Artichoke

Does it matter in school if “Web 2.0 is just a high-tech set of waldo gloves ....” ?

I seem to be trapped in an educational landscape where just mentioning that you are using Web2.0 and participatory media in classrooms to enhance student learning outcomes, home – school partnerships etc etc causes enough sharp intake of admiring breath to create a susurration of approval from all “those that know Web2.0”.  I truth I work in a landscape where the approval stakes are so high that even “those that don’t know Web2.0” can find themselves sucking in an approving breath in sympathy and symphony.

To question our educative practice in integrating ICTs (Web2.0 or not) to enhance learning outcomes is met with incredulity ... and I want to explore this idea further

Why should educators care when what is celebrated as “openness”  is really something quite different, surely a focus on improving learning outcomes is both necessary and sufficient  ... right?

The recent judgement ordering “Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom all its records of who has watched what videos. What clip, under what name, and from what IP address.”  should be enough to alert educators that focussing on the enhanced learning outcomes when integrating ICTs into classroom programmes is not enough.

Lucychili sent me the video link to Jonathan Zittrain as Artichokean mindfood a while back and I am currently following up on Zittrain by reading his book “The Future of the Internet” and how to stop it:

I like the way Zittrain opens with a historical example distinguishing generative technology of the early PC platform with the pre-programmed, locked down, tethered and controlled technology in the iPhone.

Zittrain’s criteria for generative platforms versus locked down or tethered appliances certainly helps me shortcut to what bothers me about the way the discussion over Web2.0 is unfolding in the professional learning opportunities available to New Zealand educators –

I can see an immediate application for Zittrain’s thinking about the point of difference between generative and locked down technologies in my own work with technologies in schools AND I can see this thinking can be used to look at the way we bring educators together for professional learning through organised for profit conferences versus some kind of adhoc (un)conference experience.

It is that “freedom from and freedom to” argument that Margaret Atwood plays with so effectively in The Handmaid’s Tale – where allowing the world to tilt the balance towards “freedom from” has dystopian consequences for women ... and it is the ease with which these societal changes are introduced under the guise of “freedom from” that makes The Handmaid's Tale such a chilling read 

“There is more than one kind of freedom… freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it” Chapter 5 pg 24, In The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood

Zittrain suggests that tethered technologies (offering the user a “freedom from” experience ) differ from  generative ( offering a “freedom to” experience) and that generative have usually been associated with  ....

• no CEO,
• no master business plan,
• no paying subscribers,
• no investment in content, and
• no financial interest in accumulating subscribers.

Which leads me to ask two questions 

1.  Are the technology initiatives I currently use in education examples of a generative (freedom to) or a controlled (freedom from) technologies?

Quite a lot of controlled or freedom from stuff emerges from the analysis  ... all of which leads me to another question ... the one Postman raises  and referred to in the previous post:  On selling the key to the internet to people who didn’t even know it was locked

2.  What does it matter if I am using controlled technologies rather than generative ones if I am integrating ICts to enhance student learning outcomes ...?

An interview with Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool – helped me see this better   (from a Bruce Sterling link at Viridian Design   via Teemu Arina’s great blog post on Mobile Wands ) .

So what is Alan Liu trying to say here, not particularly clearly? Basically he's saying that in the guise of empowering users through all this participatory fooforaw, Web 2.0 is actually a ploy to return the Internet's technical power to the specialized geek clique that originally built Web 1.0. They stole our revolution, now we're stealing it back. And selling it to Yahoo.

"I am highly skeptical of the 'Web 2.0' hype.

There are two reasons for this. One goes back to the issue of history (...). 'Web 2.0' is all about a generation-change in the history of the Web, but from a perspective that is looking at what is happening right now, as opposed to what was happening during the previous generational change (the '1980s'). It's not clear that we can really describe a generation change of this magnitude and complexity while we are in the midst of the change itself, except to say that 'something' is happening that a future generation may decide is qualitatively different. After all, when people speak of Web 2.0, they are actually referring to a swarm of many kinds of new technologies and developments that are not all necessarily proceeding in the same direction (for example, toward decentralization, open content creation and editing, Web-as-service, AJAX, etc.)."

"It's not at all certain, for example, that open content platforms in the style of blogs, wikis, and content management systems align with a philosophy of decentralized or distributed control, since many such database- or XML-driven technologies require a priesthood of backend and middleware coders to create the underlying systems and templates for the new 'open' communications. Just how many people in the world, for example, can make one of the current generation of open-source content-management systems (which often start out as blog engines) do anything that isn't on the model of 'post'-and-'category' or chronological posting? Even the more trivial exercise of re-skinning such systems (with a fresh template) requires a level of CSS knowledge that is not natural to the user base."

Alan Liu has even more to complain about:
"My second reason for being skeptical about 'Web. 2.0'– at least the hype about it – is more important. I think that people who make a big deal out of Web 2.0 are trying to take a shortcut to get out of needing to understand the real generation changes that are happening in the background and that underlie any change in the Web. Those changes occur in social, economic, political, and cultural institutions.

"Web 2.0 is just a high-tech set of waldo gloves or remote-manipulators that tries to tap into the underlying social and cultural changes, but really requires the complement of disciplined sociological, communicational, cognitive, visual, textual, and other kinds of study that can get us closer to the actual phenomena. (...) I don't think there are many developers of Web 2.0 technologies who have done the hard social and cultural studies to help them think about what they are developing. They make a neat system or interface that only taps into some aspects of the social scene. Then, if there are a lot of hits or users, their system is said to be a paradigm. But it's hit or miss. There is no assurance that such technologies are the real, best, coolest, or even most useful 'face,' 'book,' or 'space' of people – only that they are the face, book, or space allowed to surface through a particular lash-up of technologies."

Liu seems to make the same argument that Postman does .... and makes me want to ask 

3.  What will embracing a technology that is increasingly monitored and controlled from a central source do to learning?

All of which makes me hungry to read my latest and as yet unopened Amazon purchase .... Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion  ...

“There is no simpler or clearer statement of the radical change that digital technologies will bring, nor any book that better prepares one for thinking about the next steps.”
–Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School and Author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

It is a book that promises to help me understand the social and political consequences of what we do as educators when we introduce digital technologies to classrooms and do not focus our attention and that of our students on anything more than the immediate learning outcome.

