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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.

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Twitter has left the building

Twitter was down for a while today. In order to feed the Twitter addiction, @shareski started a group Skype chat and started to drag people into it, who in turn started to drag more people into it. Pretty soon we had our very own pseudo-Twitter going, as everyone continued adding people into the chat space until there must have about 50 people in the room… easily the biggest Skype chat I’ve had.

Twitter eventually came back up, and a huge collective global sigh of relief was breathed.

Still, the Skywitter chat was a fun experiment. As Vicki Davis observed…

“It is like an Elvis impersonator — not the real thing but close enough when the real one is dead.”

That comment made my day. 🙂

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A Testing Experience

I’m sitting in class at the moment with a group of Year 10 students as they do the NSW Board of Studies exam for computing skills. For those that don’t know, the Year 10 Computer Skills Test, or CST10, is a NSW government initiative to introduce standardised testing across the state to measure the ability of our 15 and 16 year old kids to confidently use computers. Every school in NSW has been required over the last few years to ensure that technology skills are integrated – or at least included – as part of the standard curriculum delivery. Our school (and I imagine most schools) have taken an approach where we have looked at the skills indicators (the specific list of computing skills that need to be assessed) and shared them out amongst the various key learning areas according to what we think are the most likely candidates to cover them in an integrated way. So, for example, our science classes try to include database use, maths integrates spreadsheets, word processing is obviously included in a number of subjects, HSIE do quite a bit with presentations, and so on. The basic idea is that by farming out the specific skills to various subjects and making their integration a mandatory requirement of curriculum delivery, that all students should get exposed to all the necessary skills by the time they get to this point in their school life. We also build in some redundancy, so that each skillset is covered by more than one key learning area.

It’s a good idea in theory. Trouble is, in theory, theory and reality are the same thing. In reality, they aren’t.

Since its inception in 2002 (I think?) the Board of Studies has been offering a “pen and paper” version of the test as well as an online version. This is designed to cater to those school who have bandwidth issues, are in rural areas, or for whatever reason decide they don’t want to do the online version. Of course, it should be obvious that a pen and paper test for computing skills is going to be pretty limited in scope. It’s all multiple guess questions, with screenshots of a generic computer GUI and fairly basic questions about how to interact with it. I was actually on the original writing committee for this test and found that we had to continually water things down – questions had to be platform agnostic (couldn’t be too Windows, Mac or Linux specific), application agnostic (couldn’t be too Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, Appleworks, or iWork specific), vague enough that they could be asked in a multiple choice format, and general enough that all kids could have a fair chance at answering them, not just the ones that did computing studies… In other words, the test had to cover all the basics but not really any of the specifics. As you can imagine, the questions that eventually emerge from that process are rather vanilla in nature. The fact that many schools still deliver the test on paper doesn’t really do much to improve the relevance of the testing process.

Mind you, the online version of the test is really no better in the sense that it is just an online version of the paper test… new bottle, same old wine. The online test has the same stimulating screen shots, same thrilling multiple choice question…  it’s nothing more than a whizzbang screen-based version of what is already available on paper, except it take a lot more effort, time and resources to administer. I’d love to see CST10 develop into an actual interactive test where kids could interact directly with simulated apps in a way that provides something close to a genuine user experience…  Don’t ask a kid how to put a border on a table by showing a static image and giving 4 choices about where you’d click to do it – give them a simulated version of a table app and ask them to SHOW YOU how they would do it.

Of course, this is hard to do. It would take huge resources to develop a test like this, and quite frankly I think it would raise all sorts of technical issues… as it was, we had some serious login issues this morning as 80,000 students across the state all tried banging on the Board of Studies servers at the same time. There needs to be a lot of further development to support this sort of load if we are ever to get online testing to work in a big way.

There are still technical issues to solve. But mainly, I’d like to see us solve some of the pedagogical issues of assessing this way. Whether we end up doing via paper or a screen, taking something as practical as computing skills and assessing them using a static, multiple choice method like this is, quite frankly, an insult to our kids.