Only Connect

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it were scales

2009-06-08T22:07:00.002+12:00

David Wiley asks “What would highly scalable learning look like if we invented it today…?” To which I would respond with another question, Leigh Blackall’s challenge to the flexible learning course’s online panel @8:49 “Is scalability even [an] appropriate way to be thinking about learning?”

Are we, by talking of scalability simply perpetuating an industrial model of education? An outdated model based on scarcity and top-down allocation of resources when education is increasingly based on an abundance of resource allocated over the network.

My thinking of late has been influenced by Doug Rushkoff. On WMFU’s The Media Squat he comments @32:05 that “one trap to avoid is the idea that, this false premise, (and again it’s from industrial culture) that everything you do has to be scalable for everyone, everywhere else…”

For Rushkoff, it’s an issue of sustainability not scale:

…and the fact that it doesn’t scale really doesn’t matter because your not, this is not a business plan... it doesn’t have to keep growing… all you need to do is to sustain and in order to sustain you just get to the point that works and then you’re there right and then people can either borrow, you know borrow hopefully the sort of the more fundamental decisions you’ve made or choices you’ve made rather than the specific choices of praxis that you’ve made.

So what would highly sustainable learning look like? By all means borrow those "fundamental decisions", but lay off best praxis. I'm reminded of Dave Snowden's advice when asked how he would sustain and scale successful ICT practice in schools:

It's not so much about repeating a success as repeating the conditions which led to that success. In any complex system you can never replicate outcome, but you can replicate starting conditions. Maybe part of the problem of scale and replication is a consequence of a failure to recognise this basic fact. In a sense you want multiple diverse initiatives to emerge, and you want to measure their impact on the social and educational fabric not a series of pre-determined targeted outcomes.

Back to the online panel and fast forward to 1:16:00 where Mark Nicols observes that education can be thought of as just this sort of complex problem or social mess. After which Leigh responds by calling for space for new ways of working, free from industrial scale systems.

In a "too big to fail" economy that Rushkoff describes as "about neutralising the small and encouraging the big" we can help build a diverse and more resiliant learning eco-system that is too small to fail. Simply by answering Leigh's call and encouraging the small numbers of people who are finding new ways of working we can invent highly sustainable learning.

Edu-speak bingo

2005-11-08T15:39:00.000+13:00

Both Cherrie and Artichoke have recently noted the love affair educationalists have with jargon. Here's Cherrie on edu-speak:

…there is so much jargon all over the place when it comes to education—too many cliches that people think they understand, but don't. It's ironic really, because it's a lot like school—if you remember the keywords to write in your answer, it mostly doesn't matter whether you understand it or not.

Meanwhile Artichoke, who is busy defending her reputation for anticipating edu-speak trends, is seriously considering bagsing Communities of Practice for 2006. For what it's worth, my money's on that perennial favourite: collaboration.

Storytelling across the pond

2005-11-07T11:51:00.000+13:00

From Bryan comes news of another e-twinning project. Trans-Pond leverages storytelling as a medium for cultural exchange between school kids from the North East of the United Kingdom and those in Canada (see the Frappr-powered Trans-Pond map). The project is the brainchild of Steve Thompson who writes:

…I'll be shaping open source blogging software to create an interface that will allow 20 (10 UK, 10 Canada) schools to have their own blog… We'll also be using our community media archive software developed here at Teesside Uni to allow a range of multimedia objects to be utilised in the storytelling.

More than my 2 cents worth

2005-11-04T23:16:00.000+13:00

I’m excited to have discovered Cherrieland thanks to David Warlick who added his 2 Cents Worth to a comment Cherrie left on his blog. (Funny how someone 10000 miles away can connect you with someone 100 miles away!)

Cherrie posts some very insightful observations on education from the point of view of a student. Her latest post, a comparison of formal and informal learning, makes sobering reading for teachers.

