Never mind the quality

While waiting for my flight home from Cyprus last week, I did an impromptu interview for some colleagues from Pakistan in the departure lounge. They quizzed me about my views on quality in education, and recorded my responses on video. They intend to share the video online once all the airport public address announcements have been edited out. In the meantime, here's the essence of the interview:

My view on quality in primary education is that it cannot solely be measured through standardised testing or other performance related metrics. These are used by governments as measures of whole school compliance to policies rather than as measures of how individual children are learning. Standardised testing is a device to control schools and systems. It has never been about learning. The quality of personal learning gain can only be measured through authentic forms of assessment, and the more individualised these are, the better. I suggest ipsative assessment which involves measuring a student's learning against their own previous achievements. This is a much fairer method, and has the potential to inspire learners rather than show them how big a failure they are. The Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) schemes already practiced in some UK schools are exploiting this potential, and it's a more equitable method of assessment than the old norm or criterion referenced forms that are still being used by many schools throughout the world.

How do we ensure quality learning in education? The best way I know how to do this is to provide space for children to express themselves creatively. Children need to be given licence to ask questions, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre they are, to explore outrageous possibilities, to exercise their imagination and to create something they can be proud of. The lack of expressive subjects such as art and music in the English Baccalaureate (EBAC) subjects is a travesty, and should be redressed as quickly as possible.

Children also need to be given space to make mistakes without any condemnation. Alvin Toffler once declared: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Too often 'success' culture has been so deeply ingrained within the fabric of school life, that there is no room for failure from which we can learn.

If children are able to control what they learn and create things, their interest will grow, and if they are interested in the subject they will learn. They don't always have to be happy or comfortable for quality learning to occur. Sometimes discomfort, dissatisfaction or a lack of closure will spur them on to achieve even more in learning. Children need to be given tools to help them to learn, and then they need to be left alone to use the tools in the best ways they can find toward deeper learning. Better still, allow them to use the tools they are already familiar with.

Standardised curricula are bad news for schools. More trust needs to be invested in young people to be responsible for their own choices. Too often when teachers are pressured, they tend to revert to methods they are most familiar with. Often, these methods bear no resemblence to the needs of contemporary society, because it has moved on from the time they were themselves in school. Often we forget that teaching today is about the children, not the teachers. It's not our learning, it's theirs, because as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore once warned: 'Do not limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in a different time'.

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Never mind the quality by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Just a minute

The sheer volume of content being created and posted to the web is overwhelming. In a post  brought to my attention today, Kelly Hodgkins claims that if we paused the web for 60 seconds we would miss the birth of more than 1500 new blog posts, almost 100,000 new tweets, 20,000 posts on Tumblr, 600 new videos (more than 24 hours) uploaded to YouTube and at least 12,000 new ads on Craigslist. Such a claim must also take into account that much of this content will be quite worthless to anyone but the person uploading it, of which more later. These statistics also fail to take into account all the other content that is being generated on, for example Flickr (more than 3000 images each minute), Wikipedia, Facebook (3 billion photos and 20 million videos uploaded every month), Myspace, Wiktionary, Vimeo, Picasa and innumerable other user generated content repositories. Many similar web user statistics can be found on the Royal Pingdom website. Be warned though that all web statistics, particularly those related to social media, go quickly out of date because what we are talking about here is exponential. We are overwhelmed by a tsunami of content on the web, and just trying to find what we need, even with the most intelligent search engines, can be compared to trying to take a drink from the nozzle of a pressure hose.

