Ingenuity, creativity and time

Creativity is such an elusive thing. For some, waiting for inspiration is a familiar past-time. It's more than just staring at a blank page, or waiting for that tune to arrive out of thin air. If the muse has deserted you, it can be quite a time of anguish, particularly if your living depends upon being creative. At that moment there is simply nothing you can do. Creativity, said Margaret Boden, is the ability to come up with new ideas that are surprising yet intelligible, and also valuable in some way. Creativity is what many of us yearn for, in the classroom, in our homes, in our lives. It's a problem when it appears to be in short supply. Sometimes, it seems, the answer is to just give it time.

When Thomas Edison (allegedly!) came up with the idea of the light bulb (the archetypical symbol of genius and creativity) he didn't do so in an instant. It took him some time, through periods of trial and error, and many shades of failure and near success, before the idea had incubated enough to crystallise in an intelligible form, and then, as if by magic - the idea was finally born. Tim Berners-Lee's wonderful, revolutionary idea of the World Wide Web actually took more than ten years to reach full realisation. The psychologist Graham Wallas suggested that there is a gestation period - an incubation process that leads to transformation - and the creative transformation that brings imagination alive on paper, or on tape, or on canvas, or in the laboratory, is where the genius resides. Watch the video below, a TED talk given by the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who explains where our concept of genius and creativity comes from.



In his book Where good ideas come from Steven Johnson supports this argument, seeing recurring patterns that foster creativity and innovation. He recognises what he calls the 'slow hunch' which he describes as a long period of evolution of an idea, before it matures to become accessible and useful. Creativity is almost never instant. It takes time. But it sometimes takes on this guise, when apparently from nowhere, a musician or poet can conjure up a haunting melody or a killer line. No, creativity takes practice, and this is why, when we see creativity in the classroom, it is almost always the product of a long period of immersion in study, and an intimate familiarity with the subject. Musicians and poets take time to master their crafts, and then the tunes and words visit them. Give your learners time to practice their art, their thinking, their craft, and you will be providing them with the tools to become creative in their own right.

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Ingenuity, creativity and time by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Writer's block?

Anyone who writes regularly will tell you this: There are times when you struggle to write something worthwhile ... or even anything at all. Call it writer's block, call it the white page syndrome (or white screen in the age of the word processor), call it whatever you wish - there are times when the words won't come, and there is very little you can do about it. At such times, I tend to either write rubbish and then ditch it (boy, you should read some of my rejects - you'd laugh yourself sick), or more likely, walk away from the page/screen and go and do something else instead.

Blog posting is a very immediate kind of writing, so you need to make sure you have done it correctly. Once you have clicked the Publish button, your ideas are out there for the whole world to read. It's publish and be damned. Lawrence Lessig said about blogging that it is 'the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse that we have.' Counter this with Katie Hafner's wry parodic comment 'never have so many people written so much to be read by so few' and you will see that there are ups and downs to blogging (the patron saint of ups and downs is St Francis of a Seesaw). No matter how good your blog post is, no matter how incisive, devastatingly witty or profound your points are, if there is no audience for your writing, you may as well be whistling in the wind. Just how you drive people to your blog though, is beyond the scope of this particular post (phew, escaped from that one).

So how do you start off writing a blog post, and avoid the writer's block syndrome? More importantly, how do you write something that is worthwhile writing? My advice is to just start writing. Write about something you know about, have an opinion on, or feel passionately about. You can also be controversial. Draw on evidence that supports your viewpoint, but also find those who argue against and include those too, for some balance. Use language that is accessible and easy to understand. But don't compromise on your own writing voice, which is often the one tool you can wield with devastating effect in any writing genre. Most importantly, try to engage your reader. Address them personally. That's something that makes you want to keep reading, isn't it?

There are all sorts of bells and whistles you can put into a blog post, but I have elaborated on several of my own ideas already so I won't bore you again. Ultimately, you should write blog posts because you want to share your ideas and receive comments and feedback from your readership. When done correctly, blogging is not just writing - it's a conversation. As always I welcome your comments on this post.


Image by Daniel Gies


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Who put the 'ass' in assessment?

This week's eAssessment Scotland Conference was an interesting and thought provoking event. Hosted by the University of Dundee, the conference attracted almost 300 delegates from all over the UK, and farther afield and as could be expected, saw a number of papers presented on all aspects of technology enhanced learning and assessment. These included presentations on the use of blogs, peer collaboration, mobile assessment, serious games, Google forms, Mahara and other e-portfolio applications, audio feedback and personal learning environments.

