KPS

1, 2, 3 on my mark... pretend

2008-11-08T12:33:00.005+11:00

I am struggling with a piece of scribbling for a book (web2 and education, groan!) but came across some writing of one of my favourite thinkers in this hype-ridden space: Michael Wesch. He enjoys mixed reviews. The academy can be downright bitchy at times, particularly when it sees a relatively junior academic draw serious attention to himself due to some pretty clever and interesting YouTube contributions as well as some excellent presentations that have been posted online. I'm a fan as you may have gathered. Michael was contributing to a recent debate run by Britannica called Brave New Classroom 2. He was writing about students just playing a game to get by and noted a piece by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner written over 40 years ago. In a piece entitled "Pursuing Relevance: where is the problem?" they wrote about a project assignment around ancient cultures (Greek and Roman). A small portion of their commentary runs like this:

The most depressing aspect of this piece of pretentious trivia is that to most people nothing seems wrong with it. Indeed, it may even be thought of as reflecting a “progressive” idea or two. (After all, aren’t students asked to work in small groups and do ‘projects’?) Clearly, defenders of ‘high standards’ would have no cause for complaint here. The same is true for makers of standardized texts, ‘transmitters of our cultural heritage’, and lovers of ‘basic education’ everywhere. Perhaps even most of the students for whom this ‘unit of work’ is intended would approve of it. But if they do, we can be sure their approval rests largely on a carefully cultivated schizophrenia that is necessary, in present circumstances, to their academic survival. (Mencken once wrote that the main thing children learn in school is how to lie.) The children know that none of these questions has anything to do with them, and the game that is being played does not require that the questions do. The game is called ‘Let’s Pretend’, and if its name was chiselled into the front of every school building in America, we would at least have an honest announcement of what takes place there. The game is based upon a series of pretences which include: ‘let’s pretend that you are not who you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.

Which simply says that the issues that KPS-style work is seeking to address ain't new!

Setting minds or cranial concrete

2008-05-02T10:40:00.002+10:00

The weekly newsletter came in from school the other day. On the back was a little graph and a heading about windspeed. I thought, neat, kids have been looking at wind, etc. Well, it was true that they were doing all sorts of measurements but what was depicted in the graph was data taken from the bureau of meteorology of that week!!!!

The mindset that says that kids can only do pretend stuff, stuff that no one is really interested in, stuff that no one will pay attention to is so pervasive among teachers. What possesses a teacher to discard however many days of data gathering and defer to the "official" data, taken over 100 kilometers from the school?

The "other" world is rapidly appreciating that having lots of eyeballs, minds, data collections, can in fact work pretty well in terms of tackling the interesting challenges the world poses. Crowd sourcing as it is sometimes referred to is emerging as a sometime very useful and efficient means of tackling certain kinds of problems. The one thing that schools have is lots and lots of minds, eyeballs, folk to collect, observe, record. And for the most part, this resource is ignored and made to do dumb, pretend, patently stupid activities that benefit no-one.

Wanted. A Web 2 home for KPS stuff

2007-07-29T12:22:00.000+10:00

Most of the merry little band who skim this blog from time to time will recall the frustration we went through when we began to set up the KPS site in one of the free Wiki spaces. Much to our frustration the Education system net police that control what sites schools can and cannot access blocked access to this Wiki site. Apart from tackling these folk (the net police) we do need a place where anyone can add/edit/write about the KPS stuff in which they are engaged. So.... this is a request for suggestions, ideas. I think it is important that students doing this work also have access to such sites. I can set up a site out of Deakin (Joomla or Drupal based) but would value some reactions from others.

Producing music, producing knowledge

2007-07-29T12:11:00.000+10:00

What is knowledge and how is it produced are pretty important questions in the KPS space. When I grew up, knowledge was something that you had, more or less, in your head. To some extent there is still an element of this today but, IMHO, that is much reduced in its importance as about a billion folk set participate in all manner of conversations and debates using various bits of so-called Web 2 software to produce knowledge. As David Weinberger of Everything in Miscellaneous fame, has argued in a number of podcasts, knowledge resides in the conversations, the email lists, the blogs, the wikis. Of course, you don't need the online stuff to do it as the post from Edutopia flags. The creative arts have always been a place to look to find KPS-like stuff happening. More often than not the teacher is also a practising artist and is thus well placed to articulate what goes on in the classroom with what goes on in the world outside.

23 questions

2007-07-15T17:46:00.001+10:00

I must admit to enjoying the fun Roger Schank has with the silly parts of schooling. Here he asks 23 fun questions about some improvements in Maths scores in New York city. If such testing and its consequences were not so tragic it would be funny.

Micro testing vs. Projects

2007-06-18T16:34:00.000+10:00

A lovely post from Jeremy Hiebert's headspace via Arti's blog.

He was telling me about this new grading system he's implemented -- identical to what is described here. Every test broken down into its component learning outcomes, with remedial steps and re-tests only on the parts the students haven't performed well on. At first I was thinking, "wow, pretty innovative and individualized." Then the reality of it hit me, and I blurted out, "that's pretty much the opposite of my educational philosophy!"

I'd have trouble arguing that his friend had a philosophy that warranted the adjective "educational".

Exploring some collaborative publishing options

2007-04-07T10:22:00.000+10:00

Given the wonderful support that EQ gives folk, i.e. bans access to Wikispaces and suggests folk use an inhouse Wiki (which makes sure no one else on the planet gets to see what is published!). I have been playing with Google docs and it might be a way around things. The Wikispaces site could still be used (it would mean editing it away for Qld schools) and kids could control just what they wanted to publish. It may be too messy. Just thought it might be worth an explore. Of course when they notice traffic to Google docs the Net Nazis might ban it also!

Not Happy!

2007-02-26T20:05:00.000+11:00

I've gone online today at work to check access for the wikispace and blog in anticipation of getting students online to share some of the groovy stuff they are doing only to find that we have been blocked to both spaces. Oh the frustration...

The Medici Effect

2007-02-11T11:34:00.000+11:00

I just scribbled a note in my own blog about a book I have just read and ended up in a KPS end point (how unusual).

Action research & KPS

2007-01-25T11:40:00.000+11:00

I hang out on too many email-based discussion lists (yeah I know... indicates how bad habits are hard to kick). And I am mulling about links between what we've been calling the KPS agenda and action research. The mulling being prompted by some writing I am trying to do with Leonie. Back to the lists. One of these lists, XMCA (eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity-- runs out of U Cal San Diego via Michael Cole) has been chatting about AR and the focus of the list, which is pretty broad ranging - sociocultural ideas, activity theory etc. etc. In a long series of annotated exchanges, you know those emails with multiple replies to replies, Jam Lemke, one of my favourite thinkers in the educational space wrote (21 Jan 07):

Action Research is about solving immediate problems, but one of its strategies is to get people talking about what those problems really are. In the course of which they often re-define the key problems as being larger than their immediate symptoms. When you then start to collaboratively investigate these bigger issues, you almost always find that history has played a role in getting us into the mess we're in. And that understanding how to get out of it often depends on figuring out a way around the path that historically got us where we are.

Why are school classes only 40 minutes long? why are students segregated by age in schools? why don't teacher-student relationships in schools last more than a few months to less than one year? why are curriculum subjects separated? why is curriculum content dictated to be uniform? why do we use pencil-and-paper testing? why don't students get to learn from non-teacher mentors? why can't I take my students on a field trip outside the school? why can't they learn by participating/observing in other institutions?

Why can't we talk about the topics we're really interested in? why can't we spend more than 2 weeks on this? why can't I learn basic biology over 2 years instead of one? why can't we talk about human sexuality? or famous gay figures in history? why can't we learn about law, religion, economics, politics? why can't we discuss the causes of violence in my neighborhood? Why don't I get paid for all the work the school requires me to do?

The causes of most social headaches are institutional and structural, and the timescales across which we need to look to understand how they came to cause our headaches expand in historical time as we probe these networks of causes.

Remember: give a man a fish, he eats today; teach him to fish, he eats tomorrow too? Action research, and the CHAT perspective, is about learning new ways to eat, about looking across longer relevant timescales for alternatives and solutions, not about eating the first fish to come our way (though if you're really hungry, why not?).

JAY.

PS. Short-term solutions can give us the breathing space to seek longer-term ones. But they can also exacerbate longer-term problems, or disguise them until they get even worse.

I'd like to think that a good deal of KPS work is driven by kids/teachers asking similar kinds of questions. I can recall Trudy talking about how her students at Warraburra were puzzling about water usage in the school. Don't recall the exact history but it's that sense that it's ok to ask tough, interesting questions even when there is perhaps no immediate prospect of a solution. Which brings me to related point made by James Wilkinson in the Menzies Oration last year. He was speaking about undergraduate education and making, what I thought was a strong case for students learning about the process of inquiry. He wrote:

The skill that would be of most practical value to our undergraduate students, in my opinion, as well as the key to what we mean when we speak of educated men and women, is the ability to ask good questions and to work at seeking answers based on evidence.

As I read his carefully argued presentation (you can get text and or an MP3) I kept thinking that, with a little adjusting, the same argument could and most likely should be applied to schools. I then started thinking about the early thinking around schools as sites of serious knowledge production and how research/systematic inquiry might be the way to break the interminable "kids ought to know this stuff" arguments.

The origins of KPS go back to mulling over the so-called "middle school" problem, i.e. student disengagement, troublesome teens etc. And it occurred to me that if these kids were trained up to do systematic inquiry you could hit a number of spots: one they would likely respond to moving beyond the "pretend curriculum" that they had all seen through a long time ago, they could contribute usefully to local community, they would develop skills, habits of mind that were not all that amenable to curriculum check lists and they'd produce something in which they could genuinely take some pride.

I also recall how I was chatting to a primary teacher about these ideas over the phone (in those days, distance ed. we worked with amazing teachers...never met em face to face..but I was always in awe of their energy, passion and commitment) and suggesting that this approach would work in middle school but unlikely in primary school. She berated me for about 15 minutes, telling me all the inquiry stuff that goes on in a lot of primary schools but it is not taken very seriously. It is interesting that now, some years down the track, almost all the KPS stuff has spun out of primary schools.

Just some thinking out aloud about a bunch of questions.

With friends like these

2007-01-07T09:30:00.000+11:00

I went back to the Escola Lumiar site and stumbled over the school's council of friends:

William Ury Antropólogo social pela Yale, professor da Harvard Business School e Harvard Law School, diretor do Harvard Negotiation Project, negociador do Carter Center e autor do livro "Getting to Yes"

Charles Handy Professor da London Business School, consultor em negócios e educação

David Perkins Diretor do Project Zero e professor da Harvard School of Education

Seymour Pappert Diretor do Media Lab do MIT, autor da linguagem Logo e vários livros de referência em educação

Henry Mintzberg Professor de Management e educação, Vice-Reitor da McGill University no Canadá

If I was setting up a school and could claim these folk as friends.... sure Semler has access to these folk by virtue of his business/management practices but this is a classy list of folk by any measure.

The Wiki

2006-11-06T12:44:00.000+11:00

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.

2006-10-29T14:48:00.000+11:00

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

2006-10-24T11:44:00.000+10:00

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

2006-10-13T17:52:00.000+10:00

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

2006-10-11T13:14:00.000+10:00

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

2006-10-08T08:13:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-25T11:50:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-20T14:34:00.000+10:00

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

2006-09-14T15:00:00.000+10:00

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

2006-08-01T11:16:00.000+10:00

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.

Some positive happenings

2006-07-18T09:24:00.000+10:00

Some educators in parts of our continent are doing great things. We, unfortunately, don't always get to hear about these positive happenings, so when we do it's important to spread their existence - just in case people out there get too bogged down with the density of educational change.

In Western Australia there is a secondary school that has taken a new approach to its curriculum to address, what they refer to as the haemorrohaging of Indigenous students from the system. A radical change was deemed acceptable to all involved as the problem was so great. What was interesting (but not surprising) was that the first step towards fixing the problem was that dialogue between the stakeholders - the students, parents, teachers and school administrators - revealed how a lack of communication, and therefore ill informed perspective, had elevated the alienation of Indigenous students from education in the first place. Relationships were at the heart of the problem, and at the heart of the solution.

