This is a quote from Elke Van Soom, a participant in a design thinking workshop I ran last week for the European Union's SmartCities project. The project involves countries from around the North Sea region of the EU, and has explored how citizens can be involved in the codesign of their public services, making services better by offering their own observations, ideas and review. It's a challenging process that many countries are working hard to make happen, with varying degrees of success.
Elke's background is in the business of creating and executing great surveys and workshops with citizens, to gain greater insight. Her view is that both those commissioning research, as well as certain participants, can have their "eyes to the past, backs to the future", and that research should only ever be taken as part of a wider recipe involving the expertise of institutes likes hers, as well as the gut feels of designers involved in the process.
In education (and plenty of other domains), I see so much behaviour like this: "we tried this before and it didn't work"; "it works for Norway but it'll never be that good for us"; "we're already so busy with the things we have to do now that we can't spare the time and energy to think about tomorrow, next year or beyond". The defeatest poverty of ambition exhibited by these words creates as much of a barrier to overcome as all the actual barriers that might need to be brought down, remodelled or pushed to one side.
Words are important. I think these eight - Eyes to the past, backs to the future - should be uttered every time someone says it's not possible. We must gather all the information we can on the real challenges before us, bring it together, invent ideas and then try them out before anyone can make the call as to whether they'll work or not.
Does anyone want to join me in Canada May 17 & 18 for INPlay, Toronto? You can register now for one of Interactive Ontario's showpiece events, on whose advisory board I sit (well, mostly I Skype, actually). It's unique in bringing together such a blend of transmedia, video game producers, financiers, marketers on the one hand, and researchers, educators and policy people on the other.
When Newton discovered gravity it wasn't because he was told by a teacher or even because he had the skill to look it up in Wikipedia. It was because he was provoked, deeply, and had the design skills to create a beautiful equation. Gever Tulley and Ewan McIntosh help delegates experience first hand, the durable learning that comes from deep provocation. Explore how curriculum can be turned on its head, how new skills can be learned best, how content can be explored through the same models of discovery that genuine scientists, creatives and leaders harness every day.
I think I'll be blogging like crazy for two days, and catching up with some great friends, old and new. If you want to join the fun and mental stimulation, with the social stimulation to back it up, register before April 14th to get the early bird rate.
I'm hoping that apparenly embattled leadership colleagues in the US might sit up when they see the confidence of the youngsters I interviewed for the post, and feel that they can engage in a different way of doing things from the perceived norm.
I sit on the Board of Trustees for this framework that sets out competences, not school subjects, as the principal mechanism through which students learn the 'hows' and 'whats' of the world. It's not dissimilar in goal to the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, with the RSA's Opening Minds accreditation scheme acting as a means to provide stellar professional development and coaching between schools who "are there" with those new to this way of thinking and working.
Harnessing entirely pupil-led, project-based learning in this way isn't easy. But all of this frames learning in more meaningful contexts than the pseudocontexts of your average school textbook or contrived lesson plan, which might cover an area of the curriculum but leave the pupil none the wiser as to how it applies in the real world.
There is a line that haunted me last year: while pupil-led, project-based learning is noble and clearly more engaging than what we do now, there is no time for it in the current system. The implication is that it leads to poorer attainment than the status quo. But attainment at High Tech High, in terms of college admissions, is the same as or better than private schools in the same area.
The assumption that pupil-led, project-based learning offers less success in exams is a false but persistent one. John Hunter was the anatomist who defined modern medicine because, frankly, no one else had. He had a saying that has since become the mantra of the modern surgeon: "Don't think. Try the experiment."
In the piece I cite just a few of the examples I've been lucky enough to see through 2010, and as a result I've started hearing about other maker-curricula on my own doorstep: Oliver Quinlan's students, described in his TeachMeet BETT talk as they created self-determined projects around the theme of London's Burning, is just one more prime example.
Six years ago we got a hard time for getting our students to create little snippets of audio for each other and the wider world - using iPods for learning was seen as expensive and gimmicky. "Who has those devices? We couldn't possibly purchase devices for children. They're far too expensive for them to own them any time soon."
Six years on Abdul Chohan was getting the same feedback at his school, the Essa Academy. At the Learning Without Frontiers conference he recounts how he had seen iPod Touches, the next generation of device from our low-fi iPods of 2004, as the key to untapping new learning landscapes for his learners.
