “intelligent, obsessed guys with too much time on their hands”. Now some could see this as a bit of a problem, but hey, is it our fault guys? Get on there girls.

Wikipedia in China

When Jimmy was in China he was in a restaurant and Wikipedia appeared on a menu. This happened several times and people sent him menus from all over China with Wikipedia dishes on the menu. He guessed that people searched on Google for translations for dishes and since Wikipedia comes up often, it was carried over blindly onto the menus.

More seriously, China banned Wikipedia, but freed up the site around Olympics time, and now only block sensitive pages such as Taiwan and Tiananmen Square. It’s still the one country where whole classes of students have never heard the term ‘Wikipedia’. Everywhere else, the majority have not only heard of it but used it regularly.

Who hates Wikipdedia?

So what did Jimmy think about the ‘haters’, mostly academics? As he explained, they mostly don’t understand what Wikipedia is, in terms of construction, editing and discussion. Sure things are wrong, at times, but as he explained, on the whole, it’s pretty good, and as good as other traditional sources of printed knowledge. To those who say it’s too editorialised, his reply was that you can’t accept all contributions for entry and not have an editorial process. It can’t be completely open. On the whole Wikipedia is built by smart people who care.

What next?

I asked Jimmy whether he ever thought Wikipedia would create an education version, as teachers are not scalable and a step by step instructional adjunct with self-assessment tools would make it more relevant to education. He misunderstood the question a little and referred me to Wikibooks and explained that there’s too many national accreditation boards to consider. That didn’t stop him forging ahead with Wikipedia. Simply go round them. Ignore them. Let users and creators decide on content.

This is important, as Wikipedia broke the back of the encylopedia market, then broke the illusory monopoly that publishers and academics had on knowledge. But more than this, it showed that human beings are decent, altruistic beings who know a good and worthy thing when they see it, and are willing to help create things in education outside of the institutional structures.

I suspect that the next big educational resource will come from another source. Wikipedia is what it is, we need something similar but different.

Solution 1: Wiki textbooks

You can create textbooks through wikis, and use collaborative web-based creation and distribution for quality educational content. The problem here, seems to be the fondness for the ‘book’ metaphor i.e. Wikibooks etc. We don’t want books, we want web-based content.

CK12 is a possible breakthrough, as Jimmy Wales is on the board, and it’s well funded. You can use, edit and customise their textbooks. It’s pretty neat with good drag and drop creation tools, but again, it’s the ‘textbook’ metaphor that limits its usefulness.

Solution 2: Questions and answers wiki

Quora may be the sort of thing that will work. It’s created, organised and edited through crowdsourcing, but organises knowledge as answers to questions (which may in themselves be edited). This puts a more natural front-end onto a knowledge base, as queries are almost always framed as questions, not keywords. However, one question, one answer fails to create the dialogue and opportunities for structured learning.

Solution 3: Wiki Self-paced content

Take a structured, subject based resource, similar to BBC Bitesize, and allow it to grow and edit through crowdsourcing, with an editorial eye that knows good questions, good answers and there are opportunities to answer questions by the learner. Note that I’m not suggesting an expansion of Bitesize. That’s defaulted into little bits of animation add-ons.

Solution 3: Self assessment tools

This, I believe is the key to unlocking the open source knowledge market. Educational institutions have a stranglehold on education, making it incredibly expensive. That stranglehold is reinforced by the noose of accreditation. If we can free assessment from institutional control, we free up education for all. A populated open source Assessment tool that allows you to create, edit and use assessments would be a boon to learners and organisations.

Solution 4 All of above

Over the next ten years I see these fledgling wiki-led, open source movements produce resources in learning that are as powerful as Wikipedia. It needs a combination of good content and assessments. It also needs a credible open source brand, like Wikipedia. But Jimmy Wales, is not on this tack. To be fair he’s changed the world forever with Wikipedia, it would be a bit much to expect him to do it twice! If anyone is interested, contact me.

Kinect from Mr Kinect himself at Microsoft

Man or mouse?

Are you a man or mouse? You can now be both, as Kinect gives your body control of the computer. Screens are 2D but the world is 3D, that’s why there’s a mismatch. Computers are poor on real world space, and so we have to tell them who we are and what we want them to do through keyboards, mice, joysticks and touchscreens. But with Kinect, the real world, with you in it, is now an operating environment. Kinect-like interfaces allow 3D interaction without all of those helmets, gloves and body sensors. It’s virtual reality without the hassle of gadget armour. It allows the real person to operate within the computer and within environments generated by the computer. Just step up and off you go.

