Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

If we all knew the idea we'd not be writing blog posts like this, reading them or doing workshops on the matter. We'd be busy pulling that limitless supply of creativity out of its hole to see the light of day and bring us riches, joy, learning and new friends.

However, given that we're not, over the next month or so (or however long it takes me to splurge out those thoughts) I'll be summarising on this here blog some of the best online and offline reading and viewing that has attempted to answer that question, throwing in my own unresearched but tried and tested notions (and a few that haven't even got that far). This post will change to reflect the updating posts that will take a peek at:

1. Why it's important to (want to) know Where Good Ideas Come From.
2. Stand There And Do Nothing: Designing beautiful solutions rather than solving ugly problems
3. Creative Genius. Man At Work: Arguments for not working as a team
4. Getting Creativity Done (GCD): How to get productive and clean down the mental decks
5. Nurturing creativity: Worrying about "Tanya's Bow" or the Dinosaurs: Some arguments for caring about the team, not pissing them off and really understanding what failure is
6. Finding your tribe
7. Creating visions, not missions

As they're posted, please leave comments, disagree, add your own links, videos and pictures. I hope that by the end of it we'll have a resource to which we might come back with the stories of how the works, thoughts and attitudes of others have changed the way we operate.

Bookmark this post and come back to it for updates, and subscribe to the blog to get a daily email or RSS feed in your reader every time there's a new post. Take a look at my instructions on how to subscribe.

Brill pic from Chris Metcalf

Seth on why the textbook industry deserves to die

Seth Godin doesn't just 'do' marketing but he teaches it regularly, too. His latest rant is on the insidious growth of the business of textbook writing and publishing, as a result, he believes, of laziness in the market and cynical money-grabbing by a select few from an ignorant system.

The argument is certainly not that books are inherently wrong in a schooling environment (Seth has sold his share of millions of books). Books such as those I read offer insights from leaders in their fields, normally insights which are relatively up-to-date (give or take 12 months) and which would be a nightmare to try and consume on a 500 pixel-wide blog posting.

But textbooks, written as they are, out-of-date, error-ridden by mistype or time passing, curations of general knowledge rather than journeys through learning with personal insights, almost always are the professor's/teacher's lazy option. Says Seth:

The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?)  When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

Seth's assumption is the same as mine, and the underlying pretext of the eduBuzz platform: that teachers are paid to share their knowledge, not just with those students in front of them but with anyone in their learning communities, and sharing with this community will make us all better teachers and learners.

Arnie's got the right end of the wrong stick: it's not a question of changing the media through which the textbook is published, it's about changing the very notion of the textbook.

By far the easiest way to do this is to blog regularly, in bite-sized, timely learning chunks that can be read, commented upon, linked to and adapted by students, their parents and your peers. It is much harder for everyone to publish this in a textbook, ends up much more inaccurate and, above all, is less accessible due to cost than an internet connection in every home.

Sharing, and sharing online specifically, is not in addition to the work of being an educator. It is the work.

Pic of a TextBook Warehouse

Is education's transformation just down to the teachers?

I've explored before how the number one element in quality education systems is the teacher, according to the growing pile of research. But do parents and the children themselves not have independent roles that, regardless of teacher intervention, have their effect on the course of education's transformation? Of course, they do.

There is, after all, an undeniable role of parents in the faring of their offspring, a role that is often better fulfilled, though not as a rule, in more affluent areas than poor ones, more university-educated communities than not. There are even the first glimmers of this correlation in some maps coming out of the USA, with more, I hope, to follow from 4iP's work in the mapping domain, making English schools maps like this and impenetrable uncomparable Scottish banks of data like this begin to tell the stories behind the data.

We've also seen the importance of parents, top management and full complements of school staff both understanding the point, the issues and the opportunities of using, say, social media in the classroom, or undertaking active learning techniques or coupling them with games technology. The eduBuzz social media platform and community I helped create with David Gilmour in 2005 goes from strength to strength, building an open platform and enticing small passionate groups onto it. To some degree, it has tended to ask for forgiveness later rather than stop trying now, let people in for the richness they have to offer, and rarely chucked - or had to chuck - anyone out.

