LearningPool – sink or swim

Sometimes you have an idea that is so simple that you can’t see how it can fail. But in learning, being right is not always the quickest way to success.

In 2000 I came back from LearnTech in the US with an idea, which I wrote up on the plane. I think everyone who attends a conference should do a write-up with recommendations. Inspired with the success of Napster, which eventually changed the music industry forever, I wanted to apply the technology to a less glamorous sector. I had delivered a report to the IDEA, the Improvement and Development Agency for local government, showing that training in the 450 Local Authorities in England and Wales amounted to around was over half a billion a year (verified by an Audit last year at £540m), but about two thirds of this was duplicated. Read that again, two thirds of the spend was DUPLICATED – and therefore wasted. Training departments were mostly doing their own thing designing, developing and delivering their own DIY courses.

So I went to the IDEA Director who had commissioned this research and said, “I have an idea that could dramatically reduce this figure”. He had worked in New York as a consultant for Deloittes, so was used to straight ROI talk. “Look, your 450 authorities are not competitors and desperate for efficiencies. Get them to share the design, development and delivery of training, freeing that back-end money for front-line work.”

We did it, dived in, branded it LearningPool, launched it in a bar in Soho, handed it over to the IDEA, and I lost track of its progress. To be honest I thought it had gone the way of most of these things- extinction.

Suddenly, years later , out of the blue, I received an email from two people who had bought the business in 2006 and are now doing what it intended to do all those years ago. They’ve built a successful business, www.learningpool.com, providing a pool of content and services to local authorities, police, housing associations, schools and universities, on the simple idea of sharing. They have 150 local authority customers and others in other public sector areas. It’s a single pool in which everyone can swim to exchange solutions and solve problems.

For a very reasonable fee you get access to a large and growing library of e-learning courses, an authoring tool, access to the exchange and (the important bit) lots of support in selling and implementing e-learning. Rather than delivering endless classroom courses at a fixed cost every time, you distribute e-learning to all officers, councillors, school governors, or whoever. But it’s the services in terms of being part of a national community that matter. It’s so simple and so obvious that you may wonder why everyone in the public sector doesn’t do it this way.

Duplication of effort, is the primary inefficiency in the public sector. This is especially true in education and training. Duplication in teaching is the norm. Every teacher is an auteur who designs, develops and delivers their own personal lessons and courses. Duplication in processes means that every local authority and school wastes endless amounts of time and money trying to find, amend or invent processes and policies. Then there’s duplication in procurement, where things that should be dealt with at national levels are devolved down to the individual school or college or local authority. In e-learning, the advantages come from volume. It’s a numbers game. Share, and for every pound you invest you’ll get hundreds back.

Speaking to Andrew Pinder this week, who was Chair of BECTA, we both agreed that technology solution cannot be delegated down to individual institutions. The business model must look to solutions that lie above non-competitive institutions where the cost is shared, whether it’s schools, colleges, universities, local authorities, charities, hospitals, GP surgeries, local government, police forces, government bodies and government departments. 

This will need leadership from the National Audit Office, as well as others in government. It's possible, and with over 2.5 million learners through UFI (learndirect) I've seen it happen outside of institutions. A little joined up thinking and government could go a long way here.

It's time to stop splashing about in our own tiny, shallow paddling pools and go for a swim in a pool or better still the sea of e-learning.

Dark cloud ahead?

What goes up doesn’t come down

This is my new rule for web applications. All applications, pieces of software or media , eventually migrate upwards towards the cloud away from an offline or client seated environment – and they never come down.

My web mail is entirely in the cloud as is my calendar, blog, Facebook stuff and Twitter messages.

Microsoft are also promising Office in the cloud.

Games were bought on disc or cartridge and millions of players have now migrated online, some with plug-ins, but many now through shockwave and flash, truly in the cloud.

Video was on tape, then DVD then on-demand TV then downloadable through bitorrent and is now streamed from iPlayer or YouTube in the cloud.

With peer to peer file sharing the cloud is our own PCs. Millions are already creating the cloud.

The always-on, wireless-everywhere vision is starting to shape up. It really is useful to have a wireless device on you at all times, as there’s enough lily-pad networks to make it worthwhile. In this sense wireless access is becoming a utility, like water, electricity and gas.

Heads in the cloud

When you have our heads in the cloud, you may find yourself experiencing unexpected blackouts. I experienced this in Egypt in December 08 when the whole country experienced a loss of internet access due to a severed underwater cable. It’s frightening. We have to accept that we’ll have utility blackouts when the service is down for technical or natural disaster-type reasons.

Clouds rain down

The cloud may also rain down on us mercilessly with thunder and lightning . We have an increase in crime, hacking and general maliciousness on the web. Phishing has become a massive problem along with spam, scams and malware. Nigeria, as a nation, is now best known for its online scamming merchants.