You as interface

How does it do this? Well, I lucked out this week as I had two sessions with the guy who heads up the Kinect technical team. It was like speaking to someone from the far future. A true ‘Me-interface’ has to recognise you as a body, along with your voice and what you say. This ain’t easy. In Kinectables, you can stroke, feed and train animals. You stroke your chosen pet, and see it respond, then give it a name by saying it out loud. You can toss a ball to your cub and he’ll nod it back and use voice commands, such as ‘play dead’ and he’ll drop.

Your body

The first problem with body position is size: we’re fat, thin, tall, short. On top of this we come in lots of different shapes. Then there’s appearance, in terms of hair, clothes, glasses etc.. Now add in the clutter of a background. How do you pick bodies out? Kinect’s cameras peel you away from your background. Note that 2D doesn’t do it for this task, you need 3D as depth images allow you to recognise body parts.

To understand how Kinect works, you need to see it as a database with over 1 million body positions that is rapidly compared with the output of the depth cameras (infrared plus monochrome). The infrared laser projects a grid of 50,000 dots and the RBG camera picks up the depth difference between these dots through parallax differences. The body is then reduced to around 30 body parts based on joint positions i.e. reduced to angles and positions. It is interrogated and position inferred. In that respect it’s more Deep Blue than a pure rules set. But the software also learns and this is the key to its success. It can track six people but only cope with two serious game players at a time. 1.2-3.5 metres and the tilting motor adjusts the sensor by up to 27 degrees. The Kinect software takes up around 190Mb and is a compromise, as the games guys want most of the available space for their games software.

Your voice

This is not as clever as the Peter Molyneux video suggests as it’s limited to commands, and is currently quite poor on natural language recognition. Just imagine the technical problems of isolating the sound from the background noise during a loud game and tracking different voices in a 3D environment. It does, however, have an array microphone, making it directional, so it can distinguish and isolate several different moving sound sources. You can use this for audio and video chat through Xbox Live.

Looking to the future, natural language processing is notoriously difficult but affordable software such as Dragon is around. Once this reaches a consumer price point and efficacy that allows it to be embedded in games consoles and other mobile devices, another step will have been taken in terms of the ‘Me-interface’. Google Translate for Android has just been updated to include a live conversation translator. You click on the microphone, speak, and it reads aloud the translated text.

Kinect 2….

The development kits have not been released, except for current developers and a few universities. Indeed, there’s a debate going on within Microsoft about open v closed development. My money’s on ‘closed’ as it’s in the Microsoft DNA. The hacked MIT open source release is only the for the depth camera, so there’s no body configuration stuff and that’s what really matters. So what’s in the pipeline?

They bought Primesense, bought for their camera technology along with a couple of other advanced camera companies, one is Canesta, and that tells you what’s coming. The next version with increase all dimensions by 4. Remember that increasing a current 50-60,000 number along each axis gives you a quantum leap in fidelity. It will easily resolve fingers and other smaller objects (at the moment it recognises your hands only). Even more astounding is the fact that within two years the ‘parallax’ sensing of the current Kinect will be replaced with ‘speed of light’ Canesta sensing, where differentials in the speed of light determine position. Now that’s not a step change it’s a dimensional leap that gives us accuracy.

Future apps?

Knowing where someone is in terms of body position and gesture has huge possibilities. A hugely accurate and high-fidelity system could replicate you elsewhere either as a hologram or robot, that mimics your every movement. This transportation can replace travel. Here’s a quick Kinect hack with Kinect as a robot (Kinectbot), where it moves around and recognises objects and people, along with gesture control. To give you some idea of the creativity unleashed by Kinect see these 12 favourite Kinect hacks. It can know what you’re doing when driving, so that it could warn you when you’re using a mobile or nodding off. It can take gesture commands, rather than reaching out to buttons on your radio or satnav. Surgeons in operating theatre can use gestures to get up X-rays or MRi scans during operations as they can’t touch possibly infected keyboards or touchscreens.

Incidentally, Steve Ballmer has also announced that there’ll be a PC version.

Kinect for Christmas: future unleashed!

Some pieces of technology just pull the eyeballs out of your sockets. This one had me literally leaping about with delight. I remember seeing Doom, Google Earth, Skype, Wii and iPhone for the first time. You just shake your head at the wonder of what you see, and so it is with Kinect.

It was much quicker to connect and set up than I had anticipated. You just need as a big a space as you can muster, free from things that break, because, believe me, within seconds you’re cutting some weird shapes on the dancefloor, gym mat or game space.

