Fortnightly Mailing

Critical success factors: CPD for teachers in using technologies for teaching and learning

Another first-rate post from Graham Attewell, this time reporting on research he has been doing with Jenny Hughes into models and practices in CPD for teachers in using technologies for teaching and learning. Areas covered:

• Peer learning / skill sharing
• Small group learning
• Informal learning more important than formal courses
• Clear links between CPD and practice
• A sound pedagogic base and reflexivity
• Leadership
• Working with newly qualified and trainee teachers
• Ownership of equipment
• Time useage a.k.a no time wasting
• Involvement of non-teaching staff
• Use of mentors or learning coaches
• Observation of practice
• Networks and communities of practice
• The use of E-portfolios as a tool in ICT CPD

Comment: in many respects this list could be applied to many workplace learning needs, and to many different roles.

CSR - converting cheap public debt into expensive private debt?

I've been thinking about the debt transfer that cuts in public spending will produce.

Those whose income is reduced by the cuts - for example public sector workers made redundant, unemployed people whose benefits are cut, businesses who supply the public sector, or higher rate tax payers whose child benefit is removed - will surely increase their own indebtedness, at least in the short term.

If they do this by borrowing at high rates of interest (through credit cards, loan companies, loan sharks, increasing their mortages, say) then the CSR transfers debt burden from (cheap) Government borrowing to (more expensive) personal borrowing.

Obviously (?) there isn't a one-to-one match between the reduction in Government debt and the consequent increase in private debt: I guess the latter might be larger than the former.

But given the disparity between the interest rates on the two kinds of debt what will be the net effect of the CSR on the total servicing costs of public and private debt?

Foundations for a New Science of Learning

Foundations for a New Science of Learning by Andrew Meltzoff, Patricia Kuhl, Javier Movellan, and Terrence Sejnowski provides an interesting overview of current research findings. Abstract:

Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared to other species. Humans are also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior, and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.

In praise of praise (and Local Authorities) on the day of the Comprehensive Spending Review

A

Sent: 20 October 2010 14:08
To: StreetForce
From: Seb Schmoller
Subject: A plaudit

Please thank whoever has caused the pavements of Albert Road to be blown clear of leaves. To my knowledge this is the first time that this action has ever been taken. Previously a small council sweeping machine struggled to do only the road but not the pavements. This year a guy with a blower walked up the street, with a large hired in lorry collecting the leaves. Good stuff.

B

Sent: 20 October 2010 14:56
To: Seb Schmoller
From: John Charlton
Director of Street Force, Sheffield City Council
Subject: A plaudit

Thank you very much for your recent email regarding leaf clearance, it was much appreciated and good of you to write. I will arrange for the people involved to receive a copy of your email so they can read it for themselves. People are very quick to complain when things go wrong and I wish there were more like you who write giving praise when it is due. Once again, thank you very much for taking the trouble to write, it is much appreciated. Kind regards.

 

Evidence-based policy in education?

The University of York maintains this Best Evidence Encylopaedia UK. Largely schools focused,  BEE "reflects an original US version which was created by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Data-Driven Reform in Education (CDDRE) with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education".  The site is "intended to give educators, policy-makers, and researchers fair and useful information about the strength of evidence supporting a variety of programmes available for pupils of both primary and secondary school-age".

The rate at which latest updates are being added is very low, and the site has a disappointingly untended feel. I would be very happy to be corrected.

Sponsorship needed: biking for Barnsley Hospice

Page updated on 4 October

On 3 October I rode in the Brompton World Championships at Blenheim Palace in one of two teams raising money for Barnsley Hospice. We got a result, being the fastest team of three veterans. Go here if you would like to sponsor us, and thanks to several readers who've already done so.

Handlebar view, with the sounds of suffering, from the 2008 race.

Jaron Lanier asks "How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education?"

NB - Post from October 2010 - scroll down for much more recent stuff.

Earlier this year I read and greatly enjoyed Jaron Lanier's enigmatic You are not a gadget - a manifesto. , which gets to the heart of why I sometimes feel uncomfortable about the way the Web is going, and which challenges ideas that I hold dear about it (in particularly in relation to open content). Lanier himself puts it this way "The book is centered on the philosophy of consciousness, the nature of science in the proximity of big computation, recent musical culture, and other topics that all connect to the nature of network-age personhood. I think the book is actually about what might best be called "spirituality". See also this February 2010 interview with the Observer's Aleks Krotoski.

Just now, while writing a comment on Clive Shepherd's post about Nicholas Carr's interesting but annoying "The Shallows", I came across Does the digital classroom enfeeble the mind? a recent New York Times piece by Lanier.

To put Lanier's striking question in context here is an excerpt from the NYT piece, though the former is no substitute for Lanier's "You are not gadget", which anyone striving to be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education should make a point of reading.

A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviours start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent.

This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic.

Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to.

And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.

How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education — in the broadest sense — does what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer non-genetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.

Now we have information machines. The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgement of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.