Volume of content is not the only issue. We are (and should be) increasingly concerned about the quality of content we find on the web. No teacher worth their salt would play young children a video they hadn't previously screened and vetted for suitability. That would be courting disaster. One wag at the foot of Hodgkins's web stats blogpost left a comment that in 60 seconds there would also be 800 hours of porn downloaded and at least 35,000 Twitter and Facebook posts about Justin Bieber. There is however, no indication if he was speaking as one of the main contributors to these statistics. Yes, we are all aware of the large amount of dross that sits on the web, but the most insidious and potentially the most dangerous, is content that is almost accurate, or blatantly wrong but believable. How do we filter out content that is good from content that is bad? More importantly, how do we educate students into being prudent about what sites they obtain their content from? How can we know that content is safe, appropriate, accurate and up to date?

Those and associated questions will be the focus for the Concede User Generated Conference that takes place on 14th September in Oiera, Portugal as a part of the EFQUEL Innovation  Forum (September 14-16). The Concede Project, which has concerned itself with investigating the quality of user generated content in higher education over the last 2 years, will host the event, and is giving away a number of all expenses paid delegate places to those who wish to present a paper at the event. For full details on how to apply for free all expense paid place, visit the Concede Website and follow application instructions.

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

Open all OERs

Time to reflect on the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) workshop on Open Educational Resources, which was held in Windhoek, Namibia this week. Around 50 delegates attended, predominantly from African nations including Namibia, South Africa and Botswana and there were also representatives from Canada, Australia, Holland, Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia and Jamaica. Many were representing the Quality Assurance Agencies of their home countries. Dr Stella Anthony (Australian Universities Network for Quality Assurance) gave the opening presentation for the event, and spoke about the opportunities and challenges of OERs in higher education. She took a pragmatic approach, arguing that we need to pay attention to a number of issues that threaten the success of OERs, including lack of a common understanding of their purposes and limitations, overcoming infrastructural barriers, as well as ensuring the quality of OERs in terms of content and design.

Jenny Glennie (South African Institute for Distance Education) presented a paper entitled 'Understanding OER in Higher Education' in which she outlined the basics of Openness and provided essential input into what OERs are for those who were new to the concept. A presentation by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (University of Cape Town, South Africa) opened up the debate over the benefits and limitations of OERs, and addressed some of the quality assurance issues, as well as issues of financial sustainability and battles over ownership of content. IPR and Creative Commons were discussed.

I was live-blogging throughout these presentations, and during the first panel session presented two questions from the Twitter stream to the panel. The first question was from Mark Power (Bolton University, UK) who wondered why we should pay attention to OERs when reusable learning objects had apparently failed. The panel responded that OERs are not the same as RLOs, for one simple reason - Learning objects are usually decontextualised (stand alone) whereas OERs are generally contextualised within a larger module or course/programme. It is all a matter of granularity, with Open Courseware the most contextualised. The second question was asked about design and content. If content is good, but poorly presented in an amatuerish manner, does this matter? The panel agreed that it did matter, but that many OERs are generally well presented anyway.

After lunch, it was my turn to present my invited paper, which dealt with the wider issues surrounding OERs, such as pedagogy, theoretical and philosophical considerations. I outlined two projects, OPAL and CONCEDE which respectively examine Open Educational Practices and user generated content. I touched on the synergy between Web 2.0 tools and OERs which both espouse openness, and concluded with some ideas about how OERs could benefit higher education in the future. The following panel session was lively, with plenty of questions from the delegates. From the workshop came ideas that included the belief that OERs will improve social inclusion and encourage better student engagement, even to the point where students will contribute to the development of OER content alongside their tutors.

Sir John Daniel (our host and CEO of CoL) summed up the workshop in his closing remarks. He argued that OERs are just another development in the ongoing evolution of education, and should be treated just like any other educational process - they should not treated as a special case, and just because they are created in an open manner and are free, this doesn't mean they are poor quality. OERs, he said, go beyond centralised repositories of learning objects - their ability to be embedded across multiple web sites will mean better longevity and sustainability. OERs will also encourage more widespread repurposing of existing resources across wider groups and communities of practice, he predicted. He concluded with a reference to Apple's new toy, suggesting that the iPad will do to educational resources what the iPod did to popular music.

Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.