But eduBuzz moments are in the minority. I don't think parents feel as involved or in control of the more overarching elements of their children's destiny as education policy wonks would have us believe. I also know firsthand how quickly one falls from being "in education" to being "out of education": within weeks of starting work at Channel 4 I was no longer a 'teacher' but a 'media' person (can't I be both?), and I've oft heard the remark of whether someone who's not an active teacher can ever have anything worthwhile to say about education and learning (from consultants to pushy parents...).

We have over the past 10 years talked increasingly of the importance of professionalism of teachers, though the policy-talk has a long way to go before being translated into action in some areas. But, as Julie Lindsay pointed out in a discussion this morning, it's maybe long overdue that we start conferring that same professionalism, with its responsibilities and expectations, on parenting and on young people. For young people, this means caring enough about what they have to say on learning to take major decisions on the back of it. For parents, it means helping parents in parenting as well as giving them a reason to want to think about learning (and not just when their child starts to falter or when they're seeking out a new school).

Local schools often do a great job in communicating to teachers, if not always at providing platforms that allow them/us/the kids to respond, question and bring to account publicly. But on some of our biggest ongoing education transformation discussions we all have to ask two questions:

• Are we taking our debates global enough to see how what we're doing is different from or building on others' successes? Given that most education systems' reforms resemble each other - the UK's nations almost to the letter - it could be concluded that we are not pushing the boundaries of thought far enough, just settling for what one long-past (2002!) public consultation said we wanted. The reason there are not more public consultations is that they are time-consuming and tend to halt development, but this is merely a problem of the 19th century way in which we cultivate those consultations - by email, forum, over a fixed period of time. Where Sky TV employ a Twitter-based reporter, maybe everyone in Government and education policy needs to spend more time listening to the reams of electronic chatter that can steer projects towards more up-to-date conclusions.
  Online networking for teachers and most public servants remains a niche activity. I firmly believe that discussion around pedagogy needs to take place beyond the echo chamber of one school's staffroom or VLE (affected by its school policy) and arguably beyond one nation's intranet (where views cannot be challenged or questioned by those working outside the system).
• Are we taking decisions on pedagogy or are we taking decisions on curriculum and assessment that affect pedagogy in unexpected ways? By acting merely on two parts of the equation - Curriculum and Assessment - most education systems fail in the execution. Time and space spent on developing the execution, the pedagogy, is nearly always lacking, and left to the 'stars' of a given school to do in their own time, with little opportunity to share with colleagues, parents and even students why changes in pedagogy might be worthwhile.

Pic: All Rights Reserved: Binxie

Ken Robinson's The Element: reincarnating creativity

Ken Robinson's "The Element" gets launched in the UK this week. It's a superb tome, and one that every educator, employee or entrepreneur should read, if only to check that they themselves are in the right place personally and professionally. Do your natural talents and passions meet at the same time and place, or are you plugging away at the wrong thing completely? Ken's book contains no simplistic lists of things one must do to survive the 21st century - it's Johnny Bunko for the over-educated.

Update: The RSA have now featured a film of his Element Lecture from February 2009.

Many of the messages will be familiar to those who have viewed his famous TED talk which proclaims, rightly in this blogger's opinion, that schools kill creativity. Why? Here's some of the stimulus from Ken's book along with some of my own observations, thoughts and inaccurate takes on the world of education.

Schools are built for, and in the image of, the industrial revolution
Schools are not only built for an industrial revolution past but also in its image - my first ever teaching placement in the most deprived area of Scotland was marked by every period of learning being 53 minutes long, something more like a chicken processing plant's shifts than a stimulating learning environment, with students batched by age and subject to standardised tests for quality before shipping to the real world. Conformity has thus always had a higher value than diversity. Disciplines on offer are subject to a hierarchy (maths and native language, followed by the sciences with music and the arts chasing the coattails).

