The Wiki

Just noticed that it is chugging along. Great to see the kids from Allenstown beginning to add some stuff and Sue de Vincentis has made a chunk of her thesis available.

KPS on steroids.

In the interest of saving a few bits in bitspace I have not reproduced this post onto my blog but it is worth a peek if you know of or even like Ricardo Semler, democratic schooling or totally "in your face" ideas about schooling. I thought I posted this a little while back.... apparently not.

and then there were eight

Folks,
Just had a peek at the wikispace and we have 8 bodies signed on. Almost a crowd or at least an excuse for a party.

Interesting report

A colleague working on a different project came across this report out of Tasmania: More than an Education: Leadership for rural school−community partnerships. What struck me was that the key ideas are very close to what one might value in a KPS context in terms of community-school links. The file is 197 pp. long.

The Wiki space

I've moved a few bits of furniture into this space. So the invitation is there to add stuff. The old static web page site is way past its use-by date. I can send out individual invites to the Wiki but it is simpler if folk who'd like to add bits to the site that they go there, get an account (it is free) and just do it.

Given it is open to anyone I was also wondering about having students write in this space, maybe with images rather than words but that they could have a piece of the wiki turf? What do folk think?

The Schools kids would like

I stumbled across this piece from the Guardian that reports a project the newspaper ran for school children, asking them what school they'd like. I came across it on Bob Pearlman's site. The project-based approach that he has traced across a number of schools is pretty KPS-like. Interestingly, he reports a study of school student leaders in the US conducted by the International Society for Technology in Education, they wanted schools that:

* Are Fun
* End lecturing from a textbook
* Institute problem-based, discovery-based, and inquiry-based curricula
* Implement "real life" situations and hands-on learning
* Shape the curriculum with student internship experiences
* Build relationships and "animated mutual learning" between adults and students
* Provide an "inviting" physical environment
* Provide the technology tools for students and teachers to do their work.

Not a bad check list.

Moving (the KPS) house

I've been mulling over some of the new so-called "social" or Web2 software that allows easy online editing and more participation of users. I've had a bit of a chat to Trudy and we are going to try Wikispaces. It has a nice clean interface, a lot of useful features and the structure of a Wiki is not far removed from that of the old conventional web page. I'll try and have the basic structure up in the next few days so feel free to add, edit, comment. Each page in a Wiki has a discussion page, a history page and a notification option (although that will mean you having to master RSS if you don't use it).

The new KPS home is here.

Shopping for science

You may (or may not) remember me as the quietist of the three Kiwis who attended the KPS conference in Geelong nearly two years ago now. Anyway, I have many sympathies with the KPS agenda and immediately thought of KPS when I read of this European idea via a local Kiwi weblog community Public Address. Perhaps you have heard of Science shops?

They are small entities that carry out scientific research in a wide range of disciplines ­ usually free of charge and ­ on behalf of citizens and local civil society. The fact that Science shops respond to civil society's needs for expertise and knowledge is a key element that distinguish them from other knowledge transfer mechanisms.

The general idea, generating local knowledge for the community, is the nub of KPS as I understand it. Though aimed at universities I cannot see why the idea could not work at lower levels; come to think of it, I guess KPS is evidence that it can!

Enquiring minds project

This, on the surface, has some family resemblances with KPS-like work. It is still, to my mind, not as "out there" as KPS work but has some useful characteristics. The website looks to be fairly informative. The L word (L is for learning) features as does the use of digital tools (ugh).

Sue's project

I've just finished reading Sue's final account of her KPS project in a non-KPS setting. It's a terrific piece of work and analysis and I'd recommend you chase Sue for a copy. I think Sue raises some important issues/questions in relation to working with kids, giving them autonomy to act and how difficult that can be to get the kind of agency you see fairly commonly in schools where this agenda has been running for some time.

John Seely-Brown

I guess a lot of my thinking has been more influenced by "interesting" approaches to the problems of business than by what is being scribbled in various educational discourses. In my head the Web2 stuff is a harbinger for or maybe an accelerator of increasingly serious challenges to authority claims around knowledge that have largely resided in the academy. This is a very long intro to merely point to an intriguing podcast by John Seely-Brown who has the wonderful title of "Chief of Confusion. He was Chief Scientist at Xerox-Parc for a long time. Did a lot of interesting work in relation to situated cognition. But this piece is, I think, germane to KPS-style thinking.

