Connected Blog

Four months ago I began holding lunchtime sessions based around the world famous TED Talks. These Inspiration Sessions had a simple format with a complex aim: empower anyone in the organisation to change the organisation. Here, I share the format, the resources, the questions and hope that it can be used in your school, your department or your Local Authority, to challenge current ways of thinking and empower everyone to make small, powerful changes.

The sessions themselves lasted no more than 90 minutes: 20 minutes of video, a different one each month, discussion about the clip, how it relates to our work or education in general, and then breaking out into reflection online. The advantage of using the cips as a stimulus is that the age-old reason for not sharing online – “my stuff isn’t good enough” – doesn’t figure here. It’s an opportunity to share something that’s not our own, and opportunity to rethink what we and our colleagues do, pubicly. It also presents a chance to discover a new technology that allows us to share, allowing for a natural extension and progression for the conversation stimulated by the monthly films.

At LTS we found the most popular ways of sharing were delicious social bookmarking, which allows simple things such as the talk itself or literature around the talk to be shared, without the individual feeling that they may contravene our self-publishing guidelines or that they don’t have the skill to write an engaging blog post. By using a Friendfeed room we’ve been able to connect our Research team with others around the organisation over a period of a few months, and an effective information-sharing group has begun to thrive.

Others found that crafting a blog post was the best way forward. Existing high quality examples of LTS blogging were joined by new blogs. Others are taking up much more internal blogging as a way to communicate better across teams.

Above all, the opportunity for a diverse group of colleagues to get together in a ’safe’ environment and self- and peer-assess what we do every day has helped show the way in several of our largest projects, finding room for improvement and gaps where innovation is required in the future. As they say, watch this space…

Here is a six-month outline of the talks we chose to use and some of the activities that we have designed around them. If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments and they will be added over time. Let us know, too, how you get on should you plan your own Inspiration Sessions.

Month One:
Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Links from the first session

• Creativity in the workplace: do we have any? where is it? what’s lost?
• Kids take chances – can we? What are the barriers to taking a chance? Are we prepared to be wrong? What have our biggest ‘wrongs’ been?
• We squander tremendous talents; what are the tremendous talents in LTS? how can we stop this happening?
• We have no idea what is going to happen in the future; how do we teach kids (and guide their teachers) when we don’t know how?
• Hierarchies and their role in decision-making, workflows, coverage, time, attention
• University professors: does LTS live in its head? How can we make sure that what we do is more ‘real’? Is the ‘real’ the same in the minds of teachers, learners, Government? What is ‘real’

Month Two:
Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce
Links from the second session.

• How do we know that what we are doing is going to be good? Are focus groups, samples etc any good? Is there another way? Another type of person? Role of learners in helping us choose material for the online service.
• What’s the role of the niche?
• Are we LTS or a group of LTSes? How would this work?
• Teaching as mustard – there are only different kinds of mustard. Technology needs the same kind of democratisation.

Month Three:
David Pogue: When it comes to technology, simplicity sells
Links from the third session
Learning aim: Use internal blogs to talk about how we could simplify things, use external blogs to ask users what they would do. Examine Glow, Curriculum Design and documents (e.g. Building the Curriculum 3). Are we a simple as we can be without being simplistic? What would we change in our approach and systems to guarantee simplicity? How can individuals effect this kind of change?

Additional video:
Richard St John: Secrets of Success in 8 Words and 3 Minutes
How can we get these messages across?

Month Four:
Hans Rosling: Debunking Third World Myths With The Best Statistics You’ve Ever Seen
Links from the fourth session
Workshop on making better presentations, in time for Scottish Learning Festival.

Month Five:
Barry Schwartz: Paradox of Choice
Learning aim: how to track so much information, maybe based on this. Compare and contrast with the previous sessions on simplicity and the power of the niche. Where is the balance to be struck between catering for all and doing well for all? What’s the role for involving more ‘users’ of a service, students or parents, in taking on more of the workload?

Month Six:
David Eggers: Homework drop-in centres
An example of civic innovation in practice. What role is there for organisations to kick-start this kind of initiative, extend the potential of learning beyond school?

When it comes to technology simplicity sells. That’s the title of David Pogue’s TED Talk which provides the basis of discussion at the third Inspiration Session for Learning and Teaching Scotland employees. But this time, with Scotland’s teachers on holiday and clearly with nothing else better to do, we’re inviting you along.

