Artichoke

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 in dementia centres end up being “one of those  things you can put in people’s way rather than put in people’s hands.” – he has rich anecdote to support this conclusion.

I loved this insight because putting things in people’s way rather than putting things in people’s hands seems to be something we struggle with a lot in education –

Identifying what are the conditions of value in teaching and learning and then identifying  what might enhance these conditions (“putting things in people’s hands”)  or betray these conditions (“putting things in peoples way”) is something I think about a lot with respect to ICTs and education.

I was still thinking about Grandpa’s zimmer frame classification and the twenty five ovaries when I checked my bloglines account ....

The Valve blog ... a must read has a site disclaimer that helps me clarify the things I love about bloggers

The blogs I keep coming back to have

“Authors' ideas, faiths, hypotheses, stubbornness’s against assaults of reason and evidence, points of literary honor, interests, temperaments, obsessions, political affiliations, high-bouncing utopian ideals, limpet-like reactionary attachments, elective affinities, stylistic crotchets, journalistic forays and hobbyhorses [that ] are their own, not their fellow authors [bloggers] ...ALSC's. The Valve Blog Association of Literary Scholars and Critics

The Teaching for lust  and Linguistics for administrators   posts features the 30 million plus views YouTube Hotforwords philogogist and teacher Marina explaining the various meanings of “dope”

I have been thinking about how to engage teachers in unpacking the new media literacies in the context of education, referring to Jenkin's white paper for insight

A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is
“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap.These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms” (p. 8).We would modify this definition in two ways. First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second, new media literacies should be considered a social skill. P19  Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

... but after being sensitised by Grandpa’s twenty five ovaries it strikes me that Marina may provide a better professional learning discussion example of the use of new media literacies in education – for the effectiveness of the content communicated cannot be valued by looking at the text alone.

The Valve post lets us know that evaluating the audio track tells us the content is competently captured

At Brainstorm, the ever-trenchant Richard Tabor Greene tested the videos on his students (I’m sure violating the guidelines of his institutional review board for human-subjects research in the process):
Now, evaluating this audio track—she chose to explicate word histories and does a simple competent job, if not an extraordinary job. Indeed, if you close your eyes and ignore her bulging breasts, the impression of stupidity from her goes completely away. I tested this on students the other day, giving them the audio and giving a control group the video versions, and asking ratings of 50 randomly combined dimensions. A cropped video version without her breasts upped her non-stupidity score, nearly doubling it.

I tested Marina on the adolescents who pass through the corridor – they were engaged, provoked, interested and could recall everything   - an observation that makes me think again about the possibilities in the new curriculum for teachers who obviously have much to learn about creating multiliteracy based communications for students in ways that are “open, rich, undermining, charged, connected, and practical”.

All of which leaves me with the same question but in a different context

How can we avoid education in the new literacies becoming an example of “corruptio optimi pessima” the corruption of the best is the worst of all?

Educational Metaphor: Learning as a Journey and Curriculum as a Mollusc

The New Zealand Curriculum 2007 continues our wobbly isles tradition of using a soft, wet and slimy mollusc as a metaphor for intellectual and spiritual growth

The curriculum nautilus - Since it first appeared on the cover of The New Zealand Curriculum Framework in 1993, the nautilus has become a familiar symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. Itreappears in this curriculum with a new look.It is as a metaphor for growth that the nautilus is used as a symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum P2

The New Zealand Curriculum document itself encourages us to think of "learning as a journey ..."

As students journey from early childhood through secondary school and, in many cases, on to tertiary training or tertiary education in one of its various forms,they should find that each stage of the journey prepares them for and connects well with the next. P43

By learning te reo and becoming increasingly familiar with tikanga, Maori students strengthen their identities, while non-Maori journey towards shared cultural understandings. P16

In New Zealand our predilection for constructivist pedagogies and inquiry learning means we tend to interpret the learning as a journey metaphor as when

the teacher and students travel more or less together, along a somewhat defined route, making frequent stops along the way as students notice something of interest that they wish to explore. There are occasional interesting side trips to unexpected places. At times, groups pursue different paths and, after returning to the main road, report to the class about what they have found.  Judy Yero Teachers Mind Resources

I continue to acknowledge and thank cj for making me alert to metaphor ... for introducing me to Lakoff and how metaphors both obscure and reveal ...

“Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.” P146  Metaphors we live by - Lakoff and Johnson

Cj is why I laughed darkly when I stumbled upon Alan Watt’s interrogation of the “Journey” metaphor today ...

Is a must watch for all those educators still anguishing over their inability to make any practical change in response to that educationally virulent call to action - Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on Do schools kill creativity?

I believe that creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it ... needs more than rhetoric and humour it needs lots of the sort of analysis I read today on General Praxis Blog on Arts teachers learning and pedagogy

When we talk about needing to build creativity in 21st Century Learners in New Zealand – we too often blur the individuals with the process, and the process with the product – we never get to interrogating identified “irreconcilable tensions”

"The positives in art education work are evident and well documented, and I value the work I do in schools highly. However there are aspects of working as an artist in secondary schools which do not sit right...

• The constant call for collaboration in an area which is often about a fairly solitary, highly personal exploration
• The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words
• The focus on Artists as some sort of uniquely, innately skilled creative problem solvers who will be able to redress an inherent lack in the system
• The desire to promote equal partnerships in a system where artists and teachers can never be equal
• A blurring of expectation between the definitions: ‘artist’ and ‘art educator’
• An over-simplification of what an artist is, packaging them to fulfil a ‘required’ service
• Time, as a contributing factor to all above is not valued enough" Tapp participant

The General Praxis blog analysis is a great position piece for New Zealand educators - I have pinged it off to the artists and teachers I work with in the day job in the hope that it might catalyse a similar analysis here .. I want to explore the implications further

The complexity of analysis in the post clearly identifies why if we persist with describing learning as a journey we we will continue to be “Lost in the Sahel” when it comes to creativity. 

Note to anyone reading this post: The poetic writing and photography in this National Geographic Lost in the Sahel piece - is much better than the Artichoke post ... abandon the post and sink yourself in the article by Paul Salopek with photography by Pascal Maitre

Along Africa’s harsh frontier between desert and forest, crossing some lines can be fatal.
After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.

The Sahel itself is a line.

So is "Learning is a journey ..."

 

“There are too many heroes and not enough chocolate”

“Already, ads that once appeared in print are showing up on blogs. Bloggers stand to gain ever more of the advertising share for one simple reason: they can create custom content for advertisers. This is leading to a new style of blog that blurs the line between editorial and advertisement.” Web 3.0 Annalee Newitz New Scientist 15 March 2008 p63

When I think about edubloggers creating custom content for advertisers, it occurs to me that fretting about bloggers “blurring the line” with respect to Web 2.0 is “too little too late  thinking” ..... not only because creating custom content, for advertisers to place ads in, is entrenched day job practice for online marketers like Fairfax Media’s online Division Fairfax digital .... where advertising and content are essentially simulacra - but also because “blurring the line” happens all over in the landscapes of education ... an online edu_conference this week only affirmed my belief that marketing educashin and promoting those who will cynically or ignorantly promote educashin based initiative will always be with us .... educators are helplessly implicated in promotional marketing,  for much like Faifax digital, in the workforce of the 21^st Century learner the advertisement creates the activity/ creates the placement rather than the reverse.

Like those pimento and almond overstuffed olives sold across upmarket deli counters, the hierarchies of influence in education are over stuffed with the educashin gullible, and back filled with those made vulnerable by educashin flattery.  And yeah you are right some of them blog

The kindest thing you can think about it all is - They know not what they do to belong.

It has been a big week and I am trying not to think about it all and to concentrate instead on collecting my new learning.

I have been working two jobs this week – each day’s job extended by breakfast and/or late afternoon briefings/meetings ... and I have had some great new learning from my involvement helping teachers plan for  “concept curriculum” achievement objectives, learning intentions, learning experiences and assessment rubrics for   concepts of “Turangawaewae”, citizenship, culture, and sustainability using the new New Zealand Curriculum.

My only regret for the week is not reading  the “Be Green Drive” Freakonomics blog post before I took the gulley walk option on our split school site in Auckland on Wednesday -

I cannot wait to share this "drive don't walk" post with the teachers looking at reducing their carbon footprint in our Sustain ED Cluster 

At least some choices are beyond reproach environmentally. It is clearly better for the environment to walk to the corner store rather than to drive there. Right?

Now even this seemingly obvious conclusion is being called into question by Chris Goodall via John Tierney’s blog And Chris Goodall is no right-wing nut; he is an environmentalist and author of the book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.

Tierney writes:

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

But I am hitting Easter break so very tired ...

