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?

Two days in to the new year, and already my mind is reeling at the eduthinking going on. In particular, some diagrams from two different sources may help clarify some of the issues that I believe education faces this year.

The first post of the 2008 from David Warlick has him thinking about the differences between ‘School 1.0′ and ‘School 2.0′, the ‘traditional’ way we’ve been doing things versus the new ways which are possible thanks to fast, connecting web technologies. Warlick says that:

I’ve been trying to reconcile some ideas about teaching and learning that I’d formulated a few years ago, with some of the shifts that have been happening since…

As part of this process, and in an attempt to bring clarity, he’s created the following diagram.

For me, the interest lies in the easy way we can recognise the changes that he notes on the ‘School 2.0′ side of the page. What he highlights is the quantity and diversity of information that is available to us today and, importantly, the realisation that though the future may be unpredictable we have moved to an information rich era where the means of accessing this information is easier and cheaper than at any other time in human history.

This suggests that we need to re-think our approach to teaching and to school, but there is always the problem of making teachers appreciate just how big the changes are… until now!

Enter Alec Couros – Stage Left

Sometimes all it takes is a diagram to bring clarity to the process… and on page 182 of Alec Couros’ Doctoral thesis I found two which effectively illustrate my life before and after beginning blogging. More importantly, they are a graphic representation of the difference between School1.0 and School2.0 because Couros clearly understands the difference between what he calls “The Teacher Network” and “The Networked Teacher”:

(Diagrams from EXAMINING THE OPEN MOVEMENT: POSSIBILITIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION (pdf. p182, doc, p.172) – Reproduced under a Creative Commons License – Alec Couros, Dec 2006)

If you already know what connected learning can do for you, then you’ll recognise the diagrams. I hadn’t appreciated just how much of a connected learner/teacher I was until I recognised all the links in the second diagram. And here’s why I believe this is important for Scottish Education in particular…

2007 saw the live launch of Glow, 2008 sees it being rolled out to even more Scottish educators and learners. What I think Couros has made me realise is that Glow is going to require the teachers to move from being in a network to being networked. As a Glow mentor, I will be in a position where I will need to explain the importance of Glow and also the pedagogical shift it represents because, if Glow is to thrive, we will need educators to adopt and embrace the Social tools built into it. It will not be enough for teachers to simply say “Aye, we’ve got Glow in the school…” though I’m sure that is something we will hear all too often. No, what is needed are teachers with the will to learn and adopt and participate in the truly global wall-less world of education that Glow represents, and which so many of us have been participating in for the past few years.

I think and hope that, as (the) Glow spreads across Scotland, we will begin to hear from more and more Scottish Networked Teachers. I think that’s a suitably optimistic start to a New Year which promises so much. So what are you all optimistic about this year?

Professor Stephen Heppell has been looking into the horizon with his feet on the ground for many years, and his inspirational keynote speech about where Scotland stands to gain educationally in its horizons is now live on the SLF website. There’s also a great video interview with him which takes you deeper into some of his thoughts.

One of the highlights of this year’s Festival has been Stephen Heppell’s contribution, not only in terms of his keynote address, but in the work he will be continuing to do in Scotland with Learning and Teaching Scotland and Scottish schools. What was it that Scottish bloggers got out of his talk?

Will learning ever be mobile enough?
The one thing Stephen has been thumping on about, and quite rightly so, is the importance of making learning smaller, more mobile. Recently writing in The Guardian about his early mobile phone/block of cement experiences, and rediscovering this cumbersome tool, reminds us that the tiny devices now carried by students (often ‘illegitimately’ in their school) are more powerful than the same computers we spend what relatively little money we have for ICT in education (it will always be too little for this blogger). They’re also insanely popular with the kids: they make being brainy cool. If the power really is in their pockets, why do we see rare examples of mobiles being exploited in the classroom, such as those that were so well received at Sharon Tonner’s session on mobile learning at The High School of Dundee? Perhaps we also need to talk more about how we lay the way for this to happen, preparing teachers, parents and students alike with a new set of literacy skills.

David Muir carries a great summary of the main keynote, including the first (big) question on identity online and off. The point only begins to make more sense when you take into account the sense of identity the national intranet Glow hopes to bring to online participants. Importantly, though, identity doesn’t just come with the product. It’s something that has to be developed from the bottom up, from the users who will enter this online community and, if they feel at home, will stay in it. Peter has more detail from the Glow Mentors’ breakfast talk that helps fill in some of the practical ideas that might help this happen in Glow. The most important takeaway, though, comes from the Clacks crowd: no matter what toys and devices are in Glow, it’s the ‘glue’ Glow provides for bringing people and ideas together that will help this identity-finding occur.

The great unknown (isn’t it fun?)
There is one point where tradition, rigour and the exciting pace of change in today’s connected classroom seem to be at odds. Gordon McKinlay reports Stephen’s views on our passing from an age of 20th Century government guidelines and policy to “just getting on with it”. Gordon also argues the point many teachers in Scottish classrooms will feel when they have tried to “just get on with it” – this might not be true. Between filters, blocks, well-meaning directives and the rest, innovating with small, portable and often pupil-owned equipment has, some might argue, never been more difficult.

The way out, says Heppell, is action research, and lots of it. Up to a third of school teachers carrying out action research, gathering and publishing data – themselves, on their own blogs – until it’s time for the next third to do the same. It’s the kind of thing we’re beginning to see (uncertified, perhaps, but rich nonetheless) in East Lothian, where that critical one third of teachers currently blog their practice and seek new ways forward on the edubuzz.org blog engine.

Sharing also needs to happen more often by more people for more teachers. Heppell particularly enjoyed TeachMeet07, an ‘unconference’ put together by the people who came along, all 150 or so of them, at the Glasgow Science Centre on the first evening of the conference. Katie reckons he thought it was the best CPD method he had seen; his mobile blog might concur just a bit of that.

Keeping it small
Ollie Bray, in his new post as a DHT in Musselburgh Grammar School, is perhaps understandibly thinking that smaller schools would be better – and certainly easier for DHTs to know all the names. But smaller schools would also help the kids. Smallness is something Heppell is also keen on; just taking a look at the pre-SLF BBC Breakfast appearance he made confirms this. Transition between primary and secondary looses too many of our kids on the way, as they go from intimate and engaging to expansive and fighting for attention. It makes me think of the MET Schools I visited this past summer in Providence, USA, where the cap on numbers is around 130. Small schools work for children who just wouldn’t or haven’t survived in the mainstream.
The messages seem simple: keep it small, keep it engaging, keep it fun. Share, share, share. Find others you can work with collaboratively, and help your kids to do the same. Find out what skills you need to do that yourself, and then help your students find them for themselves.

If only it were that easy… Would you say it was?
Photo: from Neil Winton