Fortnightly Mailing

Snippets from 17 September to 29 October

Egalitarian push-back from readers of the Economist in response to its "Capitalism and inequality" special report. - http://www.economist.com/news...

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Important report > "Understanding low and discontinued Internet use amongst young people in Britain" - this blog post by the authors links the the full report. Concluding para excerpted below: - http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy...

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Rereading Zhao and Frank's terrific 2003 "Factors Affecting Technology Uses in Schools: An Ecological Perspective" http://www.webcitation.org/6BgDdu1.... Related: 2006 blog post: http://fm.schmoller.net/2006...

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The Finnish school system: many jaw-dropping moments in this interview with Pasi Sahlberg by John Hattie

Via @EvaHartell I came across this 26 September 2012 interview with Pasi Sahlberg by John Hattie (author of the useful and very influential Visible Learning, himself interviewed - 28/8/2014 update - by the BBC's Sarah Montague, here) .

You would have to have been asleep in recent months to have missed the discussion about what is special about the Finnish education system, but there is a big difference between reading about it, and hearing Sahlberg's highly nuanced responses to Hattie's questions.

Particularly striking for me are the following.

1. It has taken 40 years for Finland to transform its school system.
2. Finland places a very great emphasis on preschool and primary education.
3. Parental/pupil choice about school only starts at and beyond age sixteen.
4. Pupils are given/take responsibility for their own learning rather than being "taught to the test".

Note, in particular, Sahlberg's favourable comparison of those working in pre-school and primary education with other high status, collectively run/regulated hard-to-get-into professions like law and medicine, and what Sahlberg says about the large proportion of pupils for whom expensive (but, he explains, cost effective) "special" interventions of various kinds are made at some point in their school education.

Above all, note how the policy aim of equity supported by an internal ethos that is collaborative rather than competitive is so central to the success and effectiveness of the Finnish system.

New survey report into learning technologies in FE and 6th form colleges

Source: AoC Learning Technology Survey Report, September 2012

The AoC has published a broad and interesting Learning Technology Survey report, based on responses from mainly 3rd tier managers in about one third of AoC's 294 further education and sixth form college members in England. Here is an archived copy of the report [2MB PDF].

The report would have benefited from a discussion about the extent to which responses came from large or small colleges (what proportion of the sector was actually covered by the responses?); and it struck me as being a bit too focused on specific named technologies, and disappointingly silent on, say, e-books or open educational resources, approaches to innovation, or on collaborative provision to achieve really big scale-economies.

However the report gives very useful insights into, say, the market share of different systems (VLEs - Moodle 81%, Blackboard/WebCT 15%; Student Record Systems - Tribal EBS 36%, Capita 28%, Agresso in 15%); and it contains interesting tabulations of respondents' self-assessments of, for example, how well their college is getting on with system integration, or how confident they are that their college is able to use technology to meet policy objectives such as personalisation.

If I were a college - and in a sense, as college Governor, I am one - would I want to benchmark the college against this data? The short answer is "yes, but with caution". This is because I am left with a nagging doubt about the meaning of some of the data. For example, picking up on personalisation, 81.6% of respondent colleges are "confident" or "very confident" that their college is able to use its current technology base to meet the personalisation policy objective (whatever that is). The old cynic in me thinks that hardly any colleges in the country can be doing a good job on personalisation, because it is objectively a very hard not to say nebulous thing to achieve, and that therefore if so many respondents think that their college is managing personalisation properly, there must be something wrong with their collective judgement.

But this kind of criticism is not intended to negate the considerable value of AoC's report. It deserves to be widely used, and kudos to Matt Dean and colleagues for getting it done.

Brewster Kahle and the love of books - physical and digital

Engaging six minute piece in which Alan Yentob talks to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle about the archive, and its mission to archive books as objects as well as to digitise them systematically. [No cloud based infrastructure yet for the the archive, by the look of things.]

See also this 2007 TED talk by Khale.

