Nov
28
Fogyism: Old, New and Educational
Filed Under Big Data, Blog, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Forgive the fury of a man typing while lying on his back. This is the first outing of this mind since an operation on my spine to correct a slipped disc. As in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the recovering patient could well be a cockroach, and may be better off as one in a country whose school minister lauds a deeply undistinguished contribution to the debate on improving educational standards from Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment (http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/181744-why-textbooks-count-tim-oates.pdf). A key argument here is that the absence of “approved” textbooks has diminished UK performance, compared with educational superpowers like Finland and Singapore. Mr Oates makes it clear that his romantic preference is for paper-based resources, and that his attachments are to the world of Nuffield Science and Scottish Maths (SMP), foundation and government funded projects of the 1970s in the UK. British teachers are using too wide a diversity of methods, use their own materials and exchange materials between themselves in ways that make for an undisciplined approach to gaining the outcomes desired by Mr Oakes high stakes testing and the Ministers’ national aspiration for PISA performance.
We have to put up with a lot of this Old and New Fogyism in the UK. I was an educational textbook publisher myself in the 1970s, when the champion of the art of facing backward while walking forward was Sir Rhodes Boyson, then headmaster of Highbury Grove Comprehensive in North London, and later himself a Conservative Party Schools Minister no more effective than his current successors. I wrote to him and visited the school. He explained how the re-introduction of Latin and Greek, as well as demanding that academic staff wear their gowns while teaching, were instrumental in bringing back traditional British public school (private sector) values to public sector schools like this one.After lunch one-on-one in his private dining room I was invited to tour the school with a prefect. Sadly the Latin class had only two pupils, and no one at all showed up for Greek, but I did find myself eventually in the Craft and Design centre. Here, unmentioned by my host, was a powerhouse. Working with the London jewellery markets, a brilliant teacher had created a pupil driven skill development programme which resulted in outwork and, for many, apprenticeships in the jewellery companies, who, alongside grateful parents, had endowed the school handsomely with the resources needed to do the job. The Craft teacher had been there long before his headmaster and did not relish fame: he was committed to education, and to getting his kids what they needed to be successful in life. And as a publisher I was committed to identifying good practice and spreading it around. So we shook on a publishing deal that afternoon and the four book series published as a result was very successful.
So these things are seldom what they seem to be. While mulling on these issues I heard an earlier occupier of the education ministry in the current government, Michael Gove, telling the media what he had done to improve Britain’s teaching stock. Do you realise, he said, that one in eight teachers have a first class degree and over a third have a two: one, and it is getting better every year? And it is this better-qualified workforce who are to be given a standardised, government- approved textbook by Mr Oates? Amazingly, neither Mr Oates nor Mr Gove dwelt on the critical bedevillment factor that needs to be considered before we begin to think about reintroducing paper textbooks. Class size. Pressure on UK state schools is now such that the numbers of students in class is rising, not falling. The inability to cover all bases means that, using traditional methods, it is difficult for the very best qualified teachers to do more than work on the brightest and the most troubled, because these are the noisiest and the most problematical. In the middle of a class of 35 an average pupil can sleep for five years, unchallenged and under-extended. The textbook is the proven route to making this happen.
So what to do? I was delighted to see both the British Equipment Supplies Association and the Publishers Association come out against the Oates paper. They are rightly afraid of any diminution of the traditional right of teachers in the UK to have unfettered freedom of choice in the selection of materials that they use to secure the outcomes that they were employed to achieve. The Oates paper is fragile. It generalises from science and maths to the whole curriculum. Its prejudice against screen-based learning as anything but a support mechanism is palpable. The publishing community is right to condemn it, but urgently needs to go beyond it by abolishing some of its own Fogyism. Let’s make a bonfire of blended learning and all those other halfway houses where we have sought to slowly introduce change at a pace that we think teachers (or ourselves?) can manage. Now is the time for full blooded screen based personalised learning. We have to teach individuals, not classes. The teaching role, as mentor and organized, is vital, but learners must learn at their own speed.we are not educating people for a world of print anymore. We have to raise a generation of collaborative, problem solving screen-based workers capable, as change grows more rapid, of continuous and self-learning. Mr Oates, the Minister, the trade bodies and everyone else should really be asking where the partnerships are between Britain’s great publishers, world-leading software players, educational data analytics specialists, educational institutions and high quality teachers who are going to sort this out. At the moment we see a competition of domestic minnows each trying to live in a version of their own past. We are in danger of letting down a generation of learners.
