Social media & learning – note taking on steroids

With all this talk about social media and learning, we may be missing the essential benefit, which is simple note taking and the sharing of those notes. Social media is notes on steroids.

I’m a note taker, whether it’s at talks, conferences, in margins of books or thoughts captured in my notebook. On top of this I write the equivalent of notes on Twitter, Facebook and longer blog posts. It’s a lifelong habit. I’m therefore astonished, when giving keynotes and talks at learning conferences, to see learning professionals sit there and NOT take notes and worse have no means to take notes.

In addition, articles on ‘learning how to learn’ or ‘metacognition’ often disappoint me, as they seem vague and lack the sort of direct advice that really does lead to a dramatic increase in retention. With this in mind I want to recommend something that I’d put at the top of any list. It’s simple, it’s obvious: it’s NOTE TAKING and its amplification through SOCIAL MEDIA.

Why take notes? Several reasons:

1. Increase memory

Studies on note taking (with control groups and reversal of note takers and non note takers to eliminate differences) show overwhelmingly that not taking increases memory/retention. Many aspects of increased memory have been studied including; increased attention, immediate recall, delayed tests, free recall, MCQs, remembering important v less important knowledge, correlations with quality of notes and deeper learning. Bligh (2000) has detailed dozens of studies in this area. Wittrick and Alesandrini (1990) found that written summaries increased learning by 30% through summaries and 22% using written analogies, compared to the control group. Why does note taking increase retention? First, increased focus, attention and concentration, the necessary conditions for learning. Second, increased attention to meaning and therefore better encoding. Thirdly, rehearsal and repetition, which processes it into long term memory. All three matter.

2. Increase performance

If you take notes AND review them, you do better on assessments (Kiewra 1989, 1991). Interestingly, Peper and Mayer (1978) found that note taking increased skills transfer and problem solving in computer programming and science (1986). Shrager and Mayer (1989) found similar effects in college students, learning about cameras. It would seem that note taking allows learners to relate knowledge to experience.

3. Detail & structure

As to the best type of note taking, it’s the most information in the fewest words. Students tend to miss lots of important information (even omitting negatives!), with as little as 50-10% of the important points noted. Detail does matter. Research also shows that mind maps are fine for conceptual structure bit not so good for detail. They are also difficult to construct during a lecture. There is also evidence to support the use of colour and/or lines with symbols that have classificatory meaning (EX – example, D- definition etc). In other words, the evidence for simple mind map productivity is very thin. Interestingly small breaks for revision of notes during talks increases performance as does revision in pairs (O’Donnell 1993).

4. Further learning

Notes offer the opportunity for further learning through rewriting. Notes that are spread out so that further work can be included and self-generated questions are also useful (King 1992). This points towards further reflection and study. This is important and leads to my next point that learning can be massively amplified through the use of social media.

5. Tweet it – seed it

I’d contend that the amplification of notes is the best way of using social media in learning. Note taking can be transformed into a social learning experience for yourself and others through social media. Tweets during a talk or conferences session brings it to life, captures the salient points and let’s others know what’s going on. Then there’s the amplification through retweets. In addition, links can be included. But its strength (limited characters) is its weakness, as further exposition is usually needed. Tweckling is OK as long as it doesn’t become useless carping!

6. Blog it - log it

This, I believe, is a far more useful social medium for learning. Blogs are personal voices and it forces you to write a structured and considered piece, enhancing your own learning, as well as sharing that learning with others. In addition, it opens up the discussion for further comments, often further expanding your learning. I find I gain a great deal by reading other blogs of the same event, to capture points I’ve missed. There’s also the bonus of archiving. One has a searchable database of knowledge.

7. Evernote - remember everything

Tools like Evernote point towards single. searchable repositories that work on all of your devices, for the capture, storage, organisation and recall of learning. The fact that people grab web pages, screenshots and photos adds to its richness. On top of this there's YouTube for video capture, podcasts, RSS and chat rooms. All can be seen as expansions of not taking.

NB

Note taking increases learning, results in deeper learning and leads to further learning. Social media is essentially an amplification of this process, it multiplies these effects through both personal and social learning. So in the search for an actual example of social media in learning, note taking has been researched and evaluated to be extremely powerful.

Sexual abuse, e-learning and the Vatican - just plain weird

This is Frederico Lombardi (more of him later) and this story is just plain weird. The Vatican sees e-learning as a way to prevent its priests from committing sexual abuse on children. They have set up an ‘e-learning center’ to supposedly protect children and help the victims of sexual abuse. Now, I’ve spent the whole of my adult life promoting the use of technology in learning, but this takes the communal mass biscuit for inappropriateness.

But it gets weirder. This announcement was made at a press conference for a full ‘Conference’ on ‘Sexual abuse on children by clergy’ funded by the Pontificial Gregorian University in Rome. Monsignor Klaus Franzl (not to be confused with Fritzl, the Austrian incest beast) announced yesterday, “The e-learning center will work with medical institutions and universities to develop a constant response to the problems of sexual abuse.” By the way, I wonder how Christian apologists explain the horrors of the Catholic priest rape holocaust or the Fritzl case. If there is a God, he truly does work in mysterious ways. Check out this brilliant denunciation by Christopher Hitchens.

Available in six languages it is supposed to get new guidelines out to Bishops and priests about child abuse. Now in my book, this is not an area that needs ‘guidelines’ but a process of bringing those beasts to justice and helping those who were abused. “We want people to know we are serious about this” says Father Frederico Lombardi. Oh yeah – so you weren’t serious about this before! This was the same Frederico Lombardi who tried, unsuccessfully to protect the current Pope from the scandal. He's the pontiff's PR supremo.

