Doing battle

I'm on a mission. Starting with my keynote speech on 2nd September at the Royal Geographical Society, I'm on my world tour to try to change people's minds about what education is really all about. OK, the 'world tour' bit is a joke, but I do have a number of impending speaking engagements around the world. I will be tackling issues surrounding current education, and will be talking about things like transformation of educational practice through the application of new technology, creativity, and personalisation of learning - which I think are three big guns that can be used in the battle against educational malaise. I will be the first to admit that I don't have all the answers, but I have some ideas about how we might possibly make some educational experiences better for the young people we teach.

For a start, we need to examine what 'education' actually means. Education comes from the Latin word educere which means to draw out from within, or to tap into someone's potential. It doesn't mean control. It means letting go. Socrates had the right idea, bless him. Instead of lecturing his students, he debated with them, never giving straight answers, always pushing, questioning. It's a long way from this to today's formal education, I contend. How can you draw out a student's creative potential or even discover what it is they do best, when you are intent on following a rigid curriculum with no time or space for play, experimentation or questioning? Don't get me wrong, I don't blame the teachers. I blame government departments who want to control, and the examination boards who test to find out how well teachers are doing and how much a student can remember during an examination, rather than finding out how students learn best. It's assessment of learning rather than assessment for learning. Many students don't stand much of a chance. If they learn anything (apart from synchronised behaviour and compliance with authority), it is achieved in spite of 'the school'. Isn't it ridiculous that the failing schools are the ones that have their finances reduced, just when they need it most? Education is not about punishment or reward. It's about creating environments in which students can best reach their full potential. Do schools do that? As Alvin Toffler said: "The system doesn't need reforming, it needs replacing".

Secondly, we need to know more about how technology can support formal learning in the same way as it supports informal learning. Yes, I know, the boundaries between the two are blurring considerably, but there is still a divide in the minds of students between what is informal and 'fun', and what is formal and 'expected' of them. I want to go to war on the idea that technology is there to constrain and contain learning, and instead argue that new and emerging technologies (many students have them in their pockets or handbags but aren't allowed to use them in formal settings) can liberate learners by extending, enriching and enhancing learning opportunities.

Thirdly, I want to challenge the idea that one size fits all. Curricula in schools are still largely based upon the old industrial models of delivery, and for the sake of economy rather than expediency, are based on linearity, and a 'just in case' approach. Let's learn all the topics, cram them in, and have a taste of each, just in case you need them later in life. We need to bypass this, supplant the 'just in time' model and go directly to the 'just for me' approach. We need to stop preparing children for yesterday and start preparing them for tomorrow. This will need a radical overhaul not only of funding in schools and colleges, but also a radical overhaul in the mindsets of all those who are involved in the business of education. To stop managing learning, and hand more of the control over to the learner, teachers roles will need to change. They will need to become facilitators, mentors, participators in the community of learning, rather than controllers, lecturers, or managers. It's happening, but too slowly to cope with the pace of change we see in society.

My itinerary is a punishing one, with something like 2 dozen invited presentations, workshops and conference papers from now until Christmas, in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and of course the UK (where I will be speaking in London, Nottingham and Leeds), but I think it will be worth all the miles I will travel to engage with audiences about these important issues. After all, we are talking about the future of education - the future of our own children.

NB: The picture above is of a cannon outside the gates of Castillo San Gabriel, in Arrecife (Lanzarote). More of the same can be seen here.

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

Going geographical

I remember a quote from Ed Horowitz: 'if you are not on the Internet, you are history'. I had an answer: 'If you are on the Internet, you are geography.' I was playing with words, but a message emerged from it - we can connect with others from all over the world using social media, and if you build it, they will come. The number of visits to this blog has risen dramatically over the last year or so. The month of July saw more than 10,000 visits. See what I mean? I've gone geographical.

Now it all comes home to roost. On September 2, I will be keynoting the Innovative Learning Spaces session track for the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference in London. I'm very pleased to have been invited, because although I am not a geographer, geography was always one of my favourite topics in school, and is a social science to which I have great affinity. I keep dozens of back copies of the National Geographic journal at home and I'm an avid viewer of the National Geographic channel. I used to love reading about intrepid explorers of the likes of David Livingstone, Mungo Park and Robert Falcon Scott. I'm grateful then to Professor Derek France (Chester University) for inviting me to speak at such a prestigious event and excited to be able to attend. Here are the title and abstract of my presentation:

New Spaces, New Pedagogies: Harnessing the Power of Social Media in Education

A rapid emergence of social media – the so called ‘Web 2.0’ – has opened up new opportunities for participatory learning in all sectors of education. Students now have the capability to create and share their own content through blogs, wikis, video- and photo-sharing services such as YouTube and Flickr. They can easily connect into and maintain contact with multiple communities of interest, gaining access to experts using social networking tools such as Myspace and Facebook. They can organise their own resources through free and easy to use tagging and social filtering tools. In this presentation I will argue that this rapid rise of user generated content is blurring boundaries between novice and expert, and challenging the traditional notions of knowledge, ownership, privacy and identity. In tandem with this, the proliferation of personal devices such as iPods and smart mobile phones is enabling students to move beyond the boundaries of the classroom into ‘any time, any place’ learning. In the light of these developments I shall explore new teacher roles, examine new learner expectations and explore some of the new learning territories that are emerging beyond the walls of the institution. I will offer some examples of how Web 2.0 tools have already been harnessed to support professional mentoring and to promote deeper engagement in learning through collaboration and reflection. I will discuss the concept of the personal learning environment and its potential to enrich student experiences. I shall speculate on the potential impact of emerging technologies such as augmented reality and touch screens and their potential in shaping the future of education.

Image source

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

Web feats 7: Videosharing

Teachers are discovering that video sharing sites such as YouTube, Blip TV and Vimeo can offer a very rich platform for learning. User generated content of all kinds can be found there. Some of the best educational videos have been posted to YouTube, including the seminal work of the likes of Mike Wesch's The Machine is (Us)ing Us and Karl Fisch's Did You Know. You can find lessons on how to play just about any musical instrument, learn how to speak foreign languages, and find master classes on cookery, gardening, dancing, painting, troubleshooting computer problems ... in fact just about anything. There is also a lot of dross out there too, so teachers would be advised to watch a video right through before deciding if it is suitable, relevant and acceptable for viewing by their students in a formal setting.

Most teachers will scan through existing materials to see if there is something they can use to introduce a topic, or highlight a key point they wish to make during a lesson. Some are becoming more adventurous, either creating their own short videos to share, and vodcasting is on the rise. Some are even encouraging their own students to create and share content. But these kind of activities should come with some warnings. If you can get around the school firewall (many schools block videosharing services) here are some things to consider:

YouTube in particular has a reputation as a breeding ground for abuse, and seems to attract its fair share of mindless idiots. Some children work hard on a video, editing, adding voice over, music, etc, and then post it to YouTube, only to attract a number of obscene, harsh or simply unjustifiably critical comments from anonymous viewers who get a kick out of insulting people. It's happened before. Imagine how damaging that might be to their self esteem? Teachers of smaller children will also need to be aware of child protection issues. A little caution and a lot of preparation can offset some of these potential problems. Video sharing is a very creative and motivating tool, and used with care, can enrich and extend the learning experience for students of all ages.

Image source

Web feats 3: Video sharing by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 6: Photosharing

There was a time when you had to sit down people down, plonk an album in their lap and make them sit there for a while, to share your holiday snaps or photos of your sister's wedding. The alternative was to bore everyone to death by putting on a slideshow of your favourite photos in a darkened room - remember the Kodak Carousel? Either way, to enjoy your photos, they had to be in the same room. All that has changed with the advent of Flickr and Picasa and other online photosharing services. Now you simply send a link on Facebook or Twitter, or your e-mail, and hundreds of friends, family and even those you don't even know, can come in and view your photo collection when it's convenient to them.

The great thing about these Web 2.0 photosharing sites is that they constitute their own specialist social networks - and these are organised around an appreciation of great photography, and an interest in talking about images. I don't mind admitting that I have at least 6 Flickr accounts, some to share personal photos, family and friends stuff, and others to share professional content. One of my Flickr accounts contains photos of all my overseas visits and conference presentations.

How do teachers use Flickr? I have seen some very interesting uses including one where a biology teacher used the tagging facility on Flickr to teach human anatomy. She produced some pictures of the human body and asked her students to tag the various internal organs - it worked very well, and all the students enjoyed the experience greatly. Others use Flickr to encourage students to be creative in the generation of content. If the feedback they receive online is constructive, they learn a lot by sharing their photographs. One encouraging feature is the hit counter which shows students how many times their images have been viewed, and how many people have favourited their photos. A lot of photos on Flickr are licensed under creative commons, so, with fair acknowledgement of the source, many can be freely used and repurposed depending on the type of licence assigned to them.

Image source

Web feats 6: Photo sharing by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 5: URL Shorteners

With the advent of Twitter has come the need to shrink web addresses (URLs) down in size so you don't take up too much of the 140 character limit. A lot of people share useful websites they have found with their Personal Learning Network (PLN) over Twitter. One of the best URL shorteners is Bitly. The reason it is useful to me, is that Bitly has so much more functionality than simply reducing the size of URLs.

