edublogs

Should we all be saying 'no' more often?

Educators have a reputation for generally saying 'yes' to doing things they are asked to carry out. The expectation is that if a peer or more senior member of staff asks or tells, the teacher does. It's not a healthy place to be. We need to say no more often.

To be honest, I hate saying no, most of the time. Yet, in my current job: of the 400 or so ideas I've seen in the last six months, only about 4% have resulted in a development of that idea.

Everyone else got a 'no'.

Most have had the heave-ho within minutes or days, some have had an instant yes, but there's a troublesome group in the middle, about 30% of ideas at a guess, that need looked at in more detail before being sure if they're worth taking forward. This group of ideas need at least a day's worth of thinking done by the company proposing the idea and a day or more of my time. It's only when we do the figures, work out the business case, see the approach action-by-action, explore the legal and compliance risks, that we realise the idea is a dodo. All that "for nothing".

What I wonder, sometimes, is whether it's worth just pushing back on anything that is not a clear 'yes' at the first sighting. Those "might work" ideas nearly always fail to get through the hurdle of being 'spec-ed' out, yet involve a disproportionate amount of thinking to get them to a point where we can ever know if they're likely to work.

However, there's always that grumble that maybe, just maybe, one might be saying 'no' to the best idea since sliced bread.

Seth Godin suggests we're indeed better off saying no more often to pick out the obvious gems the moment they appear:

You can say no with respect, you can say no promptly and you can say no with a lead to someone who might say yes. But just saying yes because you can't bear the short-term pain of saying no is not going to help you do the work.

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

What do you think - are we right to say 'yes' to the "might work" ideas to see if we can discover a hidden gem, or are we better to concentrate only on those 4% we feel instantly happy with?

Pic: No Way Out

Qualified to do anything?

This summer I'll be keynoting on the theme "It's not all native wit", about how we can all do extraordinary things when we release our minds (and find out how). I've been wondering how to interpret this Seyi Oyesola TED Talk quote in that light for teachers:

"We the willing have been doing so much with so little for so long that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."

Seyi was talking about health provision, and his attitude is that we need the specialist kit and specialist knowledge to do great things well, that settling for good enough when you're doing open heart surgery is not, well, good enough.

Is this quote, which could have come from a teacher anywhere as well as the Nigerian doctors who quote it, a good thing for teachers to have learnt to do, or is it actually the biggest barrier to creating extraordinary opportunities in the future?

9am: Arrive in Ireland. 10am: Meet Government.

It's not every day that, within an hour of landing at, say, Dublin Airport, you're sitting in the plush offices of the country's Minister for Trade and Commerce. I've been working for the Scottish Government in various guises for three years and never made it into a Minister's office here, let alone abroad.

I'm not sure if it was really me who got us into Minister John McGuinness' for a 40 minute chat about Ireland's potential for improvement in mathematics and languages learning from primary through to university level. But before the end of the conversation we had, I think, secured a roundtable task force with the Minister and his colleagues, the Google directorship in Ireland and other parties interested in how Ireland's education system could swiftly take its place as the creative, innovative and, importantly for Google, the robust furnace for future multinational programmers and net leaders.

It wasn't 20 minutes before we were walking through the Irish Parliament buildings, meeting up with the leading party's chief blog-reader (and one of Ireland's best photobloggers) and PR people, bumping into the Party leader and the T.D. (Member of Parliament) for Cork, pushing the agenda of getting not only adequate kit and connectivity, but world class training and pedagogical confidence running throughout the nation. Small passionate groups of the kind I was describing later in my talk at Tipperary Institute (mp3). Quite a morning, an unexpected one, too. Bernie really should take some credit for the menagerie.

To take things further, I've already been doing some work with the wonderful, enthusiastic, visionary and (what a euphemism!) compact NCTE in Dublin, the technology agency currently hatching some ambitious plans to raise the level of hardware, software and, vitally, connectivity in Irish schools. Soon they will be helping educators spend some €252m over seven years on technology for learning.

But if a political, enterprise and educator partnership of this kind can be created then those coders, managers, designers and visionaries  of the future might be able to ply their trade at home, rather than fleeing to London or Silicon Valley.

1/3: The best school systems in the world: it's not (all) about the money

It's no secret to those of us who teach, have taught or can remember being taught: the most important element in a child's education is... the teacher. So says the 2007 McKinsey report (pdf) which analysed what made the best education systems in the world, well, the best. Over the next series of posts, allow me to paraphrase for you... (Remember, boys, not my words...)

