Back to school - so what role for social learning?

US National Archives Lady Bird Johnson Visiting a Classroom for Project Head Start 1966

 

In between teaching classes, interesting posts about Ed-Tech float past me on the web and sometimes something hits a nerve. At the moment I am teaching in a school that has been going through a two year process of improvement and professional development, so I get to reflect a bit on things when I read.

I feel like I have been priviledged to observe and learn from this process as a contract member of staff. One of the key issues for example that we have identified recently as a problem for the school is the danger of breeding passive learners. We see too many kids come in from Primary, hitting adolescence and struggling to engage in school. This is not a new problem and it is not just our problem at all. So, I have tried to reflect on how we work around this, how we can try to tackle it when it comes to technology.

I recently read an article on this topic via InformED - arguing that social learning not more social media was what schools need. In the article from Open Colleges it suggests that a certain ideal of individualism is growing as a trend in society in general and has slowly worked its way into our education systems. This is not a new argument. In fact it is also one put forward in comparative education debates. The unshakable emphasis on child-centered learning within Western education projects often set in developing world contexts, tends often to foster ostensibly more 'Western' forms of education which often may not be as successful in those contexts.

The link between individual or private benefits to education vs societal ones has also been more sharply brought into focus with recent editorials from the Economist. In 'America's New Aristocracy' and 'An Hereditary Meritocracy' the writers argue that increasingly this is damaging social mobility in America. As the importance of intellectual capital grows in the knowledge economy, priviledge has also become increasingly heritable. The children of the rich are now more than ever increasingly well-suited and more likely to be earning more. There is also an interesting commentary on these articles in Hacker News.

The article however by Saga Briggs, titled 'Social Learning Is More Than Just Social Media: Crafting An Effective Strategy' reflects simply on the notion that education in America in her view is becoming 'more índividualistic'.

Saga is clear in tracing this issue back to Western philosphocial roots, refering to Rousseau and Locke and quoting Hargreaves' 'Sociological Critique of Individualism in Education', in which he suggests that:

“The child-centered movement in education stemming from the work of Dewey, buttressed by a psychology grounded in Freud or (more often) in Piaget, is merely one floriferous branch of a sturdier tree.”

She goes further to point out the scale of the problem from the point of policy-making refering to some evidence from the USA, which shows that a clear majority of those interviewed in 49 in-depth interviews with Americans from New England and southern California agreed on three points:

1. The purpose of education is to serve individuals.
2. Individuals and families are responsible for educational outcomes, in the form of both successes and failures.
3. Learning occurs through individual interactions with teachers.

It then goes on to explain what it refers to as the 'individualist fallacy' that is ubiquitous in many Ed-tech and online learning spaces. This it opposes to the ideals of social learning refering to Bandura's work, and develops an argument around 'building a culture of service'.

The article then goes on to mention how we need to focus on designing social learning with technology, instead of designing more ways to use social media in education. The point may seem subtle but it is key. The writer, Saga Briggs suggests a number of outcomes that she attributes to 'social learning':

- Confidence Through Collaboration
- Connecting the Disconnected
- Motivating the Aimless
- Accelerating Action

My gut reaction is at first to agree, in part at least.

Wired Freedom by Cofano, 2005 Dedicated to the people of UAE - CC 2.0 BY.NC.ND

The answer to X is... more and better X 

 

Einstein put this fairly succinctly - insanity, he said: "is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". For me the only fault in this well-argued piece is the fact that all the examples given in the article for the outcomes of social learning simply refer us to how more social learning can occur with technology. I think that more social learning full stop is a good idea, whether is involves technology or not.

My take-away here seems to be the suggestion that we use more technology to solve the problems being created by..... technology? Accepting Saga's point made from the beginning that we should point the finger first at the 'índividualistic fallacy' that is driving education technology in the wrong direction, she is suggesting we should not blame the technology itself. Schools may lag behind technology, but it is not simply up to them to adapt to the technology - designers need to create useful things that we actually need for learning.

