Think tanks - 10 rules of techn-ology

As we drove down the small country roads to Bovingdon, we heard them first, then started to glimpse them through the trees, rearing up and down on rough tracks. Suddenly, one was coming straight at us on the road, then two more. The area was crawling with tanks and armoured vehicles. Every time we saw one we shouted – tank, tank! What a simple, solid word.

Tank techn-ology

Our destination was The Tank Museum. And this is the fine statue at the entrance. I like technology, usually the smaller stuff, computers, iPads, mobile phones etc. What I wanted to know was whether my work in researching new technology, or techn-ology (the science of technology) applied to something as big, bad and brutish as tank technology.

So far, my 10 rules of techn-ology are:

1. Technology changes RULES
2. Technology has ALLURE
3. Technology coalesces PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGIES
4. Technology is HARDWARE+SOFTWARE
5. Technology is about SCALE
6. Technology is UNPREDICTABLE
7. Technology locks in PRACTICE
8. Technology can be USURPED
9. Technology DIES
10. Technology produces NOSTALGIA

Technology changes RULES

A tank is a moving, armoured vehicle with a gun. So who first invented the tank? Sure the Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans had armoured elephants but it was Leonardo da Vinci who first imagined the true tank, a circular, sloped cone with wheels that allowed it to move in any direction with a turret and gun. But it was the British at the start of the First World War who developed the first metal, tracked tank to breach German trenches.

These huge, trapezoid beasts were to change the face of warfare for the next 70 years. The first tank battles were messy. More men died of carbon monoxide poisoning than enemy fire. They were noisy, smelly, hot, difficult to manoeuvre and easily captured. You can crawl inside one in the Museum and see that it really is a metal tank – like being inside a metal box with sharp angles, rivets and a huge, uncovered engine, taking up most of the space. Just a small hole to see and hand rods to steer. Eight men crews were needed for gear changing, steering and gun handling, with male tanks (big side guns) and female tanks (machine guns). The Germans were truly shaken by this new weapon and all sides in future wars were to adopt the technology as an offensive weapon. The tank played a cardinal role in the Second World War and the threat in the Cold war was tanks rolling across Europe. In the Israeli Arab wars they played a significant role as they did in the Gulf wars.

Technology has ALLURE

Tanks have a special allure, both admired and feared. You need only recall the screaming, screeching, banshee sound of the German tanks near the end of the film Saving Private Ryan, to appreciate the feeling of fear and awe they inspire. Later British tanks had bus engines, designed to make a huge amount of noise, just to terrify the enemy. You can tell by their potent names; Panzers, Tigers and Leopards, that these were predators. As you walk round the Tank Museum they seem dark, impenetrable and lethal – and that’s exactly what they are.

Technology coalesces PREVIOUS TECHNOLOGIES

The tank is really several core technologies in one, with lots of add ons. The core technologies are the engine, gearbox, wheels, tracks, armour and gun(s). All of these had been developed in other contexts. Even now these are the essential, simple ingredients. But it’s all about payoffs. You can have great, heavy armour but you’ll need a reliable and powerful, fuel hungry engine. You can have great robust tracks but you’ll need to drive along country roads. You can have the best tank in a battle but if it’s up against many more, cheaper to manufacture tanks, you’re a gonner. So it’s all about comprimises. 

The accessories are wonders in themselves, those clusters of little tubes that eject smoke bombs to form a circle of smoke around the tank to hide behind. Challengers simply add dye to their fuel and use the exhaust smoke to do the same job. The slatted armour that catches RPGs in mid-air so their fuse doesn’t hit the armour. You literally pull them off like thorns and disarm them. What the tank became was an all-purpose fighting machine with troops, guns, defence, navigation and surveillance equipment all rolled into the one vehicle, taking the best of everything and packing it into a mobile, killing machine.

Technology is HARDWARE+SOFTWARE

Smart design was the key to tank development. As the Germans widened their trenches, the tanks got longer. Some major innovations included simply sloping the armour, this meant that bullets and shells had to chew through more armour to get through and the slope deflected the impact. Russian tanks develop long snorkels so they could cross European rivers during the Cold War. Concrete crossing points were even found in the West after the wall came down!

The business end of the tank is the gun barrel. This is what gives it menace. Accurate to within feet at five and half kilometres they destroy their target every time. In a rather sad story, the ex-tank driver told us that only one Challenger had ever been taken out in battle, in the Gulf War. A crew had gone off grid for a spot of sunbathing. Another Challenger had spotted it and at 5 kilometers had gone all the way up the chain of command. They fired and killed the entire crew, who would have known nothing about it.

The barrels are clad, with sights and cameras down their length as even the sun shining on one side will heat one side up and introduce aim errors. Depleted Uranium tipped shells work just through kinetic energy. They punch a small hole on their target tank, literally liquidise the crew and produce pressure so great that it pushes the liquidised contents back out of the hole. But it’s now the software that sets targets, identifies threats, controls fire and navigates the tank that is important as its hardware. It’s the calculations made of cost of manufacture, fuel consumption and numbers that matter.

Technology is about SCALE

A T34 sits there with a roughly cast turret and no frills. They gave their tank crews padded helmets, rather than padding the tanks, saving time and money and although crudely built, they made 84,000 of them with handles for troops to hang on to. The Easter front became a war of attrition with the Russians simply outnumbering the Germans in tanks and men. They also used small Mongolian tanks crew. The rest is history.

Technology is UNPREDICTABLE

Technology is often unpredictable and the tank was to develop into a remarkable flexible workhorse, with grappling hooks to pull back tangles of barbed wire and create a gap for troops and horses, mine clearer with a huge rack of ball and chains up front for triggering mines, train tanks mounted on rails, amphibious tanks, anti-aircraft tanks and so on. There were even fire breathing tanks for burning snipers and troops alive. If their crews were caught they were executed by the Germans on the spot. They were used for many more purposes than were ever imagined when they were first built.

Technology locks in PRACTICE

A serious consequence in the military is fossilised practice, where hardware contracts often stretch out to as long as 30 years, with an inbuilt resistance to change, especially when the weapons become embedded and locked into regimental structures.

Technology can be USURPED

If we see a tank on our TV screens today, it’s likely to be the state using it on its own citizens. We saw it with Gadhafi and now see it with Assad. In these circumstances it’s a blunt and brutal instrument, used to shell urban areas, with many civilian casualties.