I was very pleased to have been invited to give the opening keynote, which I entitled: Assessment in the Digital Age: Fair Measures? The slideshow is below:

Assessment in the Digital Age: Fair Measures?

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I started off with some horseplay on accents and language (I do an impressive Shetland accent, but my French accent sounds more like Inspector Clouseau gargling). Although we had a good laugh, there was a serious point to the funny accents. I made a remark that is still crystallising in my own mind, that accents tend to divide people - they are not only an indication of where we may have spent our time growing up, they are also a cultural marker and a statement of our identity. As such, there can be problems of comprehension and confusion if the accent is strong. On the subject of assessment, might it be fair to claim that the accent used by those who are assessing may be confusing or alienating to those who are being assessed? I can't recall how many times I sat down for an exam and turned the paper over, only to be confronted with what seemed to me like a foreign language. Throughout the day, both Donald Clark (another eAS11 keynote) and I showed some hilarious examples of misinterpreted exam answers. The responses given to the answers may have seemed funny, but in fact they were generally correct. The point we both made was that the students weren't wrong, the exam questions were wrong. They were either impenetrable, ambiguous, or simply poorly worded.

I have just reviewed a new book for the Times Higher Ed. It's called Now You See It, and is authored by a well known American academic and brain behaviour scientist called Cathy N. Davidson. In it, she recounts a story of a time she sat a multiple choice question paper. She got very low marks, because she spent most of the time on the reverse of the answer sheet correcting all the errors and ambiguities in the questions. She pointed out that some of the questions could not be answered because none of the options were correct. Surely she should have been given very high marks for demonstrating her creativity and intelligence? No, she didn't answer the questions, and therefore scored a low grade. There were no points for critical thinking or creative solutions. The only reward you can receive in this system is if you play by the rules and regurgitate the facts that were drilled into you.

One of the conclusions of the eAssessment Scotland conference, which very few people argued against, was that examination authorities really need to get their act together if they are to continue to administer exams that shape the future of young people. It's an absolute disgrace and entirely unforgivable when exam boards such as AQA, OCR and Edexcel cannot find the expertise within their organisations to create examination papers that are error free. Let's face it, that's all they are meant to do. Yes, we struggle with understanding people when they have strong accents, but it's more than a struggle when children are penalised because it's impossible to answer exam questions.


Who put the 'ass' in assessment? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Amplified

Below is an interview I did for the EU funded Links-Up Expert Testimonial video series on Web 2.0 and e-Learning, in the bright sunshine of Dublin, during the EDEN Conference. Halfway through, watch out for my Roy Orbison impersonation. I talk about amplified content, sharing and collaborating online, and personal learning networks. I also discuss disruptive technologies, risk taking, learner control and the changing landscape of learning.




Amplified by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Uncertainty principles

In the lead up to eAssessment Scotland where I will be speaking later this week, I offer some thoughts on assessment. There are some things you just can't assess. One is creativity. Another is character. Yet another is how tenacious or resilient a student is - do they persist in their learning despite the odds? Attempting to measure such things actually makes a nonsense of assessment. It's a bit like over-analysing a joke. What makes a joke funny? Is there a formula involved? Look at it too closely and it's no longer funny. It begins to disappear in front of you as you stare at it.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg proposed a theory of quantum mechanics that became known as the Uncertainty Principle. In essence says Heisenberg, you can measure the position of a particle, or you can measure the future momentum of the particle. What you can't do is measure both at the same time. The more precisely one property is measured, (say the Wikipedia article) the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known. Applying this outside of particle physics could be problematic, but let's try (because we're all made up of particles).

So you want to assess creativity? What are you actually trying to measure? A child's natural imagination? The creative outputs that are a result of that imagination? The value of their creativity in relation to that of the rest of the group? Against your own creativity? Against the standardised norms of the creative expectations of the entire society perhaps? Oh dear. You can identify that a child is talented in a particular area and their art is easy on the eye. They are good at painting. They have a propensity to be able to play a musical instrument pleasingly. Can you attach a value to it though? So what about Pablo Picasso? Or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Picasso wasn't particularly pleasing on the eye, Stockhausen was not easy to listen to. Although not everyone agrees with that last statement - even if they don't understand the art of the music - few would dare to suggest that Picasso and Stockhausen lacked creativity. Creativity is a very subjective thing, so should we attempt to assess it?