Read on... Swan View Senior High

John Seely-Brown

2006-06-17T13:40:00.000+10:00

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.

2006-05-17T10:21:00.000+10:00

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.

2006-05-14T12:18:00.000+10:00

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.

2006-05-11T17:55:00.000+10:00

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

2006-05-08T19:49:00.000+10:00

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?"

2006-05-03T07:47:00.000+10:00

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.

2006-04-25T15:57:00.000+10:00

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.

2006-04-23T13:22:00.000+10:00

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.

2006-03-26T11:24:00.000+11:00

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

2006-01-13T10:46:00.000+11:00

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.

Quality Learning RPA

2005-12-06T20:25:00.000+11:00

Thought I'd cruise around the Deakin site and came across the new-look Quality Learning Research Priority Area: www.deakin.edu.au/education/quality-learning/ . I'm not sure who is responsible for the neat argument on the 'philosophy page' about 'future proofing' our students, but the style seemed familiar, as did the content with its strong peppering of KPS infused throughout. Great work guys!

One more

2005-12-03T10:49:00.000+11:00

Came across this nice piece from Education Week. One of the author's (at least) is connected to the work described in the previous post. The article begins with two lovely quotes:

“So between odd and the same, you got to be rooting for odd.”
—Adam Sandler, in the movie “Spanglish”

“We are in an Age of High Standard Deviation.”
—Tom Peters, in his book Re-Imagine!

Well worth a read.

2005-12-03T10:32:00.000+11:00

I've never suggested that any of the stuff we are interested in in terms of a KPS agenda is particularly new or unique. It's just one of many instances of what I think is important at this time on the planet, doing experiments in doing school differently. I stumbled across some cool folk who appear to be doing similar stuff in the US among what Tom Peters calls his "cool friends". Well worth a look. Might drop 'em an eline.

2005-12-02T20:09:00.000+11:00

Thanks for the drum-roll, Chris! I think this interactive diary stuff might be a reasonable therapeutic replacement for manual referencing........if I ever get around to setting up Endnote. I'm working on it, Chris, I promise! And now I'm left with figuring out a train of thought to share and reflect upon (aka procrastination?). Thought I'd waffle a bit about my ideology and I'm not coming at this from an obvious angle, but sometimes the most illustrious ideas stem from unorthodox beginnings. Not that my simplistic thoughts are exemplary of this.

Trajectories, in the familiar sense, suggest pathways to be followed. It's like they are sitting there, paved and signposted, awaiting travellers. And, I guess, if trajectories are traced using actor-network theory, for example, they are assumed as being concrete (not static) and present or visible in some regard. If my understanding regarding actor-network trajectories is a bit wayward, I know I'll be redirected (corrected!) by the more serious and attentive followers of ANT amongst us. Think I better start heading towards KPS before my bloggers invite is revoked or I'm transferred mid-argument to the ANT blog site!

So, what do these trajectories have to do with KPS? Yes, they can be traced within schools, and beyond, to map the networks of resistance, micropolitical agendas, resource usage etc. But, to my mind, what is more captivating is the notion of creating trajectories: students designing and building the paths to be followed, in addition to having a say about the direction the trajectories should travel. To my mind KPS covers aspects of this beautifully within the parameters we are required to operate in at school, but I'm thinking about these trajactories beyond the cyclone wire eg kids creating curriculum; being involved in their assessment and the assessment of their peers etc (Sorry if this thinking does not exactly encompass the KPS agenda. It's a bit of a deviation - I think Chris's post about Small Steps has prompted these ramblings!) Kids have a pretty good grip on what the varying Discourses are really promoting - as depicted by Leonie's scribblings about rat mazes replicating the education process. Pity is the discrimination which promotes such thinking in students is not often nurtured within mainstream education, with its indicators and outcomes and formulaic mindset in regards to educational purposes. And, (until I can figure another way around it)as a first, subtle (this is the challenging bit for me!) step, I see my role in this to create awareness amongst other educators as to what kids are capable of if given half a chance.