Does it matter in school if “Web 2.0 is just a high-tech set of waldo gloves ....” ?  ... The short answer is that it probably does.   

On selling the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.

They looked like tinkers, but there wasn’t one amongst them, she knew, who could mend a kettle.  What they did was sell invisible things.  And after they had sold what they had, they still had it.  They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want.  They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.” P24 The Wee Free Men Terry Pratchett  

He  appears more tightrope walker than floor sander, with tape measure clenched between his teeth and arms outstretched he treads gingerly,  making  his way across a floorscape made unstable by a complex inter layering of cast off teenage possessions. Finding a place where it is safe to pause and reflect on this obvious example of egregious early parenting he cannot help but turn and ask me what I do in the day job.

I tell him I am a teacher... and when I say “teacher” I see his eyes glaze over - I know this look - I am being categorised as someone who “thinks that they always know the right answer ..... even when they are obviously wrong” ...

It’s OK ....  I explain ....I was one of those kids who suffered from premature closure at school ..... I enjoyed whole school assemblies so much I couldn’t imagine myself not attending them regularly throughout my adult life ....He is not reassured by my explanation ...   and when I add that the debate, over who sets the criteria for acceptable levels of bedroom floor messiness in the house  rivals that over the significance of the Waiho Loop glacial moraine  ... I sense that he is tagging his “teacher category folder” with “unfathomable parenting practice”

All I ever wanted to be was a teacher ... and no matter what happens in the day job ... and how many times I find myself frustrated by people in education who don’t even know the universe is locked  .... it remains all I ever want to be ...And I wonder .... not for the first time .... how such certainty of occupation .... how such “I know what I like and I like what I do” ....came to someone whose mind is so restless ...

What is about teaching and learning ... The big “T and L” that so captures me?

I suspect it is the adrenalin rush, that raw intellectual and emotional excitement that comes from finding something new ... and from having “stuff I know” about, the content, the process, the how to do it and the nature of the learner undermined ... so that I can look again .... and again  ... and again at the same thing ... and find something different each time.

Pratchett had it wrong to imply that being a teacher is about selling “the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked” – rather being a teacher is discovering each day that the key you are selling is the wrong key and furthermore that you are often attempting to unlock the wrong universe.

It seems that it is the same with hairdressing .... when I asked the hairdresser today why she loved her work ... her answer mimicked mine ... She loves the uncertainty ... the not knowing .... that every client brings a different challenge .... and that every client allows her to experiment with “truths” of her professional knowledge and experience.  The daily work of the hairdresser may well look the same to an outsider but to someone who understands hairdressing in a more deeply abstracted and connected way  ... each day provides something tantalisingly different to learn.

We do a lot of work on curriculum alignment in the day job .... including sitting alongside teachers as they plan learning experiences (coded against student learning outcomes SOLO Taxonomy) for integrated units aligned against the Achievement objectives and Key Competencies  in the (new) New Zealand Curriculum.

This process includes integrating thinking and ICT interventions that enhance the conditions of value for identified student learning outcomes, and the creation of SOLO coded student self assessment rubrics so they can see clearly where they are in the learning process and what they can do to improve their understanding .

When the whole integrated unit comes together it is like entering a Csíkszentmihályi  flow state ...  euphoria for all involved.

We have many integrated units planned against the new New Zealand Curriculum with schools across New Zealand  ... so many in fact ....that claims about the newness of the curriculum document surprise me.

Integrating the ICTs in a way that enhances the conditions of value for student learning outcomes into these units is acknowledged as challenging when working with teacher technophobes.

However, I find the task equal in challenge to planning learning experiences with teacher technophiles who seek to recklessly introduce the latest piece of Web2.0 into everything they do with students.

And reading Postman’s Technopoly  whilst waiting for the hairdresser to rescue me from my unruliness today ... helps me understand why ... there is a bit about a “pedagogical peace” between “the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word” that I had forgotten.

Postman argues that I am asking the wrong questions about technology in education when I focus so tightly on how ICTs might enhance the conditions of value in the identified learning outcome ...

I have the wrong key ... or even worse in my work I am attempting to unlock the wrong universe.
   

“we learn nothing when educators ask, Will students learn mathematics better by computers than by textbooks? .....”

    What we need to know consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool.  We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how in conjunction with television it undermines the old idea of school?

    New technologies alter the structure of our interests; the things we think about.  They alter the character of our symbols; the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the area in which thoughts develop.  “ Technopoly p17, 18, 19 and 20

I had a Billy Collin’s moment when reading this – Postman’s argument reminded me of Billy Collin’s argument  for the integration of technology into a “death by drowning experience” in his poem - The Art of Drowning.

It is a poem that never fails to make me smile ...

The Art of Drowning
By Billy Collins

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.

I especially love linking this last bit to claims made for integrating technology in teaching and learning ...

But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.

I need to think again about; the things I think about, the things I think with, and the area in which my thoughts develop in education

At the moment it seems likely that in an educational sense I am the fish..   

I am at two with nature.

“Who do you exclude?” is also known as “Where do you belong?”

"What appear to be cultural units—human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations—are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favoured, and the other is devalued in some way."Lawrence Cahoone (1996)

It is disconcerting to realise that to maintain that core notion of “belonging” – requires “an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization.” to exist.  It makes me look at those New Zealand Key Competencies in a whole new way.
It seems that:

To feel like you are inside you must think of “the other” as outside.
To feel part of an organisation you must ensure “the other” is remote.
To feel accepted you must find “the other” to be rejected.
To feel in control you must describe “the other” as out of control.
To feel at one with nature you must make “the other” feel at two

I have been working away from home.  Christchurch was full of fog and freezing – I exited the motel each morning dressed like “Cat Woman does the Antarctic - The sequel of the sequel” you know the one where the older, somewhat less nimble, but I hasten to add still formidable, Cat Woman is so tightly swathed in multiple layers of black wool that it is difficult for her to bend enough to sit down.

