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.