esroh riding

9ALL5

DO12″OR

The other was a series of 9 dots, laid out in a 3X3 grid, which we had to try to join up using only 4 lines and without lifting pen from paper (answer at the end of the post, as before):

I was at a table with a biology teacher and a dance teacher. The dance teacher gave it a go, but was struggling to get to grips with the objective. She found that her mind wasn’t wired in a way that made sense of the cryptic exercise, but she managed the 9 dots just fine. The biology teacher was totally disgruntled by the whole thing and, as she herself said afterwards, folded her arms and sulked until someone showed her the right answer. She found herself to be very competitive and not prepared to try if she didn’t have the tools to win.
I had no trouble with either exercise. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t have any trouble with the 9 dots exercise, perhaps it’s because I have done similar things before, and I’ve sussed out the pattern. As to the cryptic clues, I put it down to the fact that I am a sad cryptic crossword puzzle geek. But the lecturer challenged this. Why can I do cryptic crossword puzzles? And then she said the magic word: analogies!

I’ve said it before: I think in analogies and allegories. Everything I learn reminds me of something I’ve learnt before, (almost) everyone I meet reminds me of someone I have met or seen before. I have used this thought technique to enable me as a teacher/trainer all my life. Providing people with knowns to use as a springboard to conquer unknowns. This is like that in such and such a way, but it differs here and here. So and so has eyes just like George Clooney/Bush/Washington. It all fits together.

How constructivist of me!

But in every learning environment, there are people like the three of us. People for whom it just clicks and the light goes on. People for whom the knowledge that there is an answer makes for an interesting exercise – a creative approach, the willingness to make a few wrong suggestions on the journey to the right answer. People who resent being asked to complete a task without being given the tools and a workable (for them) set of instructions from the outset.

Whirling around in my head are thoughts along the lines that our K-12 curriculum no longer allows students the space to be wrong, to have a few creative stabs at finding a solution. There is the requirement to hone in on the right answer like a heat-seeking missile. Where’s the room for creativity there? Surely we are excluding all but one type of thought process from our quest for answers?

I think there is a chance I will be posting more on that point in the near future.

Okay, so here are the answers – how did you do?

horseback riding

all in a day’s work

a foot in the door

The Future of Education is an online confereence being organised by George Siemens on behalf of the University of Manitoba. The presenters are drawn from a wide range of sectors and countries, and the delegates (if the last of George’s conferences was anything to go by) will be an even more eclectic lot. The Elluminate platform absolutely rocks! The presenters are able to make use of a whiteboard for slides, and their presentation is delivered real time over the audio channel. Delegates have access to a chat facility during the presentation, any may pose questions or make observations this way, or by “raising a hand” to request the microphone. Conversations continue after the presentation via the conference Moodle. Considering the logistics involved, a remarkable sense of community is established.

Be there. No, really  – be there!

Sony seems to have realised this and jumped on the bandwagon.

The resources available to teachers today appear to be limitless. But availability isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t help for things to be available if people don’t know about them, or are afraid or suspicious of them.

How do we cross this great divide and combine the knowledge that teachers are able to share, the value that they have to add, with the technology that their learners know how to use? Perhaps teachers need to spend some time being learners for a bit, and allow their classes to teach them. As a joint exercise, it must surely be achievable?

I thought I had grown up a bit since then, but I did exactly the same thing the other night during a lecture.

One of my classmates is Indian. I had heard that the preferred style of instruction in India is strongly behavioural. I asked her about this, and she confirmed that this was indeed the case. She commented on the different assessment styles between the Uk and India, citing the example of economics. She had been interested to note that, in the UK, students would be taught the principles of economics and then expected in an assessment, to apply those to a case study drawn from the commercial world. In India, however, the questions would be things like “Define supply”, “What is demand?”

