I have been thinking about and scouring the net for ‘best’ models of trying to get teachers to use Moodle for some time. I have tried a few things myself with mixed success until the most obvious thing hit me.

There are gigabytes of info on ‘growing gap between the teachers and students in using technology’. And what do we mostly do? We get ‘experts’ (adults) and fellow teachers teaching the newbies, reluctant or otherwise. Yet the biggest resource and pool of experts sits right in front of our nose – our students!

Talk about focusing on solutions not the problem…

Last week, I did a little “hunch test” to check the viability of students teaching teachers about Moodle. I gave my class (mixed Year 11 and 12 – 15 and 16 years of age) a simple task:

“You have just been given full editing rights in a course in Moodle called Teach a Teacher. Your job is to upload two files and then create a folder with these two files in them. There are a couple of clips called 2 Minute Moodles to help you work it out. Go and see who gets it done!”

None of these kids have ever had teacher privileges in Moodle. Four out of 12 never bothered watching the clips – they just worked it out and completed the task within 5 minutes! Another six watched the clips and got the job done in about 10 – 15 minutes. Two of them got the job done in about 20 minutes. They were all pretty pleased with themselves!

This little experiment encouraged me to start formally mapping out a school-wide “Teach a Teacher” programme.  The idea? Pretty simple really: Train the students, then let them train the teachers. The catch? Students make an offer teachers can’t refuse. Let me explain…

If Maggie comes to her teacher and says: ‘Miss, do you want me to show you how Moodle Assignment activity works?”, she will probably get a polite “ah, that’s very kind of you Maggie but you see … I am not a computer person and I just …”

If Maggie comes to the same teacher and says: “Miss, lots of people in our class lose or get late with assignments. Would you like me to show you how we could submit our assignments from home to save us forgetting to bring stuff from home?”

No decent teacher in their right mind would refuse a student to tell them something that would be genuinely helpful to both. Most students love to teach, they are naturals at it. What a great way to establish/improve the relationship while learning something mutually useful.

Now, imagine students asking teachers questions like these below beginning with a phrase – “Would you like me/us to show you how you can…” (with aspects of Moodle in brackets):

• store all kinds of files in a place we can all easily access them anytime we want or need to (files & folders)
• allow us to talk like equals without the loud kids always having the say (forum)
• help us when we are stuck searching for good websites (weblink)
• make us work on something together not just individually  (wiki)
• let us help you put together lots of pictures, links and videos because we prefer that to a textbook (website)
• submit our assignments out of school to save us forgetting to bring stuff from home (assignment)
• check what the class really thinks without people pretending (choice)
• note down things as they happen and then use them in class (blog)
• make quizzes fun and challenging, not boring (quiz)
• show you how to use quick messages to each other, not emails (messaging) …

“Anything else you want to know?”

Julian Ridden (the friendly ‘human Moodle Google’) hit the nail on the head tonight when he said that during his teacher training sessions, he spends more time on answering the ‘why to’ question rather than ‘how to’. The questions/answers above may read as ‘how to’ but they really are a ‘why to’ becaue they come from the mouth of the person for whom this whole thing is mostly designed for – the student.

How do we get to train the students? Like any good teaching – using simple activities and challenges. The one described above worked a treat – “let’s see if you can” (upload two files and create a folder). You could get your students to compete who gets the most posts in a forum to learn about forums. You could get them to compete for the most disgusting food photo (they’ll love that!) or the funniest video clip and that way learn how to use WYSIWYG/HTML editor and multimedia filters. You could get them to do ‘battle of the sexes’ and learn about assigning groups … I am still working on it here but work on it yourself – you know your students best!

What is the benefit in all of this for the students? Aren’t we wasting their school time to learn this stuff? Preparing for and learning how to teach someone a skill, communicate appropriately and implement the training, then evaluate and improve is a hugely important and valuable lifelong skill for any student.

Many of these things can surely be built into some sort of assessment task or certificate. But just imagine getting a personal reference from a grateful teacher whom a student has taught well something useful. That stuff gets kids bucketloads of self-esteem, jobs and something that the whole shebang of education really rests on – a meaningful relationship and a chance to grow through learning. ‘Teacher’, ’student’ and ‘learner’ are mere placeholders here, holding onto their ‘traditional’ meaning may not be helpful (long live the rhizome ).

To me and thousands of moodlers around the world, downloading and installing Moodle is like planting a seed. People make it grow.

I hope this helps someone…

If you are an educator keen on using technology and wanting others to join you and benefit from it, don’t try to get them to move into “21st century” – just get them to move 10 minutes ahead to the point where they have just learned something simple and useful that will work in their class.

Use the gamers approach to learning – easy entry, easy win then level up and try again. Move them as a colleague, with empathy (”walk in their shoes”) not sympathy (”oh, you poor thing”).

Dean Groom tells it better - thanks mate for this gem. You can tell it below.

(A short blog post never felt better)

This is an attempt to organise many thoughts after spending an amazing weekend with a number of passionate and wise ‘ed-tech’ people at and after the SICTAS symposium in Sydney last weekend.

