Creativity | Betchablog

31Aug/085

Why is exceptional work treated as such an exception?

My daughter Kate, of whom I am incredibly proud, took part this morning in the 2008 Tournament of Minds. She was part of her school's entry into the annual event, which is run as an activity for the kids in the school's gifted and talented program.

The performance by the students was quite amazing. For those of you unfamiliar with the Tournament of Minds event, the students are given a scenario to which they must respond. This response is typically done in the form of a dramatic stageplay, but getting to the point of performing that stage play requires a huge amount of cross curricula learning to take place. There is lots of behind the scenes research, teamwork, collaboration, literacy and creativity. Teams must write, direct and produce the act, create all the props, and meet strict guidelines as to allowed times, materials and so on.

The scenario this year was that a famous author (chosen from a list of possible authors) had lost their memory. To try and reinstate the author's memory they had to be visited by at least 5 of their more memorable characters. Kate's group chose Shakespeare. So in the video below, you'll see an amnesic William Shakespeare visited by Romeo and Juliet, Puck, Hamlet, Macbeth and Helena, who all do their best to bring back the Bard's memory of himself and his work.

Here's the video of the piece... it's about 8 minutes and the sound is sometimes a little soft, but is, I think, worth watching.

I think you'll agree that the performance done by the students was clever, funny, insightful and creative.

These are students in Years 7 to 9 (ages 12 to 15) and what impresses me most is the fact that the study of Shakespeare does not typically take place in these years. So, apart from a basic cursory knowledge of Shakespeare, these students pieced together this play, taking excerpts from a number of different plays and characters and combining them into a collective piece that I think works very well. Not only that, they have managed to string the rest of it together with original writing and dialog that is inventive, rhyming, poetic and witty, and completely in keeping with the sorts of language that Shakepeare himself might have used. The students had several meetings in school time, and also self-organised a Saturday to get together and watch some Shakespeare videos so they understood a little more about the characters and themes they ought to be tapping into.

Add to that the way they have written, memorised and performed the final piece, and I think you'd have to agree that it's a pretty exceptional piece of work. (And I say that not just because my daughter was in it... but she was the one playing Romeo in case you were wondering.)

But here's the real question... why is this sort of thing the exception, and not the rule? Why do these sorts of activities only seem to exist in schools in the form of programs that take kids away from "normal lessons" so they can participate? Surely, the sorts of skills and learning that take place in these kinds of activities are valuable on so many fronts that EVERY student could benefit from them, not just the so-called elite few that get chosen for gifted and talented programs? While a handful of kids are withdrawn from regular classes to do things that are genuinely rich, cross-curricula, multi-literate learning experiences, the majority of kids stay in class and get bored to tears with textbooks and worksheets and subject-based teaching. Where is the logic here?

If you look at all the truly great things that schools do with kids, so many of them are run outside the realm of regular "school". The things we do in "class" are so often the mundane, predictable and regimented stuff. The really interesting stuff, the stuff that kids look back on and remember, the stuff that often defines who kids grow into in later life, is all this "other" stuff that is too often classed as "extra curricula". Dramatic performances, musicals, sporting events, art shows, fundraising events, computer programming competitions, online collaborative projects, and so on... why do schools consistently manage to treat the really interesting stuff as the added extras, rather than accepting that this is where so much of the truly valuable learning takes place.

The term "extra curricula" translates literally as "beyond school". How come our kids manage to do such amazingly great things, not because of school, but in spite of it?

When will we rethink school so that exceptional work stops being the exception, and instead become the rule?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:07 — 2.9MB)

Tagged as: gifted and talented, tournament of minds 5 Comments

20Aug/0827

The Truth is Out There

The school at which I teach, PLC Sydney, was in the news this morning regarding a recent assessment task conducted by one of our Year 9 English classes. The article from the Sydney Morning Herald talks about how this class is pushing the "open book exam" concept into allowing students to use resources that take them beyond the boundaries of the classroom and enable them to draw on outside sources - the web, other books, their own personal networks - using whatever tools they choose - mobile phones, computers, iPods, PDAs, etc - in order to be assessed on their learning.