With apologies for the late invitation, if you fancy a trip to Glasgow or live nearby, you are welcome to join members of the Glow, online services and technology teams, as well as Development Officers and Knowledge Management colleagues from across the organisation:

• Monday, July 28th, 11.45-14.00
• Classroom of the Future at Learning and Teaching Scotland, Glasgow
  Optima building, 58 Robertson Street
• Meet at 11.45am in the 9th floor reception, session from midday until around 2pm.
• If you wish to attend, please leave a comment here or email me.

This session will feature a team viewing of the, ahem, sideways look of
technology and what ’simplicity’ actually means. We’ll then have a
fairly loose discussion around how LTS could do its job better by
finding its simplicity bone. Your input here would be most valuable. I
do hope you can come along. If you want to see what we’ve done so far in our inspiration sessions, please flick over to Connected Live.

For the past three months I’ve been hosting these Inspiration Sessions, providing regular “thinking pitstops” for nearly half the staff in this time, getting to grips with what new technologies’ potential might be for their own projects and mining the staff at all levels, from administrator to Director, for their creative ideas. Several new blogs and web services have been launched with the growing confidence of staff, and internally we’re beginning to see much better sharing of information using the likes of social bookmarking on del.icio.us, an internal wiki and weblogs.

Connected 21 is now online with articles and features on literacy, Gaelic, PE and computer games.

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/connected/articles/21/index.asp

It’s not as odd as it sounds, but innovations in spaghetti sauce (and Pepsi, and mustard) might hold clues as to how Glow, the Curriculum for Excellence and other ‘national’ initiatives can prove successful on the most niche of local levels.

At Learning and Teaching Scotland I’ve been leading some monthly Inspiration Sessions, today being the second one. Last month’s debates were based on Sir Ken Robinson’s Do Schools Kill Creativity?, and from it came some key points for development in the way staff might approach certain challenges. More on those later, I hope, but for the first session we kept the results on our staff forum to see what would happen. 10 times the number of views than normal is what happened; people have seen where they can move things forward for themselves. You can see some of the links we discussed on delicious.

This month, I was curious to see how the niche would be catered for in Glow and the Curriculum for Excellence, especially having recently presented a fair bit on how the social web has capitalised on small passionate communities. The basis was Gladwell’s talk on how marketers in the past forty years have discovered the niche’s power, in much the same way as Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail describes. As some of my colleagues noted, most of the ‘big deals’ in Scottish education these past few years have been “national initiatives” or “national programmes”, leaving LTS and Local Authority staff to impress the importance of local contexts and connections. It’s what Gladwell calls the “platonic dish” approach to policy: this is the right way to do it, there is no other, versus a more user-centred approach, where we empower the user to do what they want, versus an “ask the user what they want” approach, with the complication that the user doesn’t always know what they want. Gladwell puts all these three arguments forward and leaves you buzzing, recognising elements of each in every project you’ve ever done, and not entirely sure where you want to go next.

View a high quality version of the Malcolm Gladwell talk here.

It was with this meeting of minds that we had a good hour of debate, and a set of tangible actions for our teams to undertake, to help make a dent in the concept of encouraging and celebrating small, passionate groups of participation on Glow, exhibiting, if you like, what the Curriculum is all about. Some of the interesting points to come out:

• Making the many ways ‘into’ Glow explicit: with a mentor, through an online module, with a product guide, going to an event, keeping an eye on the Glow blog watch…
• Making variety more visible: showcasing interesting groups or practice. There are some technical questions about how we do this, as it’s hard to see “into” a group created at a local level, harder still to promote it to a national.
• Reinforcing the messages about localising practice through Area Advisers’ work, and with HMIe finding local good practice and innovation, reporting on it during their work.
• Every single launch event should have a “this is what Glow can do in this context”. There might even be some double-branding to drive the point home.
• We’re going to start infiltration of each other’s meetings far more often, using Glow groups of other parts of our organisation to ‘listen in’ on discussions and spot opportunities for collaboration. This will be further aided if anyone can put a date into the whole-staff diary without having to go through a colleague first.
• The calendar is useful as it currently stands on our intranet homepage, but we also need a YouTube-esque Today, Tomorrow, This Month, This Year, to alert us in good time to events happening in the near future. We will also work on an option to have it to text message via Twitter, simply by splicing in a feed from our intranet events.
• Finally, recording of presentations, while happening far more often than ever before, needs to be done as standard, with sharing on Slideshare of visuals. They might not be of use to more than a score or two of people, but the cost is almost non-existent and potential impact huge.

