When Big Data goes bad: 6 epic fails

Data, in the wrong hands, whether malicious, manipulative or naïve can be downright dangerous. Indeed, when big data goes bad it can be lethal. Unfortunately the learning game is no stranger to both the abuse of data. Here’s six examples showing seven species of ‘bad data’.

1. Data subtraction: Ken Robinson

Don’t let the selective graphical representation of data, destroy the integrity of the data. A good example of blatant data editing is the memorable ‘ritalin’ image used by Sir Ken Robinson in his TED talk at 3.47. This image is taken from its RSA animation.

Compare Robinson’s graph with the true source.

His has no legend and he’s recalibrated states to look as if there’s zero prescriptions. To understand this data you have to look at its source to understand that the white areas represent states that did NOT participate in the study or did not have reported prescription data. It’s a distortion, an exaggeration to help make a point that the data doesn’t really support

In fact, much of what passes for fact in Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talks are not supported by any research or data whatsoever.

2. Data addition: Bogus learning theory

Ever seen this graph, or one like it? It used to be a staple in education, training and teacher training courses. Only one problem - it’s bogus.

A quick glance is enough to be suspicious. Any study that produces a series of results bang on units of ten would seem highly suspicious to someone with the most basic knowledge of statistics.

But it’s worse than nonsense, the lead author of the cited study, Dr. Chi of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading expert on ‘expertise’, when contacted by Will Thalheimer, who uncovered the deception, said, "I don't recognize this graph at all. So the citation is definitely wrong; since it's not my graph." What’s worse is that this image and variations of the data have been circulating in thousands of PowerPoints, articles and books since the 60s.

Further investigations of these graphs by Kinnamon ((2002) in Personal communication, October 25) found dozens of references to these numbers in reports and promotional material. Michael Molenda ( (2003) Personal communications, February and March) did a similar job. Their investigations found that the percentages have even been modified to suit the presenter’s needs. 

The one here is from Bersin (recently bought by Deloitte). Categories have even been added to make a point (e.g. that teaching is the most effective method of learning).

The root of the problem is an image by Edgar Dale’s depiction of types of learning from the abstract to the concrete. He has no numbers on his ‘cone of experience’ and regarded it as a visual metaphor implying no hierarchy at all.

Serious looking histograms can look scientific, especially when supported by bogus academic research. They create the illusion of good data. This is one of the most famous examples of not ’Big’ but ‘Bad’ data in the history of learning.

3. Claims beyond the data – University League Tables

University league tables are used by politicians, Universities, parents and students. But they contain a dark, dirty, data secret. They claim to rank universities but, astonishingly, tell you absolutely nothing about ‘teaching’. They often claim to have ‘measures’ on teaching, but they actually draw their data from proxies, such as employment and research activity and use nothing but indirect measures to measure teaching.

The Times rankings are a case in point. They claim that their ranking scores include teaching. In fact, only 30% is based on teaching but they use NO direct metrics. The proxies include student/staff ratios (which is skewed by how much research is done) and, even more absurdly, the ratio of PhDs to BAs. It is therefore a self-fulfilling table, where the elite Universities are bound to rise to the top. There is no direct measurement of face to face tome, lecture attendance or student satisfaction.

4. Skewed data - PISA

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

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

The problems in the data are extreme as PISA compares apples and oranges. PISA is seriously flawed because of the huge differences in demographics, socio-economic ranges and linguistic diversity within the tested nations. There are many skews in the data, including the selction of one flagship city (Shanghai) to compare against entire nations. Immigration skews include numbers of immigrants, effect of selective immigration, migration towards English speaking nations, and first-generation language issues. There’s also the issue of taking longer to read irregular languages and selectivity in the curriculum.

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

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

5. Faked data

Eysenck worked with Cyril Burt at the University of London, the man responsible for the introduction of the standardised 11+ exam in the UK, enshrined in the 1944 Butler Education Act, an examination that, incredibly, still exists in parts of the UK. Burt was subsequently discredited for publishing largely in a journal that he himself edited, falsifying, not only the data upon which he based his work, but also co-workers on the research. To be precise, Burt's correlation coefficients on IQs in his twin studies were the same to three decimal places, across articles, despite the fact that  new data had been added twice twice to the sample of twins. Leslie Hearnshaw, Burt’s friend and official biographer, claimed that most of Burt's data after World War II were fraudulent or unreliable.

This is just one of many standardised tests that have become common in education but many believe that tests of this type serve little useful purpose and are unnecessary, even socially divisive. Many argue that standard tests have led to a culture of constant summative testing, which has become a destructive force in education, demotivating and acting as an end-point and filter, rather than a useful mark of success. Narrow academic assessment has become almost an obsession in some countries, fuelled by international pressure from PISA.

6. Dirty data deeds

One example of data gathering in education stands out as truly evil. In 1939, the CEO of IBM, Thomas Watson, flew across the Atlantic to meet Hitler. The meeting resulted in the Nazis leasing the mechanical equivalent of a Learning Management System (LMS). Data was stored as holes in punch cards to record details of people including their skills, race and sexual inclination and used daily throughout the 12 year Reich. . It was a vital piece of apparatus used in the Final Solution, to execute the very categories stored on the apparently innocent cards - Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and homosexuals, as documented in the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. They were also use to organise slave labour and trains to the concentration camps.

This is not the first time the state has recoded educational details to keep tabs on potential dissent. It was common in the Stasi infused East Germany. I shared a room at University with someone who became a Stasi spy in the UK and have taken some interest in their methods. Perhaps the most meticulous storing of data ever taken by a state, right down to smells in jars, from clothing and towels placed under interviewees during interrogation. The idea was that dissenters could be found by dogs, when necessary.

Conclusion

I am a fan of Big Data in education, even though it’s really closer to ‘large or little’ sets of data. However, we must be wary of data when it is used to exaggerated claims through addition or subtraction or spearhead prescriptive programmes and extreme testing. I am appalled at the way politicians and educators take up PISA, PIAC and OECD data, with little or no detailed examination of their assumptions or relative values and use it to shape prescriptive policies that do more harm than good. Big Data in the hands of little brains is downright dangerous.