I actually had a meeting with their teacher, Deirdre Coleman, about this idea the other day and we discussed at length some of the pros and cons, what sort of tasks were best suited to this approach, where the boundaries lay between cheating and resourcefulness and so on. While the SMH article is mostly accurate in its reporting, some of the value judgments that appear from reading between the lines are a little off-target, as are many of the comments from readers that have flowed on as a result of the article. Unfortunately, the article almost suggests that at PLC we are not actually teaching these students but rather just setting them loose with a cellphone and a phone-a-friend and seeing what happens. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Whether you think that allowing students to use tools like computers and mobile phones during an exam is a good idea or a bad idea is somewhat dependent on what you see the purpose of school to be. It also depends on your world view and whether you see information as scarce or abundant.

It ought to be obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the model of school we all know so well - the model in which students come to school as essentially empty vessels waiting to be filled by the teacher - is hopelessly flawed and outdated in this day and age. Sure, there was a time many years ago when most students did not have access to large quantities of information. When I was a kid, the sign that your parents were really interested in giving you the very best educational opportunity was that they bought an encyclopedia for the home. In our house we got the World Book. It still sits on the bookshelf at my mother's house, outdated and gathering dust, far too expensive to be thrown away despite its expired use-by date.

The idea of buying your kid an expensive encyclopedia was based on the notion that information was scarce... if you didn't have an encyclopedia then where on earth would you get information from? Those students who did not have an encyclopedia at home were limited to going to the local library. Of course, the other major source of knowledge was the teacher at school, who could teach you all about the things that the curriculum deemed as important. Wonderful things like Euclidian Geometry. Quadratic Equations. Shakespearean Sonnets. The Periodic Table.

The thing is, at 45 years old, I cannot remember the last time I needed to use the Quadratic Equation. Or recite a Shakespearean sonnet. And although I did recently get asked a question about an element on the Periodic Table, I still had to look up the answer anyway.

For the record, I was actually a pretty good student in school. I was mostly bored by school, but I did do ok at it thanks to the fact that I'm relatively smart and was good at remembering stuff in order to pass tests. There was a time when I really did understand and could apply the Quadratic Equation, I knew how a sonnet was structured and I could rattle off at least the first 25 or so elements of the Periodic Table. It's not like I never learned this stuff... I did actually learn it and passed tests on it with good results.

But so what?

These days, if you ask me to tell you what a sonnet is, I would still need to look it up. I would no longer be able to describe the Quadratic Equation to you with any certainty, and as I mentioned, I'd probably want to double check the Periodic Table before I relied on my own recollections about it. The fact that I did actually once learn this stuff now has little to do with it. The real skill now is not whether I can remember it exactly, but rather, do I have the ability to find, process, use and apply the relevant information in order to solve a problem at hand.

Which brings us to the idea of information abundance. We have to get past the idea that learning is about clinging to the handful of facts and ideas that fill our curriculum. For every concept and idea deemed worthy of inclusion in our curriculum, there are hundreds of others that don't get included. Why do we learn about the language used by Shakespeare in his sonnets, but not how to write a good press release? Why do we have students who can complete a quadratic equation, but haven't the faintest idea about how to get a good deal on their first car loan? Why do we learn about volcanos in Science, but not hydrodynamics? Why do we focus on the history of WW2, but not the history of the Central American drug wars? It's not that any of these things are more virtuous or more important than the other, it's just that we have only so much time in the school day, and we can't fit everything in so we choose a more-or-less random selection of ideas and concepts and call that our curriculum. Everything else, regardless of whether students might find it interesting or not, does not make the cut and is therefore deemed as unimportant for learning.

Meanwhile, new knowledge grows at an unprecedented pace. The human race discovers new things almost daily. Thousands of new ideas are patented every year. Billions of webpages hold information and opinions on every conceivable topic you could imagine. Huge networks of people constantly build knowledge and understanding about our world. Information is no longer scarce. We are swimming in it, sometimes even drowning in it.