So is it true that individualism has worked its way into our schools and technology is to blame? Isn't it more true to say that we are pressuring schools and teachers to do this anyway, and the technology is just a part of that wider process? To what extent has the 'individualistic fallacy' worked its way into schools in the UK via technology? This is all very debatable and depends on the context and how the technolgy is being used.

I think there is every reason to believe the opposite in fact could be true and that those driving forward the 'individualistic fallacy' will find that schools are used to dealing with this pressure from outside. If you look at current debates in the UK around the hollowing out of the NHS by private business and the clashes between communities and academy trusts administering their schools - questions appear to be looming on the horizon. In short, my point is that this is probably a wider issue than just a couple of Ed-Tech companies driving sales or a misplaced use of social media in schools.

How can we celebrate the ability of schools to resist this trend? Schools are a place to go if you want to better understand the tensions created by the 'individualistic fallacy' in societies. In schools by and large we do not inculcate youth to measure themselves by Facebook, and all over the world we still teach them as groups and not as individuals. Schools frankly have not changed a great deal in a long time in some senses, while the orgnanisation of learning on the other hand certainly has.

In schools we still get to play out the dilemmas posed by our values (democratic or otherwise) - our roles as citizens and in short we replicate a vision for society. So our students in the UK learn to recognise how their opinions are being shaped by the media, how the world is also driven by power and influence, and they seek to learn values that will hold them together and support their success. They do this together in class and online. This does not require that they first quantify themselves into isolated 'personalities' in a void on social media, or that we denigrate or hollow out values of collaboration, self-reliance and respect in the process. Any attack on this process it is an attack on the ability of schools to transfer knowledge and values to the next generation which is a key role and function for them in society.

The danger of this resistence might be that in the process we are failing to adapt - we are engaging students with too few of the tools they need to succeed in the future, which risks being vastly different to how we live today.

Internet Archive "The dancing mouse : a study in animal behavior" (1907)

It's not individualism - It's behaviouralism, silly.

 

The article features a leading image which states that 'Learning Is Not Purely Behavioural, It is a Process That Takes Plance In A Social Context' - I assume that this point is one that someone wished to hold up and place on classroom wall somewhere at some interjecture. Saga Briggs however seems to be suggesting that we are slipping back into a kind of 1950's retro-comeback for behaviouralism, referencing the work of Skinner in the article.

Behaviouralist thinking is not so much in evidence in schools these days, but we do all seem unwittingly have become the lab rats of behavioural science more broadly. If you accept for example the ideas of the writer of a new book called 'Social Physics' by Alex Pentland at MIT which suggests that in a 'data-driven' society we need to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior in order to engineer better social systems.

What is more true for schools is that in this new 'data age' we do have to compete in practice with the diversity of sources for student motivation, the demands for greater efficiency and the scientific analysis of behaviour and outcomes. It is true that we spend plenty of time thinking about how to engineer better learning. This is also necessary because we need to keep up with how learning is changing in its social and cognitive aspects.

We often will fail to reach students with old methods of teaching, when students are moving towards new ways of learning. The idea of a fixed zone of proximal development has dramatically shifted in a context for learning that is blended between the online and real world. There is another dimension to my social learning that develops when my classroom and my friends are in locations all over the planet, when I could ask any question to an expert for help via twitter / google in seconds.

Similarly, we mold machines to adapt to the brain and to learn alongside us, tailoring learning to our personal needs and strengths. This is a challenge, and a gap between learning in schools and the reality outside of schools. If schools are filled with inflexible systems for delivery that ignore the sources of intrinsic motivation and challenge, then individuals struggle to find their own spirit to be part of a society that cares and that deals with shared responsabilities. We breed passivity and students will not engage.

The counter-argument is possibly in fact that we need more individualism, more characters - but not the kind of atomistic individualism that society everywhere is pushing on us from the outside. Some might suggest we need to teach different ideas about individuality and independance, and support students to learn different values in the process. We certainly need to avoid simply forcing people to fit their own ways of learning into our tiny boxes, as this will not resolve the problem. This is really just another way of selling damaged goods, offering people a broken choice between either becoming disengaged drones or entrepreneurial selves in order to adapt to the society of the future. So the solution should be to adapt to be inclusive of more diverse solutions which do allow schools to find their own ways of crossing this gap.