Technology DIES

Like most technology, it has largely had its day. There are no British tanks in Afghanistan. Why they’re too heavy to fly in and we’d never be able to fly them out as the air is too thin and the last thing we want is to leave them behind! Besides, in modern urban warfare, tanks are cumbersome. They’re too big to get down streets, vulnerable to ambush and wreck the roads and drainage systems. The last major tank on tank battle was in 1967 – the Yom Kippur War. The British Army has 300 tanks and they’re scrapping 250 of them. In the end tanks lock personnel into relatively easy to identify targets so tanks are giving way to smaller, more flexible, all-purpose, armed vehicles.

Technology produces NOSTALGIA

One need only watch the visitors at The Tank Museum and the newly built tank track stadium for summer events to see that many are fond of tanks and see in them a symbol of power and victory, especially for the British, who invented the tank. Even now they look and sound like dinosaurs, beasts from the past.

Conclusion

Tanks appeared at the start of the 20^th century and are now being mothballed. They were the land weapon of choice for nearly 70 years. In the end newer technologies, especially accurate missiles fired from the air, and now from drones, threaten their very existence. So we’re back at our first rule, technology changes the rules, again and again and again. Resistance is futile – even if you have a tank!

McLuhan (1911-1980): medium is message - Gutenburg to Zuckerberg

Marshall McLuhan is the man. He understood the towering role that technology has played in cultural development. The ‘medium is the message’ and ‘global village’ have so much resonance that they almost tip over into cliché. In many ways he was both an analyst of media and technology but also a visionary. He predicted the web, invented the word ‘surfing’ for casual fragmentary media browsing and gave us the concept of ‘the global village’. Although he was dealing with the media a decade before the internet, his ideas, endure, and he has much to offer those who are interested in the impact of technology in learning.

Gutenburg generation

Although put forward as a savant on electronic media, especially TV, he was strongest in his analysis of print media. In The Gutenburg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, he explores the relationship between media (writing, print and electronic) to the individual mind and then to society. Media are seen as extensions of mind, but not always additive. Print, he thinks, brings in a linear, sequential mode of thought that sometimes simplifies, separates and subsumes other modes (such as hearing). Print is the technology of individualism.

The industrial revolution, he thought, was a consequence of the print revolution. This new medium resulted in ‘private readers’ isolated from each other with less community and social interaction. This was a direct result of mass copying and book design as a cheap and portable piece of technology. Like Plato, he saw dangers in print culture. Print is in a sense a narrowband method of communication compared to the richness of speech. He saw most media as leading us towards a ‘global village’. (Note that this was often seen by him as a negative term.)

This work has huge relevance for learning technology, as we have seen the rise of the internet which is not really a medium as such but a delivery network for a huge range of media types and combinations. McLuhan argues that dominant media shape us cognitively and shift the balance between sense -ratios. Arguments now rage about the effects of video-games, txting and social networking on the minds of young people. There is certainly a challenge to the print-dominated Gutenberg world, by a more fragmented, mosaic visual culture, delivered online. McLuhan I’m sure, would have been excited by the fact that we, to a degree, interact, participate and share through new media. What is refreshing is that McLuhan had no time for dull moralising around technology. He was neither evangelist nor traditionalist, seeing technology as something that demanded serious study.

Medium is the message

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man he defines media as defining ourselves and society. The invention of alphabets and writing radically altered our minds and our relationship with the world. His famous ‘medium is the message’ became the foundation stone for media and technology studies. Famously misprinted by the publisher as ‘The Massage is the Medium’, McLuhan loved the error. His point was that each medium has a set of intrinsic qualities that changes our relationship with the world. Speed, replication, pattern, scalability are all features of media which shape the nature of the message. The tools we shape, also shape us and the culture we develop, and we have to understand this process.

Medium is the mentor

The lesson we learn from McLuhan is that technology can shape not only what we learn but how we learn. The medium is the message could be translated as the medium is the mentor. Learning technology brings with it an implied pedagogy. Later commentators such as Kevin Kelly and Lanier took up the challenge of exposing how technology can both liberate and trap users. Few realise the profound causal effect writing, the alphabet, manuscripts, books, printing, chalkboards, slates, and now new media, have on the process of learning.

In learning technology, McLuhan’s idea that technology itself shapes our social world is coming to pass. Millions now search for knowledge and solutions through Google, download books, learn at a distance using electronic media, the printed encyclopedia is dead replaced by Wikipedia, video has risen as a learning medium, the blogosphere has expanded, social media have exploded in popularity. This has already had a profound influence on how we teach and learn and will continue to change the learning landscape.

McLuhan understood that old media get carried over into new media, novels into movies, movies into TV, movies into computer games. This is certainly true in learning technology where lectures get carried over through lecture capture and e-learning adopts the structure of traditional course structures and that PowerPoint is just another in a long line of technologies from the blackboard invented in the late 18^th century through to overhead projectors, which preserve the ‘teacher as presenter’ pedagogy. This idea of seeing new media through the ‘rear-view mirror’ is in McLuhan and we can see this in the way the internet is often mistakenly seen as a vehicle for the distribution of old media and not a radical shift in itself. Many large organisations have gone to the wall on the back of this myopic and backward looking view.

The media master’s messages are even more relevant today than they were in his pre-internet lifetime. ‘Discarnate man’ is the non-corporeal nature of our own role in communication and media consumption. Is this alienating? Or is the internet taking us back to a more connected world with social media? The ‘global village’ was prompted by the global success of TV. Billions can watch major sports events and popular dramas. But this concept was to prefigure something that was truly global – the internet. His proposition of ‘Centers everywhere, margins nowhere’ has come to pass. File sharing has reshaped the music industry, is decimating the newspaper industry and Amazon is proving any book you wish, increasingly downloaded online. Old corporations have died, some are adapting to the new world, new ones arise. We as consumers are also producers, everyone can be a publisher.

Tetrad

In essence, McLuhan opened our minds to the role of technology and media by asking the right questions. He wanted to know how technology and media affect our minds, habits, society and culture. Late in his life he gave us, what in my opinion, is his most useful piece of work – the tetrad. His "tetrad" of four media laws tried to clarify the nature & impact of a technology or medium:

What does it enhance or amplify in the culture?

What does it obsolesce or push out of prominence?

What does it retrieve from the past, from the realm of the previously obsolesced?

What does the medium reverse or flip into when it reaches the limits of its potential?