WISE 2013 – Reinventing education

The World Summit on Education in Doha, Qatar brings together educators from around the globe. They literally fly you in, put you up in a fine hotel, feed you and let you rip. Networking here, and that is its strength, is as global as you can get, as you’re guaranteed to speak to people from every continent. It is arguably, as George Siemens says, “world’s most important education conference”.
‘Reinventing education’ was this year’s theme, an admirable goal and badly needed as we know that the Millennium goals will be missed, that the existing model is flawed, costs too high and that demand is exceeds supply. So what happened?
As I said when I blogged the last WISE conference I attended (this is my 3^rd), “Education’s a slow learner - it may be more accurate to say that education has learning difficulties. The system is fixed, fossilised and, above all, institutionalised, so the rate of change is glacial. People are, by and large, trapped in the mindset of their institution and sector. In truth, small pools of innovative practice are patchy and stand little chance of wide scale adoption. Many of the speakers repeated platitudes about education being the answer to all of the world’s problems. What they were short on were solutions. Education is always seen as the solution to all problems. The problem with all this utopian talk is that it dispenses with realism.”

4 pillars of education

The plenaries were, well, institutionalised, UNESCO, in my opinion, have become part of the problem and low on solutions. They dominated many of the sessions and regurgitated old reports, clichés and truisms, none worse that their 4 Pillars of Education ‘to be, to know, to do, to live together’. This is fine, but fails on a number of counts. ‘To be’ is a banal abstraction that has no real purchase in education. ‘To know’ is an obvious truism – of course education is about knowing – but knowing what? ‘To live together’ is better but not best taught in school and classrooms. The last, ‘To do’ is good but largely ignored as education gets ever more abstract and academic, treating vocational learning as an afterthought. What we needed was the Samson of innovation to push over the UNESCO pillars and enter the temple of institutional thought to upturn a few tables that have been selling the same tired, old stuff for decades. Sorry - I’ve mixed up two parables in one sentence!

Morin – disappointing ‘discourse’

Morin opened the conference with an abstract, rambling précis of his old UNESCO paper. He’s 92 and struggled to handle his notes and microphone. It was stratospheric, a piece of French philosophy, totally detached from the real world. It’s a type of ‘discourse’ (as French philosophers like to call it) that remains rooted in dualist abstractions and dialectic, with the occasional apercu. But this approach fails to deliver concrete ideas that one could take away and apply in the real world. When asked for some real suggestions and detail, he couldn’t and fumbled through with some more discourse on ‘strategy’. Worse, it set the wrong tone for the summit. One of abstractions and a failure to address real problems.

Literacy & numeracy

But things got much better with a hard hitting session which delivered some surprises for me. First some brilliant insights from Helen Abadzi, that around 18 our minds become less plastic and open to learning literacies. You can learn the letters but it is difficult to see them come together as words. You can experience this for yourself when you learn a new language as an adult. As you rarely reach a reasonable reading speed, of around 60-80 words a minute, you forget the start of sentences before you’ve reached the end. The implications of this research are huge, that we may be wasting too much time and money trying to solve an insoluble problem. The second was that the whole literacy push in Africa and the developed world is being thwarted by poor textbooks and teaching. I have seen this for myself in Cambodia, where a literally unusable textbook was being used in a country classroom. There was a call for the abandonment of traditional ‘English’ and ‘Middle-class’ teaching methods and texts for a literal ‘letter by letter’ approach in the local language, which is rarely as irregular a English. When done well it takes around 100 days. The other issue is teacher feedback, which is often poor and misdirected in schools, focussing on the best not the worst performers in the class. As for numeracy, it’s a different class of problem, as we are all born numerate. New born babies are numerate but not literate. In truth this side of the debate wasn’t covered at all.

Small-minded debate on Big Data

This session bordered on the bizarre. As one of the most important current topics in education it deserved better. What we got were idiosyncratic, personal and to be frank, not very informed, views on the subject. John Fallon, of Pearson, was reasonably articulate and tried to keep to topic, but the other three were amateurish. I saw one ‘analytics’ expert in the room leave after 15 minutes.

For John Fallon we need to collect, analyse and interpret data give opportunities to look at education like never before and transform outcomes. We’re not short of data, it’s just that most of it is inputs such as spend, enrolments, millennium goals, broadband connectivity and so on. As I always say, to measure bums on seats is to measure the wrong end of the learner. Then there’s the outcomes; PISA PIAC, high stakes tests, artificial once year events. What we don’t use it for, said John, is to enhance learning. How do I know what’s going on in students’ minds. Big Data needs to scale. Thousands of individual interactions each and every day, across informal and formal learning. He was the only one on the panel who had any real grasp on the detail.

Divina Frau-Meigs, a sociologist, and self-styled activist for media literacies (stretching the meaning of the word activist), gave an idiosyncratic presentation based on her own flimsy research. At one point she included drawing mindmaps on paper as Big Data. It’s called BIG data for a reason. Her statement that it’s mostly dashboards and data mining missed the point. Emilio Porta an economist from Nicuaragua was obsessed with global data – UN, UNESCO, PISA and so on. He couldn’t see the flaws in having created a sort of arms race as the leaning Tower of PISA data is hopelessly skewed. htp://buff.ly/1aCLCSb Politicians distort and exaggerate these stats for their own ends. This was a very low level chit chat about a complex and serious subject. I’m not sure that any of the panel had the expertise to do it the justice it deserved.

Mindgraphs - Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling has a great TED talk on the animation of statistics. But what matters is what those statistics tell us. Rosling stunned us with his assertion that our common perceptions about population, poverty and education are worse than that of chimps! He did this with enthusiasm and humour.

What is the global literacy rate?

80%

60%

40%

20%

(answer at bottom)

Again and again he showed us that our common perceptions are misconceptions. Population is not increasing exponentially as birth rates have and are falling and the number of children in the world has stopped growing.

On education he also scotched a few myths around figures quoted by notables on the panels. What is worse, he asked POVERTY or GENDER in education? Poverty is the clear answer. Above all, we no longer have developed v developing nations but a range. Rosling should have been the opening keynote, he set the tone for a proper debate, based on real figures.

What if Finnish teachers taught in your schools?

Pasi Strahlberg posed a few questions to show that you must tackle improving your educational system holistically. It is not JUST about quality teachers, the mantra we so often hear. It’s a wide range of social issues around scrapping the private sector, not rushing things and avoiding early years ‘schooling’. Let them play until they’re 7 or 8. Don’t get obsessive about testing. This flies in the face of almost everything we do in education in the UK. We have become trapped in an arms race, where the solution to everything is more ‘competition’, more ‘schooling’, more ‘league tables’ and more ‘testing’. I also noticed that this was in direct contradiction to Julia Gillard’s prescriptive ‘testing’ approach.

