Derek's Blog

I had the pleasure this evening of attending a meeting hosted by Gillian Heald, one of the guardians of the NZ Secondary Futures project. Around 30 secondary teachers, student teachers and others interested in secondary education gathered for an update on where things have developed to with the project, and to consider the two main themes that have emerged and are being focused on as a priority, Students First and Inspiring Teachers.

This project has been running for four years now, and it was interesting to get a first hand update on how things are going and what is emerging. Many things rang true for me in terms of what was presented, and the discussions reinforced what a multi-faceted job we have to do if we're to succeed in reforming the way we provide a secondary education for our you.

I was very interested to be introduced to the work of Valerie Hannon, the Director of Strategy in The Innovations Unit (a UK organisation tasked with promoting innovation to improve education) and her work on Next Practice in System Leadership - I can see I'll be doing some more reading in this area.

Gillian's comment about NZers being "change wary and change weary" also rang bells with me - she reinforced the fact that the SFP isn't looking at promoting another "Tomorrow's Schools" scale of change to our school system, but is seeking to bring about widespread change that is neither "top down" nor "bottom up" - but is achieved through engaging all stakeholders - parents, students, teachers, Ministry of Education, ERO, teacher unions, employers etc - in the dialogue around change leading to the implementation of various ideas and initiatives that will build an understanding of what the future of secondary schooling will be. Judging from the case studies on the SFP website, it would appear that there are already a number of schools and communities doing just that!

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Last year I was invited to participate in a research project to investigate the use of social software in teaching and learning and in capability building and contributes to our understanding of the ways in which the development of social softwares broadens opportunities for organisations to deliver flexible learning both to internal and external clients. The project project was jointly commissioned by the Research and Policy Advice and the Knowledge Sharing Services Projects as part of the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.

The results of this research have now been published, under the title Networks, Connections and Community: Learning with Social Software, and it provides some interesting insights into into how technology is being used for knowledge sharing, capability development, and teaching and learning.

The approach used for the research followed an appreciative inquiry methodology, and the report provides a summary of each of the four phases of this approach:

• Discovery ??? appreciating ???what is??? (identifying and confirming current practice, collecting success stories)
  
• Dreaming ??? imagining how it could be (identifying future or emerging practice, the vision)
  
• Design ??? determining what should be (recommendations and strategies for implementation)
  
• Destiny ??? implementing the design.

This will prove an invaluable reference work for anyone who is contemplating the value and/or contribution of social software in education - and for anyone who is considering research in this area.

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I've been an avid RSS user for a number of years now - my trusty NetNewsWire provides me with my daily updates from numerous blogs, news feeds and websites that makes it easy for me to browse through dozens of items over breakfast. A significant change from the early days of the web where I'd (not so regularly) browse through the lists of links I accumulated in my 'bookmarks' - most of which were forgotten about soon after I saved them there!

In his recent post titled What is RSS, Robin Good comments in this great little video by Lee and Sachi Lefever in which they introduce RSS for beginners. It's a great 3min viewing, and Robin includes the full transcript of the video clip on his blog, complete with hypertext links to sites and features that are illustrated in the video.

As the producers of the video say:
"There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start."

(PS - guess how I came across this link?)

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Just as I was beginning to think that I'm getting used to the Internet and the various ways that I've found to integrate it into the things I do in my life I read that researchers at several universities are working to design a new internet to replace the current global network.

The argument goes that the originally designed internet is well past it's used-by date, with all sorts of "tack-ons' having been added over the past couple of decades to address things such as security, performance, mobility etc., and that these things are now making the current internet cumbersome and in danger of falling over, particularly as we move towards much faster internet speeds and a more mobile internet.

In the article on eSchoolNews, Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton and head of the planning group for the NSF's GENI is quoted as saying, "Rather than create workarounds each time, clean-slate researchers want to redesign the system to easily accommodate any future technologies."

Wow - I guess we'll have to wait and see where this one goes, although indications are that it won't be something that happens in a hurry - with those involved recognising that the internet has now become mission critical to so many in business, government, education etc - it would create mahem to do anything too suddenly.

The article did start me thinking however. What do you do when a system, designed and built to meet the requirements of a previous era, becomes so burdened through the repeated addition of "tack-ons" designed to make it cope with the emerging demands of the changing environment it operates in? Is a clean slate indeed the best solution?

The whole scenario sounds familiar - take for instance our education system. Trouble is, we're up against the same things this group of internet researchers will find - entrenched sets of beliefs and behaviours, all sorts of established use and dependencies, and a general relectance to change from something that is familiar.