Clouds and dogfights

Then we have the danger of political dog fights in the cloud - cyberterrorism. The Gaza conflict has sparked a real online war between Israeli and Palestinian sides, taking down each other’s sites and generally disrespecting Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights – the right to freedom of speech. This is now being routinely ignored by major governments.

The cloud is not benign

It hides all sorts of hidden dangers, and before trusting ourselves to a totally online world, we’ll need to know what dangers lurk in this model. Perhaps a better analogy is the ‘mist’ or ‘fog’ which can hide all sorts of nasty phenomenon.

PS

With Lord carter's announcing an intention to bring Broadband to everyone through an industry fund, these issues are closer than ever. Look forward to the full report in June.

Why the web is the real pedagogic engine

My suspicion is that the web has done more for pedagogy in the last five years than the entire output of academic educational departments and other institutions in the last fifty years. This thought was, curiously, sparked off by my visit to the Darwin Exhibition in the Natural History Museum in London.

Web – global test ecosystem

The web is a global test house, where theories and ideas are put to the ultimate test (customer acceptance), on a grand scale. Who needs focus groups, pilots and trials, when you have a daily audience of hundreds of millions? Thousands of ideas are launched every day on this platform and many more fail than succeed. In this sense it is a Darwinian environment, in which the environment itself (medium plus users) determines fitness for purpose. Those that survive are ‘fit’ in the sense that they are rated, reused and recommended.

By contrast, recommended pedagogic progress in institutions has been glacial. Best practice is notoriously difficult to get dispersed and adopted so by and large there’s still a preponderance of old practice. ‘Chalk and talk’ in education and training, and the ‘lecture’ in tertiary education, are still dominant. Shocking but true.

Web – evolution on steroids

The web is like evolution on steroids. Great applications just take off and immediately compete with competitors in a race towards population spread. It is a huge habitat, or rather an ecosystem, with a series of habitats, as language and cultural barriers act like oceans, mountain ranges and rivers in keeping language-specific and culturally-specific habitats or applications apart. A good example is social networking where there are considerable linguistic and cultural differences. However, in this global ecosystem/environment, some applications can transcend these barriers to become almost ubiquitous, namely Google, Wikipedia, web mail services and so on.

We can talk usefully and analogously, I think, about the different levels of activity. In evolution we have the biosphere, ecosystems, habitats, communities, populations and individuals. Similarly, on the web we have the world-wide web as the ecosystem, linguistic and cultural habitats, communities of common interest, specific populations of users and individual users. It is not an exact parallel, but a hierarchical description is useful in both cases.

Webdiversity – a Cambrian explosion

While biodiversity shrinks with the crash of wild animal populations (50% of mammal populations in decline, 36% threatened with extinction and 40% of all species threatened), webdiversity explodes. About 530 million years ago we went through the Cambrian explosion, where most of the major groups of complex animals appeared on earth. We are witnessing a similar phenomenon online, with the rapid appearance of many different species of interaction on the web. The explosive growth of the World Wide Web is, arguably, the electronic equivalent of the Cambrian explosion.

Pedagogy and survival

Of course the deep driver in evolution is the blind mutation of DNA producing variation leading to sexual selection and survival. On the web it is sentient beings themselves who create the mutations, which are then selected by users. It’s not quite as clean and blind as evolution, as branding, partnerships, acquisitions, financing etc also play a role. Ideas are also sometimes selected by technical barriers such as bandwidth restrictions, plug-ins, browsers, client devices etc. This is rapidly disappearing as we move towards the world of open standards and the cloud. But on the whole, the web is an ecosystem that ruthlessly punishes applications that are slow, difficult to use, unfriendly, not useful or expensive.

My argument is that it is also ruthless with pedagogic ideas that are slow, difficult to use, unfriendly, not useful or expensive. Let me illustrate this by example.

Google – a pedagogic paradigm

Google has become the ubiquitous search tool because it was simple, fast, easy to use, powerful, useful and free. There is now a whole ecosystem of Google search applications that have similar qualities such as Google Earth, Google Maps and now Google Street. This is a global ecosystem in multiple languages. Other Google habitats include Googlemail, GoogleChrome, GoogleGroups etc. And sometimes this behemoth simply gobbles up another species; the most famous example is YouTube, now owned by Google. Interestingly, it also seeds the ecosystem with open development platforms such as Android, an interesting and newly learnt variation on web dominance.

So, Google has managed to produce several new pedagogic innovations (accelerators of learning) providing almost instant access to knowledge, answers to questions, location search (GoogleEarth, GoogleMaps, GoogleStyreets) along with efficient variations on communication by email (GoogleMail), browsing (GoogleChrome), media sharing (GoogleVideo and YouTube) and Collaboration (GoogleGroups). This has been a pedagogic paradigm shift.