If this first posting is a pile of hot steamy manure, then please print it, shred it and use it on your garden.

2005-11-30T21:01:00.000+11:00

This little scribble comes via Leonie who was talking to child #3 (of 6) who is female, 15 and, imho, very savvy. A discussion about school, what it was like produced a response along these lines.

School is a place where you run a lot of mazes, like rats. So you are put in a maze and asked to find the cheese. So you set off and and run and eventually get through the maze only to find that there is no cheese, only this machine that generates the smell of cheese. Your reward for completing the maze is to do another one.

I think I like this rat.

Welcome a new recruit

2005-11-27T19:52:00.000+11:00

I am conscious of not making this "thing" some of us call KPS too much of a thing. In any event, I've been working with a talented woman who has opted to do her Masters research in this area, Sue de Vincentis (spde@deakin.edu.au). Sue is planning on having students make an orientation DVD to a school, something similar to Carmel's work in mt Isa. Sue's research question is: How will a group of students independently execute a school community task which requires specialised knowledge? I've added Sue to the blog list.

On the talking wireless

2005-11-22T12:59:00.000+11:00

Leonie and Trudy "appeared" on Radio National this morning talking to Kate Evans about KPS-related stuff. Lots of labels were tossed about including future-proofing kids, engaged learning, real life learning etc. It went well. Kate asked lots of challenging questions and got good thoughtful replies. I'll see if i can pop an MP3 onto the KPS site sometime if folk are interested.

Why football is better than school

2005-05-24T11:42:00.000+10:00

A colleague passed this short piece by Herb Childress on to me. While it is written about High School, much of the commentary could apply to schools generally. I know there is a lot of this kind of material about but if I have learned anything about formal systems of education it is that winning a battle never means you have won. Just as in a war, you have to maintain your position, reinforce it, repeat it, rework it and sell, sell, sell it. There is a way to think about this that can be derived from my weird little interest in actor-network theory but I don't want to muddy the simple notion which is about vigilance and the policing of wins and boundaries.

Herb's piece reminded me of the terrific checklist of questions that Trudy has developed in relation to good learning.

In any event, I thought the article useful grist.

Shadowing AND Mentoring

2004-12-06T18:19:00.000+11:00

For some years now we have used shadowing and mentoring as a platform to ensure that we don't lose any opf the expertise of the staff as staff retire. For next year we will re-vitalise this important part of staff relationship building so that we can open up the discussions about pedagogy a bit more.
I have asked that teachers find themselves a different review mentor to the person they worked with this year.
They will look to shadowing others' good practice. They will also discuss and share the dilemmas re the child that it is difficult to move thinking-wise or difficult to create a relationship with.
A team approach may also work to open up the talk. We want to be able to track student growth in personal, work habit and thinking development.
The projects are a part of this development - teachers will need to talk to each other to find some assistance with areas about which they know nothing. They will need to discuss where to seek support and information so the students can do the project work.
Anyone got any further ideas about this?

Students Creating their own resumes

2004-12-06T17:52:00.000+11:00

Is this "real" work? I think so. Our year 6 students are currently writing up their own personal resumes in readiness for Year 7 at the secondary college and also for display at their graduation. They look more like digital portfolios; are interactive so I thought I would download the front page as a snapshot for the Blogg.

On the other hand I'm not sure if the pictures have attached - I feel like I'm flying blind here!

Small steps

2004-12-05T21:33:00.000+11:00

This is the first time I have had to sit and mull the KPS conference and also the AARE conference which followed immediately after. For me, the KPS work appears more and more in terms of agency (not an innocent term), i.e. agency of kids, of teachers, even of principals!

Trudy's post about what motivates community underlines a key issue in this work. In practical terms it is important to begin to map and explore the ways in which new kinds of relationships between community and schools are formed. But it is also important, I think, to mull over how kids might begin to interpret 'the world outside' in other than pragmatic terms.

