...and other things that have been preoccupying me...

Other things have been preoccupying me too - not least how to get the least worst balance between work, self and family. I could try and put down my thoughts on this, but it's all been much better expressed and researched by Gaby Hinsliff on her blog and in her book (necessary disclosure: Gaby and I worked on the university newspaper together 20 years ago, and I enjoyed seeing her again at a party recently where we talked about all this). It's succinct and very well written, and pretty well sums up the dilemmas my wife and I seem to face most days. Worth investing the time in, particularly for fortysomething parents.

A year of silence...

I know I haven't posted for a year. There's a reason for this. I have been doing a lot of thinking and learning about digital education - more than ever before - but it has all been under the auspices of my day job. Which means that I can't share it publicly, as my contract is pretty draconian on that front. Sorry!

Educational in a different sense

I'd recommend my sister in law Emily's blog about her current experiences in a rural region of Zambia. Her writing is eloquent and precise, and I want to know the next episode in the real-life, real-time story of her subject. It's here:

http://msf.ca/blogs/emilyb/2011/03/30/christina/

Eton College, and what we can learn from it

Apparently Eton College is going to start up a school for less wealthy pupils – but this report does come from the Daily Mail, my least favourite newspaper, so treat with caution. And yet again, I hear that somebody at a conference is telling the world how much the English state school system can learn from one of the world’s most famous schools. I couldn’t make the Learning without Frontiers conference last month – so please correct me if I don’t quite get this right – but apparently a teacher stood up and lauded the 571-year-old public school for not having put any interactive whiteboards in its classrooms and for continuing to teach in a “traditional” way. I have attended other educational conferences which featured a lot of talk about why Old Etonians are allegedly so successful, and a similar questioning of “modern” curricula and educational approaches. Doubtless it’s because of the fact that our current British Prime Minister attended the school, and because there is a strong argument that the private school system still dominates the elite in Britain: Eton remains a fascination.

It’s not something I tend to mention very much – and never at conferences – but I went to Eton. So whenever this subject comes up in a public gathering I sigh inwardly and bite my tongue. It’s all too easy to be pigeon-holed as the posh, naïve, over-privileged Old Etonian, and I never feel that there is enough time to bore everybody with the detail of why everybody’s asking the wrong questions and not getting into the complexities of what might (and might not) be learned from possibly the most famous school in the world. So I’m finally getting it off my chest.

Eton is a bizarre, sometimes wonderful and sometimes weird, often brilliant and frequently ridiculous, resolutely unique, educational institution. I loved and hated it simultaneously, for many reasons, some personal, some philosophical, and some blindingly obvious.

The quality of its education – which was so inspirational it made me want to work in education for the remainder of my life – was grounded in some very basic and obvious facts and a lot of common sense principles.

The facts were that the school was highly selective and embarrassingly well resourced with brilliant teachers and world class facilities. This makes teaching and learning very easy, relatively speaking. It’s easy to love Mediaeval history if you are taught by an inspirational Fellow of All Souls, Oxford who treats you as if you are an undergraduate, or to have a lifelong passion for ceramics if your teacher exhibits his pots to critical acclaim in London and New York. I can’t speak from experience, but it must be a lot more straightforward to teach a class of 15 motivated, “posh” 17-year-olds picked for their intelligence than a group of 30 ill-at-ease and undervalued students in a poor (in both senses) comprehensive.

Eton’s overriding principles were to focus on the individual and make him (for there were, regrettably, only "hims") feel that once he has been helped to find what he is best at and passionate about, whatever it is, there is no reason whatsoever that he shouldn’t be the best at it in the world. Simple but effective – and the snowball effect of saying “well, look at Jonathan Porritt/ Ranulph Fiennes/ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, he did” (and yes, all right, David Cameron) - cannot be underestimated. This wasn’t narrow academic aspiration or box-ticking, but about being pushed to do something exceptional – in whatever field was your chosen one. Learning was in itself the best thing you could do, and continue to do for the rest of your life. I still remember my “A” level English teacher explicitly telling us that the first part of the year would be about how to pass the exam – and then we would get on to the interesting bits.

So – Eton didn’t cram you with much that was out of date. It was never relentlessly focussed on force-feeding you with the speeches of Churchill or the countries of the British Empire. Intelligent questioning was always much more interesting than dull acceptance. Marx was studied, in depth if you wished (so was American blues music). Amazingly, inside the school confines class and social status was relatively unimportant (though this changed dramatically in terms of social arrangements during the holidays – I got a scholarship, so my parents were nowhere near the income bracket and/or Burke’s Peerage listings of many of my contemporaries’, and I frequently felt “unposh” in this respect). Whilst discipline was necessarily present (usually quietly so), there was no corporal punishment and never humiliation from teachers. Whilst the place was deeply traditional in many ways the tradition was often there for a purpose (although I maintain, as I did at school, that the uniform is loony and some of the team games deeply replaceable).