These are incisive questions. I have no doubt that online learning technology enhances learning and through its scalability amplifies knowledge and learning globally. I also have no doubt that it will democratise, decentralise and disintermediate the learning game, pushing out dated lectures, classroom practice and limited media mix. Unfortunately this process is hindered by forces that insist on retrieving old models and replicating them online.

Criticism

I personally find McLuhans books frustrating in their lack of argument and rigour but one can forgive someone who generates so many ideas for failing to explain each in absolute detail. Indeed, he himself famously said ‘I do not explain, I explore’ but this can lead to problems. His definition (or lack) of media is odd as he conflates technology with media or hardware with software.

At other times his language is too narrow. Media, for McLuhan, are divided into hot (low audience participation, such as print) and cool (high audience participation, such as TV). It is not clear that this distinction survives in our multimedia, internet age where the metaphor tends to quickly disintegrate. However, his analysis of the effect of different types of media are strong and remain relevant. Indeed, the advent of the internet has thrown much of McLuhan’s analysis in the air, as it has many dimensions that prove difficult to fit into these older dualistic categories. McLuhan tended to use the language of opposites in analysis when subtler and more nuanced approaches would have revealed more. Examples include hot/cold, print/hearing, mechanical/organic, static/fluid, neutral/magical. Many of these oppositions are rendered difficult or obsolete with the range of complex technology now available, especially online.

Conclusion

McLuhan opened the door for serious scholarship in media and technology. He can be infuriatingly non-scholarly, but brilliantly creative. Paul Levinson’s book Digital McLuhan takes McLuhan’s themes one by one and applies them to the digital age. Needless to say, Levinson shows that many of his insights (not all of course) into the nature of media were profound and many of his ideas about the way media and technology impact individuals and society were prescient.

PS

Amusingly, he appeared in the Woody Allen film Annie hall, as himself, saying ‘You don’t know my work’.

Bibliography

McLuhan, Marshall (1962). The Gutenburg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. New York: Routledge.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko.

McLuhan, Marshall (1967). The Medium is the Massage. Gingko.

McLuhan, Marshall (1968). War and peace in the Global Village. Gingko.

McLuhan, Marshall (1989). The Global Village. Gingko.

Levinson, Paul (1999). Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium. Routledge.

Twitter: in learning less is more

In the psychology of learning ‘less is more’. The learning industry, education and training, is plagued by overlong manuals, powerpoints, papers, books, talks and lectures. Cognitive overload is the norm, forgetting and failure the consequence. This, I suspect, is why twitter is so damn popular. It’s short and sweet.

If the internet has taught learning professionals anything, it’s the fact that most of what we do is unnaturally long-winded. In all media, the internet has acted like a massive experiment, where real people have shown their preference for information in shorter pieces. Why - because that’s how real human communication and learning works. If you sat down next to someone in a plane, asked them a question, and they replied with a 50 minute lecture, no matter how knowledgeable they were, you’d want to strangle them. So the internet has spawned media such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Wikis and YouTube, all of which have brevity as a virtue. And none are as brief as Twitter.

Who would have thought?

Who would have predicted the rise of a social networking site based on short 140 character posts? People were, and many still are, baffled by the success and popularity of Twitter. Yet it was really a confluence of two already successful technologies, txting and posting on social media. It combined 160 character txting (shaving 20 characters off) with the continuous posting flow of social networking (followers as friends). You follow people you respect and they follow you. More promiscuous than Facebook or blogging, it’s like having lots of small encounters with people from all over the country or world on a daily basis. So what use is it in learning?

Twitter and learning

Twitter can be used at a number of levels in learning; personal, at events, within formal classes/courses and inside organisations. Its use as a networking and knowledge sharing tool for learning professionals is clear, as is its virtual expansion of events such as conferences, where the backchannel enhances the event for attendees and non-attendees. However, it is not at all clear that it is useful as a structured learning tool in schools and classrooms, where the effort taken to plan and execute Twitter-based learning experiences are often forced, a little artificial even shallow. However, even here, it is early days and things may emerge that prove useful.

Twitter and professional network

As Twitter use has exploded so has its adoption by academics and experts in all sorts of fields. Following experts gives you all sorts of useful ideas and links for research and assignments. In this context, tweets often have links to deeper content that allow you to connect things and deepen your knowledge and exploration. These links often lead to blog posts, articles, papers and events. It is often forgotten that twitter signposts up and coming events in the real world. Sometimes they signpost conferences, lectures, talks that are happening at that moment. Indeed, most tweets from learning professionals point towards something interesting they’ve found. In this sense, Twitter is like a recommendation engine, supplying you with contemporary ideas on your subject or profession.

Twitter as backchannel

At a major educational conference I attended in Doha, Qatar, a huge slide went up asking all delegates to switch off their mobile devices. We took a photo of the slide and tweeted it (tweetpic), saying “don’t be stupid, the sign should say the opposite”. The next day the chair confirmed that we were right. A Twitter backchannel is a virtual extension of a real event and allows participants, both at the event and beyond, to observe, communicate and share ideas. It greatly enhances the event and can be fed back into the live event, either on a screen or as questions for speakers, discussion etc.

A hashtag (#) is a collective link that collects tweets around a specific event. Many find it useful to tune into a hashtag to get the gist of a talk, key concepts, quotes and comments, without having to attend the conference. Tweeting pictures can also be useful, especially key or summary slides in presentations. Given the 140 character restriction, this is a way to get more detailed information across. We all know that talks and lectures are padded out, so this can be a useful way of getting the crystalised thoughts of the speaker.

Beyond this many tweet points of agreement and disagreement, so that critical thought and discussion becomes part of the experience. This can develop into short dialogue using Reply function). Hashtags can also be used for questions to speakers, lecturers and teachers. I’ve answered tweeted questions during, at the end and after talks. This widens the opportunity for questions to those beyond the room, as well as allowing more introverted attendees to ask questions. Some make such Tweets visible on a big screen which encourages self-moderation and gets the debate out on the floor.

So, going back to my Doha example, announce your hashtag at the start of a conference or event (It is amazing how rare this is) or several may arise, causing confusion. Then encourage tweeting. They are honest and provide a blow-by-blow account of the event. People also Tweet at the end of a conference which is also useful. So why not harvest these instead or as a useful, evaluative supplement or replacement to your happy sheets. My guess is that the tweets would be far more detailed and useful.