If you try to measure the current state - the effects of creativity on your emotions, the atmosphere, the ambiance of the experience, you will not discover where the creativity is leading - the message, the genre (sometimes) the theme. What are we doing with assessment of learning in our schools? Are we measuring the worth of the learning, or (as is inevitably the case) the worth of the individual? If we do the latter, we are betraying the trust of the child, because they will own that grade for the rest of their lives, citing it on every CV and job application form they complete. Is this fair? Is it fair that the grades they are awarded do not reflect their personality, their creativity, their tenacity, their resilience, their uniqueness? Standardised Testing and end of term examinations are absolutely unfit for this purpose. They are great for testing the recall skills of students, but useless in finding out more meaningful information about the knowledge and skills of the individual.  And yet we measure children's worth in exactly this way. Unfortunately, in this society that is what seems to count the most. Unless we value creativity, character and resilience (and resist measuring them), we will only create uncertainty in the minds of the young people who are in our charge.

"The person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance." - William J. Wilson


Uncertainty principles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Three golden moments

There are moments in time that shape who you are and who you become. They say that your school years are the best years of your lives, but for many people, school was something to be endured rather than enjoyed. In past blog posts I have related bad experiences of school and have questioned the relevance of current school practices to real world needs. Education is not the same as school. Sometimes schooling can get in the way of learning, but on this occasion I want to remember three golden moments that were instrumental in making me who I am today.

In July, 1969, I was 12 years old and living in the remote Shetland Islands, off the north coast of Scotland. I recall waking up very early in the morning, sneaking downstairs, and watching the live television coverage of the first moon landing. I remember watching the very grainy black and white images of the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin as they took their first tentative steps on the lunar surface, and thinking how incredible it was that man was actually on the moon. It was the spirit of adventure and discovery that really fueled my imagination and from then on I made models, collected artefacts and avidly studied space exploration. It was the first time in my life that I focused my attention and energy into learning a body of knowledge.

In 1972, during my time living in Beek, near Maastricht, Holland, I went on a school trip to Eindhoven, for a visit to the Evoluon - the Philips electronic giant's building constructed in the shape of a flying saucer. The Evoluon (now a major conference venue) was a science and technology museum with a difference. There were live demonstrations of scientific principles and new technologies. Here was where I first saw video conferencing, and robotic technology. This visit turned me on to thinking about the future and the role technology was going to play in all our lives. This moment was a turning point for me in terms of the awareness I suddenly had about what technology could do to transform our experiences, our relationships, our lives.

In 1973 while I was in my final year at AFCENT International School, in Brussum, Holland, I faced a bit of a dilemma. At the time, the curriculum was very gender biased. Girls were not allowed to take more than one science subject, but could study both art and music. Boys could do as many science subjects as they wished, but were only allowed to choose either music or art. I wanted to do both, but was limited to art, which was my strongest subject. So I began to subvert the rules. I spoke to the American music teacher, Larry Domingue, who was a liberal, progressive teacher. I asked him if he minded whether I could sit in the back of his lessons as an extra student. He smiled, and said I would be very welcome. I missed a whole year of PE - Physical Education - to do this, and was marked absent on every single occasion. The teachers knew what was going on, but because of my passion for music, turned a blind eye. I found that I could sometimes bend and subvert the rules and I learnt to create my own personalised pathway through my final year in school, something that has stood me in good stead throughout my professional life.    

These three golden moments in time have instilled within me a spirit of discovery, a sense of wonder, and the agency to make my own way in life, even if it means breaking the rules occasionally. What are your golden moments in time?

Image by NASA


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Out of Africa

Many long days have passed since my last blog post, but I have been busy on another continent. I have just returned from a week working out in Kenya, where I spoke at a conference and visited several primary and secondary schools. It was my first visit to Kenya, and most of my time was spent in the coastal town of Mombasa. I had fascinating conversations with many of those living in Mombasa, and spent time with some of the school children who were very proud to show us around their schools. Schools in Africa are quite different to those we are familiar with in Western and industrialised countries around the world. Many struggle to develop and use what little resources they have, but everywhere you go, you see pride in the school and enthusiasm for learning in equal measure. Besides meeting some wonderful people in and outside of the conference, I saw some excellent projects, two of which I would like to tell you about.

The first is a project from the Kenya Institute of Education called Elimika (Elimi means education) which seeks to develop and disseminate good digital content for learning. In the past year or so, KIE has developed digital content (text, video, audio and games) in 12 subjects including languages, humanities, mathematics, the sciences and technology. This is collated from the experience of many teachers across Kenya who are invited to come together for 'boot camps' where they develop and refine the content in small teams. It is then piloted among small groups of existing school children before being refined further, and then delivered in CD format to schools across Eastern Africa. This may sound a little backward to western minds, but for East Africa, this is quite an innovation, particularly for schools that may have only one or two computers, and without internet access.