Perhaps most significantly the school was excellent at teaching twenty-first century skills, utterly in line with the way in which many think the curriculum should now develop. I learnt to speak and perform in public; to work in teams; to solve problems; to think creatively; and to learn how to learn, without ever knowing that I was doing so. We learnt these skills via “traditional” methods: by performing plays, in playing team games, by being academically stretched, through other extra-curricular activities, through our teachers’ passion for learning and by constant challenging of our intellects. All of these “twenty-first century” concepts were so ingrained in the everyday experience, and had been for generations, that they just seemed obvious. It illustrates how the whole concept of “traditional” is deeply suspect in this context.

Which brings me back to technology. I suspect that every classroom at Eton doesn’t have an interactive whiteboard because they haven’t been judged to be the most cost-effective use of technology. (If this is the rationale, I’m afraid I would agree.) But – and you only need read the College’s website to find this out – all students are obliged to take a laptop to school with them and can use the Ethernet connection which they will find in their room. Every single student has their own room at Eton, and every single one is connected to the internet and to the college’s own intranet.

I quote http://www.etoncollege.com/ComputerSpecifications.aspx complete with its Eton jargon (“F” block is the name for the first year of the school):

Computing forms an important part of the curriculum for new boys in F block. Almost all school events are advertised via email and internal websites, and a boy will use his computer daily for work and administration.

With of the growing use of IT in the curriculum and the need to ensure effective technical support for boys throughout the school, we have defined a minimum specification for boys’ computers.

Technology is there, but it’s been quietly and quickly incorporated into the fabric of the school where it’s useful and sensible.

Eton was not perfect by any stretch when I was there. It was particularly bad at training you to deal with what happens when things irredeemably don’t work out, whether it’s your fault, other people’s, or nobody’s. It had a pretty patronising and narrow view of the world of business. It undoubtedly has some unpleasant former pupils. It is hugely unfair that only 1200-odd pupils have access to such an experience at any one time, at a cost prohibitive for nearly everybody. Nevertheless, it is of course a hugely successful institution.

So what I always want to say at conferences is the following:

• What success there is, is not about looking backwards to nostalgic notions of how education used to be. It’s about a combination of quality teachers, immense confidence, and high aspirations combined with pupil selection and amazing resources. Tradition is either motivational window-dressing or serves a sensible purpose, and is always questioned for its alignment with the values of the school.
  
• I hope that quality teachers, immense confidence, and high aspirations are transferable into every school around the world.
• I know – regrettably – that the resourcing is not, and selection is a deeply charged issue (which I’m not going to engage with now).
• The interesting unanswered question is the relative importance and interdependence of these factors in creating a successful school. I hope and feel that resourcing and selection are actually the least important of them. What do you think?

An inspiring evening with Steven Isserlis and friends

Saturday night was spent at a concert in a village hall in Marazion, Cornwall. No ordinary concert, however - one of the IMS Prussia Cove Maestri concerts. It was a joy - some of the best musicians in the world performing at their best and most relaxed, in an unglamorous venue, just because they could. There was clearly no financial driver whatsoever for Steven Isserlis, Andras Scholl and others - other than raising money for the IMS project - and they were having a fantastic time playing with their friends (in both senses of the word "playing"). Recommended, if you can ever get to one...

The BBC's strategic review

I've finally had the time to read, in full, the BBC's Strategy Review. The one that caused so much furore in the (broadsheet) media about the closing of 6Music, and which also included plans to shut BBC Blast and BBC Switch, both targeted and teens and the first an admirable venture which was once seemingly at the centre of the corporation's vision for learning. I haven't seen the numbers on takeup, but this seems to be a decision to leave the teen learning space to Channel 4, who have been making the running for a little while now (if not as ambitiously as many, including me, might like). This is probably a fairly sensible admission of defeat, and is good politics, if a great shame for Blast, which was at least a very good idea (I never really investigated it fully).

The review never really addressess the perennial and fundamental issue. This is the BBC's constant need to balance audience numbers with "distinctiveness" (which is impossible to define) and "public service" (which is an essentially elitist idea and therefore potentially horribly unpopular as well as unmeasureable and undefineable). And, of course, to fend off its (sometimes justified, sometimes not) commercial critics.

So, as usual, it's a fudge. Does anyone who does believe in the idea of "public service" (like me) have a way of justifying it which doesn't sound elitist when you try to write it down? I am trying - will post anything if it comes to me...