Wikis and Wikipedia – a knowledge revolution

Who would have thought? A not for profit, multilingual encyclopaedia, created collaboratively by volunteers. There’s no way such a project could ever have emerged and succeeded in academia or the print world. With its adjunct features, such as discussions around controversial knowledge, it has become a leading edge knowledge base, almost a news source. Its revolutionary method of production, editing model and vast usage put it among the elite knowledge bases in the world. Now publishing in 262 languages it is a truly global learning resource.

Wikipedia, and wiki production in general, has produced a truly original model for the production, management and access to learning resources. It is astonishing in its success, size and scope. Interestingly, its dominance has come through a symbiotic relationship with Google, where it regularly appears near the top on any topic search.

YouTube and media sharing – a multimedia revolution

YouTube has produced more content than all of the TV stations of the US in their entire history, and it’s all user-generated. It’s easy to upload, easy to view and it’s free. ITUNES has had a similar effect in music and Flickr in photographs. Every medium now has a slew of useful media sharing services that have changed the way in which media is produced, shared and used.

In learning terms YouTube has shown us that the correct pedagogic model is not from TV with the tyranny of its 30 minute and one hour scheduling. On the whole YouTube videos are short and to the point, more importantly they’re as long as they need to be to make the point(s) and not overly produced in terms of production values. Google images allow teachers and learners to draw on millions of images to improve content. Podcasting has had a similar effect in audio. All of this frees us from the stifling dominance of text in learning. Text is fine, but not in places where it’s inappropriate and that includes huge areas of learning. Pedagogically learning has been freed from the constraints of the teacher+textbooks.

File sharing – a distribution revolution

It started with Napster and now there are lots of them, with turbo-charged Bitorrent providing extra power. This is the underbelly of the web, but no less powerful as millions use file sharing daily to their mutual advantage. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. The web showed that users understand the power of co-operation, leading to their mass use, completely reshaping several industries such as music and movies along the way.

This technology has the power to overcome one of the great shames in education and training – duplication of effort. I love the excellent Learning Pool, where users create content then willingly share it with others. In the public sector, this should be the norm. Sadly the opposite is true. Every schools, college, university, local authority and government department goes it alone in designing, developing and delivering learning. The cost and waste is unimaginably high. The pedagogic revolution here is to get sharing.

Facebook, Myspace – a social learning revolution

Social networking came from nowhere. The middle ground of collaboration, where groups of friends keep in touch, has ballooned on the web; people you knew at school (Friends Reunited), people you know at school (Bebo), people you just know (Facebook), people you know in business (LinkedIn). Then there’s Orkut, Cywold, Hi5 and so on covering every imaginable geographic group or community.

Education and training promises social contact with fellow learners and teachers/lecturers/trainers. In practice this is often more of a promise than a reality. Social activity in classrooms can be as much of a hindrance as help in schools, where behaviour management is a problem. Sitting in rows in a lecture theatre or conference room is hardly a powerful social experience. In reality teachers, trainers and lecturers don’t have the time or inclination to be social mentors to their students. True social networking thrives when users see the value and drive the phenomenon. This promises to be very powerful in terms of the social communication and cohesion in groups of learners.

LMSs, VLEs, PLEs – a learning management revolution

Specific online learning systems include whole families of management software that cover, in varying degrees, everything from the design, creation, storage, delivery, management and tracking of content. Learning Management Systems are common in large businesses with large numbers of learners. Learning Content Management Systems tend to focus on repositories of content. VLEs tend to be systems that integrate online functions in schools, colleges and universities. Personal Learning environments tend to be used by users who just like to organise their own news, learning and tools feeds.

Now that everyone has a common platform, the web, education and training can use this to get the business end of learning organised. It makes perfect sense to have an online system that does what a small army of administrators (or teachers/trainers) used to do at great expense. The efficient use of these systems saves organisations huge amounts of money. Pedagogically, this has taken the pain out of learner and content administration. All parties, pupils, students, trainees, learners, parents, teachers, lecturers, trainers, managers and administrators can have access to one system.

Authoring and capture tools – a content creation revolution

For centuries teachers have been designing their own lessons and left alone to deliver the content. This is magnificently inefficient. Media capture and sharing should be used for a portion of this effort, but the creation of good content, from simple learning objects, rapid e-learning, scenario-based e-learning up to games and simulations, good tool are needed to create good content. Tools have now emerged that make this task easier, from simple video and screen capture through to high-end 3D games and simulation tools.

This may not have created an army of teachers, lecturers and trainers who create content, as that was the promise. It has, however, allowed those with reasonable design skills and a knowledge of learning to create content in formats that can be shared online. Word doesn’t make you a novelist and an authoring tool doesn’t make you a learning designer. What we do have is the means to a glorious end – the creation of good, effective and powerful, reusable content.

Survival of the fittest

Ultimately this is a battle between the web and institutional inertia. The web, pedagogically has pushed, and continues to push, us towards more learner-centric models, that fit what we know about the psychology of learning. In evolutionary terms it’s between the dynamic world of the web and the dinosaurs. It’s between sharing and doing everything by yourself. It’s between avoiding expensive duplication of effort and doing things at great cost. It’s between, capturing the minds of young people, or boring them. It’s between the past and the future. In the end it’s about the evolution, survival and success of the fittest. I know where my money’s going.

