Artichoke

"Dance the orange" and Web2.0 proficiency in school

While I was wrestling the L300 van through the “high wind warnings” gusts on the Auckland Harbour Bridge last night, the moon entered the Earth's shadow.  I was too sharply focused on staying within my paint marked lane lines to even imagine what was happening in the night sky above.

But once I got home, unpacked the laptop and re-settled my mind, the moon had entered the darkest part of the shadow – the Earth's umbra and I allowed my focus on the world to shift upwards.

The dust in the atmosphere ensured this upward gaze was a Rilke “Dance the orange” moment.  The moon’s surface was cast in such an unusual colour - it allowed many new wild and wondrous imaginings.

Hold it...that's tasty. . .already out the door.
. . .a touch of music. . .a beating. . .a hum -;
You warm girls, you quiet girls - come
dance the taste of the fruits you savor!

Dance the orange. Who can forget it?. . .
nearly self-drowned in its own sweetness,
yet it overcomes. You have possessed it;
become its own luscious completeness.

Dance the orange. Fling the sultry climate
far from you, permitting it to shine
in its own native breezes. Glowingly reveal

bouquet upon bouquet. Your own concordat
create with the pure, recalcitrant rind
and the ebullient juice beneath the peel!

Extract from The Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Which is why I laughed when I read Professor Mike Dopita’s take on my “Dance the orange” moment in the Herald this morning.

"The moon gets this sometimes quite blood red colour and it's quite an interesting sight to see, although it is of no astronomical importance at all."

Determining what is important is the focus for much of our thinking in education.  Sometimes the environment we are thinking in in schools is so blustery we are reduced to focusing on the tarmac surface between the road markings.  Other times we can widen and lift our gaze to look at those Lucychilean “Dance the orange” eclipse type questions about “How can we help students to see the threads processes and patterns in our society which are making decisions on our own behalf?”

Mike  asks about the last Web2.0 in schools post

So is your point to define what proficiency means in the use of these tools?

It is a good question and I love Mike’s attempt to look at generic proficiency in the use of tools like del.icio.us across SOLO – reckon it will be useful to do this with every ICT application commonly used in our schools.

• Prestructural: Student uses del.icio.us like Google. Executes sequential searches, retrieves docs, reads.
• Uni- and Multi-strcutural: Student starts to navigate del.icio.us with intuitive sense that a) reputation matters, b) examining a person's terms helps one to refine, c) you want to alternate between seeing what a person points to, and what people point to an item, and d) you learn more from looking at the small number of people pointing to an esoteric item than you do from a large number of people pointing to popular item.
• Relational: Basically the above, but understanding the fuller context: That we find people through common interest, then expand our range by looking at the other things these people like.
• Extended abstract: student can articulate how such things have always been true in the physical world -- one is attracted to friends because of shared like of a musical artist, which leads to trying out other artists that person likes. Student can see how del.icio.us is similar to MySpace and Facebook, and how it is different. Student can identify potential pitfalls (group think? cultism?) of networked reference sites, and develop strategies that work across multiple domains. 

However, I hadn’t been thinking about proficiency of use in isolation so I guess my answer Mike is no and yes -

I was trying to combine your ideas about proficiency and potentially powerful learning experience in the one blank space – but after your question I can see how identifying proficiency first will help teachers

I spend a lot of time helping teachers do cargo cult thinking about “how to learn” - identifying what students need to learn for themselves is valuable - that creating an environment for learning with the fires along the sides of the runways, a wooden hut for a man to sit in, and the -coconut shell headsets counts.  But when it comes to shifting student gaze, from the tarmac to the heavens, those “what is powerful to learn” conversations – I reckon we need more than the predictive power of those coconut shell headsets

Cargo cult thinking alone won’t do it. We need Alan Kay's universals or Lucychili's powerful ideas

I guess what I want is to find ways in which the “how to learn” (proficiency in the use of tools is one part of this) conversations AND the “what to learn” (powerful ideas) conversations can run together.

I was hoping the table would help this happen - To look at the proficiency in the use of tools like how to compare, how to evaluate, and how to use blogs, podcasting or social bookmarking BUT also to help teachers plan learning experiences that do more than focus on the tarmac.  To help students self assess the depth of their understanding and the depth of their proficiency in tool use.

In our experience SOLO clarifies what deeper understanding entails and should (when you are proficient in Web2.0 tool use) allow teachers to better utilise the potential of Web2.0. applications than they currently do. I am really thinking of the limited ways I see podcasting being used in schools when I make this claim.