A historical start?

Just been having a brief look at the BBC's A History of the World in 100 objects site. It fills me simultaneously with hope and slight disappointment. It's a great, exploratory learning site, and firmly public service. It encourages serendipitous discovery, it isn't patronising, there's nice user-generated content and localisation (local museums), it's linked across the BBC brands and channels.The site is pretty useable and looks good. If this is the direction BBC learning (and Learning) resources are heading, it's encouraging.

But - the offer for schools is woefully thin right now (a bunch of lesson plans and text-focussed flat pages rather than the tools and pan-UK projects which could have been exciting). And the whole thing feels as if it could have been really amazing with more money - I don't see much narrative to bring me in to the site, and all the academic's comments seem to be text or audio. There's no Simon Schama to draw me in or reconstructions of what these objects might have been used for. So - a good start. I hope someone's working on the truly ambitious follow-up.

Love this - hope it works commercially!

This is elegant and a good idea. I hope it works.

Storybird is a service that uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families. Two (or more) people create a Storybird in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library.

Storybird is also a simple publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.

http://storybird.com/

A crisper way of putting it

After a recent conversation with a friend re-starting her teaching career and viewing it all with fresh eyes, I realise that there’s another way of expressing my previous post. Labour education policies since 1997, whilst worthy and well-intentioned, have removed much of the delight, joy, serendipity and creativity from teaching. In these grim times, which would you rather: that our children are infused with these optimistic emotions, or with tough-minded, micro-managed, slightly cynical pragmatism? If it’s necessary or indeed possible, how do we strike a balance between the two?

Avoiding a state theory of learning

A thought-provoking evening last night at the RSA, where there was a discussion about the newly released Cambridge University/ Esmee Fairbairn Foundation Cambridge Primary Review Final Report . This has come in for a lot of press comment in the last few days and seems to have been (perhaps inevitably) misrepresented and over-simplified. From what I have read and seen, the report looks like a truly worthwhile contribution to the debate about how we should educate our children in and for the twenty-first century and I share much of its philosophy.

Overall it was particularly interesting to me for its critique of the last twelve years of Labour education policy – with Strategies, SATS and DCSF-commissioned research mostly focussed on retrospectively evaluating the Department’s own initiatives rather than on exploring alternatives, we are coming worryingly close to what they called “a state theory of learning”. Their experiences mirror my own in schools and some teacher training organisations, where sometimes there is very little questioning of the “party line”, and a resulting lack of the values that I think are the most important in any educational endeavour – a constant awareness that you should keep questioning what you are doing and how you are doing it. The Cambridge team were (reassuringly) committed to empowering teachers and learners to think and work for themselves, and believers in evidence-based policies that should constantly be debated . They talked of education being moral rather than instrumental, which I firmly believe too.

The irony is that Labour seems to have been moderately successful in their ruthlessly focussed and very laudable mission to raise the “lowest common denominator” of standards: more children are leaving primary school being able to read and write well enough (although the statistics are still hardly great reading). But their highly controlling method of doing this has been at considerable cost and has disheartened the more creative teachers (and probably learners). I am gradually coming to the conclusion that a lot of really good state schools in England keep their heads under the radar and just get on with doing what they believe in, rather than make a fuss about their achievements and attract the unwelcome attention of policy makers and target-driven bureaucrats. They empower themselves in spite of the pressures from above by treating the simplistic target culture with patient resignation. Whoever our next government is, let’s hope that they don’t have to carry on doing this.

Malcolm McLaren and education at Handheld

I never expected the creator of the Sex Pistols to be a devotee of Baudelaire, but so it is. Malcolm McLaren gave a great and thought-provoking talk this morning about education and himself at the Handheld Learning Conference. Many will have found it a ramble, but the style was an elegant exposition of the substance of his talk - which asked why we have become a "karaoke culture" in which the stupid is cool, and life is lived by proxy (reality TV) and instant gratification, rather than an "authentic" one which celebrates "the messy process of creativity." I'll post the link when it's up, but MM celebrated how we should sometimes (he would say always) be enthusiastic amateurs, open to possibilities (especially those involving "glorious failure"), and celebrate learning for learning's sake and art for art's sake. Malcolm McLaren the flaneur - a new one on me.

It's also the first ever time I've had the question "so how do we fix our culture then?" answered with a metaphor involving four-letter expletives and rubber dolls...

Losing confidence

Seventy percent of primary teachers are considered to be confident and competent using ICT in the curriculum – down from 80% in 2007. The percentage has also decreased in secondary schools with 60% in 2009 being confident and competent using ICT – compared to 68% in 2007.