The real skill, to again quote Seymour Papert, is not that our students should be able to respond correctly to the things they were specifically taught in school. The real skill is that they should be able to respond appropriately to things that they were NOT specifically taught at school. We need to prepare them not to know answers, but to solve problems. And in a world where many of the problems to be solved have not yet even been identified as problems, how do we prepare children for this future that does not yet exist?

I'd suggest that we DON'T do it by presenting them with a narrow body of information dictated by some arbitrary curriculum, and then "test" them on their understanding of it by isolating them and asking hypothetical questions aimed at seeing how much they can remember about it. I'd challenge you to provide a single example, outside of schools and universities, where this type of method is used to determine a person's real understanding or knowledge.

In any other profession, the idea that you are limited only to what someone has already taught you is absurd. The thought of a doctor only operating within the bounds of her own memory and being forbidden from "looking things up" is ridiculous. I don't want to go to a doctor who cannot find the information I need when I need it. I don't want to go to a doctor that is unable to extend their thinking beyond what they were taught in medical school. I need a doctor who can think holistically, use intuition effectively, connect seemingly unrelated ideas, find current research and communicate with other expert practitioners to get the answers I need.

It doesn't matter what field of endeavour you think about, from archeologists to zoologists the real measure is not how many marks they got in a test of rote memory, but in how well they are able to use the resources at their disposal to solve the problems in front of them. If that means they need to Google for an answer, call someone for a second opinion, or grab the manual to look something up, then that ought to be ok. It's about getting the problem solved and if they need to use their resourcefulness or contacts or tools to solve the problem then so be it.

The class at PLC is trying to offer students the opportunity to do the same kind of thing. We want our students to think. We'd like them to be creative and resourceful, using the tools at their disposal to find effective answers to the problems they are being asked to solve.

The people in the SMH comments feed who keep referring to this as cheating don't really get it. Of course, everyone is an expert when it comes to school - after all, we all went to one at some point, so of course we understand how they work. I keep reading comments in the feed that talk about how it was not like this when they were a kid, about how the system of rote learning worked for them (as though the world is still the same), about how we need to teach kids to pass exams because that what universities expect (and the rest of the world?)

Even if I didn't actually work at PLC, I'd still applaud them for taking these small steps towards something that ought to be so plainly obvious to everyone involved in education... that we need to recognise our students as real learners, doing real tasks in the real world using real tools. We need to stop thinking about how school always was in the past and start getting our students to think about how they should operate in a world that rewards results.

Good on you PLC!

Image: '"Studying for class"'
www.flickr.com/photos/30885355@N00/109039319

Tags: smh, plcsydney, plc, mobilelearning

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:44 — 6.0MB)

Tagged as: learning, plc, plcsydney 27 Comments

6Aug/085

The Remix Society

I've been talking to a lot of teachers lately about copyright, Creative Commons and how we might deal with the issues that arise when we want to use other peoples' images and media and remix them into something new and creative. The restrictive thinking of traditional copyright has become an anachronism in the digital age. It just doesn't serve us well any more.

The example I've been citing is the one I heard Larry Lessig mention, and that's the story of how when land owners were once given title to their land, the title of ownership used to be phrased in language that essentially said they owned not only the parcel of land, but all the ground below it to the center of the earth and all the sky above it to the heavens. It was a nice romantic concept, this idea that you owned not just the surface of the land but the infinite column of space that extended above it.

Well, it was a nice romantic concept until the airplane was invented, that is. As more aircraft started to appear in our skies a number of greedy land owners started to make demands for payment to allow these aircraft to pass through "their" space, which they technically owned. The point is that the original land titles which gave them ownership of this space above their land were drafted in a time when the idea of travelling through the space was unimaginable. It was simply not a problem that anybody envisioned and so the laws were written in a way that did not take account of the possibility. As aircraft took to the skies, the laws had to be changed to allow for it... for to not adapt the old, outdated laws would have completely stifled the development of flight. Put simply, the old laws no longer made sense - the airplane caused a complete rethink of how these laws should work.

