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Stager takes the Stage

The main keynote on the Friday of ACEC 2010 was Gary Stager, a man who has a reputation for calling a spade a “bloody shovel”.  He did a morning keynote, as well as a “soapbox” session in the main hall where he held court and treated anyone who would listen to the world according to Stager.

I’m not totally sure what to make of Gary Stager.  I heard him speak for the first time at ULearn last year and I was pretty impressed by what he had to say.  That probably shouldn’t sound so surprising since the guy has a long history of working with schools to do some pretty innovative and constructivist things.  He was a consultant at MLC Melbourne, Australia’s (and the world’s) first 1-1 laptop school. He was a student and personal friend of Professor Seymour Papert, in my opinion one of the world’s most influential educational thinkers.  And he has some really forceful opinions about what works and what doesn’t work in education.  I admire his intensity and his conviction.

This intensity and conviction can sometime comes across with a high and mighty arrogance though, and his talks can sometimes feel like being bludgeoned with a blunt axe.  There is often a sense of sensationalism in the things he says, and there is rarely any gray between his black and white viewpoints. He seems to have a handful of things he feels really passionate about and is like a dog with a bone in promulgating them, often to the exclusion of everything else.

On the one hand, it’s a good thing because it is confronting and makes you think about the issues. Although his arrogant approach tends to piss people off a bit, sometimes people need a bit of pissing off to force them into getting off the fence and taking a side. A keynote speaker probably should be a bit confronting and prod people with ideas that force them to think and evaluate things that perhaps they haven’t thought much about. In that sense, he does a great job.

On the other hand, some of his sweeping black and white statements can be very dismissive, even outright rude. If something is not part of Gary’s world view, he tends to sweep it aside and treat it with absolute contempt.  At ACEC especially, he was very vocal about any idea that didn’t fit with his version of how education should work.  It gets a little tedious after a while, and you end up feeling gloom, doom and a sense of hopelessness about, well, almost everything.  Name a topic outside of Lego or programming, and it’s likely that Gary will dissect it and strip it to pieces, telling you why it’s rubbish and is counterproductive to education.  It really is a bit wearing after a while.  I came away from his keynote feeling like nothing we are doing at school is any good at all (which is nonsense of course).

I like many of the things Stager has to say, and I think he has some powerful insights. I totally agree that there are many things about school that need to be rethought and reinvented.  He’s right about a lot of things, but he also seems pretty narrow minded about a whole lot of others.  He spins a good conspiracy theory, and clearly hates certain technologies, especially IWBs. But he also chooses examples that highlight the poorest possible uses of these technologies and then holds those up as some sort of “best practice” to be critical of.  Sure, it’s easy to be critical of something being used poorly, but that doesn’t mean that the thing itself is bad, just that the given example is one of it being used badly.  One could probably find poor examples of 1-1 laptop usage, poor examples of students working with programming and so on.

I could cite an example of almost any technology being used poorly and an equal number of examples of it being used really well.  Like Gary, I also see the enormous value of learning with constructivist tools like Lego, the value of students learning to program, the value of students learning about computing science. But I also believe that there is room for a wide range of technologies for learning.  There is no one single answer, no single technology for helping kids learn.

There is always room for a bit of open-mindedness in education.

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PS: I just noticed that @Steve-Collis has posted the UStream video of Gary’s keynote, so here it is if you’d like to take a peek. Thanks Steve for recording it, and thanks Gary for allowing it to be recorded.

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Using Lego to Drive Learning

As much as I would have loved to have been in Melbourne all week for ACEC 2010, it just wasn’t on the cards for me. A pity, because it sounded like there was a lot of really interesting sessions to attend, and one that particularly caught my eye was the Lego Robotics one with Chris Rogers, a professor of engineering from the Centre for Engineering, Education and Outreach at Tufts University in Boston.  I’ve been a Lego fanboy for a long time, and have worked with kids to do some pretty awesome stuff with it over the years, but unfortunately my current school doesn’t really do very much with Lego. (In fact, computer programming in general gets a pretty rough deal at PLC, something that I’d really like to see change)

However, we do run a Computer Club every week in our junior school and we’ve decided that we will introduce programming to these kids to start with.  We’ve begun by getting them going with Scratch, with a plan to get some Lego Robotics gear and maybe even try to put a team in RoboCup.  The kids – mainly Year 5 –  have really taken to Scratch and are starting to do some very cool things with it.  We also have plans to do something for Scratch Day this year as well.

But back to Lego. Just before school finished for Easter I received an email saying that Chris Rogers would be running a 2 hour Lego workshop at Sydney’s Macquarie Uni. Because I couldn’t get to Melbourne for the first few days of ACEC, naturally I jumped at the chance to do this one in Sydney with him, even if it was on Easter Monday!

