Today I presented CORE’s ten trends for 2010 to an audience of around 400 delegates at the Learning@School conference in Rotorua. The ten trends are a collection of themes and issues that have been identified by CORE staff as trends in education that we imagine will impact on the work of teachers and leaders in early childhood centres, schools, and tertiary institutions in NZ in the coming year. While our focus is on the bigger picture of education, there is a focus on trends associated with the use of ICTs in education, reflecting the fact that we are living in a world where nearly everything we do has a digital dimension.
So… our politicians have come up with yet another proposal to address perceived issues in our education system – and a radical one at that!!!
I was fascinated to view a TV news item on TV1 this evening reporting on the launch of a report titled ‘Free to learn.’(PDF download), the product of an Inter-Party Working Group (IPWG) on School Choice , chaired by ACT MP, and Associate Minister of Education Heather Roy.
Free to learn claims to be “A report on policy options relating to the funding and regulation of schools that will increase parental choice and school autonomy in New Zealand.” Now that’s something that caught my attention – I’ve been arguing that for over a decade. Free to Learn recommends policies that:
create an environment where new education providers will readily enter the compulsory education sector
enable successful schools and organisations to expand and franchise to meet parental demand
increase the opportunities and remove the impediments to the establishment of special character schools
enable schools and providers to specialise
permit schools to lease or licence their premises to alternative providers.
Now these are certainly ambitious goals, but they certainly aren’t new ideas. This sort of thinking was certainly radical in the days of Plato in The Republic, and possibly still considered radical in the 1970s when John Holt wrote “How children fail“. But I can hardly call the thinking in this report radical in 2010 – particularly when most of it is simply an update of what was begun in the previous century but failed to be acted on (at a systemic level). Further, it can hardly be labelled radical when the solutions that appear to be promoted (or at least interpreted) all reflect last century thinking.
Note these responses from the TV news report…
“Some kids find it difficult enough to get to one provider and have a stable day let alone moving around the city,”
“My main concern is that it’d require a massive bureaucracy to underpin it.”
“Quite clearly we’d need more money for buildings and facilities to cater for more students under this proposal,”
“I suppose it’s all right but it’s a lot more travelling for the kids between schools. I figure it would to easy to have them at the same school,”
Note the common theme? All of these responses (plus the responses from the teacher unions and several other educators reported on radio and other newspapers in the follow-up to this item) reflect an assumption that the solution lies in the making structural changes to the physical entities we currently call schools. The focus is on issues of location, presence, attendance, structures – all characteristics of our current schools system. That’s not radical – that’s yesterday’s thinking!
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking the report. In fact, I openly welcome the challenges that it invites the education community to engage with (yet again). It’s about time we had this sort of thinking on the reform agenda again. But please – let’s be truly radical about the thinking we bring to the solutions we explore.
The report – or at least the solutions that could be implemented as a result of engagement with it – might be considered (at least moderately) radical if we were to consider how things look in a quite a different dimension for the solution. I’m talking here about the world of virtual schooling – or at least a blend of virtual and physical schooling. Where students have a physical place to be for the important social development and learning, but where they can access their learning from a range of places and in a range of styles and modes in the virtual world. Thus they have the best of both worlds – and aren’t required to spend un-productive time travelling between venues, and we aren’t required to thinking about building new buildings and facilities to accommodate them.
And this isn’t really new thinking either! The Correspondence School (which I note had input into this report) has been serving NZ schools in this way for more than 50 of its 100+ years! When I worked there in the early part of this century just on a half of the 20,000 enrolments we had were students who were already in a face-to-face school but relying on the Correspondence School to access subjects not available to them where they were located. That’s 10, 000 students – the equivalent of our four largest secondary schools combined! (Incidentally, one of those students was my daughter who took Correspondence School Spanish through most of her secondary schooling and learned to speak and write the language sufficiently to survive six months in Central America in a volunteer programme where everyone around her spoke only Spanish.)
But that was correspondence ( a technology of the early 20th century). Now we have extensive use of online technologies, and in the background in NZ there has been a growing movement of schools that have been providing for the academic and curriculum needs of their students by exchanging courses in the ‘virtual world’. The Virtual Learning Network (VLN) has been operating for eight years now, and this year already has over 1500 students in remote and rural secondary schools on its roll.