There are some further ideas for developing these in the delicious links I’ve been pulling together on the theme of niches. But the parting shot was an interesting take on what might be called LTS’s Extra Special Range (extending the food and supermarket metaphors to breaking point here!). We all tend to work for our customers – as Don Ledingham has put it before, his customers could be students, parents, teachers, lots of different groups depending on the product or outcome and scenario. One of our colleagues, with experience in the retail sector, talked about the customer’s customer, the theory that we are producing things not for the person who is buying the shopping but for the person for whom the good or service is intended. It raises interesting ideas again on the kind of metrics we used to guage success in Glow or of the new Curriculum. It will almost certainly not be on hits, and may not even be on ‘active users’, whatever they might look like.

However, the big question should be: “What has the impact been on a student’s education?” There are new metrics, involving our development officers, Local Authority QIOs, teachers, parents and students even evaluating the impact of the various programmes, pedagogies and tehcniques that have been employed. How, though, can that be filtered through in a meaningful way, so that those charged with trying to make things better still can do so with reliable evidence? Ideas on the virtual postcard? (or just use the comments below). 

Anyone who is a drops in on my edubuzz blog may have noticed that the last few posts of the term pointed to new mp3s of pupils playing. The reason for this sudden increase in recording activity was that I received as a gift a Zoom H2 Handy Recorder. It is handy not least because it fits in the inside pocket of a suit jacket!

Previous recordings had been done on a mini disc recorder and, while the recording quality was very high, so too was the faff factor:

• record item(s) – which had to stay on the recorder until I got home, as there was no USB interface
• transfer recording(s) in real time into a wave editing program at home
• take the opportunity while there to cut out any extra run-in/run-out time, add fade-outs etc.
• convert the wav files to mp3 in iTunes – ensuring that I had set (in Preferences) the importing to mp3 and not AAC (Advanced Audio Coding – Apple’s own format) which was not, at that time, Wordpress compatible.
• post to the blog

Now, I don’t see it as my job to advertise the Zoom H2 on behalf of its makers, but I would like to flag up some benefits for the educational user:

• as soon as a recording is finished, simply plug into speakers and press play – no need to rake around looking for it – far less, return home and reformat. Pupils like to hear their work as soon as possible and this couldn’t be easier
• the recording quality is very high
• there are many choices* to allow one to offset quality of recording (sampling, bit-rate etc.) against practical factors (file size, upload time etc.)
• you can record straight to mp3 to save converting later
• where you’ve recorded to wav and then realise that you’re going to need more space on the 512 Mb SD card (provided) before you are going to have access to a computer, you can convert from wav to mp3 on the H2
• the H2 can be powered by mains (adaptor included) or battery – more suitable when restricted access to power points prevents the ideal placement of the H2 – a low battery warning appears to save you losing a great performance – I pushed this to the limit recently and was able to make many more recordings after the initial warning had appeared – although this would probably not be the behaviour of a professional journalist
• you can store recordings in one of eight folders – which helps to avoid confusion when pupils in different schools are recording the same item
• once connected to a computer, you can turn off and save battery power as the H2 is then power through the USB connection
• the H2, once connected to a computer, functions like any other external drive – this allows you, for example, to change the file names from STE 000; STE 001 etc. to something more meaningful like Mhairi – Wedding Song. These names, once applied, will then appear on the H2
• when connected by USB the H2, where preferred, can act as an external mic and record to programs such as Audacity – this may be an easier way to keep an eye on levels
• recording level is initially set by choosing one of 3 mic gain settings – and thereafter by adjusting the level numerically, while keeping an eye on the level indicators
• where it turns out that the performance was not as loud as testing suggested, you can amplify after recording – on the H2 or later
• long performances/discussions/interviews can be split into sections (which them become separate files) on the H2
• there are 3 recording modes (90 degrees for a solo player/speaker; 180 degrees for a linear ensemble/panel of speakers; surround – ideal for small, circular ensemble/class discussion etc.
• using the line-in function, you can record listen again programmes
• additional features include: guitar tuner function; metronome; tripod (to allow the 2 to stand on a stool, desk etc); mic stand attachment; headphones; foam protector (to reduce wind noise when recording out of doors); small canvas carrying bag (to prevent scratches on the display)
• software updates can be downloaded to the SD card and will be taken on board the next time it is inserted

There are many more features I’ve yet to explore and there are also many rival products which come in a good deal cheaper than the H2 but, if I didn’t know better, I’d say this had been designed with the educational user in mind.