It easy to see the parallels with copyright law in the digital age. Many of our copyright laws were written in a time when the implications of the digital age were equally unimaginable. Copyright law is not written with the notion that creative works could be infinitely reproducible and easily mashed together to form new creative works, and that digital convergence allows all media types to be easily brought together and combined, edited and remixed in new ways. Copyright law was written in a time that never imagined that the price and power of computing devices would drop to the point that they could be used to make artwork, create music, edit movies and build media that would have required highly specialised equipment and thousands of dollars only a few short years ago, so that the barrier to entry is such that anyone who wants to create can produce professional looking work with limited resources. Finally, consider that not only has the cost of making media dropped to virtually nothing, but the cost of distribution of that media has also dropped to almost nothing... consider that a creative kid sitting in their bedroom can now use a computer and their own creativity to make a video and distribute it to a global audience of millions at essentially no cost. This is not the world that copyright was written for.

Creativity has always been built on the work of others. Our great artists, musicians and film makers have always stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, building on their ideas and extending them into new areas. Very little creative work comes from a foundation of nothing... it nearly always uses, references or extends upon the work of others. Manet influenced Monet, who influenced Renoir, who influenced Gauguin, who influenced Picasso, who influenced Duchamp, and so on. Some of the greatest creative minds in history were great because they built on the ideas of those who came before them, adding to them and creating yet more new ideas because of it. We have always been a remix society.

I have no idea what the long term answer is to all this but I do know that we need to find one. Creative Commons goes some way towards providing a balance between protecting the intellectual property rights of the creator and allowing some reasonable use of their work for remixing and recreating. It provides some common sense to an area where it often seems to be lacking.

This video is a great example of what can be done when someone wants to be creative with the work of someone else... the song, Again and Again by The Bird and The Bee, is borrowed to provide a soundtrack for an amazing piece of visual work that is creative in it's own right. Created with nothing more than a Macintosh computer and an amazing degree of creativity, the video has been viewed nearly a million times on YouTube.

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Tagged as: copyright, creativecommons, Creativity, remix 5 Comments

11Feb/085

The How vs. The Why

Towards the end of last year I received a request from a teaching colleague about providing a bit of technical assistance for one of her students with a video project. The student, whom I will simply refer to as Joanna, was studying the HSC Extension 2 English course and had set herself a fairly grandiose goal for a movie project. Ext2 English is a very demanding course, and Joanna had elected to create an elaborate video as part of the package of material she was submitting for assessment.

Joanna's goals for the movie were considerable. She had a number of special effects in mind to help tell the story she wanted to tell, but she had very little actual experience in movie making. Some of the effects she was proposing were very sophisticated, with visions of a very dreamlike sequence and some unusual effects... effects that were far beyond those available in entry level video editing software. She came to me to ask for some advice about the best tools to use and how she could learn to use them, and I quickly worked out that Joanna would not be prepared to compromise or "dumb it down" to make it easier on herself. After a bit of discussion about what she was trying to create I recommended she think about using Sony Vegas. Vegas is a sophisticated non-linear video editing application with a fairly steep learning curve. Joanna took the task very seriously however, and was not daunted by the enormous job in front of her. She obtained a copy of the software, enrolled in a 2 day course in Sony Vegas, watched a couple of training DVDs, and asked me lots of questions. During the project she had numerous technical hurdles to overcome including a couple of major project rebuilds due to lost resource files, not to mention dealing with the logistical nightmare of a final working file of over 30 Gigabytes! After all the tears, sweat and love, the result of her work, a video piece called The Sounds of the Silent, earned her one of the highest marks in the state for the subject and contributed to an outstanding HSC result.

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What I find most fascinating about all of this is that Joanna's desire to produce this video far outweighed her own technical knowledge about how to do it, as well as her teacher's technical knowledge, and it certainly stretched my own technical knowledge as I tried to assist her through the hard parts of the project. The important lesson from this is that if you want something bad enough then you will figure out how to make it happen. Once you have the "want to" you eventually work out the "how to".