For those of you who don’t yet know, Kinect eliminates the need for a controller (although it can still be used in some games such as Harry Potter). Your bodies are scanned through more than 50.000 dots, so it recognises positions, gestures and on top of this voice, to give you a really new learning and game experience. All the shoot ‘em up fanboys will cry ‘so what’ but my very own Black Ops 3^rd prestige level 46 son, was whooping with joy when he gave it a go.

When you see that sensor eye swivel up automatically to get you in shot, you know you’re about to see something special.

Dive straight in

On Christmas Day I had 4 to 80 year olds playing, and lots of ages in between. The science-fiction nature of the technology gets their attention but, as we all know, familiarity breeds contempt, so what kept them going? ‘Ease of entry’ was the big draw. For those unfamiliar with gaming and/or consoles, you simply step up and the sensor recognises you, telling you to simply step back if you get too close. It’s easier than any other games machine to use as it does all the work. The step by step instructions get you to DO things, without having to resort to buttons, joysticks or mice. You’re in and playing before you realise it.

That’s me that is

As your on-screen avatar reacts in exactly the way you do, it’s quite strange to catch yourself, brushing back your hair, scratching you nose, standing in a certain position or striking a pose. We see ourself as others see us. We don’t often see ourselves, except in front of static mirrors and as Kinect shows you moving, it’s sort of familiar yet unfamiliar, fascinating but weird. Once you start playing the doppelganger effect is natural.

Snappy

You know those photos taken on rollercoasters that you pay $10 for on exit, you get a batch of these for free, taken at just the moment in the game you’re likely to be in an extreme jump or pose. This is a nice piece of after-game feedback, although you need a well lit room for good shots. In some games, such as Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, your body image appears on your avatar, face, clothes and all.

Learning with Kinect

Kinect has to be played to be believed and it turns the Xbox into more than just a games console. You’re witness to the start of something new and big. We’ve had ‘first person shooters’ now we have the possibility of true ‘first person doers’ and ‘first person thinkers’. It really does know what you’re doing, communicating and saying. The sensor’s eye’s the limit.

First person doer

Kinect’s most obvious first batch of applications are around exercise and sports– doing something physical. As it can scan in your body shape it can also have a go at your height, rough weight and BMI. Fitness and exercise games are already available with everything from aerobics, gym exercises, Tai Chi to yoga. Poses in yoga and other light forms of exercise can be tracked, as can balance and actual performance. You can cheat with hand devices by shaking them up and down, you can’t with Kinect’s roving eye. Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, gives you yoga, workouts with weights and gym games. Personal trainers guide you through and give feedback in Tai Chi, Yoga, fitness classes, boxing blocks at they appear, hoops for stomach and hips, stack em up for upper body. Dance is the other obvious first genre and there’s already an eight-ball selection of titles, such as Dance Masters, Zumba and Dance Central.

Then there’s sports and sports simulations. One can easily imagine, superb golf, tennis and otherracquet simulations and coaching programmes that match your performance and shape it towards those of champions. Kinect Sports has football, track & field, boxing and bowling. This really is exhausting stuff.

Alternatively, Kinect Adventures is a good introduction to exercise with fun. River Rush, where you river raft on your feet (on your own or with two on the boat) and is hugely energetic.Rallyball has you returning balls by head, arm, hand, knee or foot; truly knackering. Space pop allows you to defy gravity and fly by raising your arms to pop bubbles. Reflex Ridge has you dodging obstacles in a wipeout game. 20,000 leaks sees you trapped in a glass tank where you reach with hands and feet to plug leaks caused by aggressive fish and sharks.

Moving beyond this to therapeutic physiotherapy, where balance and the regaining of physical skills is necessary, these applications can rehabilitate after a bone break, strain, stroke or amputation, avoiding the lack of compliance and frequent hospital visits.

Then there’s physical tasks at work, such as manual handling, physical maintenance, object manipulation, operating machinery and vehicles. Many jobs have manual components that require learning and actual practice. There could therefore be a role in vocational training for such technology.

This learn by doing can be taken over into kinaesthetic approaches to learning maths, science and other subjects. There’s no reason why objects and symbols can’t be manipulated in calculations and virtual labs. In fact, here’s a hacked example. There is evidence that this ‘apparatus’ approach to these subjects helps with both understanding and retention.

In history, we could wander the streets of Rome (Caspian have already built the 3D model and game for web delivery). Any environment past to present, microscopic to astronomical can be walked through, explored and used in active learning.

First person thinker

Peter Molyneux thinks a slew of new genres will emerge as our imaginations grasp the potential. His Milo demo is already the stuff of legend. In teaching people how to think and behave, we at last have a piece of technology that gets rid of the input barrier; those annoying mice, keyboards, controllers, joysticks and even touchscreens that put so much cognitive lag between what we want to do and what we can or actually do. Input devices are simply the design flaws of immature technology. We don’t carry use them in most real life situations, so when they vanish, everything seems so much more real.