Grandpa to all formal measures – lost in his dementia – is especially insightful today

He described his experience in the dementia centre as living in a place where “there are too many heroes and not enough chocolate” [I brought the brie he requested yesterday instead of the chocolate he wanted today ... I am certain that tomorrow he will puzzle loudly over why I have brought chocolate and neglected to bring brie]

He describes himself as living in a place where when he came out of the tunnels and fed himself into the bean machine he emerged into a most beautifully made but ultimately bewildering foggy sky ... as living in a place where “the Americans” (aka anyone who can move around without a zimmer frame) who insist on shuffling around the saveloys and mashed potato on the lunch trolley had never considered that the weakness in the place lay with Lynda (the charge nurse) .... as living in a place where every question is  countered with a “wait until you see Lynda” answer ... a place where when you try to pin anything down it just keeps moving away from you ...a place where your zimmer frame keeps on going around and around and around.

I can identify with the “too many heroes’ – with feeling like I have been “being fed through a bean machine” and with the frustrations of an institutionally imposed reliance on the “wait until you see Lynda” for the answer – all of Grandpa’s musings ensure the relevance of that widgetbox   online countup counter I have set up for those - yet to arrive - “shortly and soon guidelines”  

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.

Those new media literacies and social networking in The Old Elephant House

On Friday I was guest at a wedding in the grounds of Auckland Zoo .  I wanted to immerse myself in the ceremony and enduring ritual of a marriage celebration, but I also saw this as an opportunity to collect digital content on my new mobile phone – to experiment with mobile technology afforded digital stills, video and sound collected during the ceremony in the band rotunda and reception in the Old Elephant House.  I intended to use 21st Century technologies and literacies to communicate the “social networking” evident at an event framed on enduring ritual from the past ....  .

As those who know me might predict I didn’t get very far, I was too distracted by the event itself - the azure blue feathers on the plumptious breast of the peacock determinedly advancing on the drinks table, the elephant’s trunk seeking out the foliage pinned to the increasingly anxious groom , the zoo intercom crackling across the space around the band rotunda wishing good fortune to the new married keeper and her partner - I preferred to capture all of this with my memory rather than on my 1GB micro SD card.  And when I checked out the content I did capture the next day almost every image and sound features the official wedding photographer.

Hmmm ... seems I captured the capturer ... rather than any social networking between participants.

One of the refrains that plays on a loop in my mind is - how we can help 21st Century students use the new literacies to create and communicate new learning outcomes through collaboration and networking?  ....  I reckon a good place to start this thinking is Henry Jenkins ... he has unpacked some valuable start up thinking on this ...            

"This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and after school programs to devote attention to fostering what we are calling the new media literacies -- a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills which should have been part of the school curriculum all along."
From Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Clarifying what the new media literacies involve nudges at the back of my mind every time I listen to a student podcast, interact with a student webpage, read a student blog or view a student created movies ... which means I have been trying to critique the critical literacies that the students have used/ failed to use  in their intended  communication for deep understanding for quite a while. 

And it is not an easy task ..

For whilst we have well established criteria and clearly outlined indicators – those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant targets and success criteria for strategies to meet the purpose of tasks within the primarily text based content of the old literacies in education, we do not seem to have not developed these to the same degree within the visual, audio, tactile etc participatory context of the new literacies.

Which is why I am so often made anxious when I listen to student created podcasts, view students’ digital movies and or read student blogs ....

When we have not identified indicators and specific, measurable, achievable, relevant targets and success criteria for strategies to meet the purpose of these new literacy tasks  –

When the most significant strategy available for student selection of the visual, audio, tactile media components, for manipulation and transformation of digital media,  is little more than a poorly identified cultural intuition.

Then I would argue that our ability to both, recognise and teach/ facilitate for deeper learning outcomes is compromised.

I am made even more uncomfortable when teachers eschew well established textual literacy standards in favour of a similarly ill defined cultural intuition as their students to assess the new content broadcast by students working in these new media landscapes – an approach that sees far too many of them confidently sharing cringe worthy student creations as examples of new literacy excellence.

Sitting in the audience, participating in the network on moments like these I remind myself of Henry Jenkin’s white paper caveat that youth must “not push aside old skills to make room for the new” ... something I fear is not given enough prominence when we explore new literacies and e Learning in some New Zealand classrooms.