Seems we inevitably get back to the "evolution" vs "revolution" arguments. Meantime, another generation of young people get poorly served by what we offer.....

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More from Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak at the launch of the International Smart School Conference 2007 being held in Kuala Lumpur as I write.

In his opening address to the conference the Deputy PM has called for a review of non-ICT promoting curriculum, saying

"We can equip our schools and train teachers with ICT. But at the end of the day, if the curriculum is still examination focused, and geared towards memorisation and reproduction of facts and figures, our objectives will not be met

Gone are the days for rote learning or spoon feeding in classrooms, of regurgitating textbook chapters to fill up pages of examination answer books.

The emphasis in today's learning culture must be on thinking, the use of the mind to find solutions to emerging problems. Students must be taught the means through which they can maximise their creativity and capacity for innovation,"

(Story from The Star Online

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I spent the day today in a school here in Perak, Malaysia, interviewing a teacher about his experiences in using ICT with his senior physics class. Until just a few weeks ago this teacher had not used ICT at all with his class, and was very skeptical about whether ICT had any contribution at all to make to the subject of Physics. After a little coaxing from his in-school ICT facilitator, he decided to try using the internet to access resources to support his work with his senior physics class.

This resulted in him finding a site with short video clips of crash impact tests on cars, that he was able to use (along with some other sites) with his students. The impact of this on him and his students (I also interviewed two of them) was profound. He is now a convert to the idea that ICT may indeed have something to offer the area of physics, and is now exploring the use of computer-based simulations to bring the static images in his physics text books to life!

Quite a turnaround in just two weeks. Now his challenge will be to get enough access to the school's two computer labs for his students, and to ensure that he doesn't get distracted from meeting the school and department of education's requirements in terms of curriculum coverage and examination preparation for his students.

The work I've been involved with in Malaysia in the past couple of weeks has made me very aware that we must be focusing on change at two levels in order to achieve a truly "Smart School". These are:

1. Teacher beliefs and behaviours - as exemplified by the physics teacher above. This experience has shifted both his pre-conceived ideas about ICT and his subject area, and has changed (albeit in a small way) some of his behaviours as a teacher. Because such beliefs and behaviours take a long time to develop and embed, they will also take a long time to change!
   
2. System and infrastructure issues, including curriculum, assessment, ICT access, timetables, class size etc.

An effective professional development, and change management process must embrace and address both of these dimensions.

While I have been working here in Perak, some of my New Zealand colleagues have been attending the International Smart Schools Conference in Kuala Lumpur. In his opening address at the conference the Deputy Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, addressed this very issue in a rather hard hitting speech in which he made calls for massive change to the school system in Malaysia. In particular, he emphasised the need to do better in relation to the use of ICT, saying "They are called smart schools. But, apart from computers, there is little that is smart about them."- and calling for a massive change in the "processes and procedures" entrenched in the school system.

Of course Najib is not alone with these concerns. Around the globe education and political leaders are expressing concern at the lack of any real change in terms of how ICT is being used (or not as the case may be) in schools. Many are questioning whether the vast amounts of money being spent are worth it, while others are suggesting punitive approaches for schools and teachers who aren't (in their opinion) moving fast enough.

I'm sure we haven't heard the last of the Smart School reform ideas here in Malaysia, and I can imagine we must be due for some similar posturing soon in New Zealand, given that there's a general election coming up. I do remain optimistic, however, as I reflect on the experience today with my physics teaching friend, and his two students, that change is achievable provided the two dimensions I referred to earlier are addressed equally in any professional development effort.

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I've just spent the morning reading through a new report from the OECD titled "Participative Web: User Generated Content" (880kb PDF download) which describes the rapid growth of User Created Content and its increasing role in communication. The paper is the latest release from the OECD work on digital content.

I found the report very interesting, providing a comprehensive overview of the developments in this area, and identifying a range of issues that must be taken into account at the policy level as we move forward - including things such as access to broadband etc, and the old bogies of copyright, IP and "fair use" etc. These are all issues that are affecting schools and universities right now!

When I worked at NZ's Correspondence School a number of years ago we envisaged an environment where content contributed by students and staff would be just as important in the system as the formally produced course-ware, and began developing a content management process that would embrace this as part of the work-flow. Sadly, it was an idea before its time, and the project was shelved.

This OECD report has refreshed my interest, however. It contains a useful overview of the emerging value and publishing chain of user-created content (p.21), contrasting this with the traditional media publishing value chain which they say is characterised by a number of hurdles, including the control of "content gate-keepers".