Of school Cherrie writes "you help each other but they call that cheating", in life "you basically never have to remember because [answers are] in books, pamphlets and websites." She continues, in life "everything is related", in school "English is in period one, Economics period two, maths period 3…"

I love Lucy

2005-11-03T23:03:00.000+13:00

The folks at QUT and ANU are running an interesting project that connects isolated rural school children across the globe. Australian Aboriginal students from Cherbourg State School are learning about their Chinese counterparts in Fanchong Primary School through the sharing of digital stories (via Lucy’s Blog).

ZoomIn' marvellous!

2005-11-03T22:45:00.000+13:00

Just when I resigned myself to New Zealand getting Google Maps street level coverage sometime in 2010 the folks at ProjectX, who were less patient, have written their own AJAX-ed map of New Zealand (via Second pOst). ZoomIn Maps is bloomin' marvellous!

Where in the world

2005-10-28T16:50:00.000+13:00

Inspired by Josie's directory of edubloggers and Tom Techszewski's Where in the US is digital storytelling, I thought I'd create a directory of digital storytellers. So if you're a digital storyteller, add yourself to the map and help spread the word.

It's a small world

2005-10-27T16:04:00.000+13:00

Tip of the hat to Frappr chief publicist Josie Fraser who has created an international edubloggers directory reminiscent of Jo Murray's earlier attempt to map the Australian blogosphere using CMapTools. Josie is encouraging others to add themselves and advertise the map. Thanks to Josie's directory I've already discovered one more Kiwi edublogger!

Update: Jo pointed me to this directory of Australian edubloggers built using PBWiki.

All good things come in threes

2005-10-26T12:41:00.000+13:00

In one of those probability-defying moments of synchronicity that the blogosphere affords, three of my favourite education thinkers have been thinking the same thought.

Always delightfully thought-provoking, Artichoke borrows from Augusto Boal to describe intimidation of the spectator learning in which pre-scripted learning activities, "…for elimination of the 'bad'", offer learners little or no choice in their learning.

Artichoke is highlighting the same sort of classroom violence that Aaron Campbell has blogged to wide comment and which Chris Bigum calls repeated "organised child abuse" where "It is more important to be concerned about spelling skills of the young but less about how the system treats them and what the social consequences are."

If we are to overcome this Freirean institutional violence and encourage learners to engage in the process of inquiry then we must be prepared to give up control to allow the sort of environments that promote what Artichoke calls virtuous learning experiences, environments in which we acknowledge that sometimes the learner knows best.

Podcasting corporate stories

2005-09-28T18:25:00.000+12:00

The Storytellers' Chris Spencer links to Steve Smith on why podcasting helps companies communicate. Smith believes podcasting is all about remembering how to tell good stories:

Old fashioned storytelling may be the most engaging uses of podcasting within the corporation.

It's a big world

2005-09-27T18:10:00.000+12:00

My office is on the third floor of a library. In my lazier moments—which arrive with increasing frequency—I wait for the lift, next to which hangs a poster of this eye-grabbing photomicrograph. Written above the image is a rather bold statement:

It's a big world. We've organized it.

The "We" is the OCLC, who own the rights to the Dewey Decimal Classification system. Now we should be grateful, right?

Well, David Weinberger is not so sure. On All Things Considered he says the problem with attempts by well-meaning authorities to organise information is one of context:

What something is about depends on who is looking.

Tagging, Weinberger argues, accomodates multi-subjectivity by empowering the "…readers to decide what something is about." The big lesson, Weinberger concludes, is that:

…we no longer have to act as if there's only one right way of understanding everything, or that authors and other authorities are the best judges of what things are about.

Minds less well educated

2005-09-15T21:51:00.000+12:00

Education revolutionary Roger Schank explains in the preface to Making Minds Less Well Educated Than Our Own the origin of the book's curious title. Schank, who sat on the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the early 1990s, recounts:

When I tried to explain to this board the technological changes that were about to come that would threaten the very existence of the Encyclopaedia, there was general disbelief… Only Clifton Fadiman seemed to realize that my predictions about the internet might have some effect on the institution they guarded. He concluded sadly, saying "I guess we will just have to accept the fact that minds less well educated than our own will soon be in charge."