The second project relates to food shortages in East Africa, a topic looming large in the minds of us all as we see the tragedy unfolding in Somalia, and the sad refugee situation in North East Kenya at present. The Makini School Project is based on Sack Gardening - also known as 'vertical farming', where sacks and other small containers are used for growing food crops when available space is limited. This is a very important technique in places where drought is prevalent. The initial research for the project was carried out in Nairobi's slum areas by local primary school children. They discovered that sack gardening not only preserves soil and prevents runoff, but that healthier crops can be grown through intercropping - a variety of different plants growing together that complement each other.

These and many other innovative projects give hope to the people of Kenya during difficult times. The enthusiasm and sheer joy of living I discovered among the children and the teachers in the schools of Mombasa are truly inspirational. Their community spirit, and their ethos that your worth is based not so much on what you possess, but on how much you can share with others (the Swahili word for sharing is Ubuntu), certainly sends a clear message to the youth of the better off societies in the world.


Out of Africa by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

End of the screen age?

Since the earliest days of television and the subsequent introduction of personal computers, the visual display unit (we now commonly refer to them as 'screens') has been an integral part of the user experience. Families who previously gathered around the hearth to share their day's experiences moved their orientation (and their living room furniture) to face 'the box'. As technology has improved, and high definition television broadcasts and multi-channel satellite and cable TV have become increasingly available, we begin to see many more screens throughout the home, and a subsequent 'social atomization' of family viewing habits (For more on this concept read Future Shock by Alvin Toffler). If we add personal computer and laptop screens into the mix, we observe homes and workplaces that are replete with visual displays that can be shared or used individually for a multitude of different purposes.

As a multi-tasking society says Nick Shackleton-Jones, we spend a lot of our time looking alternately down at our laptop or iPad screens and then up at the television,  Wouldn't it be sensible, he asks, to integrate the two into one? There is some sense in what he says. The next move though, he suggests, will not be to have one single device which you can put down and lose, or damage by dropping and breaking (how many iPhones have been sent to the great beyond in this way?), but a technology that can project the images onto some sort of heads up display. This might be in the form of a visor, or a pair of spectacles which you can still see through into the real world. Some people might recoil at this idea, claiming that it is either hazardous (while watching a Lady Gaga video you could walk into a lampost) or even dehumanising. In his prescient book Natural Born Cyborgs, Andy Clark argued that such increasingly intimate relationships with technology are a natural progression in the evolution of humankind, and that we adapt very quickly to new ways of using technology. This includes intimate contact with devices that are quite invasive, in for example, cochlear implants, plastic prostheses and organs, and cardiac pacemakers. It is already a common sight to see people wearing ear buds or blue-tooth ear pieces. How much of a step would it be to see widespread use of in-view visor displays.

In-view vision, whether in visor, heads-up, or projector form, would have the capability to lock into and exploit the full potential of applications such as augmented and mixed reality, where the onboard processor can generate and superimpose information about objects or people to give the viewer instant information about what or who they are looking at. This would be an important step forward for augmented reality tools, which currently rely largely on mobile phone cameras to function. A look at the TED video of Patti Maes and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense wearable technology may give you a sense of how this can be achieved and the positive (and possibly negative) effects that may emerge with this ambient approach to interaction with the environment.

If we went down this road, and began to replace static desk and wall mounted screens with handheld and in-vision systems, what might the impact be on our social lives? Would our perceptions of reality be changed? Would the dynamics of families and small communities alter as a result? If so, would these changes be positive or negative? Would personal in-vision technologies isolate many individuals from their communities? Will we see the end of the screen age in our lifetimes? You are invited to add your comments and views below.

Image by Jonathan O'Donnell


End of the screen age? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The future is not here ... yet

I seem to be spending a lot of time lately travelling around talking about 'the future'. Does this make me a futurologist or some kind of prophet? No - I'm just one more person who wants to know what might influence my professional life and my students' learning over the next year or two. We are all interested in the future, more or less. But trying to predict the future is not something I would recommend, because no-one really knows what tomorrow will bring. If we did, most of us probably wouldn't dare stepping outside our homes. Well, here's me in an interview with a German Human Resources magazine, in the run up to a keynote speech I'm giving in Cologne, Germany in September. I speculate on what I see happening around me now, and how the trends might evolve in the coming months....

You have been working in learning technology for over 35 years. Does the evolution of learning still hold surprises for you?

Oh yes. It never ever ceases to amaze me. Every day I am surprised because new things are coming to me and I discover new technologies or I learn about new software. The important thing for me has always been to find out what is coming next, because I want to be prepared, not just to know about it myself, but also to tell other people what is ‘just around the corner’ and how you can use it.