The fifth page of BESA's ICT in UK State Schools 2009 summary report is pretty grim reading. Bear in mind this is a trade association which has a vested interest in selling educational products, but its conclusions do ring true. It coincided with a conversation I had yesterday with somebody working in Australian educational publishing. From the outside of the UK, it looks like we have a mature, well-funded and well-informed market for electronic educational materials. The DCSF rhetoric clearly works. Regrettably the reality is somewhat different.

Saul Nassé named BBC Learning chief

The Guardian reports this today:

Saul Nassé is to replace Liz Cleaver as controller of BBC Learning when she steps down at the end of the year, the BBC announced today.

Nassé is currently based in Mumbai where he has been general manager and creative head of BBC Worldwide Productions India since 2007.

I don't know Saul and wish him all the best in his new job. And for you cynics: no, I didn't want it or apply for it.

I am however worried about the tone of the announcements surrounding his appointment. They sound more and more like a BBC retreating from offering anything truly substantial aimed at schools or for use in the classroom - George Entwhistle is reported to have said

[...]His mission is to build on the success of services like Bitesize and Class Clips, and on campaigns such as Breathing Places, by forging ever stronger links between Learning, Knowledge and the rest of the BBC[...]

This sounds very much like Learning is becoming absorbed into a mission to educate in its widest - and least controversial - sense. It doesn't sound like it includes a mission to challenge, complement and enrich what is going on in schools. I am worried the BBC has finally completely caved in to the vested interests of a few powerful commercial companies, and we are left with no organisation to challenge orthodoxy. I hope I am wrong.

Culture and strategy

Been wanting to post this for a while - heard in a presentation at NESTA/ Steve Moore's Reboot Britain event earlier in the year. I forget who said it - I think it was Charles Leadbeater - but it has stuck in the brain:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

In other words, however clever your vision, however fine your organisational structure, whatever your methodology, if the people aren't with you, don't get on and/or can't be bothered, forget it. Very true!

Wish I'd done this...

Just found, via a slightly circuitous route: Creative Spaces. A shining and alas very isolated example of an open, exploratory "web 2.0" learning resource. The user - whoever they may be - is invited to engage with museum artefacts through story (see the celebrity videos like Tony Robinson's), other people's comments, and a tag cloud, hopefully driving them to reflect further and comment themselves. It's got a lovely clean design, too. Love it (tinge of envy - I was once working on similar ideas that never came to fruition).

Here we go again?

I was rather surprised to learn that the BBC Trust's service review of children's services and content, published yesterday, also covered "content to support formal learning for primary school children". I was less surprised - but weary - to discover that "As part of this review some commercial education content suppliers raised concerns about the competitive impact of the BBC’s formal learning provision. Under the terms of the BBC’s Charter, the Trust has a duty to have regard to the competitive impact of the BBC’s activities and has written to establish whether these concerns should be treated as a formal complaint."

Oh, not again. The review document emphasizes how CBBC and CBeebies are there to promote education and learning. As I have said ad nauseam before, the BBC must have a role to play in education. This should be curtailed by and complement the (usually) bread-and-butter stuff that commercial publishers can do, but that's because the BBC is the only organisation that can innovate and question the prevailing teach-to-the-test zeitgeist, and so that's where it should spend time, effort and resources. Ewan McIntosh's excellent blog pointed me to something I should probably have seen years ago - Ken Robinson's February 2006 TED talk - in a wider-ranging and thought-provoking post about what we're getting wrong.

Is there any chance that we can move away from threats towards collaboration and dialogue in the wider interests of society?

BBC raw money

I'm delighted to say that the work I've been doing with the BBC and Tinopolis Interactive for the last several months is now live at http://www.bbc.co.uk/raw/money/ - a site designed for adult learners who need to improve the way they deal with money. Nice to get some content out there!

Lord Puttnam at Handheld Learning

Lord Puttnam made a typically passionate and rousing speech at the end of the Handheld Learning conference. It's available online to view here - you'll need to scroll to the very bottom of the page.

Leaving aside his (entirely justifiable) attack on some elements of the press (which I read to mean my bugbear, the Daily Mail), his comments were an interesting view on the credit crunch.

His approach as understood by me:

• the UK should now focus its efforts on building an economy based on green technologies and the creative industries, not on financial services;
• we should think of education as "vocational" in a new sense - that of a child finding his or her vocation;
• there is a real need to re-engage the large number of disaffected learners;
• technology is key to this as it's what the learners expect and understand.