Police Dog - State Library of New South Wales

Are we even listening ?

 

My worry here is in fact when faced with this gap, we fail to listen. None of the arguments above are in any sense new or original. Most of this has been said before and the same arguments seem destined to be repeated until something gives.  

There is a gap between what people are asking for and the kinds of solutions offered to schools by Ed-Tech companies. Governments seem to make policy on education without designing it in the interests of any kind of social movement for change, without clear inspiration behind them from teachers and students and senior leaders of education. At least in the UK we have allowed schools to make large investments in a very broad and diverse range of technology in partnership with large corporations. But I personally do not see much consulation with the end-users, and that is a problem.

An interesting post that dealt with this recently at the same time was this one from Jeff Dunn which contains a neat visualisation of a survey of 100 North American and European teachers into major trends currently being used or contemplated by teachers and education experts. It shows quite clearly that many teachers are not particularly interested at this point in hearing about interactive whiteboards, digital games or mobile learning. This is most likely to be because most have been using interactive whiteboards for years, digital educational games are not necessarily new, and mobile learning is out of the question in schools where students are not allowed to use mobile devices.

The striking thing for me is what it is that teachers agree they are most interested in:

- Web-based tools for Educational Purposes
- Online Educational Resources
- Digital Literacy

I would hazard a bet that most of those teachers chose these answers because they reflect their real needs, areas they perceive as important for their practice as teachers. I would also hazard a bet that these choices also reflect a demand for better and more accessible forms of social learning with technology. Not more gadgets.

In fact I think that there is plenty of evidence to say that social and emotional learning is one of the key 'technologies' that teachers can leverage in order to help students to cope with an increasing sense of isolation as they venture into the social void of disembodied online independent life-long learners. At least this is one of the core strategies that Edutopia, a charitable foundation in the USA dealing with Ed-Tech has set out for its future work.

Finally making a similar point but in a different way, Jackie Gernstein Ed.D in her recent blog post places this same discussion into the context of psychology with reference to Maslows hierarchy of needs - discussing ways to link these with technology. Her diagram of this below also simply suggests that most of all we need to stop and think about what we are designing technology for and how it is being used. She suggests that:

"When technology is integrated intentionally with foresight and with intention of addressing specific growth-oriented goals, it increases the potential to help students learn, develop, and grow in unique ways"

Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND
  Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs by Jackie Gernstein Ed.D -

Oppi Festival 2014

Over the last two days I have attended a fantastic event in Finland this week called Oppi and have been wandering around the beautiful city of Helsinki. So after leaving the beautiful Finlandia Hall I had some time to think over it. 

It was a truly engaging and thought provoking festival with buckets of personality, crazy humour and positive 'let's get it, not sweat it' ethos behind it. Check out the video link if you want to see what I mean! 

The event was a meeting to think about education in Finland and globally, together with a number of partners, leaders and researchers in education from around the world. 

I have been truly touched by the kindness of our hosts in Finland and the generosity and awesomeness of people here. It is a great place to visit! 

Simon Breakspear (@simonbreakspear) did an awesome job of leading the discussions along with visionary innovators like Neil D'Souza founder of Zaya Labs (@zayalabs) and researchers like Pasi Sahlberg (@pasi_sahlberg).

Big picture stuff focused on how we should deal with systems of education, taking Finland as a departure point. An education system widely studied for its rise over 20 years in terms of Pisa scores and for successfully achieving the status worldwide of being a high equity and high quality system. 

Pasi Sahlberg outlined in his talk a number of important paradoxes in how we see Finland as a 'successful system'. In some sense debunking some of the typical preconceptions of Finland's education system being some kind of perfect liberal paradise.

But recent data from Pisa shows that it is unlikely that it will simply continue in this way forever. As Steven put it, without shifting from global education benchmarking to global learning redesign it is going to be a case for Finland of 'extracting diminishing efficiencies from the current education system'. He suggested that we need to start to think about about designing what he described as 'platforms for deep learning'.

