Culture of learning

I read a nice post here which neatly summarises the current thinking of many educationalists about learning.  The interesting thing is that it is written by a Grade A student who is himself questioning the meaning and purpose behind his own education - an education which netted him outstanding grades and led to a whole host of scholarships and awards, but which felt to him as if he had lost his inner voice and his creativity.   I have written about such ideas before but as the article states, this approach to schooling teaches the students that schooling is simply a tenure where you sacrifice creative learning for  educational results.  That is on a good day, with good students.  On a bad day it is simply a turn off for students who are labelled incompetent and not up to the job of organizing themselves to revise and regurgitating facts for an exam board.
I have worked in a variety of schools, some outstanding with amazing results and students.  Some courses I have taught achieved 100% A*-C, and many 95% or more.  But I did not enable this to happen simply by spitting facts at the students to swallow.  Six years ago my students were utilizing learning walls, where they come and pick their own challenging sub-task of their choice once they have finished their main lessons task.  The sub-tasks are graded from 1 star (easy) to 3 stars (difficult), and all of the classes were mixed ability. And the incredible thing?  I found that even the weaker students - who might otherwise be switched off in a standard lesson - were desperate to tackle sub-tasks that were harder than 1 star level.  They really wanted to achieve, and with a little guidance many of them did.
Six years ago we were not using wonderfully collaborative technology such as google docs or iPads.  Six years ago my classes were the only ones using challenge walls in the class.  Now I am part of a school where creativity and resilience and independence of enquiry are celebrated and formally recognised, and as a member of SLT we are starting to see the reaping of the benefits.

I have just read a fascinating article from Wired about the new beta release of Facebook search, entitle Graph Search.  Being from Wired, the article goes into a fair bit of depth about how if differs from the likes of google, and at first glance it sounds like it will have google quaking in their boots.  I remember the days of lycos, of alltheweb and altavista.  Altavista in particular used to knock google for six, and was the only search engine I ever used consistently.

Even back then I found yahoo just too...overwhelming, and google eventually started to overtake the likes of altavista in my mind because of the simplicity of its interface, and because of their PageRank algorithms, which marked data according to its visibility and popularity.  Of course now that google have monetised the whole notion of searching - so that prominent listing positions are based upon how much the advertiser wishes to pay for that heady position - you would think that would have put me off.  But no, like most of the planet it is still my trusted search engine.  In a way it has passed from a search tool into a cultural norm, into a verb in a dictionary.  To google.

So the article about Graph Search piques my interest because Facebook itself - 1 billion users and counting - has already hit that saturation point where it has become a cultural norm (if you are in the Westernised, English speaking world that is) To harvest so many users and so much data and to create a search tool with at least the same level of sophistication - and probably more - as google.  And THEN to wrap this all up so that Facebook users themselves are inadvertently providing the data - well what this does is shift the responsibility for a good link from a very clever search algorithm that simply mines passive websites, to an equally clever search algorithm that is showing what other people think and feel about data.  So searching for all the Italian restaurants that my friends in KL like is a realistic thing to do on Facebook.  And so much more powerful than what I can do with google.

Apple of course would like a bite of this, er, apple, and Siri also interests me in the sense that it takes away the pain of typing and makes searching a much more natural experience.  Well it will when it evolves over the next couple of years - and Facebook will at some point integrate voice recognition into Graph Search.  Apple of course have expertise in mobile phones and apps; Facebook have so far proved slow and unusually reticent on smartphones.  Google owns desktop and Android searches.  Three giants of technology all doing the same thing in different ways.  All owning a great chunk of the data market.

Back in the day this is what they used to call competition, and the beauty of competition is that the user ultimately benefits.

Apple Distinguished Educator? Moi?

Yesterday was not a good day for me.  Trying to run Windows 7 through VirtualBox on the newly installed iMacs in our classrooms.  This was for a Year 11 mock exam - in Year 10 the students have been using Windows 7 PCs, so with the influx of the new iMacs into our classroom, I took the decision that I would rather they stay in Windows over the next two terms than have to re-learn everything in a Mac OS environment.  Anyway the printers - which have been extensively tested mind - just decided yesterday to drop the ball and not print the files.  Nothing worked.  In the middle of an exam.  Eventually we figured out that it was something to do with Windows on a Mac PLUS something to do with this:

1. A 500kb image file needed to be inserted into a 24kb rtf text file
2. This text file is then manipulated in various ways
3. Then the students print the file.

Ach no they don't print the file because if they save the document as rtf or just print straight away without saving, it generates files that are 40, 50 or 60MB in size.  HOW on earth can this be the case?  Welcome to file formats.

Now of course we did not figure this out until the students had all panicked, been instructed by me to ignore printing, and copied their work electronically onto their desktops instead.  Still not a good day.

So imagine my delight when I found out in the evening that I had been accepted as an ADE for the class of 2013!  This is almost as if the yan of the iMac/Windows nonsense of earlier was counterbalanced by the ying of receiving such good news.

So there you have it, after much blood, sweat and tears and wiping out the entire month of November, I have been accepted into the global apple community of educators.  

Things that my old brain finds amazing - pt. 1

Internet radio

On the occasions that I venture back mentally to my days of listening to the radio in the 80s, I am struck by something.  I remember very clearly receiving a digital clock radio as a birthday resent in the early 80s, and thinking it was the most amazing invention because at the slightest rotation of an analogue dial I was able to hop to any number of other stations that were broadcasting at the time.  This included mainly Manchester stations, but also the odd foreign language channel, which was tres exotic, and if I was really lucky, a police channel.  Nothing beat the buzz of tuning in to a live police broadcast of a 1985 Ford Cortina being chased down the M62 on a wet February evening.  