It may have been an ‘echo chamber’ a little at times but…it felt wonderful. The gathering was passionate, informed, engaging, motivating and hopefully fruitful when our recommendations come to the top echelons of public service in Canberra. A big public thank you goes to people at Education.au for pulling it all together.

But there were some curious moments and statements that made me think.

Where are we going?

One of the interest-catchers was the statement “we need to know where we are going.” On the face of it, one would not think much of it. But after a day of discussing the massive changes that are occurring in the world, let alone educational opportunities and technologies to process it and make sense of it, after talking about openness, different approaches to curriculum and teacher development, discussing and imagining more organic, participative, community schooling afforded by the rise of ‘Web 2.0’ (for lack of better word), rethinking of arrangements for creating and sharing content and ideas, and more… the words “we need to know where we are going” sounded a little thin. They go against the paradigm shift we had just been talking about all day and which is happening ‘out there’. Dean Groom (must check his School Without Walls idea !) put it nicely to our table with a counter-argument: “With major events happening so frequently these days (and brought to us or affecting us almost instantly, raw or re-interpreted; my addition here), people are starting to be OK if the world turns upside down one day.”

The “knowing where to go” makes sense if we are talking about a direction, not necessarily a firm destination anymore. With institutions we had trusted for so long and thought to be immovable crumbling down (“safe as a bank” has certainly lost its punch for one) it is perhaps a good time for education to become less organisation-centric and more person-centric. Professional learning networks (PLN ) and personal learning networks (PLE) may just be handy acronyms for something we are beginning to imagine and create but they certainly have a great chance of equipping students of all backgrounds, talents and abilities, as well as teachers and administrators, to embrace, survive and thrive in the world’s messiness. There was a strong theme (if not undercurrent of personalisation and access to quality education among many of us at the symposium, particularly those ‘hitting the ground’ in classes and lecture theatres.

In the view of many gathered at SICTAS, stricter, tighter, more prescriptive curriculum, with standardised measurement to boot, is about as effective as the “control of the message” in these days where every person with a modem or a mobile phone in a street is his or her own media publisher an could turn from total obscurity to a powerful opinion-maker in a matter of a few thousand clicks, forwards, (re)tweets and shares around the world. Liberating? Yep. Participatory? Yep. Free? Yep. Scary? Yep, a lot.

Let’s not turn kids into narrow, test-performing monkeys but teach and learn with them how to recognise, negotiate and deal with the good and the scary stuff that may (or may not) be out there one day, online and more importantly, offline. Destination – unknown, direction – clear.

Perhaps it’s time (IMHO) to even begin entertaining the idea of rhizomatic education, expressed in its most simplistic form as “community as the curriculum”. The idea is not new, certainly does not come without its dangers (maybe another time on that…) but with the advent of digital technology and its ubiquity, the potential is very exciting as well as threatening to the established ways of schooling in particular. Heard of the very old proverb “it takes a whole village to educate a child”? What an exciting, messy, dynamic and huge village we live in these days.

Implications for teachers

There is a significant gap between student and teacher use of digital technology. I touch it every day and have large studies to back the assertion. A growing number of students, at least a significant majority (please no digital natives here) are excellent multitaskers and their frantic pace seems, and often is, at odds with the tradition of steady, thoughtful, lock-step process of life and learning most of their teachers are more familiar with (hm, the frenetic pace of teaching requirements does not allow much of that either, does it?).

But students are getting better at it. They are becoming more discerning and better at recognising patterns, quality will come when they are given time to think about rather than simply voraciously consume massive amounts of media. They are becoming increasingly sophisticated in seeking information, producing information, recognising patterns and, in time to come, making sense of them. And that is where teachers come in – helping to make sense, turning lifeless, static, meaningless, digital, easy to reproduce, explicit information into tacit (Polanyi), dynamic, analogue and personally meaningful knowledge. Quality – not quantity.

If a teacher simply says the only and best way to learn is by reading a book and quiet reflection (very true SOME times) by virtue of being the only way (s)he has ever known, (s)he may be selling kids short, plus sound superficial because students will increasingly know that is not the case. The teacher may also be missing on a great (not the only!) opportunity to personally connect with students.

Rather than simply being deliverers of standard(ised) curriculum and becoming mere ‘technicians of the empire’ (perhaps too fruity a term for thousands of smart operators out there), the shift afforded by the rise in consumption and acceptance of digital technology could help teachers to reclaim the somehow shading title of a professional. Professional in a sense of remaining ethical, lawful, yet taking risks, doing the best we can FOR STUDENTS as provocators of learning (not mere suppliers) and connectors to sources of vertical (experts), horizontal (peers) and deep (community) mentorship – the ‘usness’ Prof Heppel often talks about. Technology may be a powerful enabler, it can be ignored less and less, but it is no magic bullet – thinking, acting, learning and care by constantly asking the question “what am I doing to best prepare this person to survive and thrive in the world that is likely to turn out”. If clever use of technology is very likely to determine large chunks of their lives in this future, it is probably not wise to ignore it, no matter how vague and uncertain the future may be.