I had thought of the table as helping teachers plan learning experiences that move student thinking from simply bringing in (or simply broadcasting/ publishing content) to relational and extended abstract thinking through using Web2.0 applications for “collaboration and potential multiple discourse”

For example if we wanted to build learning experiences around last night’s lunar eclipse for school students and we wanted to use del.icio.us we could step it out like this

• Bring in facts and information about lunar eclipses (unistructural and multistuctural learning outcomes). [Using del.icio.us to search for reliable and valid information to describe a lunar eclipse]
• Linking facts and information about lunar eclipses through classifying different types of eclipses, sequencing the stages in an eclipse, comparison of similarities and differences between lunar and solar eclipses, or what a person on the moon would see during a lunar eclipse compared to a person on earth, or a lunar eclipse described by a poet and a lunar eclipse described by an astronomer, or how different cultures have interpreted a lunar eclipse.  Determining the historical, economic and political effects/ consequences of a named lunar eclipse.  Analyse the conditions required for a lunar eclipse and the consequence if they are not present – why we don’t have a lunar eclipse once a month?, what would happen if the earth had no atmosphere?.   Once you understand the thinking that builds relational learning outcomes the list is endless. [Using del.icio.us to allow different perspectives and contexts for understanding/ explaining an eclipse]
• Take these new linked understandings about lunar eclipses into another context through reflection, generalisation, evaluation, imagining, and prediction to discuss why we continue to have such a powerful human response to a lunar eclipse, etc  [Using del.icio.us to work across multiple domains]

To attempt to understand why we reserve special attention for the seemingly unpredictable and improbable events in our world?

In this way the Web2.0 SOLO chart allows teachers (and students) to plan for powerful ideas AND to choose to integrate a Web2.0 application in ways that make the collaboration and engagement in multiple discourses needed for these ideas to be built. I sense that it would be easier to represent this as a drill down database rather than a chart. 

But after your look at proficiencies in del.icio.us Mike - I am backtracking a bit so that teachers can understand the generic potential of the tool first.

Using Web2.0 applications in school

I am certain that the only reason I got onto the flight from Wellington to Auckland on Friday night was because of The Magnet'€™s propensity for misadventure. 

A fault in the original aircraft saw a delay in departure that allowed me to escape the consequences of arriving at the check in counter after the flight should have closed.   Mind you it was because of the Magnet'€™s propensity for misadventure that I was late arriving.  Getting lost in a Lower Hutt car park beside the Hutt River when I missed the turnoff to Melling Bridge and SH2 just has to be attributable to lack of clarity in magnetic directions given.  Another win win situation for the Magnet. 

My recklessly rushed departure meant that I travelled without my latest book and had to rely on the laminated safety instructions and Air NZ Inflight magazine for mind food during the flight.

The lack of engagement and authenticity in the safety information provided (ironical I know) allowed me the mindspace to think about the deceit in both engagement and authenticity in the context of Web2.0 and school.   

I sometimes think we get a little overexcited by notions of engagement and authenticity in school. 

For example, students may well be engaged, and the context may well be authentic BUT if nothing is remembered, has anything been learned?

A contemporary definition of "€œlearning"€ is a long term change in a person'€™s memory (thinking and behaviour).  So "€œI forgot to make a back up copy of my brain so everything I learned last term was lost"€ fails the criteria descriptors for a "€œlearning experience"€. 

I sometimes think we get a little overexcited by notions of Web2.0 in school.

We boldly claim that student learning will be enhanced if they are able to use various engaging and authentic  Web2.0 applications, and rail against the institutional blocking of access to social networking sites or YouTube,  but we seldom explain exactly how learning outcomes might be enhanced through the conditions Web2.0 applications offer the learner.

So the onflight question/s I was interested in exploring with respect to Web2.0 applications in school was

How can the use of Web2.0 applications enhance/ betray the conditions for student learning?

When I elaborated this I got

How can use of Web2.0 applications enhance the conditions for finding, organising, analysing, creating and sharing digital information?

To understand this question better I needed to unpack identifiable stages of "€œlearning outcomes"€, types of €"digital information"€œ and discriminating "€œcategories of Web2.0 applications".€

At this point, much like the use of a napkin to sketch thoughts in a cafe, the inflight sick bag offered a surface for recording the ideas I couldn'€™t hold in my head,

Digital information was easiest to unpack -“ I decided it should include language, symbols, text, movement, voice, and music.  And once Wii type game controller haptic devices become more commonly available in schools I will add in digital touch/ vibration/ motion information.

Check out the haptic cow "€œa virtual reality simulator developed to train veterinary students to palpate the bovine reproductive tract, to perform fertility examinations and to diagnose pregnancy"€.

In terms of learning outcomes, the framework of learning outcomes within "€œThe Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes"€ SOLO (Biggs and Collis)   is easily understood by both teachers and students.  The SOLO research suggests that students learn "€œquite diverse material in stages of ascending structural complexity that display a similar sequence across tasks"€.