That's an important lesson for us as educators. We sometimes feel our students need to know all the information before they can proceed, or that acquiring the facts is the important part of learning. Not always true. Sometimes the acquisition of knowledge or facts is the least important factor in success... the really important factor is something much simpler - just a desire to create, to learn, to express oneself.

Perhaps we should be thinking about how best to create in our students this desire to find out the "how" by igniting their sense of "why". If we continue to give our students a strong sense of why they need to learn things by giving them real-world tasks that they genuinely care about, the mechanics of how they learn would almost take care of themselves.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:16 — 2.3MB)

Filed under: Creativity, Kids and Learning 5 Comments

26Jan/081

Doodle 4 Google

Today is Australia Day here in Down Under land. It celebrates the arrival of the first fleet into Botany Bay, marking the beginning of white mans' occupation of Terra Nullius - literall meaning "Empty Land". Quite a large presumption really, and to the aboriginal people who had already lived here for over 40,000 years it was not quite such a cause for celebration. Even today, Australia's indigenous population still refer to it as Invasion Day. Anyway, that could be the subject of a whole other discussion ...

The point is that January 26 in Australia is celebrated as Australia Day and a quick visit to the Google Australia home page at www.google.com.au has the Google logo swapped out for another one with an Australian theme. Swapping the Google logo for temporary logos derived from the original one is not new... Google does it all the time and you can browse the collection of past special logos in their Holiday Logo gallery.

The logo being used today is a little different... it was designed by Janelle San Juan, a Year 6 student at the School of the Good Shepherd, in Victoria, Australia. Janelle's logo was chosen from a competition run by Google Australia called Doodle for Google. Watch the video below to find out more about the logo, the competition and how it all happened.

You can see from watching the video that it must have been a wonderful experience for the students involved, getting them to create and collaborate on an authentic, real world task that was not just about producing work to make the teacher happy but rather to meet a genuine design brief for a genuine problem for a genuine company with the opportunity for their solution to be displayed to a genuine audience. We need to think about how we can create more opportunities for this type of learning in our classrooms.

Congratulations to Janelle and all the other kids who took part, and good on you Google Australia for running the contest. We need more of this sort of thing.

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Tagged as: Australia, contest, Google, logo 1 Comment

21Dec/070

Great Artists Steal

My friend Anne Baird blogged today about her insights regarding the use of Creative Commons as a form of managing the usage rights to creative works such as music, pictures, video or writing. For many people, the only law they have ever heard of in regard to using the work of others is copyright law, and this is usually interpreted as "you cannot use this!" That's not exactly correct of course... copyright means "you cannot use this without asking my permission". Unfortunately the process of getting that permission is usually not so simple, so for most people the choice is to not use the work at all, or to use it illegally.

Description of where CC sits Enter the world of Creative Commons. Creative Commons, or CC for short, was launched in 2001 and is a licensing model for defining how an artistic or intellectual work may (or may not) be used. It sits in that void between the restrictive copyright model and the free-for-all that is the Public Domain. Too often people assume that because they found something on the Web that they have carte blanche to use it any way they like. Not so. By default, every creative work is instantly and automatically covered by copyright as soon as the author creates it so the right to borrow, steal, reuse or adapt these works is automatically forbidden. Aside from the sometimes vague notion of "fair use" and some specific exceptions, you are generally NOT entitled to reuse someone else's work without their express permission. Added to the sometimes seemingly illogical restrictions that copyright imposes are the significant variations in the way copyright law is applied from country to country, providing a recipe for general confusion about what you can and can't do with someone else's work.

Perhaps Creative Commons licensing can be best summed up from this description on their own website...

"Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species."

There are also some excellent videos on the CC site which make it much clearer what Creative Commons licensing is all about, including this one...

