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2007's Top Five Photos in Review

Dean has set me one of the toughest end-of-year-navel-gazing-but-jolly-good-fun tasks: my favourite five photos. I could spend a long time on this, so I've also used Flickr's interestingess and stats, too, along with my personal prefs to find the five ones that mean the most:


The most beautiful baby on the planet, my number one choice for a photo (though not taken by me). Amongst the memorable times, her first aeroplane trip to New Zealand - 26,000 miles at six weeks.

One of my cheeky shots at BLC07 this year of Will, it's indicative of the thrill and fun I had meeting old friends and meeting old online friends for the first time. Our evening on the ship, with raucous laughter and far too much of Christian Long's favourite brandy, made all this blogging stuff worthwhile! [more pics]

This was a pivotal moment for me: the people (and beer) that made me decide to go self-employed. Steve Moore, left, is one person to whom I am eternally grateful, for his confidence-boosting and considerable recommendations that have led to many an interesting rencontre. Euan Semple helped me work out how much ($) and how much (:-) I was worth. This scene is from Reboot in Copenhagen, a conference/unconference based around the theme of Human?, at which I talked without meaning to, and had confirmation from those outside education that education was doing lots of things right. [more pics]

The stats say you love this one: the kilos of kit required to keep online conferences on the road (and this RSS/Flickr/unconference junkie in one piece). I've since upped my insurance cover... This particular bunch of kit was for something else I loved, but didn't have enough photos for: TeachMeet.

Mike Coulter decided at the beginning of 2007 that anyone interested in social media in Edinburgh needed a place to wax lyrical: Edinburgh Coffee Morning was born. The off-white tables at Centotre have been the stage for many a discovery, a talk-through, an idea-bounce, a new friendship. Thanks to Mike for starting it all, and all the lads and lasses who've made it along on those early morns this year. [more pics]

The MET Schools: an ingredient for the future of schooling?

The MET Schools, Rhode Island, USA, take open-ended schooling to a level about which most of us can only hypothesise. I was fortunate enough to visit four of these schools in Providence this summer as part of BLC07.

There are now MET Schools all over America, changing the face of US education under The Big Picture Company umbrella - their site carries the aims and ethos of the schools. Just taking a look at some of my photos from the day will a small part of the big picture.

Pick-Me-Up
When you enter a MET School, initially funded through the Bill Gates Foundation and now providing education on the same funding as any other state sector school, you get what the students get: an early morning Pick-Me-Up. Someone shares a story, what they've been doing: a student, a teacher, the Principal, an 'outsider'. They effectively give a face-to-face blog, where the comments come thick and fast and a dialogue begins. The whole school attend pick-me-up, but when your maximum school size is 150, with a Principal and the administration that entails, it's not too much to ask.

Also, when the walls are magnetic and loosely attached to each other, making a room a few metres squared bigger isn't too much hassle, either.

MET Schools can say with no sense of irony or "management speak" that they are truly centred around the child. When we asked what mechanisms were in place for student involvement, expecting to have seen student councils and boards, the students looked kind of quizzically at us: "we're always saying how this school should be run; we're always working in partnership with our advisors (teachers)."

The schooling here is based on four 21st Century education principles:

• Knowledge
• Application of knowledge and critical thinking
• Experiential learning: learning by doing
• Storytelling and presentation skills

In the MET, every teacher is a generalist, helping to scaffold learning alongside others: students, parents, local business. There's an emphasis on the practical hands-on connection to learning, something they have honed over the past 6-6 years.

What does a day look like?
After Pick-Me-Up, groups of around a dozen students enter their Advisory. This is their first and only class, with the same Advisor (teacher) getting to know them, and them getting to know each other, for an unbroken four year period - until they leave school. They plan their learning with their Advisor and each other, once every quarter, building a narrative around a project and then presenting a final exhibition of their work to family, friends and school. The plan is not something that can be formulated in one meeting; it takes a long time for advisor to get to know student, for student to find an internship that's going to actually bring them something worthwhile. It's worth it in the end, of course: Lyall followed her passion of organising events and now works for the New England Patriots doing just that. Passion is the main criteria for doing, or not doing something at school. If a student does not have a personal passion for something then they will not be allowed to follow learning down that road. Just watching Lyall illustrates what I mean:

Assessment and the real world
Formative assessment is in, summative assessment is saved for the very end. Meta-cognition, learning how to learn and knowing what and how you've learnt, is equally important. Ultimately, it's the assessment that peers give in that final exhibition that counts most - and makes them never want to fail. Impressing your peers in the audience is the ultimate in motivational carrots.

And school work is not the only thing being assessed. Two days a week are spent in internships with local businesses - the four schools in Providence feed off a network of over 1200 businesses, built up over the years, with students firing off letters and making phone calls to arrange over 1000 internships for themselves every year. The schools' Advisors visit these businesses on a rotating cycle, seeing them at least every three weeks. Individual internships can last anything between three months and several years.

Making time count, 24 hours a day
MET Schools have a lot going on in them, with students following completely individualised personalised timetables, internships and learning paths. the equivalent of Literacy and Numeracy hours are set aside to guarantee some continuity of progression. "Where does 'Core PE' fit into this?" you might ask. Here, if a student is taking part in sport outside the main school day, for example, then this is documented and counts towards their school time. The same goes for literature studied or films viewed. The whole time spent my the child counts as learning - why should learning only be accountable between the hours of 9am and 4pm?

University life appears relatively well-structured when that time comes, as students are continuously taught time-management skills to cope with the complexity of working for oneself.

Getting breadth out of depth
Having students choosing their own learning paths means that a lot of depth can be gained in some areas, while none is achieved in others. This is where the Pick-Me-Up and close-knit Advisory Group setup is invaluable. As students share in their exhibitions and informal discussions, interviews with Advisories and collaborative brain-picking with peers, the breadth of study you'd hope for in a more traditional school setting is achieved. Key to this working well is the Advisor, who aggregates all the work going on in the school and attempts to make links between students who could mutually benefit from working with each other.

