Monthly Archives: January 2014

Late last year, my principal passed along a document transcript of a keynote delivered by Dr Alan Reid from UniSA titled "Translating what? How PISA distorts policy, research and practice in education". I've looked for a copy online but can't seem to find one to link to so I am uploading the copy from my email inbox to share his analysis to a broader audience. I know that we used this transcript as a basis for a powerful dialogue around the proper use of data for learning in our leadership team, but the messages he delivers could translate well to any nation where the results from PISA are being used to publicly rate and rank how their students are doing. This is not the first time he has questioned the media's and government's over reliance on the rankings and data sets that these international tests provide.

Click on the link - Alan Reid keynote CredNovember14 - to download.

It seems that PISA can provoke warning signs of decline in any part of the world, but many media outlets here down under are quick to give these tests a very high level of credibility. A quick sample via Google shows this:

Maths results a concern in PISA schools study
New PISA results show education decline – it’s time to stop the slide
OECD report finds Australian students falling behind

And interestingly, within that last article was this observation from Dr Ken Boston:

Gonski review panellist and former director-general of NSW education Ken Boston said Australia should compare itself to Canada in OECD comparisons - which performed significantly higher than Australia in maths and reading.

Meanwhile, in Canada, who Australia should be seeking to emulate, PISA results are producing a similar reaction:

Canada's students slipping in math and science, OECD finds

And this article from the Vancouver Sun, has this gem of an observation which perhaps sums up a lot of the hysteria worldwide regarding PISA:

The only people who really revel in the PISA announcement of where Canada sits in the world rankings are politicians, business leaders and university academics well positioned to take credit for successes in public education and blame those lazy overpaid teachers for any drop in the PISA rankings.

You could substitute any number of countries in Canada's (or Australia's) place and the statement would feel true to many educators who find the reality of their classroom to be quite detached from the results and how they are interpreted for the public's benefit.

Anyway, have a read of Dr Reid's keynote and let me know what you think.

• 2 Comments

Technology can be a major driver of innovation within any school setting. So, it makes sense that the corporations that develop and sell the devices, infrastructure and software that are part of this picture would want to be publicly visible as a key factor for positive change. A recent example of this came my way via Tim Holt who reflected on a partnership between Science Leadership Academy, an acknowledged innovative school in the US, and Dell who are funding Chromebooks and other benefits for the school. Now, this is a great coup for the school involved and is a win/win PR wise for both the school and the tech corporation who are very publicly providing this innovative support. But as Tim points out, "this sweetheart deal he is getting from Dell is NOTHING like what every other school will get". There is a lot more to this story which you can follow through on the comments on Tim's blog but I am interested in the point where the corporate helping hand starts to feel more like a forceful push in the back.

Corporations that have a stake in the education pie all want to be seen as the answer to innovation, or in many cases, just keeping pace. Schools are always under the pump when it comes to funding. Every Google Educator, Apple Distinguished Educator, Microsoft Innovative Educator or Intel Teach facilitator is the equivalent of me wearing my favourite Rip Curl tee-shirt out in public - a form of advertising. There is somewhat of an insinuation that those educators who sport these fancy titles, not earned from a university course or form of scholarship but from an application form or a weekend of workshopping, are somehow better or more qualified at being better educators than everyone else. (Disclosure: I have an Intel Teach course diploma somewhere in my cupboard and I can tell you that it has made little to no difference to my capacity as an educator.)

Late last term I went to a day event that was the launch of a partnership between my own education department (DECD) and Microsoft. I heard about it via a Community of Practice group that my school is involved in around Innovative Learning Environments, and we knew that a couple of schools within our group had been involved in the Microsoft Innovative Schools program so a colleague and I went along to see what this partnership could be offering or mean to the system as a whole. (Another disclosure: I have been involved in the Microsoft Innovative Schools program too, at the school I worked at prior to WGS, and benefitted from their sponsored interstate trips.) The message is one of the corporation is here to give back to you, the schools, here's what we can offer you, here's a sample of the sort of Professional Learning on offer. Which is great but being the sort of person I am, I tend to notice the subtle sub-messages, real or imagined, throughout the day that still bug me.

An example of when I feel the corporate heavy hand in the middle of my back - when a graphic of devices is shown to the audience, starting with the least powerful Smartphone then tablets then laptops and finally, the tablet PC as the ultimate learning machine. Windows machines dominate the graphic (as you would expect at a Microsoft funded day) and the sole token outsider in the graphic is an iPad just to the right of the Smartphone and well left of the inferred-superior Microsoft Surface. The message is clear about what constitutes an innovative learning device. We are also presented with a definitive list of 21st Century Learning skills - despite the fact that a quick search will provide many alternatives - but any professional learning from this partnership won't be referencing any of the alternatives. And just in case, you think I am just being anti-MS, I think that Apple's coining of the phrase "Challenge Based Learning" is just as blatant a grab for the pedagogical truth.

When I make decisions about the right tools for my students, I want that decision to be free of that feeling in the middle of my back. Schools should be free to decide that at a local level, and generally are, but partnerships that send heavy handed messages curb our freedom to help our students with learning and lessen world views instead of widening them.