What has been the biggest surprise in the last years?

The biggest surprise for me so far has been social media: it is the biggest thing in the last ten years to hit the world of learning technology. Everybody can connect with everybody else now anywhere in the world. You can literally tap into any community of practice that you are interested in and find people who are very clever and knowledgeable and get almost instant answers from them.

Do you see this change as some kind of revolution in learning?

I go along with the opinion that it always has been an evolution but not a revolution. We are all building on to the previous work of other people as in the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants”. The first technology for me was always language. And since those days we have learned to turn communication into other forms – first the telegraph, then the telephone, radio and television, mobile phones and then the internet – they are all versions of language and ways of sharing our ideas with each other.

You already mentioned social media as one of the most important technologies that have changed learning. Which other technologies are there, that have had a similar impact?

Probably one of the biggest innovations has been the mobile phone. The ability to talk or send texts to anybody in the world – that was important. But with smart mobile phones there are so many new applications available now. Together with social media those two innovations are transforming the way we work and learn.

You predict in your blog that the future of learning apart from being social and mobile will be open. Can you illustrate this prediction?

Open learning and open scholarship are important to me because to be open is to be honest – and there are still too many people hiding behind walls, saying things that they don’t mean or can’t prove. For me, knowledge is like love: You can give it away as much as you like but you still get to keep it. Why should we charge people for information that they really need to survive? Brian Lamb, who is a Canadian academic and a friend of mine, recently said: “With this economic crisis that we are in now and the global problems that we are experiencing it seems perverse and wrong to hoard the knowledge and only give it to people who can pay for it”. So therefore openness in all its forms has to be the way forward. Open learning is also a second chance for people who have failed in school to get a qualification later in life, which is exactly what I did: I left school with nothing and I went to the UK Open University when I was in my thirties and got my first degree.

There are also other things like open access to knowledge, which more and more journals are providing for free, and there is open scholarship: As open scholars, I and others like me share our knowledge and our concepts for free: all of my blog posts are free and so are my slideshows, photos and videos.

And do you get a response from the people who read your content?

Oh yes. And I can also learn from them. Open scholarship means that as an academic I open myself up to criticism. People can actually point out to me what I may have missed out on or what mistakes I may have made. In effect, open learning in all of its forms becomes a reciprocal arrangement: it’s a mutual giving and receiving – all for free.

Do you think that learners already use those new technologies with all their possibilities?

Yes, it’s becoming a huge movement in the world. You see, social media is a leveler: everybody has an equal voice to say what they believe and to argue and discuss with each other. You send your thoughts around the world and people respond very quickly. I had conversations this morning with people in Australia, in New Zealand, Canada, all over Europe, and Malaysia. This would never have been possible without the internet and social media services like Twitter and Facebook.

Will learners need new skills to use these new technologies?

I think “skills” is probably not the correct word to use, I prefer to call them literacies. Literacies are skills, but they are more than that, because literacy means the ability to engage with your culture more deeply. Students – and teachers as well – will need to learn a lot of new literacies as these technologies become more pervasive in society. They will need for instance what is called “transliteracy”, which is the ability to present yourself and your ideas across multiple platforms and to switch very quickly between them without losing quality of content. The new literacies are also going to involve skills like the ability to be wise to the fact that not all content on the internet is correct, accurate or up to date.

What do these developments mean for trainers and how do they adapt to these changes?

Some trainers find it hard to keep up because they think it is too fast and too complicated for them to understand. But any teacher or trainer can exploit the power and the potential of these technologies. Most of them are free and easy to use and there is a definite pedagogy underpinning the use of these technologies. They just have to be aware that there are privacy and identity issues, issues of safety and content management. I urge every teacher and trainer to try these technologies out in a safe environment to see how they work and what they can do for their learners.

Can we apply this also to corporate learning: Do companies use these technologies and how?

Oh yes. I can give you an example: Just recently I was speaking at a conference in London. 450 people attended from all the major companies, from banks, manufacturing companies, the police, the military and government departments. Many of these 450 people were doing something new with technology and wanted to hear all about the latest digital media and technologies. I think that it is a growing trend that corporate trainers are tapping into the power of these media.

And do companies support the use of these technologies by their employees?

Well, corporate barriers are a problem – for instance when the management says you are not allowed to use Facebook because it’s against the company policy. I say to them, if you ban Facebook, you are losing one of the biggest opportunities to gain social credibility and social traction that you are going to have: the power of social media to connect people professionally as well as personally. The ability to tap into a professional network is one of the most valuable things that any employee can have. So do not turn your backs on social media in the workplace. Rather than block it, facilitate it in a way that it becomes a benefit to both your employees and your company.