I am still thinking about a meaningful  classification of Web2.0 applications“

All this inflight thinking and sickbag sketching meant that my question became

How can the use of Web2.0 applications enhance conditions for student learning outcomes, at unistructural, multistructural, relational and extended abstract levels (SOLO Taxonomy)?

When you try to include categories of Web2.0 applications and types of digital information in the question the options become so complex that it is best thought of as a multidimensional database rather than in linear text.

The sickbag surface was no longer big enough ...

The Web2.0 and Student Learning table (Full table web2.0 and Student Learning.pdf ) is my first attempt to understand the complexity of the question -€“ it makes a limited attempt to look at the types of digital information available, excludes the asynchronous/ synchronous dimension of the Web2.0 applications AND hasn't even begun to imagine a Web2.0 equivalent of the haptic cow BUT it is a start ....

Making a Brilliant General: Halo Effects in the BES School Leadership Research

Rimmer: "But that was a bar room brawl, that was a common pub fight,a shambolic drunken set-to."
Lister: "...which you started. "
Rimmer: "I just made an innocuous comment. I merely voiced the rumour that McWilliams was sexually tilted in favour of sleeping with the dead. I didn't start the rumour; I merely voiced it."
Lister: "...to his face -- right to his face...when he was with his four biggest mates. And then you do your roadrunner act and leave *ME* to face the music.
Rimmer: "Well, I could have got hurt!"
Lister: "You'd have made a brilliant general, wouldn't you?"
                                                                                                                        Red Dwarf

We all have opinions about what makes for “a brilliant general”.  When the New Zealand Ministry of Education's ’next Best Evidence Synthesis claims to have identified “leadership approaches that really have an impact” with respect to the “achievement and well being of students” it behoves us to sit up and take notice. 

When I sat up I was dead chuffed to find Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect ... and the Eight other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers sitting alongside me. 

Every school leader believes they can make a positive difference to the achievement and wellbeing of students. Now a Ministry of Education report not only confirms that is the case, but pinpoints the leadership approaches that really have an impact. Educational Gazette Vol 86 Number 11 2007

What makes a positive difference to the achievement and well being of students is the business equivalent of What leads to high performance? – Rosenzweig’s “Mother of All Business Questions”

And the ministry’s next Best Evidence Synthesis attempts to answer the educational equivalent of what leads to high performance in terms of school leadership practice.

I am restlessly waiting for the release of the full BES report so that I can better critique the claims made about school leadership styles.  I want to look at the independence of the data used to generate this report in the ways outlined in Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect.

Before the full report is released my critique has to rely on comments in an interview with Professor Viviane Robinson, one of the study author’s, to suggest that this Best Evidence Synthesis may well be fundamentally flawed.

Close reading of Professor Viviane Robinson’s comments in the Gazette suggest that this BES is shaped by Rosenzweig's nine delusions that deceive managers - “errors of logic and flawed judgements that distort our understanding of the real reasons for high performing” schools

Delusion 1: The Halo effect

This BES sounds like a classic example of Rosenzweig’s Halo effect thinking where we make inferences about specific traits on the basis of a general impression.

“Perhaps nothing lends itself to the Halo Effect more than leadership.  Good leaders are often said to have a handful of important qualities: clear vision, effective communication skills, self-confidence, personal charm and more. Most people would agree these are elements of good leadership.  But defining them is a different matter altogether, since several of these qualities, tend to be in the eye of the beholder – which is affected by company performance.” The Halo Effect P58

I suspect this is the case when I read

“Professor Viviane Robinson at Auckland University says emerging research clearly shows that the leadership of schools where students perform above and below expected levels is quite different.”
However, she cautions that the question of whether school leaders do make a difference is another story. Studies which measure undifferentiated samples of school leaders and test the effect they have on students usually show that school leaders have a weak and indirect effect on students.
"In other words, if you take a random sample of schools, it all sort of washes out. But if you compare the high performers and the low performers in a sample of otherwise similar schools, the leadership looks very different. Educational Gazette 86 11 2007

My suspicions that the research data used in the study is flawed with Halos is affirmed by comment that it is only when comparing high performing schools with low performing schools that significant differences in leadership practice emerge.

The Halo Effect occurs when attributions made about leadership practices depend upon the school’s performance.  In a school that is perceived as performing well the attributions made will be uniformly positive, in schools deemed to be performing poorly the reverse occurs.

Understanding the Halo Effect allows me to expose a vulnerability in claims in the Gazette article that comparing leadership practice in high and low performing schools is a “particularly helpful”.

"Those studies are particularly helpful when they enable us to identify which particular leadership practices are making the difference to students. Educational Gazette 86 11 2007

As Rosenzweig explains “we have no satisfactory theory of effective leadership that is independent of performance.” 