Creativity and standardised testing can't share the same bed
We know this set of unchanging givens is killing creativity not just in high schools, though generally to a much lesser degree in primary schools, but also in Higher Education establishments. As the number of school leavers not in employment, education or training (NEET) creates a political headache for governments around the world, they are failing to tackle the continued problem in universities and colleges where the numbers also falling into the NEET category are surpassing the figures for high schools.

From recent personal experience of the 'creative output' of some UK Higher Education institutions I can vouch for a killing of creativity, independent thought and entrepreneurship, as hoardes of undergraduates and MScs fight to conform to what university markers want to see and take advantage of the spread of 'cramming courses' at the expense of pursuing personal passions at their best effort. When working on personal projects that are put forward for commissioning (i.e. asking for several £00,000s from the likes of 4iP) or for national and international media and technology prizes, the constraints of the learning environment ("a one-month unit using only x or y software") are used to justify downright poor propositions. Where's the passion that makes them stay up until 11pm and be up at 5.30am to work on their Big Idea? (These are the times 11 year olds at the New York KIPP schools regularly keep to tackle their learning, something about which they, at least, are passionate).

I said earlier that elementary schools have largely escaped this struggle for conformity, but even this elevated position is being gnawed away by standardised tests and curricula. Nothing in the past three years has made me more depressed about the state of education in England than hearing a young Wolverhampton child, part of a PDA-in-the-classroom project, saying that his prime goal from learning was to "get a five" - I still have no idea what "a five" is, but I have a feeling that it's not something that inspires me.

The death of entrepreneurship
This desire to "get a five" or to gain the best possible SAT test result is based on a wrong assumption, both in the creation of such tests and their perceived value in the wider world, particularly in the growing creative sector (worth £50b a year in the UK). Malcolm Gladwell's (right) Outliers, which I read immediately after Robinson's Element, offers a great counterpart in where creative success comes from in the first place. It explores the element of chance, background and opportunity in one's success, but also the need for a serious superhuman degree of practice at something before you reach the beginning of your prime, somewhere, that is, in the region of 10 years or 10,000 hours of passionate practice.

In the schooling environment we still see in most countries' high schools and higher education establishments, it's rare that the personal passion of a young person is given the chance to steer activity, resource and time in order that they might get close to achieving that 10,000 hours quicker. But it's not all the fault of institutions' structures and strictures.

More often than not, the successful student pictures themselves working in the 'safety' of faceless institutions rather than taking their passions and ideas to market themselves. History shows more entrepreneurs who were not successful students making it in the relative unsupported privacy of their entrepreneurship. Most students fail to realise, as Robinson puts it so well, that a degree these days is not so much a passport to a good job and salary, but a visa, something that needs renewed on an ever more frequent basis. But institutions and Governments are not particularly vocal in promoting this fact, thus encouraging the self-perpetuating myth that going to univesrity is better than going to college which is better than following a passion that, while you're willing to spend every waking hour working on it, might not lead to anything.

What is it that needs to change? Clue: It isn't curriculum or assessment
Nearly every country I've worked in for the past three years, from India to China, New Zealand to the states and provinces of Canada and the USA, from my native Scotland to our neighbours in England and Wales, is fiddling with two things: curriculum and assessment. Technology is often seen as the means of making teaching and learning better. I don't want to tackle here whether it does, but one thing is sure, as Arthur C Clarke (via Sugata Mitra) put it: "If a teacher can be replaced by a computer, then they should." This doesn't mean that all teachers should be replaced by computers, of course. It doesn't even mean that poor teachers should be, really. What it does highlight is that the myth an education system has no poor teachers or even a large hump of mediocre teachers needs to be met head on.

We also need to recognise that, largely, those teachers who use technology the most effectively and lead the way with its use are also, by and large, excellent teachers with or without the technology.

This helps us see what many of us appreciate already: the one biggest element of improving education, making learning more creatively inclined and entrepreneurial, is the teacher. It's not curriculum, class sizes (though smaller class sizes make the teacher's life easier) or even assessment. This is something I've been reporting back from research for two years (and which I've been blown out on more times than I can count). It's not about letting students lead the way with technology and "show us teachers" how it's done. Students are generally quite narrow in their knowledge of how to harness technology or creative venture.