How do they pay for it?
As I've said, the amount spent on a student in a MET school and the amount spent on a regular state school are roufghly the same. But in the MET about 80% of student 'cost' is spent on salaries of staff, to make class sizes no more than around a dozen. They're not spending on textbooks or large scale facilities, their schools being so small, which means there's that much more to invest in what really matters: the teachers. There is no shortage of ICT equipment for students to use, with enough money saved up to create media studios and theatres for the community to use, too. When we were in a local rapper and hip hop artists was in recording some tunes in the studio, for free in return for mentoring some students during term time. As you would have hoped, students are encouraged to bring in their own tools as much as possible to ease the load.

Does it work?
The MET provides a highly effective means of schooling kids. Attendance runs at 95%. Every child sits their SATs (final examinations), where in many state schools up to 20% can be refused, so as not to negatively affect the overall results. 80% of these students choose to move on to Further or Higher Education - 100% of them get accepted.

The low-/no-assessment model of the MET is respected by the universities, but only after the schools had gone out to the universities to explain how things are done, that the students are that good bit more rounded and that their scores, if the same or slightly lower than the norm, don't reveal this extra added value these students bring, above all their hard-work and passion-led ethic.

The MET's too busy with teaching and learning to be spending the disproportionate time on exam technique that most traditional state schools do.

The schools reach out into the community, often in sensitive areas. There is no graffitti, the sports fields and facilities are open to the community and the community returns the favour by welcoming the school in.

On an emotional literacy scale the MET is somewhere in the stratosphere. In state schools only a third of students say that they feel there's an adult they can approach with their problems. In the MET, nine out of ten students feel that they can approach their teacher. What does that say about the kind of education on offer?

The MET welcomes over 1000 visitors a year, events being organised by students, of course. If you fancy a gander, head over the The Big Picture and arrange your management team or department their own visit.

Harry, Hermione and Ron give a clue on digital literacy

  They've got it! 
  Originally uploaded by Edublogger

After witnessing the madness of the last Harry Potter book going on sale in Harvard Square, Boston, last month, I wasn't too sure why so many young people (actually, increasingly aging fans) were so keen on the books. But Mrs Edublogger didn't have to drag me out too hard to see the latest Potter film yesterday, and I think I might have touched on one reason why: it translates a lot of the frustrations and excitement of being a teen today.

This morning I see in the paper that an Australian academic reckons there are more lessons on how to teach in Potter books than there are in most post grads. But I already knew that.

For me there was a key moment in yesterday's film which reflects all too well what much classroom teaching involving the web is about these days:

Dolores Umbridge: Your previous instruction in this subject has been disturbingly uneven. But you will be pleased to know from now on, you will be following a carefully structured, Ministry-approved course of defensive magic. Yes?
Hermione Granger: There's nothing in here about using defensive spells.
Dolores Umbridge: Using spells? Ha ha! Well I can't imagine why you would need to use spells in my classroom.
Ron Weasley: We're not gonna use magic?
Dolores Umbridge: You will be learning about defensive spells in a secure, risk-free way.
Harry Potter: Well, what use is that? If we're gonna be attacked it won't be risk-free.
Dolores Umbridge: Students will raise their hands when they speak in my class.
[pauses]
Dolores Umbridge: It is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be sufficient to get you through your examinations, which after all, is what school is all about.
Harry Potter: And how is theory supposed to prepare us for what's out there?
Dolores Umbridge: There is nothing out there, dear! Who do you imagine would want to attack children like yourself?
Harry Potter: I don't know, maybe, Lord Voldemort!

Does this not just sum up the problems I alluded to in the last post, regarding internet safety and its long lost cousin digital literacy?

I'm not spoiling the film to point out that Lord Voldemort, while being the baddie, is not the only baddie in this story. The teacher, Dolores Umbridge, is 'old school', uses techniques which are outdated and discipline which is archaic, "never liked children anyway" and works for the Ministry. Sound familiar?

BLC07 McIntosh No.3: We're adopting! A strategy for social media in education

Part three out of three parts.

Social media, and whether or not it's adopted in any organisation, is almost entirely down to the culture of the organisation. But having a culture that doesn't match the aspirations of openness and sharing that would make social media a natural progression for the organisation does not mean that all is lost.

East Lothian Council does have a culture of openness in its Education Department senior management. The Head of Education, for example, has had a blog for a couple of years, progressively moving away from "here's what I did today" to asking some really hard questions about his job, they way he and his colleagues operate and where education should go next. To expect that this culture of public self-questioning and planning is shared by all teachers and managers would be naïve, though.

So how has the Authority, in one year, moved from a steady band of about 20 people sharing their views and thoughts on the web, to over 350 educators? The answer from one person will never be complete, so I'm going to fill in part of the story with some of what I reckon has contributed to social media being adopted on such a relatively large scale. There are other great places to go to read more about the preparations that went into the beginnings of cultural change in the Authority, and I'd encourage colleagues working on the eduBuzz project to give their takes, too.

Kind of strategy, kind not of
It's easy to do the following things:

• The Pilot Project
  As Don would say, "I've never seen a pilot project fail". It's true. That's because pilots, small scale short-term exploitations are easy to make successes of. They come with budgets, staffing and time, they are written up as the successes they ought to be, and then usually fail to get buy-in from the staffers who do not have the budgets, the extra staffing and time. They are good for proving a point before making a bigger expenditure on the project, but when the project needn't come with any cost at all (like in social media) a pilot project really loses its point.
  
  Pilot Projects are good for one thing: they give implicit permission to fail, which releases people to try things that wouldn't normally get past the User Group  or senior management. However, when your culture already accepts that failure is healthy then, once again, we've lost the need for the pilot.
   
   
• The Focus Group
  A pilot project by any other name, this allows a smaller group of people to play around, try things out, and make decisions for the majority by virtue of being "representative" of that majority. It's easy to get this kind of group together but, when social media allows you to involve any number of people (there's no limit on meeting space, time to comment, finance to get people there or pay for their time off) the focus group seems overly hierarchical, even though three years ago it would have seemed incredibly democratic.
   
   
• Democratic or "Open Source" Management
  This means that we ask everyone their opinion and opt for the option that most like, or opt for a mix of the options to compromise. Again, prior to the days of social media this seems logical. In an age, however, where every niche, every desire can be met at little or no cost of time or money, is there any need for compromise? We can offer a blank canvass and let the member of the organisation or community choose how they want to interact.