Twitter & courses/classes

Lots of teachers/lecturers/trainers have used Twitter to enthuse learners. Some, have students Tweet as characters, fictional and historic. The discipline of 140 characters teaches you to construct concise and sharp sentences. In language learning Tweeting short sentences can get students going in the actual use of a language. Following famous people who Tweet in the language you’re learning gives you a steady stream of relevant and realistic comments to try to translate. Or you can follow people directly and tweet in your target language. Pass the Tweet is a creative game where one person comes up with the title, the next the opening sentence and so on around the class, good fun, highly creative and a great writing task. You can go one step further and set up an account for your class. I’ve also seen teachers open up their class to outside Tweeters, by inviting tweets from the outside. Twitter chats are pre-defined periods where a question is posed and the contributors tweet answers in reply. This can be used to connect students within a class, across different classes, schools, even countries. Trips are always more interesting when photographs and comments are made along the way. So, on trips to museums, art galleries and especially journeys and field trips, encourage tweeting from mobiles.

Twitter & workplace learning

Whether it’s a project, initiative, launch or change management problem,  lots of organisational activities will benefit from being tweeted, if only to keep people informed but also for inviting suggestions and feedback. 

https://www.yammer.com/ is a Twitter clone that you can use privately, within a company or organisation to access experts, ask questions, organise events, poll or private message. Benefits reported a dramatic reduction in email and increased productivity.

Downside

One could also argue, that it’s often introduced as a bit of a gimmick and wastes more time than it saves. Twitter’s strength is its almost organic growth and use. As soon as it starts to be used in a formal classroom or training context it can seem a little forced or fake. Its strength is as an informal personal learning tool or as a backchannel at events. As a formal learning tool it’s unproven.

Twitter can also be a distraction among learners leading to rude tweckling (heckling using Twitter) and inattention. Your Twitter stream can be flooded with automated feeds from your other social media. You also have the problem of inclusion, namely two groups, one Tweeting, the other having no idea what’s happening on Twitter. It can also be more impressionistic and less coherent, than say a blog post about a talk or conference, with poor searchability.

Conclusion

Twitter has been boosted by the rise in mobile, social networking. This has taken it into cafes, onto trains and into conferences, lectures and classrooms. At first sight, Twitter seems an unpromising candidate for learning. Yet once we grasp its fit with the psychology of learning, its multiplicity of uses and popularity, it seems entirely relevant, as long as we don’t force it into inappropriate formal contexts.

Blogs: vastly underused teaching and learning tool

You’re reading this on a blog. As a blogger since 2006, I can only say that it has been one of the most important learning experiences in my life. I don’t go on courses or attend an educational institution but I do write blog pieces and read oodles of stuff on other blogs.

For me, a blog is more than a diary. It is a place for honest expression, a bit of reflection, and some sharing and collaboration. You learn from putting yourself to the test, by writing a piece that is readable by others, but also benefit from the comments that come back, challenging or supporting your view. A blog is an invitation for dialogue. So what’s its contribution to learning?

Blogs benefits

As a learning experience the benefits are clear. The act of writing forces you to précis your thoughts, reflect on experiences and come to some conclusions. The problem with much education and training is that written analysis is either too short (multiple choice or word/phrase answers) or too long (long-form essays in higher education). Blogs provide a far more useful format. A blog post shouldn’t be too short or too long. Some topics require no more than a paragraph or two, others a more considered couple of pages of detailed argument. Like good journalism blogs should be concise and compelling. Blogs force you to be concise but substantial. They are a useful alternative to essays in schools and Universities. Blogs reinforce learning, increase writing and communications skills and (often forgotten) increases retention. They build confidence, self-expression and autonomous learning. Even the shyest students can find a voice.

Blogs and memory

Another great advantage of regular blogging is that the act of writing a clear post involves deep processing in memory that results in better retention. I have a much better memory for the topics, exhibitions, books, films, events and journeys I’ve blogged. The very act of blogging not only boosts memory but acts as an aide memoire. I often go back to my blog posts when I have to give a talk or need to respond to a query on a specific topic.

Blogs and sharing

It is important to remember that blogging is an open invitation to converse with others on a topic. In some cases, such as my critical posts on NLP, I’ve had acerbic, personal attacks. It’s all good and I rather like the idea that the blogosphere is a bit rough and tumble. More importantly, I’ve often had good examples, new perspectives and arguments I hadn’t considered before.

Blog and ‘voice’

Good blogs have a ‘voice’. In fact blogging allows you to find your voice. The best blogs are written by those who do it for themselves and find in themselves the joy of writing. I am so glad I’ve blogged for all these years as I feel I’ve produced material that would have been lost to my mind and memory. As you can probably guess I’m not a fan of blogs from organisations – no real voice and too much direct marketing for my taste.

Teacher blogs

The admirable Millie Watts, the social networking teacher, had a blog ‘What I taught this week’. This was obviously useful for her students. Most teachers leave no trace at all of their lessons, yet we know with absolute certainty that learners need repeated access to knowledge to learn. A teacher’s blog can summarise what was covered in lessons, included media content such as diagrams, photographs and video. It can also link to useful external resources. As a resources for learners who may have found the lesson to difficult, were off ill, have English as a second language it can be a useful safety net. In doing homework or revision, it is a useful resource for all.

In many ways it is almost odd that a teacher, lecturer, trainer, instructor does not blog. They are in the business of imparting knowledge and this is a simple way to do precisely that, and it’s easy to use and free!

Similar arguments apply to leaders and senior managers in organisations. Many CEOs and other senior managers and experts within organisations blog. This humanises the organisation, gives people a voice and a chance for others in the organisation to get to know that person better.
Convincing teachers can come through arguments for deep learning, reflection and retention.

Learner blogs

Benefits of blogs for learners include summarising their experience and better retention. Useful notes for revision are also created for reinforcement and revision. The blog format not only improves writing and communication skills, it is a powerful form of preparation for exams that demand reflection and good written answers. It can also be used as a form of peer-to-peer learning, where other learners are encouraged to comment on each other’s posts. This can be left open or done formally.

David Mitchel is a huge evangelist for pupil blogging. He didn't set one piece of homework all year, yet his pupils worked producing 70,000 words+ on their blogs from home. His primary school has also shown measurable improvements in writing skills. Millie Watts encouraged her students to write ‘What I learned this week’ blogs. Blogs encourage students to write the right way, not over-long essays but short, sharp pieces that communicates ideas. Get them to blog for a specific target audience. Oh and don't call blogging homework, a hideous word that turns it into a chore.