* range of recording qualities

• wav44.1kHz/16bit
• wav44.1kHz/24bit
• wav48kHz/16bit
• wav48kHz/24bit
• wav96kHz/16bit
• wav96kHz/24bit
• mp3 48k; 56k; 80k; 96k; 112k; 128k; 160k; 192k; 224k; 256k; 320k;
• mp3 VBR (variable bit rate – where the sampling rate varies according to what is being played – presumably a narrower range of frequencies – including spoken word and silences – would require less information to be processed – thereby reducing file size)

I was reminded of this quote today:

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826); 3rd president of US.

The reason it came to mind was that while thinking about apparent serendipity, an alternative perception occurred to me which might best be summed up by a paraphrasing of the above quote as follows:

“I’m a great believer in serendipity, and I find the more connected I become the more frequently it occurs.”

While reading one of my favourite language blogs I was referred to a site entitled The Mnemosyne Project which aims, not only to provide a sophisticated free flash-card tool, but also to research into the nature of long-term memory. A few seconds earlier, I had been referred by Ewan McIntosh to Quizlet – another free vocabulary training tool. Both seem very impressive.

However, something about the url of The Mnemosyne Project rang a bell, and it soon came to me that it appears to be the work of the same talented, open-handed people who offer the free audio editing & recording program, Audacity.

Audacity is loaded on many PCs in East Lothian schools. It was that program which I used to extract, amplify, bass boost and eventually fade out the short mp3 sample in this post. It sounds like a lot, but it was the work of seconds really.

I would imagine that any organisation offering this much to learning communities of whatever kind should be eligible for an award of some kind, at some point. Any ideas?

In 1994 I went on a trip to Sweden with the Lothian Regional Orchestra and Jazz Band. Our host, a man with the resoundingly Nordic name of Gerry Morrisey, took us out for a tour in his car and and pointed out a patch of spare ground covered in oil where learner drivers would practise dealing with skids. Immediately I wondered why we don’t do that here. Why defer your first skid until you are either in traffic or in danger?

This flashed through my mind today when I was thinking about the dangers which acceleration* can present in an ensemble situation**. Many people’s first experience of minimal control occurs in a concert. They may have limited experience of:

• the factors causing it – adrenalin – allowing a tempo in excess of the norm to feel normal
• acoustical/aural novelties – not sitting next to (as as near to) the people you normally follow
• how to be part of the remedy*** – increase your volume and slowing down while your section is in command of the most frequent notes i.e. make people wait for you
• how to notice that another section (or individual) is offering a remedy i.e. being so at home with the own part that you have spare attention for the other parts

So, can you practise these skills? Here is a midi file of a Bach Air with wandering tempo. The tempo changes every bar. For the first minute the changes, while noticeable, are mild. Thereafter, they are more drastic – even humorous. Why not try the following tasks?

• See if you can keep track of the beat by tapping your finger on your leg (this way you’ll feel it in addition to hearing it).
• See if you can hear the best part to follow – the one with the most frequent notes
• Try to play along if you know it (this version is in G as opposed to the original key of D – consider it an extra challenge

* deceleration is rare – curiously a wandering tempo usually goes up, whereas wandering pitch usually goes down

** this is less of a problem in a solo situation and, if it does occur, is more quickly fixed – the nature of the situation being more like a speedy dictatorship than a time-consuming democracy

*** I’m referring here solely to ensembles without a conductor – otherwise you’d simply follow the beat (easier said than done).