Monsters and misconceptions

This was a revelation, quick fire talks on all sorts of topics and solutions, some good, some great, some awful. Let’s get the awful stuff out of the way. The talk by the Observer journalist was an anecdotal rant about how women rule the world and hapless men need to listen to them, as ‘men can’t collaborate, women do’. This was a statement so general and awful that it deserves a response. I played football nearly every night as a child, I’ve managed companies, worked in teams and have little to learn from a hackneyed journo, who has spent most of her life in solitary confinement typing out articles on subjects to a deadline. She obscured an interesting point about the feminisation of education in early years and primary by caricaturing men. OK, got that out of my system.

To counter this, we had superb presentations on hard hitting topics, like child marriages, self-sustaining schools in Uganda, MOOCs in China, Amazigh education in Morocco and the Khan Academy. This quick-fire stuff needs to be promoted and given more status, maybe themed. I particularly enjoyed the iThra talk, about an after school science programme. He had a stunning quote, “The education system is a monster, by fighting it we would have become monsters ourselves”.

Mozilla – tinker, share, make

Mark Surman showed us how to present. Face the audience, stand up, look people in the eye, speak knowledgeably but from the heart, don’t use notes and deliver a clear message. Compare this to Morin and others on the many panels that delivered the same old platitudes. Motivate, engage and excite learners. Get them to tinker, share and make things. It’s a learn by doing model that allows young minds to understand the technological world in which they live and use that technology to learn, do things and make things. What gave his message clout was the fact that he was doing this through the Mozilla Foundation, around the world, in Mozfests and Maker events.

Educators are always going on about 21^st C skills. For Surman the 4th literacy is web literacy, as the web is the new classroom, 21st century skills - 5 Cs (Classroom is not one of them)  communicate, create, culture, collaborate, community on the WEB. These skills are not well taught in schools and universities, where learners are herded into classrooms and lecture theatres, online communication tools and devices often banned and creativity rare, often squeezed by the obsession with STEM subjects. Educators are also always trying to force storytelling. Young people tell stories daily - it's called Facebook. Lifelong learning is Google, Wikipedia, Social networking and YouTube - life is not a course it's informal learning.

MOOCs

Excellent input from the knowledgeable George Siemens and the Chief Scientist for EdX. These guys know their stuff but the other two participants clearly knew nothing about MOOCs and astonishingly, had never taken a MOOC. How do I know this? I asked them and the chair. Neither had taken a MOOC. They both spoke like amateurs because they were amateurs, trotting out clichés about human interaction and drop-out without any grasp of the detail. Siemens was clearly frustrated by their uninformed negativity and explained why drop-out is not the problem people imagine it is, that pedagogy is varied and evolving and that the experience is richer than people imagine and, above all, people like them and use them. For the first time in 1000 years education that delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want and enjoy.

MOOCs are a wake-up call for Higher Education. MOOCs flip universities. Siemens is right, MOOCs are a supply response to a demand problem. We’ve seen more action in 1 year than last 1000 years and MOOCs will produce dramatic systemic and substantial change. Certification is NOT the point in MOOCs - only 33% wanted certification in Edinburgh MOOCs and there are plenty of ways they can be monetised.

Human interaction is an issue but in the 6 MOOCs I've taken this has been great - teaching seems intimate, peer-to-peer interaction strong, forums lively and physical meetups possible. Siemens got a little tetchy when drop-out was mentioned – rightly so. The sceptics seemed determined to look at everything within the deficit model. What about the hundreds of thousands of drop-ins? I’m absolutely amazed that so many have taken so many courses from so many places. Online experience need not be inferior. As Siemens said, let's hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!

There’s real fears around dominance by the private sector, but if that delivers cheaper, faster, better education, so be it. In my opinion, however, the future of MOOCs is: open platforms, open content, open pedagogies and the opening of minds. African MOOCs may unlock a billion more brains HOOKs VOOKs - High school and Vocational MOOCs are also being delivered as this is not just about HE and degrees. The MOOC session by far best at WISE talking about real reinvention and a real phenomenon.

Conclusion

This is my third WISE summit, and as usual, I met some amazing people. Thanks George Siemens, Mark Surman, Cathy Lewis Long, Derek Robertson, John Davitt, Davod Worley, Jef Staes and all of the new people I met in Doha. The Souk was a hoot (try the Iraqi restaurant there), the gala dinner hilarious (the lack of alcohol made us almost hysterical) and on the rides on the bus to and from the conference I had some of the best impromptu sessions.

Overall however, you can see the problem, a failure to engage with the real problems head-on; costs, relevance, technology, that faculty and existing teaching systems biggest barrier to progress in learning.  86% of the delegates want reinvention of education but time and time again the panels reflected and reinforced old ideas and practices, with the audience clapping every time the word ‘teacher’ was mentioned. Teachers matter, but until we recognise that teaching is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for learning and look for some other additional solutions, WISE will forever be focussing on the wrong thing – teachers, not learners. The fear, that students may ‘manage to learn without me’ and of technology in general, is holding us back. Next year, less administrators, more innovators. The good news is that the Qatar Fundation has been doing brilliant work across the globe and announced a focus on innovation this year, with financial support for such innovation. They may be on to something here.

PS

Session on University Rankings was in Room 101!

 (Answer 80%)

MOOCs – the flipped University?

MOOCs are a phenomenon, a wake-up call for Higher Education and wake-up calls, create a sense of urgency, the first step in the process of change. Here are ten MOOC flips that explain why they may be turning traditional Higher Education on its head.

1. Flip from supply to demand

As George Siemens says, MOOCs are “a supply response to a demand problem”. They have tapped into an immense amount of frustration in that the system has remained immune to change, closed, inward looking and increasingly expensive. A global flood of learners has turned up for courses on every imaginable topic. All sorts of people, from high school kids, parents, alumni, people in the developed world to the retired, have signed up in their millions. Lifelong learning has, at last, surfaced and been made visible. This demand is not going away, it will only get bigger.

2. Flip from offline to online

Like Lady Gaga, MOOCs are a ‘phenomenon’. They came from nowhere, well almost but mostly from online learning, OER and pioneers like Siemens, Downes and Khan. We should be glad of this ‘phenomenon’ effect because I can think of only a handful of examples of similar educational ‘phenomena’ – Open University, Google search, Wikipedia and YouTube. All of these have been flips from offline to online.

3. Flip from horizontal to vertical

Suddenly, we have VOOKs (Vocational MOOCs), HOOKs (High School MOOCs) and African MOOCs. MOOCs have gone viral and spread downwards into and upwards into workplace and lifelong learning. Rather than staying within the horizontal band of higher education, traditionally based on the 18 year old undergraduate, they have flipped out of the horizontal to a vertical model.