The Gazette article claims that the ministry's next BES reveal leadership dimensions associated with high performance schools.

“From this analysis, Viviane and her team have identified five leadership dimensions that have a particularly powerful impact on students.” Educational Gazette 86 11 2007

1. Establishing goals and expectations:
2. Strategic resourcing:
3. Planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum:
4. Promoting and participating in teacher learning and development:
5. Ensuring an orderly and supportive environment:

Since a wide range of behaviours can be shown to fit the leadership criteria identified by Robinson and her team, it is critical to look closely at how these were determined to ensure the data collected has not been undermined by the Halo effect.

I need to check that the research this synthesis relies upon is unaffected by the performance of schools themselves, so that the independent variables (measures of leadership practice) are measured separately from the thing we are trying to explain (high and low school performance). For example if the data used relies on perceptions in teacher surveys from the schools themselves then we are likely to collect attributions based on performance rather than independent measures.

Delusion 2: The Delusion of Correlation and Causality

The second delusion I want to check for in this BES is “inferring causality from correlation”

I will be looking at the research studies used in the BES for findings based on longitudinal studies. 
For example, I need to ask does “promoting and participating in teacher learning and development” lead to a high performing school, or do leaders in high performing schools have more opportunities for “promoting and participating in teacher learning and development”?  One way to check for this is to see if any of the research used to support the BES synthesis tracks performance and leadership criteria longitudinally rather than cross sectional data.

Delusion 3: The Delusion of Single Explanations

The third delusion I’m looking for (if we can discount Halo effects and delusions of correlation and causality from the ministry’s Best Evidence Synthesis) is whether leadership practice is a separate effect on school performance or additive. 

I want to determine

How much does leadership practice overlap with other influences on the performance of schools?

When a school changes principal how much of the improved school performance is attributable to their leadership practice and how much is attributable to other factors?         

I hope I am wrong but I suspect that the BES focus on leadership and high and low performing schools will lead educators to think of school performance in terms of “single explanation” thinking about leadership practice.

Delusion 4: The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots

When a Best Evidence Synthesis is made up entirely of research evidence from best performing schools, or even best and poorest performing schools we are in danger of connecting the winning dots delusions.  The Halo effect complicates this – unless the data is gathered in a way that is independent of performance there is no explanation of leadership practice against school performance.  I really need to check that the research data that the BES uses is collected from performance independent measures across schools at all performance levels.

This is an interesting challenge given the disclaimer by Professor Viviane Robinson that

"Studies which measure undifferentiated samples of school leaders and test the effect they have on students usually show that school leaders have a weak and indirect effect on students.
"In other words, if you take a random sample of schools, it all sort of washes out. But if you compare the high performers and the low performers in a sample of otherwise similar schools, the leadership looks very different."" Educational Gazette 86 11 2007

Delusion 5: The Delusion of Rigorous Research

“We can do our best to select samples of high performers and low performers but if the data are coloured by the Halo effect, we will never know what drives high and low performance; instead we will merely find out how high and low performance are described.”  The Halo Effect P 100
“Of course, we don’t see how problematic the research really is, thanks to another delusion : the Delusion of Rigorous Research.”The Halo Effect P 100

The Gazette interview with Professor Viviane Robinson from the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland with its “ 25 such studies have been located so far,” is drizzled with Rosenzweig’s “We were thorough.”  “We were exhaustive.” “We speak with authority”

The BES claims that

Evidence about the links between leadership and student outcomes was provided from 24 studies published between 1985 and 2006.
The majority of studies was conducted in United States schools. Two studies were conducted in Canada and one only in each of Australia, England, Hong Kong, Israel, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.
Fourteen studies examined leadership in elementary school contexts, three in high schools, and seven studies included a mix of elementary, middle and high schools.
Thirteen of the studies confined their analysis of school leadership to the principal only, while 11 took a broader, more distributed view of leadership.
While the studies examined the impact of leadership on a wide range of student outcomes, academic outcomes – notably maths, reading and language skills – predominated.
The four studies that examined leadership impact on students' social and personal well-being included measures of attitudes to school, teachers and learning, and students' academic self-concept, engagement with their schooling, and retention rates. Educational Gazette 86 11 2007

But as Rosenzweig notes

“if your data sources are corrupted by the Halo Effect , it doesn’t matter how much you’ve gathered.  You can stack Halo’s all the way to heaven, but you’ve still only got Halos.”The Halo Effect p101

Delusion 6: The Delusion of Lasting Success

The findings of high and low performance school leadership practice in the BES suggest sustainability.  But sustaining high performance in schools is hard.  Implicit in the BES is the suggestion that one particular collection of leadership practices aligns to school performance that will sustain over time.