You once said that learning transcends the boundaries of the classroom. Do you see problems when professionals, for example specialists in a certain field, connect with others from different companies?

Companies obviously want to protect their secrets, they have to – to a certain extent – because if they don’t, their rivals will come in and steal their ideas and capitalise on them. But there are ways of sharing information, there are also ways of marketing where messages become viral, enabling you to exploit the power and potential of social media, to sell your ideas to people. You see, all of my content is licensed under creative commons, which means that it can be shared and repurposed under the same license with which I have licensed it. Sometimes people translate my blog posts into other languages, and this way I get a huge audience which I would otherwise not have had. This is what companies have to see: They may wish to protect some things, but they may also wish to open up their ideas to sharing, to gain more credibility, more effective marketing and more efficient promotion of their ideas and products.

Do you think that people need rules for the use of social media in the company?

I don’t think that rules work anymore. Governments have tried to impose rules, they have tried to block Wikileaks for instance and failed notoriously, because the internet is far too big for one government or one organization to control. Many companies will have rules, but if they find that these rules are actually causing them damage, they will have to revise them and make them more flexible.

In Germany HR professionals have to face the demographic change. Are the new learning technologies just a new way to learn for digital natives or also for older people?

I don’t believe that younger people are more adept in using technology just because they were born after 1980 and I don’t want to categorize people this way. In my view, it is all about context rather than about age. What matters is what uses you see for the technology and then there is a willingness to learn to use it. These technologies are for everybody to use, demographics such as age don’t really matter that much.

How far are all these changes we talked about international phenomena?

In one sense there are huge differentials between how people use technology to learn to connect with each other, to communicate, to do commerce or business. If you go to Singapore, there is a population of people who are very much immersed in technologies, because it is one of the most wired – or wireless – countries in the world. You can’t compare that to Gambia in Western Africa, a very small nation where they don’t even have electricity for most of their country. But in other ways everybody is in the same boat, because everybody wants to learn, everyone wants to have a good life. The needs, aspirations and hopes are the same, but our opportunities are not the same. The future is unevenly distributed, which means that the future is not here yet.

Interview by Bettina Wallbrecht and Stefanie Hornung


Image source


The future is not here ... yet by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Product or process?

Picture the scene. You walk into the reception area of your local primary school and you see the wonderful displays of artwork created by the children. There are paintings and drawings, and there are mobiles and models made from cardboard, silver paper and other materials, all resplendent in their vibrant colours. It is a bright celebration of learning and it showcases the creative talents of the children. Or does it? What about the children who are not as good at expressing themselves through painting or sculpture? Where are their pieces of artwork?

Sophie's painting of a cow is excellent and it takes pride of place in the centre of the display. But what you don't see is all the learning, thinking and the skills development that went into the mix leading up to Sophie's production of such a wonderful piece of art. What you don't see is the learning process, all the mistakes and corrections. All the learning. What you don't see is all of Sophie's previous rubbish cow paintings. Perhaps they should be on display as well? They would certainly demonstrate to anyone observing that this little girl has come a long way in the last few weeks, and has developed greater skills than she had before.

When did we ever get the idea that children's work must be perfect before it can be displayed, and that some kids' work is not good enough? I visit a lot of schools as a part of my role as a teacher educator, and it always strikes me when I enter a school reception area, that only the best children's paintings, photos and other artwork are on display. To see the less perfect ones you need to go into the classrooms, or into the kids art portfolios. Why is that? We are not running a production line, and we don't need quality control. Why shouldn't the kids express themselves in their own ways? If you are a teacher stand back and watch - you will find that they have extraordinary imagination, and their creative work doesn't have to be perfect to be good. They can express themselves creatively in more ways than you can ever imagine. All you have to do it create the conditions in which it can happen. Do so, and they will astound you.

Unfortunately, the practice of only allowing the display of perfect art work is symptomatic of a deeper underlying problem in many state funded schools. It is the age old question of product versus process, and it influences the delivery of the curriculum. It also dictates how assessment is conducted. If we are only interested in production of knowledge, then we will apply summative forms of assessment - exams and essays designed to test what students have remembered. If on the other hand we are more interested in the process of learning, we will design assessment methods that feed forward as well as back, showing students what they have done well and what they need to improve upon in their next pieces of work. Standardised testing does not prepare learners for the real world, nor does it provide teachers with anything more than a snapshot of where the student is at that point in time. On the other hand, process based assessment represents a long term plan, which supports learning over a period of time, a lot more effective than simply taking superficial and ultimately, meaningless measurements.