No, it's how teachers and parents teach that is important. It is, to use a piece of edu-jargon, pedagogy, both at school and at home.

Yet no national strategy - and I would love to be corrected - headlines pedagogy as the key factor. Think about it: A Curriculum for Excellence (Scotland); No Child Left Behind (assessment: USA); New Zealand's curriculum is about values, competences, subject areas... Also, there's no large educational business à la Pearson that places its centre of gravity around pedagogy forcing the issue with superb pedagogy-based programmes of change, and with good reason - the business of standardised testing, where pedagogy must play second fiddle to cramming and passing the test, is worth in the USA between $1.2 and $5 billion per year per state. How much is teaching the teachers worth? Currently, a lot less.

Fundamental change through Brains Trusts
When I was having a post-panel-session chat with Clay Shirky (I was on the panel and he was the first question-asker of the day) he talked about my current place of employment not in terms of what it was, but in terms of who was in it: "What a brain trust you guys have there", he said. What did he mean? He meant that the organisation employed what it felt were the best people for the job of moving its business forward, and left them to get the hell on with it. The result of feeling that you're part of this brains trust is that you strive more than you ever have to be the best in the world. How many times has someone called the teachers in your school a "brains trust"? Or, for that matter, the management team? Or the parents? Or the students? How many times a day are you aware that you're goal is to be the best in the world?

When we were developing eduBuzz for students and teachers in East Lothian, we centred it around the people, not the platform or the politique of the education authority's management (who, in some schools and particularly in the early days, riled against what we were doing). In a LIFT talk last year, I made the point of saying that its success as a project was probably down to the fact that it offered an immediate change from the importance placed on the school - school boards, school achievement, school councils - and moved it instead onto a level where individuals - people - were the focus. People, not institutions and paper-borne structures, are the sole way to help individuals find their element, nurture it and take advantage of that for the greater good. It's just that most people who have ound their element have had to go and create their own institutions or projects to find a like-minded tribe - education institutions where one is packed away by age and ability, ability determined through standardised tests, are not the place to find fellow tribesmen and women who want to be the best in the world.

It's the nurturing of the brains trust in one's place of work or place of learning that counts the most if we are to improve learning. Schools are pretty poor at identifying talents that are not testable, yet alone nurturing it (this happens thanks to the actions of individual teachers rather than a systemic ability and framework to nurture talent, in the same way as, say, a broadcaster like Channel 4 does; there, the raison d'être is to nurture alternative voices and new talent, with a budget and infrastructure built more or less solely around this. My own department, for example, manages some £50m of public and private money to nurture new talent in online, mobile and gaming media alone.).

Making sure that our current and future students in schools and higher education establishments are capable of entrepreneurship in many areas of their lives, of coming up with solutions that marry new technology (bringing with it new possibilities we could not have before thought through) with strong understanding of design to tackle issues that really matter is the number one task to ensure that they can fully participate as citizens. Simply providing access to part of that equation is not enough: broadband for all without understanding for all, community without happenstance on a global scale, a child's creativity without understanding of the potential technology brings.

Pic: How Intelligent Are You? |   Malcolm Gladwell   |   C4 Offices

Ken Robinson's The Element   |   Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

Britain's 100% Broadband by 2012 - but wires aren't the whole problem

The whole country will be connected to the web in 2012 via high speed broadband if Lord Carter's recommendations, released partly today and concluded in late Spring, are taken up. Given our current politique of grand public works to keep the country moving and the view that broadband infrastructure is as important as road and train infrastructure, it seems likely that this will happen.

The hope is that the digital divide will be broken down this way. The reality is that the very real and current digital divide is less finance-based and more to do with other complex often education-related issues, issues that are often linked to standards of living in general in socially deprived areas. The research tells us that people not online at the moment make this choice based on a belief that there is nothing of interest to them. For most people already online this is patently not true. The challenges for this die-hard digitally secluded group are

a) knowing how to find relevant, engaging and entertaining material
The traditional television schedule works on the basis that you will be somewhat 'forced' to bump into content you would otherwise not choose to watch. Take tonight's schedule on one Channel, chosen at random ;-) You start off with the non-partisan Channel 4 News, bump into the often partisan docs of Unreported World or 3 Minute Wonder, bump into a light and frothy Million Pound Home In The Sun before a hard-hitting, full-of-sweary words, public service hour of Jamie Oliver making sure we buy sustainable meat sausages. You don't have to work too hard to find interesting material that you wouldn't normally have sought out - all you need is an initial hook and then the schedulers work hard to keep you.