Sep
20
Elite – Or Just Smug?
Filed Under Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
We all do it. Give me a platform, and I can be as arrogant as the next man. Tell me I am an expert, and ten minutes later I am telling you what to do. This is a harmless facet of most conferences, but in meetings about education it has a particularly nasty side effect. We are not just harmlessly telling our fellow professionals what to do, but prescribing remedial medicine in the only place that can save our world – the education of our children. Before starting a speech in this area we need to take a long drink of Essence of Humility!
Perhaps limping along on a stick with a bad back proved a levelling experience, but I found at the opening day agenda of the ELIG (European Learning Industry Group) Annual Conference in London on Thursday a level of smugness which might have typified the English at their arrogant worst, but which was unexpected in an international body combining expertise from across the entire continent. This was certainly untypical of their meetings: I have supported them from their foundation 12 years ago since I believe strongly that all components of the education industry need to sit together and talk. The nature of a networked society means exchange of roles and consolidation of different supply chains, so the more voices we have around the table the better the outcomes for the eventual beneficiaries – the learners – upon whom all our futures depend. And I shall continue advocacy for ELIG despite this meeting, in the hope that we get things better over the next decade.
It might have been the opening speaker who set the unfortunate tone. Adrian Wooldridge, Management Editor at the Economist, is a very considerable expert himself, as a journalist and commentator. As one of those speakers who keynote from the “I am not actually an expert in education myself but here is my plain man’s view of what has gone wrong and what we should put right…” viewpoint, he tended to sound more like an under-briefed politician than like someone with an illuminating angle of expertise. His theme, that the role of the teacher is sacrosanct and effective education can be aided by machines but always depends eventually upon what can be passed from a human teacher to a learner, may, as he said, have been formed by his own experience at Balliol and All Souls. But, he said, while his own university had only been founded in the eleventh century, the true model for education was Plato and Aristotle.
What the delegates from Pearson or IBM or Intel or several younger European universities in the audience made of this I could not tell. But it does not hold out much hope in a world where teaching is not a one on one or one on two tutorial experience. It sounds vaguely insulting in a country where classroom sizes now move firmly back over 30 as a result of cutbacks. And it sounds hugely arrogant in a world where the only hope that many will have of any form of educational achievement will be on a digital network.
But it could have been the following speaker, Chris Dede, Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard, who confirmed the tone. No one listening could have doubted the level of expertise here. Professor Dede speaks with massive authority in his field and produced useful illumination on a whole range of issues. But, as a Professor at Harvard, he knows only too well that we have got everything wrong, that no one has ever acted on the evidence that he and his peers have produced, and that no one ever will. So much of the experimentation with new forms is mostly misguided and eventually doomed to failure – and MOOCs are a classic example of this. Shortly afterwards he was joined by a panel of policy makers and entrepreneurs, and reverted to this critical line. How could it be, they agreed, exchanging smug smiles of superior wisdom, that no one had noted that this business model was a failure? How could it be, they lamented, that so much money had been invested and spent on such chancy, get-rich-quick adventures in education?
As the panel turned into a bonding exercise for a group who knew what policies should be adopted and how the world might be better organized and regulated for the education of the unwashed masses, I began to reflect on how far we had strayed – in this conference room and in the industry at large – from the real nature of education in a networked society. We – the experts, the professors, the journalists, the regulators, the businessmen – are still trying to prescribe, to push onto the learner the shape and structure of learning. Yet we have always known that learning is something you pull towards you. Secretly we all know that we learn best what we want to learn, that curricula and examinations are less effective than desire and learning hunger. And we also know that much of our most effective learning is acquired from fellow-learners – it is a deeply collaborative process.
In a networked society, for the first time in history, pull is stronger than push in education. What is remarkable about MOOCs is not failing business models – it is the millions and millions of people who signed up all over the world, and are still doing so, and will continue to do so until we can satisfy them more effectively with better learning experiences. And whether the experience contains video, powerpoint, remote group collaboration, scarce live teacher resources online or anything else is not important at all. The network is not only pull-dominated, but it is, in its very nature, iterative. MOOCs are version 1.1: before ELIG meets again, they will have re-iterated and changed. The joy of the world we are now moving into is that it is deeply user – sensitive, and success comes to those who tweak and change in ways that users recognize as beneficial – to them. So come on, Professors of Education and influential, opinion forming Journalists, join us in the networked self-educating society! But there I am, prescribing for others again. I just hope they encounter a MOOC one day that makes all these things clear.
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