Pasi outlined a number of paradoxes, some of which directly concerned Finland:

1. The results show that the more money you spend on education, the results can tend to decline in Pisa

2. There are actually large inequalities within Finland, one of the most equitable of school systems

3. Finnish schools promote high student learning but there is low student engagement and joy

4. There is a low level of use of technology in schools in Finland, in a very technologically advanced society 

However, it was clear that the Finnish educational establishment was taking these matters very seriously. I attended some really amazing research meetings on ideas about resilience and positive pedagogy that focuses on strengths, not weaknesses with Kristiina Kumpulainen. It was a reflection of the need outlined in the previous presentations and highlighted by Pasi Sahlberg that we should think about the motivation "problem" and think about the purpose of education if we want to move towards the future of education. 

Steven and others challenged us to think more about how educators can learn from start-ups and develop agile schools, or agile approaches within education. As Steven put it 'it's time to shift from extensive plans to rapid prototyping'. He suggested that we don't try to benchmark our way to the future but think about how to reinvent education instead 

Following this there was an engaging discussion throughout the Festival on the role of teachers in education. At one end of the spectrum Sugatra Mitra argued that in the past he had been misinterpreted as advocating for reinventing education without teachers at all. 

In some ways, the correction he described to this misunderstanding was that he wanted us to think out of the box and not to 'get rid of teachers but to try and think without them for a moment. To consider how you would reinvent education if teachers were not at the core and heart of it. 

He also suggested that we need to bring back to students the rationale for learning content, the relevance and direction for learning. Teachers are critically required to choose the direction of learning not to mediate access to it. In short we need to consider that learners may in the future benefit more from a focus on guiding relationships and motivation, than from direct instruction

There was a lot of consensus around the idea that new technologies cannot replace teachers though, and can greatly empower them. Neil D'Souza made the excellent point that 'tablets are good, content is better, and teachers are the best educational ICT investment' of all. Listening to how Neil started up his company from working with orphans in Mongolia, to now working with schools across India it was clear he was incredibly inspiring and down to earth. If you are looking to do work in this area there is info also on opportunities with Zaya on Idealist that might interest.

Simon Breakspear highlighted the interlocking nature of different problems. His presentation highlighted how relationships themselves are at the centre of it, declaring them the one 'killer app' of education. He also emphasised that it was not about substituting teachers with technology but it should be about empowerment. However, he stressed that we need to focus more on demand side measures, to increase education demand and the depth of engagement to focus on deep learning. In short rather than just focus on supply side measures which to some extent have been saturated already.

 
Innovation in the supply of education and its provision is one thing, but it never pays to start designing something and then go about trying to find out what it is that your consumers want afterwards. To me it seemed that although he was advocating for some radical departures, taking start-up culture and agile approaches into education, he was also sensibly advocating for people to do the opposite, to work with the system carefully and design learning around needs and around what does exists that works in terms of supply, while finding the pathways to extend and innovate around demand. I thought that was a well balanced approach. As he put it, "we don't want to digitise kids and put them in the 'learning machine" but create 'learning communities'.  

                          

He also tied this into the debates around learner resilience and grit. He pointed out that you cannot learn on behalf of another person, and we need to teach students to be able to work independently and to really apply themselves to problem solving and tackling challenging tasks in order to develop 21st century skills. In a sense playing safe and delivering mediocrity would end up in delivering more of the same, and would not cut it in a world where informal, personalised and deep learning might shape and deliver at least as much of how learners will come to expect to learn as formal schooling does today.  

Blog posts and presentations

A number of blog posts and presentations are available on the web already dealing with the event. Mozilla's Doug Belshaw's excellent presentation on Webmaker and Web literacy is available via the link below. 

I attended a great Mozilla Open Badges session and got an early sneak peek into what is coming with Badgekit and the Mozilla Webmaker session was a full house. The links from the Oppi sessions below are also available if you missed something or wanted to take part but was unable to clone yourself in time. 

http://thoughtshrapnel.com/post/82480510218/mozilla-webmaker-presentation-at-oppi

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/OPPI-links

There are some great blog posts available on some of the different topics, from Nesta in the UK here and also from Tom Bennet right here encouraging more debate around the idea that learning should be 'fun'. He debated and presented on the topic himself during the Festival specifically looking at behaviour manangement in classrooms and the notion of whether learning in classrooms should aim to be 'fun'. .