Let’s be clear here, the current Pope, god’s man on earth we’re told, has been complicit personally and institutionally in the abuse scandal. In 1979 a young boy was subjected to sexual abuse by a German priest and the current Pope, then an Arch-bishop, protected that priest, who went on to commit further crimes. The Pope’s brother had to admit that his memory failed him and admitted he knew of the case. Ratzinger was also responsible for obstructing investigation into this criminal activity.

Now if the Vatican had simply funded initiatives and retributive payments to the victims, fine, but this smacks of an on-going PR campaign to dampen down a global criminal epidemic by priests, that should make everyone wary of allowing contact between them and children. I’m with Christopher Hitchens, in ‘God is not Great’ and his chapter ‘Is religion child abuse?’ Ignatius Loyola famously said ‘give me a boy until he is ten, and I’ll give you the man’. How hideously true this turned out to be.

If any lessons are to be learnt from Catholic child abuse, it is that education should remain secular. Education should open up young minds, not subject them to dogmatic closure. This is why I am absolutely against the state funding of faith schools. I do not want tax money to fund schools where the creed supports genital mutilation (both boys and girls), gives priests contact with young children and imposes dogma on impressionable minds.

7 objections to social media in learning (and answers)

Social media – I’m a fan. I blog, facebook and tweet daily, and love all of the additional resources and tools. But when an important social and technological phenomenon turns into a bubble of evangelism, we’ve got to handle it with care. I’ll present on the use of Social Media in organisations in Zurich this week, to Directors of many of Europe’s top companies, and explain the upside but it’s just as important to be open about the downside. I agree with the Nick Shackleton-Jones Tweet, “When the tide comes in you’d better don your trunks and not bury yourself in the sand” but it’s also rational, for some, to walk up to dry land to avoid getting wet. Even the Vatican had a Devil’s Advocate department when discussing canonisation, so before giving Social Media the status of sainthood, let’s consider some of the downsides.

Objection 1: Dumbness of crowds

We have ‘constructivists’ who wouldn’t be able to string two sentences together when asked what that actually means in terms of real psychology. Then the woolly ‘social learning’ advocates who see all learning as social (ridiculous) and can’t see that some of it is a waste of time, like going over the top of your head to scratch your ear. Much of my productive learning is completely solitary and I’ve spent far too much time in my life, in wasteful, long-winded social contexts, like classrooms, training rooms, lecture theatres, meeting and conference rooms, learning little or nothing.

It’s a matter of balance, not blind belief in half-baked social theory. We need to see a mix of approaches that include social learning but not to the exclusion of focused, solitary learning. Reading, writing, reflecting and deep processing needs isolation from others, not chattering classes.

Objection 2: Weapons of mass distraction

Employees and learners can get stuck in a tar-pit of unproductivity as social media is sticky, seductive and addictive. Most parents have experienced concern about the amount of time their kids have spent on say, Facebook and Twitter, when they claim to have been studying or doing assignments. At work, it’s easy to avoid doing things you don’t want to do by escaping into social chat.

First, if you’re really that worried, monitor usage, which many organisations already do. That’s fine, as it’s a way of managing excessive use, but it’s far better to police by policy. Simply add a few words to your existing HR policy around the excessive use of social media for non-organisational purposes. In any case, in the end, in the workplace, employees have to be trusted.

Objection 3: Confidentiality, libel & harassment

Many organisations have examples of naïve, even malicious use of social media. There are genuine fears around the leaking of confidential information and reputational damage. In addition, individuals have been libelled and harassed, leading to complicated and expensive HR management issues and court cases.

To be honest, I think the fears are exaggerated here, but they do have to be managed. Again, police through policy, pointing out the dangers of inadvertently leaking information and expected behaviour towards others. To be frank, these four words should suffice ‘Don’t be a dick!’

Objection 4: Non-alignment

In this survey, less than 18% of decision makers at 100 of the UKs top 500 companies (by turnover), thought that L&D was aligned with the goals of the business. It is not always clear that social media solves this problem, as it can encourage divergence of task, as one link leads to another and one is led, not by goals, but interest. This can be worse than simply ‘not seeing the wood for the trees’, as social media can be so random, fragmented, long-winded and unstructured, that it is difficult to square off effort with relevance.

Anders Mørch of the University of Oslo sees this as one of many ‘double-edged’ sword phenomena in social learning. Say what you will about informal learning, there’s still a massive role for ‘aligned’ formal learning. Many things can’t be left to the vagaries of a social approach, as they have to be tackled within a fixed timescale.

Objection 5: Crap content

The mixed quality of user-generated content is also a concern. Even in media sharing the poor quality of lectures on YouTube EDU and other media sharing sites, show that sharing in itself is not always a virtue if the content being shared lacks quality or relevance. Putting one’s faith in user generated content can be a disaster if you’re relying on that alone.

Wikis solve this problem by having a process of communal and tracked amendments, but you need volumes of contributors to raise the quality of the content. Rankings and strong social recommendations by trusted colleagues is another useful control, feeding high quality links and content from outside the organisation.

Objection 6: Redundancy

Many of the productivity tools are here today, gone tomorrow. Some simply collapse, as they have no sustainable way to monetise the product. Some get dropped (even Google products), others get bought by the bigger boys and suddenly disappear or become part of a larger software suite. It can be hard to keep up.

There seems little danger of the major entities, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter disappearing, so these are safe bets. However, it would be wise to regard others as useful even though they are temporary, especially tools such as Doodle etc. Data storage is another issue, however, Google and Apple are as stable as anyone in this regard.

Objection 7: Security

Many organisations, obviously the military, government and banks, but also many other organisations, are nervous about DoS attacks and data theft, and are rightly nervous about unlimited access to social media and tools. Global Corporations are under siege from hacker groups and online organised crime. Even Julian Assange won’t use Facebook as he’s sure the data has already been sucked out by non-desirables. This is not irrational fear, it’s the real deal.

However, HR and training bods should not be making this decision. They need to ask the IT experts about the dangers. This is fair as they wouldn’t be expected to restrict your behaviour in teaching or training. Once a real examination of the issues has been done, it can be allowed. Point to other organisations that have done this and have had no problems.

Conclusion

OK, that’s the Devil’s Advocate stuff over. The reality is the astounding rise of the internet as a social intermediary with social media being the number 1 use of the web, 600 million Facebook users. Potential employees, employees, learners and customers, are using this stuff in anger. The modern executive, manager, teacher or trainer can’t really call themselves a professional without at least a knowledge of social media. You’ve got to play with this stuff to understand its virtues and vices.

You also need to understand, plan and assume its use, for there’s no way that it will not be used. Every one of your employees has a mobile which is a pipe to the outside world beyond your control.

However, it’s easy for academics and advisors who have never really had to ‘run’ an organisation, or take responsibility for real jobs and lives, to get over-excited about their passions. They themselves can be subject to social conformity, groupthink, non-alignment and hype. It’s important that this type of over-optimism is not at the expense of realism.

To be fair, people like Jane Hart, Jay Cross, Charles Jennings and Harold Jarche et al, understand all of this, the danger is the bandwagon effect and evangelistic groupthink, which can lead to the abandonment of good practice elsewhere. Social media is not the answer to every problem, but it’s a undoubtedly a useful and powerful advance in learning.

‘Body and brain’ sensor-based learning – mind blowing

Sometimes, something catches your eye, and you feel you’ve just tasted the future. So it was in a military conference in the Norwegian mountains this week. S Korea is developing software and hardware that may profoundly change the way we learn. We’ve seen the commercial launch of some primitive toys using brain sensors (see my previous post) but we’ve yet to see brain and situation sensor technology really hit the world of learning. Learning is wholly about changing the brain, so one would expect, at some time, for brain research to accelerate learning through cheap, consumer brain and body based technology. That has already happened through sensors on games consoles, such as the Wii and Xbox Kinect, but there’s a more serious game on the go, in the land of obsessive gaming (S Korea), that could profoundly change the world of learning.

Body and brain sensors

With the development of an ’emotional sensor set’ that measures EEG, EKG and, in total, 7 kinds of biosignals, along with a situational sensor set that measures temperature, acceleration, Gyro and GPS, they want to literally read our brains and bodies to accelerate learning. It’s an ambitious project that includes an emotional learning index (gathered from experimental data), middleware (device comms, analysis and recognition software), and a personal learning module and along with tools for content development.

Technology driven metacognition

They hope to significantly increase the effectiveness of learning experiences, not only learning about the control of emotion but also a general lift in the effectiveness of all learning, through increased focus and attention, whatever is identified as being the ideal mental and physical state for optimal learning. This is ambitious. It’s technology driven metacognition.

I think there are problems with this approach as it’s not yet clear that the EEG and other brain data, gathered by sensors measure much more than cognitive noise and general increases in attention or stress, and how do we causally relate these physiological states to learning, other than the simple reduction of stress. The mesures are like simple temperature gauges that go up and down. However, the promise is that a combination of these variables does the job.

However, this is the start of an important research journey, where learning is improved by understanding what state we need to be in when we learn. My guess is that will be the opposite of busy social situations such as classrooms, training rooms and lecture halls. My guess is that this will lead to a reversal of the fashionable social learning lobby, and a move toward super-efficient, solitary and simulated learning experiences. As I say, that’s a guess.

Accelerated learning

Whatever the findings, if they’re right about using the causal effect between reading body and brain states to accelerate learning, it will unlock a new era of learning, where the learner will become a super-learner, shortening the treadmill that is school, college and University and making massive gains in learning across your lifetime. It will do for lifelong learning what the jet engine has done for air travel. It will be much faster, cheaper and revolutionary.

What I particularly admire about this approach, is that it avoids all of that weak, often European funded research on 'pedagogy' (see critique), that seems to get us nowhere. This is focused research with a healthy public-private sector partnerships that want real results.

15 reasons to BAN pens and pencils from the classroom

1. Too easy to lose

How many wasted hours do learners and teachers spend getting everyone a pen or pencil? They’re thin, narrow and roll unaided, designed therefore, to be lost through any small hole and from any surface. The average person must lose dozens, if not hundreds, in a lifetime.

2. Dangerous weapons

Nothing is more dangerous in classrooms than pens and pencils. They’re used to poke, prick, draw on and even stab others. Empty plastic Bic tubes are also superb pea-shooters. They are, in effect, dangerous weapons.

3. Messy

Pens leak, clothes stain, pencil shavings get everywhere. In short, these implements are a cleaning nightmare. A leaked pen in a pocket or bag can cause havoc, staining clothes, flesh and anything else that comes into contact.

4. Notes

Encourages bullying through notes and a notes culture around going to the toilet (actually walking the corridors or a sly cig), explaining why you were off that day (forged note from parent) etc.

5. Doodling

How many learners doodle the hours away, rather than learning. They'll doodle on paper, books, plaster casts and any available surface, even their own hands and arms.

6. Pen tattoos

A bit extreme but it happens. A compass an ink pen's all you need to get your first boyfriend or girlfriend's name on your arm or those stupid words LOVE and HATE on your knuckles.

7. Limits editing

To NOT allow word processing on writing tasks is to not allow reediting, redrafting, reordering and self-correction, the essence of good writing skills. It actually encourages the regurgitation of pre-prepared, memorised answers.

8. Paper mountains

Keeps schools stuck in a world of paper, which can’t be emailed or easily stored. How many pieces of paper with writing are simply lost, deliberately or otherwise by children at school?

9. Cost of photocopying

Paper, pencils and pens cost money, but that is nothing compared to the cost of printing and photocopying, in terms of photocopying machines, printers and print cartridges.

10. Not green

Paper production, for writing assignments, destroys trees, uses nasty chemicals and if it doesn't end up as landfill. entails difficult and costly recycling.