The new look Bitly has tools that allow you to view statistics (metrics) about your shortened URLs, including how many others have clicked on your links, and an information page dedicated to each individual link, showing how many others have tweeted it, shared it, commented on it, and even useful stats on the top referring sites. These are very useful statistics if you want to trace the reach and effectiveness of your web site links. There are also easy shorcut tools that allow you to enter the long URL, click and then copy and paste the shortened URL into Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. The best bit about Bitly though, is the real time metrics section that displays hyperlinks of the Twitter accounts of all those who have retweeted your link. Cool stuff indeed.

Images source

Web feats 5: URL Shorteners by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 4: Twitter

This Web 2.0 tool is probably the last one I would get rid of if I had a gun to my head (which I don't). When Twitter first appeared on the scene it was hailed as a 'microblogging tool', but it patently is a lot more than that. OK, so it's restricted to 140 characters, and a longstanding criticism is that you can't be deep and meaningful with such a constraint on your writing. And yet, as millions of users everyday discover, Twitter is extremely expressive, and it is amazing how much you can convey in such as small writing space. I guess you only have to look at Haiku poetry or the book Twitterature (140 character summaries of some of the classic works of literature) to catch my meaning. Twitter also has a number of filtering tools, including DM (Direct Messaging), Lists, RT (Retweeting) and mentions to name a few.

There have been whole conferences dedicated to Twitter, and indeed the networking tool has been used extremely successfully as a conference backchannel. There are already several thousand third party applications that lock into and exploit the power of Twitter, including Tweetdeck, Echofon, Twitpic, Twitgraph and Tweetreach (this one tells you to what extent your tweet has spread across the network). Twitter is gaining in popularity as a tool to build your personal learning network, and also as a viral marketing tool, as well as a guerrilla teaching tool (see my post on Teaching with Twitter). Teachers are waking up to the possibilities of using the Twitter as something more than a simple communication tool. Some even see in it early evidence for a semantic social network, whilst others use it as a personal research tool. Twitter is also a useful tool to use in tandem with other services, but as I have recently argued, most people who don't get Twitter tend not to persist with it, and fail to build a critical mass of follows/followers and therefore miss out on the true power. The ability to connect and communicate with people of like minds all over the globe. My opinion is that Twitter is still emerging, and will build a head of steam in the next year or two as it continues to grow in popularity and increases in functionality. Twitter is definitely a tool I would find difficult to discard.

Image source

Web feats 4: Twitter by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web feats 3: Blogging

I continue my series on the tools I can't do without, and today, I want to talk about blogging, and the platform I use for Learning with 'e's: Blogger.

This is Blogger. What you are reading now is on a blog hosted by Blogger. It's probably one of the simplest 'free' tools you will find anywhere on the web for creating your own blog. I find blogging very valuable, because it allows me to post up my ideas, reflections, questions and fun content so that I can share it with the world. Having a blog is like owning your own publishing house or personal radio station. I have complete editorial control over my content, and once I have written and posted it, it's there for the entire world to look at, should they wish to. But I can also come back to it and add, delete or modify the content any time I want.

I first started blogging at the end of 2006, and have continued to do so regularly ever since. I have already posted up my reasons for blogging (Why do I bother?), and I have also given my opinions on what ingredients there should be in a good blog post. There has also been a lot written by others about the pedagogical and personal benefits of blogging, but I won't try to summarise it or repeat what has already been said. I will simply give my personal view, because that's what this blog is all about! Blogging has transformed my professional practice (teaching and researching) because it has enabled me to write down and present my ideas in a way which is coherent to my wider community of practice. OK, so I could publish in a peer reviewed journal and often do, but that takes time (read Publish and be jammed and you'll see what I mean). Blogging is different - it has immediacy - it's almost instantaneous, so I now use it as my preferred weapon of mass instruction. In doing so, I have had to articulate myself clearly, separate out fact from fiction, and have also needed to adopt a creative approach to the way I represent my ideas. Doing all of this has made me better at writing, better at speaking, and ultimately has given me a springboard from which I can launch into developing my ideas and theories further afield. I gain very valuable feedback from people who comment on my posts, and in doing so, I can reflect critically, strengthen my ideas further, modify and adapt them to make them more workable, and even gain some new insight as I blog. In the act of writing, it has been said, we are written. As I write, edit and then post my content on this blog, I make my ideas available to the world, and wait for the world to make its feedback available to me. It's a two way street that brings a lot of personal and professional benefits.

Image source (Joyce Seitzinger)

Web feats 3: Blogging by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.