There was a great deal of engagement via twitter also thanks to the innovative and friendly competition using Twitter called 'Oppibug' developed by Matteo Menapace (@badeo) and @metodb and if you want to check out the archive of tweets, thanks to Oppibug they are easily accessible on the web. Otherwise check out these hashtags for tweets relating to the event:

@oppifestival

#oppibug

#oppiTAC

#oppistories

Oliver Quinlan whose book 'The Thinking Teacher' has recently come out,held a really great Teach Meet that was attended on-line virtually by over 40 people as as well as being packed out at Oppi. The livestream of the Teach Meet is available here: 

http://new.livestream.com/accounts/7885046/events/2910362

With Marieke Guy from the Open Education Working group at (now renamed) Open Knowledge we worked on mapping out a number of different types of interventions in Open Education at the level of policies, tools, software, licences, frameworks and also had a round table about definitions and ideas for work and cooperation. The group highlighted work on the Open Education Handbook and the working group itself which has had something of a makeover:

http://education.okfn.org/ 

http://education.okfn.org/handbook/

I also attended an excellent session on mobile learning and mobile storytelling with the Finnish government supported agency Omnia (for more information see here) that is working particularly with vocational education providers to help them get mobile. 

I also attended a session on development and education, with Susan Brown and youth ambassadors talking about the issues they were passionate about. The topic of collaboration was discussed, although it ranged quite broadly from the idea of cooperative learning at one level to the notion of international cooperation at the level of NGO's and aid donors steering discourse together with national governments on issues to do with education. There were some excellent presentations I believe on a project in Ethiopia using technology but unfortunately my cloning abilities did not stretch that far :)

It think it is great that there was a strong focus on education, technology and development or at least education in poor majority world contexts rather than it being just about education in European contexts such as Finland. There are always problems when you are trying to span such a wide divide between the kinds of things that might be relevant in such different contexts. However, I think the attempts to deal with issues around technology, learning systems (rather than education systems) in the future and educational reform showed that common opportunities and problems faced in each context can be tackled together to some extent. 

I think that there is also a very valid space for looking at the problems and the context of developing country systems outside of this framework. There is a real need for people to recognise that you cannot always import or transfer solutions or even approaches from one country or context to another.

The good news potnetially is that from the other end of the spectrum those groups who have traditionally represented the status quo in this area, the mainstream in thinking and research at least about education in developing contexts, seem to be progressively reaching out more and more to engage outside of that zone. Today as I write this the World Literacy Summit is taking place in Oxford, and academics, policy people and educators will be tweeting about it on #literacypower.

Crucially they will also be talking a great deal about the role of technology over the next few days. 

To follow updates, check here if you are interested.

http://worldliteracysummit.org/blog/

Check the topics including new technology and literacy here:

http://worldliteracysummit.org/themes-topics/

It is great to see how work on this is surfacing here in discussions at a global level, in a wide variety of educational forums. But I am proud to see how the awesome work of leaders and innovators, and 1000's of volunteer fellow Mozillians with the Mozilla Foundation have helped in their way to enable this, tirelessly working to clear the path with tools and energy to turn up the dial on these discussions. Take for example the topic description for the 2014 World Innovation Summit on Education coming up later this year, which is on creativity: 

Under the theme “Imagine – Create – Learn: Creativity at the Heart of Education” WISE 2014 will explore ways to unleash learners’ potential for innovation and creativity. By supporting their self-confidence and ability to develop talents, think critically, and solve problems we empower learners to design imaginative solutions in their lives and communities.

In order to study how to put creativity at the heart of education, discussions will revolve around three key questions: 

− How do we nurture creativity at all ages, particularly among the youngest?
− How do we design an environment of engaging pedagogies where creative learning and innovative 

   teaching can blossom?
− How do we measure, assess and certify talents and skills in both formal and informal systems?