This, of course, is being somewhat eroded by the EPG, which could offer around 600 choices every thirty minutes, but also offers a way to personalise your TV schedule into stuff you know you want to watch.

Take it to the web, where there are billions of choices every second, constantly changing, and you hit a new problem. Understanding the tools is harder than understanding how an EPG works. Knowing what you want in the first place is a start, but websites are designed to keep you on one piece of content - theirs - and that content is often more narrowly defined than a TV schedule. For example, you are reading this education blog, or you are reading about the creative industries in Scotland and Northern Ireland, or you are reading about travel - but more often than not you're not necessarily bumping in on completely new content, merely different angles on the same content. This is, I think, why nearly all of the top content websites are rehashed versions of television, newspaper or magazine type sites, all of which carry ever-changing focuses and recycle your traffic, helping you bump into new and unexpected content. Think: all social networking sites, YouTube, the NYT, the Guardian... think Google.

b) knowing how to navigate and read off the screen
6% of adults can't read to the level expected of an 11 year old. One in five Scots has trouble with reading and numbers. This means that you can expect somewhere between 6-20% of folk to have trouble using the internet on that basis alone, followed by an aging population who lack much targeted content (because currently there is no market for it - only 16% or so of over-65s are online).

Laying cable alone will not make a difference to these groups. Schools' continued efforts to raise the media literacy flag's importance against a lot of other more sexy technology policies are required for tomorrow's generations. A lot more is required, though, to work with those who, for the next 40+ years are not in school, and not online.

At Channel 4's 4iP we announced last week that we would be venturing into this very territory, with Talk About Local:

Talk About Local will train several thousand people in 150 disadvantaged places in England to set up locality/community/neighbourhood based websites.  The project will use UK online centres as its delivery backbone.  Talk About Local will catalyse an online resource and community for people publishing neighbourhood or community websites, so that people can help each other.

Talk About Local is about giving people skills and empowering communities.  The project will empower active citizens who already have a burning need to communicate as they campaign for cleaner streets, better schools, activities for young people or put on local arts or organise a village fete.  Talk About Local will give these citizens the basic skills to communicate online more effectively and at less cost than using traditional means.  By networking citizens together, they will be able support each other in their local activism, as well as on technical publishing issues.  This will lead to stronger more effective community action.

Media Literacy is not just about learning how to use the net for the sake of it. The net is fundamentally a tool of and for democracy, to allow people to discover information, challenge authority and be entertained and educated. Talk About Local is one of the many projects 4iP will be commissioning over the next two years or so to make a dent in this huge task, with nearly all the ideas for tackling it coming from the very population it serves - you.

What are you going to do this week to make the web feel more worthwhile to folk in your community? What are you going to do to challenge those who block, filter and avoid the media literacy issue for the sake of expediency or, worse, ignorance? We've got till 2012 to answer. Your time starts... now.

Read the full Carter Report   |   Pic: I hate networking

danah boyd on handheld social networking

"New technology is the devil incarnate. We should go back to the good old days"
"New technology is the panacea we've been looking for."

The reality is much more nuanced than that. It's not about the good or the bad (it's not about pedagogy vs technology, the unfortunately entitled panel session I'll be on later).

danah boyd is talking about teaching young people to think, by taking a look through the viewfinder of social networks and the mobile devices we are already and will increasingly use to access, connect and share on.

It's about teaching young people to think. The reason we taught literature, film, mathematics in the past was to provide a reason for people to think. The introduction of technology alone will not necessarily help young people think. Worse still, technology is seen as a means of unleashing new cash, in a cynical way ("we have all Macs")

We don't just teach algebra to teach algebra. We teach it to help understand the world around us. When we think about teaching (with) technology we have to think about how it fits into this world around us.