"Perspective: Distributed Business," by John Seely Brown, from Supernova 2005, June 2005.

As a footnote, I have begun to make a lot more use of podcasts courtesy of an iPod with FM radio transmitter attached to it so during all the driving I do, I can listen to neat stuff like this.

And now for a hunch, a leap of faith, well not quite. This is a notion from the warm belly of business. I'm a bit of a fan of Seely-Brown over many years but what he describes in this podcast is well worth a listen and if you can either gloss or read into the business analysis there are some pretty interesting and familiar (KPS-like) ideas in here.

I was invited to give a short opening chat at a think tank for ICTEV with a Principal from a primary school. I threw together a small Wiki both as a means of doing the show bit of the show n tell and also to demo a little bit of Web2 software.

I had toyed with the notion of writing a commentary on VELS as if it was a student assignment. The text reads like one. But time in the end stopped me. Probably a good thing given some of the folk who were there with vested interests in VELS. VELS, I should say is a good move, as any curriculum reform ought to be in terms of how it tries to shift thinking away from disciplinary spaces. But, to my grumpy eye, it is, in the ICT space, really unimaginative, banal... It may well be a huge step forward compared to what was there before but...

There was some useful discussion and perhaps some of it might be turned into a podcast (editing out the few words from an OS visitor who insisted on discussing IP before we proceeded! I resisted the urge to refer him to John Perry Barlow's 'the economy of ideas' paper. If interested here is an interesting chat with Barlow.)

The depressing part was the recylcing of issues/problems about doing computers in classrooms. Some folk just don't want to move their heads out of the 1980s. Still there were signs of the odd mental shuffle and shift. It's not as if anything that I was trying to argue was that difficult or that it wasn't bleedingly obvious. Sigh. Some possums were stirred a tad. But for all their good intentions these gabfests are not that useful unless they actually produce something on the ground.

Just when I thought the whole technology thing had been put back in its place Web2 comes along. Well. It did not just arrive it has been leaping and bounding out of the early versions of blogs n wikis n podcasts so that it now, by most measures is a serious component in the digital online ecology. I like the notion of ecology because it avoids silly notions like the death of print. What happens in an ecosystem (if my ancient handle on Biology is still valid) is that the system adjusts to new beasties or plants or changed conditions.

I need to write a lot more about Web2 and Ed2?. I'm taking a paper to AARE, if I get it written in which I want to argue that unlike any other computing development over the past thirty years, this one is seriously significant. Having said that, I am equally convinced that formal education systems will likely drop the ball (again), largely because of the heavily entrenched ways of doing things. But, and this is the interesting thing about Web2 activity. There are now serious and large new players in the business of creating, mixing, re-mixing, re-arranging, tweaking, combining "knowledge". This is all about knowledge not perhaps as it is conventionally understood but nevertheless about knowledge. An intriguing podcast by David Weinberger asks the provocative question: What's up with knowledge. While the interest of the Berkman Centre, from which this podcast originates is the law, this informal discussion of a forthcoming book is insightful and useful in terms of thinking the stuff that the KPS agenda has glibly traded in, knowledge, for some time. To quote from the blurb on the page:

He says, "The comedian Jon Stewart has become a trusted journalist. Wikipedia is in many instances more reliable and up-to-date than traditional encyclopedias. Web sites let social networks put together their own front pages, ignoring the efforts of the highly trained members of newspaper editorial boards. So, what is up with knowledge?"

"It's by no means the end of days for knowledge," he says, "but it's no longer limited by the physical ways we've had to manage it in the past." Further, he says, as a culture we are hard at work on building an infrastructure of meaning and understanding.

There is a large amount of discussion about these and related ideas that span a large number of blogs. What is interesting is that apart from the usual "apply it" response of schools and universities there is, apart from stuff coming out of MIT and the Berkman Centre at Harvard there appears to be not a lot else on a significant scale thinking about this and working on these issues "out there". I may be wrong.

Slap in the Face

I had my sister-in-law over for pizza and coke on Friday night. She too is an educator. Our conversation turned to work. She told me about two things that happened during the week.

She took a group of 14 year olds on an excursion to the Beef Expo (Southerns imagine: a cross between provincial city show and agricultural field days with steroids) She gave them permission to take mobiles. As the kids got off the bus one student said their mobile was useless as they had no credit. Another student chimed in and said it wasn't a problem they would send them credit...and using their mobile with a few numeric entires apparently one sent the other $1 credit... What?... How?... Can you do that? (OMG I am sooo old!)...Take that for problem solving!