It's a move beyond where things are now but if this is about kids learning to engage and act in and on the world, including their school-world, then how they make sense of that world is an important part of their learning. And, I guess, this presupposes how we make sense of the world. No easy matter.

What motivates community?

2004-11-30T11:38:00.000+11:00

From my "Complexities" posting I wanted to flesh out some ideas after observing projects at Wara...on the question:
What motivates community organisations/corporations to engage with school sites and students?

* The novelty factor in marketing - This is based on response "Wow kids did that?" which for organisations or the corporate world can be an appealing angle to work with when promoting a product or service. eg pamphlets for Gracemere Saleyards

* Social conscience - There is probably a better tag or label for this idea but it is based on the fact that community groups and some businesses have an agenda to build or contribute to the social fabric of community and working with youth helps them achieve this.

* Cost factor - Basically having students undertake a project as a learning experience can be a lot cheaper than getting the professionals to do it. Quality control needs to be considered and this opens up ethical questions about paying students or the school. (I think this is pretty much unchartered territory in Qld, but that hasn't stopped us for venturing into the minefield eg Mt Morgan Museum)

* Education agenda - Many community organisations and government departments want to educate young people about their cause. They become pretty willing partners if this is the case. The tough stuff is helping them shift their paradigm around how its done. eg The Commonwealth Games phone call Chris had, highlights just how hard it can be.

* Meets a market niche - Basically this is where the teacher and kids have hit on an idea that is needed in the market place and creatively position themselves to deliver it. eg the potential of the recycling bag stand and wine from Stawell. Still waiting for the sample!!!

Of course in most cases its a combination of the above and there are sure to be motivators that I haven't identified. I guess the intriguing thing from a research perspective would be to get some anecdotal stuff from the horses mouth.

2004-11-29T19:11:00.000+11:00

Thanks for the good words and ideas Trudy. I stepped from KPS to AARE - not sure we do em cheek to cheek next time but it meant that Bridget, Matthew and Rob could be part of the KPS gig given their participation in AARE. I like the idea of doing some of this intensively online but working out when that might be could be tricky. All we can do is try eh? There is also the option of a virtual conf. with video links. A few options there.

Re membership of this blog. I set it up originally with Trudy, Carmel, Leonie to see how it might be used. I was not going to broadcast it to the list until we'd worked out what was best, if it was worth doing etc. I am very keen to move from single authored spaces, even if the words are coming from others. There are a number of options that might be explored. One is to stay with this one blog and add members who can write to it. There is a limit in size before it is charged I understand. Don't know what it is. The other way to go would be encourage folk to set up their own individual blogs and then respond to each other's blog via links. Something to mull eh?

Conference follow on

2004-11-29T17:09:00.000+11:00

I throughly enjoyed the weekend. Wouldn't it be great if it could be an annual pilgrimage that could grow and allow us to share stories, exchange ideas with fellow schools and add more questions to the reseach. $$ would be the only hurdle. Maybe timed in common school holidays and travellers could organise their itinery to take in the shopping and sites and claim it on tax. I bags going back to Deakin Management Centre. Chris was not wrong when he said it was pretty flashy. A far cry from the student res accom that we were expecting.

There may also be merit in trying to do something like an electronic conference in a defined week where different people are organised to post "stimulus" to a space. We plan in advance so that we schedule time for ourselves on-line during that week. We could then respond digitally. This blogging space may allow us to work in this way. If it worked this sort of thing could happen twice a year. Or do it in one semester and the pilgrimage in the other. Just some ideas.

Complexities

2004-11-29T13:32:00.000+11:00

After a terrific time at the KPS conference in Geelong over the weekend (Thankyou!) I thought I would act on Chris' encouragement and write in this blog space. I have taken the KPS complexities that I cruised through in the later part of my presentation and have phrased them as questions here. Since I suggested my Executive Director and the meddling academics have "ask hard questions" in their job descriptions I guess the flip side is people in schools like me work on providing the answers. (But also reserve the right to ask them back!) So here goes...

Q. What is the definition of "community"?
Answer for me to date has been an individual or group at school, local or global level. Also has to be beyond the classroom walls and "fridge door".