I made a friend in J my taxi driver whose fractured English was a damn site better than my fractured Korean.  We spent each day wobbling tentatively through Christchurch’s rush hour traffic.  We got repeatedly lost in the fog, overshot roads, had to do numerous U turns, got hooted at by large trucks wielding even larger airhorns, suffered the shared indignity of sexually explicit hand gesturing from our fellow Cantabrians, spent what seemed like twenty minutes each morning trying to get onto the roundabout on Main South Rd, travelled in the wrong lanes, at the wrong speeds, with the wrong indicators - all in a tiny white Subaru.  And yet we always got to the destination in time. We bonded so well during these hazardous “othering” excursions that on Friday when I was gifted a container of Korean Xylitol chewing gum I felt real remorse that I had nothing with me that I could gift back.  

I counted myself lucky to get out on the Friday night – with fog delaying flights out of Chrsitchurch airport I was made anxious at the prospect of extending my “other” status for yet another night. Still the whole thing made me wonder about the “othering” of taxi drivers and by default their passengers on our roads.

I have spent a lot of time this year building SOLO coded self assessment rubrics against task descriptors for NCEA and for the Key Competencies.  Which led me to ask on the flight back to Auckland - Can the art of taxi driving be SOLO coded?

Can we think of the art of taxi driving in terms of the KeyCompetency: Language symbols and Text: Interpret and Use Movement  to Make Meaning and the Key Competency Relating to Others: Communication?

Scribbling on the back of an envelope on the late night flight revealed the following

SOLO Coded Self Assessment Rubric for the Art of Taxi Driving

Solo Extended Abstract Taxi Driving

• I can hold forth on a political or personal treatise which is timed for the extent of the journey.
• I can adjust the ideas according to input from passengers.
• I can keep both the concept and the car on the road simultaneously and dont end up in the rough of either course. [From Janet]
• I can plan a taxi journey that captures the essence of a big idea
• I can drive in a way that communicates and responds to the other cars on the road
• I can drive in a way that convincingly communicates my individual interpretation of the big idea to the other cars on the road.
• I can balance listening and responding with the passenger.
• I can synthesize what has been heard and evaluate or elaborate in responses to others ideas offering alternative perspectives

SOLO Relational Taxi Driving

• I can plan a taxi journey that explains and elaborates several ideas
• I can drive in a way that convincingly elaborates several ideas
• I can communicate most effectively and explains ideas clearly to the passenger.
• I can actively listens to passengers and respond appropriately, reflecting a personal understanding of the viewpoint expressed.

SOLO Multistructural Taxi Driving

• I can plan a taxi journey that communicates several relevant ideas
• I can drive in a way that convincingly communicates several relevant ideas
• I can communicate ideas and relate sensitively to others.
• I can listen to the ideas of passengers and respond to them.

SOLO Unistructural Taxi Driving

• I can plan a taxi journey that communicates one relevant idea
• I can drive in a way that convincingly communicates one relevant idea
• I have limited verbal communication and listening skills 

SOLO Prestructural Taxi Driving

• I can participate in a taxi trip
• I can drive a taxi
• I have poor verbal communication and listening skills accompanied by a lack of self-awareness of the impact of what I say on others.

I have taken a lot of taxi rides in the past five years and whilst I may be at two with nature J is easily an extended abstract taxi driver.  I wonder what a rubric for being a passenger will look like?

Principals as the new robber barons and captains of industry.

Or should the information communication technology that a student can access at school depend upon the entrepreneurial ability of the principal?

When we work across schools in New Zealand we see an enormous variation in the quantity and quality of ICTs that New Zealand students regularly access.  It is an inequity that compromises opportunity for e learning.  And this variation in quantity and quality of ICTs does not appear to depend upon the decile ranking of the school community.

A school's Decile indicates the extent to which it draws its students from low socio-economic communities. Decile 1 schools are the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socio-economic communities. Decile 10 schools are the 10% of schools with the lowest proportion of these students.Decile Information

This disparity between what is available to students in classrooms in schools only a few blocks away from each other is hard to explain ... and puzzling over it means I have been carefully tracking the conversations around me as New Zealand principals talk .... I am interested in their conversation about the costs of resourcing ICTs in their schools and in the many ways in which they raise the funds to pay for them. 

To find out the total ICT spend ... the “how much” New Zealand schools spend on ICTs each year is not an easy task –

For example, The New Zealand Herald had to use the power of the Official Information Act to obtain a Ministry report on the costs of running computer networks in school –

And this previously confidential report is three years old ... using financial data on ICTs from 2005 to try and understand what might be happening in schools today is not unlike looking at the price of Ikg of cheese  in the supermarket in 2005 and using this data to think about how households are managing their bills in 2008.    

The previously confidential MoE report estimated ICT spending in schools in 2005 at 245 million dollars - with schools picking up 61% of this (150 million) Computers eating into school funds The New Zealand Herald Thursday May 29 2008 

WHO PAYS
Of schools' estimated ICT (information communication technology) spending in 2005:
* 25%: was from Government "central" spending
* 14%: was the value of teacher time
* 61%: was school spending, including money raised from the community and Government operations grant
SOURCE: Ministry of Education

Given the changing expectations about how best to use ICTs in education over the past three years I can only predict that these figures would be a lot bigger if a similar report was prepared to track school spending on ICTs in 2008.

Perhaps a more intriguing question is how the percentage contributions might have changed in the past three years.

However, the fact that schools are charged with meeting 61% of the costs of ICT resourcing catches my interest tonight. 

Sixty one percent is a significant funding responsibility. 

It makes me want to ask:
Are there other areas in schools with similar resourcing costs and percentage contributions – or is this unique to ICTs? 
What do schools choose to do without (in terms of their Government operations grant spending) to enable them to resource ICTs?
Does a 61% school spend make schools vulnerable to the approaches of people with product to sell and market share to grab? 

And all of these questions make me think again about the factors controlling the access students have to ICTs in New Zealand classrooms.   

The Ministry’s report figures make it seem that the access to ICTs in New Zealand classrooms relies heavily upon having school leaders drizzled with entrepreneurial charisma ...which if it is true seems kind of unfair for those schools with some of the other kinds of educational leaders ... you know the ones who have expertise in building learning communities.

It also seems out of whack with the MoE’s overall mission of reducing disparity ....

