With Thanks To …

My thanks go to Mary-Kay Goindi (twitter: @MaryKayG) and Tom Whitby (Ning: http://edupln.ning.com , twitter : @tomwhitby) for prompting this post.

The exchange of tweets that led to this post is:

Initial Thoughts

For me, learning is founded on the nature of our perceptions of the world, and how we come to acquire those perceptions. Our perceptions and our motives govern how we behave in the world. This in turn impacts on how we learn.

Knowledge

Knowledge, or “things that I know”: Some knowledge concerns long-term things (“If I drop a brick on my toe, it will hurt”), while other knowledge is fleeting (“That glass is full on orange juice” – at the moment). They are facts.

Competence

The word “competence” is used here in its educational sense, in that somebody’s response to something can be described as:

• can recognise …
• can describe …
• can explain …
• can develop …

which reflect varying amounts of knowledge about the subject. In this sense, somebody receives a stimulus, compares it with what they already know, and respond accordingly. To be able to do this, the individual must have learned something (even if it is only what it looks/feels/sounds/tastes like) and be remembering that.

Gaining Understanding

It is perhaps a fine distinction, but for me a fact is only useful to me if it has relevance to my life. By transforming knowledge into understanding, I can act on it.

Part of my learning comes from being presented with things to learn about. This includes things like numbers, and I am numerate as a result. I was taught French three separate times: it was not until I spent some time in France that I really started learning French.

Another part of my learning comes from puzzling out the answer to something. This is in a sense where my teacher has withheld the answer from me, but is nevertheless in a position to verify my answer when I have the “Aha!” moment. That I have found an answer myself means that I am more likely to remember it.

Da Capo

The more I look at MaryKayG’s initial tweet, the less I think I understand what she was saying, but I am grateful to her for making me think!

Motive

My motive for this post is to share with other ESL teachers what I learned from teaching a group of Arabic-speaking learners.

Classroom Observations

Work with the monolingual group experienced all the usual risks and benefits of them being monolingual. I won’t bore you with repeating the details, as I expect that you are already well-acquainted with them. All the other things that you would expect with an Intermediate class were also present: wrong tenses, single/plural agreement, etc.

What struck me was the use of electronic dictionaries to “translate” large amounts of text from Arabic into English. This highlighted a number of issues, explored below.

Mis-translation

By way of example, consider the words “resist” and “overcome”. While their meaning are similar, they are not identical, and can lead to an apparent nonsense: “to resist problems” where the author clearly meant “to overcome problems”.

Understanding

Translation from a second language into one’s own language using an automatic translator strikes me as being a valid use of such translators. Being master of one’s own tongue means that identification of translational goofs is easy, and can sometimes be a cause for amusement.

However, using such a translator to go in the other direction is fraught with dangers, and I much prefer to get a native speaker of the second language to verify the translation before I go public. I, and quite clearly my students, cannot recognise when the automatic translator gets it wrong.

Long Sentences

At this point, I am unsure about how sentences are commonly structured in Arabic. They may be long, short, or mixed by convention. What I have seen (in the two written submissions to date) is that writers have been putting long sentences (in Arabic) through the automatic translators, and producing equally long sentences whose meaning is quite impenetrable in English.

Next Steps

My immediate next step will be to encourage the learners to use much shorter sentences when they enter text into their translators. I see this as a stepping-stone to my own understanding of what they want to say, and I can then help them to understand the meanings and connotations of new words.

As see this as a pathway for these students to increase their own command of that most infernal of languages: English.

With Thanks To …

My thanks go to Mark Weston (web site: http://www.linkedin.com/in/westonmark, twitter @ShiftParadigm) for prompting this post.

His original tweet was “RT@djmath Teaching is not rocket science. It is…far more complex, demanding work than rocket sci. Richard Elmore, Harvard via @kdwashburn“, and it made me ponder my own practice as a teacher. He then went on to observe “@philhart Ha! Perhaps simple, elegant rules and actions reflecting deep understanding…“. Yikes, thinks I: “Am I that transparent?”.

My Own Approach

Goals

For me, my job is to escort each learner to whatever is their learning goal.