All strategies, you see, have flaws or miss something out in the detail. The problem with the generic term of "social media adoption" is that for each tool or way of working there is a different set of details to communicate. We've all done it: "You could use a blog to do this, or a wiki to do that. Why not add some audio and make a podcast..." If you're dealing with a dozen new tools that's an awful lot of detail to try to include, and a lot of implicit goodness to miss out.

To avoid the detail, I personally liked Suw Charman's strategy and last summer as part of the blog.ac.uk conference set about educationalising it. And, more or less, the ICT Team in East Lothian has used this strategy directly or indirectly to help encourage more educators to take up sharing their expertise through social media of one sort or another. It's what you might call 'common sense' planning.

The Strategy

1. Identify key user groups
The first step is to identify which potential user groups within the Local Authority could most benefit from using social software.

• What are the different groups of people in the authority? Go crazy. Find as many as you think are out there.
• What needs do these people share? Group them together, find common ground.
• What are their day-to-day aims? This is not aspirational stuff, just what people are trying to get done for their day job.
• What projects are they working on together?
• What information flows between them, and how?  Why do they choose to do things this way? Lack of choice or because a chinese meal is a nice way to do things?
• If they're using some social media tools, which one or two tools are they already using to make things possible?

2. Identify and understand key users
Once you have identified key user groups, you need to know which users within that group are both influential and likely to be enthusiastic. Then consider how social software fits in to the context of their job, their daily working processes and the wider context of their group's goals.

• What specific problems might social software solve?
• What are the benefits for this person?
• How can the software be simply integrated into their existing working processes?
• How does social software lower their work load, or the cognitive load associated with doing specific tasks?

Ideally, key users will be 'supernodes' - highly connected, in contact with a lot of people on a daily basis, and heavily involved with the function of their department and the transfer of information within the group and between groups. This may not be the group executive, but could well be his PA or a direct report. Frequently, people's supernode status is not reflected by official hierarchy.

In education there are already strong links to explore: look at bringing on board alliances that are already in existence.

At this stage, where you have around 20 key users who kind of know their stuff, it's brilliant (essential, even?) to get the technical support side hooked in. Bring the IT managers in on the meetings you have about pedagogy. Get some of the educators in on meetings the IT managers have about filtering and blocking. It doesn't matter if the IT managers say 'no' immediately, or if the educationalists can't find some convincing arguments to bring the IT guys around. This is about helping people understand how others work and what might need some thought later on. For the moment, we're just using third party tools outside the 'official' network.

3. Convert key users into evangelists

Training in the form of short informal sessions (face-to-face or online) and ongoing on-demand support are the basics for encouraging adoption. Too much training or too formal a setting will put users off, and is usually unnecessary.
More important is that the information gathered in steps 1 and 2 are communicated to key users. They need to understand:

• What their own needs are
• How those needs are going to be met by the software
• What the benefits are of using the software
• How they can integrate that software into their daily routines

This requires face-to-face, personalised sessions which won't happen unless this initial group of key users feel empowered and 'part' of something. That means it's a great help if more senior managers are part of this, too, and even better is when the IT managers, the 'corporate' people, are involved. This is the point where practical issues such as access might be considered. It might seem late on in the process, but with the understanding of how these technologies can help reduce workload and improve learning there is more 'ammunition' to help convince those blocking services, sites or technologies. If there are hardware or software procurement issues now might also be the time to show the benefits in relation to the cost.

The aim is to convert key users into evangelists who can then help spread usage through their own team, encouraging the people they work with to take the training and use the tool themselves. Evangelising works here because the key users are still working in an enthusiastic group of people, most of whom (s)he knows and by whom (s)he is respected. But no-one likes an evangelist - they talk a good game, but what people want is not motivation, but training. Making the switch to trainers as soon as possible will help keep things rolling along.

This is where concrete examples or good practice where success has been met by traditional (summative assessment) standards - convince the old guard that technology can serve their aims, even if the route is different.

As more people get skilled up it might be worth considering a support wiki allow everyone to participate and contribute – a network of involvement. It's not so much that everyone will contribute, but it's healthy for growth in the community if they know they can.

4. Turn evangelists into trainers
 The advantages of having evangelist-trainers are immense:

• They understand the day-to-day needs and working processes of their colleagues far better than an external trainer can;
• They can communicate with their colleagues more easily, in the same language;
• They have the opportunity to provide effective training on a far more informal, ad hoc basis;
• Given enough support themselves, they can then support their immediate colleagues;

5. Support bottom-up adoption and emergent behaviours
Training and support should not be limited to named groups, and should be made available to all users. 'Volunteers', especially, should be encouraged. The most influential people in a wiki or blog community are not those with official status but those who engage most enthusiastically. For example, wikipedia has about 90,000 registered users who have edited at least 10 times since they joined, but the majority of work is done by about 5% (4500) of these users. (Stats approx. for Nov 05.)

If people start to use social software in an unexpected, innovative, or informal manner, this should also be encouraged. If a user begins by putting their team's coffee rota on the wiki, for example, this will help them understand how the wiki works and what benefits it brings.

Management support
As well as supporting bottom-up adoption, it is beneficial for there to be top-down support, but that support has to be based on openness and transparency. Managers and team leaders must trust their staff to use the tools correctly, but they must also be forgiving if mistakes are made. There is always a learning curve associated with any new software, and some people find social software daunting because they are scared of what they perceive as a high risk of public humiliation.

All this helps avoid what has traditionally happened when the 'official' or paid-up member of staff responsible moves on - there is a grassroots appreciation of how the technology can work and benefit others, a whole set of helpers and enthusiasts to fill the gap left by the original organisers, for example. If something is imposed, then it is received differently from something that is chosen.

It is important that management do not see their role as 'managing' the technology but fostering and supporting it. The difference is subtle but vital - managing too closely has been seen in the past as micro-managing or meddling. Once grassroots adoption is apparent management should, indeed, take a backseat role.

Managers and team leaders could:

1. Lead by example
By using the tool themselves for team- and department-wide projects, managers can encourage their colleagues to also use social software. By being active, showing subordinates how the new tools can be used, and demonstrating the benefits, manages can play a valuable role in fostering adoption.

In the software industry, this is known as 'eating your own dogfood', and it is essential in order to build trust, interest and understanding.