The Ministry of Education’s overall mission is to raise educational achievement and reduce disparity.  Our overarching outcome is to build a world-leading education system that equips all New Zealanders with the knowledge, skills and values to be successful citizens in the 21st century.  Ministry of Education Statement of Intent 2007-2012 p13 

Reading press releases related to educational outcomes has taught me that it is smart to translate those absolute numbers (those X.Y millions of dollars) into percentage increase in the school’s operation grant before reacting.... before predicting the impact of the extra funding announced upon student learning outcomes. 

For example the much trumpeted $171.6 million dollars for schools turned out to be a mere 5 percent increase in the school’s operations grant ... a figure that will not even cover the increased cleaning charges at Gulf Harbour School, or as was suggested the other day insufficient to cover the cost of providing cheese and crackers for all those home school partnership functions.  

Education minister Chris Carter yesterday announced an extra $171.6 million over the next four years, which represents a 5 per cent increase in schools' operations grants. It includes $65.3 million for information and communication technology, or ICT.

But John Petrie, principal of Gulf Harbour School in Whangaparaoa, said the increase would amount to only an extra $25,000 in total for his decile 10 school over the four years.

"It won't even cover the increase in our cleaning costs," Mr Petrie said. $171m cash injection 'slap in face for schools'  Thursday May 22, 2008

If as the Minister suggests the problem lies with school’s choosing to buy extras beyond the basics ...

But Education Minister Chris Carter said while all schools were resourced for ICT, some chose to buy extras beyond the basics.

Then (if we are really interested in reducing disparity) it might be helpful for schools if the MoE identified the “basics” and funded them.

Milestone reporting as middleclass narcissism

Thanks to:  "I am only holding the mantle not crocheting it!", Janet, and  37 Days

The invitation to the next ictpd cluster Auckland Regional Meeting asks participants to come prepared to share a celebration...

Cluster ‘snapshots’ – 5-10 mins per cluster (dependent on the number of clusters) Choose 1 ‘celebration’ you would like to share with us all    

We often assume that we are facilitating learning when we provide an edu_space where teachers “feel safe” to speak.

And yet participating in these edu_speak spaces seldom feels like learning.

In re reading Freire’s "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" I am reminded that “Dialogue” nowadays has been debased ... it is another word I can add to my “Call of the mustelid” Folder

When all contributions are celebrated, and listened to without dissent, when right remains indexed to the individual presenting, knowledge is not progressed.

When Donaldo Macedo writes about the dangers of “exoticising” discussing lived experience as a process of coming to voice” ...

when he cautions that ....

“The over celebration of one’s own location and history often eclipses the possibility of engaging the object of knowledge”

he is not only explaining Freire’s argument that “dialogue”  is never an end in itself – he is also explaining why the MoE ictpd cluster Regional /Home Group Meetings do not leverage deep learning and for that matter why the ictpd cluster milestone reporting is mostly an experience of "middleclass narcissism".

The process of milestone reporting is increasingly one where each school’s “lived experience” is given “primacy”

When we are asked to couch this "lived experience" in the language of business and management –

.... when our goal is  to make the 21^st century learner more successful in meeting the needs of New Zealand’s economic productivity ....

... when there is a whole section “intended to give clusters the opportunity to showcase change stories in a rich narrative style using full examples of the supporting evidence.”

we become vulnerable to middleclass narcissism  ... we lose ourselves  “in the disconnectedness of practice”      

Macedo’s “Losing oneself in the disconnectedness of practice” is an interesting idea – I am suspicious that this may be what has happened me ....

Thinking about it makes me end up "if only wistful",

If only, the ictpd cluster Home Group Meetings and Regional Group Meetings and Milestone templates were an opportunity to be curious about ideas.

If only milestone reporting and the ictpd Regional Meetings were more about asking those Paulo Friere questions of the cluster schools and teachers and students

What is my experience?

How does power, agency and history interact with who I am (or think I am)?

How does power, agency and history interact with my experience (or what I think is my experience)?

I end up thinking about all the Home Group and Regional Group Meetings I have attended, all the milestones I have written (and even worse blogged about).

It all makes me ask ... when will I stop posting ideas about how others might change what they are doing and start taking responsibility for my own lack of learning within the institution?

... "Why have I not infiltrated, or built my own radar/control station?"

Reference:  Donaldo Macedo Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Introduction  Pedagogy of the Oppressed    Paulo Freire 30^th Anniversary Edition

“....what I meant was that you have a truly magnificent bottom”

"Should I give up on ambition?" - the last lucid question grandpa asked me was not a bad question in the circumstances.

Many stories were told at the celebration of “a long life well lived”  last week ... the funeral director commented that he had never heard so much laughter during a service ... I blame the influence of the dementia staff who lined up to share much affectionate anecdote of their varied exchanges with that two faced kipper - grandpa

“I know I said you had a huge bottom ... but I didn’t mean anything derogatory ...what I meant was that you have a truly magnificent bottom”

We managed to persuade the chaplain at the dementia centre to act as celebrant – something I suspect grandpa would have been dead chuffed about ... he turned a life time of atheism on its head when he moved into the dementia unit and first set sight on her ample bosom ... and he never missed a Monday service .... negotiating a seat near the front and watching each “performance” with a critical eye...

He confided to me last month that he was worried that the chaplain might be “losing her grip ...” suggesting that she needed to “slip a bit more godliness into her performance ... more vim ...”    When I asked what he suggested his solution was to take advantage of the chaplain’s natural gifts.... “It would be so much better” he claimed, “if she could just throw open her robes and ... add a bit more cleavage to her performance” 

One of the stories told at Grandpas’ funeral is relevant to our current affection for making schools more businesslike.  Grandpa, born in London in 1916 during the First World War, was an only child in a large extended family but due to the depression when he won a scholarship to the Technical College there was not enough money to purchase the overalls required. Instead of going to technical college, at the age of 15 he went to sea.

It is the “.... there was not enough money to purchase the overalls required” thinking that is important here AND  it was the recently released New Zealand Child Poverty Action Group Inc. Report Left behind: How social and income inequalities damage New Zealand children March 2008 pdf combined with Stanford University professor Larry Cuban’s book The Blackboard and the Bottom Line Why Schools Can’t Be Businesses that helped me see this.