Parodies of corporate logos (LOL)

Clever visual parodies on some very famous corporate logos. Here's a taster.

Libraries are barriers to reading

100 Classic Books on Nintendo

Who would have thought? I’ve just seen the ‘100 Classic Books’ title advertised on prime time TV, just after Big Brother, for the Nintendo DS. Brain Training was a hinge product.  It changed the entire games market. Nothing will ever be the same again. But this is even bolder.

Of course, the traditionalists will be waving their reading glasses in horror, as usual. But to turn books into a fetish is simply to deny learning and access by those who need it most. Real books are great, but let’s not confuse the medium with the content. Just as journalists and newspaper owners fail to realise they’re in the ‘news’ not the ‘newspaper’ business, so book fans and publishers fail to realise that this is about reading, not books. Books are simple a piece of technology. A damn good piece of technology, but one that has some strengths and lots of weaknesses. In time its weaknesses will outweigh its current strengths.

Books destroy trees, need to be expensively transported and stored in expensive libraries and retail outlets. Sure they’re portable, but only one or two at a time, not a 100 or 1000? You can’t search them, and they’re difficult to bookmark, highlight, hyperlink or comment without defacing the product. In time, and it may be a long time, books will be read on screens.

Let’s face it, 100 books for less than £20 is 20p per book and the advantages are portability, storage and bookmarking. William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, R L Stevenson, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Jonathan Swift, George Elliot, Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll, Jules Verne and lots more, available on a games console. It’s all good.

This is the shape of things to come, just a tiny glimpse of the possibilities in learning. Nintendo have taken a leaf out of Amazon’s and Sony’s book, with Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader both available with massive downloadable libraries. My brother-in-law, a busy man, who’s always on the move, swears by the latter.

We can now see where this can lead us, or more specifically lead our children. Why lock up knowledge and the ability to learn in libraries and schools, when we can publish and distribute it at marginal cost to everyone. As long as we publish in open standards, the devices will just keep on coming. Leave the device design to the experts, like Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, I believe that Moore's Law will produce $10 devices by 2020, possibly a lot earlier – we just need to focus on free content.

Fill their boots with books

In my book, this is a groundbreaking movement in education. It is not beyond the wits of government to be bold here and recommend an entire ‘digital canon’ for every child in the country.

Take 1000 or 10,000 books, all of the BBC Bitesize content (we the public have paid for it, surely we own it), lots of e-learning, at all levels, language learning, and give it away to every schoolchild for free. Just hand over the entire canon, all GCSE and A-level subjects and lots of juicy extras. The cost would be a tiny fraction of the overall education budget. In fact, I think it can be done at no cost at all.

Libraries as expensive warehouses

How? This may sound like a contradiction – encourage reading by closing the most costly libraries. There are lots of them. The cost of borrowing a book in some public libraries is greater than the cost of the book itself. This may be hard to believe, but it’s true. Divide the actual cost of the library by the number of borrows per year – it’s shockingly high. I don’t mean all libraries or university libraries, just costly public libraries.

Public libraries are no longer encourage reading. In the age of digital abundance, and cheap books, they’re an expensive obstacle to reading. Libraries spend inordinate amounts of time trying to fine people and recover books that people just find too inconvenient to take back. They stop reading from libraries as they criminalise readers. Librarians have become debt collectors.

My local library in Brighton is a beautiful, frightfully expensive, award winning building, but inside is a scrappy warehouse of cheap shelving and a very sparse book collection. Many libraries are just like this, more like bad second-hand book or charity shops. They can’t hope to match the demand-led approach of a real bookshop.

What the planners had to do, to make the idea fly, was include a CD and DVD lending facility. In other words it had to become a Blockbuster to survive. This is the cul-de-sac that the modern library faces, as in the age of digital distribution and downloads; it’s a service that is heading towards vanishing point.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually took a business-like view of the world. This New Year I stepped into the local library in my parent-in-laws’ home town, in Scotland. The library had fewer customers than staff, and I simply wanted to use the internet facility they advertised in the window. I was told that I had to be a local resident. Even the offer of payment was rejected.

Then there are the book wardens – sorry librarians. Let’s be honest, they’re mostly just warehouse workers ordering, stacking, handing out, taking in and stacking again. Yet they cost the earth. As graduates (in stacking?) they demand salaries way beyond what the job requires. And many are seriously deficient on the customer care side. The main cost of any public library is the inflated salary costs. This is why the borrowing cost per book in many libraries has become absurd.

OK, I’m sure there’s a few tramps out there and those earnest parents who drag their children along every Saturday, when they’d much rather be playing football or playing computer games, who’ll be seeing this as an affront to civilisation, so I’ll try another tack.