4. Flips teaching to learning

You can’t choose your teachers at school or University but you can with MOOCs. The focus on MOOCs is not on the teacher or lecture but the learner, who chooses what course they want to do, when to start, when to watch lectures and formative work, and whether they want certification or not. They are fundamentally more leaner-centric.

5. Flips assessment

MOOC assessment is flipped in several senses. First, peer assessment flips tutor only assessment to learners assessing each others work. Second, many do MOOCs without any interest in paper certification, reversing the universal certification in the old system - it’s learning for the sake of learning. Third, you don’t need to be assessed on one day a year in a physical location within the University. You can choose when and by what method, either online through services such as ProctorU or at centres around the world through Pearson VUE.

6. Flip the standards

MOOCs have little to fear from being benchmarked against traditional campus-based courses. The online experience need not be inferior and may, in many cases, be  superior to such courses. As Siemens said, let's flip this and “hold classrooms and lectures to same standards as online!” On costs – they’re cheaper,traditional courses expensive. On numbers – they’re massive, traditional courses tiny. On access – many are available to start at any time, not once a year. On interaction with others – many have structured peer-to- peer contact, lively forums, social media offshoots and physical meetups.

7. Flips drop-out to drop-in

Drop-out in MOOCs is not the problem people imagine – it’s a category mistake, taking the old-school concept of high-school drop-out or University drop-out. and applying it wrongly in this new domain. I’m just amazed that millions have dropped in! let’s celebrate the fact that tens, even hundreds of thousands turn up for these experiences before pointing the finger. I have stopped in some MOOCs, I’ve also stopped in lots of things – that’s life. I’ve rightly stopped reading some books and watching some movies. Stopping is rational, continuing with a course you don't like for months or years is not.

8. Flips criticism

Before they’ve had a chance to breathe, sections of academia have tried to throttle the infant at birth. They have failed of course. The fact that MOOCs have been such a gadfly is as sure a sign as any that they are having impact. Let’s flip this. The immediate criticisms, on drop-out, pedagogy, inclusion, human contact, assessment and monetisation express a deeper fear, that these things may not be so great in offline Higher Education. The pedagogy is varied and evolving experience is richer than most people imagine and, above all, people like them and use them.

9. Flip from inward to outward

MOOCs are not only the outward facing democratisation of education but internally a facilitator for change and internal improvement. They hold a mirror up to Higher Education and force us all to ask more searching problems about the purpose, methods and costs. In this sense MOOCs have flipped from inward to outward delivery then flipped back into internal catalysts for change.

10. Flipped University

For the first time in 1000 years we have flipped education to delivers quality education to massive numbers, at low cost, that people want and enjoy. And what’s the response by the curmudgeons? Not in my back yard. It’s intellectual nimbyism. The reason MOOCs have succeeded, when so many smaller, even funded initiatives by and within Universities have not, is that it boldly flips the model. Inward looking attitudes have turned outwards, internal courses have flipped into external courses, the 18-year old undergraduate has been flipped into lifelong learners. The agricultural calendar has been flipped into anywhere, anytime. The offline only model has been flipped into the online model. The extortionate costs have been flipped to zero at point of delivery. What’s not to like here?

Conclusion
You might assume from above that I’m being critical of Universities. Well, to a degree, as they have their serious deficiencies in pedagogy, some poor teaching and high costs. In fact I want more and better Higher Education, not a system premised on scarcity and elitism. Like the flipped classroom, MOOCs may be the best thing that’s happened to Higher Education in the last two hundred years. It may encourage growth in higher education, based, not on the paper chase for degrees, the cramming, the poor teaching and primitive assessment but to a newer model, where students are drawn from a wider world and can try and take courses when they want from where they want. Are we in not the learning game? Can’t we celebrate access and low costs for learners? AMEN to the MOOC!

Oculus Rift: learning machine that will blow your mind!

One of the most talked about and exciting devices (to be released 2014) is not the Apple Watch or iPhone 6), it’s the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, priced at less than £200, which gives full immersion in a 3D world. I’ve tried it, here in Starbucks of all places, and several times since, and it blew my mind.  The experience is so real, so vivid and so memorable that I can remember every last detail weeks later. This matters in learning, as the trick in simulations is transfer, all the way back to Thorndike, rarely efficient, except in simulations and in this case super-efficient.

YouTube has videos showing people freak out when they play horror games with total immersion and 3D sound (watch this guy get freaked out), get their head chopped off by aguillotine in the French Revolution (your head falls into the basket and you look back at your neck!). It will spawn a new generation of compelling games but also a new generation of compelling learning experiences.

Learning machine

Vocational learning has lots to gain from this cool device, as it’s made for learning by doing, real world tasks, not only for acquiring competences but being assessed for those same competences. The possible applications come at you in a rush when you’ve tried it..

1. First person thinkers

‘First person shooters’ is the big genre in computer games; Quake, Doom, Halo, COD – legendary games that sold in their tens of millions. The immediacy of the experience where split second decisions mean the difference between life and death make it still the genre of choice for most gamers. Think now of First Person Thinkers where the player/learner has to make decisions in response to real word events and I mean human events – management training, health and safety conflict resolution, you name it….

2. Training within 3D worlds with 3D instruments

I’ve seen a simulation on domestic house gas inspection that simulates scenarios so well it’s now used as a large part of the assessment, saving huge amounts of money in the US. You’re free to move around the house, check for gas leaks, do all the necessary measurements using the right equipment – a completely open training and assessment environment. With Oculus Rift it is far more realistic than a 2D screen showing a 3D simulation.

3. Safe failure

Training that involves experiencing things that would be impossible to experience in real life as it is likely to result in harm, even death, can be delivered virtually. Emergency incidents, health and safety, military operations, medical treatment, surgery – you can be put through experiences where safe failure is possible just experience an emergency evacuation from an aircraft once on an Oculus and you’ll never need to listen to that boring speech again before you take off on an aeroplane,

4. Soft skills

I’ve seen sims that really do train people how to sell, interview, deal with conflict – even made a few myself - they work. But they’ll work even better with Oculus, as the level of physical and psychological fidelity can be finely tuned to the task. Note that this is not all about physical hi-fidelity. The Oculus, especially the high definition version, delivers this. It’s the psychological fidelity of being there in the moment with complete suspension of disbelief. It’s almost impossible not to believe.

5. School curriculum

Experiencing real physics experiments and lab work without the expense and danger from objects and chemicals is just one set of scientific learning experiences that can be fully simulated with the Oculus. Get a head start with live history and walk around a Roman Town populated by Romans (already exists), a trip across the solar system, into the bloodstream, into a cell.