2. Lead by mandate

If the manager makes clear that this new tool is to be used for a specific process or task, it can help foster adoption and encourage reluctant users to learn how to use the tools. For example, managers can mandate that all meetings be documented on a wiki, with agendas written through collaboration and minutes being published as soon as the meeting is over, or that monthly/weekly update reports be made on a blog or a wiki instead of in a Word document or by email.

Key to leading by mandate, however, is that the manager must also lead by example. If one of his team puts a document on the wiki, but the manager comments on it by email, that gives conflicting signals to the team. Managers must be clear about which tool they expect people to use, and must use that tool themselves.

Arrive at a position where not using is more difficult than using!

3. Lead by reminding

Managers can also increase usage by reminding colleagues to use new technology instead of old, e.g. when a colleague emails with a document to be proof-read, the manager can reply with a request to put it on the wiki.

4. Ensure there is adequate support

Managers must accept that their staff may require support, and they must be willing to allow staff to take time out to do training. They must also ensure that they have access to ad hoc support, so that problem can be solved quickly - it is important that there is someone tasked with 'hand holding' through the initial adoption period.

5. Ensure personal and business benefits reflect each other
Management plays a key role identifying and communicating the business benefits of social software adoption. When users understand these benefits (e.g. reducing email volume, speeding up projects, improving productivity, encouraging innovation), and see that the business benefits are in line with the personal benefits, (everyone likes to get less email) they will have greater confidence that the software is worth their own investment.

In education, one of the biggest challenges is encouraging teachers and students that reading each other's work is beneficial and important for development and innovation. Unless we are 'doing' something (i.e. not reading) then it appears a 'waste of time'.

Understanding time-scales
In large companies with thousands of users, it is impossible to give everyone face-to-face training, but even with online screencasts and help documents, it takes a significant amount of time for adoption to take place.  Two years is about the length of time it takes to get a good scale of growth with a lot of hard work. Having a clear adoption strategy, and ensuring that the correct key players are identified and 'converted', helps to speed up the process, but it remains a fact of human nature that it takes time for people to become comfortable with new technology, new ways of doing things and, most importantly, new cultures.

The cultural aspect of implementing social software in enterprise cannot be underestimated, and it is the hardest aspect to overcome. It requires time, patience and understanding, but given those three, it too is a temporary obstacle.

Remember what your goals really are

Adoption of social media isn't a goal in and of itself. Think about what your ultimate aims are; make them discrete, measurable and attainable. Go for 'reducing occupational spam', for example, rather than 'improve communications'. Measure your email usage before you start, monitor it whilst you adopt, and report back regularly so that people can see the progress that they are collectively making.

In education, the goals are more likely to be related to the vagueness that teaching and learning policies often can be. Trying to cut to the core message so that everyone can get it is the key. It's a bit like giving a good quote to the press: cut to the chase and get to the core in 30 seconds flat.

It's something East Lothian has managed to do rather well (pdf), using blogs, wikis and video podcasts to spread the word and gain people's opinions on the final core messages. In turn, it has probably been the key element in relating why social media is such a key element in improving teaching and learning.

BLC07 McIntosh No.2: How Public Is Your Public Body?

Part two out of three parts.

I don't know one public body, particularly in the education world, that doesn't have the mantra, the strategies or the policies which make sure that stakeholders are consulted, that dialogue is continuously deepened and that the organisation "really gets to know its public".

But when you ask the question about how public your public body is, or how open your organisation is, you are immediately going to have to answer the question of how private you want it to be. The two words are inextricably linked and most organisations still tend to tread on the side if private rather than public.

So when you are comfortable with your organisation's background and the myths of 5 Million Years on which you are going to base your future strategies, how can you move forward when the world is so, well, new and ever-changing?

Who am I?
"Hello, my name is Ewan McIntosh and I am... oh. Who am I?" More people than ever are having trouble introducing who they are and what they do. Gone are the days where we decide what we want to do aged 17 and stick with it for the rest of our lives, but so, too, are the days where simply being good at something means that you will stay with it forever. It's more likely that the job title you have bears little relation to what you do if, indeed, you have the luxury of just one job title. LinkedIn and Facebook are full of people with multiple employments, multiple identities.

So who are you? Let's try something. I want you to grab a small piece of paper or post-it, open notepad on your computer or take a look at your own Facebook profile. In no more than 2 minutes, try to write down who you are, in the same way these tools invite you to define yourself:

• Name, relationship status, birthday, hometown
• Education and Employment
• Favourite activities, TV shows and music

Does this really define who you are? The problem, to use some language from Dave Weinberger's zeitgeisty masterpiece, is that you're trying to make explicit who you are, when so much of who you are - your friendships, attitudes, the nuances in your work and play - is built up over time and, for you and those around you, remains implicit. Attempting to make the implicit explicit makes it sound flaky, not quite right, pretentious even.

Trying to make the implicit explicit
What do I mean by this implicit-explicit play-off? How many of the elements you were writing down just there were crying out for an asterisk here or there, just a little more information than would comfortably fit in the space or category. How many pieces of information did you hesitate to add, not knowing if the audience was close family, extended family, friends, work contacts, online-only contacts...? The chances are, a lot. How many of you wanted to fill in gaps, add extras, show how things developed over time (how many jobs, for example, change form one day to the next? Many now evolve and morph into new projects). How many of you felt that adding the context to the element you were writing down would make it clearer for a stranger or long-lost friend coming across it?

Our online-offline worlds are raising more questions about what we can and should share with different audiences. My colleague Matt Locke over at Channel 4 has come up with what I think is a pretty definitive rundown of these different private-public spaces which compete for our information (read his full post for more detail):

• Secret Spaces
  Examples: SMS, IM

• Group Spaces
  Examples: Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, etc

• Publishing Spaces
  Examples: Flickr, Youtube, Revver, etc

• Performing Spaces
  Examples: MMORPGs, Sports, Drama

• Participation Spaces
  Examples: Meetup, Threadless, CambrianHouse.com, MySociety

• Watching Spaces
  Examples: Television, Cinema, Sports, Theatre, etc

Now, try adding all those elements you wished you could include, again, in a couple of minutes - no epics here. Adding the context, the development, you'll find that you make it so far before the exercise seems futile, that the information you are plotting still seems incomplete, that there will always be more to add, that writing it down to make it clear for others is actually over simplifying things and leaving gaps open to misunderstandings. Being explicit will never cover all the implicitness in our complex, interconnected lives.