Educational System

Learning goals can be made explicit, as in for example Units of Competency under the Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF). For me, the contextualisation of such documents into the learner’s own reality is simple, and at times feels to be merely clerical.

Delivery

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step” (Chinese proverb). Equally, eating an elephant is best done with small mouthfuls. I carve up the contents of the learning into sizes to suit my learners’ mouths.

Assessment

This is easier in some subjects than others, e.g Maths compared with English, but it still comes down to comparing student product with the learning outcomes specified in the relevant document. If no such document exists, then I am free to write my own.

Classroom Dynamic

The classroom dynamic is just about people sharing a common purpose. I try to make it enjoyable (I find that it aids the learning process), and for the life of me I cannot see why we should not all be enjoying ourselves in the process.

Mixing These Ingredients Together

It is the classroom dynamic, judging how everybody feels at the moment, that sets the agenda on a second-by-second basis.

Introduction

This post is a personal reflection on the way that learning seems to have changed since I was a child, and focuses on the impact that Web 2.0 has had on the way I learn.

Schooling, Old Style

As a child, my school experiences were typical of the time. I see today’s children also having those same experiences. As a teacher, I have unconciously carried some of those childhood learning experiences into my practice today. Upon reflection, I think that most of them are still valid.

Having said that, while those practices may have sufficient by themselves some decades ago, I believe that modern teaching practice must take into account the new ways that learners can access knowledge. Failure to do so is to handicap today’s learners.

The Days of Books

Part of my learning included how to access information. Those of us of a certain vintage may well remember the importance of the Dewey Decimal system as a meaning of locating learning resources. To any librarian, that system must still be an invaluable tool.

The Oxford English Dictionary is available in hardback, all 20 volumes of it, for a mere $995 (US). It is also over a decade old. The Encyclopædia Britannica can be had in 32 volumes for around $2,000 (US), and it is next year’s edition.

The Development of Access to Information

Search engines have saved me a lot of time and effort. It means that I have learned about, and used, things of which I would otherwise have remained ignorant. This is access to information prepared by others in anticipation of questions being asked by people like me.

Personal Learning Networks (PLN) have vastly extended the number of people of whom I can ask questions. Before things like Twitter took off, I was reliant on asking questions of people whom I had met in person. Now, when I ask a question, I can receive answers responding directly and immediately to my question, and this from hundreds of people. No author has had to anticipate my question, and the people who respond inevitably add their own touches of personality to the answers.

Like all new technologies, there are dangers as well as benefits. One of the chief dangers in this context is misinformation. I have seen answers that are so far away from what is accepted by specialists in their field that those answers are potentially lethal to anybody who acts on them. In this case, the resource can be used as its own antidote: by doing a reasonably thorough investigation, it is possible to identify information that is well researched and has a good foundation in academia.

Impact on Teaching and Learning

I expect that there are already some forward-thinking schools and colleges that are already taking full advantage of these relatively new ways of accessing information. From my own perspective, I have not seen institutions around here that do so, nor have I seen anything that suggests this as a mainstream approach to learning in any of the curriculum documents that I have seen in this country.

I know that there are some dedicated individuals individuals world-wide (and in this country as well) who recognise the value of learning by these methods, yet their efforts are being resisted by backward thinking educational and political systems. We need to get this message out to the wider community, and reach the point where all parents demand this as a right for their children.

My Thanks …

My thanks go to Chad Sansing (web site: http://classroots.org, twitter: @chadsansing ) for prompting this post.

His tweet was “what would make school relevant? what would happen school divs were portflios? what if we standardized authenticity?”

For people less acquainted with school divisions (like me!) he went on to explain “what if schl systems purposefully ran schools w/ unique missions/specialties instead of trying to make each the same“.

Hence this post.

The comments are below are cast in the light of my understand of typical Western countries, as I imagine was the background to Chad’s original questions.

Learners are all Different

It strikes me that there is a dichotomy between serving the needs of the individual leaner and society’s expectations of equality of opportunity, and that while this dichotomy has been stated for over two decades, there has been pitifully little progress during that time in resolving it.

An Historical Perspective

The 1944 Butler Education Act in the United Kingdom (Education Act 1944 http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Tripartite_System_-_History/id/5544953) resulted in education becoming fragmented along social lines (http://www.jstor.org/pss/2264397). I have yet to see any evidence that such fragmentation has been eliminated or even reduced.