As Cuban points out school based solutions to poverty and inequality are popular         

From reducing crime, unemployment, and poverty, to defending the nation against domestic and foreign enemies, and yes, to preparing future workers for a changing labour market – reformers resorted to school-based solutions.  They seldom tried altering socioeconomic and political structures or reducing inequalities (direct public and private intervention to narrow the income gap between the rich and the poor or to reduce residential segregation) when politically vulnerable public schools were available.  (Cuban 2004 p164)

The Auckland Homegroup ict_pd cluster workshop for educators held on Friday was awash in the language of the business reformers -  much of it so seamlessly integrated that those taking part in the discussions didn’t even realise that their ideas and vocabulary came from business rather than teaching and learning....  we  had: effective leadership, visions, timelines, personnel involved, modes of contact, implementation of programme activities, feed forward, lists of key activities, management teams, national programme objectives, leadership and strategic planning, data gathering, alignment of goals, progress reports and programme impact statements, milestone tasks, programme outcomes, case notes, financial statements, disbursement schedules, projections and predictions , efficiency, productivity and mitigation strategies ....I note that we had very little discussion on students and learning. 

The unchallenged assumption amongst the educators present at the Auckland Home Group Meeting being that 

“Schools are just like businesses.  The principles that have made businesses successful can be applied to schools to produce structural changes that will improve academic achievement..... “Cuban 2004 p27

An assumption that is shaping more than the Auckland Home Group Meeting and the direction of the ictpd clusters ... this is an assumption that is reshaping our educational thinking, reframing our educational policies.

This thinking is so entrenched that I am grateful for Cuban in helping me tease out and clarify that when we adopt the business rhetoric of “efficiency and effectiveness” and “productivity” in education, when we describe students as “human capital”.... we adopt a mindset that believes that....  personal advancement comes from individual merit and hard work in school.... we start to believe that schools are a solution to inequality in society.

As a direct consequence of this thinking our educational policies start focusing on removing barriers and enabling access to opportunity in the education system framing this education as the solution to  producing the future workers and citizens for the 21st Century.

The Ministry of Education’s overall mission is to raise educational achievement and reduce disparity. Our overarching outcome is to build a world-leading education system that equips all New Zealanders with the knowledge, skills and values to be successful citizens in the 21st century.  New Zealand Moe Statement of Intent 2007-2012 p 13

Yet by pretending that the solution to poverty is educational and furthermore resolvable through the introduction of business inspired “efficiencies and effectiveness” into schools, (and I include the push for elearning here) we ignore the social political economic and personal costs of economic inequality – we ignore “.... there was not enough money to purchase the overalls required”.....  [Or insert the equivalent from the latest Child Poverty Action Group Report]” and we become complicit in making the working poor’s failure to thrive in our schools “all their own fault”. 

When we adopt a business approach to education we butter up the wealthy and condemn the poor.

And despite all our technology the poverty that meant grandpa went to sea at 15 rather than take up a scholarship has not changed. 

The most recent report from the Child Poverty Action Group on the real lives lived by many New Zealand children gives us many reasons to challenge our thinking about schools as the solution to inequality and about children as a product ... and to lobby for socioeconomic and political solutions to inequality.

In the last decades of the 20th century New Zealand had the fastest growth in income and wealth inequality in the OECD. Little has been done to improve the situation since then. Child poverty remains a major concern in New Zealand, even after the implementation of Working for Families (WFF). In 2001, NZ ranked near the bottom of the rich nations’ index measuring infant mortality, children’s health and safety, teenage pregnancy, and immunisation. It also ranked bottom in the percentage of 15-19 year olds in full- or part-time education, and in the number of deaths from accidents and injuries.

Despite the better economy and significant increase in paid employment, between 2000 and 2004 the proportion of all children in severe and significant hardship increased by a third, to 26 percent. In 2004, there were about 185,000 children in benefit families in some degree of hardship, with 150,000 of them in significant or severe hardship. While official data is yet to be produced for 2007, this report concludes that little has changed for this group of children who have been “left behind.”  Left behind: How social and income inequalities damage New Zealand children ISBN 0-9582263-6-9 © March 2008 Child Poverty Action Group Inc. www.cpag.org.nz

Things you seldom hear discussed at an (e) learning conference.

I have been following up on the great comments and links on the Artichoke happiness post and happened across a link from Lucychili, to a TED talk by technologist, scientist, physicist Clifford Stoll who made claims about computers in schools that were so unlike what I am used to hearing in New Zealand that I laughed aloud ...

“there is a massive and bizarre idea going around that we have to bring more computers into schools ... my idea is to get them out of schools and keep them out of schools.”

 

I am amazed that I haven’t nudged up against Stoll before - his background is enticing - impressive diverse and quirky - a polymath (astronomer, researcher, computer security expert , klein bottle maker ) and with his current determination to “think local act local” - a teacher (Stoll teaches physics to eighth graders). It gives him an domain experience and authority that I have not seen in the commentators we invite to speak at (e)learning conferences in New Zealand.

But all this doesn’t mean that Stoll’s analysis is sound .... he is a compelling presenter but his arguments about computers in school were more rhetorical than research balanced – However as other edu-bloggers have argued many of our arguments for introducing computers/ ICTs/ Web2.0 into school are based on generalisations and rhetoric.

I have ordered his books High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian  and The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage  to see what he can do when given longer than an 18 minute sound bite to explain his ideas ..

History, including educational history, is full of ideas that seemed good at the time.

Stoll’s comments challenged me to think about conversation starters I seldom hear/ questions seldom raised at (e) Learning conferences.  I decided to generate a list of questions seldom raised at (e) learning conferences in New Zealand using Postman’s five things as a framework – Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change because Postman’s thinking along with others like Ivan Illich, Carolyn Marvin and Larry Cuban provide a useful starting point for any thinking that might provoke analysis of our current “(e) learning is good” position about the integration of ICTs into school.

What follows is still clunky, and I am a little fearful of charges of techno determinism,  but here goes ...

“Five ideas I’d like to discuss at the next (e) learning conference"

In response to Postman's :
“First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price”

What do ICTs give to teachers and/or students?