More money, smaller class sizes, lower impact
In 2006 there was $2 trillion spent on education by the world's governments. But money alone is not the reason we see improvement, not always.

Between 1980 and 2005 there was a 73% increase in spending in the USA, after allowing for inflation. The teacher-student ratio fell by 18%, class sizes were the smallest they had ever been, tens of thousands of initiatives were launched to improve the quality of education. Yet the outcomes didn't change at all. In other countries where similar cash and policy decisions have been made, flatlining or even deterioration has occurred.

Smaller class sizes actually mean that there is now less money per teacher for resources, for, example, than there was before. Worse still, smaller class sizes have had little impact, or any impact has been evened out by the little amount of money left for resourcing.

Less than 1% of African and Middle Eastern children perform at or above the Singaporian average - to be expected, you might believe, because those Singaporeans must hemorrhage cash into their education system. Wrong. Singapore spends less on Primary education than 27 of the 30 OECD countries.

Could do better...
The lesson here? Across the OECD countries taxpayers could expect 22% improvement for their education investment. "The world is indifferent to past reputations, unforgiving of custom or practice", the report claims, and I'd go with that. Success will go to those which are swift to adapt, slow to complain and open to change. There are three key points to getting this point of success:

1. Getting the right people to become teachers
2. Developing them into effective instructors
3. Ensuring that the system is able to offer the best possible instruction for every child

Improvement is therefore possible in a very short period of time, if the will and brains are there, and adjusting these three areas will have an enormous impact on improving school systems.

Over the next series of blog posts here, I will look at all the areas that, according to the report, make a difference in education, and show how education bloggers could be, if they desired, at the forefront of profound educational change in their own countries, and across the world.

Related posts:
2/3: Finding the best teachers

Collaborative creatives and the future of education

Andy Polaine set the scene with the importance of collaborative design and creativity in this new age, and now turns his attention to how education can innovate in a future we cannot determine.

'Slime mould and suburbs'
There are lots of small things being developed independently on the web that are becoming one, much in the same way as slime moulds form - one cell links to another until you get that yellowy fibrous material you find in rotten logs. It's the way small villages and towns become part of cities.

This changing, metamorphising of the web we thought we knew is so much like these slime moulds that it's almost impossible to track and follow until you see the final fibrous mould and wonder: "How did that get there?". So how can education change when the mould appears so slowly?

Process vs Knowledge
One way, that reflects how designers have worked for years, is the emerging importance placed on process instead of knowledge. Knowing how to do something is actually less beneficial than actually doing it. Listening to a seminar on how to podcast, for example, is less beneficial than doing a series of radio shows on a local environmental issue.

Funding: the fossil fuel of education
Funding is never going to be enough in education. It's effectively a toxic fuel that creates short-term benefits easily but leaves unsustainability in its wake. Great efficiencies are not what is required to resolve this, but rather greater effectiveness. The Victorian Industrial Revolution way of doing things doesn't work. If I have an idea in the shower to whom does it belong; if I make professional connections in Facebook but I'm only allowed to use it during breaks (as the national trade union stated today) then am I not working for free? The boundaries have changed. People graze for knowledge, they don't clock in for it. Life, work and play are converging like they never have done before. It's a mix of work ethic and play ethic.

But for education leaders to count on this convergence as their sole research and development, professional development or employee improvement is not sustainable either - less and less money for more and more grazing?

Expertise by portfolio or degree?
Likewise, if this grazing has not been 'credentialised' then, under the old regime, it's not been seen as having worth. Would you rather spend four years increasing your knowledge and capacity by reading 800 blogs a day for free or by spending $50,000 for an MBA?

Increasingly, though, this unpaid unofficial expertise and capacity is turning the investment in an MBA sour; portofolios, not further degrees, are what give you the edge. Just ask Jonathan Harris. Does formal education recognise and support this? In education circles is a blog seen as being as valuable as a certificate? That's a challenge to resolve, a truth to be acknowledged at the very least.

Portfolios' little cousin, Learning Logs, are currently mostly done on paper, if at all, are rarely read or shared by and with the teacher, almost never read by fellow students. Maybe an online alternative is the only feasible way of not only making learning logs more manageable, but also making them of more worth.