In the past six months, having nothing better to do, I have submitted responses to several government tenders in which I've proposed a UCC-centric approach to the establishment and operation of online portals etc. Needless to say I haven't been successful (yet), but this report gives me confidence that it's the right thing to do, and the analysis provided in it will assist in future work and thinking.

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I was fascinated to read Robin Good's report on the annual Technorati Blog Statistics and Trends report that has just been released by Technorati CEO, Dave Silfy.

Not surprisingly the report shows that the uptake of blogs continues to escalate at an explosive pace, but there are signs also that the "blogosphere" is maturing, with some definite patterns of use establishing in what the data reveals. Some indications of this growth include:

• The blogosphere is now 70 million weblogs wide
  
• About 120,000 new weblogs are created each day, or...
  
• 1.5 million posts per day
  
• 1.4 new blogs are created every second
  
• 17 posts are made every second

The first relates to the internationalisation of blogs - and the language they are written in. According to the Technorati stats for this year, the Japanese are now the world's greatest blogging nation (based on langauge of blogs). Of the top four languages for blogging, Japanese retakes the top spot from the last report, with 37% (up from 33%) of the posts followed closely by English at 36% (down from 39%). Next after these two front-running languages is Chinese which comes in third at 8% (down from 10% in 2006, and fourth is Italian at 3% (up from 2% last year).

The other thing that caught my eye is the data indicating a rapid rise in the use of Tagging. The report noted that 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags. As Silfy states; "we???re seeing explosive growth in the tags index. People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages.. Is this the sign we've been looking for to confirm the establishment of folksonomies as a legitimate contender for how we organise and mange information>

Read the full State of the Live Web report by David Silfy in its original version with additional graphs and stats here:
The State of the Live Web, April 2007

There are also links to the previous year's Technorati reports at the bottom of Robin Good's post - these provide very useful reading to make comparisons and discover where the trends are.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm back in Ipoh, Malaysia, for a couple of weeks to work on the KPEC project. The photo above shows Jedd Bartlett, the NZ facilitator for the project, and his wife, Jenny, working with local teachers at a workshop at one of the local schools. It's encouraging to see the progress that has been made, albeit in small steps, since I was last here - with teachers sharing what they are doing in classrooms with students to integrate ICTs into their teaching and learning. The KPEC programme is based on teachers planning their own "ICT Challenge", and, supported by local facilitators and mentors, working through the challenge, all the time maintaining a log of their personal reflections and 'learnings' from what they've been doing. These are shared within the online environment which, at this stage, is available only to other participants in the programme - thus creating a community of practice where teachers are learning from each other's experiences as well as from their own.

The focus on teachers as reflective practitioners has been a passion of mine for some years now, based in the belief that the most powerful learning we can do as professionals comes from the time we take to reflect and 'unpack' the daily experiences we have in our own classrooms.

I was interested to discover recently the Making Teaching Public project (courtesy of Teacher's College Record).

The websites in Making Teaching Public bring together videos, interviews, written reflections, curriculum materials, student work and other resources that enable viewers to examine many aspects of teaching and learning. An exhibition overview, slideshow, and invited commentaries explore some of the opportunities and issues of documentation and representation raised by the use of multimedia and new technologies in making teaching public.

These are well told stories that each of us can learn from. Take for instance the story of Martha Andrews' 5th grade classroom at the Bronx New School. The following extract from Martha's web entry summarises the approach:

Rather than highlighting "best practices", the site seeks to provide an authentic slice of life of a teacher who is continually inquiring about her practice and using what she learns from her inquiry to deepen, develop, and refine her work. While the site captures many aspects of teaching and learning in Andrew's classroom, it focuses on the way that Andrews adjusts, adapts and expands her initial curriculum plan in order to meet her students' needs. It also provides a glimpse of how Andrews' adjustments are informed by formal and informal efforts to assess what her students are learning and to reflect on the progress of the project.

Similarly, the experiences of the New Zealand eFellows over the past four years provides some in-depth insights into ways in which ICT can contribute in powerful ways to achieving the goals and outcomes for learners. Each of the eFellows have used an action-research process to reflect on and document the research focus that they had for the year of their fellowship.

Stories like this encourage me with what we're doing here in Perak, and I look forward to similar stories being shared from among the teachers in this programme.

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This year's ODLAA conference is being held in conjunction with the Distance Education Association of New Zealand (DEANZ) from 11 to 14 November 2007 at Lincoln University, New Zealand

As a member of the organising committee I thought I'd let you know what's happening...