Schools of Excellence

I am aware of a number of schools in the UK that specialise in certain academic areas. By way of example, Kettering Grammar School was for a while internationally famous for its work in tracking satellites (http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/getstart/oldcyts.htm).

A Tricky Path

In an ideal world with unlimited resources, each person’s education would be provided in a way exactly tailored to that person. (I nearly wrote “… each child’s …”, as that where perhaps the bulk of education happened in my own childhood, but this is nothing like so true today.) However, the best that we can achieve in a practical sense is to deliver the best learning possible with the resources that we have available.

The matter is complicated by the existence of state schools and private schools. The tensions that are created by this split in schooling are perhaps inevitable; any further comment on that point is beyond the scope of this post.

I believe that there is merit in schools offering different balances of subjects to their students, this catering for different needs and ambitions. Having said that, there needs to be a minimum levels of skills (often confused with qualifications) possessed by every school leaver. The manner of how to achieve that is a hot debate both in the USA and the UK. (I would classify those skills as literacy, numeracy, and e-knowhow.)

The UK has a set of national standards that apply to all school leavers. There is some movement there to the International Baccalaureat as an alternative standard. These standards include a moderation process to ensure uniformity and consistency of marking. When I came to Western Australia, I was astonished to find that such moderation processes were not used even at the state level, let alone the national level. I commend such processes to everywhere that lacks them.

My Thanks …

My thanks go to Tomaz Lasic (blog: http://human.edublogs.org , twitter: http://twitter.com/lasic) for prompting this post.

“I Have Had Kids Tell Me …”

Tomaz’s original tweet was “I’ve had kids tell me I suck as teacher because ‘I don’t teach them anything’ (i.e. tell them the ‘right’ answer). Think sunshine!” which set me to thinking very hard about my own style of teaching.

My Own Teaching Experience

I was perhaps extremely fortunate in my early teaching experiences (both voluntary and professional) in that the students were always motivated, and I unconsciously expected them to think about whatever it was they were learning about. I was also extremely comfortable with those students challenging my own thinking processes, and saying to me, in effect, “Justify your statement!”. It came as something of a shock some years later to start working with youth-at-risk and those not as blessed with cognitive powers as their peers.

I found that if even there is the smallest desire to learn, I can harness that spark, and help the student to achieve. (I regard myself as a resource to be utilised to help students achieve. If the student repeatedly and consistently refuses to work, then I cannot bring myself to waste myself as a resource on them while there are others in the class who I know will benefit from my efforts.)

“Think, Sunshine!”

Do I encourage my students to think? You bet I do! Having said that, my expectations of the level of thinking is predicated my assessment of their cognitive powers. (As an aside, I have not observed any correlation between cognitive powers and a desire to learn.) So for somebody who is working at Certificate IV level, I expect them to be able to think at a high level of abstraction; after all, they need to be able to do that for any Certificate IV qualification. At the other end of the cognitive spectrum, I still expect them to think in response to very simple questions, such as “What would you feel about [going there to have a holiday]?”

Your Thoughts

Is encouraging students to think good, bad or irrelevant? Do you have any other thoughts on this issue? I invite to share your thoughts in the comments below.

OR: Memories of being a Computer Numbskull

The title of this post was chosen as a reminder to myself of the impact of information technology on my own reality in perhaps much the same way as it may have just had upon you, dear reader. It was this: “What on earth is going on?”

Having been in this game for over 3 decades, now seems like a good time to dust off those memories and see how thay might apply to today’s educators who feel less than comfortable with today’s available (information) technologies.

Da Capo

As an undergraduate, I felt swamped by the amount of information that I came across. Even a decade later, I came across DOS file extensions (.doc, .ppt, .exe for example) and wondered what thay all meant. (Fast forward to the present day: I now take all these things as “small change, or common currency”, and I keep having to remind myself that this familiarity is perhaps nothing like as common as I might like to believe. But more of this later.)

An Analysis

Refecting on my own journey of learning, one of the things that strikes me is how I have been able to reduce the cacophony of information into a small, and hence intellectually manageable, number of concepts. But even learning about those concepts in the absence of a suitable guide was quite a struggle. The aim of this post is to suggest to fellow trainers those ideas and concepts which they may think it is most beneficial for their students to use as stepping stones their own IT Nirvana.