Yet being explicit is what schools, districts, Local Authorities and whole countries require, isn't it? We need strategies and policies to make sure that everyone is involved in the decision-making process. Yet, if you've been a teacher in a school with 100 teachers (or a company with 100 employees) you know how hard it is to keep track of who's coming and going, let alone get to know them. Add on top of that 1300 students and the strategies and policies of our 20th Century decision-makers aren't going to cut it. We're never going to get to know people in a school, let alone across a whole district.

Well, that's not entirely true...
In East Lothian, a Local Authority to the East of Edinburgh, there is undeniably a heightened understanding from the Authority management of who is working in their schools and what skills, aptitudes and mindsets they have. This has been achieved, in part, by creating an online community where people, not a forum or a blog or a website, have been at the centre of its growth. You can find out more about how this was achieved next week on a revamped eduBuzz.org and the next post in this series, We're Adopting.

Teachers have been able to talk about what they want, make explicit the things that have been implicit in their teaching and learning. But rather than being limited to a form, a questionnaire, a survey, a tick-box, they have been given an unlimited space over an unlimited time to eek out their implicit gems, bounce off each other, be inspired into revealing more of one thing they didn't even appreciate was different from other people.

They've been given as many blogs as they want, for free, with our help. Over a third of the teachers, over 300 of them, have taken up this opportunity to document what makes their teaching tick, what makes their school cool, and have served over a year or so as inspirations to countless others, and a source of valuable person information to the management of the education authority.

Can you have more than 100 'friends'?
I don't think we could say that all those we read on blogs are friends, although large numbers become that. Blogs and the media we put on them do, though, provide a more human opening to a person than any other electronic medium we have at the moment. So when you have over 1000 teachers and support staff in your organisation, of whom 300+ are actively participating in online spaces, can anyone expect to get to know them adequately enough, like a friend perhaps, to gain enough information to inform decisions? How public do people have to get to make that amount of information valuable, instead of same-y, clichéd and not-quite-public-not-quite-private blogging that you get in organisations where the PR machine is more important than the human one?

The answer comes in two parts. The last point helps: people need to feel entrusted to say what they want to say, and communally constructed guidelines with all involved will help get that balance just right. It will also help people see who they need to consult before pressing publish, in case they are unsure about the content of their post, and will help construct some organic pathways through the myriad of blogs: no hierarchical tree of options on a homepage that sends you from the Head of Education's blog "down to" the others, but rather an individual voyage for each individual, discovering what's useful to them.

But this brings up the second point. Hierarchies have traditionally been used to artificially create an upper limit of interactions any one individual can have. It's well-meaning, taking the Dunbar Number of maximum interactions and friendships one can have (150) and turning it into rigid structures through which information flows. It's much the same way the Roman army operated, with groups always set in multiples of close-to-eight, the Centurion being the lynch pin with his 100 men.

Back in real life, though, we do not operate as if we are in the Roman army. Information flows back and forth over coffee cups, glasses of wine, after-school interest groups, school orchestras, garage bands. Information tends not to respect hierarchy, and when this happens the top-down command and control of hierarchy, from the Press Office to the employee, for example, cannot operate, either. We operate, rather, in wirearchies, less command and control, more "champion and channel".

How do you get the hierarchy to embrace its self-destruction?
The worst thing you could do, arguably, is plan how you're going to give people a voice. The reason for this is that people will misunderstand the word 'plan' and start coming up with criterion-referenced strategies (we will have n people blogging by next month) and shoe-horn 'real life' in around it. The kind of cultural changes that might required are less about scaling up and more about getting face-to-face with key people, those who are likely to spread the word and those who potentially could get in the way.

Live in conterburnia
When the time comes to scale things up beyond the initial 20-150 people that have been canvassed and schmaltzed to see the light then far more successful are small changes, prototypes to borrow another Weinbergerism, around which people can cluster when they wish to take part. Lots of small prototypes, cheap or costless, to attract just a few people each time. Eventually, when you add all these small parts up you see that the organisation has, in our case in one year, become incredibly more open than it was before.

The trick, finally, is not to make explicit all the implicit things that make being open so great. When you attempt to make explicit why blogging, Twitter, podcasting, filmmaking, gaming or photography is such a wonderful way to learn and share what you're up to, or why sharing is even a good thing in the first place, you'll lose it. The fragile implicit joy of it all is destroyed. People have no personal attachment to any of these things to start with and evangelising will tend to turn them off further.

People do have a personal attachment to playing, though, and providing some space, some tools and some time to play in small groups (why not make them the size of the Roman conterburnium [8]?) has made a big difference in how many and who takes up sharing through technology in our corner of the world.

Audio-visual presentation
To see what kind of framework can help you keep track of all these smaller projects and maintain a clear way forward, you'll have to wait until I thump out the third and final part of this three-parter. In the meantime, you can listen to the talk here or wait a day or two longer to view the audio-visual version on Slidecast (above) (I'm sorry it's not synced - Slideshare was playing silly games)

Listen to How Public Is Your Public Body [Lo] [mp3]

There's also Bob Sprankle's podcast and the full transcript of the Skypechat that took place at the same time as the presentation - the running commentary, if you will.

BLC07 McIntosh No.1: Why Scotland Has Been Blogging For 5 Million Years

Part one out of three parts.

Before the presentation title puts you off, Scotland is blogging. It's education system is arguably using proportionally more social bookmarking, online video sharing, image sharing, wikis, feed readers and blogs than any other country in the world.

There are a couple of immediate questions that might need answered here: why blogging and social media, and why is Scotland appearing to be so much more connected than elsewhere?

The answer lies unapologetically in looking into our past, as well as our future. That said, I apologise for the length of the post, but it might be worth it...

Why Social Media?
The "why social media" is quite easy to answer, based on some of my previous posts on what social media is now offering us and offering leaders, which has been hard to achieve before now: the increased audience, the creative opportunities to express oneself in more than just words, the richer differentiation and means of assessment, the ubiquitous nature of doing top quality activities, here and now, without having to wait for equipment to arrive.

Answering why Scotland appears to have grasped better than other nations (and I stress 'appears') is a different matter.