I will be interested to look for the research in the BES that tracks performance over time.

Performance is essentially competitive.  Rosenzweig’s research suggests that competitive advantage is hard to sustain over time, suggesting that highly performing schools are unlikely to continue as highly performing schools over time.

It seems more honest to acknowledge that  “Imitation, competition and expropriation” means that (school) performance over time has a “tendency to move toward the middle a clear regression towards the mean” The Halo Effect p105

Delusion 7:  The Delusion of Absolute Performance

Performance is relative.  Focusing on leadership practices associated with high performing schools suggests that a school’s high performance is in some way independent of the performance of other schools.  But in truth the performance of any school will always be affected by the performance of other competing schools.

As a principal, your leadership practice impact on student achievement and well being is affected by how other schools are performing. Your impact is not absolute.

Suggesting that you can achieve high performance, regardless of what other schools are achieving may well make the BES more palatable but is a delusion.

Delusion 8: The Delusion of the Wrong End of The Stick

How do we interpret our findings? 
Do all school leaders who establish: goals and expectations, strategic resourcing, planning, coordinating and evaluating teaching and the curriculum, promote and participate in teacher learning and development and ensure an orderly and supportive environment do better?

When we focus on schools where students perform above and below the expected levels we exclude the middle.  We cannot say on average whether principals who adopt the five leadership dimensions will do better overall than principals who don’t.

I  need to look at the research data this BES is based upon to determine whether it looks broadly enough at school performance to claim that one vocabulary of leadership practice will enhance the chances of school performance success.      

Delusion 9: The Delusion of Organisational Physics

“The emphasis on certainty, on clear causal relations rather than contingency and uncertainty, illuminates one final misconception. ...”  The Halo Effect

That we might discover “timeless universal answers that can be applied to any organisation.” in the ministry's BES is delusional.

To paraphrase Rosenzweig

“We can’t put [schools] in petri dishes and run neat experiments. And since even the best studies of [schools], ones that carefully follow stringent research methods , ones that make sure to avoid Halos and that control for rival variables and make sure not to confuse correlation with causality, can never achieve the precision and replicability of physics, then all claims of having isolated immutable laws of organisational performance are unfounded.” The Halo Effect P126   

Perhaps "The Halo effect ... and the Eight other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers" is what Professor Viviane Robinson alludes to when she states         

“We need to be cautious, however, as there are very few studies which have tested the links between leadership and student outcomes." Educational Gazette 86 11 2007

Or perhaps Red Dwarf’s Lister is “ontoit” and the ministry's next BES on leadership really does tell us how to become a "brilliant general". 

“I want to start thinking of ICT as a verb and not just a noun."

I have been too busy working with different schools to contemplate blogging or even reading blogs recently.  My blogging restlessness temporarily satiated by new places, new conversations, Janet's steak and kidney pie and motel room visits from policemen at midnight.

I have been accompanied on my travels by a battered copy of Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” – (a conversation between the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan and Venetian traveller Marco Polo) - such a wondrous catalyst for new imaginings about education and schools – and perfect to dip into  when stuck in an airport lounge,  flying, or waiting for a taxi.

The only better thinking came when landing at Napier, where my mind was captured by imagining the 1931 Hawkes Bay earthquake – and the 1.8 meter uplift of over 3600 hectares of inner harbour – turning a great place to spear flounder (Ahuriri Lagoon) into the site of Hawkes Bay Airport. As we grew closer to Napier I spent several fishy moments imagining what the flounder were thinking as the earthquiver and earthshiver changed the watery parameters of their world forever.

I have much fun creating the links between Calvino’s imaginings of “Invisible Cities” and  my real experiences in different schools. Marco Polo’s descriptions of “cities and memory”, “cities and desire”, “cities and the dead”, “cities and the sky”, “trading cities”, “hidden cities” are so easily transcribed to “schools and memory”, “schools and desire”, “schools and the dead”, “schools and the sky”, “trading schools”, “hidden schools”

[Warning plot spoiler ahead]
As you read “Invisible Cities” you grudgingly realise that each delicious and differently detailed, complex and complicated city described is really the same place. 

In this way the Calvino's narrative becomes a mind tool for analysing and imagining future school in a way that the The OECD Schooling scenarios do not.

