Peter Slattery

Here we are in Bali and watching the children head off to school each day.

And I have no idea really just what happens in school here though yesterday I did chat with an American living in Bali who has a child at school, and is herself a teacher and on the local school board. And she thinks highly of her experience here. And I try to pay attention, and still I wonder how and in what ways the children grow up here. I was speaking to a traveller the other day who said: ‘I have heard children crying here, but they have all been Western kids.’ Hmmm….

So with possibilities in mind, I again say thanks to Wes Fryer for the following.

And I think I might just quote him holus-bollus and you can decide what you think. It is another comment in the ongoingly important discussion about education and the world we live in. Sometimes…with two small children…I just look at the future (ie next week?) and LOL….oh and have the occasional thought and even discussion…sometimes with people other than myself.

This is what Mr. Fryer has to say referring to the Bloom’s model:

‘This mode of teaching is certainly “messier” than traditional, teacher-directed instruction, but this is exactly the sort of dialog we need to prepare students to be engaged and educated citizens in the 21st century. Our need for critical thinking is greater today than ever before. Are you living in an echo chamber? Are your students? We need to find ways to regularly step outside our bubbles of normalcy and question both our assumptions and our sources of information. This inquiry-based process should allow us to act as true “sceptics” guided by a scientific way of thinking rather than “deniers” driven primarily by ideologies or other biases. Our digitally connected learning landscape makes this need even more apparent than it was a decade ago, last year, or last week.‘

Thanks to Wes Fryer for this entry on his website. A really nice idea for communication and imagination in the world of today.

There is a beaut YouTube vid on my site from a few days ago about learning. The title of this post is taken straight from that. It is a little difficult from the credits at the end to work out exactly who is saying what so you might want to go look for yourself. But the title above comes from Stephen Heppell. And the following comments, which I found really interesting and encouraging, come from Daniel Pink.

‘The coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they are going to need to know for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be:

Do you know how to find information?

Do you know how to validate it?

Do you know how to synthesize it?

Do you know how to leverage it?

Do you know how to collaborate with it?

Do you know how to problem solve with it?

That’s the new 21^st century set of literacies and it looks a lot different than the model that most of us were raised under.’

 

I am not going to say that there is nothing more important than the education of our young people. Nup, not gonna say it. But there is this.

ABC Radio National’s ‘Law Report’ of 4th May 2010 offers some interesting stuff. Here (with thanks) are a few quotes from a conversation with Robyn Treyvaud:

Damien Carrick: And I’m just thinking back to my adolescence, I can think of humiliating moments, I don’t necessarily think of things which were there constantly, 24 hours a day for the rest of my life, you know, if that stuff is online.

Robyn Treyvaud: Well that’s the problem with this, is that once you’ve got images and text in a digital format, which you’ve got invisible viewership, plus it’s permanently there and available, or other people may very well have copied and pasted or just sort of archived that data, if you like, then you’re absolutely right, it potentially is there forever and the humiliation of when it happens initially is very great, but we don’t necessarily know what it’s like when people can view it five years, ten years or fifty years from now.

AND…

Robyn Treyvaud: Well again, Damien, this is one of the great challenges we’ve got, because a school has to demonstrate a duty of care, and that can be duty of care in terms of the environment, monitoring behaviours, etc. Now part of the duty of care demonstrated by a school in relation to digital technologies and the internet specifically, is to have a firewall, to have filters, to block inappropriate sites, or to ensure that between the hours of 8.30 and 3.30 students in their school aren’t accessing sites where covert bullying or cyber-bullying can occur, or where sexting-type images can be spread. We get into some issues here, because a lot of this is done via mobile phones, and the school really, they might have a policy that say you’re not to use your mobile phone at school time, but those of us who work in schools know that you can’t enforce it. Then we have the other problem where young people in schools bypass our gatekeeping mechanisms, if you like, without our knowledge, using what are called proxy sites. So the school will see that the student has gone to a proxy site. One example is, say, Sneaky Sue, and you go to a proxy site and you then type in facebook.com, and it will then allow the user to go to Facebook and leave the school’s network. Now that I think leaves schools incredibly vulnerable to duty of care issues, because we don’t know where they are, we don’t know what they’re doing, and we don’t know who they’re with when they hang out in those places when they’re at school.