Why has Scotland been blogging for five million years? (or why storytelling is so important)
It's one of these claims that is delectably waiting to be blown out of the water by the literal, the doubtful, the Scot, the non-Scot. They'd be quite right. If you've ever tried to find out what was actually happening five million years ago you'd be hard pushed to find much more than the dinosaurs.

But that is where our story begins. The dinosaurs are, for most of us, something of a myth. We know they once lived on earth, we know that they were made extinct by a huge change in our planet's ecosystem, but, above all, we enjoy telling tales, many of them rather tall, about what it was like when dinosaurs walked the earth.

Myths and stories are incredibly important for the Human as a means of knowing where they have come from, where they are now and where they are likely to head in the future. Without myths as a foundation we tend to flounder, pushing back on empty air, to tread water as fast as we can but not get very far, wasting our energies and risking burnout and a lack of impact on our progress.

Yet myths are often viewed as a waste of time by those wanting to 'get on' with the future. Prensky worries that we are looking into the future while walking backwards. My proposition is that rather than walking into the future we use our technology to walk faster, to drive, to rocket even into the future, while at the same time looking over our shoulder for juggernauts from our past coming to ram us down. You know what I mean: "Ewan, we did that back in the 1960s. It didn't work then, it won't work now". Well, sometimes it might just work now, thanks to the significant changes in the tools we have to make things happen.

What's so different about Scottish education?
Scotland has always had a peculiar awareness of its own history, as a mark of distinctiveness not to be assimilated with England. This distinctiveness is based largely upon a set of particular myths on Scottish education, but not a myth in the stuff of legends sense. For us a myth is:

"...a story that people tell about themselves... for two purposes... first, to explain the world and, second, to celebrate identity and express values." [ref]

The Scotland 20:20 report sets out eight myths, eight stories on which Scottish educators, politicians, parents and pupils have drawn over the years to explain away why some things work and others don't. The links on these give you John Connell's excellent summaries of what they mean:

• Unionist Scotland and Nationalist Scotland
• Kailyard Scotland, Divided Scotland, and Collectivist Scotland
• Calvinist Scotland, Tartan Scotland and Educational Scotland

The myths play out in education
The early arrival of near universal literacy and a precocious university system of the 15th Century helped lead to the democratic myth of Scottish education: the lad o' pairts, climbing the educational ladder into the professions. There were always links with the universities, with schoolmasters teaching enough Latin to give direct entry to the unis for the boys, with bursaries in support. Then, Scotland had three universities in the 15th Century (St Andrews, Glasgow, King's College Aberdeen) and two more at the Reformation (Edinburgh and Marischal College Aberdeen), with huge degrees of success. The educational opportunities offered in the countryside made Scotland rather unusual.

The First Book of Discipline in 1560 sketched out an educational structure, from parish school to university. Landowners were obliged to provide a school and pay a salary to a schoolmaster, supplemented by parents' fees. In the meantime, in America at around 1680, it was Scots setting up schools in the South. In Norfolk, Virginia, nearly everyone there is a Scot and nearly every physician in America is a Scot.

A desire to share our education system and spread the/our word had started.

Where Scotland leapfrogs - what was the push in innovation?
By 1775, Scotland is the most literate society in Europe, yet those who had gone to America were holding on to their culture - the culture, now, of a hundred years ago. Already there were "digital divides" of a sort, where Scotland was leading the way into the Enlightenment while America dawdled in its past.

How was Scotland leading the way? Adam Smith (left) was working out the economic dividends of the division of labour, while James Watt was busy inventing the steam engine. The Gregorys & Munros, in Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively, were teaching medicine & Darwin - that is, the Munros were really teaching Charles Darwin. Cadell was jointly responsible for coming up with the idea of the modern factory, basing his capital investment on the work of fellow Scot Smith.

Meanwhile, as the Scots continue to sail to America and spread the word, James Lind found that citrus fruits stop scurvy. This was useful in 1785 for one Captain James Cook, argued by many as a Scot by birth, who was discovering the worlds beyond America. Back home John Pringle realises that the field hospital needed invented to stop doctors being blown up in the battlefield. John McAdam started to pave Scotland's roads with his invention, tarmacadam, or tarmac.

Between 1793-1812 the self-taught lad o' pairts Thomas Telford (left) started building some of the world's most impressive aqueducts while Henry Bell was the first to successfully commercialise the steamboat, on the River Clyde. Meanwhile, on land, George Stephenson set the railways in motion using Watt's steam engines. This is a huge innovation for the cotton mills, invented by fellow Scot Archie Buchanan while another, David Dale, came up with the concept of the factory town.

In health, Scots come up with some amazing innovations at this time. Charles White started the first infimary, in Manchester, England, and John Farrier put standards at the top of the priority list by inventing the Board of Health. James Simpson happily invented anesthetic while another Scot, William McEwen, thankfully came up with some antiseptic. Samuel Smiles finished the 19th Century do-gooding with his appreciation, quite distinct from the rest of the UK, that where private money can pay, the private money should pay.

Innovation's effects on education
When the 1872 Education Act came along, frankly, most of its aims had been met, including equality of access to education for the sexes, the Act itself bringing in compulsory schooling. This formalised a nationalised ideal of public education, secular now instead of supported by the church, with cultural uniformity traceable to the Reformation, another strong part of Scottish education. Illiteracy survived but was stigmatised and deplored by the church and the secular authorities, and the ability to read and write was broad enough to support the beginnings of a tradition of working class self-education and self-improvement. A lifelong education already had small wings.

As an industrial pioneer the class differences were marked, so the myth of universal and democratic education was important to attempt to cut through these divisions.
John Stuart Mill, pulling on the last of our Scottish heros, in Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help, writes:

“The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.”

It's this attitude, of individuals making up the whole, of small pieces loosely joined, that makes Scotland at least some 150 years ahead of the Live Web, Web 2.0, School 2.0 movements.

Technology and curriculum: YouTube in 1940
1888 saw the introduction of the Higher exam, which was still celebrating its birthday 100 years later.

In the 1940s educational technology made its first appearance, in the form of the Scottish Central Film Library, sending out 4000 16mm films every week to schools across Scotland's mainland and islands. School was the place where many children discovered film and television for the first time. The organisation was split in 1974 into the Scottish Film Council and SCET, which later became part of Learning and Teaching Scotland, for whom I work today.