11. Encourages academic curriculum

Pen and pencil assessment skews assessment towards writing and away from performance. This has led to an overwhelmingly academic curriculum, at the expense of practical and vocational skills.

12. Paper homework

It encourages primitive, photocopied A4 sheets for homework and mechanical 'fill-in-the-blank' assignments, with the additional problem that homework has to be physically marked by overworked teachers. Automated, online homework and assessment is surely superior.

13. Red pen assessment

It encourages teachers to use ‘red pen’ marking, highlighting failure, rather than the generosity of formative feedback. Children learn from failure which is why all feedback should be constructive.

14. Skews assessment

My kids look at pens and pencils as if they’re Egyptian artefacts. The fact is, that pens and pencils, if used in assessments, actually hinder or skew the proper assessment of attainment. Many of these kids write, incessantly on keyboards, not using pen and pencil.

15. Real world deficit

Lastly, when they enter the world of work, if they write, it will be largely on a keyboard. Surely touch typing is a skill worth learning.

This was inspired by Katie Stansberry's original idea

Is Higher Education a classic bubble? 7 reasons to think so

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and first major investor in Facebook, has a track record in spotting bubbles, namely the internet and housing bubbles. He thinks he’s spotted another: Higher Education. But he’s not alone, an increasing amount of commentary and evidence points in this direction. Like the housing market, where people rushed to take out loans (mortgages) based on the belief that the value of their asset will always rise (or at least stay the same), many suffered a shock when the value dropped.

Interesting idea, but where’s the evidence?

1. Blind belief

Criticising Higher Education is like “saying there’s no Santa Claus” claims Thiel. This is a feature of all bubbles, believes Thiel, where ‘groupthink’ takes over and false assumptions become absolute beliefs, and even debate of the negative consequences is seen as ‘party-pooping’.

2. Pricing

Huge hikes in prices for the buyer (almost tripling in UK), now seem unrelated to the real price of the degree. Since ’78 a US degree has increased by 650 points above inflation, compared to the housing bubble at only 50. This is exactly what happened in everything from tulips to internet stocks and housing. There is no compelling evidence that the future worth of degrees will be guaranteed. That’s the mistake made in all bubbles.

3. Unintended consequences

In a bubble, real demand is brutal, and in a buyers’ market may lead to degrees being simple indicators of ‘class’ rather than intrinsic value. In adopting the £9000 (or close) fees, Universities may be creating their own bubble, dislocating cost from real value. Institutional brand ranking, and they are brands (academics & students come and go, and content owned by publishers), may lead employers to dismiss degrees from institutions perceived as second-rate. In short, your degree may become a liability while your debt remains all too real.

4. Student short-termism

Decisions made by young people are measurably short-term, with factors like ‘fun’ or ‘easy’ often playing a part in their decisions. This is a distorting factor, as it over-values some subjects and degrees over others. This generation could become the most indebted generation ever, in a time when debt has been shown to be an indicator of failure. What makes this bubble so dangerous may be naivety.

5. University short-termism

No one could really claim that the huge hikes in pricing reflect corresponding hikes in the value of University tuition. So what’s happening? Universities are complicit in this. They raise prices because they can, without attention to lowering costs through online learning, fourth semesters etc. In fact the quality of tuition may have fallen, with more students and less qualified lecturers, matched by salary inflation at the top, higher numbers of administrators and wasteful capital expenditure in largely empty buildings. I've blogged on this before.

6. Context changes

Just because degrees lead to value now, doesn’t mean they will in the future. The chicken that comes out for its feed from the farmer every day, may suddenly find its neck wrung. When a bubble bursts, the rising tide that raised all ships, suddenly falls, leaving huge numbers stranded. As unemployment rises, a similar effect takes place with large numbers of debt-laden graduates on the market. There is already evidence of graduate wages stagnating or falling.

7. Tsunami of debt

The student debt bubble in the US has reached $1 trillion and raising eyebrow. Delayed payment means the accumulation of huge debts by students, and in this case, ultimately, the bailout would come from the state. Heard that before? In the US SLABS (Student Loan Asset-Backed Security) underpin students loans and have Federal Guarantees. A recipe for a massive default?

Conclusion

The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that Higher Education has become simply an extension of school, but with delayed school fees. Shortly the majority will be moving seamlessly from school to higher education. Many will enjoy the fruits of a meander through University but may (literally) pay a heavy and disproportionate price later. However, as Shakespeare said in The Merchant of Venice, ‘All that glisters is not gold’, and debts, as that great play so eloquently shows, distort human behaviour in unpredictable and distasteful ways. A degree should be seen as more than a fiscal investment, but that does not mean taking ridiculous risks when you’re only 18 years old.

Why Royal Wedding is lethal for young girls

When I became a school Governor in a comprehensive school, I was shocked at the lack of educational ambition, among both working class boys and girls, even their parents. It was something that was less obvious in Calvinist Scotland, where I was brought up. I saw, and spoke to, young girls who were infatuated with make-up, looks, fashion and the lethal, mistaken hope that luck, marriage or fate will get them somewhere. They had given up on education as a means of advancement before they had even started. Since then I've been looking for causes.

Rousseau and reading

“Reading is the great plague of childhood” said Rousseau, in Emile (On Education). What he meant was the way the dead hand of a fixed narrative can shape a child’s outlook, not always to good ends. This is a debate that goes all the way back to Plato, who warned that an early infatuation with fiction has its dangers.

There was a vivid illustration of Rousseau’s point on Radio this week, when a smart, young, black, woman author, Michelle Gaye, who’s written a book called ‘Pride and Premiership: from Wags to Riches’ (what a great title), described today’s young women as being obsessed with the Cinderella narrative. She saw the WAG phenomenon, the relentless pursuit of footballers, who would rescue them from their ordinary lives, as a playing out of this narrative. The poor girl gets her prince. It’s a fixed, fictional narrative that drives young girls (and men) to extremes of behaviour, fuelled by a newspaper and magazine industry that has long abandoned serious and real events, for the perpetuation of fairy stories.