She also explained her senior business students in conversation with her happened to mention that the night before their exam they set up their web cameras, go online and chat over questions and solutions in prep for the exam. What is that? We joked about virtual study groups and laughed together about how in no uncertain terms would you refer to it as a "study group" to them. (So NOT cool!)

OK so what does this mean. First understand these kids live in a community that tops the lists for all the wrong things (high unemployment, low socio-economic, crime rates, domestic violence and the rest) In fact I heard it was in the top 5 for one of these categories and what strikes me is that these kids have access and are so well connected. Though my S-I-L did make comment that the 'haves' and 'have nots' is getting further and further apart.

The other thing I got to thinking about (and this is where the slap in the face comes)...I realised that for the first time in the history of education (ever) our kids have the ability and means to access more information than what their teachers do (read also "parents"). This is hugely significant. About 5 years ago I was talking about teachers no longer being the gate keepers of knowledge. These examples just hit me head on and reinforce that. I don't have a clue how to do either of the above tasks. How kids are getting information, learning skills, communicating, understand the world...just leaves us old foggies standing in their wake (scratching our heads saying "What?...How?...Can you do that?)

When I say the "history of education" I got to thinking about learning of the past..
- teaching kids research/library skills,
- libraries and encyclopedias being the place to get info,
- teachers preparing lesson plans and deciding what to teach, what facts to cover and therefore what to test.

The world really has exploded with information and IT that enables access to it.
The changes really are profound. I think this major shift (explosion) has happened in the last five years (I say that thinking about primary aged students, perhaps secondary teachers may argue a slightly longer timeline, I'm not sure) It certainly screams at me that some significant clunking or "explosions" need to happen with teaching approaches for these kids. And as an educational leader I'm left with the question..."how to make it happen?"

An interesting read in today's Australian. Eslpeth Probyn writing about youth and a quote about schooling: Maturity becomes them

My partner and I watched, amazed by the example shown by these 13-year-olds. Then we talked about the difference between our youth and theirs. She put her finger on it when she remarked that by 15 she'd had the assurance of these 13-year-olds bashed out of her by the school system. Thinking back, I have to say that it was the same for me. Maybe it's not that young people are growing up too fast. It's just that at least some are being encouraged to handle the world with ease and self-assurance. These little adults really are human becomings.

Just stumbled over (how else does one describe wandering aimlessly, in bitspace?) a nice piece of John Seeley-Brown's written quite some time back but with nice resonances with KPS-style stuff. He revisits some of his work at Xerox-Parc and offers some interesting examples of expert communities working with kids in school among a lot of other stuff.

Both in the spirit of blogs taking over the known digital world (for the moment) and for the nice expression of what I think is at the middle of the stuff KPS folk are interested in, a nice quote from the creating passionate users blog.

The quote:

Learning is one of the fundamental reasons games are so engaging. For most games, the moment you have nothing left to learn is the moment you become bored and move on. Most teachers know that real self-esteem doesn't come from people thinking you're good at something... it comes from actually being good. Almost any activity gets better and better the more you improve, the improvement is nearly always a result of learning.

Musicians know this. Snowboarders know this. Programmers know this.

The more you learn, the better you are at something. The better you are, the more engaging it is. If you can help people have more of that feeling, they won't talk about how good you are-- they'll talk about how much they kick ass.

And that's a powerful formula for creating passionate users.

The word expert is tossed about a lot, even in KPS-style stuff. I came across this little polemic which I thought was interesting. It derives from that dreaded new fad in education, "brain science". The book, The New Brain (oooh I hate refs to Amazon but too lazy to fix it) looks to be in that "this is what brain science tells us about how to be a whizz". As in all of this work, it can be mined for useful stuffand points to the work of K. Anders Ericsson who works on genuises, prodigies, and superior performers.

These ideas loosely couple with that notion of high expectations which is another way of talking about the serious work kids do in KPS-style environments.

and now for something entirely different

The rise and rise of the neurosciences and their slow but steady drip into educational thinking, at least at a gestural level has been something I have been trying to keep an eye on over the years. But today I stumbled on a piece that, at the very least, provides some interesting insights into possible relationships between the social and learning.

It's an Edge essay by V.S.Ramachandran called Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat. If you have time on your hands or on some other part of your body, might be worth a glance.