6. Attitudinal learning

The intensity of the experience is perfect for affective learning, where motivation or attitudinal learning is needed. This may be, values, compliance, ethics, sexual harassment, anything that requires a head-shift.

7. Assessment

Many competences an only be measured by someone doing something. Yet most exams come nowhere near measuring competences. This is head and shoulders above traditional paper exams for many vocational and practical tasks, real skills. Your performance can really be measured. Your assessment can be your performance – complete and you’ve passed. This is already a reality in many simulations, flight sims and so on. It can also be true of many other skills.

Psychology of learning

In terms of the psychology of learning it hold the attention of the learner, a necessary condition for learning, rarely achieved for long periods in lectures and classrooms . You stay on task (almost impossible not to) providing intense and sustained learning experiences. Safe failure is possible, taking the learning experiences beyond what can be done in the real world.  In terms of memory, these experiences result in deep processing in memory, increasing effective storage, recall and retention. Importantly, as this is a huge problem in learning and training, it results in the superior transfer of skills from the learning experience to their application in the real world. It is literally a learning machine.

Conclusion

Oculus Rift may remain just a games’ peripheral but I doubt it. Whenever I’ve got learning professionals to don the headset, they get it immediately – this thing is a turbo-charged, learning machine. The fact that it’s cheap, open in architecture and will be a widely available consumer device, gives it the coolness and kudos that will make it irresistible to anyone who wants learning to be a transformational experience. All I can say us try it – it will blow your mind.

Armando Pisani: the pioneer who holds the key to immediate increases in school attainment?

Want immediate improvements in student attainment in schools, especially in maths? Listen to this guy. He’s a pioneer. Armando Pisani is unique. Why? He is a high school teacher who teaches 14-18 year olds in maths and physics and is unique in that he records all of his lessons on video for later use by students. He is also unique in that his academic background is in data analysis, so he has gathered a great deal of useful data on his work in his school. If his data is correct, and I think it is, he could be the catalyst for a huge increase in productivity in schools across Europe. The following is the result of a structured interview I did with Armando in Trieste.

What are the advantages of recording lessons?

To learn efficiently and deeply, students need to be able to “review, not miss things through inattention, being distracted, illness, student absence, teacher absence or  language difficulties – some students have other languages as their mother tongue”. The lack of “supply teacher availability is also a problem”. Recorded lessons give the students the ability to “catch-up and cover work not covered in a teacher’s absence”.

What data did you gather?

The survey data is outstanding, with evidence on how much was watched, when it is watched, how it is watched and the resulting rise in attainment. Another fascinating side to the data is the acceptance of the method by parents.

First the results...

Black no lectures  Red watched lectures

What percentage of students use recorded lectures?

 Do you think the lectures give you good help and support?

How much time do you spend watching the lectures?

Do you watch lectures in your normal study time or spare time?

Would you recommend the use of lectures to other students and friends?

What device do you use to watch the lectures?

Would you suggest that parents watch the lectures online?

Parents - have you seen the online lectures?

Parents - are you in favour of online lectures?

Parents - do you think online lectures help your child to study?

What are your views on homework?

He is appalled that some teachers and schools consider dropping homework. “Spain’s plans to drop homework nationally is crazy”. The “Italian word for homework is ‘Compiti’ with its root in the idea that you’re closing a gap in your knowledge”. Homework, he thinks, is an essential part of the learning process, the place where one gets reflection, gap-closing, deeper understanding and practice.

Has recording lessons affected student behaviour?

“Students appreciate the effort you make to record your lessons and moderate their behaviour” he claims. “As every teacher knows students get bored and often do ask to go to bathroom. When I’m recording, they never ask to go out of the bathroom.” Other changes in behaviour include, “less disruption, more questions asked by students, staying afterwards to ask questions”. After recording 182 lessons, he “can’t think of one incident where a student disturbed the lesson”. In some cases, “they are keen to know about the content of the next lecture”.

What about parent behaviour?

In Italy there is a strong family tradition and education “must involve family – school is part of that family”. That is reflected in parent involvement in schooling, with four meetings a year, “the first to meet and get to know the teachers and vice-versa, especially in the first year but also to show parents the school’s plans and activities. Subsequent meetings are for progress and to solve problems and misunderstandings”.

More than this Armando sees parents as a key driver in the use of his recorded lessons. Parents “like to see what students do during lessons” and some parents “loved the subjects when they were at school”. “I had assumed parents like it (recorded lessons) less than students but the opposite is true”. He thinks this is because parents they tend to think of it as “learning, students as  a task or work”.

What is the technical set-up?

I have given lectures at the highly innovative International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (they built the 800 euro hardware) for three years and this is one of the best presentations I’ve seen there. He uses ICTPs EyA system at a total, all-in cost of 800 Euros. “I do this on my own, with no help – it’s easy”. With no more than a 5 minute set-up he can record his lessons, including questions from students, although they are left out of shot for privacy reasons.

Conclusion

Having been involved in technology based learning for 30 years I am not easily impressed but Armando impressed me greatly. First, he is obviously a great teacher but more than this he wants, and this is his great strength, to turn his students into more independent learners. He really does understand the idea that teaching is really about motivating learners and giving them repeated access to good content.

PS
A fuller version of the study is to be found here in the European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning. Armando is well aware of the limitations of the study in terms of sample size, especially when comparing students who don't use the lectures with those that do. However, he is convinced that the poorer students tend to get more out of his lectures, He is keen to move on to the next stage of his research. It would be great if this were done in the UK.

Sceptics & social media: 5 stages of grief

I’ve long been an observer of the way newspaper, radio and TV journalists have dealt with social media. Many simply snipe away. We’ve heard the weary tones of TV pundits who have been forced by their Producers to refer to their web page or Twitter accounts at the end of the programme. Others can’t wait to find a story that confirms their deep prejudice against any form of mass communication that doesn’t involve them. This week, the press have discovered the word ‘troll’ and there’s no end of attacks on Twitter from people who probably had to look up the word on Wikipedia.

TV, radio and newspapers have been full of this over reaction this week. To take just one example, the normally rational Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, describes Twitter as “a harmless pastime for show-offs and voyeurs…the crack cocaine for the commentariat”. NO matter that journalists regularly use Twitter to get more reach for their work. No matter that many Guardian columnists now read like second rate bloggers. No matter that the newspaper industry is only just recovering from phone hacking practices that make the occasional troll seem like a choir boy. Journalists are keen to punish trolls but less keen to punish their own.

