edublogs

edu.blogs.com in Wall Street Journal. So what?

A fascinating and personal insight into the Long Tail in action. Earlier this week I appeared alongside illustrious company in the Wall Street Journal. However, I can't even find the referrals from there in the first few pages of my stats, with links from Google search, other educators and, lo-and-behold, Twitter, knocking the American giant of the printing press off into stat result obscurity.

There are, as usual, a lot of people typing the address into their browsers directly, but no discernible difference from normal numbers. Indeed, there's even been a 400 person decline in my subscription numbers since starting work at Channel 4 (evidently there's a great mistrust of thoughts coming from those who turn to the dark side of the media), a figure that's not buoyed by the one-hit clickers of the WSJ readership.

Conclusion? It's more worthwhile cultivating online and offline relationships with people than relying on large institutions' pull of strangers with no tangible digital breadcrumbs of their own. Here endeth the lesson.
Pic from Superamit

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.

The Global One Room Schoolhouse

David Jakes starts with the story of Huron County's nine one-room schoolhouses (three of them have wifi), schools which serve four families over two-and-a-half square miles which locals are fighting to keep open. Five years ago the children in these schools would have been amongst the most isolated in the world. Now, though, they're as connected as anyone in the Big Smoke.

Matanuska-Sustina Borough School District, a local authority in Alaska, covers an area the size of Virginia: 24, 500 square miles. Its one-room schoolhouses are essential, keeping children living in their own homes, educated in small but highly internet-connected communities of learning.

In Peru, children use the One-Laptop-Per-Child to connect to students in other one-room schoolhouses, back in Alaska, maybe in India, where similar projects are run.

And in your school, though there may be thousands of students in the same building, most still operate in a form of one-room schoolhouse, working in isolation behind the four walls of their classroom. Most working in the same way David's students would have had to work back in 1986 when he started teaching, and the Ditto machine (what's that? ;-) was about technologically advanced as it got.

Now we are having to assess whether the alternative reality of the connected student, who can break through the classroom walls with connective social media, is actually a reality. David - and I - fear this is not the case. Students are using their own tools for their own (informal) learning already: Childnet's recent report on social networking says as much. Yet, we still have huge resistance at a systemic level to opening up access to social media tools from within the one-room schoolhouses on our planet, with fear getting in the way of education.

Jakes' four key strands for effective technology use to begin connecting students to the world outside their one-room schoolhouses, metaphorical or physical, have nothing to do with interior politics or fiefdoms:

• The technology must support the fundamental literacies the school believes in.
• The technology must add value to the learning experience, adding something worthwhile that cannot be done without the technology.
• The technology must be framed within an appropriate pedagogical process (note: I think AifL is made possible by social technologies).
• The learning, and the application of the technology to the learning process, must be assessed (note: is it always assessable?)

Part of this, though, is down to everyday actions that teachers take. Is it really adequate to have classrooms where students are sat in rows, with a pile of paper as their worldy resources to learn, separated from those with whom they enjoy discussing ideas, forced to sit and work in near-isolation? Is it really adequate to have teachers who themselves don't connect out to other teachers or those working in another sectors, whose only view out on the world is the mainstream media, with its huge distortions?

Jakes has prepared a list of 15-minute tasks that any teacher can undertake to get themselves more connected, which bit-by-bit will help them become more connected citizens.

Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities

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This is the 25-minute keynote, Unleashing The Tribe, which I delivered at the Tipperary Institute in May this year, a shorter version of the 90 minute marathon I was invited to give at Redbridge Council the same week. It's a "here's where we are now" on what makes communities tick online, on mobile, in face-to-face settings, and why understanding this is so important for learning, borrowing unashamedly from Clay Shirky, danah boyd, a plethora of the hundred or so research reports that have crossed my browser this past 12 months and all the conversations I've had, blog posts written. Not bad for less than half-an-hour of audio and slides.

Quirkology: there is no career path, but there is luck

Last week Bernie Goldbach took me out to dinner with about a dozen of his third year graduating students, all of them working with social media in some way or other (there was also a lovely first year there, who dared to come along to chat with a strange Scotsman and had to go to the trouble of getting a babysitter - much kudos).

The thing that got me: they thought that their careers would be plan-outable, that there was some pre-determinable path on which to travel in order to get their dream job. I tried to pop the bubble gently.