Harnessing 'grazed' portfolio expertise
So even if you have educators who understand the potential of the portfolio, and students who also engage in this online grazing and gathering of information and continuous collaboration to analyse or discuss it, how can you know about it and how can the education institution take advantage of it?

Tom Coates' outline of what makes a successful social network provide some worthwhile ethical pointers for any education institution thinking of using blogs, wikis or social networks to harness the expertise being grazed and published in online portfolios:

How you can use social software to build aggregate value… in a nutshell:

• An individual should get value from their contribution
• These contributions should provide value to their peers as well
• The organization that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able to expose that back to the users.

What would an education institution look like that works on this basis? What would happen if there were no departments or even no funding in the institution? What would a sustainable, open source, sharing, nurturing and mentoring institution look like? How can education institutions keep themselves relevant?

Well, I think I know one place that's getting there, not-so-slowly and very surely: an online social space where people can share what they've done, see what others have done and create collaborative projects with that information; open source leadership that encourages and empowers unpromoted staff to have an active distributed role in decision-making, rather than cutting managers and expecting the remainder to do more; collaborative projects for designing new curricula and bringing colleagues up to speed.

I'm sure there are others.

I'm hoping there will be more.

Scoopt gets scoopt

Scoopt, the Glasgow-based mobile / amateur photograph buying company which I took Shel and Rick to see last November, has just been bought by Getty for an undisclosed sum. Well done, Kyle and co. I knew it was a winning idea the moment I met you, especially since thirty minutes later I had made my first web bucks with you.

Scottish Executive not keen on gaming? Or the Internet?

There's a report in Holyrood Magazine, the Scottish Parliament's publication, about how the gaming industry in Scotland feels it's £30 billion stake in the country's creative industry is being ignored:

“Scottish Development International and Scottish Enterprise talk a great deal about the knowledge economy and they seem to appreciate its importance, but that is where it ends. The Executive seems to have no concept of how big the games industry, or even the internet, really is, and certainly not of the successes we have had.”

Baglow said that one of the key frustrations for the industry is that the Executive only pays attention to the interactive and games industry when a title containing adult content is released, without realising the benefits such material can bring to Scotland.

Ouch. Agencies such as the one I work for, Learning and Teaching Scotland, do realise the importance of gaming, the 98% of it which is not adult. For the development of the sector within the education sphere a significant amount of effort and cash has been put into researching, applying and advocating the use of commercial, epistemic and educational games in the classroom. Indeed, if plans for handheld devices for 63,000 teachers and learners in the East of Scotland were to be open-minded enough to include wifi and browser-equipped gaming consoles, education and, by proxy, the Executive would in fact become major customers of the gaming industry.

I'm still left agreeing with part of the article's point, that there is a need for symbolism amongst the action, and I don't think it's limited to gaming. Where on the decision-making boards and advisory councils are the country's top internet CEOs, social media experts, online marketing gurus and gaming manufacturers? So far, it would seem, most of that talent seems to be going West to the Valley or South to London.

How to benefit from failure, Part One

In all the organisations with whom I have worked and currently work I've never been sure what the attitude to failure is. This isn't really a revelation, since rejoicing in failure is not something most groups or individuals are particularly good, or that keen, at doing. But three times this past week I've been reminded how vital failure is to becoming successful in our ventures.

How to Benefit From Failure No. 1: David Law, Speck Design
I went to hear David at the superb Edinburgh-Stanford link Entrepreneurship Club Silicon Valley series (you can download his presentation from the site). He was talking about Business Design and the role creativity has in that process of building something. David is a Glasgow Uni educated, self-proclaimed "unlikely" entrepreneur of Speck Design now hailing from Palo Alto, who believes that creativity is what makes the only competitive advantage for many industries and, importantly, countries. This grand statement, though, was proceeded by a host of failures (about 20 minutes' worth).

First failure: cool stuff isn't easy to come up with all the time

First of all he went after Patent Sales, where you come up with an idea, slap a patent on it and hope someone else will buy your great idea for loads of mullah.

But when was the last time you said "Wow. That's cool"? Coming up with cool stuff for a living is not easy.

David worked at first on the "work an hour, earn a dollar" basis, quickly moving on to only speculative work, using what the company had in terms of creativity to create what they believed would maybe sell. They were "all over the map" - producing everything that could possibly hit a niche which was as yet untapped. They thought they would sell tonnes of patents, but realised this wouldn't work, either - they've only sold one patent, in 2002. They developed real estate radio, taking videos down ski slopes, vents that drew the heat out the top of LCD screens. They were all over the place.