"We are now living in an age where the recipe is more important than the cake". - Charles Leadbetter

Image by Dietmut Teijgeman-Hansen


Product or process? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

No more funnels

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. Because of lack of space, time and resources (you will always have this problem when the state intervenes) there is little latitude for personalised approaches and creativity is stifled. Every child gets the same content, and every child is tested in the same, standardised way. The result: children become disenfranchised and demotivated, teachers are exhausted and demoralised, schools are positioned unfairly in league tables, and governments measure success not through human achievement or creativity, but through cold, hard statistics. This is universal education, and if one size does not fit all ... tough. Shame no-one has told the powers that be that universal education is unachievable.

Ivan Illich railed against this mindset way back in 1970 in his anarchical, visionary critique of the school system. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for personal learning through informal learning networks, and rejected the funnelling approach of mass, unidirectional, instructivist education systems. More recently, powerful modern day visionaries such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson are saying the same thing. They ask how we can sustain a factory model of education 'production', where children are 'batch processed' according to their age groups. It's obvious to any teacher or parent that children develop at different rates, and all have different talents and interests. I suppose we have Jean Piaget and his fellow 'stage theory' psychologists to thank for that kind of constrained thinking.

In their current configuration, says Robinson, most schools kill creativity. The picture above was taken in 1909. If those students could jump into a time machine and be transported a century or so forward to 2011, what would they be amazed by? Jumbo jets, motorways? Satellites and HD television? The internet, medical science? Mobile phones and credit cards? They wouldn't recognise any of those. One thing they would almost certainly recognise though, would be the school classroom. It has been largely bypassed by the last century of progress, because institutions are very hard to change.

Heppell points out that creativity could be encouraged and personal learning achieved through the use of handheld technologies such as mobile phones. When they use these tools, he says, children are in their element. When they walk into the classroom, they are told to switch off all devices, and in doing so, the school switches off the child too. Gaming consoles could also be used to personalise learning, engaging children in playful learning, something which Heppell strongly advocates. But ultimately, teachers have a vast array of personal learning resources at their disposal thanks to the social web. Students must choose their own personal tools - if they have tools imposed upon them there is little scope for personalisation. Schools are now beginning to incorporate some social media into their lessons and even allowing children to use mobile and handheld technologies during lessons. It's starting, but it's slow progress. If students are shown a range of tools and then allowed to choose which ones they would like to use, if they are allowed to create their own personal webs and choose their own connections, we might begin to see some very personal learning taking place in our schools.


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Getting the bloggers to write

One of the perennial problems teachers face, especially in early years education, is trying to get children to write. The main problem is that children are expected to write in a vacuum, for an audience of one (the teacher). There is often very little incentive in this exercise for kids, who would probably rather be doing other things with their time like playing on their Nintendo. But several schools are beginning to address this 'won't write' problem by making it entertaining and productive through the use of social media. In an article entitled Could blogging be the key to raising a generation of great writers? Liz Dwyer argues for creating audiences online for children to write for:

'"I don't like to write." That's the refrain teachers have heard for a generation when they ask students why they're struggling to complete a short, three-paragraph essay. Thankfully, more and more educators are using two things kids love, technology and social media, to change that. By encouraging students to write on their own blogs, savvy teachers are helping kids take their writing out of the classroom vacuum, and cultivate a broader audience.'

Liz is right of course. Children raise their game when they know they are being watched, so why should it be any different with writing? David Mitchell, Acting Head Teacher at Bolton's Heathfield Primary School is a great advocate of blogging as a means to develop children's writing skills. He reveals that some children are proactive in setting up their own blogs when they realise they can write for a large audience and actually receive feedback. Many of the children at Heathfield have become avid bloggers, and the results of this are clear for all to see. According to David, some children within the school have raised their literacy attainment scores by two full levels. Blogging is gaining ground, and it's not that hard to set up for a group of children in your own school. Some teachers reading this might ask the question: What about internet safety and child protection? Well, I could answer here and now, but I won't. Instead, I'll let Liz Dwyer answer:

'Concerns about online privacy have historically made teachers wary of allowing students to blog, but the rise of platforms built specifically for students has made blogging safer for kids of all ages. Plus, in our networked 21st century world, more teachers are already taking precautions by talking about internet safety, telling kids not to reveal their home addresses or engage in online bullying. Let's hope more teachers embrace the medium and let their students get some real-world writing experience.'