Blogs and assessment
A learner blog gives a running account of what the learner is learning. It acts as a form of continuous formative assessment. There is an argument for replacing the drudgery of homework with learner generated blogs that force the learner to reflect on what they’ve learned. There's a degree of honesty and substance in a learner blogs that one is unlikely to find in formal testing.

Informal blogs

There are millions of bloggers who have been energised to blog on almost every imaginable subject. The blogosphere has, in effect, become a source of knowledge sharing in all professions and all subjects. No matter what subject interests you, enthusiasts are no longer tied to the narrow-cast journals or trade magazines. The blogosphere is a rolling wave of knowledge leaving a useful archive in its wake. For me it is perhaps the most tangible evidence for the health of informal, lifelong learning.

Blogs and politics

At another level, that of political engagement, blogs have played a significant role, not only in stable democracies but perhaps more relevantly in repressive regimes and most notably in the Arab Spring. Bloggers have written about corruption, presented alternatives and galvanised people around causes and real events. To be absolutely clear here, for some naive commentators have dismissed this activity, bloggers have been murdered, imprisoned, tortured and harassed in many countries.

Blogs and publishing

Finally, it has to be recognised that the blogosphere is a publishing medium in its own right, as well as a source for authors, columnists and journalists who can emerge in a meritocratic fashion, to publish their own work. Entire works of fiction and non-fiction were blogs or have emerged from blogs.

Conclusion

Blogs are a potent and vastly underused teaching and learning tool. The habit of regular writing as a method of reflection, synthesis, argument and reinforcement is suited to the learning process. Blogs encourage bolder, independent, critical thinking, as opposed to mere note taking. For teachers they crystallise and amplify what you have to teach. For learners, they force you to really learn. A last word for those bloggers who have been jailed, flogged and killed, maybe we owe it to them to do this. 

Do the maths: 7 reasons why the obsession with maths doesn’t add up

I'd much rather employ this smart, innovative, humorous and creative person than someone who actually knows how to apply Pythagoras's Theorem. Maths has never been the sole touchstone for being 'smart' or 'employable'. So I'm annoyed that maths has become a weapon of mass distraction in education, a topic full of bluster and exaggeration. Maths is hard to learn, hard to teach and easy to test, in other words the ideal recipe for mass failure. Everyone seems to agree that we have a huge problem in maths. The problem, it seems to me, is a lack of a basic understanding of maths by politicians, employers, even experts in education. So here’s some FAILS, or failures to do the simple maths.

FAIL 1 Numeracy not maths

There is persistent exaggeration in the size of the so-called maths problem. This is caused by people shooting arrows, drawing a chalk circle around the arrow and calling it a bullseye. Typical is the recently formed National Numeracy charity, which claims we have 17 million (nearly half the working population) with poor numeracy. They do this by relying on one ‘survey’ and conflating numeracy with maths, as their definitions are based on GCSE achievement.

This exaggeration is endemic and a simple failure in statistics. The actual needs in the real world match what we call ‘functional maths’: basic numeracy, use of a calculator, some understanding of statistics etc. This is not congruent with what is actually taught in GCSE maths. If they were represented as sets there would be a small overlap. When employers talk about poor maths, they are largely talking about poor numeracy. These are two different things. In fact, almost invariably people conflate and confuse maths with numeracy (or functional maths). A simple Venn diagram is all that’s needed to make this clear.

FAIL 2 Most maths quantifiably irrelevant

What’s the quadratic equation? What’s a surd? When was the last time you divided two fractions? When did you last use algebra? The recent report into the teaching of maths confirmed, yet again, that the curriculum is largely irrelevant to most students, as they are unlikely to use much of it in later life. They rightly recommend a new qualification in functional maths. If GCSE maths were a pie chart, most of it will not be used by the vast majority of people in later life. In any case, if we do need the more complex stuff, we can learn it later. Do the maths. It doesn’t add up.

FAIL 3 Maths is easy to test

Rather than test what really matters in problem solving and real life, we’ve stuck to a lazy and often irrelevant method of testing that puts maths at the top of the tree. Why because it’s easy to test. Maths problems have single solutions and are therefore easy to test. Nevertheless, problems, largely of calculation, are perceived as being a good test of one’s ability in a general sense. This is nonsense. Maths problems are rarely realistic. Nobody goes around using maths to share marbles, split up pizzas, share out cakes at parties or dilute orange juice. There is a critical failure to ‘bridge’ between the real world and its representation in mathematical language. But in an age of perpetual testing, maths is an easy option.

Fail 4 Maths a transferable skill

If knowing maths teaches you to think clearly, how come the world has been plunged into a financial crisis by people who are good at maths but couldn’t see the problems they were causing. The answer to this problem was identified by Thorndike over a century ago. ‘Transfer’, the degree to which learning transfers to actual performance in the real world is still a largely misunderstood or ignored issue in education. Learning is largely (not always) a means to an end, namely the application of that knowledge or skills, yet few educators know or care much about transfer. They assume it exists where it doesn’t (for example in maths and Latin) and make little effort to make sure it happens. Thorndike showed that transfer depends on the similarity of the situations or domains. This principle of ‘identical elements’ led him to recommend problem solving and practice in real-world contexts, so that the learning tasks and context matched the real world. Has this lesson been leant in the teaching of maths, or Latin? No.

FAIL 5 Calculators calculate

Almost everyone has a calculator in their pocket, as it’s a native app on almost every mobile phone and computer. Yet we insist on teaching people how to ‘calculate’ as opposed to useful, functional numeracy. Experts, like Wolfram and others, have pointed to the crude culture of ‘calculation’ in school maths, at the expense of real, functional and conceptual maths. Richard Norris has shown that maths in the workplace is intimately tied up with computers, spreadsheets and others forms of software. Yet maths and ICT are treated as two separate subjects. Isolating ‘maths’ in this way presents it as a purely abstract and often irrelevant subject.

FAIL 6 Miscalculation on teachers

Statistically, your child was, is or will be, almost certainly taught by someone whose knowledge of maths is rather poor. We know, with mathematical certainty, that primary school teachers have poor maths skills. The recommendation of the recent Government report into Maths teaching is a minimum B pass in GCSE before you’re allowed to teach the subject. This sounds like a bad joke until you realise that our children are being taught by largely primary school teachers with an absurdly low competence in maths. It claims that, “Almost all of those on primary PGCE courses gave up studying mathematics at age 16. So, by the time they taught their first classes, they had not studied mathematics to any meaningful level for at least six years.” Only about 2% of primary school teachers have a degree in science or any STEM subject. Another shocker is the fact that in secondary schools, “24% of all children in secondary schools are not taught by specialist mathematics teachers”. Read that again. Most maths is not taught by maths teachers or even by teachers with a solid grasp of the subject.