Face to face tasks such as meetings, chairing meetings, interviewing, appraisals, disciplinary meetings, grievance meetings, coaching, counselling and mentoring will become topics in simulators as we learn to do these things in safe environments by simply sitting down on front of the screen. We can make all of the mistakes that others make in real life, to learn from failure rather than inflicting our failures on others.

Customer service skills with a wide range of possible customers, randomly generated, or weighted towards your client base, can be presented and your behaviour and words tracked. Even ancillary tasks such as checking in baggage for airports staff, handing over security badges, searching at security and so on, will be possible.

Sales skills can be sharpened through both visual feedback and voice recognition, so that the right listening skills and reactions can be learnt back at the ranch where they do no harm, and not in front of real customers.

Presentation skills can be taught quickly, with immediate feedback on performance, both physical and vocal. You will be able to see yourself present as well as get an intelligent diagnosis of your faults. Timing, gestures, position, speed of delivery, emphasis should all be trackable.

At a higher level, full organisational and business skills around business planning, sales, marketing and strategic talks can be tackled in realistic simulations.

Me, you, them

Note that in Kinect, or Kinect-like technology there’s:

1. One-to-self learning with you on the screen

2. One-to-one learning with someone on the screen

3. One to one with another real person

4. Or a threesome or more

It’s a self, first, second and many thinker simulation tool. The combinations of all three make this an extremely versatile simulator, come game, learning experience.

Future of Kinect

We are at the start of an era where learning will be freed (where appropriate) from the dry page, freed from the lecture theatre and classroom, and available to all though digital abundance and duplication on affordable technology in every home. This is exciting as much education and training is trapped in the inefficient environments of schools, colleges, universities, classrooms and lecture halls. If we don’t find ways of freeing learning from the huge capital cost of building and running buildings, and paying armies of often stressed teachers, then these possibilities must be entertained. Of course you can always sit back and play non-Kinect games such as the classic Halo, or shove in a DVD.

(Next post on mindblowing Kinect applications already in research and development.)

10 lessons learnt at WISE in Doha

Loved the speedy little birds that darted back and forth in front of the speakers and across the heads of the crowd at the WISE conference in Doha, Qatar. A good omen, as Twitter was to prove pretty useful. Symptomatic of the old world versus the new was the constant reminders to ‘switch off your mobiles’. How are we meant to tweet and collaborate, if not through the technology? For those Twitter sceptics – remember that this was how many who couldn’t get to Doha knew what was happening.

This culture clash surfaced time and time again at the conference, characterised by 10 Manichean oppositions;

1. Monologue v dialogue

2. Global v local

3. Private v public

4. Closed v open

5. Teaching v learning

6. Religious v secular

7. Old practice V new science

8. Assessment v attainment

9. Horizontal v vertical

10. 20^th C v 21^st C.

Contention is good, and perhaps we could redefine the dialogue next year by having these oppositions as themes, to stimulate debate and discussion and a forward looking dynamic.

1. Monologue v dialogue

Nima, our earnest BBC host for the next three days was being very ‘presenterish’ with lots of pregnant pauses. I personally think she’d be better off not using a script fed through an earpiece, as it makes her sound inauthentic. I met her later, and she’s quite informal and good fun. This is, perhaps, the problem with education, all too often a series of earnest, didactic monologues, rather than dialogues. But I liked her “Who dares teach must never cease to learn”.

The format of educational conferences, with their endless speeches from the great and the good is a bit tired. Are future problems really going to be solved through lectures - or discussion? Don’t get me wrong, this was a great event, but the real action was among the hundreds of amazing delegates, rather than the speakers. Too many simply read from notes or described their own pet projects. Few addressed global problems head-on.

Nima introduced a stellar series of video introductions including Kofi Annan, Nancy Pelosi, Ellen MacArthur and others, with lots of effusive congratulations on winning 2022 FIFA World Cup bid. This would remain a three day theme, although I’m not sure what it has to do with education. Although, as I was staying in Zidenine Zidane’s room in the ‘W’ Hotel, an almost religious experience, I didn’t mind. If education were as popular as football, we’d be pleased as punch. In any case, the Qatar 2022 win was a real force for good among 1.3 billion people in the Islamic world.

Lessons learnt 1: More dialogue not monologue

Encourage people to use their mobiles and Twitter, don’t let speakers read from written scripts, have more head to head debates, more organised discussions.

