Those shortly and soon guidelines ...

A  “shortly and soon” ICTPD cluster guideline alert pinged in yesterday

* This year there is a new expectation that all school principals will write a detailed report of their school progress for the Milestone reports. This is both designed for your own reflective purposes as well as the need to report to the Ministry in regards to outcomes of the programme. Guidelines for this are to be completed shortly and distributed to all clusters soon. Therefore schools leaders will need to be vigilant about data gathering practices that  support accurate reporting in this area from now on. National Facilitator ICT PD Programme

Now changing expectations is an unchanging expectation in the ICTPD clusters, but when aligned with “shortly and soon” thinking .... it gives me grief

Since we already expect our cluster principals to comment on the impact of the contract delivery within their individual schools at each milestone, the wriggle in this edict lies in the guidelines yet to be distributed.

For how can I ask our school leaders to be detailed and vigilant about gathering accurate data when we are six weeks into the term and the new guidelines for what they are now to report on have yet to arrive?

Even when we know the detail of what the guidelines include, capturing the progress of a cluster of schools is an interesting challenge for writers of the New Zealand ICTPD Cluster schools Milestone Reports.

I am struck by this newly articulated need for detailed progress reporting on each individual schools within the cluster, as well as (presumably) detailed progress reporting on the cluster as a whole.

I wonder if the guidelines will ask individual schools to evaluate and comment on what they contribute to the whole ...

That ....”If we removed a school from our cluster what would happen to the cluster as a whole?  So what does each school contribute to the progress of the whole cluster?” Thinking

– or will the guidelines remain trapped in an individualist focus on the schools themselves?

In an act of reckless (and probably furtive) textual scholarship, I’d like to gain access to the individual Milestone Reports from across all clusters since the programme began – to examine the records for how individual  ICTPD clusters represent progress in their Milestone reporting, to determine how the reporting of progress  changes within a cluster across the three years of the cluster funding, and to analyse whether the overall representation of progress by individual ICTPD clusters, has changed since its inception.

I guess I am interested in some kind of empirical measure of the diversity of milestone progress reporting – across all clusters at any one time, within a cluster over time, across all clusters since the inception of the cluster programme etc. 

And then once I have measures of the diversity of progress reporting. I am interested in the quality of the measures themselves –

Have cluster progress indicators become richer or blander? Has the increasing introduction of “Guidelines for reporting progress” resulted in a  “McDonaldisation” of measures of progress much like the overall biodiversity of bird species may remains high in an area yet the native species have been replaced by sparrow’s, blackbirds, mynah birds and thrush.

Fortunately for the people who have to work with me each day - I do not have access to the ICTPD cluster milestone archives,

.... but I do have a kind of Wikipedia like editorial record of our cluster/s involvement, archival copies of the thirty two ICTPD milestones we have written to date, the responses to each from CORE Education,  all the email exchanges, and the Administration and Support Handbooks (2003 to 2008) that advise clusters how to attempt this recording of progress.

When it comes to digital preservation I reckon my archives can button the button on all measures in Kenneth Thibodeau’s tripartite model for defining digital objects – physical, logical and conceptual.

“Thiibodeau .....offers a tripartite model for defining digital objects: first as physical objects (“signs inscribed on a medium” – for example the flux reversals on a magnetic tape); second, as logical objects (data as it is recognised and interpreted by particular processes and applications software; for example the binary composition of a Word .DOC file); and third, as conceptual objects (the object we deal with in the real world,” such as a digital photograph as it appears prima facie on the screen).  P3 Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination  Matthew G. Kirschenbaum .

So I guess I have enough material to reflect on all these challenges within the context of my own reporting next time we have three months of rain or while I await the “shortly and soon” guidelines.

Comments

[botts]

reckless, furtive AND textual all in the one sentence... i'm going all funny on the inside... be still my beating heart...

[Artichoke]

Thank you Botts ... I just knew somehow that I could rely upon you for close reading of the post and the use of a decryption algorithm based on intuition to capture the hidden subtext of it all .....

In an act of reckless (and probably furtive) textual scholarship,

I continue to be both bewitched, bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the inability of others to understand the artifice in Artichoke ... to grasp the real "be still my beating heart" meaning in the text of each Artichokean - purportedly edu_blogger post ..

[Janet]

the clusters could soon and shortly look at the process they are working on
think about what they would like it to do more of or less of

invite the core folks to participate on a wiki which has threads around what they want to change including how they would like the core function to contribute in terms of information about funding options and copyright policy and room for new spaces or collaborative.

turn it around and have the reporting be something which all can see and which is about voice rather than reporting?

[Janet]

This chap is looking at social structures for collaboration. The video on hierarchy might be interesting/useful.

http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm

Peer to Peer, Hierarchies And You
Michel next discusses the notion of hierarchies, and how they are transformed by the Peer to Peer approach. He argues that:

* Peer to Peer production does not dispense with hierarchies
* Hierarchies are transformed to hierarchies of engagement and knowledge
* These hierarchies evolve according to meritocratic principles

He goes on to discuss how Peer to Peer modes effect everyday people:

* Passionate production - Free production is based on passion and interest on an individual level
* On a group level this makes for pooled passion and knowledge to produce the best possible product
* Working relationships in corporate culture have become dysfunctional.