A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is
“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap.These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms” (p. 8).We would modify this definition in two ways. First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second, new media literacies should be considered a social skill. P19  Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

I try to ensure that textual literacy remains core when working with students and planning with teachers by an act of creative visualisation – by stripping any textual content from the aural, graphics, haptic and animations in the new media and imagining an educator’s reaction to it in isolation. Is pretty good as an Emperor’s new clothes strategy ... but this approach misses something important

Just as textual literacy is complicated by changes in the page interface - check out In the beginning was the word – A visualisation of the page as interface so synergies develop when aural, visual and digital transliteracies are added to textual content.

So we do need to persevere and elaborate on looking at learning outcomes through textual literacies - to work carefully to develop well established criteria and clearly outlined indicators – those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant targets and success criteria for strategies to meet the purpose of tasks within the visual, audio, tactile etc participatory context of the new literacies.

A significant challenge for educators. 

Warning: Greater Thinking Challenge Ahead

All this Artichokean thinking was not helped by the grudging realisation that our thinking about, and negotiation between, the multimedia of the new literacies is even further complicated - our thinking about the multiliteracies may well be betrayed by our immersion in the multimedia culture industry

Thinking about this in the context of student learning outcomes through the new literacies means that as well as risking betrayal of content when we work with the students in this way - we also risk betrayal of process

I can attempt to explain this with reference to one of my favourite 20th Century thinkers

As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

The “corrosive effect” of media on our creative and aesthetic minds is persuasively argued for by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944 ... and if they are right then our ability understand the new literacies and to help students communicate meaning through the new literacies may be undermined at a far deeper level than I have been fretting over in the post....

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

We live in the 21st Century participatory multimedia culture yet Adorno and Horkheimer’s 20th Century bolded claim has never been more true ...

To paraphrase Adorno and Horkheimer’s thinking ... 

Our ability to identify synergies and strategies that help students produce multimedia products to satisfy (meet, persuade)  consumer/ viewer/ audience needs and then encourage our students to adopt them for their own multiliteracy networking communication has been corrupted by the multiliteracies adopted by the producers of media for the masses – so what we do identify and teach as strategies for effective and persuasive communication of understanding risks limiting student  imaginings and reinforcing student needs for more of these “as soon as the film begins” like multiliteracy products.

All of which makes me ask:

How can we avoid betraying both content and process when we introduce blogging, videomaking, podcasting, wikis, webpages  and other Web2.0 applications (like social bookmarking, collaborative authorship [text, concept mapping, spreadsheets, timelines], image sharing, calendar sharing, video sharing, book sharing, voice sharing [pod casting], presentation sharing, social networking, communication text, communication voice, blogging, RSS feeds, digital storage, geographical mapping, customisable start pages etc)  as useful new literacies to the 21st Century learner?

How can we avoid education in the new literacies becoming an example of “corruptio optimi pessima” the corruption of the best is the worst of all?

Righteous pedagogies at Learning@School 08

And there ain't no man righteous, no not one. Bob Dylan

Does our focus on the “righteous pedagogies” in New Zealand undermine student learning outcomes?

A contemporary definition of ‘learning’ is a long term change in a person’s thinking and behaviour.  But rarely do schools, teachers, and students assess such long term changes. At our best we focus on the “formica veneer” of learning, the short term outcomes of what has been learned, at worst we focus on “righteous pedagogies”.

My recent experience at the Learning@School08 conference means that I suspect that rather than looking at what we do to build changes in student long term memory, we tend to neglect memory altogether and shortcut to an educational focus on the “righteous pedagogies”.

At Learning@School08 I kept nudging up against a “pedagogical righteousness” ...  that sense that as long as schools (and their edu_conference presentations) string together an educational mantra of words like;

personalisation, putting learners at the centre, New Zealand Curriculum 2007, 21st Century, authentic, inquiry, learning community, scaffolding, assessment for learning, collaboration, engagement, learning intentions, key competencies, evidence based practice, home school partnerships, wisdom and values

when they describe their programmes, they are somehow beyond reproach.

I reckon that this focus on a “righteous pedagogy” comes at the expense of a focus on the learner.

(Note to self: It is an enormous irony that Alton-Lee's Best Evidence Synthesis BES (and the teacher misinterpretation of the iterative nature of the ten characteristics of quality teaching) must shoulder some of the blame for this state of affairs)

This relentless referencing of constructivistic pedagogies (learning_theory) and associated jargon in the conference presentations by New Zealand schools is not matched by an equally relentless unpacking of what these terms might mean to students - nor by any clarity of how we can design learning activities to achieve them in school.   

When I think about what is memorable about my learning experiences today I recall

• laughing over coffee with the sales manager for the publishing company of Science World9 and 10,
• watching the caregivers at the dementia centre wrestling a full size harp into a lounge filled with, residents waving leeks and, the smells of welsh rarebit baking.  (St David’s Day celebrations dementia style),
• sending Nix a mobile phone photograph of Marilyn in full air,
• fighting off some seriously “outlet sale inflamed” shoppers to grab two cushion covers needed by the Magnet ( an easier task than my previous Magnet induced challenge of locating a place that dyes shoes in the wilderness of an Auckland inner city building site)
• strategies that failed to persuade “Stanley the Errant” Labrador to bring back the packet of pita bread he stole from the kitchen
• ordering Eden Catering lunches for our ict_pd cluster lead teacher start up meeting/s next week
• alerting our cluster principals to changes in the MoE milestone reporting requirements in 2008. 

All of which makes me wonder

1. What will I recall from today, tomorrow?
2. What will I recall from today, in a months time?
3. What will I recall from today, in 6 months time?
4. What will I recall from today next year?
5. W hat will I recall from today  in 25 years time?

The activities that made learning memorable are not linked to any particular pedagogy. They are not answered by "Lisa like" "either/or" pedagogical questions ...

Lisa: So, dad, will you be teaching from a standardized text or using the more Socratic method?

I predict that the activities that will build new learning for me, the ones I will remember longest, are the ones that (as Graham Nuthall’s work suggests) I repeatedly experienced in a range of different settings in the day job –

All of which means I suspect will remember how

• the dementia centre staff create magic every day,
• shopping for the bargains identified by the Magnet involves the key competencies of reckless misadventure, ruthlessness and determination,
• sharing the mobile photo trivia of my life builds friendship,
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thinking is necessary but not sufficient for learning ready teachers,   
• laughter can persuade you to agree to do extra stuff when you know that you should’t.
• the expectation of changing goal posts in the MoE ict_pd cluster milestone reporting requirements is unchanging.

Note to self: Stuff constructivism ... work on building memory ... and helping clarify for students what is needed when you are learning how to learn.

Learning@School 08: A mixture of "Isn't it delicious?" and “chelonian” learning experience.

When Marilyn Monroe's dress is blown up above her waist by a passing train underneath a subway grate she is standing on, she exclaims "Isn't it delicious?"    

We left the conference venue on Friday with a small carry-on sized travel bag and laptop each ... before we hit the intersection of the Old Taupo Rd and Ngongotaha Rd we had added a larger than life sized photograph of Marilyn Monroe with dress blown up  mounted on three hinged screens, an outsized turtle shell in need of linseed oil, a wicker topped table and two chairs and a collection of brightly coloured ceramic pasta jars ... we had all the key ingredients .... with Marilyn and the Mock Turtle on board we were ready to talk ....

I get a little excited ... ... about the potential conversations on the return road trip from the MoE Learning@School conferences in Rotorua each year –

Over the years these conversations have been associated with moments of significant new learning. Academics would probably categorise this as “historical precedent excitement” – but to me intellectual excitement (historical or not) is hard to differentiate from all those other catalysts for emotional lurch 

I reckon this excitement is because the road trip from Rotorua to Auckland provides an uninterrupted and unmonitored opportunity for “frankly reckless conversations” about those Lewis Carroll “We called him Tortoise because he taught us.” moments –the  what was of value, what was dodgy and what needs more investigation of the Learning@School 08 conference experience.  And it also provides a time where intelligence gleaned from multiple sources is pooled – the she said, he said stuff, he looked, she looked, he was, she was ...

I like to start by thinking about the conference breakouts, spotlight presentations, keynote addresses and trade hall exhibits using chelonian thinking  - I use an assessment rubric based upon the Mock Turtle's analysis for assessing “a really good school” (and translate this to “a really good educational experience at conference”)

So I analyse my conference session notes and memories against rubrics I have developed against the Mock Turtle’s analysis of what makes a really good school.

"Ah! Then yours wasn't a really good school," said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief."

He goes on to flipper the following as essential to goodness ...

"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," ....."and then the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."

Not too hard to find examples of all of these ....from here it is easy to move quickly onto an analysis of my learning moments of "Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography“  and by the time we hit Tirau I am ready to tussle with my learning experiences that best aligned with “Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils."

When I get to “Fainting in Coils” I bring in Marilyn .... asking

What moments of new learning at Learning@School 08 best meet a “Fainting in Coils” assessment  rubric at the "Isn't it delicious?" learning level – that fusing of mind and heart moment.

From the Keynotes it is easy to pick “Key Messages” from Murray Brown for a current focus, clearly articulated, well sequenced overview of the different flows of information and data happening through eLearning in New Zealand, national student identification and authentication programmes,  and for his identification of the need to look carefully at the new critical literacies that e Learning brings to education.

But the consensus from our teachers would see the overall “Isn’t it delicious?” moment go to “Learning’s the Thing!”- Mary Chamberlain’s Spotlight session on the New Zealand Curriculum -  – a breakout delivered with such passion and relevance that there was hardly a dry eye in the room –

Note to self - Give feedback to conference organisers ... This is a verve filled presenter whose message and delivery needed a bigger audience –mark for an opening keynote position on the next conference programme.

The only thing the Mock Turtle is uncertain about is the role of the Classical master and the importance of “Laughing and grief” in a learning experience.

"Hadn't time," said the Gryphon: "I went to the Classical master, though. He was an old crab, he was."
"I never went to him," the Mock Turtle said with a sigh: "he taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say."
"So he did, so he did," said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn, and both creatures hid their faces in their paws."

Learning@School 08 certainly had its share of both ....

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
Chapter 9 The Mock Turtle’s Story 

"The New Zealand Curriculum v2.0" and working in tenuous circumstances

Alexander Trevi has a fascinating post on a proposal from Purdue University to build Instanbul  v2.0 as a way “for Istanbul to lessen the humanitarian crisis and economic impact of a catastrophic earthquake striking the ancient city”.

After unpacking the proposal he examines what building the back up city might look like to the occupants living in the first version city.

Let's say a new city is built, a fully functioning metropolis complete with homes, businesses, museums and infrastructure. For twenty years, people would live there, going about their lives, going to work, raising their children, tending to their gardens.  Every day they would hear news of another city under construction at an adjacent site. In fact, they will be reminded of this at every of the day, if not from the news, then from the distant but incessant machine noise and dust plumes emanating from the horizon. It becomes a major aspect of daily life, settling in nicely or not so nicely into the background, like radiation or an impending major earthquake or a Hurricane Katrina, oscillating between states of immediate critical concern and ambience.

When the new city is finished, everyone will have to migrate en masse there, as the now older city will torn down, including the sewers, and everything else burnt to the ground. But in another 20 years, they will again be exiled, forced to a newer city constructed on the very same site from where they had fled decades ago.

And so on and so on.

Trevi's post made me think about what it might be like to work in an education system where the physical buildings and location of schools were constantly changing and students and teachers were regularly relocated.

To ask: what advantages might this bring in terms of undermining the intransigence of tradition bound thought and practice about curriculum and pedagogy? ... what disadvantages might occur when teachers and students become increasingly peripatetic? ... and what might stay the same in terms of our beliefs about teaching and learning when we adopt “impermanence and continual change” in location?.

All this Instanbulv2.0 catalysed thinking reminded me of listening to teachers and families ( in schools we worked with) talk about the impact on their communities  before, during and after the Labour Government’s policy of closing state schools with small rolls.

And then, thanks to adopting some focussing strategies from Lucychili - I realised I was thinking about this at the wrong focus level .... 

I don’t need to imagine Instanbul v2.0 in an educational context ... I am living Instanbulv2.0

I am at the raw face of observing what it is like to experience Alexander Trevi’s imagined city reconstruction scenario within an educational setting.

I am observer, researcher and teacher of teachers during the introduction of the new New Zealand Curriculum –

A curriculum whose arrival has been (draftily) trumpeted for ever since I can remember ... all that "oscillating between states of immediate critical concern and ambience" over the 1992 curriculum, the 2000-2002 revision of the curriculum, the process leading up to the The New Zealand Curriculum: Draft for Consultation 2006 and now The New Zealand Curriculum 2007.

“Every day they would hear news of another city under construction at an adjacent site. In fact, they will be reminded of this at every of the day, if not from the news, then from the distant but incessant machine noise and dust plumes emanating from the horizon.”

I am charged in the day job with helping teachers in today’s workforce implement what is for most of them the equivalent of Curriculum v2.0.