What will ICTs do for pedagogy?

How will ICTs advantage the conditions of value in learning?

What does ICTs take away from teachers and/or students?

What will ICTs undo in pedagogy?

How will ICTs disadvantage the conditions of value in learning?

What is the cost of ICTs to education?

 In response to Postman's:
“Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.”

Who specifically benefits from ICTs in school?

Which groups will be favoured by ICTs in school?

What kind of processes will be enhanced by ICTs in school?

Who specifically is harmed by ICTs in school?

Which groups will be harmed by ICTs in school?

What kind of processes will be harmed by ICTs in school?

Who are the winners when ICTs are introduced to schools?

Who is trying to persuade others of the benefits of ICTs in school?

Who are the losers when ICTs are introduced to schools?

Who is being persuaded by others on the benefits of ICTs in schools?

Are all schools benefited and/ or harmed in the same ways by the introduction of ICTs? 

In response to Postman's:
“Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on.”  

What bias does ICT bring to thinking?

What bias does ICT bring to managing self?

What bias does ICT bring to participating and contributing?

What bias does ICT bring to relating to others?

What bias does ICT bring to using language, symbols and text?

What bias does ICT bring to communication?

What bias does ICT bring to community?

In response to Postman's:
“Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates.”

What are the consequences of the introduction of ICTs for the culture of school (culture = the things we do to belong)? 

What are the consequences of ICTs for the culture of the city, the suburb, small town and rural New Zealand? 

And finally in response to Postman's:
"And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us. .... When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control."  

What are the ICTs that are ubiquitous in school?

What are the ICTs in school that we cannot imagine doing without?

What do these ICTs do for us?

What do these ICTs do to us?

 I want to keep refining these questions, and adding in some more as I read and think more carefully - I don’t hold out much hope that they will be on the formal ULearn08 conference programme BUT I am always hopeful that I will find others who will play with them in the evenings ... 

And as an aside I reckon that Postman’s criteria for speakers on technological change should be stuck to the screen of every (e) learning conference organiser.

One might say, then, that a sophisticated perspective on technological change includes one's being skeptical of Utopian and Messianic visions drawn by those who have no sense of history or of the precarious balances on which culture depends. In fact, if it were up to me, I would forbid anyone from talking about the new information technologies unless the person can demonstrate that he or she knows something about the social and psychic effects of the alphabet, the mechanical clock, the printing press, and telegraphy. In other words, knows something about the costs of great technologies.  Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Hysteresis: Teachers, technology and red herrings

Even the most ardent advocates, (those paid to proselytise over the integration of  ICTs into New Zealand education), would concede over a Speights at the Springfield pub that the status of ICT use in New Zealand classrooms is variable –

... and after a three or more Speights  most would concede that many primary and secondary teachers remain locked in Cuban’s limited use cycle, Knezek and Christensen’s Stage 2/3  Instruments for Assessing Educator Progress in Technology Integration, or Moersch’s LoTi Level 2 / 3. of the Levels of Technology Implementation (LoTi) Scale.  

However, gaining a Speight’s fuelled concession from the crusading champions of ICTs in school, those digital prophets, (e)visionaries, and techno advocates, doesn’t interest me as much as my gradual realisation that the level of use that exists in any classroom (or across any school) is a system of hysteresis – an event that seems independent of the things we identify as significant inputs.

The craziness of the day job ensures that I have spent too much time focussing through a 100X eyepiece on technology adoption by teachers rather than stepping back and looking at why we would want technologies in school at all.

All of this means that I am so overly rehearsed in all the (e) excuses, in the “long list of barriers to teacher use of ICTs”identified  by researchers across the globe (including our very own Lai, Pratt and Trewern, 2002), that I could rip off a FAQ Troubleshooting page for the “teachers who fails to implement technology” without pausing to draw breath.(except to apologise to Microsoft's XBox Help and Support site)

FAQ: Teachers who fail to implement technology

CAUTION: Before you begin any of the procedures in this section, follow the safety instructions in the Product Information Guide

Notice: To avoid electrostatic discharge, ground yourself by using a wrist grounding strap or by periodically touching an unpainted metal surface (such as a connector on the back of the teacher who is failing to implement).

Step 1.  Determine whether the indicator light on the teacher who is failing to implement technology remains green or whether it blinks.

a. If the indicator light repeatedly blinks green and orange, the teacher is not functioning correctly. If this is the case, follow steps 2 through 4. If these steps do not resolve the issue, continue to step 8.

b. If the indicator light remains green, continue to step 2.

Step 2.  Verify that the teacher can easily and flexibly access ICTs. If this is not the case, contact the person in charge of ICT budgets and remedy any access barriers. If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 3.

Step 3. If you can connect your teacher directly and flexibly to an ICT, make sure that you have connected the teacher correctly – that is competently and confidently,  (does the teacher know the ICT and understand the value of its use), and check that the teacher has good technical support.

a.  Turn off power to your teacher and to your ICT.

b.  Connect the ICT cable connector to the teacher output of competence/ confidence in ICT use and to the RGB input of understanding the value of ICT use to student learning outcomes.  Make sure that the connections are firmly connected. A dodgy connection means the “teacher who is failing to implement” will not sustain progress past start up.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 4.

Step 4.  If you can connect your “teacher who is failing to implement” directly, flexibly, confidently, competently and understandingly to the ICT, make sure that you have connected the ICT correctly to teacher planning of learning experiences, learning intentions, success criteria, learning outcomes, and assessment for learning rubrics

a. Verify that you are using the same type of RGB cable for the student learning outcomes and for the ICT connection. If this is not case, the student performance may not be as expected. If you connect your teacher to an ICT without them knowing and understanding the goals for student learning, they may not implement well when un-monitored. Note that this does not affect the performance of teachers whose green light never goes off, they will continue to implement technology in the absence of any identifiable student learning outcome.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 5

Step 5. Verify the input selection. Make sure that you have tuned the teacher and the ICT to the correct input curriculum channels. Typically, you can find the Input Curriculum Select menu by using one of the following methods:

a. Look for a hidden panel on the front of the teacher or ICT.

b. Look for a button on the original remote control.

c. Use the on-screen menu option.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 6.