This situation is set to gain momentum as the speed and reliability of our national network improves. The government is currently investing $1.5 billion dollars in rolling out high speed broadband around all of New Zealand, that includes the goal of reaching 93% of rural schools with fibre, enabling speeds of at least 100Mbps, with the remaining 7% to achieve speeds of at least 10Mbps. Initial research into the benefits to schools of having this level of connectivity showed promising results, including a case study of senior level music being taught successfully via video conference.
To be honest, my gut reaction when I read the policy backgrounder in the Free to Learn report was to think “at last, a set of policy recommendations that could lay the long needed policy framework required for the VLN to expand fully to become an integral part of our nation’s education system. Then I waited to read or hear reference to the VLN. Silence. Instead, the incessant droning of tired politicians and educators speaking about cars, buildings and bureaucracy.
Surely it’s time for some truly radical thinking. Something that is truly ‘out of the box’ and more likely to succeed. Something that builds on an already succeeding model that exists in our own back yard?
Several years ago, following a PPTA symposium on this topic, I wrote my own list of the things that needed to be on a policy agenda. I’m re-posting that list here in the hope that it might inspire some action this time.
Issues to be addressed before the use of distance/eLearning methodologies can become truly systemic in NZ include: Policy issues
How can student funding be shared between schools?
How can staffing, including management units, be shared among schools
What evidence needs to be gathered to demonstrate the worth of this?
Technology issues
Connectivity and interoperability – who sets the standards?
Networks – VPNs or MUSH etc
Bridging – what is required? What technologies must be supported?
Scheduling – enable direct access and school level control?
Curriculum issues
assessment – developing consistency in approach
reporting – enabling a unified student report from several ‘schools’ etc
modularisation – a different view of ‘course’
RPL – includes recognising the value of informal learning
Staffing issues
Creating more flexibility in recognising teacher roles: e-teachers, m-teachers, c-teachers,
How to involve those with real subject expertise as mentors, hotseats etc
Pedagogical issues
“personalisation” – what does it mean? How do we make it happen?
staff training – how to train a large group of the teaching force in these new approaches?
Leadership and coordination issues
where does the leadership come from?
What form should leadership take?
What coordination is required nationally, locally etc?
Learning Resource issues
How best to provide resources for learning to support teachers in this environment
learning objects, repositories, search tools – who provides them, who manages them etc?
how to cater for user-generated resources?
Copyright and IP issues – how are these to be managed?
Interesting report from KY3 News in Springfield, Missouri on the challenges and opportunities of working with social networking in schools. Emphasis appears to be on the communications capacity of these networks, and the assuption that because they’re common place in students lives now that schools need to be exploring how they can appropriate them within the role they have.
Some interesting quotes from a couple of the people interviewed..
“I’m preaching the gospel of using social media as another public relations tool,” said social media expert Evelyn McCormack.
“We are on Facebook and Twitter to get that transparency,” said Josey McPhail of the Springfield district.
Also interesting to note that issues of privacy and online safety, and the development of policies around the use of social networking tools in schools is being considered, but nothing yet developed.
Ulearn is over for another year, and apart from spending most of the weekend resting to recover, I’ve been pondering a lot on the usefulness of this event in the lives of the nearly 2000 educators from around NZ and other parts of the world who attended. I’d wanted to publish my reflections yesterday – but it looks like Tony Ryan has beaten me to it with many of the things he’s reflected on in his very masterfully written blog entry.
So I thought I’d simply confine myself to a single thought that has come up repeatedly for me over the period leading up to, during and after the conference, and that is, what is the value of a conference as a professional development activity?
Here are some of the things that come to mind when I think of what I gain from attending a conference..
you gain exposure to ideas
you get to meet and greet people you may have “talked to” online.
sometimes, you’ll meet people who have shaped or influenced your use of technology.
you can make alliances with people who share similar interests, or find the opportunity to explore new and evolving interests.
you have the opportunity to find out about initiatives that are not always shared either online or in print.
you may get the idea to present your own work, which means you are becoming a thought leader.
you develop new friendships that can last and make important links for you.
you most certainly leave better equipped to shape the future of what is happening in your class, your school or the education system more broadly.