So to say that we in a school have an ability to monitor where they’re going and what they’re doing, I think is inappropriate because it’s not true.

Thanks to lotsa people for this vid. It pops up various places including Wes Fryer’s site:

Richard Louv , author of seven books about people, being connected and being in the great outdoors, has some stuff to say about ‘gettin out in the woods.’ In Australia we might say ‘bush’ but same same. In an article in Orion he says:

‘A growing body of scientific evidence identifies strong correlations between experience in the natural world and children’s ability to learn, along with their physical and emotional health. Stress levels, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, cognitive functioning—and more—are positively affected by time spent in nature. “In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health,” says Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine.” In October, researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, and the University of Washington reported that greener neighborhoods are associated with slower increases in children’s body mass, regardless of residential density. Such research will be immensely helpful as we rethink our approaches to urban design, education, and health care, in particular our societal response to childhood obesity.’

Sitting with bums on seats-usually hard (seats that is)- and surrounded by our four walls maybe aint the way to go in our schools.

Education and our young people continues to be, as it should, a disturbing topic for many of us. The heading for this post does not come from me. It comes from the Edutopia web site. Check out this interview with the notorious Alvin Toffler.

‘Forty years after he and his wife, Heidi, set the world alight with Future Shock, Alvin Toffler remains a tough assessor of our nation’s social and technological prospects. Though he’s best known for his work discussing the myriad ramifications of the digital revolution, he also loves to speak about the education system that is shaping the hearts and minds of America’s future. We met with him near his office in Los Angeles, where the celebrated septuagenarian remains a clear and radical thinker.

Edutopia.org: You’ve been writing about our educational system for decades. What’s the most pressing need in public education right now?
Alvin Toffler: Shut down the public education system.

That’s pretty radical.
I’m roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, “We don’t need to reform the system; we need to replace the system.‘

Go to the source to read more. It’s worthwhile. The final words are these:

‘You’re advocating for fundamental radical changes. Are you an optimist when it comes to public education?
I just feel it’s inevitable that there will have to be change. The only question is whether we’re going to do it starting now, or whether we’re going to wait for catastrophe.’

This I think is important. From Wes Fryer who constantly blogs (I can read his block because I have no filters) about the foolishness of internet filters in all sorts of places including schools. He found himself at a school trying to access Flikr and found himself blocked. He had this to say on 13th April 2010.

‘First of all, the technology director in the school holding our workshop had specifically whitelisted flickr.com the day before, on Monday. Yet today, on Tuesday, the site was mysteriously blocked again. I guess the district’s Internet content filtering could be considered, “highly aggressive.”

Second of all, the webpage title of this “blocked” message was:

busted

The English Wiktionary definitions for “busted” which apply in this case are:

Caught in the act of doing something one shouldn’t do.

and

Caught and arrested for committing a crime.

The normative message from this content filtering page is: You have committed a grevious error. You are in the wrong. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Perhaps we could go even farther. Is part of the message: Accessing websites not approved by our school district’s Internet provider is a big game, and for your last attempt we give you a score of ZERO?! You failed, you’re busted!

Internet content filtering is not game. It’s not funny, and I resent being shown a message which implies I’m a criminal when I’m only trying to visit a website which provides access to millions of educationally valuable, copyright-friendly images for teachers and students to use.

The third comment I’ll make about this “blocked” page is the message at the bottom. The assumption inherent in this offering of “alternative websites” (Google, Yahoo, CNN and Fox News) is that the only reasons a learner at the school would be using the Internet is to either search for information or read the news. These are CONSUMPTIVE activities. This supposedly “helpful” set of links on the block page (which I’m sure is viewed hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of a school year by students as well as teachers) completely misses the point that the Internet can be used, is being used, and SHOULD be used by learners for serious work CREATING and SHARING content on websites which power creative productivity. A mindset persists in schools and many businesses that “real work” on the computer is done only in Microsoft Office, and “the Internet” is used just to “look stuff up” and read the news. This perspective is sorely out of date.’