Step 6. Try different connection configurations.

a. If the teacher is connected directly to an ICT, try a different ICT.

b. If you connect your teacher to a planned student learning experience through an ICT, try to connect your teacher directly to a planned student learning experience omitting the ICT.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 7

Step 7. Determine whether the behaviour of the teacher who is failing to implement technology occurs with one ICT, with two ICTs, or with more than two ICTs.

a. If the problem occurs with only one or two ICTs, search the ICTPD Cluster Knowledge Base for known issues for that particular ICT.

b. If no known issues exist, return the ICT to the retailer.

If the teacher continues to fail to implement continue to Step 8

Step 8. The teacher may be malfunctioning.

· I     If  removing the teacher from the ICT does not resolve the issue, you may need to repair the teacher.

Step 8 is the telling step..... it alerts us to the fact that we are looking so closely at the teacher who fails to implement  - that we don’t examine the assumptions inherent in this approach.

We neglect to ask the could we/ should we question/s altogether

The “Just because we could integrate ICTs into classrooms should we?” question.

Perhaps the reason why the level of ICT use that exists in any classroom (or across any school) appears to be a system of hysteresis – (an event that seems independent of any of our “identified as appropriate inputs”)-  and has been like this ever since the 1920’s - is that we have neglected to clarify the outputs we value in education and in doing so misidentified the inputs.

Instead of talking about change management for the teacher who fails to implement we should be clarifying the kinds of learning outcomes we want for children and evaluating whether these are the outcomes that ICTs bring.

Cuban’s “What kinds of learning are most important to children?” is a great place to start the discussion 

“Harriet Cufaro asks what a youngster learns when she presses the keyboard to call up cars and garages on a screen to figure out how to park a car in a garage. Eye hand co-ordination? Perhaps. A sense of control? Not really, since the programmed instructions produce alternate paths from which the child chooses. She directs the car on the screen, unaware of the mysterious programme as she presses the keys. Cuffaro then asks what occurs when the same girll parks a car when playing with blocks. Her eye-hand coordination now must deal with three dimensions, not just the two on the screen. The block that is the car must be manoeuvered physically by hand to fit into a garage made of blocks. Cuffaro says , “The computer version of parking a car is action in a vacuum, motion without context, and with reality twice removed.”

She argues that the unanticipated lessons that children pick up informally when working with microcomputers should give educators pause before plunging ahead with the new technology.

“It is the presence of these collateral learnings – the distance and narrowing of physical reality, the magical quality of pressing keys, the “invisible” sharing of control, the oversimplification of process, the need for precision and timing – that merit great attention when thinking about young children’s learning and the use of microcomputers.”  P95 and 96 Teachers and Machines.  The classroom use of technology since 1920

Cuffaro and others single out the computers power to teach many significant, misleading, and unintentional lessons to children beyond the programmed ones. 

All this means we have to be especially careful about what and how we choose to use ICTs with students of any age …. and that the teacher who fails to implement may well be a red herring.

 

"Education significantly shapes how children will define their happiness"

I have been reading Amy Gutman – and was struck by her analysis that

“Education itself significantly changes how children will define their happiness once they become adults.” p68 in The Problem of Education Utilitarianism and Rights Theories in "Mill's Utilitarianism"

The media reporting on the suicide of a vulnerable student from a local school has seen me thinking a lot about student happiness this week.

The 17-year-old Takapuna Grammar student was found dead at his home 13 days ago - a day after he suffered a severe beating at school, reported to have been watched by 15 students and recorded on a mobile phone video.

He was being treated for depression at the Waitemata District Health board's mental health unit for adolescents.

I am thinking about this from the perspective of a parent with sons of a similar age, and I am thinking about it as an ex secondary teacher, I am thinking about it ... . and it is uncomfortable and desperate thinking from any perspective.   

Gutman argues that encouraging “happiness” per se is not a reasonable utilitarian standard for education ...

How is society to prepare children for the pursuit of their own, self-defined happiness? Children cannot themselves determine the particular ends of education, nor is maximising their present happiness a reasonable utilitarian standard for education, if only because the rest of their life is likely to be much longer than their childhood. Yet what will make children happy in the future is largely indeterminate. To make matters more complicated still, education itself significantly changes how children will define their happiness once they become adults. To guide the education of children, utilitarians need to find a standard that is not tied to a particular conception of the good life and that is not derived from the circular argument that if they become happy adults their prior education must have been good. P68

And society expects schools to worship economic advantage through the knowledge economy and global consumerism, something which University of Waikato academic Martin Thrupp addresses when he looks at school zoning, and the economic, class and ethnic separatism that leads to societal resentments and unhappiness. Education’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’: Part One – Persistent Middle Class Advantage pdf New Zealand Journal of Teachers’ Work, Volume 4, Issue 2, 77-88, 2007 

And yet listening to parent after parent at student interviews would suggest that “happiness” aligned with some small measure of institutional compliance tops achievement in the forefront of many parents expectations/ needs. 

When I remember some of the children I have known as three and four year olds and then compare the exuberance of their pre-school sandpit social play with their social lives transitioning from school as young adults I am reminded of Sue Vickerman’s Oyster Catcher poem 

The social decline of the oyster-catcher

Back then, you were the swaggering rocker
of wading birds; boldly-coloured, dazzling
in flight, the most conspicuous bird-of-shingle,
the loudest. I remember your effortless landings
on muddy sand-banks; your hot-shot red lenses;
how you eyed up the cockles. You always claimed
the most abundant mussel beds, the ones
on rocky outcrops in down-town estuaries,
the tangiest; always picked the best ridge of sand
for your high-tide roost. You were so cool
with your minimalist nest: no fuss; lay the eggs
on an exposed pebble shoal, let nature do the rest.

It was frequenting estuaries that brought you down.
Your stout, pale pink legs - not your best feature -
wandered too far in the long, dark winter. Increasingly
you nested by rivers, even on farmland, digging bluntly
in mud and soil when you used to be so at home
on rocky shores, on beaches. And thus it was

that your diet deteriorated from coastal molluscs
to earthworms. Now, even a good cockle year
doesn't bring you back. Instead you get into fights
over food. I've seen you poking through the rubbish
at night, spearing litter. I used to love watching you
on the beach, how you waited for a chance to strike
into an open shell, or simply hammered one free
with your powerful chisel-tipped bill.
But that was the coast, and this is now: not Norway,
not Iceland, but a long way up a northern river
with no shellfish. Only your clear, sharp
kleep voice tells me you're the same person.

