I would like to see the NSW Department of Education (DET) install an enterprise wiki on the DET Intranet so that teacher's and students could start to really connect and collaborate in a secure environment.
Recently I heard of a teacher who has decided to use Google Apps because she finds Moodle clunky and often difficult to access. I had a look at Google Apps and it says:
"Imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community — students, faculty, and staff — could share information and ideas more easily. With Google Apps Education Edition's free communication, collaboration and publishing tools, including email accounts on your school's domain (like student@your-school.edu), you can start bringing that vision to life." http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html Accessed 12/3/2008
Google Apps may be a fantastic tool for "sharing information and ideas more easily", I haven't tried it out yet. My concern is that some teachers are using Google Apps, some are using Moddle, some are using Janison, some are using Wikispaces, some are using a special Sydney Institute part of Wikispaces, some are using PB Wiki, some are using Mediawiki, and so on. People's information is spread all over the place and so we are failing to connect and to share.
Teachers can see how useful these various tools are for enhancing teaching and learning in this information age, and are doing interesting and original work. How wonderful it would be if DET NSW showed some visionary leadership by setting up an enterprise wiki for all teachers to use. If DET did this, the following could happen:
teachers and students could tag their work and search within the DET space to find other work that has been done on the same area and thus work more efficiently;
students could participate in collaborative projects with other students who are in public education in NSW, in a secure environment;
teachers could find other teachers working in their area through the whole of NSW and begin to collaborate. This would create opportunities for professional development and the development of supportive relationships;
high school teachers could collaborate with TAFE teachers on the integration of TAFE courses into the high school teaching programme;
In their personal spaces, teachers could link to work that they do in course management systems, such as Janison and Moodle, and so working in disparate tools need not be a barrier to connecting and collaborating;
teachers could create wikis for their students that could be seen by others within the DET community, but were secure from the greater www.
Sydney Institute of Technology (SIT), which takes in a hand-full of TAFE colleges in NSW, is doing interesting things with Wikispaces. They have purchased a Wikispaces license and offer their teachers a space where they can use wikis which they can make private and which are all free of advertising. I am seeing a community develop in this space, where people are able to see what others are doing with wikis in the institute.
I am impressed by the leadership that the SIT Learning and Innovation team have shown by setting up this space. The space has been growing for about a year. It's a good thing they didn't wait around for DET. However, the SIT space brings people together because they happen to work in the same institute. How much better it would be if we had a DET-wide wiki that could bring people together throughout the state of NSW in primary and high schools and TAFE. In such a vast space, communities would spring up based on commom interests, rather than geographical boundaries.
It seems they are so unfamiliar with having their own ideas, and writing about them, that they simply cannot do it with any engagement. Their free-choice blogs are, overall, schooly imitations of authenticity. Pretending to have ideas they pretend to care about. Thank Goodness, there are exceptions. But the rule is so distressing, it's led me to believe that, by high school, it's too late to unlock the creativity and engagement Wes so often champions. Twelve years of schooliness seems to have beaten the desire to learn - the pleasure of learning - completely out of most seniors. It seems to me now that, if we're going to feed fires for learning, we have to do it before they're snuffed out. And that means, to be clear, focus on school reform in primary and middle years.
It is so easy to fill a child's life with activities that leave no time for the being, reflecting, exploring and wondering that Burell writes about. Yesterday, when I booted my 8 year old of the computer she proceeded to wail at me, "But what can I do? Tell me what to do! I don't know what to do!" Eventually I found her engaged in a quite story-making game of her own, gently singing and talking to herself.
I love to watch my 5 year old daughter dance through the house with a doll, creating an elaborate story that is invariably a reflection of what she has recently seen, or read, or experienced. This is her way of reflecting on and exploring what she has experienced. Invariably, when the tv goes off she begins to skip and dance around the house re-telling the story that she has just seen in her own words, making it her own.
A child's life, and certainly their education needs to include time and space for the child to be, reflect, explore, wonder, and to construct their own meaning. Through doing this, they will learn to articulate the ideas that they really care about. Through doing this they will not, hopefully, lose touch with the creative, passionate, expressive part of who they are.
"In the early years the technology people had a large voice because they were the only ones that understood the environment. And so we gave them a lot of authority. But at some stage we had to take it back again and put it into the hands of the educators."
Wikis and blogs, in particular, have made this a reality. Wikis are so simple to use, that I have had students who have never used a computer before, publish, upload images and create hyperlinks using a wiki in one semester.
I find great resistance amongst teachers, to get going with wikis, but once they do they can't believe how easy the technology is. The great thing about the technology becoming simple enough to be wholly in the hands of the teachers, as opposed to the techos, is that teachers can plan and reflect on the use of this technology to ensure that is being used to enhance learning, that its use is pedagogically sound.