Cinderella crushed

The Diana affair was mass hysteria, based around this ‘princess’ myth, albeit a tragic extension to the story, where the princess, being driven from the Ritz, gets smashed to pieces in that most fairy tale of cities, Paris. The crowds, of largely women, that flocked to the streets and laid flowers, were not shedding tears for Diana. They were playing out a narrative that locked them into a fatuous fairy tale. They had never met the woman, and acted upon their anger that the fairy tale had been usurped. It was a cathartic vehicle for their own failed dreams. They weren’t mourning Diana, they were mourning the death of a fairy tale. The story had been hijacked and skewered. Childhood dreams were being crushed.

Frankie Boyle hits a nerve

Frankie Boyle shocked the nation, and shot to fame on the back of one famous joke that hit a nerve with anyone who saw through this nonsense, when he recommended that we celebrate Diana’s death by, “by staging a gang-bang in a minefield”. It was typical Boyle, but clever in its own way, because it is so extreme. It was a disturbing and obscene counterpoint to an equally disturbing and obscene myth. It got 1.6 million hits on YouTube.

When Princes go bad

Prince Charles screwed around with the Princess story, and got burned. He’s now forever a baddy, having shacked up with one of the ugly sisters. That wasn’t meant to happen. It’s not what we wanted. Prince Andrew married Fergie, a puffed up, rouged, pantomime buffoon, and they’re still playing out the Cinderella tale gone wrong. Both have turned into money-grabbing caricatures of a Prince and Princess, and we all shout ‘boo’ when they appear. The youngest has already been written off, after his ‘nazi’ uniform gag. What a lark – eh? They thought they had supressed all that German Nazi stuff when Edward abdicated, then he splashes it all over the forever loyal, Royal, red-tops.

Third time lucky?

Third time lucky the nation hopes. This time it may work, and Royalty will clear away the broken crockery and put a new mug on the mantelpiece for the nation to adore. This time it’s an unbreakable plastic mug, as this Prince is an anodyne cypher of a man, devoid of personality and original thought. He may very well play out his destined role as the quiet actor in this crooked old pantomine. So the fairy tale will continue with the WC wedding. A large section of the nation will, once again, play out their role, resurrecting the memory of Diana and what should have been. The tape is rewound and her bloody death and possible marriage to a dark skinned foreigner, can be erased. England will revert back to buying bricabrac, eating cake, and watching their Cinderella marry her (gormless) Prince, on TV. Once again, young women will be seduced by a dangerous fiction, that if you get a makeover, tan and hawk yourself around the circuit, you’ll find your Prince.

Disneyfication of Royalty

In the second half of the 20^th century two forces united in UK popular culture, Disney and Royalty. Royalty became Disnified, in the sense that the sanitised, feudal idea of a ‘Prince’ and ‘Princess’ was seen as ideal and aspirational. Young women are being seduced by this ideal into believing that it’s possible, when it’s the very opposite. Princes have been replaced by boorish footballers, but it’s the same old myth. Was there anything more depressing than the recent series Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, where the Disneyfication of the wedding reached absurd proportions. The lower the caste in society, the more they hang on to these dreams, as it’s a way of avoiding reality.

Don’t read Cinderella to your children, especially your girls, it’s a lethal cocktail of falsehoods that will do them inestimable harm.

Tony Buzan, true or false?

Just finished a fantastically readable book on memory, Moonwalking with Einstein – The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. In addition to scotching the usual myths about photographic memories, it’s a fine introduction to how important memory is, along with the techniques, which anyone can learn, to improve their memories. Foer takes up the challenge of entering the US memory Championships, ends up the winner, and the book is the story of that journey. But the weirdest episode in the book is his encounter with the eccentric Tony Buzan.

I’ve always been suspicious of Buzan’s hyperbolic claims and the fact that his books seem like an endless series of re-treads, so it was satisfying to read that an expert on memory, and others, had similar, if not harsher opinions.

Brain is not a muscle

Foer clearly dislikes the ’brain is like a muscle’ analogy that Buzan trots out, “Buzan’s most hyperbolic claims about the collateral effect of ‘brain exercise’ should inspire a measured dose (at least) of scepticism.” Foer is not alone. Ed Cooke, an English memory grand master, has similar views, “Ah, yes the estimable Tony Buzan. Did he try to sell you that nonsense about the brain being a muscle?...Anyone who knows the first thing about the respective characteristics of brains knows how risible that analogy is.” To be fair, it’s only an analogy, that suggests that practice improves memory, which it does, so I’d let him off on that one.

Self-styled guru

Foer also thinks that Buzan takes the “self-styled guru” thing too far, “he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru”. But it’s the interview that’s most telling. Buzan is half an hour late for the interview (maybe he forgot the time) and Foer damns him with faint praise, “Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression”. Buzan often reminds Foer that he is a modern Renaissance man but all Foer finds is “Buzan’s tidy little narrative”.

Books

When he asked Buzan’s chauffeur (he drives around in an ivory coloured 1930s taxicab) about his boss’s books, the guy's caught off guard and says, “Same meat, different gravy”, and Foer clearly agrees that across 120 books there’s oodles of repetition. Indeed, the competitive memory community contains a great number of people who think he has “gotten rich peddling unscientific ideas about the brain” and that he’s, “a bit of an embarrassment”.

Pseudoscience

What Foer seems to find most annoying is Buzan’s “habit of lapsing into pseudoscience and hyperbole”. For example, “Very young children use 98% of all thinking tools. By the time they’re 12, they use about 75%. By the time they’re teenagers, they’re down to 50%, by the time they’re in University it’s less than 25%, and it’s less than 15% by the time they’re in industry”. I have to agree, there’s a point where credibility gives way to straight sales talk, and that’s a line he needn’t cross.