Assumptions About Context

In the remainder of this post, I assume that people are comfortable with using “hardware”: screen, keyboard, mouse, CD/DVD, and possibly a USB storage device, and that your target audience is fellow educators. As such, I do not go any further into this area.

Basic Concepts

For me, (and excluding hardware) there are four basic concepts that underlie everything:

1. People
2. Data (e.g. MS-Word documents)
3. Applications (a.k.a. “software”)
4. Communications (e.g. connection to an ISP)

Everything else amounts to detail: the four concepts above provide some sort of context, and hence opportunity to understand, what is going on. To give an example by using an analogy, the difference between Windows and Linux could be likened to the difference between a petrol engine and a diesel engine in a car: they both move the car, they just use different fuel. (The technological differences on both sides of the analogy also hold true when you go into the details of these four technologies.)

Motivation

My own motivation for what I learned was a drive to understand the technology so that I could use it in the workplace. Leaving aside teachers who simply refuse to learn about Web 2.0 technologies, the question is how to present the concepts of Web 2.0 in the most digestible fashion.

What and How to Teach?

I can only offer what I would teach and how I would teach it in this context. I offer this “solution” as a starting point for formulating your own ideas.

To start with, I describe the basic concepts listed above in terms that the learners can understand – I contextualise those concepts into the students’ own lives. For example, people still write letters (“data”, stored in “files”) using pen and ink (“hardware”). Corrections to electronic letters are much easier: “software” deletion is easier mechanically than using a physical eraser. Sending the letter can be physical (ask your local post office) or electronic (“communications” using e.g. wires).

Eating an elephant is best done one mouthful at a time. Introducing little bits of technology that are relevant to the learner’s needs at the time is a successful approach. Being wholly selfish, if I was now to learn what I now know, I would want to know how each of those mouthfuls fitted into the four basic concepts above.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Tom Whitby (Twitter: @tomwhitby) and Shelly Terrell (http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/ , Twitter: @ShellTerrell) for prompting me to write this post, and to Di Bédard (http://learning-commons.blogspot.com/ , Twitter: @windsordi) for providing the French translation.

Introduction

The twittersphere is buzzing with how to use Web 2.0 in places of learning. I nearly wrote “in the classroom”, and that is perhaps symptomatic of this issue in educational institutions today. “A place of learning” was once synonymous with an educational institution, but this is manifestly untrue today. I justify this assertion later in this post.

About the Author

I started my career as an  information technologist, and I am still very active in that area today. Since 1997, I have also been an educator. I am perhaps extremely lucky in being totally at ease with information technology, and its use in places of learning (in its widest possible interpretation) are manifestly obvious to me. What has also become obvious to me is that many educational institutions are finding harnessing that technology a truly daunting task.

Lexis

Astute readers will by now have noticed that I am using the phrases “places of learning” and “educational institutions” to mean very different things. For the purposes of this post, an educational institution is a school, college or university, typified by having a campus or two. A place of learning needs a more careful definition: it is wherever the learner (note: not necessarily a student) happens to engage in learning. By way of example of a place of learning, it can be a street junction where a learner has received an answer the question “Which street should I go into?”. This is an example “micro-learning”. And what do we get when we have lots of micro-learning? Answer: A curriculum-full of knowledge.

“Dinosaur” is a cipher for educational institutions that will not survive today’s earthquake in learning. “Moth” is a reference to Biston betularia, also known as the peppered moth, which is perhaps the best known example of an organism adapting to its changing surroundings.

The Landscape from Here

There are many educational institutions which have embraced Web 2.0 with a vengeance. These are the moths: they demonstrate the ability to adapt to changes in the way in which learning is happening.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are the dinosaurs. Such places may pay lip service to adapting to today’s ways of learning, but they will not survive as future mainstream educational institutions.

In between there are the institutions that are wavering. This post has been written with them in mind.