The majority of teachers in this country don’t ignore technology, but we are often simply baffled by its enormity as a whole. We often struggle with the fact that technology is sometimes forcing us to let go of the control or admit that we don’t know everything there is to know or, heaven forbid, assess in our classroom. That is a significant rewriting of centuries old and encrusted ‘teaching DNA’ we are talking here, and not just in teachers’ minds but in the minds of voters and their ideas about of ‘what a teacher does and should do’. It is not to be ignored but not held as gospel either.

“Technology alone does not make good teachers” is an accepted truism, but one that often helps teachers to avoid even considering technology in their teaching. The key question here is “what makes ‘good teaching’?”. Ignoring at least the potential of technology to improve one’s teaching practice is probably going to be less and less tolerated – first by students, then by their parents and with them the wider society.

What clever use technology can do is enhance the very things that research has shown time and time again to be the determining characteristics of a good teacher. For example, teacher feedback (considered most influential on student achievement in oft mentioned study by John Hattie) does not have to be mediated by technology but surely it would help to:
-    send the student a quick note (text, audio) about parts of their paper as you are reading it before the final draft is due,
-    asking for further clarification of stated ideas in a public online forum to really see how sound the knowledge is,
-    an online, private, asynchronous dialogue about the (un)met needs, aspirations or background of the student,
-    using voice comments on student’s work as if talking to him/her thus providing rich feedback way beyond the few scribbled notes on paper,  … not to mention
-    feedback from experts or peers around the world in the form of comments on a blog post, invitations to collaborate, group ratings for a piece work

… and more, and of all it from virtually anytime, anywhere.

These are just a tiny few, top-of-the head examples of personal, human feedback made possible and/or enhanced by technology. These have been all been put in practice by some truly excellent and passionate educators around the world. It’s not all just about ‘time saving’ and economics of it – it is about the richness and authenticity of feedback made so accessible with simpler and simpler tools (and at increasingly low cost too).

For all its volume, the most useful technology is actually becoming simpler and simpler. Setting up a Twitter account for example, requires far less technical skills than learning Microsoft Word or Excel, not to mention setting up a VCR (still know what that is?). But learning and using the former (Twitter) can be not only faster but much, much more powerful and useful for teachers and students than the latter. It is not because it is simple to operate (too often teachers are treated with ‘must make it as simple and dumb as possible’ – if teachers see value in something they will learn how to operate the most complex technology!). It is because, in the words of Dr Evan Arthur “technology works best where there is direct interaction between humans“. The mental leap to the job of teaching is not hard to make here is it?

Implications for policy makers

When asked by one of the policy makers at the SICTASS symposium about the most important things for change we have collectively sought on the day, I stated my top two: time and leadership. Time to play, explore, reflect, adopt, reject, collaborate, create – enough verbs here but you probably get the sense from the starting few that all this does not and will not happen over a year or two. Leadership to make things not only law(ful) but acceptable and accountable in the eyes of the voting and paying citizens.

At the moment, a lot of the talk in the media is about the computer richess and funding the physical infrastructure. It’s easy to measure, it’s easy to show, it’s easy to scrap too. But the human infrastructure will make things go, the one that can’t be ticked in a box that easily but is messy, probably expensive (but note necessarily so), and far less certain or easily measured. Please, no more extravagant computer riches and thinking ‘we have solved the problem’ by putting computers in schools. It is often the schools with few resources that pull off amazing things with ICT because of the people, not the flashy equipment. This is NOT to say that funding for new ‘computer power’ should be scrapped but it needs to be aligned with the ‘people power’ that will make it go in that class or school. The excellent, very brief ‘3 x E strategy’ paper could be a useful guide to what make technology go in schools (and there is always the good old ‘11 things that make a difference’ by Bryn Jones and Chris Betcher).

There was much talk about the best approaches in infrastructure and professional development for this much touted ‘digital revolution’ to happen on the ground. The main dichotomies seemed to be national (top down) versus local (ground up), both with their merits. In my view, the issue is not so much the level of deployment but the usefulness, flexibility and ease of use of ICT by people on the ground – nowhere else. To use a bike analogy, let’s give teachers and students a simple, sturdy bike that works in all conditions – soon they will want to get the bike to go faster, look nicer, they might even strap an engine to it to get to wherever they want faster. The job of ‘policy makers’ is to give teachers and students that bike, get them to learn how to pedal and balance, show them places they could go to hold their imagination, give them time to do it – then leave the rest to them. When hearing squabbles about what best system to use etc etc, I kept thinking of a great line by G.K. Chesterton’s: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.”, somewhat like that often used yet poignant urban myth about the American space pen and Russian pencils.

Let’s reward clever use of technology, useful innovation, production and use of resources that will make an impact beyond the walls of the single enthusiast’s class. Then open the whole thing up! Enough fantastic and expensive resources that only 5 people get to see and use, enough sector squabbling, enough ‘copyright paranoia’ (Delia Browne proposed a simple red-yellow-green system for labelling resources that will make teachers pick, share, use and (re)shape resources with ease). Let’s open the doors to open source software and its dynamic, creative and committed army of supporters, contributors and improvers rather than locking ourselves into expensive vendor contracts that so often make sharing and exchange technically, legally and practically difficult. ‘Web 2.0’ we talked about so much at SICTAS has been stunningly successful largely because of the idea of sharing, thus countering the individualistic, competitive, protectionist attitudes. The phrase ‘participation is the currency of community’ was flashed on screen a number of times. This glowing, buzzing enthusiasm for ‘community’ is of course not without it dangers to exclude (again, more about that another time…) but we (at SICTAS) have agreed it is direction worth pursuing despite its pitfalls and uncertainties exactly because of its human face, human potential and not the least – human method.