That's hard.

Technology is fundamentally taking apart the world around us. Technology opens up the potential to access much stuff around the world, with the teacher and their rear view mirror allowing the context and meaning of that to be brought to light.

The contexts of social networks
Social networking sites have three core structures that make them work:
1. Profile
When we enter a room we tend to take some thought about decorating ourselves: what we wear, do we put on that tie...? Online we are an IP address, a rather undecoratable unappealing code. Therefore, where we create a SNS profile we're taking some care to create a presentation of ourselves within a space. Bedroom culture is the same, but on social networks it's amplified.

2. Friending
There are three clusters of behaviour: 30-40 friends, worried about their nearest and dearest. 300 friends are all the people they met at school, at church at the youth group. Very few teenagers collect Friends (politicians, music), reaching into the hundreds of thousands of friends. Mostly they're boys, collecting "hot girls". They're creating that list that, apparently, lots of boys used to make on paper.

But whether someone is your friend or just your Friend becomes socially awkward. In girl culture girls grew out of the habit of exchanging friendship bracelets to work the equivalent online.

3. The Wall
Comments, testimonials, the wall... in the early days of SNSes, people spoke in the third person about their friends (and still do on LinkedIn, inhabited by older professionals). Later, it began to be used as a space for conversation that complimented other places where conversation was going on (IM, chat).

Looking at it as a stream of text one could be mistaken as meaningless "how are you", "fine", "you?", "OK"...
What's going on is "public social grooming": it's a way to upkeep your social status as friend which, after all, is only a check box at the beginning of the online Friendship.

Why are young people spending so much time on MySpace?
We used to have permission from our parents to roam really far. Nowadays, the circle of navigation has been greatly reduced to the garden, out of public view. We've also tended to programme the lives of our young people more than we ever did, meaning we leave less time than ever for them to socialise.

Other characteristics of online interaction

• Persistence
• Replicability
• Unexpected scalability and visibility
• Invisible audiences
• Searchability. collapsed contexts (type of audience, rules of engagement, social scripts)
• Convergence of public and private

danah reckons than social network structures will go mobile soon, within two years. I would bank on them coming a lot sooner than that, given that many of those with the better phones can already and do already interact on their various SNSes through mobile. In the UK, 3G is cheaper and more ubiquitous than most places on the planet, so we can expect it sooner here.

Location-awareness is increasing, making the network part of social networking even stronger.

Knowledge is online, and when we don't know it first time around we access just in time when we're mobile.

Notes of her talk, as usual, riddled with errors and unreliability.

UK Government Research: Web 2.0 does improve learning

New research from Scotland and the UK Government shows that Web 2.0 and gaming can and do make a difference to educational attainment and student experience.

Since the birth of most "web 2.0" technology in the past six years I've been there gathering and even doing some of the research into whether it offers up any improvements on pedagogy and/or student experience in the classroom. It's not stopped healthy questioning of the validity of data, normally in midflow during a keynote, but there has always been a layer of distrust in stats and research that has not been peer reviewed, to the extent that there has been a great excuse for the lack of change by haughty educators and States that don't want to make the effort.

So I'm delighted that colleague Derek Robertson and University of Dundee researcher David Miller have, through their large-scale study, found that playing 20 minutes of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training every day is much more likely to improve attainment and speed of calculation in mathematics (up to 50% faster than the control group). Their results are to be peer-reviewed, hence the frustrating but necessary wait for the graphs, stats and data.

Furthermore, Becta's research into Web 2.0's impact in the classsroom, for which I presented the opening keynote at the expert seminar earlier this year, has just been completely published, and shows

• Web 2.0 helps to encourage student engagement and increase participation – particularly among quieter pupils, who can use it to work collaboratively online, without the anxiety of having to raise questions in front of peers in class – or by enabling expression through less traditional media such as video.
• Teachers have reported that the use of social networking technology can encourage online discussion amongst students outside school.
• Web 2.0 can be available anytime, anywhere, which encourages some individuals to extend their learning through further investigation into topics that interest them.
• Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online and this can encourage attention to detail and an overall improved quality of work. Some teachers reported using publication of work to encourage peer assessment.