While all of these things are certainly big motivators for attending a conference, they are principally focused on change and development at the individual level. But what about from a whole school, or even whole of (education) system point of view?? With the focus on whole school review and development now being emphasised more, what is the role of conferences in this? Our own Ministry of Education is struggling with this issue also it seems. Recent communications suggest that, from a policy point of view, investment in conferences is not regarded as an effective way of building capability in the sector – which probably explains why only three people from the MoE’s ICT unit were allowed to attend.
I do have some sympathy with this view. I have attended conferences in the past that were regarded by those who attended as a ‘junket’ – an excuse to take a trip away, listen to some speakers and spend the rest of the time playing golf. This style of conference certainly does little to develop the capability of the professionals attending (apart from their golf perhaps )
But as I think more about it, ULearn isn’t, and never has been, anything like this. Nor has it been a conference that simply focuses on individual P.D. As I had an opportunity to speak to a number of principals and senior staff I know from around the country who were attending the conference, I got the distinct impression that, far from being an isolated event in the calendar that just a few got to attend, many schools are now regarding ULearn (and I suspect other conferences in the education space as well) as more than one-off events. They see them as a significant part of their school’s annual professional development plan.
What makes me say this? Well, here are some of the things I gleaned from the conversations…
One school principal I spoke with had brought his whole staff to the conferences – it was their choice to spend their PD money in this way in order to experience the event together and to then be able to return to their school to ‘unpack’ and implement what they had learned
Several staff from another school who attended had met with their whole staff prior to coming and had strategically planned what workshops they’d be attending so they could focus specifically on the things that were a part of their school’s development plan – so that, on their return they could feed this into the school development process with their colleagues.
I met several principals who have strategically planned to make sure their whole staff have had the experience of attending the ULearn conference over successive years, telling me that “it helped develop a culture of a shared experience that becomes a point of reflection in ongoing school development.
Several workshop presenters at ULearn were there as the culmination of many months of mentoring and preparation in their own school or cluster, with peer support and encouragement to grow professionally as they shared the results of their own investigations and work with learners with a wider audience.
A large number of teachers who follow each other on Twitter used ULearn as an opportunity to meet face-to-face, arranging to link up for a meal and also sharing several times together during the conference to build the sense of professional community that was started online. Many of these people are already or are becoming leaders in their professional learning networks in their schools and/or nationally.
These are just a few of the examples that come to mind – but each serves to illustrate that ULearn, with the sense of ongoing purpose it provides, can play a significant role in the professional learning of teachers in our schools/centres, and in the ongoing development of schools/centres as a part of the ongoing, strategically planned cycle of professional development in schools and centres.
Truth is that attending a conference does cost – in terms of money and time, and this sort of investment must be measured against the outcomes at both a personal and organisational level. To dismiss conferences as a ‘low yield’ opportunity is to miss the considerable amount of strategic planning and thinking that goes into leveraging the benefits of attendance back in each school or early childhood centres. Large conferences such as ULearn do indeed provide opportunities for growth that simply don’t exist in other settings – but they must be seen as a part of an overall personal/school development strategy and not just a ‘one-off’.
New Zealand’s broadband is only meeting the needs of today’s application threshold according to a new study just released. The global study of broadband quality sponsored by Cisco ranks countries on a broadband quality score (BQS) derived on research based on 24 million speed tests done in 66 countries via speedtest.net. The test focused on download speeds, upload speeds and latency – the delay that happens as information is routed around the net.
According to this test New Zealand ranks 35th out of the countries tested – meeting the needs of today’s application threshold, with just nine countries in the category of “ready for tomorrow” (an increase on only Japan in that category in 2008). The UK is only slightly ahead of NZ at 31 – although this ranking is adjusted to 25th after researchers combined these results with the broadband penetration in individual countries to create its broadband leadership index (BLI). On that scale New Zealand ranked 32nd.
The report provides ample evidence as to why it is important that the government progresses its rural broadband plan announced earlier this week. The rural broadband discussion document is available as a download (pdf), with responses due by the end of October.
The summary pages and appendix of the Cisco report provides informative reading for those interested in what’s happening in the broadband world – You can download the summary report and its appendix and the full study.