The older and wiser heads among us at SICTAS rightly asked “this has been the case for two decades – 20% keen, the rest lagging not interested, so what is going to be different in the coming years?” Maybe it will be the sheer volume and ubiquity of digital technology, maybe it will be the shift to a more human web, maybe it will be a growing sense that ignoring digital technology in class may become close to putting students in the educational ‘at risk’ category (love the edu-jargon, don’t you ). Don’t know really, no one does.

There was a slightly grandiose yet welcome talk about changing culture and attitudes, but I think we might as well change the behaviour first – one teacher at a time. You don’t necessarily need to have a positive attitude about something before you start doing it, positive attitude simply helps (a lot!) and may often lag. Let’s not righteously evangelise technology but humanise it with all its potential and pitfalls. Acknowledge the real world of the classroom, not the imaginary ones we like to build and talk about. Tools, no matter how flashy and ‘useful’ in the eyes of their designers, given to teachers without considering their real needs are really just a bunch of ‘misguided weapons’ that are not and will not be used in the trenches (in military speak…). If you want to make teachers use the tools – reward them, individually, but only if they help the core business of becoming a better teacher in the minds and hearts of their students, not just their own.

Dr Arthur’s summary words keep ringing in my head “technology works best where there is direct interaction between humans“. Yep… noticed the name of this blog?

PS Congratulations for reading through all this. Comments always welcome.

This afternoon a staff member walked up to me and said: “Tomaz, I have been meaning to see you about Moodle. You really need to teach me about how to use it.”

This of course is music to my ears as the resident moodler. But then I returned what is now becoming a standard line and a sure tickler: “I couldn’t possibly!”

She stood there stunned but polite. Huh, did I get her attention.

I did continue:”I would love to have a chat with you about Moodle and show you around but first – have a look in our Sandpit what Moodle is [the "Moodle explained with Lego" clip] and then the sort of things you can do with it [the 'How can Moodle change a school] clip(s)]. This will give you a broad idea about Moodle before starting to poke around. When done, come up to me with a classroom problem and we’ll solve it together, step by step. How does that sound to you?”

“See you on Monday at the workshop!” was the immediate and enthusiastic reply.

Too often we approach teaching of things like software applications with a “these are the features, click here, click there…” and then leave it to people’s imagination how they are going to use it. Doing so, we tend to break one of the most important rules of communication – we make it about the software not about the people. We own the information, they merely borrow it.

By turning things around and solving a real-life classroom scenario, challenge, problem, idea people suddenly own the solution. They recognise themselves in the picture – “Hey, that’s me”!

Teachers are a very pragmatic lot and love to borrow good stuff. Give’em a good one in Moodle and they will come! If a science teacher has a great solution using Moodle for a problem or idea her class and say, an English teacher sees it and ‘gets it’ – you can bet the English teacher will at least try or ask how to go about it. And coming from a colleague and a fellow ’struggler’ is a much more powerful thing than coming from the school’s main Moodle peddler like me. The bigger the struggler the more potent the message, even at the subconscious level (”If she can do that I reckon I can do that too!”).

‘Classroom solutions (with software)’ versus ‘Software solutions (in classroom)’. I know which one a regular chalkie would go for and why. Do you?

‘That sounds interesting’ you may say but that ‘interesting’ bit could be like the (oft misused) Chinese proverb. Why? I am taking a big gamble here – and I need your help.

I really want to open a few eyes around the school how real, human, powerful, accessible and effective Web 2.0 CAN be. I have been working hard ‘behind the scenes’, preparing things, dropping hints and this is a first big chance to drop a few jaws around the place and get some clever minds thinking.

We (students and teachers) will blog, wiki, get to Twittter, look at things like VisualCV, LinkedIn, Ning, Google Docs, Flickr and so on in small digestible chunks. The last thing I want to assume is that the kids in our class are ‘digital natives’ (some great papers have come out on that recently, got this this one courtesy of Darcy Moore, thanks!).

The gamble will work if my/our network chips in. If it doesn’t – there will be plenty of ‘ah, another fad’ comments around the school. If it does…  (insert a big smiley here)

So here is my plea. I have just started a simple blog at Posterous called Reality Check. Could you please visit the site and get as many people (particularly young, upper high-school students please as peers) to make a short recount of their experiences at their first paid job. Commenting should be a breeze, I will moderate.

The kids in class, teachers and myself sincerely thank you for every comment you or your students, friends, relatives care to leave.

Now what is with that ’sinner’ bit?

I have just commited to a large project looking at the “classroom use of Moodle” over the next six months. With family, full-time teaching and a couple of other things in my life, this will put a great deal of pressure on my time spent blogging, reading and participating in the blogosphere. To invoke religious iconry, I will be commiting (a couple of) the 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media (great read, recommend it) – but it is for a great cause, particularly if you are a Moodler.