2. Global v Local

Martin Burt, from Paraguay, laid siege to the idea that traditional schooling was suitable for the majority of the world’s poor. Just building schools is not the solution – people LEAVE schools and drop out of schools. How is quality education to be funded when governments lack resources? You can’t just say give us more money. Money in education has doubled but results not doubled. Too many children just get ‘schooled’ then leave into a life of poverty. They aren’t taught the skills they really need to improve their lives. He wanted to inject entrepreneurial spirit back into school by linking the curriculum to work and business start-ups. Learn maths so that you can understand a break-even point.

In Paraguay, a vocational school built by aid was closed down as the government wouldn’t pay for teachers. They turned around this school by delivering entrepreneurial and vocational skills. Students learn how to DO things; how to deal with public, set up shops, manufacture jam, do the maths for breakeven points. This addresses relevancy, motivation and aspiration – hence the zero dropout. It appeals to the dignity of the poor people they serve. They learn to earn.

Now he has a point, but as many delegates pointed out, the model can’t be used across education a whole. The point is not to turn everyone into ‘little capitalists’.

For example, the Chinese government are investing massively in online for science and technology by 2020. Innovation matters through pedagogical reforms. 100 key academic higher institutions have been identified as the key to China’s development, as they need high quality human capital. We saw examples from Haiti, New Orleans, Pakistan, Denmark, UK, Africa – all with different needs and political contexts.

The lesson here is not to blindly import models from one system to another. I spoke to a guy in Guatemala who described Mormon archaeology and US Christian education in Mayan ruins, hugely resented by the local Mayan population. Another delegate, from rural Brazil, thought Burt’s ideas were OK but no real solution for education as a whole in most countries.

The lessons learnt from post-Katrina New Orleans, were that the trauma of disaster had become the catalyst for change. He saw education as a marathon not a sprint. Good line, I thought, but it’s mostly a treadmill. Similarly in the presentation from Haiti, where a new approach is arising like a Phoenix from the ashes of disaster. In both cases, the previous systems were moribund and broken. Only time will tell, whether these newer approaches, involving Charter Schools and fresh government policies will work.

Lesson learnt 2: Global v local – one size doesn’t fit all

There is no ‘one size fits all’ model for either funding or curriculum choices. It depends on the political, economic and cultural context.

3. Private v Public

Strong voices were heard from the private sector lobby, some of whom (Microsoft, CISCO) has sponsored the conference, about the failure of the public sector to deliver. We heard from the World Bank about Human Capital Banking. Yes, I felt more than a little disgust at the term. His idea was to raise money through a Global Education Bond, like carbon trading. My doubts include the political stance the World Bank takes in these circumstances. However, if it could be offset against debt, we may get somewhere.

But, as one delegate stated from the floor, we must move beyond this simple private v public argument. The private sector has just been bailed out by the public sector. If education is the way out of the current crisis why did crisis start in most educated countries? What went wrong in those top Universities & business schools? We were led astray by a highly educated elite. Education could be accused of causing the problem.

3. Lesson learnt: Private v Public – it’s not a war

Both sides have their faults, and in reality education is, and should be, a mixed economy. Above all, it should match the goals it sets and not be overly politicised.

4. Closed v Open

Imagine a future where there’s access to free education and resources for everyone. A future where learning and assessment are free. A future free from institutional protectionism. Education is largely delivered through formal instruction in expensive institutions; schools, colleges, Universities etc. Contrast this with the way we actually access knowledge in the real world; Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, OER.

We’ve had 3 generations of open learning, the attempt to open education up to new people, places, methods and ideas. Gen 1: No entry qualifications – the massification of education through print/radio/TV. Gen 2: Web, blended and flexible approaches. Open access. Gen 3: OER – open resources – knowledge a public good. Initiatives include: CORE – China, LIPHEA – East Africa, OER Africa, JOCW Japan, The Vietnam Foundation, Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth, Open Learn.. OER promises much more than it currently delivers in terms of shaking up the status quo.

Cecilia d’Olivera Exec Director of MIT Opencourseware explained that OER is more than traditional course materials, it’s also online textbooks, online lectures, online games, complete online courses, software, virtual labs. But at heart it’s really about these c-words – consortia, community, collaboration, copyright cleared content and courseware.

OER initiatives include: Connexions Curriki – collaborative platforms. Khan Academy – 1600 free Youtube resources for younger learners – non-profit. NPTEL – India. Flat World Knowledge – open textbooks with a business model. Online Learning Initiative – full online courses Carnegie Mellon. OU – led to explosion in rest of world but not UK. UNISA. Athbasca. The list goes on and on.