Q. How do schools identify their community uniqueness, 'point of view' and potential opportunities to build relationships with their community?
Might be useful here to review "point of view". Other than being observent, listening to folk from all sectors, being open minded and capitalising on opportunites I don't have any greater insights. Do others?

Q. Is the KPS agenda easier to establish in rural schools than city, metropolitian or provincial sites?
Now at Allenstown (a large school in Rockhampton, Qld, Aust) I can start to challenge my own beliefs and assumptions behind this one. To this point I would believe that it is infinetly easier. PS I've worked in a rural community in North Qld where "dinosaurs" would be a legitimate learning experience. Marine Fossils sit on the desks of kids in Richmond as paper weights...too bad if they are the missing peice to some rare archelogical find.

Q. What motivates community organisations (read also as 'corporations') to engage with school sites and students?
Being a part of the Waraburra developments I have some observations and ideas on this that would make a good post all on its own. stay tuned.

Q. How do we know (measure) students are developing as Life Long Learners? (In Qld this is defined in terms of characteristics such as Thinking, Understanding, Creating, Investigating, Communicating, Participating, Reflecting) Aside from collecting work samples and anecdotes as evidence, my greatest sense has been we just get them trained by year 7 and then we lose them to the secondary school. The students become essential "workers" within the school who are highly reliable, responsible and effective in carrying a miriad of tasks you may call on them to undertake.

Q. What impact does KPS agenda have on leadership in schools? As Sue Barfood indicated - "flat leadership", even flatter than usual notions of administrators and teachers being partners, students organising events, making authentic decisions and suggestions and creating their own learning experiences is on. Organisational charts and heirarchies are gone.

Q. What do traditional approaches to schooling over a period of time do to students ability to solve authentic problems (and think in reality) OR What does KPS approach over a period of time do to students ability to solve authentic problems (and thinkk in reality)?
This is prompted by Bill's anecdote about kids taking 10-15minutes to realise to film an ad in a bar they could actually go to a bar.

Q. How do we understanding or define “knowledge”?
I stumbled across the ideas of declarative and procedural knowledge from Dimensions of Learning earlier this year, but am interested in what others have to say.

Q. How do we understand or define "knowledge creation" and help teachers understand this concept?
I sometimes have a sense that teachers think I too must be from another planet when I talk about this. (Apparently Chris is an alien life form) Some teachers' understanding comes from the perspective that students can't possibly create knowledge Pythagorus discovered the theory and I teach it. Students can't possibly create it, it's already done.

Following from above.. What do we know about the sophistication of student's knowledge work? Is there a continuum from volunteer labour to knowledge worker? Are they different concepts? Are both roles legitimate?
For me the jury is out on this one..needs more thought, reading and exploration. Its an interesting area. I need to understand earlier issues in more depth before I could call this one.

Q. With KPS, is the finished work product of higher quality and why?

Q. How do schools deal with the "ownership" issue? This goes beyond the copyright and intellectual property discussion towards what happens in a school when the culture is such that students can start a project and it becomes bigger than Ben Hur?

Q. How do we enable (give permission to) teachers to...
- continue working/learning beyond the unit boundaries?
- pursuit tangents that enrich the learning and build on the known?
- ensure the end product is achieved despite time pressures?

Q. How do we enable (give permission to) teachers to
- become experts for specific projects and
- build on them from previous years with new cohorts of students not necessarily starting from the beginning?
The wine making course sheds some light on the first part of this question.

Q. How does creating our own community space (ie history project, museum idea) that is potentially an on going context support teachers who work in this mode?
If we can get this sort of concept up and running I will be very interested to see the impact on teachers professional life and student learning outcomes.

Well there is a start. I look forward to the responses of others.
Take care.
Trudy

More Gatto

2004-11-09T15:44:00.000+11:00

Having revisited John Gatto in the previous post I thought it useful to dig up some of his collected work. Preservenet has a collection of Gatto's work that you can find on the web. There is also Gatto's own page.