I was really impressed with what Chris got us to do; it was an excellent example of just how the open ended nature of Lego can cover so many angles of our existing curriculum in a spirit of real constructivist, collaborative learning.  Working in pairs, Chris started us off with a very simple non-robotic building project – each team of two people had a small bag of Lego bits on the table in front of them, and our job was to open it and construct the tallest tower we could out of those parts. Just to make it interesting, we only had about 5 minutes to do it and we had to limit ourselves to only using only our non-dominant hand! Of course, this made teamwork and communication very important.  At the end of 5 minutes, he stopped us and asked us to look around at what we and the others had done. Important lesson 1: everybody built something quite different and clearly demonstrated that there is often no single “right” way to complete a task.  Important lesson 2: You learn far more from failure than success, and the process of “fixing your mistakes” is where the true learning happens.

With that small but important introductory exercise done, our next task was to take the Lego NXT controller brick and, using another limited set of parts, build a “car”, or at least something that had motorised wheels and could drive in a forward direction. (Also worth noting that no two “cars” were the same either. Everyone took a different approach, yet everyone made something that did what it needed to do.  I think there is a hugely significant lesson for educators contained in just that simple idea!)

Once our car was built, Chris showed how to create a very simple NXT-G program that simply ran both motors for 1 second in order to drive the car forward.  That’s it.  It took him no longer than 30 seconds to “instruct” us.  Now that we had a car and knew how to make it move forward for 1 second, he told us what we had to do…

On the floor was a “starting line” made of masking tape, and a long ruler to measure distance.  We were to program our “car” to travel for 1 second and then accurately measure how far that 1 second would make our car go. The we were to modify the program to run for 2 seconds, and measure how far that took us. Then modify for 3 seconds, measure, and so on.  He gave us about 30 minutes to build our car, write the program and then do all of our testing to establish how far our cars would travel for various motor-on timings.  At the end of that time, he said, we would be given a specific distance and we would have to figure out, from the data we’d collected using our car, how long we had to run our motors for in order to stop exactly at that distance.  To make it interesting, we would place a little Lego Person at the specified distance and our cars were to just “kiss” them – not stop short, and not run them over.

The excitement and buzz in the room as people built and tested their models was quite palpable. And people took it really seriously too!  There was some real competition to get it right on the mark.

As we worked through the process, we had to address a number of really valuable learnings and skills.  Building the model required some engineering and science skills, and of course a whole lot of teamwork and cooperation skills too. Measuring the distances taught us to be accurate, to learn how to collect data in a consistent repeatable way, how to measure and record distances.  As we worked, we had to think about the best ways to record the data.  This got us using valuable mathematical concepts including the creation of a graph (which turned out to be a fairly linear graph – a great discussion starter for a maths lesson)  Overall, it was amazing just how broad and deep the learning was, and how we had to construct our own knowledge as we completed the task.

Once the target distance was announced, a second masking tape finishing line was put on the floor.  People furiously calculated the required motor-run timing that they needed to program into their cars in order to stop exactly on the line, and the models were lined up.  On the starters orders we all pressed out Go buttons and tested our theories and our calculations.  It was a lot of fun and had so much embedded learning in it!

Some of the important reflections for me was a reminder of just how powerful learning can be when it is open-ended and focuses on the creation of a solution to an interesting and engaging problem.  It also struck me that a problem does not need to be particularly complicated in order to embed some really rich learning. And finally, it was a great reminder that the creation of rich tasks – whether they are based on the use of technology or not – are not an “add on” to what happens in a classroom.  We need to remind ourselves that it’s not about “covering the curriculum” and then hoping there is enough time left over to do some interesting projects. Getting students working on interesting projects should be the primary way in which we get them to cover the curriculum in the first place.

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Calling Home

I’ve been travelling a fair bit lately.  Although much of it has been within Australia, I’ve just spent the last few days in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, for the Sitech Champion Schools Conference, and I’m writing this from in the hotel foyer. New Zealand is starting to feel a bit like a second home lately… this is my fourth trip here in the past 12 months. Aussies and Kiwis have a friendly relationship. Aside from the obvious opportunity to take shots at each other over the cricket and the rugby, our two countries get along amicably well, and the trip across the Tasman is something that feels more like going interstate than international.  It’s easy to feel at home in NZ.

About 12 months ago I was here for last years Champion Schools Conference and some readers of this blog may remember that I came home to a $1000 phone bill for international roaming. That was a saga in itself, and much was said about it both here on the blog and on Twitter and Facebook.  While I should have known better, I was quite unprepared for such a minimal amount of data to be charged at such an exorbitant rate.  I was not a happy customer and I made sure my carrier knew about it.  As a result of that experience, and the subsequent whingefest I made of it, I learned two important lessons.  One, unless you’re prepared for huge roaming charges, do not allow your phone to roam when overseas. In the brouhaha that followed the bill I asked my carrier to completely disable international roaming for both data and voice, and insisted they unlock my phone so I could use an overseas SIM card when I was abroad. They complied and did both these things.  The second lesson was that if you make enough fuss about an outrageous bill you stand a much better chance of getting something done about it.  It took me numerous phone calls to customer service and plenty of persistence to get through to someone who could do something about it, but I eventually succeeded in getting the bill reduced to a reasonable amount.  Sometimes it pays to be the squeaky wheel, and to their credit, my carrier eventually just dropped the entire charge.