With a seamless wifi setup in the school students never lost touch with the web through their mobile devices. Polish students, recently arrived at the school, were able to decipher English-language physics lessons by backing up their learning with the Polish language version of the theme's wikipedia entry.
Above all, teachers could stop judging what students should or could be doing based "on their date of manufacture" (or, as some might add, on their sell-by date). Youngsters were able to extend or support their own learning as they saw fit, when they saw fit.
Students overnight had knowledge at their fingertips (and in their pockets) in text, on the web and in podcasts (boys in particular were amongst those downloading 900 or so GCSE Pods to revise for the examinations).
Edmodo provided a learning social network through which teachers and learners could send messages, manage their learning, set tasks, ask for help.
The £40,000 ($80,000) leasing bill for printers will, as a result, be greatly reduced as the amount of paper being used is reduced significantly.
The cost of the devices themselves, even with a refresh rate of 18p/35c per day included, is therefore relatively affordable.
The results? Where, a year or two before, the school had been set for closure by the Government watchdog for having a pass rate never above 30%, examinations results coming in after this mobile investment, at Grades A*-C, were running at 99%.
When we believe that youngsters are capable of anything and, vitally, provide the human and virtual help and support to make that potential a possible, there's nothing that can hold them back.
When teachers ask Karen Cator "when is all this technological change going to happen" she gives a tongue-in-cheek answer: August 2012. From the urgency in the US Education Department technology director's speech at London's Learning Without Frontiers Conference, you can tell she'd like to see it happen a lot quicker.
She compares the hunger of the 150,000 innovators from all over the world who came to CES in Las Vegas to what is going on in educaton. Consumer electronics is a world of massive change: in 2010 there wasn't one tablet on the lips of those innovation-hungry folk, this year there were more than 50 being trialled and talked about. There were 150,000 professional learners getting themselves gen-ed up.
Education, meanwhile, seems to currently lack that scalable innovation that the world of touch electronics and wireless mobile has achieved. Is there a way for us to create more scalable, higher quality learning in schools? Is there a way to instil in every teacher the notion that they are a lifelong learner, with a portfolio of learning and repertoire of their contributions to the learning of the profession? Cator, to put no fine a point on it, wants every teacher in America - and beyond - to a) learn how to teach better, b) share that learning with the world, online, in public, and c) ratchet up the professionalism of teachers by removing the ties that keep their hands behind their back as they try to teach. By this, she means moving teachers to a digital learning environment where educators have every technology and tool they need at their disposal. Mobile phones, the super computers in every child's pocket, she says, must be switched on.
The School of One is one example upon which Cator pulls to show how technology can help us do more than simply tinker with curriculum or assessment:
School of One re-imagines the traditional classroom model. Instead of one teacher and 25-30 students in a classroom, each student participates in multiple instructional modalities, including a combination of teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, independent learning, and work with virtual tutors.
To organize this type of learning, each student receives a unique daily schedule based on his or her academic strengths and needs. As a result, students within the same school or even the same classroom can receive profoundly different instruction as each student’s schedule is tailored to the skills they need and the ways they best learn. Teachers acquire data about student achievement each day and then adapt their live instructional lessons accordingly.
By leveraging technology to play a more essential role in planning instruction, teachers have more time to focus on doing what they do best - delivering quality instruction and insuring that all students learn.
But in order for this model of learning to scale we need to find ways of harnessing technology - multiplying the investment in people that made School of One possible is not going to work for the many. What needs constructed in order to make learning as engaging as a video game and as effective as a face-to-face tutor? How can feedback loops be improved?
Teachers need to be more widely connected to each other, and to expertise in the field. And they need access to resources just-in-time. We need to ratchet up the teaching profession.
Productivity is more or less guaranteed by activity pitched at the right level, at the right time for each individual student. We cannot expect this competency-based learning, at such an individual level, to succeed unless we have a Mission Critical infrastructure. And that includes the cell phones in every child's and teacher's pocket.
I'll be at the event, capturing as much as possible on the blog and my YouTube channel.