Thanks to Ewan McIntosh for a link to a Times Online article I’d otherwise have missed concerning Leonard Sax’s book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors* Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

This is a massive field and one upon which I do not feel qualified authoritatively to comment. However, one claim in the article (not indicated as being a direct quote from the book) stopped me in my tracks and that was that boys do not hear as well as girls. My initial reaction was one of disbelief as my my experience of the playing by ear vs. playing from written music divide suggests that boys massively outnumber girls in preferring the former. There are side-effects: their reading suffers, but their memory improves. For a while the feeling of incongruity was amelioated by the realisation that there is a world of difference between simply having a musical ear and being disposed to listening to instructions in class. However, the more I thought about this, the more omnipresent listening skills appeared to be:

• part of the selection process for instrumental instruction involves a multiple choice listening test
• much further down the line, Listening forms 1/3 of SQA Music courses and exams
• all external exam bodies include some kind of aural testing
• ensemble skills rely on a mixture of reading and taking cues through listening to the other parts
• although written parts convey expressive ideas, many decisions are arrived in rehearsal without further writing – the participants simply listen and remember

Instrumental instruction requires such a level of listening that, were that statement in the article to be true, girls would simply outnumber boys when it comes to lasting the course. I looked at the statistics for the five schools in my orbit and compiled the following:

Primary School 1 Boys 8.7% Girls 91.3%

Primary School 2 Boys 50% Girls 50%

Secondary School 1 Boys 62.5% Girls 37.5%

Secondary School 2 Boys 47.5% Girls 52.5%

Secondary School 3 Boys 50% Girls 50%

N.B. No pupil was sawn into fractions in the compiling of these statistics.

I’d be very interested to see a breakdown of statistics for other instruments taught by either gender. It should be borne in mind that other factors come into play e.g. which instruments have been taught in feeder primaries and how many musicians of either gender are already in the system when they arrive in secondary school, where the full compliment is on offer.

* Dr. Sax lists the The Five Factors Driving the Decline of Boys as:

Video Games. Studies show that some of the most popular video games are disengaging boys from real-world pursuits.

Teaching Methods. Profound changes in the way children are educated have had the unintended consequence of turning many boys off school.

Prescription Drugs. Overuse of medication for ADHD may be causing irreversible damage to the motivational centers in boys’ brains.

Endocrine Disruptors. Environmental estrogens from plastic bottles and food sources may be lowering boys’ testosterone levels, making their bones more brittle and throwing their endocrine systems out of whack.

Devaluation of Masculinity. Shifts in popular culture have transformed the role models of manhood. Forty years ago we had Father Knows Best; today we have The Simpsons.

Connected Live will be reporting regularly throughout one of the world’s biggest education shows, BETT, at London Olympia.

Come here from Wednesday morning to discover the best podcasts, videos and bloggers’ coverage from around the web, as well as a peek from a Scottish perspective.

We’ll also provide a live rolling blog of Friday night’s TeachMeet08, the unconference par excellence for educators doing amazing things with teaching and technology, and provide you with an opportunity to follow events in Second Life from 6pm that evening.

The front cover of this weeks New Scientist boasted a promising article about procrastination. Uncharacteristically, I ripped it open and began reading immediately. If anyone in my orbit would like to borrow it, just ask and I’ll bring it in sometime in the next fifteen years.

Seriously though, my mountain of NS back-numbers is quite redundant because, as a subscriber, I have access to the complete NS archive. If anyone would like some for their school, department, spouse’s waiting room etc. just let me know and I’ll try to get them to you.

As one of the world’s worst procrastinators, I’m in no position to offer advice. Yet if a new, unmentored instrumental instructor were ever to ask me about producing numerous ensemble arrangements to deadline throughout the year I feel that I would have a few pointers.

1. Reduce the whirlwind of disabling possibilities simply by starting. Once an arrangement is under way, many distraction options are then ruled out by your initial choices.
2. Assuming you are using software, save every 30 seconds and before getting into too much detail, consider creating two versions – one for reading and one for sound. Aim for clarity and (apparent) simplicity in the reading version and remember the ancient proverb from the Province of East Lothian “One overlooked layout decision – a thousand repeated sentences.” Pepper the parts with rehearsal marks. No pupil has ever complained that there are too many. The audio version, the potential source of multiple midi versions at graded tempi, can benefit from features which would make the written parts unfriendly e.g. the insertion of rests to emphasise articulation. Only in this version need you worry about audio features such as the stereo spacing relative volume of parts.
3. Before committing to print, play through the various parts at breakneck speed. This will flag up any technical or reading difficulties more vividly than simply looking over the arrangement.

Pic: Procrastination