Image by WallMic


Getting the bloggers to write by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Parrot fashion

There is a story of a woman who wanted a talking bird so she went to the pet shop bought a parrot. After a few weeks, she returned to the pet shop and complained to the owner that the parrot wasn't talking. 'Does he have a mirror?' asked the shop owner, 'parrots love mirrors. They see themselves and start up a conversation'. So the woman bought a mirror and the next day she was back again. The bird still wasn't talking. 'How about a ladder?' suggested the shop owner, 'parrots love climbing up and down ladders. A happy parrot is more likely to talk.' She bought a ladder. Next day she was back again, because the parrot still wasn't talking. 'Does the parrot have a swing?' asked the shop owner. 'If not, that might be the problem. He will relax if he swings, and then he'll start talking'. The woman sighed, bought the swing and left the shop. The next day she walked into the shop and she looked very upset. 'The parrot died' she reported. The shop owner was shocked. 'Did the parrot say anything... anything at all?' he asked. 'Yes,' said the woman 'right before he died he asked me if they sold any food down at the pet shop.'

The point to this story is that you can spend your life looking into mirrors, worrying about your appearance; You can focus on ladders to try to advance your career; and you can try as many swings as you like to try to entertain yourself. But if you starve yourself of a social life, your relationships will die, and your life experience will be the poorer for it. We live in an increasingly connected world, which is profoundly influencing education. And social media are the enablers. Yet many teachers and students see social networking tools as frivolous entertainment or ego massage. They can be much more than that, and if they are developed appropriately, they can be valuable tools for education.

How many students and teachers are missing out on a broader social experience, because they have disengaged with social media? How many students have a narrower view of learning because they have no professional learning network to call upon? And how many teachers are failing to develop themselves professionally because they think Twitter and other social networking tools are a waste of time? It's true that Twitter can make you feel a little like a parrot talking to itself in a mirror if you don't give it enough time to develop connections and reach the critical mass necessary to become a useful PLN. But if you invest time and effort developing a network of critical friends and knowledgeable experts, it will pay you back a hundredfold.

In a previous blogpost I argued that Twitter is not about content, it is all about connections. There is more to learning than simply taking in knowledge, and more to a course than its content. Connections are important, because they lead to richer social contexts. The ability to connect into and engage with global communities of practice is unprecedented. The conversations to be enjoyed and insights to be gained on Twitter are immense, and their value is immeasurable. Developing your professional learning network is time consuming, but what is the alternative?

Well, I suppose you could always learn parrot fashion.

Main story by Bob Gass. Image source by Riza Nugraha



Parrot fashion by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Seven billion teachers

Everyone on Earth is a teacher. We all have the ability to help others to learn. This is exactly what Vygotsky had in mind when he proposed his famous Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory. Children (and adults too) can learn more broadly, deeply and extensively if they have a knowledgeable person by their side, than they can on their own. In our society, we often think of that knowledgeable other person as a professional educator, a tutor, lecturer or classroom teacher. But it need not be. Not everyone is cut out to be a professional educator, but anyone can teach and most of us do exactly that, just about every day. The artistry of a good educator though is to continually engage students in learning, to inspire them to persist in their studies and to transfer their own personal passion to that student's learning. The art of education is to draw out the very best from learners, to encourage them to excel at what interests them, and to instill this within them so they continue to do so for the rest of their time on this planet. The very, very best teachers can do all these things, and usually instinctively.

We learn in a multitude of ways, some within formal settings, others less formally. How did you learn to tie your shoelaces? Most people would remember a friend, or a parent showing them how it was done. Then it was practice, practice, practice, until you could do it without thinking. Your first language was acquired naturally before you ever went to school. You learnt informally, listening to your family members speak and then engaging with them as you built your vocabulary. One of the great, unchanging roles of a parent is to be an informal teacher of their children, and older siblings also take a hand. Children today learn a lot of social rules and mores through informal play, long before they ever see a school playground.

If there is any difference at all between formal and informal learning, it is where that learning is heading. What is the study for? In formal learning contexts, learning is usually aimed toward obtaining some kind of qualification, an accreditation of a skill or knowledge. In informal contexts, it's simply about living. Going to school or college can be a real effort, day in, day out. Formalised learning can be a chore, but it need not be. This is where the skilled teacher can make learning engaging and fun, and motivate students to arrive each day anticipating something special. It takes passion, dedication, drive, tenacity and self-belief to become a professional educator. That's the difference between education and teaching, and it is why, although there are 7 billion teachers in the world, only a select few ever go on to become skilled educators.

Image by Momento Mori


Seven billion teachers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.