Of course we are now living in the middle of the changes Schank forewarned and, in response to online competition, the venerable encyclopaedia has named a new board. A decade has passed and as board member Wendy Doniger astutely points out "The world has changed," but some things haven't, like the patronising attitudes of the board, judging from this quote, also from Doniger: "We're deciding what people are going to think."

The spirit of leadership

2005-09-01T21:38:00.000+12:00

Peter Cammock presented his poetic vision of hope for the world at the 2005 Winter Lectures. To realise his vision Cammock says: "We need a type of leadership that goes beyond rationality; we need a type of leadership that has a touch of soul."

Cammock considers great leadership might have its origins in spirituality which he defined by means of Peter Vaill's term spiritual condition: "…the feeling individuals have about the fundamental meaning of who they are, what they are doing, and the contributions they are making."

We need to bring our spiritual condition into the conversation if we are to be effective leaders. Although the stakes are high, many of us are ill-equipped to participate in such a deep dialogue, because as Cammock points out:

We live in a society that's put off the knowledge of ourselves very often for a knowledge and utilisation of the world external to us and in the process of our life of work, in the pursuit of our ambitions, we very often lose connection with ourselves—we become washed away.

Cammock believes the language we need to have this conversation is what David Whyte calls the "despised poems." Cammock quotes from Whyte's book Crossing the Unknown Sea:

For a real conversation we need a real language. To my mind that is the language not enshrined in business books or manuals but in our great literary traditions. Keats or Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson or Mary Oliver often say more in one line about the invisible structures that make up the average workday than a whole shelf of contemporary business books.

Pimp my periodic table

2005-08-12T22:00:00.000+12:00

Surely the most successful image to communicate a scientific concept is the the periodic table—science's equivalent of the London underground map. Now the table has been turned into a spiral (via 3quarksdaily). Gone are the familiar rows and columns, replaced instead with a continuous sweeping curve resembling a spiral galaxy, an aesthetic allusion to our heavenly origins.

Creator of the chemical galaxy, Oxford ecologist Philip Stewart was inspired by Edgar Longman’s 1951 spiral form of the table: "I realized that the atoms that make up a galaxy can be arranged in just the same form as the galaxy itself."

In his conversation with Slate’s Jon Lackman, Stewart explains that the old table was ready for a makeover:

The old table arose and survived because we live in a world of boxes. We're used to them. But I think the human brain is actually more comfortable with curves. The old, square forms were very convenient for old-style industry. But until a few thousand years ago, humans lived happily in a world without rectangles.

All this talk of boxes reminded me of Roald Hoffman’s rebut of chemical reductionism in The Same and Not the Same:

The world out there is refractory to reduction, and if we insist that it must be reducible, all that we do is put ourselves into a box. The box is the limited class of problems that are susceptible to a reductionist understanding. It’s a small box.

Like Hoffman, Stewart is helping show the humanity of chemistry by encouraging us to step out of the box.

Every picture tells a story

2005-08-11T21:22:00.000+12:00

Larry Gonick pioneered a blend of art and science to communicate abstract scientific concepts in cartoon form. As a science teacher trying to make Mendel's peas palatable for 15 year olds, I drew inspiration from the pages of Gonick’s 1981 collaboration with biochemist Mark Wheelis, The Cartoon Guide to Genetics.

Larry was a participant (alongside my favourite chemistry writers Peter Atkins and Roald Hoffman) in MIT’s Image and Meaning conference at which scientists and artists collaborated to explore the use of images to communicate scientific concepts.

Freelance science writer Phil Ball was there too and he ends his conference coverage for Nature.com with this Gonick gem, "Sometimes what one needs to understand a concept is a story."