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If you look back the the development of art, architecture, design, cinema or literature of the last century, much of it was shaped by the ability to build on the work of those that went beforehand. Impressionist artwork inspired the Post-Impressionists, which in turn inspired others to create the movements of Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Dada. Each of these movements was built on the ideas and work of those that preceded it. As Picasso noted, "Good artists copy, great artists steal". Some of the most influential works of art in the last century were only possible because the artists were able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them and build on their ideas. Some, like Marcel Duchamp, were able to change the course of artistic history with acts as simple yet profound as painting a moustache on Michaelangelo's Mona Lisa, causing an entire generation of artists to deeply question the notion of what art was really all about. Indeed, the very notion of appropriation - using the work of those that came before you as a basis for you own work - is a fundamental characteristic of Post Modernism. And you have to ask yourself, if the notion of copyright as we understand it today had existed in the earlier part of this century, would we have had any of this intellectual and artistic explosion of ideas? Or would Picasso have been threatened with legal action after painting Le Demoiselles d'Avignon because it borrowed too heavily on the art of Africa, or the work of Georges Braque?

CC licensing adds some common sense back into the way content creators allow others to use their work. It adds some balance and moderation, letting content creators decide just how restrictive or not they wish to make the reuse of their work. We have allowed ourselves to become a society where we legislate against nearly everything, and in the process we have lost some of the humanity that goes along with sharing and spreading ideas and mentoring to the masses.

Many of the senior courses I have been teaching over the last few years have really harped at the students about the idea of respecting copyright, as they should. But I'm realising that I have not paid nearly enough attention to the alternatives to copyright such as Creative Commons or Copyleft. If you've also not paid attention to these alternatives, now is the time to start looking at them seriously.

By letting our children stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them we give them a broader perspective and a deeper creative vision for the possibilities.

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Filed under: Creativity, History, Kids and Learning, Schools, Web Life No Comments

26Nov/074

My Grandmother's Country

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother's Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work.

In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task... it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I'd try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do).

They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written response as usual, but many said it was really useful being able to hear the task explained again from home. After they submitted the written task, which I thought they mostly did pretty well, I got them to record some of their responses as audio files which we uploaded to Voicethread along with their photo. This ability to upload audio to Voicethread instead of having to record it directly onto the page is a feature of a Voicethread Pro account, which is available to educators at no cost. I found it made it so much easier to collect the audio comments, especially since this class is not in a room with computers. I use my MacBook Pro to record their audio to QuickTime, convert it to MP3 using QuickTime Pro, snap a photo using Photobooth and then I do the uploading after class or whenever it's convenient.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here are some of their observations so far... if you want to leave an encouraging (moderated) comment for them that would be wonderful...

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It will be interesting to see if the quality of their speaking and recording changes once they realise that they have an audience...

PS: Thanks to @nzchrissy via @alannahk for pointing me to the solution to embedding these Voicethreads into the blog like this. Nice!

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Filed under: Assessment, Creativity, My Tools, Podcasting, web2.0 4 Comments

20Nov/076

Thinking about Thinking

Blogging started for me as a way to document a year living overseas, and although many serious bloggers sneer at the idea of using a blog for something as lowly as a simple travel diary, I found it a wonderful jumpoff point into the wider world of blogging. Not only do I now have a permanent record of a wonderful year in Canada, but that blog got me into the habit of writing regularly. And really, getting into a habit is an important part of the whole blogging experience. I guess, I'm writing this now because I hadn't written a post for a few days and I was starting to think that I needed to! Not for you. For me. This blogging thing has become an integral part of who I am, and when I go for a few days without writing it just doesn't feel right.

But the habit is not just about writing, it's about thinking. It's about engaging with ideas that you read on other blogs, or through listening to podcasts, or even from trawling through Twitter posts. It's about simply not being able to let that river of ideas flow past you without having to respond in some way. I can't imagine being exposed to this rich smorgasbord of ideas without having some reaction to them, and responding via a blog seems like such a natural thing to do. It's definitely about the thinking and not the writing... (in fact if you only knew what a lousy typist I am, you'd realise that the actual writing is a real pain!)

So I blog. I can't help myself.