You can read the full research report online, which includes some input from myself and colleague Matt Locke at Channel 4. The recommendations state that all teachers need to be given more significant time to do more complex work with Web 2.0 in their classrooms, directing students learning in these tools. It also, thankfully, helps us see realistically what students do with technology.

Above all comes the caveat that we must not over romanticise what young people are capable of doing with technology without the structure of learning and teachers acting as guides on the side.

Fascinating stuff on which to start building more daring policies. Essential reading for all those who lament the lack of interest in new technologies from "those up top".
Pic from David Muir, his blog is here.

Blue Sky Thinking in Canada

We're heading towards the end of a marathon week in Canada, firstly in Alberta and now in Saskatchewan, working with educators, administrators and leaders of learning to think about some new ways we could inspire tomorrow's generations.

All the links from the past week which I've mentioned, examined or peeled back in my workshops can be found under the big Canada grouping in my online bookmarks. Within that, one can just click the small + sign next to any additional category that takes your fancy to narrow down the options. Happy researching and, above all, tell us here how you get on.

Image of Saskatchewan

Remixing Cities, remixing learning: Charles Leadbeater

There's a great deal of 'play' at this year's Scottish Learning Festival, with LTS's Consolarium Challenge stretching over both days, pitching student gamers from across Scotland against each other for the ultimate accolades (and loads of free gaming kit for their school). I'll also be doing a seminar on the crossover between gaming, social media and learning, as well as leading a band of innovative educators at the Discovery Hour on Wednesday and, maybe, Thursday - come and find out how teachers have been making superb uses of Second Life, robots and new media in the classroom.

However, as always, there's at least one keynote I feel might not have the pulling power on the masses who, by the last day of the Festival, are seeking some easy takeaways for their schools and the latest classroom innovations, a keynote that promises to have several profound messages for our school leaders and curriculum designers. In fact, if the audience were not 2000 but more like 200 of Scotland's ICT coordinators, Directors of Education, Head Teachers and policy wonks I'd be quite happy. This is my appeal for you to attend or watch the video stream of Charles Leadbeater's keynote on the future of education.

To leave you in no doubt as to the thought he's given this issue, let me direct you to a paper he published about the evolution of the city. I normally abhor those who ask "What does School 2.0 look like" but, by kings, he's pretty damned close. In Remixing Cities he manages to succinctly outline what 'school' might look like. It's more like Schools, in the best tradition of Malcolm Gladwell's Pepsis and Spaghetti Sauces, because, in the future (well, the sooner the better really) there will no longer be a school that we go to, but rather schools that we go to. And, yes, play features heavily throughout. Here is a lengthy citation from his superb manifesto:

If a city addresse learning from the vantage point of these social web models, what could it offer? The outer circle would be:
An eBay for learning: a city-wide learning exchange to match learners to those with the skills to teach but who are not teachers. For example, if someone needed a tutorial in using garage band software, they could find someone with the skills who may not be a school teacher.

The Learning Game: more learning opportunities modeled on large scale, multi-player games in which players discover challenges and acquire the tools and skills to overcome them together. For example, a city-wide sustainability challenge using maths and science skills.

YouLearn: using the power of user-created video to provide learning opportunities complete with user ratings and comments.

Wiki-learning: a city based resource of facts, figures, information and insight, created by and for the city’s citizens for its curriculum.

Social search for learning: using tools such as tagging, folksonomies and social book marking to allow more structured peer-to-peer learning, so that one generation of learners can follow in the footsteps of others.

These mainly digital tools would be augmented by enhanced opportunities to learn outside schools in businesses, libraries, galleries or in settings relevant to what is being learned—the city as a classroom.

The middle circle would focus on families, learning and social networks. That might include:

Social networking for learning: peer-to-peer networks on MySpace, Facebook and other networks to link people in learning clubs to learn with and from their peers, including adults and parents, online and offline, in coffee shops and homes.