What is missing here is good ‘journalism’. Few discuss the detail around the protections that existing laws provide, whether it be harassment, confidentiality or libel. Few actually know anything about the procedures which Twitter and Facebook have in place to deal with extreme transgressions. Few bother to even find out.

Five stages of grief

It struck me that there’s some merit in applying Kubler-Ross’s ‘five stages of grief’ to their behaviour in facing up to the realities of contemporary mass communication and journalism.

Denial: Work of the devil. I’ll have nothing to do with it. Most journalists completely ignored the presence of social media, even when millions were using it and it was feeding images and reports into mainstream media.

Anger: Snipe and sneer whenever it’s mentioned. Suddenly, they were no longer silent but openly resentful and hostile on TV, radio and in print, with the usual ill-informed remarks about media they had never used and barely understood.

Depression: Why don’t they want me any more? Panic then sets in as they realise that newspaper circulation is heading towards disaster. They are in danger of missing out on a means of communication they need to both ‘pull from’ and ‘push to’, as a valuable source for stories but also dissemination of their work.

Bargaining: Maybe I’ll give it a try…  Then it literally clicks. This stuff is here to stay. They take a couple of baby steps and find out that it’s easy to use but do so irregularly and clumsily, with more than a tinge of residual scepticism.

Acceptance: Know how many ‘followers’ I have? Suddenly, they realise it enhances their reach, reputation and personal brand, and jump gleefully on to the bandwagon. Then you can’t stop them.

Flip media

But something else has happened, a sixth phase, which I’d call the ‘flip’. This is when traditional media relies so much on social media as a source – Tweets, Youtube, mobile cameras etc .that it resorts to simply telling people what they already know.

I liken this to two tectonic plates colliding. As the new online media plate crashes into the old offline media plate, the old plate starts to be pushed down and as it is submerged, it sends out lots of tremors, earthquakes, even volcanic explosions. Arguments erupt, as the old world tries to deal with the new reality. Calls are made for more censorship, arrests, jail sentences – even torture (Manning) prosecution and persecution (Assange). It’s the wretched acts of a defeated army in retreat.

Conclusion

There is something inevitable about all this. Technology is always ahead of the sociology. What matters is that the early adopters and people with some foresight ignore the naysayers and get on with their blogging, contributions to Wikipedia, YouTube uploads, Facebook posting, Tweets, whatever, and ignore the sceptics.

Wikipedia Zero – mobile as lifeline to learning

It jars when I hear people say online learning isn’t used. Don’t you use Google, Wikipedia and lots of other online services to learn? I know you do, because the stats are overwhelming. In fact billions use online learning, daily.

Increasingly, this is done through mobiles. Compare the 6 billion mobile subscriptions in the world to the 600 million broadband connections. We’re close to seeing mobile as the most ubiquitous piece of personal technology ever, and it’s the developing world that’s experiencing the fastest growth. Check out this table which shows the countries with the highest mobile access to Wikipedia.

Nevertheless, in the developing world, where mobiles have become massive, internet connectivity is scarce and expensive, tariffs remain a problem. Here the mobile is often the only means of accessing the internet. A mobile is a godsend to someone who is poor, often their only link to erratic employment opportunities, services and money management. Yet access to learning is hampered by cost. Call and data time is precious and used carefully and sparingly.

Zero tariffs

An idea that has been around for some time is now getting real traction – zero tariffs for education on mobiles. Simple, but it opens up knowledge and educational opportunities to billions who do not have easy access to books, libraries, schools and learning. As Eric Schmitd says in his new book The Digital Age (a largely tedious tomb) in the developing world the mobile phone is often the only “lifeline to learning”. I first heard of the Zero tariff some years ago in relation to Dr Maths, in South Africa. Started in 2007, it grew rapidly, and unexpectedly to thousands of users.  Maths tutoring is delivered, largely through MXit. Tutors, from anywhere in the world, help students with questions and homework. It uses text messaging. Interestingly, when they faced the problem of scalability (tutors are the scarce resource) they upgraded the architecture so that content could be created to produce ‘bots’ or automated replies, reducing the load on live tutors. Geoff Stead also points out that it has happened even in the developed world, with free SMS messages for TextForBaby in the US, a mother and child healthcare service. 

Wikipedia Zero

But the big news is Wikipedia Zero, now available to an astonishing 470 million subscribers in Africa, India, Eastern Europe and the Far East. Of the 25 countries that have the highest rate of mobile traffic on Wikipedia, the top eight are in Africa and an astonishing 22 are in the developing world. Wikipedia Zero is also now available in India to 60 million subscribers (through Aircel). Note that in India, mobile penetration in India is over 70 % at 867 million subscribers, compared to only 77 million people with access to the internet (Comscore, June 2013). This move is born of necessity as the context has turned the developed world’s model on its head. Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and many other countries are on board.

Local languages

An interesting side effect is the stimulation of language versions of Wikipedia. To be really useful Wikipedia must be translated into local languages. This statistic says it all;  Hindi Wikipedia, has 22.1 % of page views globally from mobile, compared to 17.3% for ALL other languages. Wikipedia Zero, I suspect, will accelerate translation into many other languages.

Win-win

Even on a purely commercial basis, I see this as a win-win situation; learners getting free services and telcos increased reputation, reach and market edge. Like Google and Facebook, learners get a valuable service for free, the companies increase their brand capital and deliver adjunct services.

Conclusion

Wikipedia came out of the blue to become a consistent top ten website, showing that there is a massive thirst for online knowledge. What was even more astonishing was that it was crowdsourced, for free. No one saw that coming. Now we have the opportunity to extend free production to free distribution on powerful, portable and personal devices that have become ubiquitous in the developing world. If that doesn’t make your heart leap with hope and optimism, what will.

Good, bad and ugly: 7 critics of social media

I’m of an age (56) where lots of my contemporaries show contempt towards social media. It’s rarely a reasoned argument, simply a sneer accompanied by a ‘I’m too good for that sort of thing’ attitude. Euan Semple made the valid point on Facebook that “Not being attracted to the social web is OK but adopting a sneering tone when you tell me that, frankly, isn’t.” and that it’s not easy dealing with the criticism as the debate as it’s very difficult arguing the case for something your opponent has never used or has no real knowledge of.

1. Know nothing critics

Unfortunately, the most common are those who simply scoff and start with something like “Why would I want to know that someone is having a cup of tea…” Barely a week goes by without me experiencing this type of criticism. They haven’t used social media but assume they’re experts on the subject, pull the ‘ugly’ face and sneer as the rest of us. It’s a sort of superior attitude usually accompanied by simplistic, ill-informed views of how social media is actually created and used. All of those Wikipedia articles you’ve used, they were crowdsourced. Ever watched a YouTube video, someone made that and uploaded it.

