“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 

Comments

[Simon]

Hi Art,

I to have missed blogging and reading blogs etc of late. No jet setting for me though.

Currently, I am working on Assignment 2 of a Vic Uni paper. I'm looking at ICT progression in my through primary school. Not so much to go on really, literature and document-wise but your post has got me thinking about this whole ICT thing and how you get a 5 year old to be ICT literate by their 14th birthday.

The other thing is, let me know next time you're in Napier would love to grab a coffee and a conversation.

[Teemu]

What a brilliant insights! The technological determinism has reach schools.

In this kind of scenario the starting point has been that the school system is broken. Still everybody with basic education understands that "school system" even inside the OECD is not one – it is many, many different kind of systems. Some systems are very broken, some are a bit broken and some are not broken at all. OECDs own comparative studies show this very well.

So, one should probably look why some school system are not broken and compare if the use of ICT is the distinguishing factor behind the “broken” and “not broken” systems. I doubt.

Again, with a proper basic education people understand that solution to the "Bureaucratic School System" is not ICT, but organizational changes. Similar way a solution to "teacher exodus" is not ICT, but social and economical appreciation of the teacher profession. Simply educate and pay them properly!

[Alexander Hayes]

Caspar Fairhall, Robert Muir, Paul Carstairs and I had a great deal of fun interrogating the 'Invisible Cities' principle in a collaborative installation piece - http://www.casparfairhall.com/electronic/motion.php

I concentrated on the sublime aspects of the real and the perceptions of the unreal... transposing still images of surrounding graffiti perpetrated by 'chained' students who attended the Perth Boys School in the days of shackles and canes who had inscribed their names in the mortar of the basements in which they were detained.

Welcome back.

[lucychili]

collective nouns throw some pomeness into our daily prattle at work
we have a resident 'troubling of goldfish'.

perhaps we could also start unpacking the 'collective verbs' in policy negotiation democracy participation direction safety adventure surprise responsibility diversity.

check out shaun tan's 'the arrival' for some heart without words.

[Artichoke]

It doesn’t feel like jet setting Simon – it feels like making new friends and finding new ways of teaching and learning and there is an awful lot of talking to yourself when you travel around – which is why I hate to leave home without something old and something new to read and think about. Next time I am wandering without purpose along the Marine Parade imagining those flounder I will contact you and you can advise me on the best place to watch the sea.

Think you are right Teemu, when making ICTs part of every scenario we need to ask “Is the use of ICTs the distinguishing factor between schools that are performing well and schools that are failing?
I have just finished reading The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig – a profoundly interesting book on how we attribute success in business (I think you would enjoy this as much as I have). It seems that attributing success is much dodgier than we might imagine – it is as you suggest highly unlikely that we could ever validly and reliably show that performance in schools or lack of it was determined by the presence of technology.
And then I wonder if ICTs are an ubiquitous expectation in future schools (much like electricity and sanitation would be) why do we need to identify them at all?

Alex – I loved your collaborative interrogation of Invisible Cities – the novel has such a deliciously complex and textured narrative that I can imagine a project like this that never ends, moving from iteration to iteration.

And Lucychili I know I am torn between an affection for Language Log’s grammatical precision

“Bark - The noise a dog makes, can be a NOUN OR a VERB! When we tell the dog to "bark", it is a verb which tells the dog to ACT, and when we describe the dog's "bark", it is a noun describing the "thing" that the dog did.” and

“most people have no grasp of syntactic terms like ‘noun’ or ‘verb’ or ‘adjective’ other than three traditional but utterly hazy semantically-driven ideas: that nouns are things that you can touch, and verbs are actions that you undertake, and adjectives are qualities that you can judge.”

And the delicious lyricism in “troubling of goldfish” ... just as well I enjoy paradox

I am thinking about collective verbs in a new way ... and agree with you about the illustrations in “The Arrival” must get a copy - they have a similar emotional appeal to Calvino’s use of text.