LWF 2011 will bring together the equally high demand Handheld Learning, Game Based Learning and Digital Safety that Graham Brown-Martin and his partners have put together over the past four years. The Sunday Service on January 9th will provide a festival atmosphere for all the family, with a chance to trial the latest games and take part in a grand TeachMeet. Speakers will bring their expertise, research and classroom-based stories from the world of games-based learning, mobile technology and social media for learning:
Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
Karen Cator, Director of Educational Technology, US Department of Education
Theodore Gray, co-founder, Wolfram Research
Iris Lapinski, Director CDI Europe & Apps for Good
Ed Vaizey MP, UK Minister for Communications, Culture and the Creative Industries
Lord David Puttnam of Queensgate, CBE
David McCandless, Author & Information Designer, Information is Beautiful
David Yarnton, General Manager, Nintendo UK
Josie Fraser, Social & Educational Technologist
Tim Rylands, Award-winning Educator
Stephen Heppell, Heppell.net
Tom Chatfield, author, Fun Inc.
Derek Robertson, Consolarium at Learning & Teaching Scotland
David Yarnton, General Manager, Nintendo UK
Ray Maguire, Managing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment UK
David Braben, CEO, Frontier Developments
Alex Evans, co-founder, Media Molecule
David Samuelson, EVP Games & Augmented Reality, Pearson
Dawn Hallybone, Senior Teacher, Oakdale Junior School , and star of the latest Nintendo DS adverts
Professor Andrew Blake, Managing Director, Microsoft Research Cambridge
Evan Roth, artist & researcher, Graffiti Research Lab
Saul Nassé, Controller BBC Learning
Genevieve Shore, CIO & Director of Digital Strategy, Pearson Plc
We often talk about how important it is for organisations to be agile and to knit learning into the fabric of daily life, and then produce large, unwieldy processes and technologies for making this happen. I'll be presenting, provoking and setting participants off on a 100 hour journey to revolutionise the way their organisations learn, the way THEY learn, in my session at Learning Technologies 2011, January 26th (tag: #LT11uk).
We'll take a look at how organisations which already are nimble, creative and dedicated to learning are doing this effectively and see what we can learn from them.
Most of the companies and tech start-ups that we admire for their speed to market and smart solutions to real problems see learning as a crucial part of their DNA. Even if the return on investment of time, energy and opportunity cost comes months and years later, if at all, learning is at the core of every great new idea.
I'm going to draw on my experience with large corporations, small start-ups and the education sector, examining what can happen when learning ceases to be something that’s done to you and becomes something you live every working day.
Learning is not about training courses, nor is it measured in in-service days.
What are the working processes that involve learning as a key part of creative work?
What can we learn from the world's most creative and learning-centred companies?
What next steps can you take to transform learning from add-on to core?
The myth of the digital native and why learning fast isn’t just a young person’s game
If you have your own stories about your own organisations, however small, large, nimble or unwieldy, please feel free to tell them here and I can send delegates to your site to explore your story more.
Success with digital media for museums, education and cultural organisations isn't about scrambling to sign up to the latest fads, those teasmades of technology, and more about attitudes of organisations and the individuals within them. What are the handles we can grab hold of to begin or better develop our journeys into digital media use in the world of exhibition, performances or engagement of new audiences?
It tries to make a few points, some more successfully than others, no doubt. Key amongst them:
how to institutions do better what is now so easy for everyman to do?
is there anything to be learned from the world of startups where coming up with a compelling problem that needs solved?
what are the problems museums manage to solve? Do they need to think in that way at all?
what potential is there for cultural organisations to open themselves up to new audiences by tackling the same content and ideas in alternative ways and on different platforms?
John West-Burnham ended the Partners in Excellence Worldwide Innovative Education Forum with a set of conversations. What would your conversations be around these questions?
Are we just about Improvement or are we truly trying to move to transformation in learning? Are we becoming immune to improvement, in that there's a limit to how much we can approve? If that's the case then what we really need is innovation that transforms where we are, that moves what we're doing into a new space where we can further improve.
"We cannot restructure a structure that is splintered at its roots. Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies - it creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are creating through transformation." (McLuhan, 1995)
But why move off into new ground? Is it a given that change is good, that where we have improved to is not good enough? We innovate because opportunity, well-being success, learning, inclusion and excellence are not available to all.
It comes with its challenges. When I was introducing a totally project-based, product-based curriculum in my French classroom in 2002, to when I propose it to teachers all over the world now, the loaded response is: "That's great, really engaging, but at the end of the day we've got to pass exams." The implication is that different = worse. If we've managed to get 80% of students (or 99%) succeeding with these, splintered methods then how could any change improve on that?
