I spent yesterday with a group of intermediate and secondary teachers in Levin, followed by a community meeting chaired by the Mayor for Horowhenua. The focus was on how the community in that district might be able to play a greater role in supporting the work of the local schools in educating their students. I shared with them the publication on Personalising Learning I blogged about yesterday, in particular, the section on “Strong and engaged communities”.

Encouragingly, there was quite a bit of interest in this, with each person bringing their own level of understanding and interpretation of personalising learning to the discussion. One thing that I noticed was that there was a general assumption in the meetings that personalised learning should be a feature at all levels of our education system, with some discussion taking place at the meeting around the importance of the transition points in our education system (primary to intermediate, intermediate to secondary etc). This is something I whole-heartedly agree with, and it was doubly pleasing in this context as this was exactly what the community meeting in Levin was setting out to do. But as Stephen pointed out in his comment to my post yesteray, this is something that the NZ discussion document fails to recognise, focusing solely on personalising learning within the compulsory school sector.

All this said, I was interested to read tonight an article by BBC News education correspondent Mike Baker, in which he shares some concerns he has about the personalised learning initiative in the UK. In his article, titled Tailoring lessons for every pupil, Baker claims that, in their efforts to implement personalised learning in UK schools, educators will, again, have failed to realised the importance of taking parents, employers and other lay people along with them on the ride to the latest new thing.

Agreeing that change in our school system is overdue, Baker goes on to report on how the use of ICT has also failed to fulfill its promise if bringing about that change. He quotes Andrew Pinder, chair of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), who told a conference this week that schools are “one of a relatively small number of industries that do not look as if they have changed much over the past 30 years”.

Earlier this year, Becta published its annual report which has been summed up as saying that much money has been spent on IT in UK education with little discernible return. Pinder is reported as saying that Becta research concludes that about 15% of the UK’s 25,000 schools have shown some gains in performance as a result of the technology that’s been poured into them.

I came across a more forthright version of Pinder’s speech on Donald Clark’s Blog post titled BECTA on the offensive, in which he (Clark) begins with:

In a blistering analysis on the wasted spend in schools, the new Chair of BECTA, Andrew Pindar, blamed the teaching profession as being the block on progress.

These reports from the UK, who have been the trailblazers for the path NZ is about to follow, provide some stern warnings that we’d be best to take on board lest we find ourselves having similar things being written about us in the future. The things we need to take on board include:

• there’s some courageous leadership required if we are to achieve a radically different view of schools and schooling. This will require risk taking and vision - the current climate of extreme risk aversion is stifling such leadership.

• We must address the policy issues that are creating some of the biggest blocks to us achieving these changes - the standard patterns of lesson delivery to classes of 30 kids in square classrooms is as much to do with the policies that support this as it is with teachers not wanting to change
• personalising learning must impact across all levels of our system - both life-long and life-wide, so let’s quickly get to the next version of a document that reflects this, and engage all levels of the education system in the discussions.
• the involvement of communities must be pivotal in all of this, not just as a something that is “ticked off” because it is referred to in the document. There must be meaningful engagement and collaboration, much of it initiated by community leaders, not leaving it solely to school leaders and principals.
• Technology/ICT of in and of itself will not bring about the change that is required. ICT can enable and facilitate powerful shifts in behaviour and thinking, but on its own it is not a “magic bullet”.

I’ll end my little rant with another quote from Clark’s blog post:

Schools, in [Pinder's] opinion, are organised in the wrong way. They need institutional reform, not management by individuals. One must separate the institution from its staff. In education the workers are in control and run the system for their benefit. They can’t go out of business, are massively funded and supported by the state and have therefore have no reason to reform themselves. Reform must come from the outside.

Now there’s a serious challenge to the current way we think within the New Zealand political and education system!

The Ministry of Education have just released their discussion document Let’s Talk About Personalising Learning (PDF download) which is available through the TKI site.

I’ve been waiting to see this since hearing Education Minister Steve Maharey speak so passionately on the topic at the ULearn conference earlier this year. His focus on personalized learning reflects what is happening on other parts of the world, where an increased emphasis on meeting then needs of individual learners, providing greater flexibility and choice within our education system, is a key goal of government education strategy.

