7 reasons why Kafka would have loved assessment

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

Sell ‘cheating’

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

Mindless maths

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

Summative is too late

The educational system is structured like horizontal layers of impermeable rock. The learner has to punch vertically upwards through these strata, with exams at every stratum, designed to halt progress for the majority. This obsession with summative assessment also means that formative assessment suffers. Teachers teach to the test. In short, we test too late, when the damage is done.

Tests measure failure

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

Test and forget

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

Luddites

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

Abysmal quality control

Recent A-level exams contained impossible questions in a range of subjects from major test organisations such as AQA, OCR and Edexcel. Their quality control was so abysmal that they hadn’t tested their papers with even a SINGLE student. They claim to have statistically eliminated the problem by adjusting marks. Just how did they measure the distress and distraction in trying to answer an impossible question?

Conclusion

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

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

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

Teaching

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

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

“Good teaching is only possible if professors are also active in research” is the mantra the hear time and time again. But the pressure to shovel more and more research into more and more journals, with fewer and fewer readers and attend more conferences, with fewer attendees, is a road of diminishing returns. Research, through the publishing virus, is now a reputation and resume issue, largely divorced from teaching. Indeed, newer teaching institutions have massively expanded research, at the expense, they say, of teaching. This research-led teaching myth also promotes the teaching of inappropriate, esoteric topics. In short, there’s a need to de-link or further disengage research from teaching.

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

Dropout rates

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

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

Bureaucratic behemoths

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

Extravagant facilities

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

Poor performance

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

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

Skewed admission

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

Vocational/academic

The authors unashamedly support a return to a Liberal Arts model with undergraduate courses leading to vocational specialisms. They are rather snooty about engineering, MIT and CalTech. Although they have a pop at the Ivy League and rankings that reflect a “premium on prestige” and brands not teaching and learning. The Golden Dozen in the US come in for some heavyweight criticism for below par teaching.

This is mirrored in the UK, where vocational degrees (apart from medicine) are regarded as below par. On the other hand we have some worthy Universities, such as Heriot-Watt and Manchester and UCL that still carry the banner for solid, professional vocational courses. In may ways we’ve never adopted the Liberal Arts BA then Medschool/Lawyer model from across the pond. That’s to our credit.

Recommendations

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

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

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

Toxic debt & bubble

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

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

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

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

In many ways the arguments in this book can be applied to UK Universities, the notable differences being the US commitment to campus sport and a much larger number of private institutions. I’d suspect, therefore, that the debate has already reached these shores with fees looming, as we are now third in the world on the cost of Higher Education to students, with only S Korea and the US ahead of us. We would do well to listen to what these researchers have to say.

Brilliant student tool that saves tons of time

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

CITEME – how it works

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

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

Saves tons of time

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

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

7 ways education contributes to rioting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vorderman – a few unsavoury facts

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

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

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

Curriculum

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

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

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

Teaching

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

Almost all primary teachers stopped maths at 16

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

Most maths not taught by maths teachers!

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

Conclusion

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

Download full report here.

Education at its very best - Brighton Rocks!

Rockshop – education at its very best

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

Goal driven

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

Learn by doing

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

Work with strangers

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

Good social mix

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

Peer learning

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

Focus

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

Performance

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

Family and friends

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

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

Share it

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

George Siemens - if social media goes so does connectivism

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

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

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

Connectivism not really there?

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

Solution?

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

Social media and politics

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

Story

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

Learning Technologies & LWF (2+2=5)

Graham Brown-Martin & Donald Taylor

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

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

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

Two plus two equals five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curator? Doesn’t chime

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

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

L&D and curates’ eggs

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

Coach in disguise

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

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

Millie the social networking teacher

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

Millie’s Blog: What I Taught in….

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

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

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

Facebook: Richuish Geography

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

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

Coveritlive: online workshops

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

Conclusion

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

Never praise a child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

7 reasons why 'marking' sucks

In all the time I was a parent and employer, I never marked anyone. So I was delighted to give a keynote, alongside assessment guru Professor Paul Black. Inside the Black Box by Black and Wiliam, should be compulsory reading for all teachers, trainers and lecturers, and it was thrilling to see him give a masterclass in assessment with solid, evidence-based advice that you can apply straight from the hip in teaching. Marking (not against in entirely) may do more damage than most educators realise. It is a summative assessment technique, all too often wrongly used in formative assessment.

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

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

Marks

Comments

Marks plus comments

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

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

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