2. Know a little critics

A little learning is a dangerous thing and some use one aspect of, say facebook, but have no idea that the tool also includes messaging, apps and other functionality. It’s like someone who thinks a car is only useful for social visits to friends and relatives. NO - you can also use a car to get to work, do work, engage in poltics, visit interesting places, go on holiday and so on. Social media for many people, replaces email, voice calls and txting and the sheer range of social media options means that it has many different functions.

3. Lurkers

First, it’s OK to lurk. Some of you reading this sentence will be lurkers, indeed the evidence suggests that in many social media, and media sharing services with a social dimension, the great majority of users are lurkers, who rarely if ever post or comment. What is odd is when the lurkers turn into critics. They take out a lot, but only give back criticism, sharing is a mystery to them.

4. Hypocrites

Let me give you an example.  Pew surveyed 2,462 middle and high school teachers and found that , when it comes to Wikipedia; 1) Teachers recommend that students do not use it, warning them that its accuracy can’t be trusted, but 2)  Teachers overwhelmingly use it themselves for research and preparation. In fact, they use it “at much higher rates than U.S. adult internet users as a whole (87% vs. 53%), Pew also found that Wikipedia reliance “does not vary across teachers of different subjects, grade levels, or community types,” and only varies ever so slightly by age, with 90% of the youngest teachers using it versus 85% of those 55 and older. This is ugly. http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teachers-and-technology.aspx

5. Know but don’t engage

Some don’t do social media because they simply don’t want to or don’t have the time. That’s fine. This is good. These critics I like. It’s OK not to engage in social media in the same way that it’s OK not to engage in lots of social events, go to the cinema, theatre, football, cricket or music festivals. It’s not for everyone. These people don’t moan and whinge about social media, it’s just not part of their lives. In fact I rather resent the social media Taliban, who insist on everyone being online and everyone needing to be highly ‘social’.

6. Privacy (weak)

Some don’t like to put their neck out and have their lives out there for others to see. This is good, as long as it doesn’t tip over into criticising others for being more social, taking risks and enjoying the range of social, professional and interesting interactions that social media brings. I’ll come to a theory on this later.

7. Privacy (strong)

A stronger argument is the species of critic who values their privacy and has suspicions about government, big business and other shady institutions knowing what they’re up to. I respect this position and think that for some, it is a valid argument. Julian Assange, for example, never uses Facebook for that reason. Given recent revelations, the US government is clearly not to be trusted on the matter. However, I think it’s exaggerated. What exactly in your life do you think they can use against you?

Characteristics of critics

Here’s an observation, not based on any research that I know of, merely a hypothesis. I have noticed two specific characteristic that distinguishes enthusiastic users of social media, from sceptics and critics; 1) personality type and 2) risk taking.

1) Introversion and extroversion. On the whole, the people I know who are extroverts are enthusiastic users of social media, introverts tend to be non-participants or critics (3 good, 2 bad, 2 ugly). This is not a criticism, merely an observation, and it perhaps reflects a general attitude towards networking and social activity by extroverts and introverts both online and offline. This is reflected in my full acceptance of non-participants and the privacy stance (weak and strong). The downside of extrovert dominance is the tendency for people to present their ideal lives online. There’s a lot of showboating that masquerades as sharing.

2) Risk taking. For me, this is a more interesting issue, as I suspect that much of the criticism of social media comes from an intrinsic fear of taking risks that expresses itself as derision. Nervousness often expresses itself as scepticism and scorn. On the whole, the risk takers I know, in business and life, tend to be users of social media, or at least willing to give it a try. Good risk takers are also able to distinguish between good and bad risks, that’s why I respect those who are wary on the grounds of privacy.

Social media Taliban

After all I’ve said above it may surprise you that I don’t follow the groupthink view that we should strive to get everyone online. I’m a libertarian at heart, and for me going online and using social media is a matter of choice. I have little time for spending huge sums of money on this form of mock inclusion. Make it cheap and compelling and they will come. I can remember when print and TV journalists constantly sneered at social media and the web, now they all have their blogs and Twitter accounts. The numbers speak for themselves.

Neither am I a social constructivist and therefore keen on those who see all learning as social and ‘connectivism’ as a valid ‘theory’ of learning. I spend relatively little time, for example, in MOOCs on forums, and don’t much like the diffuse chat that passes for learning or training sessions where round tables construct flipchart pages blue-tacked to the walls. On the other hand I see social media as an invaluable part of my life and learning.

Conclusion

Having used social media since its inception and blogged, facebooked and tweeted for many years, I’ve come across a large number of critics. I respect those who simply opt out as well as those who don’t participate on grounds of privacy (weak and strong). That’s three of my categories. On the other hand, I resent those who simply sneer and/or don’t have any real knowledge of these media in terms of their functionality, actual use and potential. I’m also impatient with the hypocrisy behind lurkers who sneer, and duplicitous hypocrites who condemn but use it at the same time. Stay clear or share, don’t just take or sneer.

Cambodia: what do you do when all teachers are killed?

Teachers annihilated

Cambodia all but wiped out its teachers in the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge genocide. In a curious twist of fate, many of the senior cadres and architects of the revolution had been teachers and many of prisons were former schools, including the notorious S21 in Phnom Phen. Think of it –being a teacher would most likely get you killed. Think of the problems they’ve faced after this holocaust; no schools, no books, no professional teachers, no cultural capital around teaching and a generation of people left illiterate. The numbers are shocking. Soviet sources state that 90% of all teachers were killed by the Khmer Rouge. Only 50 of the 725 university instructors, 207 of the 2,300 secondary school teachers, and 2,717 of the 21,311 primary school teachers survived

The Khmer Rouge took away the very things the people held dear; family, religion and work. Children were separated from parents, husbands from wives. Intellectuals, teachers, monks and eventually even city dwellers were seen as the enemy. It was ‘dialectics’ picked up by intellectuals who had studied Marxism in France, taken to surreal extremes. 

This is very recent history (1975-79) and it’s never far from the surface when you’re in Cambodia. My tuk-tuk driver’s head hung low when he told me that both his older brother and father had been killed at that time. It was the saddest and most poignant moment of my whole trip. This is still a country of graves and landmines, and seeing people daily with missing limbs is a blunt reminder. Landmines are an evil and make no mistake, if you sell them, you should hang your head in shame, as you’re part of that evil.