FAIL 7 PISA ‘standards’

The PISA results show plummeting performance in maths by our young people. The Chinese have screamed to the top. We’ll be an economy the equivalent of Bangladesh in a few years if we don’t get our maths scores up.  This is all baloney. A more detailed analysis of why PISA is wrong.

This is a common mathematical problem among politicians, employers, even so called experts in education. Our performance has remained stable. There is no ‘drop’ in standards. If you construct a league table, you can, mathematically, rise and fall in that table while remaining the same in terms of competence. That’s the problem with league tables – they create the illusion of winners and losers.

Gove is an English graduate with scant knowledge of maths and science. I know because I challenged him on a shared platform at the Tory Party Conference in Blackpool when he claimed that all schoolchildren should know that the orbit of an electron relies on the same force as the orbit of the planets around the sun! There were guffaws from the audience, so I suggested he needed a new example as the forces at work here couldn’t be more different (true story). He went apeshit but he was still hopelessly wrong. His EBacc has all the hallmarks of a PISA-led curriculum, far too academic, and exclusive. 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 Ebacc 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. Do the maths. 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. 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.

Conclusion

We don’t actually live in a more mathematical world. We live in a world where most maths is done by calculators, computers and machines, or a relatively small number of experts. The vast majority of us need little actual maths, other than ‘functional maths’. To funnel all young people into a path that demands a mostly irrelevant, maths curriculum is to turn them off school and learning. This obsession with maths may, mathematically, be the very things that lowers our general educational attainment.

3D printers: gimmick or game changer? Next big thing or expensive way to produce lots of ‘small, useless, plastic things’?

OK, if you have a spare grand or so for a 3D printer. Are they the ‘next big thing’ or merely an expensive way to produce lots of ‘small, useless, plastic things’? Apart from adding considerably to planetary waste, what impact will 3D printers have in learning?

Not a game changer

Technology is unpredictable. When Gutenberg produced his 2D printing press it led to massive social and political changes, and a shift towards putting learning literally in the hands of learners. This was to drive a religious reformation, scientific revolution and a rich cultural life based around writing and reading. In education, books and text remain the mainstay in most subjects.

Could the 3D printing press have a similar result? Well no. Books had been around for 12 centuries in learning prior to being printed. Little plastic objects have also been around for a long time but are not used that much in learning. Sure, there will be some applications in learning but this may not be a game changer.

What’s available?

Technology starts out expensive, experiments with formats, then prices plummet as the technology settles and becomes an affordable product. Laser printers, when invented  1969, were $20,0000but are now around 0.5% of that price, $100. This already happening with 3D printers. Sure, you can buy a $20,000 professional HP 3D printer but a $1200 3D printer is already available.

First came Cupcake  and Thing-o-matic then Makerbot Replicator with a single or dual head so that two colours or two different materials can be used in one object. Repraps such as Prusa, Mendel, Darwin etc are hacker designed using open source. Ultimaker, originally a student Msc project in Holland is now a viable $1194 machine. Makerbot, has had $10m VC funding, and its Replicator2 comes in a box. The market is still young, with a wide price range, different types of technology, using different materials producing different levels of quality.

How do they work?

Depends. Some squirt molten plastic or resin from a nozzle in layer after layer as both a table and nozzle move in three dimensions. Others use powder, ceramics even metal. Formlab’s laser plus resin is $3000 but resin is expensive $150 a litre, three times the price of plastic. Plastic around $50 per kilo but you can make hundreds of objects

Printers can print themselves

This is exaggerated, but it is true that some of these printers can print off some of their own components. The more they can print the cheaper they will be to replicate in other locales. More interesting is that the technology has benefited from the open source movement, in both software, hardware and the sharing of3D objects.

What do you do with them?

You can clone, create, prototype, share and replicate objects. Clone objects using a 3D scanner then print as many off as you wish. This has already happened in Metropolitan Museum of Art hackathon, where exhibits were scanned and cloned. Greek statuary from the British Museum has also been 3D printed. Create new objects, anything from new art to practical devices. Prototype objects, so that they can be refined, tested ergonomically and aesthetically, even presented to raise funds. Share objects, as they are all ultimately, relatively small packets of data, that can be shared, uploaded and download like any text, audio, image or video music file. Tens of thousands of 25000 objects can be downloaded from sites such as thingiverse.com and grabcad.com. Replicate objects on site or closer to their point of sale. Why ship objects when they can be manufactured on demand? It gives a whole new meaning to just-in-time production.

Long tail attached to one large beast?

This is a Chris Anderson, long-tail product that caters for all sorts of small batch, even one off objects for design development and actual delivery. This is interesting for a retailer, such as Amazon, where you can satisfy long tail demand in books. However, it’s likely the Amazon model will prevail, namely domination by a major player. For example, a new factory was opened this year in New York, the Mayor opened it with a pair of 3D printed scissors. This factory will 3D print any object you want in whatever colours and numbers, prototypes or finished products. It prints 3D 50 industrial printers.

How can they be used in learning?

Isn’t it odd, however, that we teach and learn people about the 3D world largely in 2D? Yes, but how often do you actually need a 3D object to learn or understand something?

Art & design

Museums are already using these printers to replicate some of their objects. The creative possibilities are endless, where students create forms and prototypes for sculptures, jewellery etc. It is likely to spawn new art in itself.

Archaeology

Archaeology in 3D is revolutionising the copying of bones of early. Louise Leakey’s African fossils. But other rare objects such as cuneiform tablets, coins, almost anything we pull out of the ground can be replicated on demand.

Engineering

Unfortunately, we in the UK have started with the rather cumbersome £6m research centre Engineering and Physics research Council, which says it is working with industry. What this lacks is real entrepreneurial push. However, it is clear that 3D design, prototyping and testing will benefit from this relatively cheap technology.

Maths & physics

Maths can be visualised, from simple geometric shapes, volumes, surface areas, intersections,  to sophisticated topographies. In general it offers huge opportunities to teach maths using real maths problems with real object creation as the goal. This could surely add a welcome boost in motivation for students who fail to see the connection between abstract maths and real world applications. The physicality of the process has been shown to instil curiosity and understanding. Interesting paper on this.