What's become really interesting though is the environment that the blogging habit exposes you to. Without realising it, I look at my feedreader these days and it amazes me just who I have been inviting into my world, and even more amazingly, who has been inviting me into theirs. Browsing through my Skype contact list is like a who's who of incredible educators from all around the world. My Twitter feed is a rich tapestry of deep thoughts, trivial chatter and personal relationships, but it's engaging me with these constant ideas about learning, teaching and the relationships we form with kids in our classrooms.

Having just gone through the process of applying for another job, it really struck me just how much my online world has contributed to who I am as an educator. I don't have a string of letters after my name, in fact I'm not even teaching in the same discipline as I was originally trained. I've occasionally considered going back to university, doing some further study and becoming a bit more learned, but I look at the idea factory surrounding me and can't seem to justify the time and cost involved... and although I'm not sure how I'd ask the question, I suspect my new school saw enough of this world reflected in my interview that it played a big part in them offering me the position.

I did go back to university a few years ago to do part of a masters course in educational technology. It was a good experience, and forced me to start reading literature about learning that I wouldn't have done otherwise - Negroponte, Papert, Stoll, Cuban, Spender, etc - all names that I had never even heard before despite having been a teacher for many years. It was this exposure to ideas that flipped switches in my head and caused me to rethink a few things about school and learning. And it made me realise that many teachers never do this sort of thing at all. Try going to work on Monday and when your colleagues ask what you did on the weekend, tell then you went to an education conference (in your own time!) or read a book about learning theory, or chatted with other teachers about how to make learning more relevant, and see the sorts of odd looks you get, or the sarcastic "gee that must have been fun!" comments.

The thing is, I don't mind learning. In fact I can't imagine not learning. And exposure to this stream of ideas and thoughts and opinions is quite possibly the best environment for learning I've ever come across.

So maybe that makes me dysfunctional or just plain boring, but I really do enjoy the feeling of being stretched by new ideas all the time. I don't like to be the same today as I was yesterday, I want to be growing all the time. And one of the most rewarding and amazing ways of getting that constant stream of brain food is through the blogging and the writing and the reading and the podcasting and the sharing and the conversing with other people who I think are some of the smartest, brightest, cleverest people I know.

Tags: blogging, pln, pd

Popularity: 1% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:57 — 2.7MB)

Filed under: Blogging, Creativity, Social Change, Teacher PD 6 Comments

13Nov/071

Big Dreams, Big Opportunities

I had the good fortune to attend a talk this evening by Greg Whitby, the Executive Director of Education for the Catholic Education Parramatta Diocese. Greg was the special guest of the Australian College of Educators, and was speaking to a cosy little group of teachers at St Cath's Waverly.

Greg is one of those larger-than-life characters that has some fairly strong ideas about how education should look for the 21st Century, and I was pretty keen to hear him talk since I'd read quite a few articles about him. His views on school reform and his somewhat radical ideas on redesigning schools are aligned with a lot of my own thinking.

The talk focussed around a few key areas, among them the need for schools to reinvent themselves or to become dangerously irrelevant to our students, the need for teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning for themselves in order to truly embrace the notion of being a lifelong learner, and the way in which technology is simply an amplifier. Too often, says Whitby, the technology is seen in isolation as the "solution" to a school system's problems, whereas in truth it does little except to amplify what is already happening. His talk was peppered with examples of schools who have done a lot to put the technology in place but very little else to change the underlying paradigm of learning in order to leverage the effectiveness of that investment. What a waste.
There's no doubt that Greg is an idealist and an optimist, but maybe we need more of them in the senior levels of educational administration. He can certainly lay claim to putting the talk into action, and taking a really holistic approach to school reform. It's not about just the technology, it's about the pedagogy, the PD, the architecture, the social design, etc... rethinking school really does mean RETHINKING school. That means taking a clean piece of paper and asking the hard questions about redesigning the process and every aspect of supporting that process, in order to better answer the fundamental question of "How to we improve the learning outcomes for every student?" That is a worthwhile goal, and really comes down to the heart of what education should be about... it's not about remembering lots of stuff, not about getting better test scores, not about meeting some arbitrary standard... it's just about improving the learning for every kid that goes through the process. And the first step in making that happen is to deconstruct the entire process from ground level, accepting no preconceived notions about what already exists, and to question every assumption about what we mean by "school".