AND:

‘One of the teachers in our workshop today, when asked the question, “What instructions: guidelines do you give students NOW about getting photos to use in a video project?” responded:

Pictures must come from a legal website. No obscene pictures.

When I asked the teacher how he defined “a legal website,” he said it was a website which students were able to access because the district’s content filter allowed them to view it.

Let’s deconstruct this comment, because the assumptions here are a BIG problem. This teacher assumed that EVERY website which was NOT blocked by the content filter was OK. That somehow, the school’s Internet filter was acting as an all-knowing, uber-grandmother figure, granting permission and giving blessing to any site which was NOT blocked / on a blacklist. I regret to suggest this perception is common. I lament this perception, as well as its normality in schools.

Folks, WE are the filter. Our minds are the filter. Legality and ethics are not defined by the whim’s of an Internet service provider, a tech director who decides to block or unblock websites, or for that matter by a company which decides today “certain applications” are cardinal sins to own and use but tomorrow become authorized in “their online store.”

We make ethical decisions and judgements based on values, not based on the whims of organizations or individuals. I tried to make this point in our workshop today and my discussions with this particular teacher, but I don’t think I made much headway. The perceptions that “if the filter doesn’t block it, it’s OK for the kids to use in a video project” as well as the belief that “it’s not my job to make decisions about right and wrong online, since our content filter does that for us” are both erroneous and depressing at multiple levels.

We’ve got so much work to do when it comes to digital literacy and digital citizenship.’

I am always borrowing from Wes Fryer…here is some more stuff to do with what is happening or possibly not happening…in education…

‘Do you understand the “normalcy bias” in our educational context?

I have been studying people who are not just surviving in this situation, the are THRIVING
- to help us and our students do this, it is going to take another level of fluency

It is not about getting ON the web, it is about being OF the web

Remember the old days of the web: web 1.0?
- it was a big digital library
- it was a read-only experience
- very little interaction
- it was just a bigger library

This is a PEOPLE revolution, not a technology revolution
- we are social beings

Web 2.0: new technologies emerged
- we can take notes as we are reading a text at the same time
- technologies driven by human needs
- that is web 2.0
- we love web 2.0′

Wes Fryer continues, I think, to raise interesting questions about use of technology in our educational systems and what this means for young people, classrooms and the processes of learning and education. Blogging on the 26th Dec (and yes, he blogged on 25th as well), he gives this outline of a paper he is soon going to be presenting at a conference:

‘Every learner in our classrooms today needs immediate access to mobile, wireless technologies, along with opportunities to learn how to use these tools in powerful, constructive ways. Learning today should not be limited to a consumptive activity followed by periodic regurgitation. Instead, students as well as teachers should continually act as co-learners and co-creators of content for local audiences as well as the global stage. Clay Shirky correctly observes technologies don’t get socially interesting until they become technologically boring. The commoditization of digital learning devices is essential (but not sufficient) for digital learning equity and the learning revolution. In this presentation we’ll examine how netbook computers and the free, open source Ubuntu operating system can empower a new generation of digital learners in Oklahoma adept at the three C’s of 21st century literacy: Creating, Communicating, and Collaborating.’

Good old-fashioned education? High-tech cutting edge use of learner driven e tools? Truth is slippery and elusive as always. And there is no difference with the topic of young people, computers, learning, eduction, schools and all that goes with the growing upness of our young people.

There is a sight called ‘Educational Insanity’  (kinda cool name for a site) and there you will find what Jonathan D. Becker, J.D., Ph.D. has to say about this. I have cut and pasted some findings from research that he quotes. Main points are these:

• Teachers niche in the ecosystem – English teachers were much more likely to use computers than their peers.
• Teacher / Ecosystem Interaction – teachers who reported feeling pressure and support from colleagues were more likely to use computers more. Also, where there were too many competing invading species (other “programs” or “innovations”), computer use suffered.
• Teacher-Computer Predisposition for Compatibility – teachers who found computers to be more compatible with pedagogical beliefs and practices used computers more.
• Opportunities for Mutual Adaptation – teachers that had more time to “play around” with computers used them more for teaching/learning.

Whatever your view, computers look like they are here to stay.