• 3 Comments

I am no big fan of FaceBook. There are too many aspects that make me wary of becoming a regular user ranging from the regularly reported breaches of users' privacy to the complete inanity of the apps, likes and offensive advertising that plagues the site. Have a look through my FaceBook page and you'll see very infrequent contributions and minimal information. However, I think it is important for me to have a presence there just so I know how it all works. Because the staff and many of the students I work with are all on there, and from time to time, I've needed to lean on my familiarity with how it all works in order to try and resolve a bullying, trolling or general exchange_of_insults_issue at school.

I am well aware of the general philosophies behind being CyberSmart - I am also aware of the general advice about being careful what you post on FaceBook because current and potential employers can "check out" your FaceBook presence. But there is an underlying presumption for many of us that people are who they say they are on social media - and in the last couple of years, I have seen that many, many kids know exactly how to subvert that. It is almost like taking cybersafety advice and turning it back on itself to create a world where a community can know each other but evade being pinned down for anything by external FB users through the constant changing of identities, sharing of accounts, constant shutting down and creation of new pages, the splitting of one person across multiple identities and so on.

randomIn my dealings with kids there seems to be an equal mix of savviness and naivety. One kid might have five accounts, none of which bear their actual name - one for their "peeps" at school, one to show Mum and Dad and family members that is clean cut, one for the boyfriend or girlfriend, one for trolling or to masquerade as an adult and one for gaming / other social media type interactions. Through these multiple accounts (of which only several might be active at any given time) the kid can be very hard to pin down. An argument can blow up in one intersection between two kids but by the time I'm asked to check things out, one of the identities is gone, or the story changes. (That wasn't me, that was my cousin, I let him use that account, he knows my password, I thought she was someone else when that was written.) So when these ten to thirteen year olds actually get around to applying for their first job, even if it is an entry position at the local newsagent or McDonald's, checking through their Facebook account might be quite a difficult thing to do. Just because many of us adults set up our account in our own real name, use real photos from our actual lives and report truthfully about events that happen to us doesn't mean that the kids I'm referring to are playing by the same rules.

And by the time they enter the workforce, Facebook may be dead and buried, all of its inane data buried deep in the web where only the most dedicated needle-in-the-haystack hacker will be able to make sense of the posts, chats and likes of the Facebook era. I'm not saying that kids shouldn't be careful what they post or that it can't get them into deep, deep trouble. I am saying that for at least a significant proportion, they don't really care what we think they should be doing with social media and like the pre-teen and teenage years from any era, the forming of identity means that most Facebook identities will be temporary social sandpits which evade adult intervention.

• 3 Comments

I got my credit card bill the other day. As usual around this time of year, an automated amount is charged to me from Edublogs. This small investment keeps this blog alive and visible on the web. But it takes more than that payment to keep this place alive. It needs me.

Check out this graph below. It shows my blog post frequency over the years that I have been running Open Educator (originally Teaching Generation Z).blog activity

I have found it hard to get back into the writing groove. Purpose has been missing. But little habits that would feed this beast have contributed to the downturn. I used to scroll through Google Reader over breakfast and tag items of interest into possible future posts, make mental notes to engage with certain personalities over issues of interest and so on. But not having a decent replacement has meant that I have let a lot of that go. I've been conscious that in my current role, that most things of interest from a writing perspective involve delving too closely into personal observations of colleagues and I have wanted to respect their right to not have their professional interactions microscoped in a public forum by someone who is meant to be leading in the ethical and powerful use of technology for learning. I've often felt out of touch with things. I've had some extended family distractions that have dulled my enthusiasm for blogging - for a while, these issues were ruining my golf as well which is not a good thing. I also felt that I have nothing really to write about and deep down, my ego tells me that no one is probably reading any more, either.

I can remember the enthusiasm and passion when I started putting my ideas and thoughts here. I can only admire those bloggers who were blogging regularly then and are still doing so now. Alan Levine, Stephen Downes, Brian Lamb, Tom Hoffmann, Doug Johnson, Wesley Fryer, Miguel Guhlin and Tom Woodward just to name a few. But quite a few super talented writers that I loved reading - Christian Long, Doug Noon, Ken Rodoff, Jennifer Jones, Alex Hayes - no longer do so. Their reasons are their own but it shows that purpose is a big part of chosing this public digital place as a repository for half-baked, embryonic, still fermenting concepts and realisations.

Darcy Norman is still one of those original "edubloggers" that I started reading when I first started this blog. Now that Google Reader is dead, I found this post from him while sifting through Feedly (the new but not as enticing aggregator I now use) that rings pretty true to me.

We’re living in a time when it’s never been easier to share what we do, at little or no cost, and people get hung up on how they will need to squeeze their creations through a press to extract every last drop of monetization out of it. That’s not the point. Create because you are creative. Share because you give a shit. Or don’t.

I don’t generate a profit from anything I do outside of my Day Job™. At least, not directly. But being creative and sharing makes me better at my Day Job™, so has likely made me “profit” indirectly. How do you calculate that? Easy. You don’t. Well, I don’t.

 

I think some of the most fun I've had blogging was when I came up with some cartoon, or played around with words. This place needs to get back to being more enticing than the next game of NBA 2K14 or the next episode of "Game of Thrones" - making my own art, in other words.