Over this time, the posts on Human may dry out quite a lot, but you can always catch me on Twitter (@lasic) or over at Posterous at the less formal http://tomazlasic.posterous.com or the ‘Reality Check’ mentioned above.

Please help a sinner make Web 2.0 work .. at least as well as Moodle does and head over to Reality Check when you can. 

Thank you all.

PS Sue, I am not abandoning Edublogs (”a sin” you may say) I’ll just be ‘light on’ at Posterous

The standard PowerPoint overkill on compliance, procedures, initiatives, scores etc breached just about every rule of good communication, so I decided to cut my presentation from 30-45 minute mix of ‘tech stuff’ and animation (see the intended icebreaker monkeys below, text here) to a very brief 10 minute stand-up address. Even though a bride-to-be upstaged my presentation (no kidding, she walked in about 2 minutes into it and had everyone admiring her dress…she did look stunning, best wishes!), I think I managed to sow a few seeds without those glazed looks on people’s faces.

I flagged the running and the format of regular workshops on the use of technology in class but I didn’t tell staff what the workshops will be on. Moodle is probably a gimmie, but the rest….?

I was inspired to write this post by Darcy Moore’s ISER Conference Presentation where he talks about professional learning networks, future of learning and a bit of his vision for the Region 2.0 (Darcy is a school administrator in NSW and holds an increasingly loud and persuasive megaphone so dream of Region 2.0 is not that far fetched. Good luck!). He even argues for compulsory ‘2.0 training’, much like in eg. child protection, literacy and other areas.

One thing really struck me before my presentation and later as I read Darcy’s post. The basic skills of ‘Web 2.0′ or ‘read’n'write Web’ alone are actually so easy to ‘get’ and learn compared to say the workings of MS Office or similar. I dare say that learning basic Twitter is ‘ten times’ easier and faster than learning Excel or PowerPoint. What is more, with Twitter you connect with people, with Excel it’s you, the (to many ‘dreaded’) machine and that annoying paper clip ‘assistant’ to ‘help you’ with 2,500 features. Yeah right!

So, in our workshops we are doing away with what to many probably feels like a common sense, linear progress (”First, the beginner level of MS Word”) – we’re ‘going 2.0′ straight up. It’s easier, more human and terribly useful. We’ll start looking for people and learning just the necessary things as we go and solve problems, in context, with and for others.

At the same time as I plunge myself and our staff into this, I am acutely aware of the danger of getting caught in the ’science’ of getting the right, the latest, the best, the most ‘time saving’ technology (yeah, wasn’t that a doozy, ask Robert Owen and his ‘technology will set us free’ ideals centuries ago) or the mistake of confusing production of flashy pixelated content with (critical) thinking, the annoying rhetoric of “excellence”, “necessity”, and technological determinism (”learn the latest IT tools or perish”).

To chase the elusive ‘best’ would be to miss the enormous human potential of Web 2.0. And that is what I would like our staff and students to feel. I neither can or want to tell them how to feel about ‘2.0′ or how (not) to value it, but I can help them (hopefully) enjoy it and benefit from it professionally and personally. This stuff is not a panacea, but a super-placebo that needs to be believed in order to work.

Web 2.0 is not some esoteric niche of the nerdy domain. Things are beginning to and will continue to change in the direction talked about here. If business and economy are the engine of change (sadly, not education) we are heading there. Some of the clever(est) companies are using ‘2.0′ tools more and more not just to move their stuff but to research and recruit. Now imagine university or job entry criteria as a portfolio of published and critiqued material, amount, extent and quality of social and professional networks etc.? It would leave the quasi-science of exams, school scores, and the false meritocracy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools for dead in its ability to accurately pick a great prospective student or worker. All of this could (well, does) work across the boundaries of schools, cultures, countries and continents.

Utopia? Ask me in five years time.

And how are we going to teach the teachers to use this ’stuff’? Workshops and collegial PD are fine but by far the best people to do it would be their students themselves. Like an example from our school?

At the start of the Career and Enterprise course this year (another bloody thing I coordinate at our school , all students will get to create their own VisualCV (yep, heard it via Twitter, thanks @digitalmaverick). VisualCV is a great tool to easily create a great looking online resume and portfolio, which could be shared, controlled, and ‘mashed up’ in a way these kids are so familiar from their MySpace, Bebo, Facebook etc. All in all, it works on the basic principles of Web 2.0.

Now, most of the teachers teaching this course have little or no idea about the basic 2.0 lingo such as ‘RSS’, ‘embed’, ’share’, ‘comment’, ‘tag’, ‘friend/follow’, ‘post/publish’. However, I am completely confident that the students, 90% of whom own and maintain a webspace of their own, will be happy to show teachers not versed in the technology how to use it, why, even what the potential dangers of it are. And what better way for teachers to learn some valuable new skills and concepts and build a relationship with their (new) class at the start of the school year. If you ask any half-decent teacher – relationship is the ‘game-set-match’ of great education.