Bringing technology into the classroom without the teacher re-thinking their delivery of education is tokenism. I am amazed when I look around at the way that wikis are being used in education and see so little collaboration going on in the wiki. Mostly, wikis are being used as a repository for course notes. Look at the recent changes and you will see that most education wikis are only edited by one person. What's collaborative about that?
Technology is in the hands of the teachers. Let's see them do something with it that is inspiring and that is good teaching practice for the 21st century.
University of Melbourne lecturer David Gurr, who works in the university's Department of Education Policy and Management, Faculty of Education, says that anyone talking about the future of education is talking about personalised learning. (Herald Sun, 15/7/07 http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21063319-5011683,00.html)
What if every student had a personal wiki, where they could build a history of their education and their interests over their lifetime, that was given to them when they started school at age 5? To begin with pieces of work would be scanned into their space, but as they got older the wiki would evolve, including various projects and pieces of work, with certain pages made private and others public.
Throughout school, students could collaborate with other students, linking to each other's work, sharing ideas and sources. The collaboration would not be restricted by geographical boundaries. Students would find others who share their interests via social networking sites and groups, so that even students with the most obscure interests need not feel isolated but could connect with other like-minded learners and develop relationships while exploring and growing their understanding with others. Under the current model, a student who develops an interest in something unusual might feel 'weird' and not have the opportunity to explore the interest with others. However, when students start hooking up with others through social networking sites to collaborate and learn together, information sharing will explode. For example, a student interested in the Edo period in Japanese history finds others with this interest (around the globe) and they link in to each others wiki pages on Edo. They proceed to discussing each-others content and links and perhaps move on to trying to discover something together. Imagine the collaboration and learning and discoveries that have become possible.
The individual's wiki would be a social networking tool, with certain parts of their space selectively disclosed to different people with whom they share interests. Upon joining a social networking group, one could list their relevant wiki page as a contribution to the group's shared knowledge.
Imagine what the wiki would look like after 12 years of education. What a treasure for an individual to continue to build beyond school years as a life-long learner.
In today's Sydney Morning Herald, there is a story about universities using more testing to chose their students: "Students Face More Tests to Get Into Uni" by Harriet Alexander and Anna Patty. In this article it says that
"The five technology universities have also offered prospective engineering students the option of sitting a supplementary test that will assess their ability to think scientifically, display personal skills and analyse problems.
Industry had been calling on the technology universities to produce candidates with better communication and interpersonal skills, the lack of which had forced companies to recruit from overseas, said Vicki Thomson, director of the Australian Technology Network."
I have just been looking at a project called 'Literacy Matters', published in 1997 by Christine Ingleton and Barbara Wake.
The four most enduring concerns staff express about students' inability to communicate effectively are:
students are frequently unable to interpret critically and evaluate subject material
they are often unable to write according to the logic of the subject
they are often unable to give an oral presentation based on their own analysis of the content
as a result, many students resort to plagiarising information
I am so bothered and concerned that our young people are not learning the thinking and communication skills that they need.
We have some good technology tools available to us now to help them to learn these skills, but it takes more then these tools. Teachers need to start teaching differently.
I am very interested in PBL as an alternative approach to teaching. What do other educators think of PBL?
Today I was fortunate to attend the Teacher's Federation Health Week Conference where I heard Ian Hickie speak about mental health. It was a disturbing talk, highlighting the enormity of the mental health problem in Australia. Over 2 million Australians a year suffer from mental health problems.
Hickie said that when it comes to education, "social function is what we're principally about." We want to give our students the tools to be able participate socially and economically in our community.
He also mentioned that "interpersonal interactions are the most complex and challenging cognitive task that we face."
Makes me think, again, how important it is that students are given opportunities to develop these skills within the educational context, and how perfectly collaborative task-based learning lends itself to the the development of these skills.
I have been thinking about how social media must be used as much more than just a different platform for the delivery of education. Teachers need to think of open-ended tasks. Start with a problem and give the students an opportunity to develop their problem-solving skills. Give the students the space to manage (at least) some of their own their learning, so that they're not always managed by adults.
Mary Mason said in 'Jousting for the New Generation' "To develop understanding a student must internalise knowledge and actively use it for it to grow."
Give students the opportunity to problem-solve, to collaborate with others and develop social skills, to have the space and the opportunities in their education to learn what works in interpersonal interactions, to learn to trust others and to enjoy working with a diverse group of people.
AC Nielsen research (1999) cited in 'Jousting' found that employers seek:
Do the work practices in companies reflect this idea yet? Are companies using bottom-up processes and working collaboratively?
Some people are great collaborators, but others lack the skills needed to collaborate effectively with others and need to be taught.
I love the ideas used for the Cafe Conversations meeting style. Some people really need guidance in how to give other people voice space. www.conversationcafe.org
Exploring the Conversation Café
One of the ways highly effective communication can be achieved in a team is through deep dialogue. It is common for organizations and teams to discover that although they thought themselves to be good at communication, they were, in fact, only utilizing a small portion of their potential in this area. Conversation Cafés adapt two ancient traditions: the talking-stick circle and deep dialogue. The talking stick ensures that only one person talks at a time and deep dialogue provides the opportunity for participants to speak to their own truth in meaningful ways. Dialogue also creates an environment that enables those involved to think together about a topic.