Regularly updated snippets, with RSS feed

I bookmark things I find using a service called FriendFeed. This page updates itself automatically with the last five items. You can subscribe to these snippets by RSS, or on Twitter; and you can review the last 30 of them here.

Udacity's approach to course improvement

Small "on re-reading this" edits almost immediately after publication.

You may have read this fierce critique of one of Udacity's courses by Daniel Collins, an experienced  and articulate community college maths teacher who will for sure appreciate at first hand the challenges faced by students who do not take naturally to learning mathematics.

What particularly caught my eye was the unusually open way in which Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity and teacher of the Statistics 101 course has responded to the points made by Collins, and the gracious and constructive way in which Collins acknowledges this.

All three posts are well worth reading, along with their developing discussion-threads.

This is the kind of relatively open and self-critical dialogue that needs to be taking place between people who understand the problems and possiblities of the different kinds of mass courses that are currently under development, and who understand their fields from the point of view of how people learn. And if I am judging the underlying quality of a mass course provider, then its openness to criticisms and the extent to which it is committed to incremental improvement in its provision is a key consideration.

It is a matter of regret.... [Hillsborough Disaster post from 2012 updated]

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with Press Secretary Bernard Ingham, second right, and others at Hillsborough on 16 April 1989, the day after the disaster [Source: Page 185 of the Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel]

[Addendum from Inquest added 26 April 2016]

With the publication of the coruscating Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel [PDF], I am rereading my copies of Lord Justice Taylor's August 1989 Interim Report [PDF] and January 1990 Final Report into the 15 April 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (Cm 759 and Cm 962).

I am also looking again at my copies of a few papers about the disaster, including letters to the press by the then Labour MP for Hillsborough Martin Flannery, and materials from  Sheffield Trades Union Council, including the Trades Council's 3 October 1989 media release "calling for Police Officers, irrespective of rank, found to have been responsible in any way for the disaster, to be dismissed",  and the Trades Council's submissions to the Taylor Inquiry of May and October 1989, in which I had a hand at the time.

The end of the beginning? Guest post about the ESRC/EPSRC TEL programme by Richard Noss

The Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Research Programme ends this year and a final public event showcasing our hardware, software, and thematic work is set for 6 November at the Royal Society (see www.tel.ac.uk). [The 17 minute documentary from the final public meeting is here.]

It’s an obvious time to assess where we are, where we started from, and where we are going. TEL was a result of 2003’s ‘consultation on e-learning’ and ‘An e-learning research agenda’ report calling for interdisciplinary research into technology’s potential for improving education. The programme initially formed part the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (which ended in 2010 - see www.tlrp.org).

The chances of edX, Coursera, Udacity et al reaching "Facebook numbers" should not be lightly discounted

I mentioned EPIC 2020, a US-focused Call to Action to compel universities to 'decouple the delivery of content and assessment through a “test out” option' in Snippets from 14 July to 3 August.

Today, via science librarian John Dupuis, I found this interesting critique of / commentary on EPIC 2020, by Justin Marquis.

Though I do not agree with Marquis's assertion that MOOCs currently have a serious and probably inherent flaw in their inability to help people develop their creative and innovative capacities, the piece is worth reading in full.

It is also worth noting the comment on the piece by Bill Sams, originator of EPIC 2020.

"Thank you for the excellent review and discussion of EPIC 2020. My objective in producing EPIC was to create a piece that would cause people to consider and discuss that there are dramatic alternatives to the traditional education system. Given the 25,000 views from 83 countries I am satisfied that I have made a small contribution to what hopefully will become a lively discussion. On a side note as to the timeline: In about seven months Coursera has enrolled one million students. Facebook took ten months to achieve the same level of members. Five years later Facebook is in the neighborhood of one billion members and has a capitalized value of $41 billion. The chances of Coursera and edX reaching similar numbers should not be lightly discounted."

Mark Guzdial's talk with Sebastian Thrun

Mark Guzdial has written this informative and sensibly low-key piece about Thrun's thinking, which benefits greatly from Guzdial having done a lot of prior thinking about teaching and learning computer science.