Second failure: Be creative but link it to reality

The lesson from the patent stuff was that the closer you are to reality the easier it is to sell. Unfinshed products or notions are near impossible to sell.

"Made", his spin-out company, found success by making something quickly which related to a real product, the iPod. Made made that first iPod holder that wraps around your arm, but succeeding only when the iPod was finally released - in 2001 several investors told them that they were "not sure the Apple thing is going anywhere".

Third failure: You can't have it all

There's a visual you can pull up when you've got an idea you want to develop, either in the classroom, in the education office or in the board room. Innovation, Speed and Cost are three factors within which you can lie. But you can only be in one spot, and that's where you'll be. You can't avoid that. If your products follow in the wake of others then speed is the most important - get something simple which you know how to do out there asap. Once that's done, you can get your innovation worked out for the follow up, still maintaining some speed but, of course, in both instances it costs money. Lots.

Combining speed and innovation is, in David's words, going to make you "fall flat on your face".

Failure 4: Fail fast Fail frugal Fail again

This is true just given his introduction, covering 15 years of, mostly, failure. Lots of 'em. Build a prototype, as cheaply as you can, test it. Take the feedback and roll with it again. The same is true when we're trying out innovative teaching practice: give wee bits of it a go, fail, don't lose the kids or your sanity and learn from what didn't work to come back at it from a different angle. Everything will fail. Just get to that failure first and before anyone else does.

This links into David's latest, more successful way of being creative on a frequent basis: the microventure. This way of working is exactly what I try to imbue in my workplaces, with varied success ;-). David and his associates want to start at least 35 companies in the next five years, most of them if not all self-funded. They will target underserved niches, happy if coincidentally one or two of those niches overflow into the mainstream, though it doesn't really matter in this global marketplace.

To get return on investment they make the investment small (a microventure) and any return will mean the ROI is relatively large, and therefore successful. Quick wins are essential, not superficial, so that the company is sustainable. Investment can't be nothing - $25,000 is small in David's world. So don't make the mistake of ROI being the same as ROE - return on effort requires small but significant, small but well-targeted and intelligently used effort.

Failure 5: Don't to a me-too - get obvious advantage

Don't do a me-too when it comes to innovating; find something where you are adding on obvious advantage. In the business world the Far East is specialist in me-too companies, thrashing out widgets. In the West, in Scotland, we need to produce things with added obvious value if we are to be exceptional.

Failure 6: Keep your credibility

What is it you do? Work it out and keep to it. Straying from what you are good at doing or what you tasked yourself to do strains your credibility.

How does failure like this work in education?
1 . Cool stuff: we constantly put ourselves under pressure to come up with cool entertaining stuff to get the kids educated better, deeper, wider or in a more motivating way. We're never going to get that all the time, so is it worth investing more energy in one or two big projects where we can see a feasible sign of success?

2. Link it to reality: so many projects to effect educational change don't offer a hook to what we do at the moment. Unless we can hook onto reality of today we can't expect to make a success of the unknown of tomorrow. School 2.0? Let's work our way there through all the 0.1s first.

3. You can't have it all: We can't have huge innovation in broadband overnight without huge cost. Spending money in one area means another suffers. Do you want high speed with no means to publish or a means to publish which is a bit sluggish in school? We'll always have to make that choice - nothing will change.

4. Fail fast, fail frugal, fail again: I'm not convinced the public sector allows us to do this. Projects are generally funded (saying you just want to do a project with no funding means the project is not taken seriously), and sometimes overfunded. There's rarely a get-out clause - part fund people until they fail and then part fund again until they have success. Website rarely just appear, they're always launched. A bit like most education initiatives. Maybe there's something to learn here.

5. Don't do a me-too: It's easy to copy others' ideas and think that what they're doing is the best possible thing. Don't. The best ideas are borne out of a localised, individual need. Satisfy what you need in your classroom and someone else might find it useful, but don't feel you have to join a bandwagon if it's going to stop you spotting a success for your own class.

6. Keep your credibility: I think teachers are pretty good at this. What are the instances of people losing their credibility through social media, though? Plenty.

More failures and what it means for education coming soon...

Keeping up with the Joneses: has your kid got a tutor?

  "Studying for class" 
  Originally uploaded by jakebouma.