MIT’s traffic is 1.5 million visits per month, so that 70 million have used the content to date. Fewer than 10% are educators, Self-learners 43%, Students 42%, Educators 9%, Others 6%. The dominant use is the advancement of personal knowledge at 46%. Guy from Taiwan translated MIT courseware to through network around the world by crowdsourcing. So what explains the failure of institutions to take advantage of this?

Cecilia suggests that it needs to be easier to find and that language is still a barrier. Sorry, but I don’t buy this. It takes seconds to find this stuff on Google. Fact is, they don’t want to use it. NIH (Not Invented Here) is the real barrier to use. Sure content isn’t enough; we need other services – study groups, certification, assessment etc. But what we really need is an embrace by government. This is happening in China and India.

Prof VN Rajasekharan Pillai gave us the run down on IGNOU Open Course Portal - 40,000 text, 1600 videos, 80,000 users, one of world’s largest educational resource repositories with a special YouTube channel. Anyone can register and use resources, there are no entry qualifications, no restriction on duration – you only pay for certification – the revolution is here.

This is driven by huge demand. By 2020 India needs to provide employability skills to 500 million! The only way to satisfy this demand is through unconventional ideas. OER will transform education, so we need sustainability plans for these initiatives. People will use it if people see advantages for themselves. This means Open Assessment combined with Open Courseware. Knowledge and learning are trapped inside accrediting institutions. Until we break that mould we’ll be pricing learning out of the hands of the masses, especially the poor.

We need acceptance, not sniffy elitist statements about quality from the current establishment. This is happening, take the OU in the UK, now the largest University in the UK, or NIIT in India – it just takes time. Even in traditional system there’s a hierarchy and brand marketing. It took Oxford and Cambridge a thousand years to develop their brand – give it time – it’s a marathon not a sprint. Let’s not keep it as a treadmill.

OER needs to focus less on Universities and more in schools, further education and adult education. Openschooling already uses distance learning and free content with 20 subject areas in Africa. Other examples are Hippocampus, Monterey and Currici with 50-60k users per month accessing MIT content in schools.

We could also use the OER model for teacher training – that will act as agent for immediate global change, with more teachers being trained quicker and cheaper. Online teacher training has already started through Hibernia in Ireland and the UK. There certainly needs to be more off campus, not contact, models. The trend is for both, that’s the future.

Lesson learnt 4: Closed v open - Private money should be targeted at Open Resources

Education is a closed shop. Technology opens it up. Rather than funding schools and schooling, let’s fund the future model of open resources in the global classroom. In OER we are at the end of the beginning – so what’s about the next ten years? How do we turn this all into a quality education? Quality of teachers a big issue. Training, retraining and CPD – that is the challenge- at all levels. Above all OER needs to move from the development of materials to use of materials.

5. Religious v secular

The star of the first plenary, for me, was a challenge from Dr Ben Achour on how education (or lack of it – I’m not sure which) can cause mayhem. First the brutal murder of men, women and children in their Christian church in Iraq. Second, the “prison or concentration camp” that is Gaza, where he saw 8-10 year olds being taught in a sweltering sea container, as the Israeli embargo on building materials prevented schools from being rebuilt. Surely, he reminds us, that denying children education, or educating them in hatred is not the way forward.

Right from the start this raised a key question for me. Should education be secular? Christian fundamentalism in North and South America, Islamic studies as a compulsory school subject in the Middle East, Ultra-orthodox Judaism in Israel – are they really such forces for good?.

In the next session Charles Clark, a UK Minister for Education, who introduced Whiteboards wanted to see education cast its net forward, not back. He admitted that there was always a tension in education between going back or forward, mentioning Gove’s recent mad policy of reintroducing Latin into UK schools, which is going back 2000 years! However, his suggestions were more ‘status quo’. Nothing really new: look at system holistically, quality of teachers counts (not class sizes) accountability etc. Although he did mention the importance of ‘work experience’ and thought that the gap between education and work was too wide. His parting shot was an appeal for more focus on pedagogy – but he left it there and I’m not sure that he had any more to offer on that issue.

My question to the panel was, “If, as Charles claimed, education must cast its net forward, and not backwards, then is religious education in schools a forward or backward step? Should education be in the business of opening up young minds and not closure?

Only Charles answered, but he fudged it. “Well, there’s good and bad religious education…….” If we continue to fudge like this, rather than challenge and discuss assumptions we’ll get nowhere.

Lesson learnt 5: Religious v secular – keep education secular

It is often assumed that all education is good, it is not. Much religious fundamentalist education, in any religion, is bad. My own view is that we educate for autonomy, and that education should be secular. What a bold step this would be for an international organisation to state, rather than accept education as indoctrination.

6. Teaching v learning

On the final day, while young people were rioting in London and attacking a Royal’s car shouting “off with their head” we were talking about ‘teaching’ not ‘learning’. Putnam was right to say the young no longer trust us, and that we need to win back their trust.

However, if we had a Wordle slide for the whole conference, the largest two words would be ‘teachers’ and ‘teaching’. There was too little talk about’ learners’ and ‘learning’. I know it’s an old chestnut, but it signals a failure to move on. To be fair the Conference gave the Learner’s Voice group, 24 students, a stand, but they themselves were shocked at the lack of real collaboration. They were really active on twitter, videoing delegates (including me) and asking smart questions from the floor. We could have done with a few of them on the stage.

Typical of the teacher-oriented adults was the Microsoft guy, who really only related a couple of anecdotes, and talked mostly about classrooms and teachers. (CISCO did the same.) The plural of anecdotes is not data. He did have a useful suggestion - use student driven learning, namely learning outside of the classroom. On student assignments, he claimed that most teachers don’t know how to do this – too true. But let’s be clear, the future of technology in learning is NOT Microsoft, Cisco and Intel, it’s Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, Twitter and OER.

Lesson learnt 6: Teaching v learning – more about learners and learning

Think more about learning and learner voices, not teaching and teachers. Think OER, Wikipedia, Google and Social Networking, NOT Microsoft, CISCO and Intel.

7. Old practice V new science

Educators largely assume that our experience and common sense guides us well and tells us all we really need to know. Sorry, we need to wake up. However, the session on cognitive science was a case study on how not to impart information. The three presenters simply presented their incredibly narrow research areas or jobs, and provided little in the way of real and practical advice for practitioners. There were two interesting presentations on ‘plasticity’ and ‘natural pedagogy’. The problem here was that both were presented in isolation, and seemed to contradict each other. In fact they don’t. The mind is NOT a tabula rasa, completely open to plastic change through formal and informal learning. That’s taking us back to a behaviourist agenda. The mind is prepared and hard-wired to learn.

Education and health are the two main pillars of public spending but while medicine demands objective, evidence-based [proof before use; education wallows in a sea of pseudoscience and pop-psychology (learning styles, Maslow, NLP. Mozart effect, R/L brain theories). Half a century of cognitive science is now ready to be used. We know a lot about memory, deep processing, elaboration, reinforcement, practice and media selection but we apply very little of this.

Why does educational psychology seem to have lost its way lack impact? A question from the floor nailed the problem: teacher training. Questionable selection techniques, practice in the absence of evidence, and lecture based courses the norm. This is the fulcrum around which new approaches to learning could be delivered, but the courses are fossilised.

Barbara Wanchisen of the National Research Council recommended www.nap.edu. The reports are free e.g. How people learn, Knowing what students know etc. Although science evolves on its own, there are serious roadblocks: laws, large population to reach, tension between communities. The exception seems to be the military, who really do absorb and apply cognitive science. Other resources are www.ies.ed.gov www.nsf.gov www.nas.edu

Lesson learnt 7: Old practice V new science – revolutionise teacher training

We need to weed out old theory and practice and feed the system with fresh findings from science and research. This means reshaping teacher training around learners and learning, not just teaching.

8. Assessment v attainment

Do we need an OECD Nuclear Arms race in education? Is it wise to create league tables at a national and international level? Do they create a rising tide or do they create a great deal of angst and rushed policies?

This 4^th round of PISA covers 65 countries in a 3 yearly assessment of 15 year olds, with between 3,500 and 15,000 samples from each country i.e. over 400,000 students.

Conclusion 1 – socially equitable education systems do best. Curiously, the PISA results, released during the conference, confirmed that open competition in education is not a driver for improved performance. Doesn’t this put into question the very PISA approach to the quantification of education? In the UK, successive governments have been keen to use PISA as evidence for action, but selectively. Now that PISA has shown that equitable systems are best, will they promote this as policy? Of course not. They will cherry pick as usual.

Conclusion 2: Money is NOT the determining factor in educational performance – it explains only 10% of output. Was increased spending matched by better outcomes, not generally, apart from S Korea, who switched from small elite to a more equitable approach.

Conclusion 3: The top performer is Shanghai (not even a country) based on its innovative, forceful collaborative approach to schools development, something in which few other countries excel. They paired good and bad schools, have no group learning within their classrooms and focus on complete classroom discipline.