Close down a whole swathe of libraries and encourage, even subsidise, the big bookshops, such as Borders or Waterstones, to expand their activities. They have all the best sites, good coffee, helpful and knowledgeable staff, and better book collections. Give us all some tax breaks on buying books.

Spooky quiz - try it

At the end of this message, you are asked a question. 
Answer it immediately. 
Don't stop and think about it. Just say the first thing that pops into your mind. 

This is a fun 'test'... AND kind of spooky at the same time! Give it a try, then e-mail it around (including back to me) and you'll see how many people you know fall into the same percentage as you. Be sure to put in the subject line if you are among the 98% or the 2%. You'll understand what that means after you finish taking the 'test.' Now - just follow the instructions as quickly as possible. Do not go to the next calculation before you have finished the previous one.. You do not ever need to write or remember the answers, just do it using your mind. You'll be surprised. 


Start: How much is: 

 

15 + 6 











21










3 + 56 







59







89 + 2 



































91







12 + 53 



















65







75 + 26 

























101 





25 + 52 









































77







63 + 32 



























95







I know! Calculations are hard work, but it's! nearly over.. 





Come on, one more! ... 















123 + 5 























128 



QUICK! THINK ABOUT A COLOUR AND A TOOL! 

Now look at the first comment for the answer....

Cognitive overload – why we’re in the forgetting not learning game

Victor Hugo went on holiday after publishing Les Miserables but couldn’t help writing to his publisher to see how sales were going. He wrote a letter with just one symbol ‘?’ and his publisher replied ‘!’. I love this story as Occam’s Razor is my guiding principle (the minimum number of entities to reach your goal).

On an academic note, Itiel Dror gives some fine talks, and if you’re lucky, he’ll bring his ‘brain in formaldehyde’ along, and pass it around the audience. It’s to force the point that the brain is the focal point for all learning, and that without knowing how it works, you’ll be a massively inefficient teacher and/or learner. He’ll also take you through some exercises to show the severe limits of your working memory.

Brain is a filtering and forgetting machine
Cognitive overload usually results in a loss of psychological attention. We all know the signs, drifting into other thoughts, feeling confused.... The brain is a highly selective organ and has some heavyweight filters. The first is sensory input, the second is our working memory, and then there’s a whole battery of processes that can aid or hamper encoding, deep processing and retention in long term memory. In other words, we have evolved to learn only what our ancestors thought was useful to us and ditch the rest. The brain is not a learning machine; it is a filtering and forgetting machine.

Cutting consciousness down to size was the subtitle of Tor Norretranders excellent The User Illusion, a book devoted to mapping out the limits of consciousness. Every second we ignore and discard millions of bits of data and the tiny residue is consciousness. Most people have no idea about how perception and the representation of the external world works in consciousness – but the illusion is that it is about what we need, not what actually exists. Out of the eleven billion bits of sensory information from eyes, ears, smell, taste, balance and touch, we experience a tiny fraction in consciousness. Unbelievably we seem to process about 16 bits a second and even then it passes quickly into the past and forgetfulness. Then upper limit seems to top out at 50 bits per second. Learning is about catching things in this fast panning spotlight and encoding them in such a way that they can be remembered. This is like juggling a never-ending series of balls and occasionally, and deliberately, popping the relevant ones into your pocket. On top of this we tend to operate with only one or two modalities at a time, sight, smell, hearing etc. making consciousness a process of selection and rejection.

Even worse consciousness is full of deceit and deception. It is always trying to get you to do things other than learning. It’s a dangerous world out there and we’re genetically disposed towards getting our rocks off, so placing young men and women in a crowded classroom with a herd of close proximity mates is unlikely to promote psychological attention.

Much of the effort in education and training is wasted as it results in instant or near-term forgetting. We know that working or short-term memory is severely restricted, and without adequate rehearsal and spaced practice, little or nothing is learnt. This is why chunking and the parsimonious presentation of content is essential, not just desirable.

So if this is the demand sign of the equation, what’s the supply side like?

Courses are bloated
Many courses are bloated with material that is quite simply unnecessary. It’s common practice to load up a course with stated learning objectives at the front, followed by an overlong introductory session on the history or background of the topic. You see this at conferences where experienced executives spend 5/10 minutes opening their presentation with slides about their organisation; IBM, Microsoft, Cisco – as if we didn’t know that they’re big, have loads of employees and operate in lots of countries!

In e-learning you see it with overlong animations, animations that are illustrative and not instructive, over-written text and spurious graphics that simply match the nouns in the text. Almost all e-learning programmes have text that has not been adequately edited. Interfaces are not consistent or fine-tuned and screens are too busy. Then there’s the absurd text plus identical audio. Note that in 3D worlds I think this is different as your avatar increases attention and forces actual performance. Consciousness is a simulation and that’s why simulations work.