Mindmaps

He gives Mindmaps an endorsement but rejects Buzan’s claim that they’re the “ultimate mind-power tool” or a “revolutionary system”. I agree with Foer here. I don’t use mind maps, as they tend to limit the way I think, which is more language based than visual. But, like Foer, I agree than the increased ‘mindfulness’ and focus that mind-mapping brings can be useful.

Conclusion

Foer’s book is a rollicking tale of someone with an average memory, who simply set out to show that it can be massively productive through training, and engages with the serious science of memory, along with it’s role in a person’s character, life and learning. If you don’t like the pure science, it’s a wonderful introduction to how the mind and memory works.

PS

Another book I’d recommend along the same lines is Embrace the Wide Sky by Daniel Tammett which I’ve reviewed in this blog.

Diversity training damned in new study

Has diversity training become and end in itself rather than a means to an end? The vast amount of time and money spent on diversity training, when evaluated, is found wanting, mostly ineffective, even counter-productive. With evidence from large scale studies, from Kochan, Dobbin and now Kalev, you'd have thought that the message would have got through. The sad truth is that few on either the supply or demand side, give a damn about whether it works or not. It's become an article of faith.

I've blogged about this before, giving both an example of a diversity course I've experienced and a major study from Professor Frank Dobbin at Harvard, to show that diversity training is mostly a sham, a view, I should add, that is shared by the majority of people I've spoken to on the issue.

Massive study – diversity courses largely useless

Most diversity training is not evaluated at all or languishes in the Level 1, la la land of ‘happy sheets’. So check out Alexandra Kalev’s study from the University of Arizona. 31 years of data from 830 companies – how’s that for a Level 4 evaluative study! Her latest study found, after the delivery of diversity training, a 7.5% DROP in women managers, 10% DROP in black women managers and a 12% DROP in black men in senior management positions. There were similar DROPS among Latinos and Asians.

The strength of this study comes from the quantity and integrity of the data. It relies on compulsory federal EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) filings on the number of women and people of colour in management, along with details of diversity training programmes.

Sensitivity training a problem

The bottom line is that the vast majority of diversity courses are useless, especially when driven by HRs perception of avoiding prosecution. The problem centres around courses run in response to legislative and external pressures. Kalev found that , "Most employers….force their managers and workers to go through training, and this is the least effective option in terms of increasing diversity. . . . Forcing people to go through training creates a backlash against diversity." One of the problems, that both Kalev and Dobbin found, was the focus on ‘sensitivity training’ where people are often forced to focus on interpersonal conflict. These were the training courses that produced a backlash, as they were intrinsically accusatory.

Diversity courses are “more symbolic than substantive," says University of California LAW Professor, Lauren Edelman, She independently reviewed Kalev's study and concluded that the problem was training in "response to the general legal environment and the fact that organizations copy one another."

One bright spot was the finding that some diversity initiatives, namely those that were voluntary and aligned with business goals, were successful. This is similar to Professor Frank Dobbin’s study at Harvard, who showed, in his massive study that ‘training’ was not the answer, and that other management interventions were much better, such as mentoring.

Kochan

Thomas Kochan, Professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management’s five year study had previously come to the same conclusions, "The diversity industry is built on sand," he concluded. "The business case rhetoric for diversity is simply naive and overdone. There are no strong positive or negative effects of gender or racial diversity on business performance." The problem, according to Kochan, is the bogus claim that diversity leads to increased productivity. This is simply unproven as there is little or no hard data on the subject. Kochan found that none of the companies he contacted for his study had carried out any systematic evaluation of diversity training. Evidence around productivity is mostly anecdotal and repeated as a mantra by interested parties.

Groupthink

Companies, worldwide spend many hundreds of millions of dollars each year on diversity training. The tragic truth is that most of this is wasted. Groupthink seems to be at the heart of the matter. Groupthink among people who employ and promote people like themselves creates the problem. Groupthink among compliance training companies who simply do what they do without supporting evidence and tout ineffective ‘courses’. Groupthink in HR, who find it easier to just run ‘courses’ rather than tackle real business problems. The whole edifice is a house of cards.

E-portfolios – 10 reasons why I don’t want my life in a shoebox

E-portfolios have taken up more conference time and wasted effort than almost any other learning technology topic I can recall. The idea’s been around since the nineties but isn’t it odd that no one seems to have one? And if they do it's forced upon them by an institution or LMS. Never has so much time been devoted to something with so little real impact. An army of researchers, academics and vendors have been touting the idea that everyone should have a shoebox of ‘stuff’ which they fill up as they go through life as 'reflective' lifelong learners. Politicians and educators of the ‘control freak variety’ love the idea, but like identity cards, the rest of us seem to be completely indifferent. So why have they not taken off and where are they useful?

1. Uninteroperable

E-portfolios are largely confined to education, and some vocational adult learning programmes, but the 40 odd mainstream VLEs preclude any real interoperability. Buy a VLE and you’re stuck with their e-portfolio, a specially designed shoebox in a specially designed boutique shoe shop. This is like buying a safe where you put stuff in but can;t take it out.

2. Institutionalised

Hopelessly utopian, it is the perfect example of something that turns out to be the opposite of what was intended; a shoebox of stuff so attached to institutions that you have to leave it behind. E-portfolios have been institutionalised and therefore rendered useless for students by the very people who are meant to be equipping them for life.

3. Human nature

Human beings do not behave as educationalists would like them to behave. That’s because education has a flawed and simplistic view of human nature (usually behaviourist). People are lazy, procrastinators, messy, change their minds and quite often want to forget what they’ve done. Neither is endless 'reflection' on our learning a natural process. Some reflection yes, but not the overcooked form of e-portfolio reflection, that is often recommended and rarely done. Human nature mitigates against us having our life in a shoebox.