Enhanced parental involvement in schools: development of family learning centers; parents as teaching assistants.

Get Started: Increased investment in early years provision for disadvantaged families and linking them earlier to schools that prepare them for learning.

NetMoms: Using social networks to promote mothers’ clubs to support informal learning and employment.

Personal trainers for learning: Local learning support workers who would work door-to-door, similar to health visitors.

Schools would still be vital, but they would be designed to maximize the value of the wider platform. For instance:

Parents and adults might learn in the same building as children.

Schools could be productive enterprises, centers for small business clusters, in which children run real money-making businesses.

Teaching by discovery and doing to instill social skills alongside cognitive skills would be much more central.

Schools would be open longer, more flexible hours, with schedules that suit the different paces that children learn and the times that parents work.

There would be more, smaller, studio-style schools, akin to cafes or drop-in centers suited for more virtual learning communities and particularly for disaffected teenagers.

Alongside teachers would be more para-professionals, teaching assistants, business people, environmentalists and artists.

Children would learn from one another with the creation of a new generation of lead learners.

Every child would have a self-directed learning support plan to shape what they learn and from whom, in and outside school.

Download the whole document.
Picture; Sparktography

Lehmann's Philly: the same, but different.

What is learning? For the past few nights I've been enjoying my time with Marcie and her boss, Chris Lehmann, Principle of the Science Leadership Academy, taking a look inside their school's way of thinking.

Learning and teaching is about what the students can do, not what the teacher is able to do. It's about what questions we can ask together, about being inquiry-driven, through questions which are authentic, to which we don't know the answers.

It's about being passionate and whatever we're learning has to matter. Chris' students were cutting sheet metal, part of a project to create a new type of biodiesel which would be more efficient than existing methods. The class applied for two patents this year, and two communities in Guatemala are developing the product to provide fuel for real.

It's got to be meta-cognitive, everyone's got to think about what they did, how they did it, what they could do better the next time. It's got to be technology-infused, technology which is ubiquitous, necessary and invisible. We've got to choose technologies not on the basis of what's new, but what is good for a given task. It's also about being on the same page as the community with whom you wish to interact.

What do certain tools do the best?
Lehmann's approximate and reasonably false taxonomy:

Research: RSS, delicious, Google, Wikipedoa
Collaborate: wiki, google docs, moodle
Create: blogging, drupal
Present: podcasting, uStream, Flickr, iTunesU
Network: Twitter, Skype, Facebook, email.

But tools don't teach
We need strong pedagogical frameworks to see the whole learning experience, onto which we can slot the right tool for the right job. It's categorically the wrong approach to come up with an idea for a "blog project", "a podcasting project", "a social networking project", in the same way as it's wrong to approach pedagogy from a starting point of "what pedagogical proof is there that social networking improves attainment". You start with the pedagogy and use an appropriate tool to fit the pedagogical bill.

In Chris' school, every member of staff and every bone of curriculum is hung on Understanding By Design, with all the teachers using and all the students understanding the same metalanguage of the oeuvre. By doing this, students are able to reverse engineer the work they have done within the pedagogical framework the teachers have used, in the same way as assessment for learning strategies aim to promote. They are able to learn about learning.

Planning
So, planning is undertaken along these five structures:

Desired results: where do you want to go
Learning objectives
Understandings: the big ideas - why are we teaching or learning this?
Essential Questions: The throughline - what do we keep coming back to throughout the inquiry?
Skills and Content: What is the stuff that we have to know to get to those big ideas?

Assessment
If, after a period of learning, you assess by giving out a test, you are not doing project-based learning. Tests and quizzes are but a dipstick, a quick snapshot of where everyone is at. The projects themselves, the projects that are the creation of the students themselves, are the main assessment tool. They are constant, they are ongoing.

What Chris is describing seems to me, albeit in other meta-language, to be what Scotland's Assessment for Learning and Assessment as Learning programmes are beginning to achieve throughout our small corner of the world. The ambition of his school's learning approach reflects the Curriculum for Excellence. I really shouldn't be so surprised that Chris is one of those here at NECC with whom I'm the most comfortable chewing the educational fat.