I graduated from this to a full on Alba midi system in 1986 - and again the thrill of having a comprehensive sound system - with the girth and the go-faster flashes and the whirring of the cassette heads...well it is something that is difficult to reproduce now that we are all firmly ensconced in the digital world.

However now that I am fully immersed in Apple tech, I downloaded the Tune-In Radio app - and what do you know, I found myself once again experiencing the thrill of having an enormous panoply of radio stations from which to choose. Of course now the choice is global and is digital, but it still raised the hairs on the back of my neck to listen to a Swedish Jazz station playing John Coltrane at 3pm KL time.  Of course digital internet radio stations are not exactly cutting edge - but the point is that this free little app brought me back to a halcyon time in my youth when the world was full of possibilities and all kinds of strange music.  And as a human being in my 40s, it was nice to be transported back to that time.

Grabs you and locks you in

Now do bear in mind that I come to Apple technology from the point of view of the Spectrum/Atari ST/Archimedes/WinTel models.  In other words my experience with computers has been very diverse and the closest thing to a single platform is that I have tended to teach on Windows machines for most of my teaching career - and therefore use them for personal computing.  A couple of years ago, having gone through hell and high-water to even attempt to get a ticket for a queue to buy an iPhone 4 in KL, I  turned on my heels and went to the nearest Maxis shop and bought an HTC Wildfire instead.  And I felt good about it because open source Android OS things are generally good in principle, and I felt like I was cocking a snoop to the Apple behemoth.  

Fast forward now, and having used iPads and subsequently a macbook and iMacs in teaching, I must say that I have gone over to the other side.  Apple devices just WORK better, FEEL better, ARE better than their PC or Android equivalent.  And much of this has to do with the ecosystem that envelopes you whenever you use an Apple device - an ecosystem that supports you and does crazy things like use iCloud across all devices, bouncing photos around photostream.  Not crazy now but the idea was two years ago.  It just works better.  Hence we now have a Macbook, an iPad 2 and 3 from work, an iPhone 4S for my Christmas present, which is so much better in so many ways than my Wildfire that I do not have the time to express how, and that gleaming white tease of an iPad mini for K.  The reason why the ecosystem is important in all of this is that it took me - Director of ICT - two full, intense, concentrated hours in the wee small hours to get my contacts off my old Android phone and onto my iPhone, involving convert address books into csv, then into vcf, then into iTunes, then up into the (google) cloud, then down onto the iPhone.  Eventually.  The process was like moving house and at one point I was seriously going to give up and manually enter them all, which of course is anathema to anybody who is in any way IT-savvy, but was an attractive proposition with three small children snapping at my heels.  So eventually I got it to work and I now realise that I never want to move house/ecosystems again.  I want to stay enveloped and secure.  As an aside, the iPad mini is just the most desirable piece of kit I think I have ever used - works absolutely perfectly, as light as the gossamer wing-tip of a silicon angel, and brings a smile to your face whenever you use it.  Apple are doing something right, aren't they?

Ownership in the cloud

An interesting read in the Guardian yesterday, concerning who exactly owns the content that users upload into cloud services such as Instagram.  This is a thorny old issue but is prompted by the changes to the Terms and Conditions of the use of Instagram, which kick in on January 13th.   From then on, the use of Instagram is conditional upon you being required to share your username, likeness and photos - and for them to be used for advertising purposes without you receiving any form of reimbursement.  This would certainly impact upon professional and semi-professional photographers, who might otherwise make some decent money from selling their photos online - if they now upload these photographs into Instagram then they could lose all rights to these.  To which one could counter - well, don't do it then.  Keep your own personal or commercial photographs - or any kind of data - away from such cloud services.  But that does not really address the issue, since a great many people are using cloud computing services and entrusting these services with potentially sensitive data.  My school has - in no small part because of me - committed to using google apps for all staff and students.  This includes gmail and google docs, plus google calendar.  There are now many hundreds of thousands of documents that we have entrusted to google to backup, restore and generally look after for us.  In google's case, they do not own the data that I have put into their services, but they do reserve the right to do whatever they like with it.  The lesson there being - if you want to use a free cloud service, be sure to know what you are signing up for.

Just who is the teacher here?

Reading all about third millennium learners and how they are that much more collaborative and social and independent in their approach to educational materials, visiting the likes of iTunes U and the Kahn Academy and taking learning into their own hands….and yes I teach in a school where I can imagine that happens a great deal.  But it was brought home to me on the evening of my ADE application when I was trying to overlay a soundtrack that I had made in Garageband into iMovie.  It is a bit of a bind if you are not familiar with sharing things via iTunes (as opposed to Save As on a Windows machine using something like Audacity).  Anyway I was searching for answers on youtube as one does, and I came across this video:

Now this exactly met my needs and it explained what I had to do perfectly.  And it was delivered by a schoolboy who is known as techkidhelp101 who could not surely have been any older than Year 9, and in fact may well be younger.  So here I am as Director of ICT in a major International School, with 13 years of teaching experience under my belt, being taught by an anonymous school child from somewheresville how to do something fairly technical.  AND notice that he has an entire channel that he posts instructional videos into.  Is he charging for this?  No.  Does he get some long term hidden benefit out of this?  Probably not.  Is he trying to monetize this as a service?  I doubt it.  He is simply sharing his knowledge across the web because he thinks it is a cool thing to do, spreading the word, and utterly empowering himself as a provider of knowledge - which is exactly what teachers used to do back when I started.  
Isn't that amazing really if you think about it?  What a modern world we are in, what a flipped world.  I know that there are plenty of children who are nowhere near anything like this level of communication and technical skill, and I don't want to make assumptions that everybody is doing this all the time.  But when I find people who do, then they become nuggets of gold in my teacher brain and it does make me think that the modern world is an amazing place, and that we as a profession need to adapt to it pretty quickly.