The NZ discussion document focuses on these areas:

• effective teaching

• assessment for learning
• curriculum
• strong and engaged communities
• professional leadership
• highly supportive system

Most of what is discussed in the document around each of these areas draws together elements of existing initiatives within the NZ system, illustrating how these might contribute towards personalising learning. As it says in the document, By personalising learning, we???re identifying the strengths of New Zealand???s education system. By building on these strengths, we will be able to achieve the following:

Children and young people will:
• have high expectations and can take control of their own learning
• learn how to learn and work with others, with support and challenges
• have a much better understanding of the learning process
• identify the knowledge they???ve gained and the next stepsbe supported at home and in the family/ wha??nau and community
• be involved in planning their children???s future education and supporting their children to plan their learning pathways.

Interestingly, there is no actual definition provided. There are plenty of suggestions of what personalising learning might be, including:

• working to build a system that is geared up to equip every young person for the future

• a way of renewing Clarence Beeby???s vision of equal opportunity for all students
• not only about putting students at the centre of our system.. but about making learning meaningful for them
• regarding students as individuals who engage in a dynamic, two-way process

. Acknowledging that, the first suggestion made in the final section on how do we put personalising learning into practice? suggests that schools ask themselves “how do we define personalising learning?”

Internationally, there is similar work going on, In 2005 the DfES in the UK released a white paper called Higher Standards, Better Schools for All - that sets the scene for personalized learning, focusing on increasing choice for parents and students.

They’ve since set up their DfES Personalised Learning website for the UK personalised learning initiative, providing details of the five components that they’ve identified:

• assessment for learning,

• effective teaching and learning
• curriculum entitlement and choice
• organising the school
• beyond the classroom

(note the parallels with the NZ document)

There are already some interesting perspectives coming through from the UK research, including this list of Personalised Learning Research Summaries - a series of research reports written by eight head-teachers and/or deputy head-teachers/vice principals in the UK who’ve written on each of the five components of personalized learning as set out by the DfES.

One of my favourite background papers on personalized learning comes from the UK’s FutureLab titled Personalisation and Digital Technologies, in which, as the title suggests, there is an exploration of the ways in which ICTs can and are contributing to the personalisation of learning.

Well, the scene is set - it will be interesting now to see in what direction(s) the NZ education system goes. Will personalising learning simply become the current ‘buzz term’, ensuring that anyone who is clever enough to include reference to it in their planning or reports will achieve a tick for their funding approval - or might this be the catalyst for truly transforming an education system that is undoubtedly still intensely “institution-centric” and “delivery-focused”?

Interesting entry from Helen Barrett on her e-portfolios for learning blog in which she introduces a model of portfolio differences. The model is a response to what she sees as a lack of understanding between the use of portfolios for learning and for accountability. The model stems from the work of Dr. Evangeline Harris Stefanakis in her book, Multiple Intelligences and Portfolios, which contains a diagram placing portfolios along a continuum of Learning and Accountability. The model combines Stefanakis’s diagram and some of Barrett’s work, and is called the Stefanakis-Barrett Model of Portfolio Differences (PDF)

I rather like what the model portrays - particularly because it emphasises a continuum view rather than a binary choice, and in this respect complements the thinking I’ve been doing and writing about on the scope of the online learning environment.(PDF dowload), and the continuum model I’ve developed to show the differences between established and emergent approaches within our education system.

I’ve just spent the weekend in Rotorua attending a 10 year celebration of the beginning of the Primary Open Learning (POLO) primary teacher training programme in Rotorua. This is a programme that I had a part in establishing when I was working at the Christchurch College of Education. Back then it was difficult to imagine the programme would last for ten years! To date there have been 163 graduates of the programme - most of whom are now teaching in and around the Rotorua or central North Island region. The Rotorua programme is a regional initiative based on the distance education teacher education programme that CCE have been running since 1995. Similar programmes have been run in Gisborne, Panguru and Te Aroha - but only Rotorua has continued for 10 years.

This is a credit to the vision and leadership of a number of people, including the principals association of Rotorua who initiated discussions with the Christchurch College of Education, to the management and staff of CCE, and to the long term commitment of Ann-Marie Hunt (left rear in photo above) who has been the local coordinator of the POLO programme since it began - and the many other lecturers and staff who have worked with the students there. It also owes a lot to the partnership that has developed between CCE and the Waiariki Polytechnic that has been the local “home” to the project since it started.

The theme of this weekend was “making a difference”, and during the weekend I heard many stories from students of how this programme has made a difference in their lives, and how they are now able to make a difference in the lives of the students in the classes they are teaching.

The weekend was also attended by some of the past and present management team from the Christchurch College of Education, making it especially significant for them as it also marks the end of the formal relationship with the College as an entity, as in six weeks time it will amalgamate with the University of Canterbury.

The final part of the weekend was a poroporoaki that held in the Wharenui at Waiariki Institute of Technology(see picture below). A feature of the Rotorua POLO programme has been the wananga, led by Peter Moeau, that were held in this wharenui. Many students spoke of the significance of these experiences throughout their course - in preparing them to work with Maori students in mainstream schools.

Now here’s some serious competition for the traditional print media publishers - WikiJunior, a project of WikiBooks, aims to…

…produce a series of full-color booklets for children aged 8 to 11. The subjects will be appealing to kids, and the writing will be light and friendly. These booklets will be richly illustrated with photographs, diagrams, sketches, and original drawings. The texts will also follow a format, so that each booklet, while different, will also have certain common features.

Using wiki technology and an open community format, over a 1,000 textbooks are being assembled online (with some PDF and print versions as well). Titles include Accounting, Chess, European History, Physiology, Managing Groups and Teams, Ecology and more.

I downloaded a PDF copy of the solar system booklet - 97 pages packed with information and images. The layout is pretty basic from a design perspective, consisting largely of headings and blocks of text, with the occasional image inserted here and there. The image quality is pretty good on the whole. The main headings are phrased as questions that students may come seeking an answer to, but without an index of them it’s pretty hit and miss as to whether you’ll find the question you want. I’d have to say that the language level may be a bit challenging for many students in the target age group - many comparable published texts that I’ve watched my 9-year old become engrossed in would have a greater amount of visual material including annotated graphics etc to make it easier to access the meaning of some of the scientific and technical terms.

That said, this is an interesting development which will deserve to be followed to see how it develops and how the resources being produced are used.

A further 8 pages follow that provide details of the GNU Free Documentation License which tells you what you are able to do with regards copying and distributing copies of the booklet.

Thanks to Kevin Kruse for the heads up on this one

Interesting to watch the news tonight and see more on the leaked emails saga that is dogging NZ politics at the moment. With this in mind, I was interested to receive an email from Rich McIver from IT Security today, advising me that his company has just published “Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips “.

The authors ask why is it that…

when it comes to emails, there are no accepted standards? Even though 6 billion emails are sent every day, almost no one agrees about simple things like email etiquette, how to organize a note, or whether emails are considered private or not.

I’ve scanned through the list of tips and they ring true to me. They could be used as the basis of a pretty good email policy within a school or organisation - with sections dealing with

• etiquette

• communication and effectiveness
• mobile email
• productivity, folders and filtering
• email filtering
• tricks, hacks, backup
• system specific email (which is pretty much a hard sell for google mail, but worth noting all the same)
• privacy and security

Several of the tips have hyperlinks for further information, background or definitions. There’s stuff here that will be of interest for even the most experienced email users. Thanks to Rich and h is team for making this available!

A useful resource from UNESCO called Using ICT to Develop Literacy is now available as a PDF download from their website. It’s an easy read - concise and useful, focusing on five key ways in which ICT can support literacy

1. Enhancing Learning

2. Broadening Access to Literacy Education
3. Creating Local Content
4. Professional Development of Teachers
5. Cultivating a Literacy-Conducive Environment

There is a useful discussion at the beginning of the document on how literacy is defined:

“The word ???literacy??? is often used today as a substitute for the word ???ability??? or ???competency???. For example, ???computer literacy??? is the ability to use computers, and access and create information through a computer. Such uses should not be confused with the term ???literacy??? as we use it here, i.e. the skills related to reading, writing and communicating in the written form.

Examples of other uses of the word ???literacy??? include:

• Information literacy: The skills required to organize and search for information, while also analyzing that information.

• Critical literacy: the ability to engage in critical thinking, and judge the intention, content and possible effects of written material.
• Mobile literacy: The ability to use mobile technology, such as a mobile phone and its non-voice features.
• Media literacy and research literacy: The ability to be a discerning reader and the ability to find various types of information.
• Cultural literacy: the ability to understand cultural, social and ideological values in a given context.
• Legal literacy: the knowledge of basic legal rights and how to protect those rights.
• Visual literacy: the interpretation of images, signs, pictures and non-verbal (body) language. “

The resource also contains a range of informative case studies and illustrations from a variety of cultural contexts.

One of the focus areas, professional development, is a particular interest of mine, and on that subject, here are a couple of other links that I found over the weekend:

???Cultivating Digital Educators??? - a paper by two school teachers from the US in which they share their experiences and ideas about how to transform a traditional school environment into one where teachers effectively use technology for collaboration, curriculum development, instructional delivery, and student engagement. Their presentation is available as an 18min movie download and is worth viewing.

Beyond Spray and Pray PD - an article by Wesley Fryer in TechLearn nothing new here at all, in fact, everything he reveals in this latest ‘epiphany’ is what has underpinned the ICT PD cluster schools programme in New Zealand for the past six years - but always good to have this affirmed!

It’s a public holiday in Canterbury today, so I’ve had an opportunity to browse and ponder a few articles that have come via my RSS feeds. Linked to my musing about the advice I should give my daughter in a recent post, I was interested to read about a recent report from the US titled “Are They Really Ready To Work? Employers??? Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st. Century U.S. Workforce” (PDF file). TechLearning uses the heading Workforce Readiness Crisis for their commentary on this report, while the Partnership for 21st century Skills group (who commissioned the report) lead with Most Young People Entering the U.S. Workforce Lack Critical Skills Essential For Success.

Or what about this one; Are College Students Techno Idiots? - from Inside Higher Ed reporting on a recent report released by the Educational Testing Service (US) which finds that students lack many basic skills in information literacy, which ETS defines as the ability to use technology to solve information problems.

“Crisis”, “lack critical skills”, “idiots?”, - these are powerful and emotive words. The picture painted here is grim, and focuses our attention again on what Neil Postman refers to as The End of Education in his book subtitled, “redefining the value of school.”

Predictably, each of the articles tells just one side of the story - but the beauty of the web is that you can also read the reviews and comments that people have left to help get a better understanding and, perhaps, more balanced perspective. But the challenge remains the same - just how seriously are we taking this “crisis” - and how many cohorts of students will we graduate before we come close to sorting things out (I’ve got three more children to come through the system yet!).

Yesterday I spoke with a teacher who is helping coordinate a group of local secondary schools to form a cluster for the purposes of participating in an ICT professional development programme. The enthusiasm was evident, as was the extent of preparation etc. But the major concern revolves around the priorities as seen by the principals and senior management of the participating schools - whether to invest time and effort in the ICT PD programme, or in the other, competing priority they’ve identified - behaviour management. (MMmmm he muses, let me see - choice between preparing these young people for their future, or learning how to control them in class??)

Now I don’t want to demean the situation - let’s face it, the issue of disruptive students and inappropriate behaviour is not insignificant in our secondary schools, and is has a major impact not only on those who are mis-behaving, but everyone else as well who has to wait while the problems are sorted etc. But all of this serves to illustrate how the tyranny of the urgent so often becomes an excuse for not addressing the more important, long term issues we must find solutions to.

The problem seems to me to be one of relevance - we keep coming back to the fact that we operate a school system designed to meet the needs of the past, barely the present, and certainly not the future. Technology is certainly has a major part to play in this, and as Postman says in “The End Of Education”;

“Technolgoical change is not additive, it is ecological. A new technology doesn’t change something, it changes everything!”