PISA has some useful signposts but it’s as skewed as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, when it comes to data and conclusions. Small countries are clustered at the top. Indeed there seems to be a correlation between size and homogeneity of country and results. The outputs like the tower are tall and narrow, focusing on reading, maths and science. It quantifies what is easiest to test. To be fair, that’s why PISA has a raft of initiatives around other measures; PIACC (adult skills tested via computers in 26 countries results 2013 on problem solving, cognitive abilities etc.), AHELO (assessing HE outcomes, not just research), OECD (review of evaluation and assessment frameworks for improving school outcomes (2009-2012), TALIS (International survey of a randomly selected 200 schools on teaching & learning).

Lesson learnt 8: Assessment v attainment – improvement, not league tables

Unfortunately, PISA has become an object of fear in many countries, promoting, in general, an atmosphere of failure, and skewed towards the developed world. The press and politicians focus on league position, rather than improvements, but it does point towards some basic policy shaping recommendations around equitable education, quality and collaboration.

9. Horizontal v Vertical

We had a presentation by Jeffrey Sachs that presented education as a series of horizontal layers of sedimentary rock – primary, secondary, further, higher. The problem with this structure is that education for the learner is vertical. The poor learner has to punch their way through these layers of impermeable rock to get anywhere, and most simply give up tunnelling, with only a few surviving.

Few talk about the core rationale for education. Sure it leads to better economic and health outcomes, especially the education of women. But some education (fundamentalist Christian, Judaic and Islamic) also leads to strife. I’d prefer to see education defined in terms of social good through individual empowerment. I have always held that education is about personal autonomy, autonomy in terms of abilities which help you make a living, contribute to society and have en enriched life. But education is so often about attendance not attainment, assessment not attainment. It’s about institutions, not the person. It’s about teachers not learners.

Lesson learnt 9: Horizontal v Vertical – don’t pander to horizontal interests

We could really address a core issue here. What is education for? The current models can soak up cash (often doubling budgets) with very thin improvements in outcomes. Equitable systems seem to work best, but we want to encourage competition and private sector driven hierarchical systems. Collaboration and sharing work, but our institutions share nothing.

10. 20^th C v 21^st C

There was one depressing aspect of the summit, the oft repeated refrain that students are badly in need of something called 21^st century skills. A series of presenters ‘lectured’ us on how a new set of skills have emerged around collaboration, social skills, and problem solving! It was deeply ironic, if not tragic. The very idea that ‘teachers’ and ‘lecturers’ have the skills to teach the very things that the average 12 year old has in abundance, was laughable. What are my children going to learn from baby boomer models of collaboration and social interaction – nothing.

We get ‘talked at’ in schools, ‘lectured’ to in HE, suffer the stupid ‘breakout group’ method in training and spend far too much of our lives in useless, often unnecessary ‘meeting’s’. This was the baby boomers approach to collaboration and sharing. Compare this to the immediacy of mobile, txting, messaging, posting, commenting, tweeting, social networking, blogging, team-based gaming, skyping, filesharing and crowdsourcing. We have more to learn from them, than them from us.

The very phrase ‘21^st C skills’ is a symptom of our prejudiced thinking, as if there was a sudden shift in cognitive need around the decimal system, and that we 20^th century adults had it sussed, if only these 21^st century kids would listen to our advice. We invented the treadmill that is the current system and need to sit back and learn from them on sharing and collaboration. The people who really are shaping learning through pedagogic shift are not educational theorists but the smart young people who invented Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and OER models.

And to those who say that we educators need to be in control of this attention sapping technology, I’d say it’s none of your business. What learners do with their spare time and technology is their business. ‘Teachers’ and ‘lecturers’ don’t own the minds of learners, their role is one of nurture not control. Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone!

Lesson learnt 10: 20thC v21st C – we have more to learn from them than them from us

Let’s be clear, we have little or nothing to teach them on this front. Neither can we predict the skills they’ll need. Since 2000 we’ve had an explosion of wireless broadband and mobile technology, fuelling a renaissance in communication, collaboration and sharing. The average teenager has already amassed years of daily, if not hourly communication skills, shared thoughts, photographs and videos, collaborative game playing, constant dialogue, filesharing and they write something every day, if not every hour. They understand collaboration and sharing at a far deeper level than their teachers and parents.

Last word…

Sorry, if this was rather long, but the summit did make me think, reflect and in that sense was a great success……thanks to all the people I met there: Graham Brown-Martin, Derek Robertson, Stephen Heppell, Charlie Leadbetter, Jay Cross, Dan Sutch, Marc Prensky, Andy Smart, Lee Heeyoung, Rob Crawford, Sharath Jeevan, Suhair M Ayyash, Samer Bagaeen,Mrko Mahkonen, Inacio Rodriguez, Farid Ullah Khan, Keith Kruger, Dilvo Ristoff and many, many more....