4. People are not learners

People do not see themselves as ‘learners’, let alone ‘lifelong learners’. It’s a conceit, as only educators see people as learners. Imagine asking an employer – how many learners do you have? People are individuals, fathers, mothers, employees, lawyers, bus drivers, whatever….but certainly not learners. That’s why an e-portfolio, tainted with ‘schooling’ will not catch on. By and large, most adults see school as something they leave behind and do not drag along with them into adulthood. And how often are e-portfolios recommended by people who don't have one themselves?

5. Boundary problems

Media are linked on the web and cannot be easily stored in a single entity or within a single entity, so the boundaries of a real e-portfolio are difficult to define, and will change. An e-portfolio would have to cope with my links and social networks but they are proprietary. We want to be part of all sorts of expansive and variously porous networks, not boxed in. Blogs, for example, seem to much more expansive, open and accessible.

6. Plus ca change

The only thing that will not change is the fact that there will be change. So e-portfolios will be no sooner built than redundant. The technology, and culture around technology, will change. And as these changes occur, e-portfolios will be unable to keep up with the changes. In another sense, people sometimes want change, and don’t want their baggage dragged along behind them.

7. Product profusion

The big one is Blackboard, but that locks you in like a prisoner in a dark dungeon, similarly with WebCT. These are largely used because they come with the package. Others such as PebblePad, RAPID, EPET, LUSID were developed by institutions and therefore limited in all sorts of ways. There are many, many more and that is part of the problem. Too many people decided to create too many products, with too much JISC funding, without due attention to the market and sustainability.
8. Easy alternatives
I don;t have an e-portfolio but I do have a blog, which I've been writing for ten years and a history on social media and files I've securely backed up and stored. All of these mitigate against hte e-portfolio idea as they are my trusted sources.
9. Yes in vocational
There is, of course, a strong argument for e-portfolios in vocational learning, where the learners are being asked to create concrete things that can be stored digitally - graphics, design, photography and so on. We don;t want to throw out the portfolio baby with the bathwater.

10. Recruitment myth

I spent a lot of time recruiting people and what I needed wasn’t huge, overflowing e-portfolios, but succinct descriptions and proof of competences. If by e-portfolio you mean and expanded CV with links to your blog and whatever else you have online, fine. But life is too short to consider the portfolios of hundreds of applicants. Less is more.

Let’s get real

Lifelong learning in a shoebox? Not really, most are institutional affectations that end up as relics. Justifying e-portfolios on the basis of lifelong learning won’t wash. It’s too ambitious. So let’s get real. I can see their use in limited domains, such as courses and apprenticeships, but not in general use, like identity cards.

Flip the classroom - every teacher should do this

Salman Khan was a hedge-fund manager but there’s not a teacher on the planet who wouldn’t benefit from his views on learning. Khan has recorded 2200 educational videos and over million are viewed a month. How did he get started? By tutoring his cousins in maths. Eventually, they told hm that they preferred his YouTube lectures to him in person. From their point of view it makes sense – they can stop and review things when they want, do things at their own pace, do it when it's convenient. More importantly, the very first time you try to understand something, the last thing you need is a hovering human presence or teacher. You need time to reflect, ponder, get to grips with the ideas. I have had exactly the same experience in tutoring in maths. I started in person, migrated to Skype and now favour this more distanced approach, where the actual tutoring is the application, not exposition of the knowledge.

Flip the classroom

Khan’s trick, is something I’ve believed in for years. Don’t use technology in the classroom, use it before and after, outside of the classtoom. Classrooms were never designed for technology, apart, perhaps, for Whiteboards. But the danger with whiteboards is that they reinforce talking at students and ‘lecturing’. Flip the classroom. Assign the short talks for homework, THEN use the classroom for the application of the concepts. The net result is that you humanise the classroom. It becomes a place primarily for learning, not teaching. Simple, but like most great ideas - brilliant.

Flip assessment

He uses another flip technique I’ve always recommended. He takes some of the magic dust from games and apply it to learning. You do short ‘ten in a row’ automated assessments. Get ten in a row right; move on. This simple game pedagogy, along with badges for progress, within a structured knowledge map, allows the students to understand where they are in the learning journey. It also has motivational punch.

For Khan, overall summative assessment is all wrong. It’s too little too late. Individual formative assessment is the true driver in education. Traditional assessment penalises failure and doesn’t expect complete mastery. It fails both failing and successful students.

To this end his whole system relies on detailed formative data for teachers, data that is both detailed and personal. It’s not classroom guesses or waiting until a final test is completed to see how your students are doing. Every student is tracked and the teacher intervenes appropriately. Note that you can only track every student if the system gathers the data online. So learning and assessment have to be done online. Technology is brilliant at tracking progress as teachers are too busy. Free up their time so that the teacher can teach and assign the strong kids to tutor kids who are struggling. Arms teachers with data and they can focus on the progress of all.

The flip has one other major advantage. Flip homework, so that it is done in the classroom and you free teachers from the dreaded marking. They can then focus on the targeted application of knowledge. Traditional classroom teaching becomes homework and homework, classroom activity.

Conclusion

Khan gets it. He understands the difference between learning and teaching, between classrooms and self-paced environments between formative and summative assessment, between scalable and non-scalable components in education,. Most of all he is not encumbered with traditional methods and thoughts about whet education needs to be.

He also sees the global implications of this scalable solution. The flip creates a global classroom and gives access to education for the poor. Watch this and if you're not convinced tell me why.

Leaning tower of PISA – 10 serious skews and flaws

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 have sparked off an annual educational ‘international arms’ race’

In the UK, education policy is rooted in, and firmly targeted at, the PISA results. The English Baccalaureate has PISA written all over it. PISA is also used as a political football by D-list celebrities and wannabes, like Toby Young and Katherine Birbalsingh to beat the state system over the head. They stare at the learning tower and swear blind that it’s straight.