Prior to running the conversation café process, it is important to have an orienting question that people speak to as a catalyst for the conversation. An example for a team involved in providing customer service might be "What would it take for us to be able to surprise and delight our customers?"
NOTE: At least 50 minutes should be allowed for the process. It helps to have someone to volunteer as facilitator to keep a gentle eye on the process. Also it is useful to have someone acting as a recorder for the conversation, keeping track of the themes that emerge. Both of these roles should not prevent the volunteers from participating fully in the conversation.
Step 1:
The facilitator begins the session by reading out the six Agreements - six principles common to most dialogue and conversation cafés.
• Suspend judgment as best you can.
• Respect one another.
• Seek to understand rather than persuade.
• Invite and honor diversity of opinion.
• Speak what has personal heart and meaning.
• Go for honesty and depth without going on and on.
Step 2:
A simple process: A "talking stick" (any object that has been designated for the task) is passed around the group in a clockwise or counter-clockwise fashion. Only the person holding the talking stick may talk. Once they have finished they hand it to the person next to them. Two rounds of speaking without interruption introduce a quality of listening and reflecting that opens people to themselves and one another. People can pass if they like. They can be silent as their way of speaking. Then a lively conversation happens, keeping in mind the agreements to inquire rather than assert and debate. At the end, a final "talking stick" round anchors for each participant the gems they are taking away.
Step 3:
At the end of the session participants are asked to reflect on the process they have just experienced and share their thoughts. They are also asked to comment upon anything that emerged in the conversation which surprised them.
Special thanks to those at conversation café for their kind permission to use this guideline for the conversation café process. (www.conversationcafe.org)
Yesterday I went to DET's Connected Learning Conference to run a workshop with Tony Whittingham on using Wikis for teaching and learning. The wiki that we created for the workshop is [csofchange.sydneyinstitute.wikispaces.net]
Here are some quotes that I used to begin our workshop:
"Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It's the wrong tool for the times." Bill Gates, 2005 (cited in 'Jousting for The New Generation', David Loader 2007)
"We have a new generation of students, with new digital skills and a different mind set....... We have new needs from our knowledge society." (Loader, 2007) (Emphasis my own).
What does our knowledge society want from graduates?
I asked wiki consultant James Matheson "As one working with industry who are investing in using collaborative technology to improve their work practices, what skills do you think people should be developing in their education to help them work better in the workforce?"
"People need to understand how to work in an on-line culture; How to be effective in an on-line culture; They need to get experience being a part of an on-line community, seeing what kind of community works and what doesn't, and what kind of behaviour works in those communities."
A wiki is an easy-to-use on-line collaboration tool that can be used to give students this kind of experience, working in an on-line community and developing collaboration skills.
The first Keynote speaker was Bruce Dixon from Anywhere, Anytime Learning Foundation. He strolled around the stage Al Gore-style, and it's a pity no one thought to turn the spotlight off and the other lights up so that we could see his face properly. However, it was worth straining to look at him as he drifted in and out of the spotlight for an hour, because the content of his talk was great:
Content is so abundant, it's a poor foundation for learning. "If we can google it, should we teach it?"
Dixon sited the Top 5 New-Hire Skills. The top one was communication skills, and teamwork skills was amongst the Top 5.
The skills that Dixon identified as being the most critical in the 21st century included analytic thinking, problem solving, effective communicating, effective collaborating, IT and media literacy.
Teachers should be providing opportunities for students to learn how to collaborate. Collaboration is a new literacy. There's a lot to understanding how we can best get people to collaborate. We need to. The world is becoming flat. We now have a network of people collaborating in flat structures, connected all around the world. Communications have become the great leveler. Hierarchies take too long to make decisions and don't involve enough collective expertise.
The new era is one of "many-ness" and instability. How do we prepare our students for coping in an uncertain future? Success used to involve working out what you were good at and getting educated in how to do that well. Now, success is being able to do well what you weren't taught to do.
One of Dixon's good suggestions: schools need to employ a technology coach for their teachers.
The other Keynote speaker who I really enjoyed listening to was Jonathan Nicholas from Inspire Foundation.
Nicholas talked about where young people are at with their use of technology, about how they are not content to be passive consumers of content, they want to create the content. This is why the gaming industry now earns more than Hollywood. He showed how Inspire Foundation is using the interests of young people, such as gaming and content creation, to capture their attention and to engage them in learning that will strengthen their mental health. He suggests that instead of shying away from these technologies, we need to figure out how we can use them safely and use them to engage students.
He talked about the need for education systems to educated children with high skills and an optimistic outlook. "Those that succeed best will be those that are happy."
"To compete in new economies, people will need to:
