cj's

cj has moved

2010-12-24T17:21:00.000+11:00

I've begun to colonise a small piece of digital bit space. All of my scribbling, notes and crazy stuff will appear there from now on.

Taleb the scribbler

2008-01-26T18:12:00.006+11:00

With a wee bit more time on my hands now, or that is what I keep telling myself, I have been chewing on the fun scribbles of one Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think that iconoclasts who write in an entertaining manner are folk who tickle my intellectual fancies more often than not. A good book to me is one that provokes new ideas, disturbs what I thought were settled ideas (yes, I do have a few) and also is a tad playful. Taleb's two books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan both qualify on these grounds. Taleb is wonderfully skeptical and delightfully curious in his exploration of ideas which touch on much of what count as important in education, the academy and other interesting and important bits of social space.

I came across an excellent review of The Black Swan. Well worth a read.

Researching the self and the (in)significance of trends

2007-10-14T21:12:00.001+10:00

I was checking to see if an interview that I did for a local issue had appeared yet. In my searching, I stumbled over a small piece I wrote for CPSR in 1997. At the time, I recall having a bit of fun doing the scribbles. But that was written or at least published (an odd term these days when most everything is published) ten years ago. I was pondering the cultural and educational imperialism of the US. It seemed to fit with my lived experience at the time. And now with the flood of AJAX software (I recall reading that AJAX was simply Java script that worked!) that imperialism is a little less certain. Sure the US is still the centre of the Internet universe but the "all to all" of social media makes national boundaries almost quaint. I don't want to get all romantic about the longer term play out of "all to all" networking but there is now a small but fairly insightful (IMHO) group of folk who figure that all of this is really Gutenberg 2. In 1997 I got it kinda wrong. I am puzzling the prospect of a global community which shifts to an "all to all" communication system and the impact that will have on virtually all of the social institutions we have built upon the one to many, broadcast logic of the past century. My favourite piece on this was written a good while back (1994) by Jay Weston. I figure it is one of those not seeing the forest for the trees moments. Lots of good folk all out their busily worrying about "applying" various bits of "social software" to their educational practice and somehow unable to zoom out to see the larger shifts that are happening. Popular culture (music a movies) might be the current sites of interest but I think it is now only a matter of time before we see similar kinds of disruptions around various bits of formal education.

Peeling onions

2007-10-06T08:44:00.000+10:00

Roger Shank recently picked a couple of video clips from The Onion, a sometimes useful source of satire about most things human. For those afficionados of curriculum debates I'd recommend: Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales? For those with interests in international comparisons this piece may appeal.

Moments that matter

2007-08-01T08:51:00.001+10:00

I am reading the draft of a proposal for research from a long standing colleague, a Principal who has been working with KPS curriculum for a good number of years. Like the other Principals and teachers who work in this space they are simply wonderful teachers, leaders and thinkers and from whom I have learned so much these past years. The piece I am reading was mapping some of the early experiences this Principal had which has prompted her to more formally study this approach to schooling.

She asked one of the teachers about what stood out to her in doing this work. She quoted her thus:

“Knowledge they’ve (students) retained, by listening to language they’re using during tasks, talk and play (when they’re playing with their mines).”

“Lower achievers taking on leadership roles because they are more of the experts than my academic kids”

The last statement put a large smile on my face.

Revisiting a curriculum of questions

2007-05-26T10:05:00.000+10:00

I was scribbling a note to an internal Faculty blog and trying to make a case for thinking about curriculum in terms of questions. I gestured back to the piece I scribbled about that a few years back and in doing so had to use Google's blogsearch to find it. But, as is the way of the web, I stumbled over a long piece by Bill Ayers which while writing about Peter McLaren's work made this lovely observation:

The most important lesson I learned in the earliest days of my teaching came from the Freedom Schools in Mississippi in the early 1960s. These schools were premised on the idea that while the black people of Mississippi had been denied many things—decent facilities, forward-looking curriculum, fully trained teachers—the fundamental injury was the denial of the right to think for themselves about the circumstances of their lives, how they got to where they were, and how things might be changed. The curriculum for these schools was a curriculum of questions, of inquiry and dialogue, a curriculum of posing problems: why are we, students and teachers, in the Freedom Movement? What do we want to change? This is an example of critical pedagogy at its best. It invites people to engage, to participate, to transform their lives, and to change their world.

Which, to me, begs the question, what, with our right answer obsessed curriculum are we denying the young of this country? From Ayers point of view quite a lot.

Schools R Us

2007-03-31T11:09:00.000+10:00

It's Saturday and one should be doing other stuff but I stumbled over a post of Roger Schank's and when I stopped falling about laughing all the noisy babble by the self-appointed critics of Oz schooling more or less fell into the category he outlines here: Trying to get people’s arms around the real problem in education is not that easy. The reason is you. You all went to school so you are quite sure that what is taught in school is what should be taught in school -- only we should teach it better. Australia currently suffers from a bunch of old folk who want to reproduce their experience of schooling across the country's schools. I'm not going to link to them... it will only encourage them to write more inanities. I often think that much of the history of education can be captured by the notion of well intentioned old folk making idiotic decisions on behalf of the young. The basis of all of their commentary are the results of international tests. They always justify their pet fads on the basis of the performance of Oz kids with the performance of other kids via these international tests. To me, the first question to ask is what do these tests tell us? I know what is being claimed for them but what do they actually tell us. No one wants to go there. It is all too easy to simply cite the evidence. For my part, these tests need to be tested. What do they actually achieve other than indicate to us who is good at taking tests. If this was a serious educational goal then why do we need to inflict so many of them on children. To accept that this kind of testing is actually doing something to improve the capacity of the young to deal with the complexities of living on this planet requires considerable quantities of mind altering substances. To suggest that countries who achieve highly on these tests are somehow better than countries that don't is laughable. And what is being promoted as the solution to improve scores? Schank has a view that resonates with the back to school as I knew it noisies in Oz: This country needs to come to grips with the fact that the high school curriculum reflects a notion of how nineteenth century scholars thought about how to produce more scholars like themselves. There may be a place for a few folk like this, but entire age cohorts? If you, like me or my daughter, think that the emperor has been wandering around naked for the past half century of so then you'll enjoy more of Schank's scribblings.

Reassembling the social

2007-03-09T17:55:00.000+11:00

I must confess to having neglected the Dear Bruno for far too long. The book has been out a while but I had been too busy patrolling the diameter of my ever shrinking life (thanks Arti) to pay it sufficient attention. I am, for those who don't know of my interest in what is generally called actor-network theory, something of a devotee of Latour's scribblings. The man has a wonderful sense of humour, fun and a delightful capacity to puncture much of the pomposity that passes as social science (I did put on a string of garlic when I typed those last two words). "Be prepared to cast off agency, structure, psyche, time, and space along with along with every other philosophical and anthropological category, no matter how deeply rooted in common sense they may appear to be" pp. 24-25.

The Medici effect

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

Any book with the subtitle: what elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation is at least worth a scan. Leaving aside the usual hype that goes with a lot of business publications (yeah, I read stuff from the dark side), this 200 page little jolter is worth a peek for folk who puzzle about the I word (I is fer innovation), although to be fair, Johansson writes more in terms of break throughs than innovation. One of the intriguing observations about break throughs was just how much hard work is involved. Often such things are popularly presented as "Ah ha" moments while sitting in or imbibing fluids. Johansson reports that Mike Oldfield (remember Tubular Bells?) did 2,300 recordings before he got what he wanted, and that Edison did 50,000 experiments to develop the storage fuel cell (p.107). Johansson's thesis is that the break through stuff comes at the intersection of two, often quite disparate fields and gives a good number of well told accounts of this phenomenon. I must confess that this book probably encouraged (or even justifies!) my weird tastes in reading and pursuing ideas that don't even remotely look educational. It also offers yet another telling crit. of what goes on in the name of curriculum in most formal educational systems as being quite daft. Put simply, if we play the Medici game with this book and curriculum, schools (at all levels) come out as places of incrementalism and conformity. As Johansson argues, incrementalism has its place but its not the place you want to be if you want to do anything that either stirs or feeds you passions. If nothing, the book is a great source of "off the wall" PD ideas for jaded educational consultants or tired university lecturers looking for a new riff for their stuff. To help, Johansson offers a kind of framework for the break through phenomenon and includes some interesting counter intuitive ideas. In my humble opinion, it would be such a neat way to think about curriculum, kids and turning schools into sites that did interesting, even useful knowledge production (yeah cheap plug for the KPS stuff.... ). The other thing that struck me was the importance for the intangible stuff around all of this, passion (and I love this gem from Arti's recent scribble: I have always felt that grappling without lust is unethical), energy, persistence, faith in self and ideas and all those other qualities the school system is so good at squashing in kids. There is a lot more to say, the book resonated with a very large number of memes that are important to me and I think might rank up there with the current top 100 of selfish memes busily looking for compliant hosts.

The rise and rise of the quants

2007-01-28T10:46:00.000+11:00

It was in James Boyle's keynote at Beyond Broadcast 2006 that I guess the term behavioural economics was first raised for me. Apologies for y'all for which it is old hat. Then Christopher Lyden's Open Source podcast on Economics Reimagined helped the penny to drop, if indeed it has. Lyden's chat with a number of behavioural economists opened my eyes widely. David Leonhart's piece in the NY Times refers to them as intellectual imperialists. It is apt. What is behavioural economics? Quoting Lyden: Economics used to be about markets and predictions: tax rates, interest rates, fiscal policy, monetary policy. In short, about money. But with the advent of behavioral economics, economists began to realize that markets are simply aggregations of human choices, and that to understand these choices — imperfect, often irrational or counterintuitive — is to act as a psychologist. For this insight the economist Amost Tversky and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize together in 2002. If economics is not necessarily just about money, then, but about human behavior, it can be applied to any number of other fields. In the Times article, brand-new economist Emily Oster applied her talent to the field of AIDS research to solve a problem that epidemiologists couldn’t. Oster is one of many, a generation of economists looking for new fields to conquer. Put very bluntly, given buckets of data, not collected for a specific research purpose, i.e. an experiment, and given ever growing computer power, the opportunity to fashion interesting questions of social importance and to use existing data to examine them gives you, very crudely, behavioural economics. One of the folk in the Lyden conversation was interested in the question, why poor kids do poorly at schools. Now folk with interests in this area will be aware of the little war that has been raging in Australia about this. Very simply, them who say it is all about school effects and them who say that socioeconomic background is very important. Enter player three from left field with none of the history but access to a lot of data and the economic routines to explore/examine and tease out patterns. To me, this is an interesting shift for those folk who dabble in the broad church we call research in education. Anyone for economics 101?

Breakthrough ideas for education in 2007

2007-01-27T08:28:00.000+11:00

The Harvard Business Review has published its 20 breakthrough ideas for 2007. The list makes for some interesting reading, at least for my quirky tastes but it got me wondering what would a similar list for education or perhaps schooling look like? Is there an educational imagination out there? Perhaps the notion of breakthrough and education are antithetical? As Heather-Jane Robertson wrote some time ago: "The only thing you can do quickly in education is damage" Heather-Jane Robertson (1998) No More Teachers. No More Books. The Commercialization of Canada's Schools, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.

Old influences, happenstance and the whirl of fun ideas.

2006-10-29T14:33:00.000+11:00

I was reading a blog (I should write an old blog mate's blog but I have never met the blogger and would never want to attach any kind of chronological measure to folk one stumbles over online). Nevertheless, for folk who enjoy the odd bit of good fun around curriculum, schooling, computing and so on then Arti's little blog is a heap of fun. I was responding to a post about Starbucks and the NZ curriculum and was pointing out my own preference for drawing on business ideas and thinking. I do this because, generally there is a lot of good, hard-nosed thinking goes on about teaching, learning, leadership, change etc. It was also how I stumbled so long ago into the fun little habit of scenario planning after reading Stewart Brand's the media lab (which is also where I stumbled over the size/problem of so-called global money!!!). But back to the Artichoke post and Arti, true to form, goes beavering away and pulls up some stuff about Semler that I had not heard about, Semler's Escola Lumiar. From the bits you can find online it sounds a bit like KPS schools on steroids. Some quotes from the Telegraph report: "One of the things that is very silly - and I hear from educators all the time - is that schools essentially teach kids to learn. They don't need school for that. Learning is what they do best. We kill it for them." "We are trying to prove that by giving kids freedom, they will in the end be better educated, with much more residual knowledge than the kids in the disciplined schools. They can have a much happier existence and be much more prepared for life if we don't teach them the stupid things that traditional schools do." and Armed with University of Chicago statistics showing that 94 per cent of what we learn in school is never used in later life, he decided to ditch what he calls the "unsuccessful teaching methods" used in millions of schools around the world.

My (bad) digital habits

2006-10-20T19:55:00.000+10:00

As a pseudo/semi-functional academic, I am always interested in ways of tracking contemporary writing, ideas (memes) in and around the stuff in which I have interests. i/e/ how to drink from the fire hose without drowning. One little trick I have been exploring is to do a Google Blog search for the key words/phrases and to copy the 100 RSS feed into my RSS aggregator. I end up with an always updated set of posts, many of which often point me to a publication I have missed, a conference, or call for papers, and even occasionally some useful commentary. And you can filter and search the inputs from this into the aggregator with the search facility in the aggregator.

Widget's for blogger

2006-10-09T12:51:00.000+10:00

As you probably know, Google owns Blogger and has a neat widget for posting, so this is a small test of how well it works.

2006-03-24T13:31:00.000+11:00

For something that probably reflects my weird online reading habits than much else but I must say a good deal of this is a darned good read. It is stuff from The Edge and it a collection of short speeches, transcribed or available in mp3 format that were given to mark the 30th anniversary of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Maybe some quotes to whet the appetite. From the book: "They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines." from the book River Out of Eden: Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don't. From Dennett: First I want to remind you of what Francis Crick called Orgel's Second Rule. "Evolution is cleverer than you are." Now what Crick meant by this jape, of course, was that again and again and again evolutionists, molecular biologists, biologists in general, see some aspect of nature which seems to them to be sort of pointless or daft or doesn't make much sense — and then they later discover it's in fact an exquisitely ingenious design — it is a brilliant piece of design — that's what Francis Crick means by Orgel's Second Rule. a virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude From Krebs: I first came across the notion of an intellectual plumber when I was sitting in my then Oxford College, Pembroke, next to Simon Blackburn, the philosopher now at Cambridge. I turned to him and asked, "What's the point of philosophy anyway, Simon?" And he said, "Well, think of it this way, John. You're just a biologist, you sometimes have leaks in your thinking, and what you need is an intellectual plumber to patch up those leaks, and that's what philosophy will do for you. " From Ridley... size doesn't matter: From this end of the telescope, human beings look like they have quite a big genome, but if you turn the telescope around and look from another direction, the human genome looks rather a small one, compared with that of grasshoppers, which is at least three times as large, or deep-sea shrimps, which have ten times as much DNA as us. From McEwan My son, William McEwan, last year completed an undergraduate biology course at UCL. When he was studying genetics, he told me he was advised to read no papers written before 1997. One can see the point of this advice. In the course of his studies, estimates of the size of the human genome shrank by a factor of three. Such is the headlong nature of contemporary science. But if we understand science merely as a band of light moving through time, advancing on the darkness, and leaving darkness behind it, always at its best only in the incandescent present, we turn our backs on a magnificent and eloquent literature, an epic tale of ingenuity propelled by curiosity. and from Dawkins at the end: So what are the general principles of life, wherever life might be found? I just want to suggest some candidates, as a sort of stimulus to get other people thinking of others. First, Darwinism itself. I've mentioned that. I think it's universal. Can't prove it, but I think it is. Second, digital genetics, with very low mutation rate. Does it have to be DNA? Presumably not. Does it have to be a polynucleotide? Possibly not. Does it have to have a triplet code? Almost certainly not. Et cetera; those are the kinds of questions I'm trying to ask.

On the immutability of skool

2005-12-07T18:55:00.000+11:00

I have maintained for a long time now that it would be nigh on impossible to invent the curious system we call formal education from scratch. In one sense this simply reflects the impossibility of reproducing human history in another place/space and obtaining the same or similar outcome. It also reflects my strong view that this is a system that has gone so far past its use by date that it has become some kind of mesmerising theatre. But it is more than that. When you stop to consider just how much stuff is attached to the various formal education systems that are now deployed the beast takes on proportions that are truly difficult to comprehend. Appreciating the sheer size of these systems and here I don't merely mean the buildings, but also the many people who work in them or rely on them in some way for work plus the administrative support for them. But there is more. There is all the other stuff attached to them as well: parents, governments, varous other social institutions and so on. This makes these things darn near immovable, unreformable, and likely to be only slightly amenable to edits. All of this makes the various claims that have been made from time to time in relation to reform, revolution and re-invention of school such nonsense. All that matters is the ritual. The performance of school. We dare not ask the dangerous question, "what if it did not exist?" Apart from creating a lot of child minding work, it might allow the young to set more of the agenda than has been the case so far and which, might be characterised as a one hundred plus year performance of the Sabre-Tooth Curriculum. J.A. Peddiwell (1939) The Sabre-Tooth Curriculum, New York, McGraw-Hill.

Noticing the sun coming up each morning

2005-11-10T20:42:00.000+11:00

I have yet to get to writing more about computers, learning n stuff like that on this little epistle-machine and I have misplaced the prompt that triggered the frustration expressed in this post which I wrote and then cleverly deleted by using a browser that does not seem fully compliant with what Blogger wants. In any event, I will scribble a little about what I recall I was going to scribble about. There is now a huge industry of writing about, puzzling about and in general making noise about using computing and related technologies in the noble pursuit of supporting teaching, and by extension, the thing that goes on in peoples' heads that we call learning. The L word, one of my top ten "catch-all verging on meaningless" terms of all time. What is so interesting is that folk continue to write about this stuff as if it is something new, different, wonderful. News Flash. This has been going on since the late 70's and before then if you want to include some of the pre-microcomputer stuff. And, most importantly, there has been precious new to say about it. Perhaps the most annoying elements in this well intentioned but fundamentally flawed work is the never ending attempts to "integrate" these technologies into school classrooms. That these efforts have never worked in any sustainable way; that they have cost the blood, sweat and tears of so many self-sacrificing teachers; that there is precious little to show for a quarter of a century of effort, are lost on the mindless "researchers"/"policy makers" who keep insisting that it must be possible. I won't bore the tiny audience about why this might be so but there is clearly sufficient empirical data to suggest just how stupid this is. Folks. The sun keeps coming up each morning. Folks. Trying computers in classrooms hit their limit in the 80's all that has changed is the technology. The more powerful technology, aka schooling will keep winning. As an aside, this may the lasting noteworthiness of schools, that as a social institution they are one of very few that have remained largely untouched by the massive deployment of all manner of digital technologies across the planet. The other, more depressing side of this stupidity is that while we focus attention on such mindless goals as integration into classrooms that the world beyond schools has and continues to change profoundly. This has to be the focus of attention, not the stupid assumption that getting kids to learn computer skills in their Geography class will somehow prepare them well for this world. It's fiddling while Rome burns. This is something of a rant but underpins the origins of my interest in doing school differently, taking seriously the very real challenge of how to prepare kids for a world that is so dependent upon things digital. Now is not the time to be certain (or as Tom Peters puts it: "If you're not confused, you're not paying attention."), particularly when it comes to such important questions such as how do we prepare the young of the tribe to deal with the "interesting" mess they will inherit from us?

Joining dots

2005-10-28T14:47:00.000+10:00

It is one of those consequences of the Western approach to "stuff" that after millenia of working out how much fun it is to split things up, chop em into little "disciplined" pieces and categorise, label, identify and code anything that can be that there is this now very strong sense that "dot joining" is important work. Maybe it's one of those huge cosmic correction things. Doing too much of one thing inevitably leads to a huge press to reverse it. One hopes that the fascination with global money and its deployment to make more global money in any way possible will go the way of the categorisers. But here we are not quite talking geological time scales but not far off them. Science fiction has much to answer for in providing templates and models for maddies to try and produce. How else does one explain that decisions to provide money to the needy by a particular government has to be OK'd by pension fund managers in the US (OK. I skipped a few dots) But it is this kind of dot joining wse need more of. On the other hand, the well rehearsed joined dots around schooling, i.e. in shorthand, schooling is good for the young is in drastic need of unjoining. Describing schooling as a colleague of mine once did as organised child abuse seems closer to the mark than all the nonsense that is currently claimed for this period in a young person's life. Maybe there is an entropy balance here. You can only unjoin as many dots as you join. A kind of joined dot bank where the balance is assiduously maintained. Go join some for me.

On the virtues of loopiness

2005-10-27T19:19:00.000+10:00

Intellectually I am drawn to the loopy, the "enfant terribles" of the academic world. I figure that folk who keep repeating, reinforcing particular epsitemologies, ontologies are, more or less, intellecutal sycophants. We enjoy an enormously privileged position in being paid to think and also to contribute to the well-being of the citizens of this country/planet. Being an intellecutal "yes person" does not cut it. It seems to me that merely echoing others, acquiescing to the status quo mindsets is, effectively, squandering public monies. If we can't convey to our students the importance of skepticism, curiosity and even bloody-minded resistance to status quo ideas then we don't deserve the monies the public provide us. I hope there is no need to rehearse what status quo thinking has delivered to the youth of this and other countries. What to me is curious is what holds, what are palpably silly ideas, together. For example, the nonsense around literacies that "rages" in the public media in Australia at present. Pathetic neo-liberal nonsense versus precious old left nonsense while the kids of this country are ignored. Well, not exactly ignored, both camps claim to represent the youth and as far as I can tell the youth are saying, to both, "huh?" (which is a polite translation of what is actually being said). There are multiple nonsenses, many of which come from a well meaning bunch of elderly folk making decisions on behalf of the young. Mostly the oldies get it wrong but hey, they were well intentioned. I have often suggested that if you started from square one, ground zero, it would be impossible to invent the stupid, unfair, absurd, inefficient, stiffling education system we currently enjoy and what is worse we export this nonsense to countries who can ill afford such wasteful "luxuries". We live in what is argued to be an "evidence-based" world. Anyone care to offer any evidence that the current system does much other than impress on the young that they are stupid, dumb, can't cut it? Where is the evidence that "the system" actually prepares the young for the contemporary world? Much huff and puff, zip evidence. There is much to be said for systems that encourage and nurture idiosyncracy, loopies, people who will think way outside the tiny little square that claims to capture all of human wisdom. It would be ok to have a uniform system if we lived in a 1950's world where much was predictable, linear, not much different from the year before. But we don't. We need a system that supports people to think, to challenge, to be rewarded for being loopies (well argued loopies). In a dangerously unpredictable world, educational certainty is a handicap we can well do without. A system whose sole purpose would be to produce eccentrics would do more to secure the future of humanity on the planet than the deadeningly dull certainty and conformity of the educational here and now.

The public private debate and Australian schools

2005-10-23T09:43:00.000+10:00

There has been a lot of debate and lining up of the usual sides in relation to the funding that now flows to many private schools in Australia (how many polo fields do you really need?). Despite the ideological convenience of doing over public education and favouring the well to do as well as the not so well to do (a large number of private schools are not well funded) I would suggest that the actual driver is to rid the Commonwealth of what is a very expensive funding item, i.e. schooling. If "the public" can be weaned off public schools by whatever means then government is in a position to wind back support for schooling generally (what is left of public and all private), shift the burden, user pays as we have seen in universities. Nor is this to suggest that this is about dry economics, although that continues to play a poisonous role in Australian public policy, it is likely out of a genuine long term fear of not being able to fund the retiring boomer generation and beyond. Simply, that there will be more old folk putting their hand up for government support than young folk paying enough taxes to fund them. The cost of schooling to the Commonwealth is a sizeable chunk of each annual budget. Any savings from this are clearly going to be significant. So the tactic now, feed private, starve public and do it to speed the process. It is a serious issue but putting at risk the future of this country by starving public schooling of much deserved funds makes as much sense as hoarding one's reserves of wheat instead of planting for the next season. Yes. History will judge the public policy makers hashly.

Lemmings and similar phenomena

2005-09-19T07:24:00.000+10:00

I just realised I had an unfinished post from months back in relation to computing and related technologies in education. When I ever get around to finishing it, a very poor substitute for a book that is still to be written, it will argue that the real issue is around education, or its formal bits, that of schooling and here I like to think in terms of primary, secondary and tertiary schooling. The more one reads research, talks to teachers, students and most other folk who are somehow involved in or with schooling it is clear that, at least for secondary schooling (I think similar crits of primary and tertiary are possible but it is at its most glaring here) is a game that almost no one believes in. There are many instances where humans do foolish, sometimes heroic things for no good reason. Indeed, biologists tell us that along with a blind mole rat in Africa, we are the only species capable of giving up our life to save the life of another of our species. One can understand moments of foolishness and heroism. It is part of being human. These are events which contribute to a sense of who we are and why we are. With Secondary schooling we have a system which, in my view, is increasingly difficult to justify. It is a form of what might be called organised child abuse which repeats itself over and over again, year in, year out. The only beneficiaries of this system are a handful of private schools in each capital city. That is not to say the huge efforts and energy goes into trying to do school differently. There is an amazing array of things that teachers do to try and escape the nonsense of a sytem that was designed to send a small elite onto university in the 50's and 60's. But any or all of these, and particularly if they appear to be working well for students are dubbed fringe or satellite to the main game, the high status subjects of years 11 and 12. It is important to recognise that what began as a system to select an elite has been turned into a mass system of ranking and rating that serves no purpose other than to determine access to a small number of high demand courses in a couple of universities in each State. One might say that this is a very expensive selection machine and it is. The human cost, of telling around two thirds of each cohort passing through school that they are dumb, deficient or in some way not up to scratch is an appalling outcome. While the system does not physically kill these students it stamps them as failures of one kind or other and then expects them to get on with their lives as if this trauma is akin to falling down and grazing one's knee. I work in a university. We have what is effectively an all expenses paid ranking system. It is not a good predictor of university success and why should it be given the disconnected nature of the high elements of the curriculum? But the best part is that universities don't have to pay a cent for it. Are there better ways to select? Yes. Are there better ways to support all students in our secondary schools and provide them with the genuinely high expectations that will prepare them well to shape, lead and grow this country? Of course. Do we have the will to do anything about it? Sadly, it appears that it is more important to attend to the low level expectations. Let's make sure everyone can spell catastrophe or onomatopoeia. But let's make sure our children do not learn how to engage the world, nor develop agency in it. It is easy to attend to some of the measurable stuff. It is more important to be concerned about spelling skills of the young but less about how the system treats them and what the social consequences are. So let's turn out the best spellers in the world and keep counting the lemmings as they run off the edge.

Blink

2005-01-20T11:59:00.000+11:00

I stumbled across Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point a year or so back. I just got my hands on his recent book: Blink. I'd characterise his work as popular psychology which focusses on small changes having significant outcomes. Blink is about those decisions that are made in an instant, the kind we don't think about. Intriguing stuff for thinking about much of educational practice. Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown.