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. In fact it compares huge watermelons with tiny seeds. PISA is seriously flawed because of the huge differences in demographics, socio-economic ranges and linguistic diversity within the tested nations. Here’s seven skews as a starter:

1. Size skew

Shanghai topped the table this year but why was one city from an entire nation singled out? Could it be that Shanghai is China’s flagship city? To compare a set of students from the richest city in China (on average 3 times the national income), that has attracted a high proportion of high-achievers, with a similar sample from across the whole of the US is odd. It smacks of political manipulation by the Chinese. There was also evidence, presented in the New York Times, of student priming. Imagine if the cohort was drawn from rural China? This comparative method will fail as there will be lots of outliers in the data. It is not surprising that small homogeneous cities and states pop up at both the top and bottom of the table. The incentive to 'cheat' is huge.

2. Tuition skew

One huge variable that is NOT accounted for is external tuition. This is rife in some of the high perfroming countries, especially China, Singapore and Hong Kong. Many would argue that this one variable alone kills of the statistical significance. We have a choice, ht house or bring up blanced, rounded kids. I know what side I'm on.

3. Immigrant skew

Different tested cohorts have different immigrant ratios. The difficulties that immigrants have with language, social adjustment, school and poverty, is a serious pollutant to the data. As one would expect, Finland and Shanghai have very small numbers of immigrants in their tested cohorts. It is bonkers to compare cohorts with radically different numbers of immigrant children.

4. Selective immigration skew

There is another odd skew associated with immigration, namely that for some countries, immigration is controlled, so that only wealthy or smart kids get through. So, for example, there’s only one country in the PISA results where the immigrant students outscore the natives and that’s Australia, where immigration is highly selective. There’s a huge difference between refugee immigration and cherry-picked immigration.

5. English skew

Associated with immigration, is a curious linguistic skew – the tendency for smart immigrants to migrate towards English speaking nations. This could mean that English speaking nations benefit in the long term from such immigration but show poor short-term results due to high first generation immigration with associated language problems at school.

6. Linguistic skews

On reading, languages with regular structures are likely to do better than languages which are more irregular. The tests may favour languages with simplified spelling structures such as Finnish. Reading data may also be skewed by reading habits as PISA doesn’t recognise reading on screens. It’s big on books.

7. Subjects skew

PISA measures academic subjects only, namely maths, reading and science. To be fair PISA have recognised this flaw and are now embarking on a correction process. But is it right to judge education in these subjects only? One need only focus the curriculum heavily on these subjects to do well, which is exactly what many counties do. Dump sport, music, the arts and humanities and you can produce stellar results.

8. Subject focus skew

Simple differences in taught curricula can also affect the results. In maths, for example, if you have taught ‘series’ theory you will do well in the 2009 results, as a major set of questions focused on extrapolating series in the test. If this is not part of your curriculum, you will score badly.

9. Data fatally flawed?

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.

10. Differences not that great

OFQUAL published a Progress Report (International Comparisons in Senior Secondary Assessment ) in February 2011 making similar points.

They listed several major criticisms:

1. differences between countries’ performance are not that large…usually statistically insignificant
2. whether or not a country has moved up or down the league tables is not that meaningful partly because the absolute differences in scores between countries are not that great
3. the constituent group of comparators changes from study to study and from year to year

They point to three major but dangerous assumptions that:

1. items tested for are somehow an objective measure of what is best
2. learners undertaking the study are a balanced representation of all learners at that stage of education
3. learners sampled in each country are equally motivated to perform well in the tests

Additionally, these snapshot studies do not isolate variables and may well be skewed by “factors in the past that no longer apply”, such as “learner performance in an examination may be the result of curriculum developments undertaken” or “investment in education infrastructure some time in the past”. In other words, using the data to praise or blame the current system is unwise.

Gove’s skew

The great danger is that the world skews its curriculum to fit the PISA expectations, just as PISA draw away from their own curriculum tested areas. This has already happened in the UK with Gove’s Ebac. Gove has specified A*-C passes in five subject areas: English; maths; two sciences; ancient or modern history or geography; and a modern or ancient language. It has all the hallmarks of a PISA-led curriculum. First it’s far too academic and restrictive. Second, it excludes too many sensible options. But his greatest crime is to have moved the goalposts after goals have been scored. If you change the goalposts so dramatically and quickly, you simply condemn 85% of students as failures (only 15% currently meet the Ebac standard). What’s worse, Gove is applying the measure retrospectively. This is like moving the goalposts at the end of the game and disallowing goals scored. It’s madness. You can have schools with high achievement in Maths and English plummet down the new league tables from near the top to near the bottom, as they haven’t focused on humanities or languages. The consequences of this error could be disastrous as the staff pressures will also be enormous, with thousands of teachers in vocational subjects being rendered useless in favour of history, geography and language teachers. One weird consequence is that a student who does Latin and Ancient History will be judged above those who do Business Studies, Engineering, psychology, a third science and lots of other subjects. It’s worse than bad , it’s perverse. I’m glad my kids are leaving secondary education, as it descends into this backward looking nonsense.

Devil’s in the detail

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.

Conclusion

One could quibble with the details of my analysis, but I’m convinced the PISA comparisons are riddled with skews and errors, many more than indicated above. The great danger, and it is already happening, is that people read causality into the data. It’s crap schools, crap teachers, money spent doesn’t matter etc. The scope for false causality is enormous and exploited by politicians for their own ends.

PS

"In the last 10 years we've plummeted in the PISA rankings" heard this before from Michael Gove - he lied. UK results were excluded in 2000 (low response rate) and 2003 as data was dodgy. Only gathered in 2006 and 2009. PISA tests not that important but National tests have gone up - what's happening? OECD does not compare over the 10 years. Performance has not fallen, if anything it's flat.