Medicine

In medicine, there are niche applications, such as anatomy, rare physiological conditions etc. However, it is likely that the real practice of medicine has more to gain than learning such as customised hearing aids, dental implants and so on.. Prosthetics can be created anywhere at anytime in remote places, customised legs, arms, hand etc. What’s more, with a scan of your existing leg an exact mirror copy from the digital file can be created.

More ambitiously, Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow has been working on models downloadable chemistry sets that can make complex drugs. The3D printer created the chambers and tubes which you fill with the correct, commonly found ingredients, and out pops a drug.

Bioprinting uses bioink (cells) to build layer upon layer to create tissue. Ultimately it is hoped that entire organs, heart valves or bone implants could be created this way. In the short term a 3D printer could print skin cells directly on to a wound. Printed meat could also be used by pharmaceutical companies for testing, saving huge amounts of money.

Science

The real world is in 3D (well maybe more but let’s put esoteric maths and physics aside until 6D printers come along) yet science is taught in 2D, largely in print or from 2D PowerPoint presentations. Molecules in chemistry, organic forms in biology, planets and comets in astronomy the list is endless…..

Music
You can even print your own flute! See this video. Other instruments are also possible.
Fun stuff

The Cube is a Chinese 3D plug and play printer for kids/families which can produce small toys, such as figures, robots, dinosaurs etc. in many colours for $1299. You buy cartridges just like a normal printer. You can print off clothes and accessories, such a bikinis, plastic shoes and purses. Rather worryingly, you can create replica keys really easily and a 22 calibre handgun has already been created! I feel a film script coming on…

Serious stuff

This is exciting, 3D objects for the developing world. Water pumps, frames for eye glasses (which break more often than the lenses), replacement parts on vital machines, such as sewing machines etc. are all possible. The problem with poor and remote economies is that the cost of shipping is often prohibitively expensive. By simply shipping the software, objects can now be printed at the point of need.

Conclusion

Every educational institution could have a 3D printer that can create objects across the curriculum, on demand. STEM subjects are often the first port of call, but many other subjects can benefit, especially art and design. While it is true that the potential of a technology is often realised once people start to use it in anger, 3D printers are in danger of being the ‘next big thing’ when they are, in fact, just expensive machines that churn out ‘lots of useless small things’, more gimmick than game changer. Time will tell. What is clear is that 3D printing is a game changer in the real world outside of learning.
PS
Thanks to Carlo at the wonderful International Centre of Theoretical Physics for his excellent recorded seminar on this topic that can be found here.

Values as ‘crap acronyms’?

I was on a conference panel last week, when someone flaunted their ‘values’ approach to training. Now whenever values and training collide inside the ‘round and round the table’ Hadron collider of HR, the net result is usually a ‘crap acronym’.

Bacronyms: values created to fit word

Chances are that some wag in HR or training has shoehorned some abstract nouns into a word that sounds vaguely positive, completely losing sight of the original intention. Are they telling me that their values ‘just happened to fall into this acronym’? Actually, what happens is that at least some of the values emerge from the acronym.

How about this for banality from a Cheshire voluntary group: FLUID: Freedom 2 Love Ur Identity. Or another real example of a crap acronym: VALUE: This HR person went online as she could only think of Value Added….. and wanted others to fill it out! They did, and she was delighted with, Value Added Local, User friendly Experience. What a load of guff. When values are created to fit a word you want to say – shove your course….

Using middle, lower case letter in acronym

PEOPLE: Positive Spirit and Fun, HonEsty and Integrity, Opportunties Based on Merit, Putting the Team first, Lasting value for Clients and People, Excellence through Professionlism. One overlong, impossible to remember acronym with eleven nouns, and I love the way they have to use the ‘E’ in the middle of HonEsty to make it work! This, by the way, is from an HR consultancy.

AAAA (Association Against Acronym Abuse)

It’s not that I don’t like acronyms (Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of Name Yielding Meaning). They’re great as memorable cues. For example, I rather like ABC (Airways, Breathing, Circulation) in first aid and the customer care acronym GREAT, as an aide memoire, where five simple things can be recalled on the job:

Greet all customers & make them feel comfortable

Respect cultural & other personal differences

Evaluate how your customers want to be served

Adjust your approach to match your customer's needs

Thank your customers for their business.

I also have a soft spot for funny acronyms, such as ALITALIA (Airplane Lands In Turin And Luggage In Ancona), BAAPS (British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeon) unbelievably a real organisation and DIMWIT (Don't Interrupt Me While I'm Talking).

…it’s just that I’m a fully paid up member of AAAA, the Association Against Acronym Abuse.

Conclusion

This type of ‘affective’ training is delivered by sincere people who don’t know the slightest thing about how people learn, so we get poor presentation-driven pedagogy. Values need to be believed and felt emotionally. You need pretty sophisticated experiential training, through scenarios or fist-person-thinker simulations to do this well. It can be done and one of the best I’ve seen was for Apple, which was seriously scenario-led.

Injecting values into an organisation is hard and most often fails. It failed in the banks (catastrophically), it failed with politicians (expenses, morals, snobbery etc.), it failed in journalism (watch Levinson). I have a confession, I’ve delivered a fair number of these programmes into banks and similar organisations. They’re always the same, some fatuous acronym and values that stand no chance of widespread adoption through training. Why? You can’t teach values from a flipchart of PowerPoint. The acronym is usually a flipchart and PowerPoint gimmick. A list of abstract nouns is not a list of values. People see through the artificiality of this stuff as it doesn’t relate to them personally.

Calculators: Education stuck in pre-calculator age

Archaeological evidence for an abacus goes back to 5th century BC Greece, however, there is indirect evidence of their use in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Persia. It is still widely used in Asia. The humble electronic calculator was the first computer to impact teaching and learning. It quickly replaced mechanical slide rules and mechanical calculators in the 1970s. Calculators now include scientific, algebraic, trigonometric  and graphing functions.

Education is still stuck in pre-calculator age

Everyone’s miserable about maths: employers, politicians, teachers and especially learners, many who fail and hate the subject with a passion. Indeed, governments have become obsessed with the subject, largely on the hysteria surrounding the PISA rankings.

One issue that is receiving intense attention is ‘calculation’, which is kicking up a storm in maths education. The ubiquity of calculators has led some to question the way we teach maths in schools. They claim that the world has changed from analogue to digital and the teaching of maths needs to respond accordingly.