I had the opportunity last week to attend the launch of Christchurch’s new network company, Enable Networks. I had hoped to be able to have blogged earlier about this rather exciting event, but have had to wait until today to find the first public news release about it in the local media. (I’m sure if there was a negative slant to the story it would have made the headlines ) Unfortunately neither the Enable website or CDC’s website had any press releases available either
Today’s story in the National Business Review confirms what we heard announced last week, however! Christchurch, through Enable Networks, has received a $30M+ boost from the City Council to expand the city wide fibre network beyond the existing 100km of fibre it already has around the city. The good news is that schools will be a key target of this roll-out, with all 160-odd schools in the Christchurch metro area expected to have fibre at their gate in three years (there are currently 70 that do!)
This, combined with the budget news of a $34M boost for school access to high-speed broadband has made me a very happy person! Now the real work begins – to ensure that all parts of this jigsaw are properly aligned, and that the vision of a network developed with the philosophy of an ‘open’ architecture can be realised, and that our school leaders will step up and take leadership in terms of determining the nature of the services that can be developed to ensure this network is used in new and exciting ways to enahnce the education of kids in our schools, and ensure they are well prepared for life in an increasingly connected world!
The Learning@School conference is rollicking along in Rotorua at the moment, with keynote speaker on day one, Andy Hargreaves, setting the scene with challenges to us all about the need to take account of the whole context and culture of our school when considering change and development. Pam Hook had the audience spell-bond also with her “Hooked on Thinking” ideas and strategies.
Unfortunately for me I am missing the conference, and have had to rely on my Twitter feeds, text messages and the odd call to keep me posted. Having made it to the opening of the conference I’ve had to return home for family reasons. That didn’t stop the presentation I was scheduled to do from going ahead – with my colleague from the Ministry of Education, Douglas Harre, stepping up to share thoughts, insights and ideas based on CORE’s Ten Trends for 2009. This is the annual list of trends developed by CORE staff to represent a view of some key areas of interest for NZ educators with regards to the impact of ICTs on teaching and learning.
This year’s trends are:
Mobile Technologies for learning
Netbooks
Cloud Computing
Learning spaces/environments
Open Education Resources
High Definition Video conferencing
Advanced Networks
Cyber-Citizenary
Green computing
Digital Literacy
The slideshow used at Learning@School is provided here:
Cloud computing continues to be one of the top “buzz words” as predicted in CORE’s Ten Trends. Released this year from Educause is a new book titled “The Tower and the Cloud, edited by Richard Katz – available as a free electronic download (2.4Mb PDF).
This volume tackles some of the questions and challenges for the education system such as “How are ‘cloud’ technologies and applications already affecting us?” and “What does that say about how they are likely to evolve and impact us in the future?” Although the focus is primarily on higher (tertiary) education, much of what is described applies more generally to the broader framework of our education system.
In her forward to the book, Diana Oblinger comments;
“While not offering a crystal ball, [the book] does provide a series of reasoned, analytical perspectives on how current trends may unfold, altering our institutions and the higher education landscape in a future that may arrive faster than we expect. In reading it, we are all challenged to move beyond acknowledging the pace of technological change to envisioning all that the tower can be if we embrace the cloud.”
The metaphor of the “tower” (the tradition, silo-ed, autonomous institution) and the “cloud” (the concept of ubiquity, sharing, collaboration etc.) is well explored in each of the contributed chapters, exposing the obvious tensions and paradox, and providing both food for thought and some practical ideas on how things may unfold.
I was particularly pleased to note Katz’s comment that “It is still all about empowerment” – a theme that emerges several times in the book, raising the question; “What is the role of the institution in a world where individuals are empowered to seek solutions anywhere in the network cloud?”
I’ve found this volume of particular interest in light of the work I am currently doing with a school that is aggressively pursuing a vision of positioning itself “in the cloud”, and considering my own organisation where we’ve recently moved some of what we do into the same space. Ideas in the book that particuarly challenge me include the concept of a ‘cloud academy’ (p.22), new models of governance and scholarship (p.108) and the raft of issues around open source and open content (chapter 5) – all of which present huge challenges at a systemic level within our education system.
The figure included at the bottom of page 76 of the book, titled “Towards a Strategically Unified Information Future” (below) bears an uncanny resemblance to the eLearning Framework I helped develop here in NZ five years ago, and also underpins the thinking behind the eFramework development initiated by JISC and partners.