In many courses, subject matter experts load the content up with over-long explanations, examples and legal stuff, as they don’t know anything about learning. If the content has been passed through ‘legals’ it will have gathered a lot of messy unreadable moss.

Delivery designed for dumping
Courses offer the illusion of learning through their breadth and depth of content. In reality, a tiny fraction is retained by learners and even then, our memories demand that this knowledge decays rapidly, without practice. Traditional learning delivery therefore seems to be designed for forgetting – talks, lectures etc. In addition to being too ‘knowledge’ based – because it’s easy, there’s a dearth of learning by doing, spaced rehearsal and practice. We’re a profession who are stuck in ‘teacher-mode’.

Online/offline overload
Now I happen to believe that cognitive overload, although common both online and offline, is commoner offline. That’s why I’m in favour of more online education and training. It’s an observable phenomenon among all ages. I’ve been wholly absorbed in games, programming, research and writing for up to 8-10 hours, almost without a break. My ‘flow’ experiences on this scale are largely online. This is especially true for children who find it difficult to find the intrinsic motivation to stay focussed. It also gives us the ability to implement spaced rehearsal and practice, by both reminding us that it is necessary and delivering the relevant content or practice.

Epilogue by Picasso
A man on a train once asked Picasso why he didn’t paint people as the way they are. When Picasso asked him what he meant by this expression, the man took out a photograph of his wife. “That’s my wife” he said, and Picasso replied “Isn’t she rather small and fat?”

In short, everything is too noisy, too ‘presented’ and too long.

Teacher sacked for saying santa doesn't exist

This interesting seasonal story made me think – do teachers have to lie to keep their jobs? Do they have to pretend to believe in Santa, tooth fairies, bogeymen, Narnia, angels, Jesus, Allah and God. The parents of one tearful child explained that the teacher had said this because of her religion. In other words, her actual truth (Santa doesn’t exist was trumped by the view that her religious views were false).

In England state schools have to teach Religious Studies by law. In other words it is decreed that teachers must lie, as they cannot logically all be true. In fact, they are by definition a range of relativist beliefs, the tragedy being that their believers are absolutist in their convictions. Even worse the law states that Christianity must have a prominent position in all this. In other words, let’s tell lots of lies but we have one lie that needs more time than the others.

If this wasn’t bad enough a daily act of worship is also mandated by law, with a 51% bias towards Christianity. Thankfully, the great majority of schools, as reported by Ofsted, simply ignore this law. It would seem that legally mandating the daily chanting of lies is a step too far for most people.

What a mess. The lesson here, I suspect, is that education should be secular and that religion is a matter of personal belief and has no role in schools, as it causes more problems and contradictions than it’s worth. Religious education is a farce. It needs to be replaced by Philosophy which takes a more ‘educational’ approach to such issues.

PS

The teacher wasn’t sacked; she was a substitute teacher who is still registered. The school, in Manchester, simply said they wouldn’t use her again.

Pedagogy – faddish, non-empirical and lopsided

Reach for my gun

Whenever I hear the word ‘pedagogy’,  like Goebbels, I want to reach for my gun. The language of learning is a mishmash of backward-looking classical, industrial and behaviourist terms, but this is the one that masks an uncomfortable truth. Pedagogy means the ‘science of teaching’ but science is rarely a guiding hand in teaching. More often than not, so-called ‘pedagogy’ is a hotchpotch of confused practice. When you see genuinely efficient teaching, the usual sign being n attentive, engaged, note-taking or active learners, it contrasts wildly with the commonly observed inattentive, disengaged, no- note-taking, inactive (or active in the wrong way) learners.

Pedagogy – the science of teaching

If you want a heavy dose of how unscientific pedagogic talk can be I refer you to the journals Radical pedagogy and Pedagogy, Culture & Society. Here you’ll find evidence-free content of such mind blowing banality that you really will wonder whether teaching can survive the onslaught of non-empirical and faddish thought.

For a sobering account of educational research, I recommend James Tooley’s Educational Research: A Critique, commissioned by Ofsted. It was written some time ago, but not much has changed. It’s a worrying read, or as Tooley says in the Foreward  ‘a pretty grim business’. Tooley studied 41 articles across four academic journals and judged them on the quality of their empirical research and within this quantitative and qualitative evidence, with a stress on sample size and the objectivity of the researchers.

What did he find? Most of the papers were of unacceptable quality. He found an abundance of subjectivity, with mostly content taken from secondary sources without citing the primary source. Much of it was ‘second rate’ .... irrelevant to classroom practice and caught up in arcane disputes’. It reminded me of the permanent secretary who famously described the then Department for Education and Schools’ as a ‘knowledge-free zone’.

Seeds of its own destruction

The word ‘pedagogy’ contains the seeds of its own destruction, as the ‘science of teaching’ is hopelessly lopsided if it is not rooted in learning. By side-stepping the real science in the psychology of learning it simply observes one-sided practice. This is not a bad thing in itself, if it is done well, but let’s not pretend that it is anything like a full picture. It’s like a cricket writer writing only about bowling, never batting or fielding (in US pitching in baseball without batting and fielding).