What NOT to Do

There are institutions that see their way into today’s ways of learning as merely a transcription exercise: take already existing paper-based materials, and copy them into some sort of Learning Management System (LMS). At the risk of preaching to the converted, I will mention just two of reasons why this is a disastrous approach. Firstly, it fails to capitalise on the advantages of Web 2.0 technology. Secondly, there is no vision of how learners might be learning in ten years’ time.

How to Encourage Change

For any institution to adapt successfully, it needs to embrace everybody in that institution. Just coming “from the top” is not enough if all the people at the “chalkface” (we need a better word for that, but until the English language catches up with today’s technology, it will have to serve) refuse to adapt, then the institution will not survive. Equally, if there is a groundswell of opinion that is ignored by the management team, then the instution will also die. What is needed is co-operation of leadership from all levels within the institution. If you are one of these people, then post is addressed to YOU!

Resources

I believe that the best way to help any organisation to change is to “communicate, communicate, communicate”. This perhaps leaves open the question of “What to communicate?”, and I hope that you will find at least some of the resources below useful in your labours.

Changes in the ways learners are learning (video)	http://www.innovativelearning.com/
Creativity, learning and risk-taking (video)	http://www.innovativelearning.com/teaching/index.html
Mobile learning	http://www.m-learning.org/
Revolution in access to knowledge (video)	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Changes in the way people communicate (video)	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8
University of Texas sample mobile device web pages	http://mobile.utexas.edu/
E-Learning Centre Of Excellence	http://www.melcoe.mq.edu.au/
A student’s perspective (video) (Courtesy of @teachernz http://teachernz.edublogs.org)	http://teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=25285

Please Contribute!

I know that the list of resources in the table above is extremely limited. Please do your own bit for helping fellow teachers/trainers/tutors/facilitators by adding your own resources in the comments below – others will thank you for them!

Thanks To …

My thanks go to Andrew Forgrave (@aforgrave on twitter) for his thoughtful post on the Obama Speech controversy. His post has prompted my post, which offers my own thoughts on some of the issues that he offers.

Background

Andrew’s has the advantage of coming from the USA’s next door neighbour. He is far more in tune with the feelings of the general populace than I can ever be, writing as I do from a distance of several thousand miles. I have also needed to do some research into recent publications in the USA, so I have probably missed some important strands in the current debate. My own slant is to look at that debate from the wider educational context, and this from an AussiePom background.

Some Parts of the Debate

As you might expect, the debate ranges from the thoughtful to the confused to the name-calling. Rather than trying to summarise each of those strands, I will leave you follow each of those links yourself; this avoids me imposing my own bias on those articles.

A Reason to Listen

For me, education is not just about delivering curriculum into students’ skulls. It is about developing every individual in a way that they feel is appropriate for their future adult lives. Adult life does not come neatly packaged in the manner of “curriculum, learning and assessment”. It is full of opportunities and setbacks, and I feel that as an educator I must model the behaviour of capitalising on every opportunity and overcoming every setback: I owe this to all of my students.

When I was young, my teachers sometimes grasped those extra-curricular opportunities and gave unique experiences. I did not appreciate their value at the time (after all, when you are a child, the assumption is “that is just the way the world is”) but as an adult I have benefitted from those experiences. The rest of this post is cast in that light.

The Responsibility to Educate

The heading “The Responsibility to Educate” is deliberately chosen. It is not ” … to Teach”, nor is it ” … to Deliver Learning”. It is its etymological association, “to draw out from within”, hence to empower to live a full life, which is the primary focus here.

I hold it as a self-evident statement that to deny a child an extra-curricular activity, such as listening to the leader of a country (even if it is the leader of the country in which you happen to be living), is to deny it that child the possibility of growing in that direction. We may feel that the speaker’s agenda is thoroughly odious, in which case we have need to have already given the child as much critical thinking skills as is appropriate to his/her age, even something as simple as “Do you think that what this person is saying is good or bad?”

The Tough One

There are some parents who will always reject the message contained in the previous paragraph. What then, should we as educators say to those who are open to persuasion? This is a question that you will ultimately have to answer for yourself. I offer the previous paragraph as a springboard for your own cogitations.

Postscript

Since I wrote this post, Obama has delivered his speech, with predictably mixed reactions. The BBC’s Mark Mardell puts in beautifully.

If you want to read Obama’s speech, you can get it here.