A busy week (again!) with finishing off exam marking and unexpectedly going to the SHP (Schools History Project) Conference on Saturday/Sunday. It was a great experience which I’ll be discussing a bit more in the next few days. What follows is stuff that’s caught my eye this last week and the week before… :p

I’ll mention these blog posts in what follows:

• Learning Is Messy – Have Too Many Lost The Passion?
• Teaching in the Digital Age – Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Cool Cat Teacher Blog – If you want me to try, tell me why!
• Futurelab – One Tablet or Two?
• elearnspace – Downes on Subjectivity/objectivity
• Mark’s edtechblog – Blogging through the school year: parts 1, 2 and 3

Brian Crosby, in Have Too Many Lost The Passion?, looks at the rigidness of the educational system in the USA. He insinuates that the diktats from on-high mean that teacher professionalism is slowly (or in some cases, quite quickly) ebbing away. This leads to a lack of passion for teaching and therefore uninteresting, uninspiring lessons that don’t use elements of some of the great strides forwards educators have made pedagogically-speaking over the last few decades. This links rather nicely to something Vicky Davis was talking about in If you want me to try, tell me why! where she looks at the reasons students have for learning in the first place. Often it’s parental or teacher expectation that makes the difference. It’s teachers that inspire and propel young people towards their goals. Now if they’re simply regurgitating something either partially or wholly prescribed, then their enthusiasm will go. And with it (in many cases) will go a lot of ambition, dedication, inspiration and hard-work on the part of their students.

The problem is that the bureaucrats who run education in many western education systems – the majority of whom have never taught – have an outdated conception of knowledge. This is something which is the focus of an ongoing debate between George Siemens and Stephen Downes, to which I shall refer presently, but also discussed by Louise Starkey in Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy. She states:

Bloom’s taxonomy has been useful tool in developing educational tasks for the past 40 years. It was based on an underlying assumption that the mind behaves like a filing cabinet. This assumption is being challenged as the implications of learning in the digital age is explored further.

Quoting a paper by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1998) Louise lists the following 7 levels of approach to knowledge:

1. Knowledge as individuated mental states. Knowing that one person may know things that someone else does not.
2. Knowledge as itemizable mental content. Telling knowledge in the order in which it comes to mind.
3. Knowledge as representation. Telling knowledge taking into account the listener/ reader.
4. Knowledge as viewable from different perspectives.
5. Knowledge as personal artifacts. Viewing oneself as constructing knowledge.
6. Knowledge as improvable personal artifacts. Viewing a theory in terms of what it can and can’t do, what its strengths are and where it needs improvement.
7. Knowledge as semi-autonomous artifacts. knowledge objects, like other constructed objects, take on a life of their own and can be considered independently of their personal relevance.

I’m still mulling this over and need a chance to read Bereiter and Scardamalia in full. Likewise with the conversation between Stephen Downes and George Siemens – as I did my undergraduate degree in Philosophy this interests me greatly. Hmmm…

Finally, a weekly roundup of mine wouldn’t be complete without some mention of educational technology. So here it is – in two guises. Firstly, Futurelab have published a discussion paper entitled One Tablet or Two? Opportunities for Change in Educational Provision in the Next 20 Years. In it, the author (Sean McDougall) discusses briefly the history of educational technology before going on to look at how it can be used to enhance learning in future. Some standout bits for me were:

While educationalists would agree that schools have always tried to incorporate the latest technology into their work, outsiders would observe that the biggest change in the classroom between 1900 and 2000 was the colour of the blackboard.

…or indeed the ‘interactiveness’ of the board, or who has ownership of it. Which brings up a plethora of related questions relating to the teacher-learner dynamic.

How strange that… we still shape our lessons as if they are Christian religious services. Our children, dressed up for the occasion, come into the room and sit silently in rows facing the front, just like the congregation. The teacher plays the role of parish priest – an authority figure who stands at the front, providing information that children are encouraged to remember and repeat. Knowledge is salvation.

A bizarre analogy but, I suppose, a valid one. Hopefully we’re getting away from the ’sage on the stage’ model, but there’s still an awful lot of it about. It’s more of a factory production model, as McDougall also alludes to – get raw materials in, ‘add value’ and then ship them out. :p

While the rest of society has used technology to transform the way in which we do things, schools tend to accept new technology only when it reinforces the old conventions of teaching, or when its saturation of the market is so complete that it cannot be ignored.

Interactive whiteboards, anyone?

Mobile phones threaten loss of control. Nowadays, the average age of a first-time owner is eight, yet despite their enormous potential as a means of learning and for the exchange of information, mobile phones are banned in most schools. The most popular mass communications device in schools remains the assembly hall – a place where children sit in silence, listening while adults shape their learning experience.

True, true. I pretty much wince every time I tell a student to turn off their ‘phone. I realise the potential of them but I’m not really in a position to buck the dominant school view that Mobile Phones Are Bad Things. We should be looking at the potential of such devices – after all, my current mobile phone is at least four times as powerful as my first PC… :s

Tradition is a powerful force which can be used for the good. But on the other hand, doing things ‘because we’ve always done it that way’ is dangerous and often leads to negative outcomes:

Let’s think about place, process and people. Yes, children learn in schools, but they also learn in bedrooms, on the bus, in museums and libraries and while walking down the high street. Independent tests have proved that they are entirely capable of listening to music, video-conferencing, texting and watching a documentary simultaneously, with almost no loss of information intake. Given access to the internet, most children will engage in school work in the mid to late part of the evening.

We need to change the system. But that would have huge social and political, as well as educational, implications. Parents would have to perhaps their working patterns, political capital would be perhaps lost by a party proposing it, etc. Anywhere, anytime learning sounds great for adults, but I’ve yet to meet meet many parents that seriously want it on an everyday basis for their offspring…

As usual, the Scandanavians are ahead of the game:

In some schools in Copenhagen, children choose where they want to learn. Some sit quietly in the library, others walk round the school together chatting, others use laptops to ask their penpals for information or make a PowerPoint presentation. They work in ways that enhance their employability – sharing knowledge, persuading, pursuing – and it matters not a jot that the teacher was not standing in front of them at the time. Technology (combined with a proper human relationship with the children) allows for full assessment of their learning. In Danish there is no role exactly equivalent to ‘Teacher’; the nearest you can get is ‘Learninger’ or ‘person who enables learning’.

Sometimes it’s the very process and environment of traditional schooling that is the problem for students. McDougall gives the example of Notschool which works with students excluded from mainstream schools and for whom home tuition has not worked. Its virtual infrastructure has led to ‘a GCSE pass rate that is above the national average and at least ten times the pass rate for other excluded children.’ That must be telling us something.

And finally (because I’ve been going on a bit…) Mark Ahlness has been blogging for the past year with his students. His thoughts about this and diaries are collected in Blogging Through the School Year, parts 1, 2 and 3. It’s very much been a success story and I’m going to try and integrate blogging into my teacher from next year! :D