The consequences for the use of technology in this one-eyed view of learning, is that teacherless interventions are not taken seriously. It is assumed that teaching is a necessary condition for learning – but let’s be crystal clear on this - it’s not. The vast majority of actual learning takes place WITHOUT teaching.  Teaching can induce good learning but it is not a NECESSARY condition for learning. Most pedagogic theorising assumes it does.

Radical pedagogy

I’d much rather redefine pedagogy as ‘the science of teaching and/or learning’. This really would allow us to develop more radical pedagogies. Actually it may in the end be better to abandon the word altogether. How far could a radical pedagogy go? Let’s imagine we had no existing infrastrucure or practice. Working up from ground zero  I’d put forward two sets of ideal features for an optimal pedagogy:

Seven cognitive features:

Achieves high levels of psychological attention

Avoids cognitive overload

Allows efficient encoding into long-term memory

Provides opportunity for spaced practice

Results in efficient recall from memory

Results in the competent application of that learning

Promotes further autonomous learning

 Seven practical features:

Accessible – when learners want and need it

Flexible – in a practical format for that learner

Self-paced – matches speed of learner

Personal – suited to that person’s needs

Repeatable – caters for repeated experience

Scalable – available to large numbers of learners

Cheap – cost must be kept low

Traditional teaching rarely achieves many of these fourteen goals. This is simply how it is, it is not an attack on the professionalism or abilities of teachers themselves, it’s simply a losing battle when the cohorts are up, to 30 or more.  The basic model– the classroom – is a busted flush.

Future pedagogies

Teacher pedagogies are difficult to pin down as they are mediated by real people, who have their foibles. Any pedagogic practice is subject to the personality and capabilities of the teacher. If we can develop and capture pedagogies that disintermediate teachers this must be to the benefit of learners and learning. This is a big ask, but it’s one worth pursuing.

Pearson’s new Fronter - good news for e-learning

M&A market for e-learning

Capital is being dammed up in investment companies and it needs an outlet. I have been doing on-going  work for a private equity house across Europe, and believe me, there’s real interest in investing in e-learning. Curiously, the credit crunch seems to have accelerated that interest. I can name four private equity groups who have or want to invest in this area. This is a damn good sign.

Fronter bought

Confirming my view that there are sectors that are relatively immune from the credit crunch, Pearson have gone to lapland and bought Norwegian company Fronter. This should be a good Christmas present  for Roger Larson, one of the founders.He gave a terrible keynote at Online Educa last week, a pure sales pitch, and the largely educational audience didn’t like it one bit. This was a shame, as the content of his talk was actually quite informative. It was a triumph of bad style over substance. However, they really have done something that works, with large numbers of students in schools. Rather than doing largely useless research they’ve actually done something in the real world that is helping thousands of students to learn.

This pushes their platform into the big time, as the winners in the VLE market tend to be those with sales and marketing clout and global reach. But it won’t be that easy. In the UK, they have proof of concept with the London Grid for Learning but London is not often the catalyst for the rest of the UK market. There can be no doubt that these systems can revolutionise learning in schools. Students, teachers and parents all have access to a transparent online system that provides communications, assignment submission, planning and shared resources for teachers. Homework can be seen to be set online, submitted online, and marked. This solves an eternal problem, often the subject of angst by parents. Teachers, of course, don’t like this function, as it forces them to set and mark homework. Teachers can also reuse materials (the source of much inefficiency in schools). Above all it provides an ‘always-on’ platform for students to structure and advance their learning.

Not all plain sailing

It won’t all be plain sailing. This is a fragmented market. There are dozens of vendors and sales are often down at individual school level, where cost of sale is high and budgets low. Once bought schools rarely have the project management skills to implement these systems efficiently, and there’s fierce resistance from more traditional teachers.

Prognosis

In 2009 we can look forward to some sensible consolidation in this market. There are financially weak companies that need to be bought or merged and, others that could expand by being properly capitalised.

Credit crunch survival guide

Will e-learning be accelerated or decelerated by the credit crunch? One thing’s for sure – training budgets and training departments will be hit hard. Some organisations will disappear. Others will not train as they’re laying off staff. Some will take the budget and decimate it, as they need to save money they to simply survive. Some, however, will see learning as a survival mechanism. In this market it may be useful to red, amber or green each sector.

GREEN
Some green shoots and surprises as a tsunami of cost cutting washes out old stand-up methods and looks for things to be faster, cheaper and scalable.

Financial sector may be surprisingly robust. They’re merging and, as traditional training has clearly failed to have much effect on their behaviour, using e-learning to solve compliance and regulatory pressures.

Defence has guaranteed budgets, for the time being, and the world is a scary place, and getting scarier.