Obviously this isn’t fully understood yet in our education system, judging by the advice I read today for principals and teachers regarding their options for online professional development. The focus here is on an additive attitude to the acquisition of ICT skills, based on a transmissive approach with a measure of rewards and incentives thrown in.

I’ll end this little rant with a quote passed on to me by my friend and mentor, Tony Mander, from a recent book by John Lienhard:

So with Menocchio in mind, let us look about us once more at over a billion computers that have been thrown into the world during a scant two decades. Like Sebastian Brant, we tell one another, ???Gee whiz, look at all the information our children can now access???. The real changes that the computer is bringing about ??? changes in the way we see reality ??? remain invisible.

We hardly yet have an adult generation that has known the personal computer from birth. At this writing, you and I still see the computer against the backdrop of the not-computer. We typed before we word-processed. We learned the algorithms of arithmetic before we used hand calculators. We memorised facts, algorithms, and spellings.

All of us see the personal computer against the backdrop of a world without it. What we cannot see at all is how a mind will work when it has never known anything else. What did they say about books in 1501? In the end, whatever was said was irrelevant because it was ??? ipso facto ??? useless commentary. For everyone looking at the new books in 1501, the future was as hopelessly unpredictable as it remains today.

Lienhard, John H. How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines. Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 171

A few weeks ago I blogged about a newcomer to the social networking software scene called Shelfari. I’ve been adding to my collection during the weeks since then, and have also begun exploring with a couple of teachers ways in which this application could be used in a classroom context.

Recently I received a communication from Mark Williamson, co-founder & Board member at Shelfari who has shared with me a piece of code that will allow my shelf to be linked directly to my blog. That is what I am experimenting with here. Seems to work well, with the books on my shelf being dynamically displayed here within my blog.

The forward and back arrows allow me to scroll through my collection and the link to Shelfari takes me directly to my home page on Shelfari, which, thanks to the keychain in my Mac, automatically signs me in ready to go. However, having this centred as an entry in my blog isn’t where I’d prefer to have it, so I’ve suggested to Mark that he create a script that will allow me to put this in my side-bar, perhaps with the most recent book on my shelf, or the one (or 2 or 3) I am reading at the moment - with the same navigation arrows and links to my shelf in a pop-up browser window - now that would be really cool!

I sat with my wife and 20 year old daughter last night watching a television documentary about Darfur and the crisis that exists there. The images were compelling, as was the commentary and interviews with those involved. It made me think of a recent entry I made on my blog about the interactive game, Darfur is Dying, and wonder just how effective playing this game is in really helping children understand the situation that the people in this country are facing.

My 20 year old daughter has just returned from a six month stint in central America as part of a Global Volunteer Network scheme - spending three months in Honduras helping build a house for a family, and a further three months in El Salvador working in an orphanage. Her experiences were nowhere near as extreme as what we watched together on TV last night, but they have left her just as troubled about how she as a single individual might work to alleviate the suffering of others. She has spoken to me at length about the plight of the young girls she worked with in the orphanage, plucked from a life of poverty, but destined to a life of prostitution or roadside begging once they are too old to remain in the orphanage - how terrible the cycle is.

She has returned to NZ with thoughts of training as a teacher (focusing on her interest in science, particularly chemistry) - but is currently wondering just where she might best put her energies. Understandably, she wants to act now - but is also discerning enough to understand that there may be a lot more she can achieve with some sort of training or qualification behind her.

It’s a dilemma - How might our education system better prepare our young people for facing this sort of world? When in our education process is it appropriate to expose students to this sort of situation? Can it be done without appearing tokenistic? How do we best prepare our students to develop the right attitudes of mind and dispositions to cope when they are exposed? What sort of qualification does it take to prepare one for work in this area?

I can’t help but find myself contemplating the message in the letter that Will Richardson wrote recently to his kids, titled Dear Kids, You Don???t Have to Go to College. What advice should I give my daughter?