We have developed a set of six scenarios for schooling in the future up to 2020. They have been clustered into three main categories: Scenarios 1a and 1b "Attempting to Maintain the Status Quo", 2a and 2b "Re-schooling", 3a and 3b "De-schooling". The OECD Schooling scenarios

It appears to me that the OECD Schooling scenarios for the future have developed from a Kublai Khan type of imagining process   

“And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said.  “It contains everything corresponding to the norm.  Since cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.” P69 Invisible Cities Italo Calvino

Rather than from a Marco Polo thought experiment

“I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,” Marco answered.  “It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions.  If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists.  So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities, which always as an exception exists.  But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.” P69 Invisible Cities Italo Calvino

Along with thinking about the existential thoughts of the Ahuriri lagoon flounder I find myself wondering what would have resulted if the OECD contributors had adopted a Marco Polo’s approach to imagining –

I suspect we may have produced a more compellingly audacious document, something without the pervasive sense that ICTs will be ubiquitous, extensive and in some ill defined way the rescuers of future schooling.  Check out the "ICT triumphs regardless" positioning of information communication technology throughout the thought document.

1. Attempting to Maintain the Status Quo

Scenario 1.a: "Bureaucratic School Systems Continue"
•    The use of ICT continues to grow without changing schools' main organisational structures.

Scenario 1.b "Teacher exodus - The 'meltdown scenario'"
•    Widely different organisational responses to shortages - some traditional, some highly innovative - and possibly greater use of ICT.

2.  Re-schooling

Scenario 2.a "Schools as Core Social Centres"
•    ICT used extensively, especially its communication capabilities.

Scenario 2.b "Schools as Focused Learning Organisations"
•    Extensive use made of ICT.

3.  De-schooling

Scenario 3.a "Learning Networks and the Network Society"
•    A multitude of learning networks, quickened by the extensive possibilities of powerful, inexpensive ICT.

Scenario 3.b "Extending the Market Model"
•    A wide range of market-driven changes would be introduced into the ownership and running of the learning infrastructure, some highly innovative and with the extensive use of ICT. 

The uniformity in these ICTs imaginings across all scenarios makes me suspect that it won’t be too long before in Jane Gilbertian  like "Knowledge Wave  rhetoric " I will hear people in education saying

“I want to start thinking of ICT as a verb and not just a noun."

Thanks to the LanguageLog’s post “I gay, you gay, he gays” – I am completely prepared 

“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

“We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.”
Marginalia.   Billy Collins In “Sailing alone around the room” 2001 Random House p94

I realise that some of you will judge me harshly but I have never been able to write in the margins of any of the many books that I own.  Reading Billy Collin’s  Marginalia poem makes me wish that I had.  And I will concede that there are a number of artichokean blog posts that would have made more meaningful if I had tagged their margins with – “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love” scribbles.

Reading “Marginalia” makes me wonder.  I wonder if an (e)Marginalia will be the new Twitter Web2.0 application, and I wonder:

What is it like to attend school fot year after year after year without leaving “an impression  along the verge”?
What is it like to be anonymous to the institution, the department, the teachers, and to the other kids?
What is it like to be the kid that your secondary school subject teacher cannot identify without reference to the mark book even with the enrolment photograph for reference?
What is it like to be the kid who transferred after the first week but still receives glowing comments about how they were progressing in physical education in the term 1 report?
What is it like to be marginalised and ignored by the institution?

When we work in big secondary campuses in New Zealand, institutional anonymity is not restricted to the students – anonymity is also afforded to staff – not being valued enough to be known as an individual is a condition applicable to both staff and students in the institutions I visit.

I once created a fictional staff member complete with their own staff pigeon hole who co-existed with the real staff at school quite happily for the term (putting requests in the daily notices, holding meetings and booking various campus facilities) until a member of the SMT worried that their teacher registration might have lapsed and after finding no records in head office checked with accounts to see what salary scale we were paying.    Which is why our recent MoE enthusiasms for “personalisation” make me smile in a distrustful kind of way . Talk of personalisation and learning communities in education is revealed as a cynical linguistic manipulation when the existing school culture is one where we don’t know our neighbours, be they fellow teachers or students.

Working with many different schools in the day job leads me to observe that the bigger the educational institution the more likely it is that you will be able to describe your daily experience in Billy Collins like “Sailing alone around the room” terms.  Ask for a staff member by name in many large New Zealand secondary school and you will be too frequently met with blank stares and redirections.  “I’m not sure – perhaps you should ask ....”

Is no wonder that the dislocated and institutionally anonymous mark their name on other surfaces on the way to the exit. Perhaps I expect too much – perhaps the anonymity afforded is integral to the institution of school – perhaps “the holes are part of the whole”.

“Dross is integral to the urban landscape.  The holes are part of the whole.” “First we had cities: space for living and working.  Then came suburbs, for living in and commuting from.  A couple of decades ago we got edge city, where the world of work came out to meet the ‘burbs again in an extended version of urban sprawl.  Now beyond the sprawl we have drosscapes.” New Scientist 4 June 2007 p56

Whatever we believe about the value of these drosscapes of institutionalised education there is no doubt that they embarrass us. The many ways in which statistical data can be manipulated means we will never know whether that claim (in the recent Radio New Zealand interview with COMET Trust executive  Stuart Middleton) that New Zealand has the poorest record in the OECD for the number of 15 to 19 year olds in full or part time education is both reliable and valid. I find it hard to credit that twenty percent of our students have already left the school system before the end of compulsory schooling at 16? Do we really have 25 thousand 15 to 19 year olds who are not in education, employment or training or are these figures a manipulation of data to suggest untruths?