They're not alone. Last year NESTA commissioned Demos to produce the Ready For The Future? report, and it reveals how fair young people reckon the world is. 90% believe that if you work hard at something you'll get what you deserve, and only 30% think that getting on in your life involves any luck.

This is borne out further still. The majority of young people feel that qualifications are the most important factor, by far, in getting a job. In fact, they feel that being hard working is twice as important as being a good communicator and four times more important than being creative. Schools have never done as well, with constantly 'cleverer' kids getting their grades A-C. Parents are over the moon, with certificated 'proof' that their child has really been working as hard as they said they were. But have government policies over the years and around the world on attainment, attainment, attainment "emphasised what's measurable rather than what's important"? Bill, who's currently assessing said attainment, seems to think so.

Yikes - our economy depends on creative, innovative youngsters to thrive, yet they feel they're doing their bit by doing what they think school expects of them - getting good exam results at the cost, if need be, of creativity and communication skills.

No wonder employers complain bitterly about never having the personnel they need.

I want to get back to this idea, though, of having a set path, and that hard work alone will get you through this imaginary path and towards success. Speak to anyone who you might frame as a mentor and the words 'luck' and 'opportune moment' will crop up somewhere. Luck does play a part, serendipity leads to wonderful things and it's only the fact that some take that serendipity and do something with it that makes the difference between those who are 'lucky' and 'unlucky'. I've also started to get the distinct feeling these past few years that the more connected you are to more people, the more these serendipitous moments crop up. It used to be something to meet someone who knew someone you knew. With Facebook, it's not so uncommon to find you're related to them.

I'm also reading a bit of Richard Wiseman's Quirkology, where research showed that those who feel lucky generally are better off than those who feel unlucky. It's something I notice the minute I land to start working in the USA: people are incredibly confident in their ability to pull off something really good, regardless of how much or how little preparation, fundraising or graft they've done. It's often referred to as an "enterprising attitude" or "self belief". I think it's just that the people in the USA who I've been fortunate to work with feel that they've been lucky in life, and it rubs off on the amazing work they have done (of course, there's also plenty of hyperbole of mediocrity in good measure). People in Scotland have long held the belief that we are crap at everything, especially football (we're historically on the same level as the USA, did you know, and currently doing a lot better).

So, the message for those sitting their exams at the moment or about to set out on that non-existent yellow brick road of employment: do all the revision you can, work as hard as you can this summer in the real world and, of course, start feeling lucky.

Or, as the late design legend Paul Arden put it in the title of his superb book on creativity:

It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
(The world's best-selling book by Paul Arden)

A comma's omission can make all the difference, eh? But it made me buy the book. And it is good.

Pic: Yellow Brick Road

Why Glow isn't Bebo, and why it will probably succeed

It doesn't take much digging around to know that I have a passion for finding out what makes social networks, online communities and the people on them tick, and learning from this to help influence how communities and groups might be built around learning. It's become a core part of my work with Learning and Teaching Scotland, whether the project is small, medium or large scale, an unconference, an online blogging platform or a national intranet.

In my latest BBC Learning column I explore the huge growth of Bebo over the past couple of years, resulting in its impressive sale a couple of months ago, and what we might learn from it in making Glow a success in years to come. There are a few community-building challenges which have begun to be worked through by the Glow team and by the leading Local Authority lights in the Glow roll-out. I'd love to know what they have to say about this SNS angle on what is effectively a highly organised attempt at community building.

The last column on mobile learning got a fair few comments from around the world, which were fascinating in their different takes on such an emotive subject. This post might be a little closer to (my) home, but I hope that doesn't stop readers in Scotland and further afield having a good ol' debate about how Glow's going to see its success form. And while we're at it, what would success for Glow look like? Comments are open.

It's a long way to the Tipperary Institute...

It had to be done. Now it has been. No more poor jokes about my trip next week to Thurles and the Tipperary Institute's Internet Experience in Education Conference. The inimitable Bernie Goldbach (I'm sure he used to be a spy, you know) invited me over to keynote to about 200-odd of Irish education's technologically empassioned. I'll attempt to show why schools need to start shaking things up from the grassroots, and let participation culture leak into their learning spaces, in my talk: Unleashing the tribe.

Certainly, that's the impression you get from the young people you meet at the Tipperary Institute. I've only met a few, at Reboot last year. I was impressed, bowled over by their confidence and understanding of how the new web could make things so much better, and by the fact that their 'projects' were actually legitimate web startups.