Maybe the bride that stole my show on Friday was a sign of wonderful things to come…

PS The ‘icebreaker’ monkeys on why things don’t change below, accompanying short story here. To share and comment on, of course

This week I lost half of my job. The half I formally started this year and was promised to go for another year, the half that gave me a chance to begin to wisen up on ICT, how to ‘infect’ people with enthusiasm for the impact and potential of ICT, the half that gave birth to Moodle and so many other valuable things at our school that have made an impact on the entire school community. Like many of my colleagues working for the same employer (largest in our State…have a guess), I was asked at the start of this job to come up with ways to better engage teachers and students with ICT in ways that are relevant and specific to the context of our school. A number of wonderful colleagues and myself worked hard to do just that this year, only to be…

gazumped!

I won’t bore you with details but here is a sketch. A fantastic programme with a wide scope and support for integrating ICT in teaching and learning locally and meaningfully has this year become a narrow selling vehicle for a pretty ordinary and massively expensive piece of proprietary software (a CMS of a kind) our employer had committed to. (Reduced) funding is now tied to adopting this ‘thing’ plus a few other strings.

Remember those couple of clips about ‘Moodle changing the school‘? “Nah, you can keep your Moodle but no $$ your way” the powers-that-be say, without bothering to even once call, email or, heaven forbid, come to our school and see what we have been doing so well! The official line is that instead of investing in development and strengthening of wide ranging, locally developed and context-relevant strategies at our school, we would be “better off” with 5 people trained in the use of this particular CMS (that is what the funding is for), who will attend the PD and then magically pass their knowledge on to other staff, probably through chunks of formal staff PD. This smacks of conspiracy of convenience, so aptly described by Charles Jennings.

Just as I wrote these first two paragraphs, I got a message from a colleague in USA describing how she and her partner were ‘gazumped’ by the bureaucracy they had worked for. Although from the other side of the world, the parallels were uncannily similar. Developed something wonderful and locally meaningful, often in their own time and following their own passion, only to have their ‘superiors’ outsource the implementation to external parties (no doubt with good intentions). The result was a flop since, in her words, “there was no teacher buy-in” and the two ended up leaving the district.

This isn’t about some silly CMS or a piece of software or hardware, not even about a particular training model. All of these have good intentions and will be successful to some degree (but possibly widely varying) in their mission to improve ICT integration in teaching and learning. It is not about the numbers’ game, it is about something that makes all technology go – the people.

It is a no-brainer that the best strategies for change are reasonable and make people call them ‘ours’. These two things make them ‘stick’.

But what is reasonable? Reasonableness (2) goes beyond the rigid, uncreative rationality of the ‘dollars game’. It is a social disposition to respect others, take into account their views, experiences, the context on which they operate, their feelings, and allowing own perspective to be changed if need be. Reasonableness allows us to arrive at the decisions and judgements we are prepared to own, enact and live by (for example, the implementation of Moodle at our school). Reasonableness is not always the cheapest or most efficient (but can be both!) but it is worth the price in the long run in terms of dollars and good nights’ sleeps because people own it and care about it.

What then is ‘ours’? As I use the term ‘ours’, I have in mind Professor Stephen Heppel’s idea of “us-ness” (if you haven’t seen his keynote to the 2008 K12 Online Conference it is a worth while 40 minute experience). In short, the idea of “us-ness” refers to the age old, powerful sense of community, which can be developed and tapped in so easily and affordably by digital technologies in ways that have been historically (near) impossible to do.

Developing and nurturing a sense of community of practitioners (teachers, students, parents, experts in the field…) who help each other out, struggle, succeed and learn from each other, first on-site then beyond the confines of school walls, is one thing. Another is sending 5 people to a few PD days, assuming they become the ‘experts’ about this ‘new thing’ upon their return, who are then expected to have all the answers (“because they went to the PD”) and then bear the brunt of dissatisfaction when things go awry. Both of these have been done before but I ask you which one do you think is likely to ‘stick’ more.

I borrow the concept of ‘stickiness’ from Gladwell’s well-known “The Tipping Point”. In this age of clutter and info-glut, the most powerful messages ‘stick’ and create ‘social epidemics’ because they address a personal need and people make a personal connection with them. Recipients need to get it at their own level. Any half-respectful theory of human communication will confirm these truisms, so no news here. As a micro example, coming to a teacher and saying a) “Do you think students creating their own classroom ‘wikipedia’ from anywhere, anytime would be a useful thing in your class? Yes? Would you like to learn how to set one up?” is different to saying b) ‘In our PD workshop today we will be learning about the features of the Glossary module’. Again, which one of these approaches will ‘stick’ more with (busy) teachers? Which of these approaches is more likely to see the teacher spending a bit of time playing with and working out that Glossary module, then quite likely helping others with it voluntarily? Which of these approaches will be more reasonable, create greater ‘us-ness’, ‘stick’ more?

Next year, I am going back to full-time classroom teaching (5 instead of 3 classes this year). Don’t get me wrong I love teaching. But this does mean less helping out, nurturing, mentoring, trialling, explaining, embedding of ICT with my colleagues. At the same time, I look forward to creating more useful ICT ‘tipping points’ in my class and hope these will push fellow teachers slightly (but in the right place!) to create ‘epidemics’ of useful, innovative practice that will affect one teacher, one student, one class at a time. Or as a reader of ‘Human’ and a good friend of mine Greg Thompson made a wonderful point recently:

I wonder if continuing to look for external inputs that will ‘prime the pump’ of change in schools is only going to offer more false gods and it is to the internal that we have to look to. Of course this is said completely aware that this is most likely offering another false god. Perhaps the best advice for change is to forget about the world and change one life at a time.