You may agree or disagree (mostly I agree) but I was desperate to ask about public service educational content in this respect. The BBC seems currently to be worryingly quiet on this matter, Channel 4 can't do it on its own, and allegedly some not-for-profits and LAs are now so scared in the aftermath of BBC Jam that they won't develop content for fear of being accused of having state aid in a free market. This is absurd. Will somebody in politics or public service broadcasting stand up and be brave, please? We need to be building stuff of the quality that the independent sector were creating for Jam. But we just can't do it right now with no funding and no evidence of ambition.

BBC Trust review of younger audience provision

"The BBC Trust is consulting publicly on how well the BBC serves younger audiences and on its services aimed specifically at them – BBC Three, Radio 1 and 1Xtra."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/consult/open_consultations/younger_audiences_org.html

Self-explanatory, but people should know about this.

How I learned to love games in the classroom – or, conversion by Derek Robertson

I’ve always been a sceptic about the use of off-the-shelf computer games in the classroom (in other words, pre-existing games not designed for education being used in schools). This is even after working on a Futurelab-sponsored “thought leader” panel about it. My doubts stemmed from a number of things:

• The sloppy thinking that “you can just put the learning in” – I’ve seen one prominent commentator describe how he thinks that French questions should be inserted into an existing action-adventure game at key points in the action, forcing the student to answer them before they can continue. This apparently would make it educational. In fact, it would be positively damaging: the whole point of an action-adventure game is the visceral experience. Stopping that experience ruins the game and demonizes the learning. It may be possible to integrate the French into the plot somehow – but that requires developing the game with that in mind from the beginning, and ensuring that it fits seamlessly into a compelling story and experience. Shoehorning sucks.
• Many of the games ideas that I have seen, implemented or not, have contained an inherent dishonesty. The idea is that the learning gets “hidden” – that kids won’t notice that they are learning about history while they are playing a game. This is a recipe for disaster. Make the learning necessary for the game, but be honest about it. Kids of every age spot the lies very, very quickly.
• The limits of simulations. There has been some interesting and good work in schools with a range of simulations – from SimCity to Theme Park – but several issues emerged. It took the teachers a very long time to work out the way the game worked, and where they did, even more time to embed them into meaningful lessons. More profoundly, though, I have always worried that however interesting the simulation, it never reflects the true, sometimes fickle complexity of reality. Additionally, there is often a rather frustrating relationship between the fidelity of the simulation and its usability.
• Scalability and transferability. Almost all of the work I have seen or read about depended on an a charismatic and motivated teacher delivering great lessons. Arguably, these teachers could have delivered a great lesson with a carrot and a piece of string, never mind a computer game – the success of the teaching depended on an individual, not the resources they were using. I have rarely seen examples of work which could be used without that fantastic teacher.

But. I’m writing after the Handheld Learning conference this week, where on both days I saw Derek Robertson from Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium speak about his work across a wide range of Scottish schools. I also saw a teacher from a London LA talking about how she has re-applied one strand of Derek’s work (with the Nintendo DS and the Dr. Kawashima Brain Age game) in her school. All of the numerous examples Derek gave of his projects - from Guitar Hero to Endless Ocean – seemed honest, well thought through, compelling and – and here’s the important bit – scalable.

I even challenged Derek on a big issue for me about projects involving ICT. I always wonder how much the novelty and attention which kids automatically get from being involved in a project with computer games and learning increases their motivation and focus automatically. Derek’s great answer was: why shouldn’t kids get new things all the time? And what’s wrong with giving them attention? Fair cop, particularly if you are working for an organisation which has institutionalised that novelty and attention by providing Derek and his colleagues as an ongoing resource.

It strikes me that the key things about Derek’s work are the following:

• Selection. Derek chooses – very carefully- the games which he works with for their potential for use in the classroom. Strangely, Grand Theft Auto hasn’t featured in his work yet...
• Derek’s notion of a “contextual hub”. Derek doesn’t just push the games (and their associated devices) into the classroom. He spends a lot of time working up how the games can be used, and building extensive activities around them. So, when working with Nintendogs the children got so excited with dogs in general that they wrote about dogs, read about dogs, made pictures of dogs, and even got the local dog warden in to understand how you should treat and look after a real dog.

There’s a challenge here for those of us who develop software for education – to match the way in which off-the-shelf computer games engage their users (mercifully, this isn’t just a question of production values and money, although they obviously play a part). It’s this motivational quality that Derek is so successfully harnessing in his work. Guitar Hero offers a great context for learning, if you have the imagination. Off-the-shelf games are going to provide a fantastic – but by definition patchy – set of resources for teaching. Let’s make sure the dedicated resources that people like me develop learn from the games and from Derek’s work with them.