On a previous occasion, speaking to representatives of a hee-uge organisation in India, I was told that Indian students would be shocked if a teacher asked them to have a group discussion on a topic. Or if the teacher referred them to another resource for material on a module. This would be considered a deriliction of duty. It is the teacher’s job to teach. For the duration of the lesson, the teacher is expected to earn his/her keep by doing just that. And “teaching” to them means disseminating knowledge and information. A friend of mine recently spent two weeks in Bangladesh teaching English to medical professionals. Her experience echoed this. What was expected was rote learning. They were most uncomfortable with the idea of group discussions – although to people in the UK, this would seem the obvious way to learn a language: to practise it conversationally, rather than repeating stock phrases.

I just assumed that my classmate would be won over to the more constructivist style of teaching and learning practised in the UK. That she would immediately appreciate that behaviourism was an outmoded approach based on flawed principles.

I was wrong. We have yet to have a discussion in which she is given the space to explain what she perceives as the advantages of behaviourism, but I look forward to it. Who knows, maybe she will convince me… although I doubt it

Perhaps this is not the case elsewhere in the world, but in the UK, certainly, GCSE English includes a Shakespeare as standard. Most kids hate it, don’t understand it, can’t relate to it, see no point in it.

But English literature isn’t the only or even the main problem. The gap between the skills taught in schools and the skills needed to make headway in the world is enormous. In this article, Wallis and Steptoe say: “This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education”. Not having? Bloggers have been banging on about this for ages. Perhaps now that the subject has gained a profile in such a reputable publication, however, we will start to see some results.

In America, at least, apparently, “this week the conversation will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce… releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy.”

Recently, I attended a lecture given by Joe Harkin, during which he indicated that a taskforce was investigating the future of education in the UK. This was in response to my observation regarding the proposed raising of the minimum school leaving age in the UK from 16 to 18. My argument was that extending the amount of time disaffected or marginalised kids must spend in a school system that is already failing them would do nothing but massage a few numbers so that the government could tick some boxes – it would add absolutely nothing to the lives of those young people. Dr Harkin asserted that this taskforce includes representatives from tertiary education facilities as well as employers. Hopefully we will begin to see some sensible changes being introduced. My concern is that the system is now so far out of touch that “some changes” will be woefully inadequate. As the Time article puts it: “can our public schools, originally designed to educate workers for agrarian life and industrial-age factories, make the necessary shifts?”

One increasingly important skill is critical thinking – something that is being majored in for me and my classmates on this MA course. The assumption is that we are now in a position to aspire to this level of thinking. However, with the surplus of information available to them on the Internet, kids needs to be learning this skill from the off. Research quoted in the Time article echoes my own observation of my sons who will harvest great swathes of information from the web and submit that as research into a subject, having made no effort to assess the objectivity, validity, reliability of the material. The observation was: “We kind of assumed this generation was so comfortable with technology that they know how to use it for research and deeper thinking, but if they’re not taught these skills, they don’t necessarily pick them up.” I suspect they are not alone in their initial assumption!
My classmates and I recently undertook an online discussion about collaborative learning. How I wish that this paragraph had been available for me to quote before it closed: “Teachers need not fear that they will be made obsolete. They will, however, feel increasing pressure to bring their methods–along with the curriculum–into line with the way the modern world works. That means putting a greater emphasis on teaching kids to collaborate and solve problems in small groups and apply what they’ve learned in the real world. Besides, research shows that kids learn better that way than with the old chalk-and-talk approach.”

I suspect the system needs to be revamped from the ground up, and that is going to be one heck of a hard sell!

Some of the less technically confident teachers I know seem to feel that they need to follow the route taken by those who caught an earlier techie bus. I disagree. This view is inevitably going to be discouraging. Rather than going back over old ground, it is possible to short-circuit the process, and a publication like the Horizon Report can prove very helpful in this regard.

The six focus areas this year in order of their expected “time to impact” are:

• social computing (less than a year)
• personal broadcasting (less than a year)
• the phones in their pockets (2-3 years)
• educational gaming (2-3 years)
• augmented reality and enhanced visualisation (4-5 years)
• context-aware environments and devices (4-5 years)

I strongly recommend this report to anyone intending to do the ICT in Teaching and Learning module later this year.