A thought to remember indeed (thanks Greg).

PS If you found this story resonate with your experience (and particularly if you are a local living in Perth or wider Western Australia) you may wish to consider joining EVICTS (Educators Valuing ICT in Schools) – a social/professional network of local and (inter)national teachers in a similar situation, who don’t despair but continue to support and learn from each other.

(1) Source: http://www.investors.com/FinancialDictionary/Term/Gazump.asp

(2) Splitter, L. J. & Sharp, A. M. (2005) Teaching For Better Thinking. ACER: Melbourne.

M: ‘Computers are such time wasters!’

T: ‘Don’t say that, it’s a silly thing to say’

M: ‘BUT THEY ARE! Look, this thing froze up just trying to upload a photo so instead of spending half an hour walking in the sun I spent it in front of the stupid computer screen. It robbed me of my precious half an hour.’

T: ‘But you can’t just bag computers, they have their uses too – I for one enjoy them a lot and have learnt enormously from them over the last few years – you don’t seem to? You see them as stupid, useless and time wasting but there are so many things they can do’

M: ‘All I am saying is that you can so easily waste time with computers. You know, a screen freeze here, a link there and on it goes so before you know it you spend hours in front of the screen.’

T: ‘Well, growing and mowing grass is a waste of time too, TV is a waste of time…everything can be waste of time if you think about it. Computers are no different – you can waste time with them.’

M: ‘And it is just so easy to waste time with computers….’

T: ‘But hold on here. It was not the computer that said ‘you must stay in front of me for half an hour and not go for that walk’, was it? The decision was yours alone! So why blame the computer?’

M: ‘Because they just make it so easy to waste time with them. You spend hours in front of the computer where you could be doing other things…(insert long list here).

T: ‘Yes, but it is my passion, I love the tinkering, creating, learning. It is … (insert long list here).”

M: “I know and I don’t want to deny you of those things but I stick with my original statement that computers are time wasters. Don’t deny me that.”

T: ‘Well yes OK, but you seem to see the bad things about computers, I seem to see the good parts, the benefits. In my work I come across many people who simply say ‘I hate computers’ without having a clue what you can do with them and that frustrates me no end.”

M: “Not all people are like you.”

And so on for a little while longer.

M is my wife (not her real name , T is me in this little domestic. Ever had conversations like this? With your partner? Your colleague? An administrator? Friends over dinner?

As the argument progressed, we realised we had both given computers (loosely speaking here because we are really talking digital technologies here) some sort of mythical personal qualities (”Computers are time wasters’ or ‘Computers are wonderfully helpful’). We soon agreed that they are simply things we choose to use.

We have also discovered that my wife actually thinks computers can be really helpful and that the positives of having computers actually outweigh the negatives. “I love the email, and our website and the fact we can communicate so easily with people…” were her words, not mine. One would not have thought so after reading the first few lines above would they?

On the other hand, I confessed to often massive frustration with computers, particularly when things don’t work. And yes, I agreed that one can easily ‘waste hours on the thing’.

Luckily we love and understand each other and it all ended with a laugh. So what went wrong here at the start? It was the thing that so often creates barriers between the ICT enthusiasts (in this case) and ‘normal people’ (slippery, I know) – lack of empathy.

As the argument wound down, my wise and wonderful wife reminded me simply what I could have done in this scenario.

‘You could have listened to me. If you simply acknowledged that I was frustrated, and just try and show me that you understand, or at least are trying to understand, you would have my ear. After a little while, you could have brought up the benefits of having computers and I would probably be nodding to you. Instead, you went defensive straight up and that just brought my walls up too.”

Sounds familiar? Agree?

As a teacher and tech-mentor, I am very wary of the technological determinism of “evangelists” of the kind who say “you have no right NOT to use tech in your class” as much as the Digital Luddites who see digital technologies as the “source of evil, back to books and basics will solve our social and educational ills.” None of these sides really listens. They don’t honour the resistance people may have to their ideas. Both impose, and the more they do that, the less likely it is that digital technologies have a chance of actually making a real, tangible difference on the ground.

Let the use of digital technologies grow between the black-or-white, all-or-nothing camps. People are analogue, not digital/binary. Technology either ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’ – it’s black or white, 1 or 0. In contrast, people operate in the grey, between the two extremes. Let people discover it, try it, fail with it, complain, brag, ignore what they don’t want and explore, then take what they like.

The described exchange with my wife this afternoon reminded me again that the best start to any promotion of digital technologies at a school, another organisation or your dinner table indeed, is by listening, not talking. Showing empathy to others (walking in their shoes) is different to sympathy (agreeing with them, particularly if fake!). Once a common ground and a level of trust is established, asking the person or group about any positives they may feel towards the things you seemingly disagree with is much more likely to bring out an understanding and a shared one at that. This is no ‘rocket science’, just a simple law of communication that so often gets forgotten in the business of pushing agendas and goals.