Adult learning as massive unemployment will mean massive retraining needs. Look out for Train to gain and other government initiatives that combat this problem.

Oil and gas are running out so these organisations have to get smarter to survive. Until alternatives are found, we still need to heat, eat and get around. They’ve got us over a barrel.

AMBER
Challenging but these guys are survivors.

Healthcare will carry on like leeches on our backs.

Telcos will continue to charge too much, feed our addiction and pollute public spaces.

Education will drag itself into the 21st century - maybe.

Government departments will be squeezed but benefits and training will not.

RED
Blood all over the classrooms in these sectors.

Automotive’s a multiple pile up. They’ve been looking in their rear view mirrors for far too long. Some big names are crashing out of business, others will lay off staff. All will have to reduce costs.

Retail is in big trouble. We’ve shopped til we drop and the party’s over. Closing down sales.

Construction has ground to a halt with massive layoffs. Bricks don’t mean clicks.

Airlines will consolidate or crash. The combination of credit and climate crunch is causing them serious pain.

Damage limitation
The so called experts didn’t predict the crash, so we can safely assume that they don’t know how long it will last. So, if I were running an e –learning organisation, I’d certainly be rewriting my sales and marketing plan, and readjusting now. I’d also be selling less on learning and more on business benefits. The Next generation Learning campaign has a pretty good list:

1. Achieve more with less - optimise limited budgets and time
2. Gain fast access to learning - available 24x7 at point of need
3. Improve Competitiveness - respond quickly to changing business needs
4. Improve Productivity - skills & knowledge when needed
5. Address statutory learning effectively – faster, better, cheaper compliance
6. Reduce Carbon footprint - reduce travel & meeting costs
7. Harness Informal learning - connect learners with resources and experts

Interestingly, I’ve heard of layoffs by some e-learning suppliers and in-house departments, but increased sales in others. This confirms my view that there’s pain and gain, depending on what you do and for whom.

Going out ain't social

My ears were ringing for two days after seeing Primal Scream. You gotta love a little live ‘rock n’roll’ now and again, a dose of Dionysian pleasure. So here a conundrum. Although I spend a pile of time online, this has only increased my thirst for drafts of intense, real life events. It’s as if each has become an antidote to the other.

What is it to be ‘social’?

This isn’t a yearning for the social. Facebook is far more of a social experience than going to the theatre, cinema or concert. The scale, intensity and dynamic nature of the social interaction on Facebook is way beyond the idle chit-chat with relatively small numbers of people you get in these real places. In fact, people are loathed to speak to strangers at arts events. The only exceptions to this are popular sports events such as football where thousands will sing, chant, shout and chat with those around them.

 

High social

Facebook –network of friends – multiple chat  - anytime *****

Messenger – multiple chat – with cam ****

Email – one to one – daily ****

Conference – networking in coffee breaks and evening ****

Football match – social singing – lots of chat ****

 

Medium social

Down the pub – small social group – chat fuelled by alcohol ***

Dinner party – small social group fuelled by alcohol ***

At work – open office – chat ***

 

Low social

Gig –social but on an emotional level **

Theatre – brief chats in the foyer *

Dance – same as theatre *

Classical concert – people hardly socialise at all, certainly not with strangers. They don’t even speak to the people sitting next to them *

Cinema – not social at all – it relies on the suspension of disbelief and other viewers are often an annoyance – crunching popcorn, crackling sweet papers, slurping coke *

Art exhibition – nobody speaks to anyone - 0

What we yearn for in the real world is not primarily social, it’s transformative experiences. Real social experience is in inverse proportion to the degree of live performance. Just because there’s lots of people around doesn’t make it a social experience. Being in a live audience is often being part of an anonymous non-social mob.

Conclusion?

Are we being driven to polarised extremes, with online social activity at one end and live non-social performance at the other? Does increased activity online lead to an increased need for real ‘reality’.

Is an audience of one a lecture?

At almost every conference I attend, someone reads an entire lecture verbatim from notes. Is there anything dumber? It’s a throwback to a non-literate age. I can read. In fact, I can read faster than they can speak. It’s an insult to the audience.

One of the saddest learning stories I’ve ever heard was from the actress Tilda Swinton. She was the only student who turned up to a lecture at Oxford by Raymond Williams where he read out his lecture, from notes, from behind the lectern, and neither of them even acknowledged each other. How sad is that? Almost every University has even worse tales of lectures where not one student turned up.

Samuel Johnson saw the folly of it all:
‘Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary. If your attention fails, and you miss a part of a lecture, it is lost; you cannot go back as you do upon a book... People have nowadays got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shown. You may teach chymistry by lectures. You might teach making shoes by lectures!’

As David Hume, observed, it is the content, not the person who matters:
‘...as you know there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in books, and there is nothing to be required in order to reap all possible advantages from them, but an order and choice in reading them...I see no reason why we should either go to a University, more than to any other place, or ever trouble ourselves about the learning or capacity of the professor.’