Citizen Storytelling

2005-07-29T22:33:00.000+12:00

Neil McIntosh asks us (via JD Lasica) to forget citizen journalism. Like Mark Deuze, McIntosh believes the future of journalism lies in "…the web's emerging storytelling culture…"

What blogs, and picture phones, and other "me media" do is bring everyday storytelling to the web. They're mainly personal stories, being published—yes—for an audience, but an audience that we think we know very well. And we tell those stories using the words we write on simple CMSs, like blogs, or via pictures distributed via Flickr, or movies made in iMovie.

Occasionally—very occasionally—those stories, pictures and movies will intersect with a story which a very large audience is interested in, as happened to the mobloggers who got pictures of the July 7 bombings. But a big, mainstream audience is never the intention—we're just using technology to do what we've always done, and tell stories.

Podcasting with pictures

2005-07-20T22:43:00.000+12:00

My friend Tim has a new dog and K9Cast’s dog socialization podcast might be the perfect excuse for a new iPod. Walter and Tara’s podcast is an example of what the folks at Apple are calling enhanced podcasts: podcasts organised into "…chapters that display intermittent pictures and web links as your audience listens."

MAKE magazine's Phillip Torrone explains how to make enhanced podcasts. Take a listen to (or should that be a look at) Phillip’s example. You don’t need an iPod; simply download the 1.7 MB MP4 file and drag it into iTunes 4.9. (Make sure song artwork is set to show in the lower left-hand pane of the iTunes window.)

This technique also enhances the educational appeal of podcasts. Complementary pictures and web links add to the instructional value of the audio, while dividing the podcast into chapters and the relatively low bandwidth (Phillip’s example weighed in at a reasonable 0.7 MB/min) increase accessibility.

As Bud points out, screencasting is podcasting, but with pictures. Now that podcasts have been enhanced to support pictures, what's the difference?

Update: Although enhancing podcasts remains the domain of those of us with Macs, it has become considerably simpler with the release of this nice GUI for Apple's Chapter Tool utility.

I'm on the map!

2005-07-06T17:25:00.000+12:00

…well nearly. Google is slowly charting the globe with the U.S. and U.K. already mapped down to street level, and the rest of us under the all-seeing eye of the Google satellite. Here's the most detailed satellite view Google provides of my little corner of the globe. Can you see me waving?

Update: Here's home, sweet home after fiddling with the Google Maps API for a few minutes. Hmm…

Catching the Knowledge Wave?

2005-07-01T15:32:00.000+12:00

A year ago Jane Gilbert's inspiring challenge of knowledge society rhetoric forced me to think about the changing nature of knowledge and its implications for teaching. While I’ve been thinking, Jane’s been writing. Her new book Catching the Knowledge Wave? was launched early last month. You can read a summary (PDF) and order the book from the NZCER.

A picture's worth a 1000 words

2005-06-30T16:58:00.000+12:00

We all know field trips are fun, but how much do children actually learn from these excursions? Harlene Hayne, a psychology professor at Otago University, investigated the kinds of information five and six year-olds absorbed from a field trip to a local Albatross colony and how long that information was retained.

The children were interviewed and tested about the experience. Not surprisingly, the results suggested that standardised testing did not accurately measure the children’s knowledge:

You would draw very different conclusions about what they learned and what they had remembered on the basis of their narrative interviews than you would on the basis of their performance on the tests.

Hayne asked half of the children to illustrate their experience while they talked about it. Interestingly, those children "…reported more information than children who were simply asked to tell." Hayne concluded that, at least for younger children:

…we can sometimes get a better assessment of what they have actually learned and remembered under these more avant garde assessment procedures using drawing than we ever would in standardised testing.

However, the discrepancy between the results of quantitative and qualitative assessment, irrespective of drawing, "might persist forever."

A Storied Career

2005-06-29T17:09:00.000+12:00

Kathy Hansen is blogging her PhD research on the use of storytelling as a form of organizational communication, but the scope of her blog is broader, exploring traditional and postmodern forms and uses of storytelling.

Kathy makes the connection between story and career, writing about the emerging narrative approaches to career counselling which represent a welcome move away from psychometric testing and the sort of career planning folly that Jeremy exposes when riffing on a couple of Brian’s recent posts.