By the way, I argued in person, drafted this post on a piece of paper, then typed it up and sent it to you (around the world, regardless of location) using the now pretty common piece of digital technology. Without this technology, you probably would not be reading it.

Have I wasted my time? Your time? …. Probably – but thanks for reading anyway.

The staff at our school are currently completing (what looks like) a survey on the current level of their ICT skills, obstacles and aspirations. The ‘survey’ is in fact a fairly simple database activity in Moodle, designed to kill several birds with one stone – we get more than just a snapshot of where we are at and what we need. Through this simple, easily searchable database, people can quickly see who in the school has the skill(s and attitude) they (may) need, sometimes literally on the spot, just-in-time, where there is neither chance or time to attend some PD but simply problem-solve and learn from it. Staff can update their entries, comment, thank each other, inquire and so on in a way true to the 70:20:10 principle underpinning our ICT-related PD efforts this year. It is working really well but I might describe it in more detail in another post – back to the ‘12th thing’.

Even after a cursory analysis, something clearly stands out from the data from approximately 75% of staff so far – lack of time they have to ‘play with’ ICT, improve their skills and consider the improvements to their practice ICT can/could have. In the data, I can see (in)direct references to the other 11 Things but “(lack of) time to learn and work on/with ICT” comes through really strongly and makes a strong case to be the 12th Thing. Surprised? Not me.

As an ICT integrator/mentor, I have been trying to mitigate for this problem by various means – individualised, flexible workshops during last periods of the day when they are most likely to be convenient, just-in-time support, classroom demos, encouragement of 70:20:10 principle, awareness-raising expo and other strategies.

But all this flexibility, individualisation and convenience goes only so far – the person still has to get their ‘hands dirty’ with ICT and that takes time. Some people take longer, others may be faster, depending on a myriad of factors. Since we can’t simply invent more hours in a day to improve the use of ICT in our teaching and learning, we seriously need to ask the question: “At the expense of what?” With so many things clamouring for our attention, that is no easy task.

A number of surveys, done mostly by AEU and other educational unions, show teachers in Australian schools spending increasing (and risingly frustrating) amount of their time on administration and compliance tasks rather than the thing they are supposed to be good at and model every day in class – learning. It reminds me about the often quoted story of a professor and his jar of golf balls.

A professor stood before his philosophy class with some items in front of him. When the class began, he picked up a very large and empty glass jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was. The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was. The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “yes”. The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed. “Now,” said the professor. “I want you to recognise that this jar represents your life. The golf balls represent the important things – your family, your health, your children, your friends, your passions, the kind of stuff that if all else was lost and only these remained, your life would still be full. “The pebbles are the other things that matter, like your job, your house, your car. “The sand is everything else, the small stuff. “If you put the sand into the jar first, there will be no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.”

You know, the same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small things, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the elements that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Set aside time for your medical check-ups. Help out at a charitable institution. Take your spouse out to dinner. Don’t worry. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the hinge on that cupboard door. Take care of the golf balls first; the rest is just sand.

I then cast my mind to the context of education. My ‘golf balls’ in education are firstly my own health and welfare and that of my students and colleagues, then comes students’ value of learning as the basis for making informed, ethical decisions, followed by my passions (ICT is clearly one of them), knowledge and skills. If all else is removed, my life as an educator would still be full(filling).

My pebbles are things like my job and conditions, my pay, compliance with the main and necessary rules and laws, relationships with parents and school administrators, career opportunities and similarly important things in my life as an educator.

The sand are those millions of little instructions, assessment tasks, test scores, syllabus changes, admin updates, upgrades, staff notices, endless instructions, flyers, stationery salesmen, performance management indicators, moderation meetings … you know it.

I am not suggesting for one second that ICT should be everyone’s ‘golf ball’ of passion. For me, it is a passion for which I have burnt many hours of my life (mostly sleep) I will never get back. But I would strongly argue that a ‘golf ball’ of every teacher worthy of his/her title and the trust invested in them should be students’ value of learning. And that is where clever use of technology (not technology alone) can make truly dramatic impacts.

Many teachers still see technology in education as ’sand’. They dismiss it or resent time spent engaging with it. However, a growing number of teachers see it further up the size scale and can (or are beginning to) see the increasingly strong connection of technology with the ‘golf ball’ of students’ value of learning and ethical decision making, but they are frustrated because their days in education are filled with ‘sand’. They are missing the 12th critical thing to make a difference – time. As the metaphor goes, they would love to learn but there is a huge pile of sand in their way (my son would say ‘bring out diggers, buckets, shovels and play’ – gotta love the children logic).

So, dear reader, what are your educational golf balls, pebbles and sand and those of your colleagues? Do you think ‘time to learn’ is the 12th critical thing to ICT making a positive difference in education (or have any others to add)? What are you or your colleagues prepared to forgo to pursue this goal?

“That’s all great professor, thanks, but what about those two beers” asks a student. “Ah, it’s just to demonstrate that no matter how full your life is, there is always room for a couple of beers.”

Cheers!