What is the reason for our change and evolving projects? What is its Moral Purpose? Equality and equity of provision is a fusion that leads us to true social justice. Any strategy focusing on innovation has to promote social justice to be long-term sustainability.
"The high quality and performance of Finland's education system cannot be divorced from the clarity, characteristics of, and broad consensus about the country's broader social vision. There is compelling clarity about and commitment to inclusive, equitable, and innovative social values beyond as well as within the education system." (Pont et al 2008:80)
And what future is it leading us to? What future are we creating? If you were to ask students what their criteria of success were for the schooling process they would almost all say "fairness". They have a strong sense of justice, of social justice even. If you ask teachers, they'll use the word "consistency". Leaders have to translate policy, words, into practice. They have to tell stories that capture imagination and provide a guiding light for everyone that hears and uses those stories - these stories are what management consultants call 'vision'.
Allowing people just to dream about what they would like as a future for learning is hugely powerful. Giving permission to believe the unbelievable can create a path which people can end up working towards. Building scenarios, pictures of a preferred joint future are vital in helping paint a target around the arrow.
This process is vital - we need a moral destination for our work to make the journey to its achievement possible, and easier. What is it we're trying to do, where does it lead us, why are we taking this journey and why are we going to that destination?
What trust networks have we been able to gather, and how are we going to use them?
"We don't come fully former into the world. We learn how to think, how to walk, how to speak, how to behave, indeed how to be human from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. We are made for togetherness… to exist in a tender network of interdependence. That is how you have ubuntu - you care, you are hospitable, you're gentle, you're compassionate and concerned." Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
"We-Think emerges when diverse groups of independent individuals collaborate effectively. It is not group-think - submersion in a homogeneous, unthinking mass. Crowds and mobs are as stupid as they are wise. It all depends on how the individual members combine participation and collaboration, diversity, and shared values, independence of thought and community." Charles Leadbeater.
"That leaves us with just two main sets of factors behind Easter [Island]'s collapse: human environmental impacts, especially deforestation… and the political, social and religious factors behind the impacts… competition between clans and chiefs driving the erection of bigger statues requiring more wood, rope and food. Jared Diamond
One of the challenges is the extent to which we are going to sustain innovation through sharing. How do we build communities of learning for students, moving schools from places of learning to places of communities. Professional generosity is one of the most powerful means of raising the whole educational game. Part of this, in a virtual sense, is to do with the defaults of systems: all too often the virtual learning environment is set to default sharing with just the class or the school, and not the world. But collaborating with a school 6000 miles away is probably easier and more common than collaborating with the school just down the road - how many secondaries / high schools regularly collaborate, whole school, with another neighbouring high school.
Trust?
"When trust is high, the dividend you receive is like a performance multiplier… In a company, high trust materially improves communication, collaboration, execution, innovation… In your personal life, high trust significantly improves your excitement, energy, passion, creativity and joy in your relationships…" Stephen Covey
If you want me, as a teacher, to really let hog of my habituated practice, to work in different ways, then I've got to trust you.
Children in schools go through all phases of trusting within just one school day. When you're a 12 year old boy you live in a control culture ("In by 8pm or else"). By 16 there's some delegation and negotiation ("How about 11pm? Hmmm, how about 10pm?"). By 18 you're legally empowered to do what you want ("What time might we see you"). As a 32 year old you are bound by family but not ("Who are you?").
Is what we're doing a vocation or just a job?
"When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose and well-being. Being there provides a sense of self-revelation, of defining who they really are and what they are meant to be doing with their lives." Ken Robinson
When faced with 350 Head Teachers deemed by a national accountability agency as "Outstanding", John asked "Why are you outstanding?" Two thirds responded: "A sense of calling."
And when we face a huge range of pressure, where are our reservoirs of hope?
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without words And never stops… at all. Emily Dickinson
Long-term sustainable innovation, leadership and creativity depends on a sense of hope. The most creative and innovative heroes we have all seemed to have this deep well of hope.
"The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wider than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; freqneutn coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links, let others build... Steven Johnson
The connection that we aspire to make is shared by all educators: the neural pathway. The child and the family connecting and interdependent. The community connecting. Then get connectivity between communities.
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