It all leaves me wondering ..

If “Education significantly shapes how children will define their happiness” then ...

• What can schools do better to help children define happiness?
• What can families do better to help children at school define happiness?
• What can friends do better to help their friends at school define happiness?
• What can school students do better to help other students define happiness?
• What is our responsibility when using media and technology in helping children define happiness?
• What happened to “belonging”?

Deja vu at 10,000 meters, howling like a dingo, and what we report as noteworthy as an indicator of failure.

I chose Cuban’s book “Teachers and Machines: The Classroom use of Technology since 1920” from the corridor library as an Air New Zealand in-flight re- read for the return trip from Wellington to Auckland on Friday night.

It has been a while since I read Cuban so when I hit the following paragraphs I experienced an intense moment of déjà vu that crossed the decades and the continents  ... in truth it was hard to suppress the urge to join in the dingo like howling of the infant from Oz in the seat infront ..

Seventy six years ago Benjamin Darrow was claiming

“The central and dominant aim of education by radio is to bring the world to the classroom to make universally available the services of the finest teachers the inspiration of the greatest leaders ... the unfolding world events which through the radio may come as a vibrant and challenging textbook of the air.” Benjamin Darrow in “Radio: The Assistant Teacher” 1932 cited in Cuban Teachers and Machines The Classroom use of Technology since 1920 p19

Sixty seven years ago

A survey of almost 2,000 Ohio principals, conducted in 1941, produced the following list of reasons cited for lack of classroom radio use and the percentage of respondents who gave each reason;

No radio receiving equipment   50%

School schedule difficulties   23%

Unsatisfactory radio equipment  19%

Lack of information 14%

Poor radio reception 11%

Programs not related to curriculum     11%

Classwork more valuable 10%

Teachers not interested  7%    

 
I have nudged up against enough valorising claims about the potential impact of information and communication technologies on education, and “why don’t teachers use technologies in their teaching?” research findings and reports in the educational literature in New Zealand in the 21^st Century to recognise simulacra.   

I reckon conversations amongst the ict_pd community in New Zealand (and for that matter between any educator involved in attempts to reform a reliance on “teacher talk” in schools through the introduction of “a new technology” ) would be much more interesting if Cuban and perhaps Caroline Marvin were required prior reading.

And by “New Technology” I mean anything designed to ameliorate a reliance on teacher voice – eg chalk and slate, textbook and pictures, chalkboard, lantern slides, radio, film strips, film, overhead projectors, tape recorders, photocopiers, television, digital cameras, digital microscopes, computers, data shows, interactive white boards, graphic tablets, mobile phones, PDA’s and or the internet and the participatory medium of Web2.0 ... add your own ....

Cuban provides evidence from the introduction of radio, film and television  in the 1920’s and 1930’s for the “exhilaration/ scientific credibility/ disappointment/ and teacher bashing cycle that results when new technologies are introduced by non teachers determined to change teacher practice.

This thinking challenges those nonteaching educators/ academics/ specialists/ administrators/ facilitators/ edubloggers and reformers  who are no longer charged with delivering the New Zealand Curriculum fulltime or even part-time to students in classrooms, to acknowledge the expertise of those who are, when they are calling for the introduction and implemention of ICT charged change in schools.

“Reformers branded stability in teacher practice as inertia or knee-jerk conservatism. They viewed teacher reluctance as an obstacle to overcome. Seldom did investigators try to adopt a teacher’s perspective or appreciate the duality of continuity and change that marked both the schools and classrooms. Nor did any reformer even raise the disturbing issue that teacher expertise, drawn from a pool of craft wisdom about children and schooling that dances beyond the limited understanding of nonteaching reformers, should be bolstered rather than belittled.” 

And Cuban raises something else of interest to those of us working to introduce ICTs in the 21^st Century  classroom.

If we want to know how successful our efforts have been perhaps we should monitor more carefully what is considered noteworthy of praise in the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Educational Gazette, and other educational information technology media reporting.

For as Cuban notes what we see reported on as noteworthy ... is an indicator of difference from the norm ... is an indicator of what we have failed to implement and integrate with ICTs in education. After all we seldom reserve editorial space for how students and schools are utilising the felt tip pen.

When most of a school’s staff would embrace the new technology the effort would excite its boosters, like the story of the man who kissed his wife every morning for twenty four years and finally got kissed back. Teachers would be lauded; the principal singled out for praise; the school would be featured in newspapers and magazines. But such noteworthy praise and articles only have underscored how rarely teachers have used machines in their classrooms since the 1920’s. Cuban Teachers and Machines P51

Twenty five ovaries on the table at the dementia centre

Grandpa was in full grump today launching into a convoluted complaint that saw him railing against slippers, moving horizons  and zimmerframes.

After startling me by claiming to see twenty five ovaries on the table ... a conjured image so disconcerting that I still haven’t shaken out of my mind – [Trust me - thinking of belladonna lilies as “naked ladies”   just isn’t the same thing as imagining a vase of pink tinged stalked ovaries] –he  started his grump

It seems that slippers are noted for their ability to “betray and disappoint”  ....“all these slippers that give you bad service “- “one sole is an inch wider than the other sole .... you fool ... what can you expect from rubber soles ... etc etc  ... until he runs out of froth and gazes bleary eyed  at the foreign pair of slippers he has jammed on his feet ...he then adds without any sense of chagrin  ....”especially when they are not mine” ...

He wanted to know why when he drinks juice from the green plastic tumblers the horizon moves ... “just when you are certain that you know where you are the horizon moves and the juice that should have gone into your mouth runs out the side and rolls down your chin” ... I have had a similar horizon shift experience but not with juice in green plastic tumblers but he settled only when reassured that “horizon shift” was as he suspected a design flaw in the tumbler

And then we hit the zimmer frame argument – it seems that despite the best intentions in Grandpa’s observations zimmer frames