The theme for ODLAA2007 is Open and Distance Learning in the South Pacific:Cultures - Collaborations - Cognitions - Communities

Participants are invited to present papers reflecting on the role of open and distance learning pedagogy, technologies, systems, policies and providers in

• respecting cultures,
  
• enabling collaborations,
  
• cognitions: building knowledge and managing learning, and
  
• valuing and sustaining communities

• Full papers for double blind review: (3000-4000 words);
  
• Workshops: (three hours); Abstracts only (non peer reviewed): (300-400 words).

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http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=268691876&size=l

Following on from my last post on School2.0 etc, I read with interest Stephen Downes post titled To The School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates in which he responds to some questions from Christian Long.

I rather like Stephen's responses to Christian's list of questions. They resonate with my understandings of the whole school/class2.0 discussion. This is emphasised in one point he makes;

I have commented in the past, and I reiterate the point here, that from my perspective the predominate use of the term 'School 2.0' has been to promote a view of learning that is traditionalist, rather than oriented to the future, one that seeks to preserve the existing trappings of education, most notably, schools. We hear a lot of language like "the fact is, schools are here to stay," but there is in my mind no fact of the matter, certainly not in the time-frame of 25-30 years.

The other thing that I find often find inhibits our thinking about the future of schools and schooling is the extent to which the discussion dwells on the physical structures we call schools, and the systems and processes that we use to operate them, instead of a focusing on the nature of teaching and learning as being the things that need to change most markedly as we look to the future. When you look at things from that perspective then things like buildings, timetables etc can be viewed from the perspective of how well they enable or inhibit effective teaching and learning practices.

With this in mind I was interested to read Phil Brown's Student Self-Directed Learning blog entry titled What makes a good learner? in which he poses the question then summarises a number of factors suggested in a paper from NREL. It's my contention that if we begin by looking at the list suggested by Phil, and considering what sorts of environments and support would be required to enable this sort of learning to take place, then our perspective on what the future of schools and schooling might be might be very different.

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A fascinating article in the Manchester Evening News caught my eye - titled Don't text kids out of school, teachers told. Seems that some teachers who have been making use of emerging technologies such as cell phones and some social networking software to communicate with their students out of school hours are facing complaints from parents and some even facing court action! Now, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) is warning that sending cyber messages is leaving teachers exposed to malicious accusations against them.

While there's a cautionary tale here about the need for discretion about who and where teachers choose to share personal details, and what sorts of messages and comments they may make, I'd certainly hope that a few isolated incidents won't quench the exploration of how these tools can be used to bridge the gap between home and school, and contribute positively to supporting students learning when and where they want to.

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The April/May edition of Innovate is now online - and interestingly it deals with the topic of the Net Generation - this is a generation that has grown up with video games, computers, and the Internet. In light of my blog comments a couple of days back about Don Tapscott's 1998 book on this topic it is timely that some more current thinking and research on the topic emerges.

The intro to the site says...

The expectations, attitudes, and technological fluency of this new generation present both a challenge and an opportunity for educators. In this special issue of Innovate, we examine how educators and educational systems can respond to the challenge and leverage the opportunity.

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I've just been listening again to Evangeline Stefanakis and Helen Barrett at the CORE Breakfast session, speaking about the use of ePortfolios and the ways in which these can support the goals of personalising learning. While the idea of personalising learning sounds good in principle, there are many ways in which the idea may be manifest in practice. All of these require that we confront our existing ideas and understandings about schools, teaching and classroom practice.

The frame above is from a 9 minute video that comes from the The Consortium for School Networking's 21th annual conference that kicked off March 28 in San Francisco. It features Chris Dede offering some thoughts on personalising learning and the challenges it brings. Chris interviews two speakers who are working to create personalised learning experiences for students:

• Jean Johnson, the project director of NotSchool.net, and
  
• Jack Dale, the superintendant of the Fairfax County Public School district where they are implementing an Individualised Learning Plan for every student!

The clip contributes some useful thoughts to the Personalising Learning discussion - I particularly appreciated the latter part where the panel engage in discussion around some of the issues about implementing a personalised approach within the existing school system. Dede's final comment is worth noting - he points out that the major issue is with breaking down the social and political barriers - pointing out that technology will only ever take us part of the way towards the personalised learning dream.

A final point - although I was pointed to this clip through a link on personalising learning - the actual title of the session refers to individualised instruction - obviously the nomenclature issue is still to be resolved!

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