Some argue that calculators have led to a reduction in numeracy and maths skills. They recommend not using calculators in schools until a certain level of competence in mental arithmetic is reached. Others argue that the traditional focus on ‘calculation’ needs to be replaced by a more sophisticated curriculum of solving problems using maths. Why teach long division, when you are unlikely to ever use it in real life? Calculators can also be used to do the necessary calculation spadework on algebra, trigonometry and graphics.

Maths need exaggerated

Some, like Roger Schank, believe that the need to learn maths is grossly exaggerated as only a tiny proportion of adults will use the maths that is taught, beyond basic arithmetic. His point is that most of what is taught, especially algebra, is of no real practical use and does not help people to think logically. He often asks highly educated audiences to tell him the quadratic formula – few ever answer. Sure, some will need maths in their later career, so says Roger, let them learn it later. Roger has traced this obsession with maths back to early 19^th century curriculum choices and claims that this is a historical problem, fuelled by the fact that maths is easy to test, especially ‘calculation’

Too much calculation

Conrad Wolfram decries the focus on ‘calculation’ in school maths. We spend most of our time teaching calculations by hand, which any calculator and computer can do better than any human. Practical, mental arithmetic is fine, but what are these numeracy basics? Automation pushes the user towards using the tools in more sophisticated ways. Maths is not calculation and over the last thirty years calculation has been automated by calculators. Education is still stuck in a pre-calculator age.

Far better to understand what you’re trying to achieve. He recommends that programming is a better way to do maths. It makes maths more practical and academic at the same time. He goes further and argues that the obsession with calculation in maths kills off the initiative, intuition and perseverance that maths needs. In other words we’re turned off maths by maths. Students learn to look for and apply formula, which they then proceed to calculate. Text books are full of primitive, dry, exercises that seem like chores. Many now argue that real life problems should stimulate mathematical enquiry through the use of more word based problems.

Calculators and computers

A calculator is pretty standard as a native application on PCs, Macs and mobile devices. Tills automatically calculate the correct change for customers. Calculators are therefore embedded in newer forms of technology making them more readily available. This is one potential use of mobile devices in schools that teachers should consider.

Conclusion

Maths is forced, by law, upon people who see it as lacking relevance and don’t want to learn it, taught by people who, because they’re good at maths, often don’t know how to teach it. Yet the curriculum is aimed, largely at those very few who will use high-level maths professionally.

Radio education: huge and hugely underestimated

For over 80 years it’s been quietly delivering formal and informal learning to millions worldwide, especially the poor and marginalised. Far from being an old technology it is now transforming itself through podcasts, digital and internet radio.

Formal learning

Radio is a broadcast medium and so has several practical, educational advantages:

·         has huge geographic reach

·         reaches very large numbers of people

·         audio is cheap to produce

·         audio is cheap to transmit

·         radios are cheap

·         local languages can be used

·         can be self-sustaining

Formal learning, where radio is used on its own or is integral to a blend of distance learning materials that deliver formal courses, has been delivered for many decades. Unsurprisingly, it has long been used In large, sparsely populated rural areas, where schooling is difficult to organise, such as Australia and in most developing countries. Radio remains the most popular and accessible form of educational technology in Africa.

International Educational Systems has taken radio into marginal populations, such as refugees, nomads and those who simply cannot afford to go to school. Women have also been reached in some societies, where schooling is impossible or difficult, for example the Somalia Distance Education Literacy Programme (Somdel) supported by the BBC Worldwide Education Trust, where 70% of those who passed the course were women.

However, much radio in rural areas is used directly by schools, as it can deliver consistent and high quality content. Radio has been of particular use in health education, especially HIV/AIDS. Farming and food distribution has been taught in 39 African countries through Farm Radio International.

There has been radio delivered teacher training in Mali and training for health and education stakeholders in Sudan. One of the features of many of these initiatives is their delivery in local languages and their sensitivity to local cultures. In some cases, such as the Sudan Radio Services, radio time has been sold to pay for the educational services making it truly sustainable.

However, one of the criticisms of radio education is its focus on outside originated content, abstracts life skills and a lack of practical vocation content, especially farming, as the majority of children are the sons and daughters of farmers. Cheap wind-up or solar powered radios are now widely available from developers such as The Freeplay Foundation. This gives radio a real edge over TV and computer technology. Typical target audiences are in the tens or hundreds of thousands, some in their millions.

Audio and learning

Audio also has several cognitive advantages in learning:

·         listening is a universal skill

·         note taking is easy

·         imagination has to be used

·         great for visually impaired

·         easy to deliver in multiple languages

·         good in language learning

·         obviously essential for music

The use of the imagination is a fascinating point as it has been argued that this leads to deeper processing and higher retention in some subjects. The obvious downside is the lack of images and the fact that broadcast media are not under the control of the learner. The lack of control has been remedied by recording and podcasts have significantly improved the power of radio to teach and inform at the learner’s own pace.

A whole culture has developed around radio learning to include ‘listening groups’ and support materials such as comics and workbooks. In Australia, short-wave radio was used to transmit and receive between farmsteads and therefore among groups of teachers and learners, sometimes mimicking traditional teacher-classroom arrangements. Increasingly, for example in Zambia, we have seen radio’s power amplified by the supplementary use of iPods and mobile phones.

Informal learning

Radio is still used to educate in formally. The BBC’s R4 has over 10 million listeners a week and purely educational broadcasts, such as the highly academic ‘In Our Time’ have been running for years with many hundreds of podcasts now free on iTunes, covering science, philosophy and history. Radio has also been used, by the likes of the Open University and others for successful local advertising.

Radio and propaganda

Of course educational radio is not always worthy as it has also been used for propaganda. Major and minor powers still use radio as a form of educational colonialism. The Nazis were the first to see the totalitarian power of radio with Goebbels claim that, "radio will be to the twentieth century what the press was to the nineteenth". The Japanese used ‘Tokyo Rose’ and the North Vietnamese "Hanoi Hannah" against US troops and the Nazis Lord Haw-haw, against the British. The US has used radio for propaganda against many countries including Panama, Cuba and Iraq.

Radio and new media

Podcasting is the true heir to radio. To timeshift an audio experience and put it in the hands of the learner, gives them is convenience and control. Internet radio has given many access to distant radio stations and led to growth in stations with a very specific focus. Far from being a dead or dying medium it is finding new purposes and new channels.

Conclusion

Radio is scalable, in the broadcasting sense. It’s low cost and reach have seen widespread use, not only in the developing world but in developed countries like the UK, where radio has long been respected as a source of high quality educational content. Video is very far from killing the radio star.