Pursuing statistical representations of what is going on, or what is not going on, in education is beyond a simple googler in the edu_drosscapes of the wobbly isles like me – I have already spent far too much time scanning OECD reports, searching spreadsheets for educational data on New Zealand. Fortunately I can refer to people with far greater research facility and support systems ..

In New Zealand only 60% of students  are still at school when they turn 17 – a 42% increase in the number of students granted exemptions to leave school before they turn 16 since the last time we counted in 1999. Scoop  

“More and more young New Zealanders are opting to leave school early. Around 4,000 each year are leaving before the official leaving age. One-in-five has left by age 16 and two-in-five have left by age 17. When these young people leave school they are becoming lost from learning. Many of the young people who do stay at school aren’t getting much out of it. Their interest in education is strangled by a vicious mixture of boredom and low aspiration. More than one-in-ten has no formal achievement record for their time at school, 30,000 play hooky each week, and many fail to achieve even basic NCEA literacy and numeracy standards. A horrifying 53% of Maori boys leave without obtaining even NCEA Level One. Many of these unqualified school leavers end up becoming another negative statistic, alienated from education and not equipped for skilled work. Some might one day want to do an apprenticeship, but won’t have the reading and writing skills to start it. Scoop John Key Leader of the National Party

If the stats are valid and reliable then there are several reasons why a government might respond by increasing the school leaving age - despite the evidence that the existing school leaving age is not holding students in school – Raising the school leaving age is a quick and dirty measure to reduce unemployment figures  and a win win move in suggesting to the voting public that you are increasing the proportion of kids in the skilled labour force. But anyone who has worked in a secondary school knows that attempting to enforce an increase in school leaving age will not reduce unemployment figures or increase skills – In truth the move is far more likely to lead to mass truancy – and a criminalisation of up to 40 percent of New Zealand students who find turning up to school each day intolerable.

Solving the right problem in education wrt notions of school attendance relies on thoughtfully locating those Lucychillean  “thar be dragons” references and encouraging Sc's dreaming of "big ideas"  - I don't think increasing the number of years of compulsory education is going to do it.

If you have never planted an impression along the verges of a school, if you have never had  cause to scribble in the margins of the institution  “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” then it is absurd to imagine that increasing the school leaving age is going to persuade you to stay.

In our current user pays educational landscape (that ensures kids rark up debt if they choose to learn in one of our nine hundred plus tertiary institutions - rather than a school when they are 16)

"Nine hundred-plus institutions seem a bit of overkill for a country of four million people" OECD Thematic Review of Tertiary Education New Zealand)

we'd probably be better off getting rid of the school leaving age all together and instead giving each kid so many years worth of educational credits to be used however and whenever they wanted.  Then the disenchanted and disengaged could step out for a while and look at what was on offer in the world outside without financially compromising their future educational opportunities and outcomes. 

It has been a 13-amp plug kind of day

“What kind of reality is that, huh, you know, with a thirteen-amp plug on the end of it? Huh? Huh?... That can be un-plugged like that? 

We finished up our “13-amp plug kind of day” drinking with the locals outside Muldoon’s pub in Orewa’s beachside community – no one mentioned 21st Century learners, Second Life, Web2.0, e-learning  or digital immigrants all night.

I am beginning to suspect that there is a critical disconnect between the concerns of the MoE’s e Learning Action Plan and edu_bloggers' posts with the rest of New Zealand - who seem deliciously disinterested in it all. It reminds me of that Tomorrow's Schools “No I don’t think our marriage will benefit from a mission statement” thing all over again.

Absolutely Fabulous’ Eddie captures this e disconnect best, but Luke’s comment comes a close second...      