If you're a teacher, lecturer, education person or work in and around Thurles, then get yourself down to the conference next week. It's going to be a real eye-opener in how Ireland might start spending its €282 €252 million on making technology work for learning. Mobiles and moleskines to the ready!

School Of Everything moves to next level

I was delighted to hear from Jemima that friends and colleagues at School of Everything secured some proper funding to get their plans off to a larger scale, thanks to Esther Dyson, Rocco Pellegrinelli and JP Rangaswami, with more from the Young Foundation and Channel 4 Education (disclosure: I'm on the Education Advisory Board of C4).

Last month I met up with Andy (far left) and Dougald (far right) in a happy-go-lucky eatery off Leicester Square to chat about the project, and reassure them that they were doing something that a) was what education was about, b) was of worth and c) would work with enough people on board. I also shared some of the things we reckon helped to get eduBuzz, the learning/social platform project I helped kick off in East Lothian, off the ground and into that nice parabolic curve of success.

School of Everything is everything that large, national, organised projects can't be (sorry: been reading Shirky, and can't shake his 'tude). It helps those who have something to teach find someone who wants to learn, and those who want to learn find someone to teach them it. Actually, it's exactly what Glow could do tomorrow if we had the time to put it into action or paid School of Everything to do it for us. (Note to self: have a word). It does all this without organising people into groups, without making you go down one route (teacher) without being another (learner). It accepts that teachers and learners often want to teach and learn lots of diverse things (Yoga, French, Magic, Corporate Accounting). They make their money by taking a slice of any online payments that are made for tuition, although many of the site's current 1000 users (including me) teach some stuff for free.

In the next 12 months the gang hope to scale from 1000 users to 100,000, something they need to do to really get the site to work properly in the first place: we need to see enough learners and teachers wanting to share their skills there to see if the concept will take off. Hopefully the £350,000 in new cash will help employ some bods or thinking power to generate more interest.

In the meantime, if you want to read about one vision of "21st Century learning" (arghh) that really makes the cut, then check out Elevator Pitch's interview and don't forget to join the School of Everything this weekend.

What is the worst online community you've ever seen?

I seem to be asking for a lot of help on the blog at the moment - I can only thank those who take the time out to respond. This one should be amusing to see develop.

I'm looking for examples of the worst online communities out there, and why they were so bad for you or your colleagues. You might not know how the community came about in the first place, or you might know very well - it could be your own!

Anything goes, though it would help reduce the potential for libel if you can also provide any redeeming factors. Think two stars and a wish. Also, if you know of any that you think are particularly excellent online communities then bang them in, whether they're yours or not.

I'm going to be using the results along with some of my own research to inform some community work at Learning and Teaching Scotland, and will share the finished product here and on Slideshare, of course. Many thanks in advance!
Pic: Coda.

Which TED Talks would inspire an education agency the most?

One of the things that people seem to appreciate the most in their working lives is an opportunity to be inspired, feel inspired and then, hopefully, go forth and do inspiring things. I get that inspiration from listening to people like this, a neuroscientist who talks through and analyses the stroke she had, describing what we can only imagine in the first person. I don't know why she inspires me, but she does.

At the moment in Learning and Teaching Scotland, the education agency here, we've had a few weeks of being inspired by different successes in our work and outside it. I'm keen to get more discussion going on around the potential behind simple ideas and help more staff understand that their small everyday actions and attitudes, and big 'impossible' ideas, can make a difference to Scottish education - provided colleagues in-house and in schools know about them. We're hoping for more relationships to be built between our curriculum and technology staff and teachers, relationships built through sharing ideas rather than a closed black book of contacts.

One idea is to hold fortnightly or monthly "Be Inspired" sessions (naff title; suggestions welcome). These would simply be a showing of a TED Talk or Pop!Tech excerpt followed by some offline discussion around the topic, personal experiences, group experiences or what the organisation could learn from the individual giving the talk. Ideally, we would help people move into online discussion and discovering more talks for themselves. It's a book club, but without the books.

The obvious thing to do would be to show Ken Robinson on a loop. But we don't do things in an obvious way.

So my question to you, should you choose to answer it: what would your top five (or top ten) talks from TED and/or Pop!Tech be? Your idea of inspiring as an educator might be different from other TED Talkers. What lessons are there to be learnt by a national education agency from watching particular clips? What are the most inspiring talks you've found on the net? Tough questions, perhaps, to hone down, but another way to help people discover the wealth of goodness out there.