So, for the last few days, I’ve voluntarily chosen to cripple my iPhone by requesting my carrier not allow it to roam onto the New Zealand phone networks. The international roaming charges are hefty enough, and my need to make phone calls is not critical enough, that I figured I could live without telephony for a few days.  Besides, I figured that as long as I could get occasional access to wifi, that would be enough. Wifi would let me get to my email and other stuff, and I could make any phone calls using Skype or Fring, both of which work just fine on wifi.  Of course, I never anticipated that getting access to affordable, reliable wifi would be so ridiculously difficult in Lower Hutt, which is only 25 minutes outside Wellington, the capital of New Zealand.  The hotel advertised that it had wifi available, but despite paying for an NZ Telecom voucher it never seemed to work, and most times never even showed up in the list of available wifi access points. I went to Starbucks to pay for wifi there, but still had zero success in getting connected.  So for the past four days I’ve been mostly disconnected. There has been wifi at the conference of course, but I’ve usually been too busy to use it for my own personal needs.

But the real point of this blog post is to question why, in this day and age, is it so damn difficult to be connected while travelling.  Why is 3G connectivity so expensive once you roam away from your own country? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that it should be free, but I’d love to see a bit more interoperability between networks and a few more strategic partnerships formed between the carriers so that staying connected while travelling was a bit more affordable and not so difficult.

To access the mobile web in Australia I pay $20/month for my phone to have 1GB, or just over 1000MB, of mobile data. The cost of data when I’m in some countries is charged at over $20 per Megabyte!  So, the cost of accessing the mobile internet when I’m in overseas can be 1000 times what I pay in Australia. I have no problem with paying a reasonable premium to access data over another carrier’s network, but 1000 times more? That’s just gouging!  I’d be willing to be charged a little extra to use the local carriers network, but I refuse to get ripped off like that, hence I turned off the roaming completely.  Sure, it was inconvenient not having access to phone and data while I was in NZ, and there was more than a couple of time when I wished I could make a quick call, but the phone companies can go and get stuffed if they think I’m willing to play their overpriced game.

Why should the cost of accessing the web cost so much just because you’re in another place. I mean, sending an email doesn’t cost you more depending on where you send it.  Once the bits that contain the message content are “in the pipeline”, it costs no more to route them next door or around the world. They just become part of the flow of electrons that circle the globe. The notion that it should cost more to send them further is just a hangover from the old days of telephony, when phone companies charged “long distance” rates for calls that went a bit further. The reasoning that it costs more to push data further is completely flawed.  It makes no difference how far you push binary bits through a network, the cost of doing it doesn’t really increase.  You remember when you sent your first email? Remember how liberating it felt when you found out that you were sending a message to whole other country, and it wasn’t costing you any more than sending it to your own suburb?  How could they do that? How could they afford to transport messages clear across the other side of the world and charge no more? Easy. Bits are free.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t solve my problem.  What about Plan B… get the phone unlocked and simply insert a local SIM card to access data on the local country’s network. Getting the iPhone unlocked by my carrier was not too difficult – I just asked and insisted that they do it, and told them that I was unwilling to be charged their inflated data roaming prices. Surprisingly, they complied immediately, although they now tell me that to finalise the unlocking process does require a complete system restore of my iPhone, something which is quite unreasonable. I sync my iPhone with my home iMac and I travel with my MacBook Pro, so the computer I have when travelling is not the one that contains the sync data for my iPhone. Even it it were, the notion that I need to do a complete system restore (which would involve erasing and restoring all my phone data) is plain ridiculous. 

On top of all of that is the near-impossibility of buying a short-term phone plan that offers both voice and data on the guest country’s network at a reasonable proce.  You would think that the concept of someone wanting a temporary local SIM while travelling would be so obvious, but almost no phone companies actually offers something like that. Crazy! I can’t imagine why they are choosing to be missing out on so much potential revenue from travellers.

So I want to know why it it is so difficult for phone companies to provide what seems like an obvious need in this hyperconnected world of ours… the ability to remain connected -at a reasonable price – to our telephony and data while travelling. The web is built on global standards. Data is data. Most voice calls are carried on VOIP anyway.  The methods for connecting to a network node – any network node – is no different no matter where you are in the world. There has to be a better solution than the current overpriced, under-delivering method of roaming onto another network and being charged through the nose for it.

Come on phone companies! Get your act together!

Image: ‘We are spirits in the material world‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73584213@N00/114475509