Eddie: Yeah I was gonna' make a- [taps microphone] Testing. Testing. -Yeah I was gonna' make a speech, but I just can't be bothered anymore. I mean, this used to be like fun you know; yeah it used to be fun, but I'm getting bored of all the 'fun' bits now. You know, your endless bloody lunches and launches, you know, no-career celebrities and party desperates. And what for, huh? Some colony of crap tags and mags! Well I'm sorry there has to be a little more than that doesn't there? [slams her handbag down] Hmmm? You know I had a speech, you know, my... my integrated-projected-global-tele-network system bloody system-system. But you know, if that's what the worlds coming to I don't want to be in it. No I don't want that. I don't want to be in some sort of cyber-space-hypervirtual bloody reality. I don't want that- exchanging e-mails with some old age bloody hippies with more information at their fingertips than is safe to know about. I don't want that! What kind of reality is that, huh, you know, with a thirteen-amp plug on the end of it? Huh? Huh?... That can be un-plugged like that? Come-on I'm going. [She turns to leave, but... ] No I'm not going yet! No, you! [points to her competition, Claudia Bing] You, you, just sit there like your velcroed to some bloody add-man! You know those crap-head add-men over there, you know, those kings of bastardization that have just taken everything that was ever real and genuine and honest and original and attached it to a toilet cleaner! Whereas I, I... Like a bird on a wire... Like a drunk in a midnight choir... I have tried in my way to be free. [Then she sings] Like a bird, on a wire. •  "Absolutely Fabulous" (1992)

I have so enjoyed thinking about the comments in response to the last Artichoke post that it has made me reluctant to post anything new. I didn’t want to do anything that might interfere with the prisoners of the nation state comment “flow” – That along with the fact that I am trying to fall in love with a new "blacker than black" DELL laptop and operating system and making sense of some fascinating new books purchased in random acts of cognitive whimsy from Amazon and Alibris.

[Will admit at this point that I am so used to reading light transmitted from a screen nowadays that reading the light reflected from the page of a book triggers narcolepsy.]

When Teemu suggested that Sweden was a worthy destination for educators seeking “Illich like” convivial societal lifestyles I imagined nothing could trump this comment, and secretly willed it to remain frozen as the final insight offered. 

I forgot about Luke.

Just like Eddie in Absolutely Fabulous there is something absolutely compelling about the insights provided by the maverick in education.  I have always reckoned that we have so few mavericks in New Zealand that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to ask the MoE to set up an endangered edu_mavericks register. But then as The Magnet likes to remind me they already keep a register of mavericks – they just call it something else. 

Thinking about the role of, and support for, the maverick in society is interesting. 

When I started reading and thinking about the key competencies I had many questions.  And the more I read the more questions I had – When I re-read them tonight the concern for the maverick/ schizoid creative is strong …

When the key competencies were first mooted I wanted to know:

Are there really a set of generic (subject independent) competencies needed for effective participation in life?

And if we can be convinced that they exist, how might we define and select these key competencies? For example would you choose generic competencies based on notions of communication, problem-solving, reasoning, leadership, creativity, motivation, team-work and ability to learn?  Or would you choose generic competencies based on notions of iconoclasts, mavericks, unconventional eccentricity, rebellious simplicity and marching to a different drummer?   

To have notions of competence in schools, do we have to have notions of incompetence?

Is it useful to distinguish between personal and professional competencies?   

Which competencies are particularly relevant for educators? 

Are there competencies possessed by individuals that are more modifiable than others. Can we distinguish between competencies possessed and competencies that can be developed?  Can we distinguish between those competencies that are modifiable only to a very small degree, versus those competencies that are acquired and can be developed?   

Within the MOE key competencies are there “necessary but insufficient” competencies?

Is metacognitive competence the key, key competency? Both necessary and sufficient?  If you can understand and control your own thinking, can you control your own learning? Is the key to engaged life long learners, self initiated, self regulated and intentional learning?      

Given our current predilection for assessment - are any of the MOE key competencies measurable?

Will a focus on key competencies in our schools develop a new inequality – a society of competence rich and competence poor?  Will there be a new funding pool to address this?

How can the promotion of competitive competencies ever sit comfortably beside the co-operative competencies?  How can notions of excellence, efficiency, diversity, and choice sit comfortably alongside social justice and equality of opportunities, solidarity and tolerance?    

Can we ever resolve the tension between competencies in self-reliance, risk-taking, initiative and entrepreneurship with competencies in  teamwork, consideration, solidarity, dialogue and active citizenship.

What skills and competencies are needed in today's workplaces and social environments, and how can they best be studied and promoted in schools?

Enhancing the maverick student in school is currently framed as “A Good Thing” to do for the economic future and competitive advantage of New Zealand.

“For New Zealand, the development of a prosperous and confident knowledge society means the development of new skills and knowledge.  It will require a culture of continuous enquiry, innovation and improvement, risk taking and entrepreneurship.  This can only come from the education system.”  Steve Maharey Minister of Education June 2006
Enabling the 21st Century Learner.  An e-Learning Action Plan for Schools 2006-2010

Looking at how we enhance creativity in individuals is called for in Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, Prime Minister  Helen Clark niche marketing response to outsourcing NZ jobs overseas and Education Minister Steve Maharey

What is not so clear is what creativity/ innovation is, and how we might help kids do this better.

More thinking about building creativity in schools tomorrow ...