Ditches worth dying in

2004-12-05T20:30:00.000+11:00

A long time ago Rob Walker, a great colleague and friend, used to talk in terms of ditches worth dying in. I, along with 1500 odd other folk attended AARE last week in Melbourne. It was the usual AARE in many respects but the Radford Lecture was, for me a wonderful highlight. Richard Teese spoke. It was measured, eloquent and so keenly to the point about the profoundly discriminatory schooling system that operates in this and other Australian states. Data that can't be wished away by the neo-conservatives who assert that it (school suyccess and life chances) is all a matter of ability and has nothing to do with where one is born and the family into which one is born. The patterns of success one finds in year 12 results suggests, if you follow the neo-conservative line, that all the ability in year 12 students is clustered, year after year, around a small number of private schools in each capital city. If you believe that then you would probably find Frances Wheen's little polemic (see the Mumbo Jumbo posting in this blog) upsetting, i.e. astrology isn't a reliable way to predict the future. If Australia is to realise it's often spoken of potential then the demolition of the nonsense social advantaging that flows from year 12 assessments in all States requires urgent attention.

2004-11-10T11:53:00.000+11:00

We are a defect on an insignificance This kind of thinking seems oddly reassuring in a world that appears to be removed from its material reality. An interview by Robin Williams of Gerry Gilmore on the Science Show. Gilmore is an experimental philosopher at Cambridge.

A curriculum of questions

2004-11-09T16:10:00.000+11:00

This little idea was hatched late one night in 2003 at Burwood, in conversation with Alan Reid who was at the time a DEST Fellow and working on the question of national curriculum. I turned it into words in February of this year. National questions, national curriculum The current period in education is characterised by considerable interest in curriculum. In most states and overseas there appears to be an unease about the suitability of current curriculum for preparing the young for a world that is much changed from the period when most contemporary curricula were developed. New curriculum initiatives can be found in many states. Debates that figures in these initiatives ask questions such as: what is worth knowing, what are ‘essential’ or ‘basic’ knowledges, and should there be more emphasis on process or content? For education curriculum/policy makers, contemporary computer-based resources such as the Internet appear to place an emphasis on knowledge (as per the knowledge economy) which subsequently slides into debates about content, i.e. curriculum is about content, and, more often than not, its consumption. Importantly, the social character of knowledge is largely ignored. The irony of schooling systems with an emphasis on the consumption of various forms of knowledge at a time when the production and leveraging of knowledge and research skills are prized, appears lost in the current debates. My own view of curriculum is that it is the stories the elders of the tribe tell the young. I want to suggest that increasingly these stories, in this era, are less narratives and more questions, i.e. how should we live in the world? what does it mean to be an Australian? how do we relate to our geographical neighbours? how do we understand global phenomena such as finance, terrorism and entertainment? As a way out of the problem of deciding in advance what is appropriate content to equip students to participate as active citizens I propose that we might think about curriculum in terms of questions. Importantly, this device might be used to engage the Australian community in contributing to the construction of a set of questions. One way to operationalise this notion would be to poll a large subset of Australians to nominate, say 5 or 6 questions that they believe to be important to Australia now and in the future. A variety of events, protocols might be employed to arrive at a set of national questions, which would be the basis for curriculum across the country. The process might be repeated at regular intervals (3-5 years) to reconsider the question set. How would the questions frame curriculum? Nationally they would constitute a statement of our priorities. Things that need to be investigated and thought about. A question, unlike a lot of content, can be contextualised at a national, state and local levels. This then would be the curriculum. Engaging the young and their communities in a set of national questions, locally nuanced, that have arisen after a process of debate and contestation would require them to engage in knowledge production/leveraging and research. It would mark the country with a curriculum that looks forward in a more pragmatic and potentially effective manner compared with current content-focussed thinking.

Mumbo-jumbo

2004-11-01T13:03:00.000+11:00

I'm reading Francis Wheen's, How Mumbo-jumbo conquered the world. There is an opportunity for a book of similar levity and hard-nosed evidence to be written for education. Few of the new age gurus go untouched as he meticulously and carefully dissects the pomp, the false and the stupid over the past few decades. Wheen, Francis (2004) How Mumbo-jumbo conquered the world, Harper Perennial, London.