1990s: Reinforcing the professionalism of the teacher
Scotland's always historically been in relative poverty and so the notion that parents would look after the interests of their own children at the expense of others provoked a degree of cultural and moral revulsion when more 'choice' was offered. For example, there was very little take up of the Self-Governing Schools act of 1989 - equality and social unity might be as much myth as reality but it's not important; it's what the people believed). School Boards were largely rejected by parents who had no desire to interfere with the professionalism of the teacher. They did not take over the running of a school from a Head Teacher, taking a minimalist platform.

Policy was developed logically and managerially: conception, development, implementation and evaluation. Once the framework was decided the emphasis was, tragically, on delivery and action:

"Endless reflection on issues of meaning and purpose is seen as unprofitable, an intellectual luxury"
(from Scottish Education, a quote from Scottish Office Minister Forsyth in the early 1990s - has this changed?)

In 1988 the Highers celebrated their 100th birthday, but there was now recognition of too much cramming along with the Standard Grade which replaced the O Level. There was a vocal desire to educate, not examine, and a revised system is ushered in.

Teachers now used self-evaluation with superiors to identify professional development opportunities, rather than to root out the incompetent.

In the 21st century before it begins

"Building generic skills for the 21st century to let Scotland flourish in the Information Age and the knowledge"

This is a quote from a report, written by Nigel Paine of SCET, the former technology and education organisation, in 1999. It's ahead of its time by perhaps four years, but its sentiment lives on in everything we do in Scottish education, or at least everything we strive for.

Conclusions?
So how does one start to understand the success stories of Scottish education, social media, gaming and other technologies? Well, you need to appreciate this strong past, this foundation on which we are building, in order to understand why there is less floundering than we see in other parts of the world. It also reveals the struggles that remain and why some things aren't happening faster, that continual resistance to change but the "publish and be damned" attitude of the innovators who pushed the envelope.

It might be helpful, also, to ask yourself the same questions as I have:

1. What are your guiding myths?
2. Have emerging technologies through the ages, and now, always led to emerging practices?
3. Do your students own their own learning path?
4. Are you meeting children at their (high) creative level?

However, there is also a new set of values which is driving at the core of changing the practice of our teachers. This set of values and strategies are what we will look at in the following two posts in this three-part series.

Next, How Public Is Your Public Body? and We're adopting! An Adoption Strategy for Social Media.

Image credits:  |  Scottish football = social media  |  Robert The Bruce myths  |  Early university: Marischal  |  16mm film

Why some things work for them and fail for everyone else

I have experienced that feeling, that begrudging felicitation when someone else has tried something and has done it really well, yet the same thing has been a resounding flat liner in my own camp. What made it work for them? Why can the destiny of an idea be affected by a few hundred miles, a language or an individual?

Well, after a lot of thinking and plenty of reading and viewing, I've been coming to a startling conclusion (spot the irony): culture is everything in the success or the failure of a plan. Change the culture, you have to change the plan. So how can anyone take an idea for one culture and make that work in their own? Do we have to reinvent the wheel every time? I'd argue, not.

What follows over the next week are three posts based around the presentations I gave at this year's Building Learning Communities conference from Alan November in Boston. They are designed to push some ideas, some thoughts forward, but are also designed to help educators and organisations take a fresh look at what they want, why they want it, how they get it and with whom. Ultimately, it wants to show that while 'where' is important, it needn't mean that your idea will fail.

"It would never happen in my organisation" is a phrase that will, hopefully, leave your vocabulary. Ideally, you will leave after these posts feeling empowered, desiring success in your idea and feeling more likely to get it.

• Why Scotland's Been Blogging For 5 Million Years:
  Where has Scottish education come from? What are the myths on which we can conveniently draw, and ignore when we choose? Where are your own myths and what foundations do they give you to take you into the future? Do you have any myths on which to draw or are you flailing against the flow?
  
  Technology has always been a change agent in our lives and the Scots have been amongst the best at creating and harnessing this change. What lessons can be learned from the past of this vibrant country as netizens around the world try to help understand this current wave of change through technology?
• How Public Is Your Public Body?
  If you want to create change in a public organisation (or even a business) you will very quickly hit the big issues of what is public, and what is private. Public and private needn't be at odds with each other, but what are the different levels of 'private' and 'public', and how has the current technology trend altered that, if at all?
  
  The problem, being human beings an'all, is that the minute we try to explain private, public and technology's role within all that we get far too explicit about what is possible in a negative sense, leaving the implicit assumptions we hold to take care of the positive impact technology could have. Or, the opposite, that we evangelise on the positive incredibly explicitly but we leave implicit the hard work we have done to research the potential risks and weight them up.
  
  Can we call a hammer a hammer? Can we call a blog a blog? When everyone has their own interpretation of what technology is and where it takes us, making our organisations more open and public becomes far more complex than we had first envisaged.
• We're Adopting! An Adoption Strategy For Social Media
  Education, by and large, has made a hash of 'integrating' technology to its work, claiming that "technology will change the world" without acknowledging sufficiently the importance of people in being the agents of change, rather than the technology. "It's not about the tech, it's all about the teach" has never been so true, yet attempting to convince people who don't know much about an element of tech to see what we see in that tech, especially within the context of a seminar, keynote or workshop, is nearly always doomed to failure.
  
  What has one education authority done to create as much online sharing as, arguably, in the rest of the UK put together? East Lothian Council in partnership with Learning Teaching Scotland has achieved this success in spreading the word through strategy and sharing good pedagogy.

The rules of the game for these three upcoming posts: please do comment, please disagree and agree, give your reasonings, tell me they're lame ideas... But, above all, give your reasons why from your part of the world (and be polite). Some come as audiocasts, too, for those who are more audio-visual.

BLC07 Closes - Time to move on from just creativity...

  BLC07 - Over and out 
  Originally uploaded by Edublogger

Building Learning Communities 07 has now come to an official end, although posts with the old BLC07 tag will continue to thump through Technorati from this blog. The conference, in a way, marks just the beginning of a refreshed learning journey for myself, for other speakers and participants.

Alan asked me to help sum up at the end of the conference. The obvious remarkable factor is that this was not a 'Boston conference' as it had been in previous years. Through people making messages on the web and through their mobile phones on Twitter, to the scores joining in on seminars through Skype with their questions, arguments and counterpoints, from the comments on blog posts written in almost real time to the rhythm of the conference, to the many comments that will continue to discuss its contents in the weeks and months to come, this conference has been one for the (relative) masses.