From BBC Breakfast this morning was a preview of tonights wry look at those who have and those who have not in the BBC 2 (8.30pm) The Madness of Modern Families (it comes just after the equally depressing Dr Alice Roberts' Don't Die Young). One of the topics? Tutors.

It got me thinking (again) at whether schools and Local Authorities should not be nipping the tutor trade in the bud and providing something more, something better and for free.

I only ever had a piano teacher when I was at school, but some might say that I did well in my other subjects because I happened to have two 'professionals' on my back all the time. But when I got stuck in Physics, Mathematics or Geography I had great teachers who spent time in their lunch hours or after school, for free, taking me through what I had failed to keep up with in class. They were, I felt, Good Teachers.

Later in life, in the first year at Edinburgh University, I found myself submerged by a fairly poor (OK, bloody awful) understanding of French and German grammar. In the case of French my language tutor, Dr Brian Barron, took me aside at least a half dozen times in that first term to help me 'get' the perfect tense vs the imperfect. He's now Dean of the Arts Faculty. Just shows that Good Teachers make it places ;-)

Even in my professional life Good Teachers have been there to offer some free advice 'after hours' to help out. My old PE teacher at Dunoon Grammar took me into the school gym one Christmas eight years ago and spent four hours showing me how to scale 12 foot walls, jump hurdles without breaking my neck and jump through open windows head first without, again, breaking my neck (that was for the Army exams, not teaching).

My current bosses are more than happy to take five minutes out of their own busy schedules to give me their help in managing others or getting through projects.

Why, then, do we allow the kids in our classes to go off to private tutors, paying between £25 and £50 an hour for help which, really, the school might be able to provide? And what are the rates of private tuition elsewhere around the world?

• Is it a case that the school doesn't know who needs more help?


• Is it the case that kids in classes where they don't like the teacher or the teacher is, shock and horror, just not very good, don't feel that they can approach another teacher in that school to ask for help?


• Is this not an issue we could do something about to save our families' money and bring more respect for the expertise in our schools back to those schools?

Mums' and dads' views as welcome as those at the chalkface.

Update: Mike shows us, through Google Earth, the amazing lengths parents might go to keep up.

Why handheld learning shouldn't be about laptops or even giving kids kit

The Edinburgh Evening News carried a very fact-low hype-high story on Learning Hubs, the one-to-one computing and area-wide wifi project whose board I have been asked to advise. Ollie made some good points on the story but felt that any one-to-one computing project should be using laptops instead of PDAs. There are other options and reasons for not doing this en masse.

The first relates to variety. In one class or one Local Authority, even, it might be seen as desirable for some to use one handheld device for learning: a PDA, a laptop, a smart phone. However, in the world of work, where we have to borrow many different types of technology to get our jobs done, there might be more value in dispensing whatever piece of kit will do the job justice.

Some days, an entire class will need a smartphone between two for some work out in the field trip, while another class will need a GPS device, a laptop and a 3G plugin to do some work around their school. Other times a GPC device and air monitor will be needed for science, while a good old MP3 recorder and laptop will be needed for the kids doing some podcasting.

What will make each of these projects work is having quick and easy access to the technology and an online or network profile which will allow you to pick up where you were before.

Gaming devices are nowadays just as apt a tool as a PDA or SmartPhone. You can even run your Nintendo DS (which has voice recognition built in) as a Voice over Internet Protocol telephone.

Ollie also points to a few of the PDA or one-to-one pilots that have taken place in the UK and USA. From what I saw, though, at the Handheld Learning conference and from excerpts on Teachers TV I've not been impressed by the incredibly offline way the tools have been used. They have been used to make connections in class between kids that could just talk to each other face-to-face, and have helped most in providing old-type resources (textbooks) in rather similar ways, just with a smaller screen. There have also been a fair few of these "high input, low educational output" exercises, to those of us observing from afar, at least.

Our challenge in East Lothian and throughout the East of Scotland is going to be doing something rather different from what else we've seen in the UK. We want ubiquitous town-, village- and city-wide wifi internet access so that kids can use their own technology online, whatever that tech is. This is the real deal: if we get the access right and manufacturers continue to build in wifi as standard, within a few years we just won't be thinking about spending mega-bucks on mega projects to provide kids with kit. We'll just be facilitating them to use their own.

This last point is my own, and not an official aim of the project. However the board's existing aims are ambitious and in the really early stages of negotiation. It is almost certainly far too early to know what the technology we will be using might be when this aim will take much time to achieve.

Update: You can also use your PSP with a keyboard.