And it's a hard process. We had the chance at my school a couple of years ago to rethink what we were on about when we rewrote our strategic plan. We had consultants come in and try to help us work through that rethinking process, and they really did try to push us to question every paradigm, challenge every assumption. They kept pushing us to reinvent what "school" might mean for the future, but it seemed to have fallen on largely deaf ears, with very little substantive change taking place, and - I think - large gaps in our long term strategy simply because we were unable to step back and disassociate ourselves from our idea of "school" enough to blue sky about what it could really be like if we let ourselves dream a bit. Instead, we just reworded the Mission Statement, created some new levels of hierarchy, and produced a fancy brochure to proclaim our success. Such a missed opportunity.

I'm glad that people like Greg are in there, giving it a go. I'm sure that great success will ultimately emerge from the process, even if it is just through his sheer force of will. I just hope there is enough people who share his vision, and most importantly his determination to actually make it happen, that these initiatives continue to take hold in a big way.

Thanks for the inspiration Greg.

Tags: gregwhitby, ACE, school reform, reinventing school

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Filed under: Creativity, Schools, Social Change, Teacher PD 1 Comment

1Nov/073

We are the Robots

While trolling through some old files today I happened upon this video of some Lego robotics projects done by my Year 10 students about five years ago. I recall that their task was to build a sort of merry-go-round device that conformed to a few specific requirements. From memory it had to have provision for two "seats", and when a start button was pressed it had to rotate around align the first of these seats with a loading platform, pause, and then rotate to align the second seat. Once both seats were "loaded", it had to pause, then start rotating slowly, then get faster, until it reached top speed and did a specified number of rotations. Once these were complete if had to slow down again to a stop, aligning the first seat, then pausing again and finally aligning the second seat.

Here's the video...Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

It was an interesting exercise. The girls (it was an all girls class) initially struggled with the idea of gears and motors, and it took them a while, and a bit of guidance, to figure out just how a motor would be able to make something turn like a merry-go-round. I had come from an all-boys school the year before and was really struck by just how much more easily the boys seemed to find the mechanical part of this task. I don't mean to sound sexist, but there really does seem to be a huge difference in the innate mechanical abilities between boys and girls. The boys didn't hesitate to grab the motors, gears and cogs, and within minutes, most of them had rudimentary vehicles constructed. The girls, on the other hand, seemed to vacillate for ages before even wanting to pick up the Lego, and when they did, they took quite a lot longer to build any sort of device, much less one that was at all mechanically "correct" or usable.

However, once the girls got started, I found they came up with a much more interesting and creative approach to problem solving than most of the boys I'd taught. Perhaps this comes from a naiveté and a less developed understanding of what was "right". Whereas the boys seemed to know that certain combinations of blocks and gears would not work, the girls seemed to be more able to just try things whether they worked or not.

Thinking about this now, some years hence from when that video was made, it reminds me of a book I read called Paradigms, by Joel Arthur Barker. In this book, Barker contends that some of the best problem solvers are those who are outside the prevailing paradigm... outsiders who, to the experts, "don't really understand the question". But it's this not really understanding the question that leads to some of the most creative solutions to many previously "unsolvable" problems.

If you think about it, many of the best thinkers, the most inspiring leaders, and the people changing the world the most, are those who least fit our conception of who we expect them to be. Look at the Albert Einsteins, the Pablo Picassos, the Steve Jobs's, the Richard Bransons of the world... the square pegs in round holes. People who challenge the status quo because they don't know that what they are proposing is completely unrealistic. Most of the innovation and creative flow in our society comes from those who don't know that what they don't know doesn't matter. So they invent the future anyway.

As educators, we have to make sure we don't educate the creativity out of kids. I'll finish with a link to a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, who expresses this notion far better than I could ever hope to. Every teacher - no, every person - should watch this video...

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Filed under: Creativity, Kids and Learning, Lego, Schools 3 Comments

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