....This is an area where there's plenty already done, in fact for the last few years people at Mozilla have been developing Open Badges and talking about badge systems. So it is really timely that in order to facilitate issuing open badges Mozilla is just putting the finishing touches on a new tool called Badgekit.

I think seeing these topics get center stage at such events might come as a sort of weird déjà vue sensation, or even a bit of a Wayne's World moment for people in the community working on these things, you could almost imagine the ghostly voice of Morrison explaining: if you book them, they will come. 

Education, Innovation and Development

Working within or between education, international development and ICT4D I try to stay focused on how all this might relate to a reality within much less 'ideal' contexts. Dealing with Third World or developing country situations is tricky when you talk about innovation and technology. Generally there are no easy answers to problems in education here certainly, there are plenty of experiements but it is as a rule an environment organised around the scarcity of resources. It is a little overwhelming when you take into consideration how innovation and technology might fit into so many diverse contexts for a start. Recognising that the deficiencies of education systems in developing contexts may be diverse and also deeply embedded, (like the barriers to expanding literacy) in one way is at least a good start.

However, there are some ways to break it down, to see how a number of problems bunch up together to lead to these kinds of roadblocks for literacy at least, this Guardian article does a great job of quickly pointing to some key drivers around the specific problem of literacy. 

I would really encourage thinking with this hat on for the future. We (those people thinking from the tech end) need to think a lot more about technology but we also need to think a lot more about people and their contexts. I think we should bring more ideas towards some of the contextual problems at the back of our minds. 

The majority world situations in contexts of education in poverty are pretty intractable. Web-making, badging and web-literacy might seem just as far removed as you can imagine from questions about teacher demand and supply, use of mother tongue languages in education, raising the standards of teachers, expanding into informal and mobile environments, creating more culturally relevant reading materials, creating more links between the world of work and education, making sure that qualifications are more than just pieces of paper. 

But then that is not really true, or at least there is much less of a gap than you might think. Webmaker mentors have trained hundreds of new teachers informally, bringing a platform for teaching outside of the limits of schools within communities, and the localisation of content on the Webmaker platform is incredibly managed by a global network that is distributed wide and far creating materials that are culturally relevant at source. Webmaking mentors and the web-literacy roadmap also provides a potential pathway for teachers and their learners to become much more skilled and to raise their standards of technological knowhow. Furthermore, the links between Mozilla's work on badges and the issues described above is also clear in terms of the need for new qualifications and accreditation allowing people to work and learn outside of institutions and within them. 

My final takeaway from Oppi however was the inspirational presentation given by Marko Vuoriheimo who is the Famous Finnish Rap artist Signmark

He talked to us about his learning journey a a deaf person trying to get a decent education. He also talked about becoming a someone who had to fight for what they believed in to achieve his goals. His music speaks for itself and he was amazing. During the Oppi festival we were asked to consider what we would do if we were to put together a commitment or an action plan post Oppi. For me, it was a promise to myself to do something about this at least personally, so I would at a minimum learn to do basic sign language to communicate :) 

So thanks Oppi for a great festival! I will look forward to being here in the future, and hopefully to another Oppi fest in 2015!

Some perspectives on Open Data for Education and Development

Here is a quick whirl through some thoughts that relate to the Open Knowledge Festival in Geneva taking place on the 16th of September. I will be there attending a number of workshops and listening to some of the debates on development and open data work going on worldwide in different contexts. There is also a workshop on Open Education which will be connecting up with the work that Mozilla is doing and many others are engaging in on this.

But just to stimulate some reflection, here are some of my own thoughts on the topic of open data for education and development:

Why people protest in North Africa

Plenty of protesters have  mentioned education as one of the reasons for popular discontent in North Africa. Given that some of the revolts started with students, it is no surprise. But whose education are they talking about?

This nicely put together graph from UNESCO gives a picture of the relationship between poverty and education in Egypt. From this graph you can see how big the gap is in term of years of education by income group and location. University student have greater access to education and resources but they are not alone. Clearly the educational divide between the rich and the poor is quite large.

Ken Robinson in pictures

If you have never see this, then check out Ken Robinson's famous talk on TED, all done in pictures :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U