Seventeen reasons

2005-05-25T17:46:00.000+12:00

Chris Bigum links to Herb Childress' Seventeen Reasons Why Football Is Better Than ~~Sex~~ …oops High School! Reading the opening lines:

We define school as a place of learning. But as I visited classes in the high school in which I was an observer for a year, what I saw mostly—and what the students told me about most frequently—was not learning at all but boredom.

I was reminded of Will Richardson's daughter's judgment on school: "It's so boring, Daddy."

Derek points out that finding problems with schools is relatively easy, instead a healthier approach is to inquire into what works best and appreciate that.

So I welcome Rob Paterson's attitude to changing what he calls the "'Imposition' vs. 'Invitation'" approach to education. Rob's intention is "to ask kids what they would like to do and find out ways of making this happen."

To return to Childress, "…ask what it is about the activities they love that is worthy of their best effort." This sort of appreciative inquiry into education might prevent me listening to Tess' refrain uttered from my son's lips.

Cameraphone revolution

2005-05-19T18:03:00.000+12:00

Before her demise, the then HP CEO Carly Fiorina described the digital revolution as being about helping people tell their stories. Well it seems this was more than revolution rhetoric.

Building on the work of Daisuke Okabe and Howard Rheingold who recognised that cameraphones "…represent a new opportunity to tell the story of our lives to ourselves as well as to others," HP researchers are exploring ways to lower the barriers to digital storytelling:

StoryCast is an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller's voice.

Remote control renaissance

2005-05-19T15:38:00.000+12:00

Maybe we don't all have a craving for knowing what happens. Walter Parkes asserts "…[popular film narratives'] entertainment value isn't diminished by knowing what happens next." (If you believe his argument you wouldn't leave the television remote in the hands of Scheherazade's husband.)

Although writing in 1994, Parkes' argument is strikingly similar to Doug Rushkoff's message delivered from the Pop!Tech 2004 podium some ten years later. (You can hear Rushkoff's presentation courtesy of IT Conversations.)

Rushkoff and Parkes agree that storytelling is evolving and that the remote control has not only changed the way in which we watch TV, but the narrative format of the TV programming we watch.

Rushkoff believes we have become addicted to the Aristotelian "male orgasm curve" of storytelling and to the release provided by our endings. Escape from the tension built by the unfolding of a traditional sequential narrative, both Rushkoff and Parkes argue, is provided via the remote control and its ability to randomly access content.

The response Parkes observes has been the development of a new narrative style characterised by multiple storylines and characters. (Steven Johnson provides a much more detailed analysis of the increasing complexity of television programming and eloquently argues in favour of its cognitive demands in a recent New York Times article based on his fourth-coming book.)

As Rushkoff's "screenagers" deconstruct TV with their remotes, the powers that be problematise attention and diagnose deficit. Parkes believes simply that “…we’re developing a different kind of attention.

”No longer are we required to commit "…to a half-hour or hour of concentrated viewing." We can interact by "…sampling bits of information at will." As Rushkoff comments:

…it's about making connections; it's about finding patterns in this mediaspace… It's no longer a beginning, middle and end, it's a series of connections.

What Steven Johnson calls "filling in" and according to Johnson: "The open question posed by these [multi-threaded narrative] sequences is not 'How will this turn out in the end?' The question is 'What's happening right now?'"

Once upon a time

2005-04-21T21:14:00.000+12:00

Philip Pullman believes "We all have such an appetite for narrative…" and like Scheherazade's husband, "…for knowing what happens next." As E.M. Forster explains in Aspects of the Novel, stories satisfy our "primeval curiosity."

Pullman (whose Guardian piece on playfulness I linked to previously) shares some advice on beginning stories: "Get the main character on stage as soon as you can." Timely advice to have arrived in my aggregator (courtesy of my PubSub: Storytelling subscription) as I’ve been agonising over my own beginnings too much of late.