Whilst the more cynical and wordly amongst them think “this too will pass” - suspecting in Trevi’s words that  “in another 20 years, they will again be exiled, forced to a newer city constructed on the very same site from where they had fled decades ago.” others are in a more desperate struggle to give meaning to the new documents.

I reckon Trevi asks some great questions for educators thinking about the significance of Curriculum v2.0 changes

Or will they gradually come development cultural traditions favoring the values of impermanence, of continual change? Will their society be based on a culture of experimentation and radical innovation? In other words, will they stop designing buildings and landscapes exactly the same way as before, even if it's been proven to work time and time again, when failure can and will be erased in no more than 20 years' time?

How will you live your life in tenuous circumstances?

All this thinking about Instanbulv2.0 means that our f2f work helping teachers plan learning experiences, success criteria, and assessment for learning rubrics against SOLO Taxonomy with the new New Zealand Curriculum is going to be far more interesting than I initially suspected ...

Just how will teachers plan with the new curriculum, when talk of curriculum change since the late 1990’s has led many to believe they are working in tenuous circumstances?

Learning@School08: “Sitting down there amidst the wallpaper”

I have spent the first three weeks of the school year on the road -  Billy Collin's “striding around like a vivid god my shoulders in the clouds”.

In the first fifteen days The Magnet and I have worked f2f with over 972 teachers from 36 different schools across New Zealand, been interviewed/ grilled by an ERO review team, met with cluster facilitators, and visited six cluster schools -  (and those fifteen days are really twelve given that they include three down days - Anniversary Day, Waitangi Day and a day unexpectedly spent at the eye ward at Greenlane Hospital). I am not even going to attempt to chronicle the phone calls and online exchanges with teachers and principals, the cluster wiki building and blogging.

As a consequence I cannot wait to be “lifted up by the ribs, then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table.” as it were – at Learning@School in the Energy Events Centre in Rotorua. 

I feel over ready for Learning@School – over ready for a little Billy Collin’s like “sitting down there amidst the wallpaper, staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?” time where the only “striding around” will be done by our ict_pd cluster teachers who are presenting for the first time.

I have chosen my breakouts carefully – on the basis of location – not content – I want to find a seat in one location at the start of day one and remain there throughout – accepting without qualm anything that might waft in front of me.  It is a registration tactic that has worked well for me in the past – choice in edu_conferences is often over-rated and bound to disappoint.   

When I am sitting down there amidst the wallpaper – listening to the presenters allocated the space I have registered for - I will be thinking about how their presentation links to notions of “communities” and the NZ Curriculum Key Competency notion of “Participating and Contributing”

Key Competency: Participating and Communicating - Be aware of local/national/global communities/ understand the purpose of these communities/respond appropriately in a group situation/ make connections with others/ take on a range of roles/display an awareness of local/national and global issues/ be actively involved in community issues/understand the importance of balancing rights, roles and responsibilities/make decisions/ contribute to social/physical and economic environments

Participating and communicating in the Key Competencies seems to be painted as all about community – which makes me wonder if this is why the participation and communication of those who ride as outsiders in education are seldom recognised by those within.

When I sit in the audience at L@S – staring straight ahead with my little plastic face – I don’t think that shared interests will be enough to claim that I am part of the learning community.

For when you think about it - community requires a sense of belonging, a sense that individuals matter to one another and to the group – a sense that I and others in the audience have influence and something to contribute, and a belief that we will be rewarded for our participation in meeting the needs of others - and finally community requires that as members we share a sense of history – an emotional connection.      

The  first problem I foresee in building a sense of community/ belonging in the brief time the L@S registrants are together in Rotorua is trivial - it lies in the absence of a conference bag this year – perhaps the carbon footprint zealots who dispensed with the conference bag in the interests of reducing our footprint (whilst at the same time retaining the conference buses to ferry participants to venues across the city and maintaining computer servers that are as bad for climate as SUV’s doing 15 miles to the gallon ) - will have granted a carbon footprint concession to the conference name tag.

For without any overt signs of (learning) community membership how will I know if the people I nudge up against in the Pig and Whistle are L@S community, tourist or locals?

I figure that I am going to have to rely on that unmistakable teachers’ dress code (we might not know what this is but ask anyone who isn’t a teacher) and the loud flocking behaviours of teachers in public places  to distinguish the L@S teachers  from the rest of Rotorua. 

Some Days   by Billy Collins
 
Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?