I’ve reported from schools in Africa, China and the Middle East and always try to get a feel for education on the ground when I travel but this was different. We’re talking ‘Year ZERO’ here. Let me tell you one anecdote. A teacher I met in Cambodia told me of a parent who didn’t want to send her daughter to school “as they’ll all (teachers) be killed some time”. However, this is rare. Cambodia and Cambodian parents are now almost obsessive about education, partly because they’ve been through so much.

Meet Sue

I met Sue in Siem Reap market where she was buying a few dozen pirated DVDs. In her seventies, she’s worked in rural Cambodia for the last three years. This polite woman from the Isle of Wight came here on holiday and decided to devote the rest of her life to teaching the rural poor. As she said, “When I’m gone, I just want to make sure I’ve left a legacy that works”. After losing her money on an ill-fated attempt to buy land for a school, she persevered and the local MP has given her some land. The main problem here is that it is difficult for foreigners to buy land (understandable for other reasons) and the difficulty in erecting permanent school buildings (NGOs often have to build collapsible structures). She’s here for good and clearly loves the children, people and Cambodia. “I’ve learnt a lot about life since I’ve been here” she said, a lovely role reversed line from a dedicated teacher.

Sue’s scalable technology

Sue has a computer and dongle which she uses for email and to keep in touch back home but when it comes to technology in her school, she was smart. The reason she was buying so many bootleg DVDs was that she wanted to expand her children’s knowledge of English. English is the aspirational language here, as it is everywhere else I travel. She’s also careful to teach them Khmer, as they need to read and write in their own language to progress at school. So she gives them a treat every Saturday, which is ‘movie night’. She has a TV but is after a projector, as she wants to show movies to 100 people at a time. Her rationale is that this is scalable solution taps into their natural motivation to learn English, but expands their knowledge, cultural and linguistic, in all sorts of ways. Instinctively practical, she knows that the choke point is the limited sockets and electricity. This is smart thinking.

Another issue is cultural context. Although these are western movies, she had lots of David Attenborough and National geographic stuff! She explained that displays of affection, even kissing on screen, can be seen as shameful, so she carefully views and selects the programmes she shows.

All in all, she was building a sustainable, scalable solution by fitting the technology to her scant resources with a fair amount of cultural sensitivity. This is exactly what I presented at Online Africa, and why I’m so critical of many of Sugata Mitra and Negroponte’s ‘parachute projects’. Innovation should not trump sustainability. Innovation is only innovation when it’s sustainable.

Monk and me teaching

While poking around in a Buddhist monastery, I had a second illuminating experience. No, not religious enlightenment. I came across a monk, who was teaching English. His kids were not monks but local children, many who had been sent here by their parents. He invited me into the classroom, which had no walls, a dirt floor and I did a little teaching. The roof was less than 6’ and I’m 6’4” which led to some hilarity, as I had to cock my head to one side. They were a lovely and lively bunch, keen to chat and ask questions. They continued talking to me after the class, keen to extract as much ‘English’ practice as they could. The sad thing was the awful national textbook they were using, written, it seems, with the intent to prevent you learning English, an awful, grammar-laden affair full of sentences, no real English speaker would ever utter. It made me aware of the fact that some schools may be doing little to actually teach English, just going through the motions.

Then a shock. In a room next to the open classroom was a row of computer screens all still wrapped in the plastic they had arrived in, covered in dust. They had never been used as they lacked sockets and electricity. Once again, my point about sustainability was confirmed.

They had been kindly donated but no one had really thought about the support resources and how they would be used. Interestingly, as I was doing my bit in the classroom, one kid’s mobile went off. Like kids everywhere, they love their mobiles. Everywhere I went, cheap mobiles were being used to text, make calls and listen to music.

Informal learning

In practice, most people learn their language skills in work. This is important. Time and time again I met young people who had really learnt English on the job. Necessity is the mother of language learning. Even very young kids were picking up languages through selling. This tiny 5 year-old could count to twenty in three languages and challenged me to a game of tic-tac - for money! She wasn’t in school but she was as smart as a squirrel.

In my hotel, this young girl, a waitress, was allowed to use the computers when she had finished her work and no guests were around. She was doing lots of useful things. I watched her use Google earth to view Angkor Wat, Facebook and message away. She was constantly reading, writing and picking up IT skills useful for her future work prospects. E-learning, in Khmer, to learn English and other practical, vocational skills, would be a godsend.

Schooling not enough

In speaking to young Cambodians, it became clear that some learnt a little English in schools, but not much. There are real problems with the quality of teaching, materials and lack of teachers. Teacher attendance in state schools was also appalling in some areas. Sue had been to schools where the kids were there and were getting on with learning but the teacher hadn’t bothered to turn up! To be fair the salaries are between $20-50 a month. Many teachers have themselves, failed to finish their secondary education, teacher training is poor and some need to work to supplement their salary.

English is their passport to further education, work and prosperity. Tourism is growing at an astonishing 25% a year, and I can see why. Angkor Wat is a dream cultural destination but the country still has that laid back feel, with good food, cheap accommodation and charming people. What these people need is some formal learning, in basic English, then support in a vocational context. An interesting addendum was Sue’s comment that she was looking for a good local person who could also teach Chinese, as this was the big growth area in visitor numbers.

Conclusion

So what did I learn from this? First, Cambodia has much to teach us, as the madness of killing teachers has not gone from our modern world. I had to cancel a trip to central Nigeria twice this year because of the threat from Boko Haram (translation: Western Education is bad) and in some areas of the Islamic world, education is war, with teachers and even pupils being targeted by religious zealots.

Second, Cambodia certainly needs more good teachers and schools but it has recognised that vocational training needs to be its main focus. Sure it has Universities, all private, with fees at $360 for the first year and $400 thereafter but they’re all in the cities, so travel and accommodation expenses are a problem. The quality is low and there’s the usual aloofness and lack of alignment and relevance. But the main focus is, rightly, on the idea that people need to 'learn to earn'.

Third, what I witnessed was ‘schooling for the sake of schooling’. The English textbook was ridiculous, teaching hampered by a lack of training, irrelevant tests and so people were in classrooms going through the motions. What these countries really need is not more ‘schooling’ but better ‘teaching and learning’. They need curriculum reform, teacher training and a reboot of the system. I saw lots of great work done by volunteers like Sue but the sheer scale of the problem, means that a radical shift is required. The good news is that young Cambodians are getting on and doing it for themselves. This is a young and vibrant population in a country of micro-businesses. The problem seems to be the age-old politicians, corruption and their lack of vision.