Peering across a curriculum gap

2004-11-09T15:02:00.000+11:00

I've just spent a few hours in a telephone hook-up brainstorming about a Victorian curriculum project concerned with the Commonwealth Games. I'd been invited along, probably because I had had some conversations with the convenor of the bid about kps-style possibilities. I had a chance to talk about kps and spoke briefly about the main ideas and the kids on outcomes that have been reported from kps schools. I did not imagine that I was going to persuade folk about the merits of kps but thought it might be interesting in terms of having a conversation about what I anticipated would be competing notions of curriculum. What I was not prepared for was the unproblematic way that the exercise unfolded.

There was much discussion about engaging students. There was a lot of discussion about what this group of adults thought was interesting about the Games. There was an unproblematic notion that designing 'engaging' materials was simply a matter of making things engaging. Time and again there were suggestions for students to do pretend tasks in terms of simulations of issues or problems around the Games, of 'looking up' data from websites, of teachers or curriculum designers doing all the interesting work to make it 'engaging' for students. In the end I felt I must have been talking in tongues. Every time I ventured something along kps lines responses ranged from, yes I think we are doing that in the way you are proposing, or teachers would have trouble doing that in a 20 hr timeslot. In the end I was grateful for the experience and time to reflect on the problem. As each gesture was made to the ways teachers speak and think I was reminded of John Gatto's work and the problem of educational mindsets: when all you have is a curriculum framework, everything looks like a categorised outcome, assessment item or content to be designed.

My favourite piece on mindsets is a useful reminder of how fixed either side of this debate can become.

Conference Registration

2004-09-23T13:42:00.000+10:00

hiya folk; just trying this blog out and thought while i was here i'd remind people who are interested in the kps conference to register as early as possible (rego forms are at the kps site). i think it will be a great forum for us to actually map what's happenning and develop some shared plans for the future. we're also hoping to do some publishing out of the event. have a good day. Leonie

Welcome

2004-09-23T11:24:00.000+10:00

This is a trial to see how useful this kind of shared publishing is for a distributed project like KPS.

another oldie from the kps home page

2004-03-07T09:35:00.000+11:00

I have been back in Victoria for over a year now and have had more than a few opportunities to talk KPS ideas to various Principals, teacher groups and individual teachers. I've also been interested to see the kinds of CCT-related work that is current in schools. What strikes me is how little has changed not just from when I was here last but since the 1980s when CCT use took off in schools. People still talk about integration. They still talk about problems of using this stuff in classrooms. They still talk about the needs of teachers. Almost all of the work is still "schooled". It is still pretend. And, I think that using CCTs to do pretend work is actually more difficult than using them for real work! In my humble opinion, all of this busy work with CCTs in classrooms misses the point. It is as if we are saying: all we need to do to prepare the young for the world beyond schools is to have them use CCTs for learning, teach them the current, vogue pieces of software and all will be well. This is the line that has been running since the 1980s and there is precious little evidence to suggest that learning has been improved/helped; that students are better prepared for the world outside. What is clear however is that students leave school wuth an abysmally limited sense of the changes that are playing out and which are totally dependent upon the delpoyment of CCTs.

old stuff

2003-11-30T09:30:00.000+11:00

I was attempting (albeit unsuccessfully) to do some blog-like stuff on the kps home page. I thought I'd pop them into here even though they date back a little in time.

I've dated them back using the dating facility of Blogger.

I was doing some tidying and came across some words of Colin's and Michele's from last year. As they argue, it is always easy to lose sight of what is at the heart of formal educational practice.

As a crude paraphrasing it has been said that history is written by the winners. So, for the most part, are curriculum and pedagogy so far as they pertain to the formal educational work of schools. They are designed and written from the standpoint of what counts as succeeding within dominant Discourses as we all know. But while we all know this, it is easy to forget it in the hurly burly of classroom life. Although we have it paraded before us almost constantly, it is also easy to forget that most of the world's population live outside the representations of what it is to know and do and be (in effective and successful ways) that are peddled by curriculum designers and pedagogical experts. This is true whether success and effectiveness are seen in terms of individual benefit and advancement/development, or from the standpoint of benefits to private and public corporations moved by performativity and profit, or, as in the case of social and economic elites, from the standpoint of both.