It is when thinking like this that the enormity of the task really impresses itself on our thinking. Adapting to the cloud is not a technical problem, it is a behavioural one – and the fact is that the technology is now enabling the more rapid change in the behaviour of individuals, while being resisted by larger organisations and institutions, be they univeristies, local governments, businesses or government departments.
Now there’s something for everyone in the education system to think seriously about – from the BOT of the smallest rural school, through to the CIOs in our education agencies!
Broadband has been in the news this week – in Thursday’s budget in New Zealand the government announced the establishment of The Broadband Investment Fund, to be the main mechanism for the distribution of the government’s planned NZ$340 million (US$266 million) in urban and rural broadband funding. In addition to this, NZ$160 million has been earmarked for broadband services to the education and health sectors, bringing the total investment to NZ$500 million. A week or so earlier the National party announced plans to spend $1.5 billion on a public-private partnership for a fibre-optic network by 2012 (should it win the election later this year). According to the news release, the Labour package will be “a targeted fund aimed at increasing speeds to businesses, universities, schools, hospitals and under-served rural areas.” In urban areas it will be used to connect users to infrastructure that is required to be operated on an open access and non-discriminatory basis. The priority in urban areas is to deliver high bandwidth services to businesses, health and tertiary institutions, schools and other entities and that supports future roll-out of fibre or other high bandwidth technology to the home.
This is all good news for those of us working to promote the development of broadband services within education, and the development of things like the Virtual Learning Network and local schools “loops”. Providing access to broadband technologies for our school and tertiary level students is essential, not only for the opportunities they create to provide quality educational experiences for these students, but also because the development of skills, understandings and competencies in the use of these technologies is going to be increasingly important for their future as workers and citizens, and for the economic well-being of our nation.
Of course, while this sum of money appears large, it must be seen as just a beginning, as to do things properly we will have to continue to invest in this basic infrastructure for some time yet. In his response to the budget announcement, Ernie Newman from TUANZ comments, “to be honest, I feel a bit underwhelmed. The amount of money is pretty sparse and I guess I was anticipating more.” Ernie has long been a campaigner for bringing NZ’s broadband connectivity up to speed with other parts of the world – and in the other key broadband news item of the past week, we can begin to understand why.
The OECD released its 2008 report on Broadband Growth and Policies in OECD countries during the week, and for anyone wanting to come up to speed with the significance of broadband in a 21st century economy this is a good read. The report begins by stating; “Broadband not only plays a critical role in the workings of the economy, it connects consumers, businesses, governments and facilitates social interaction” and proceeds to illustrate the extent to which the various OECD countries are making progress in providing broadband connectivity to their citizens. The report canvases a range of issues such as cost, coverage and competition, and concludes in the policy section that open access ducting and dark fibre will be key.The report also states that… “because of their reach, wireless Internet connections using 3G or emerging wireless networks will be an increasingly important but largely complementary access technology to wired broadband. “
So how does New Zealand fare?
It would appear that out of all OECD countries we are currently just below the OECD average for broadband penetration (see graph above), with the majority of connections being DSL – so the recent government announcements are timely if we are to rise above that average line. This is not simply a case of “keeping up owith the Joneses” – access to a reliable, competitively priced broadband network is essential to the future economic wellbeing of our nation. We are simply too far from anywhere to remain competitive in the world while depending on shifting high volumes of physical goods too an fro. Broadband connectivity will enable us to participate in the global knowledge economy and contribute what NZers have become known for – innovation, creativity and the capacity to problem solve!
This week I finished teaching my Global Classroom course which is part of the University of Canterbury’s Graduate Diploma of ICT course. I’ve had (another) fabulous group of teachers who undertook projects including an intercultural study with a class in Malaysia, planning a virtual camp with another class in NZ, participating in a virtual field trip to Antarctica and using ePals to connect with students in the US.
I’m always on the lookout for projects that these teachers can link into for their Global Classroom experience, and so was interested today to come across the Interactivity Center, from Education World, which features collaborative projects, virtual field trips, educational games, and other interactive activities. Most of these are free or very low cost, and illustrate the incredible imagination and creativity of teachers in making use of the opportunities now available in the online world and with the emergence of many creative applications in the Web2.0 world.
If there’s not something here that you feel you can participate in, then there are heaps of ideas for projects that you could begin yourself, using some of the online environments and applications that are freely available.
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The Distance Education Association of NZ
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