I therefore concluded by amplifying one of the comments made on the blog, admittedly from one of those whose choice of words and friendly manner never fails to push me on to something different.

The passepartout this conference has been the word "creativity", a word that is unfortunately overused and has begun to shrink in useful value for those of us trying to work out what it actually is. The creativity of the young filmmakers with us here, the creativity of some of the presentations and arguments, the creativity shown in some of the throwaway chats I've been having - all of them are completely different genres of creativity, some of them more 'creative' than others.

Stephen Heppell's comment here this morning began to open a new line of enquiry for me. Creativity is almost a commodity, given that everyone is born with some degree of it and some people manage to maintain it at a high level despite their schooling.

How, though, do we make sure that our kids, or even just us, as teachers, don't become a commoditised version of creativity? "Quite creative", but blending into the background as everyone else's level of creativity slowly rises or, at least, the phraseology used to describe their 'creativity' increases the worth of their efforts if not its actual content?

What is the true value of creativity if everyone can claim to be creative?

The answer, says Stephen, is ingenuity. I'm tempted to agree.

Marco Torres' students of filmmaking, of sociology, of storytelling are not creative in the same way as many of the 'good filmmaking' kids that I had worked with. They were exceptional, they made something click, they pulled a chord, they made grown adults weep in a conference centre, they earned a standing ovation from 150 educators who, at the beginning of the week, were asking more about how to assess stuff than how to inspire stuff.

In a word, they had ingenuity. They were ingenius.

The future looks bright. The future is ingenius.

Sustaining Change with Christian Long and Chris Lehman

Chris Lehman is a guy in his mid-thirties who is principal/Head Teacher of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Christian Long has been CEO of DesignShare, and helped Chris create this new school in less than a year.

The needs analysis from Chris, the new principal of a school which didn't exist yet, had to take place in only 72 hours before building started. The key element of the design would be that every architectural space became a secondary learning space, from the café (not the cafeteria) to the gap in the roof where a stairwell should have gone.

What does learning look like?
Inquiry-driven, project-based and empowering for all members - every kid produces something different in a project, not 30 identical projects.

• Inquiry, Research, Collaboration, Presentation and Reflection are the guiding principles of this framework
• That's very similar to the 'Four Ps' that Marco Torres' students use when creating films:
  Planning, Preparation, Presentation, Pheedback ;-)
• Technology, similarly, must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate, again, just like film has enabled and empowered Torres' students.
  

Do we need to start education afresh? Is School 2.0 just a myth?
Learning might look different in these schools which are rebuilt, but it's not the build that necessarily makes the difference to learning, although it helps make it quicker, perhaps. You can rebuild a school without touching a brick. It's vital that, after a conference like this, one does not try to replicate the Philly or the Marco Torres effect in a copy and paste fashion.

You don't need a new building to create a new school or a new classroom, of course. But the same goes for building new (global) models of education, monoliths dedicated to starting afresh, building a new education system from the foundations up. School 2.0 and Classroom 2.0 do not exist, in this blogger's head at least. My classroom and your classroom, my school and your school do exist and it is on our own cultural foundations that we must build. What I've found, though, this week is that a large number of educators don't know where their education system foundations lie. Without these foundations teachers can only flail about looking for traction for future ideas.

It's vital that we look towards what we can learn and adapt to our own situations and that we get the 'top' educated and understanding why the teachers and students in the frontline want and need certain things - like Skypecasts for lessons for parents to follow lessons, too, from afar. Is this a risky business? Well, what's the worst thing that can happen with your best idea?

If you have an idea to share on how we sustain change in education, technologically, in school buildings, above all, in teaching and learning, then please do go and add your tuppence worth to the SustainChange Presentation wiki.

Technology redefines talents

High Definition television is great, an advancement in technology that makes multimedia seem even more real. But it's also redefining who is going to be a television star, as some personalities become unusable when every pore can be seen - hi def becomes dicey.

The industrial revolution made Herbert Spencer in 1859 design an American school curriculum that concentrated on the sciences. 150 years later this is still true, although there's a new revolution that should be influencing our attitudes, curricula, teaching and learning.

And it is in some respects, but Dr Yong Zhao believes educators may only be a very little way along the change curve. We now see countries fighting new cold wars, not industrial ones with bomb threats and infamous red buttons, but cyber attacks where Russia tries to shut down Estonia, China tries to attack Taiwan by ramming it's internet systems.

In children's lives we are also seeing changes in the way that they escape. When we were younger we might have hidden away under a bush or tree, day dreaming and escaping from reality. Today, children do this through computer games and online virtual worlds, but we take so much 'care' of them that we begin to deny them the opportunity to escape in the way to which they have become accustomed. SecondLife, World of Warcraft and so on are not "just games". They are more than that for children looking to escape in the same way, but differently, as today's teachers did when they were younger.

Virtual meeting-up, YouTube sharing of multimedia from our bedrooms, making money from online worlds, outsourcing wealth creation to young gamers in China's latest breed of hi-tech sweat shops, where youngsters 'harvest gold' for richer players elsewhere in the world - how does this change our outlook on life and the way we are?

What does it mean when a pair of young Chinese lads can become famous in their own country for miming a Backstreet Boys number?

What does it mean when I know more of the guys who live 7,000 miles away and who I only met for the first time last night, but who I know better than I know my own next door neighbour? What does it mean when I can watch a film made by some strangers and then completely get what they're about when we meet face-to-face?

What does it mean when McDonalds make the Japanese eat food with their hands with their first store in Tokyo, when McDonalds in one day managed to do what the British Empire had failed to do in their entire Hong Kong occupation: make people stand in line for their food?

There are new talents, new ethics, new moralities with which we have to deal in our schools. We have to deal with them, not brush them under the carpet and wish they weren't there. Our students are affected by global forces, cultural clashes and different value systems.

We need to not only rethink what talents are going to be the most sought after, we also need to think about how to support the emergent talents of our young people and rethink our terms of academic success.

Update: You can listen to the entire talk from Dr Yong Zhao over at Bob Sprankle's Bit By Bit podcast.