All just a click away?

Everything is just one click away. All knowledge, all learning, anything you want to know - can be found online. Have you ever sat down and watched a movie or a TV programme and then Googled the actors or directors to find out more about them? Ever listened to a track and then delved deeper to discover the meaning behind the music? If you have, then you are not alone. People do it all the time, because they can. You can track down resources, people, contacts, tunes, images, videos, quotes. As long as you are able to ask the right question and enter it into an appropriate search engine query box, you will find what you are looking for. That makes it easy. It saves us time. It's very convenient. But does that make it right? If knowledge is now so easy to come by, and we no longer have to strive to find it, do we still understand what we discover? Are we able to contextualise and critically evaluate knowledge if we find it online?

Increasingly, the use of the Internet and other digital tools is coming under the scrutiny of researchers. Some commentators hold the belief that searching for content online is 'dumbing down' education. Tara Brabazon for example argues that internet education is poisoning teaching and learning (see for example her book Digital Hemlock) and builds the case for a return to more traditional values of education. Nicholas Carr is another critic of the Internet and its effect on learning. In his book The Shallows, he argues that Google and other 'short cut' tools are damaging the way we think. Invoking the earlier work of Marshall McLuhan, Carr argues that digital media are dangerous when used regularly, and that they can insidiously alter the structure of the brain.

Others are more positive about the effects and influence of digital technology on learning. The web, they argue is capable not only of informing us of any knowledge or content we need, but can also change the way we learn, enabling us to search wider, perform personal research, and engage with the content in a rich social environment where peer learning occurs. Writers such as Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody) and Tapscott and Williams (Wikinomics)  espouse the use of digital media as as offering unprecedented opportunities to connect, crowdsource ideas and collaborate with others across the globe.

This from Tapscott and Williams: 'The knowledge, resources and computing power of billions of people are self-organising into a massive, new collective force. Interconnected and orchestrated via blogs, wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting, the web is being reinvented to provide the world's first global platform for collaboration.' (sleeve notes, Wikinomics)

This argument relates more to context than it does to the content based arguments proposed by Carr and Brabazon, and tends to be the view adopted by many of the new generation of Internet users. It tends to be a compelling argument, given the global needs of society and the expediency for worldwide communication on issues that will ultimately affect us all. The question is: can we harness the power and potential of the Internet to make a difference, to provide new and previously unavailable education for the world? Some would argue that this is already happening, whilst others argue that this is the wrong way to proceed. What are your views on this important question? Is all knowledge just one click away? And if it is, should we be celebrating it, or cautioning against this easy to come by learning?

Photo from Public Domain Images


All just a click away? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Diversity or conformity?

'You can have it in any colour you like, so long as it's black' - Henry Ford on the Model T Ford Motorcar.

Henry Ford built motor vehicles. He was very good at it. The cars were identical, and due to the economy of scale and the industrial process he devised, they were affordable for many, but still made a sizeable profit for Ford's company. His large scale industrial model rationalised resources, processed in batches, maximised the labour of his work force and minimised errors and guesswork. The result was the Model T Ford - a car that was driven by a diverse population, but each one looked exactly the same. This idea, when applied to other production processes, was known as Fordism, and it's now a byword for conformity and massification.

What about education? Ask anyone. We live in a diverse world. We are all unique individuals. Each of us has his or her own specific abilities and talents, preferences, desires and aspirations. These should be nurtured and encouraged, especially during our formative years. And yet many schools are based on the Fordist principles of conformity and massification. State funded education, said Nietzsche, is often mediocre for the same reasons that cooking in large kitchens is poor. Even with the best teachers and the highest aspirations, state funded education is still about lack of attention to detail, and a push to serve up a 'one size fits all' education. Children are required to perform according to the expectations of the school system, teachers, parents, society. It doesn't start with the mind. Insidiously, this indoctrination starts even before they arrive at school, through the way children are required to dress. Children in British schools are all expected to attend school dressed exactly the same, in the dreaded school uniform. The school coerces uniform behaviour through the symbolic act of uniform wearing. This often creates more problems than it addresses. School uniforms place an inordinate strain on the finances of many families who have to purchase the school uniform. Again and again. Throughout a child's formal education. I should know, having put three of my own kids through school, with new purchases required year in year out, to take into consideration; child growth, normal wear and tear and impromptu muddy football matches.

Another conformity device is the school bell. When it rings, the entire population of the school moves en masse to another location to start another activity. The school is ruled by that audio signal. When the bell sounds at 1300 hours, you had better be hungry, because it's lunchtime! No running in the corridors! No loitering outside the science lab! Do you have a hall pass? Clearly, there are logistical issues to consider if we are to safely and effectively manage a volatile school population of over 1000 young people, but surely there are less militaristic ways to operate? When will we see schools acting less like prisons or military bases, and more like places where learning can actually be enjoyed?

Lessons are all conducted the same way, at the same pace (we have a lot to get through today...), and for those who are not quick enough it can be a regular nightmare. To address this problem teachers have to place children into 'sets' or 'streams' and teach souped up or dumbed down versions of each lesson to cope with the bright and less bright students. That's because schools insist on batch processing kids on the basis of their age and not their ability. Just another example of the Fordist principles schools are based on.

Standardised testing is yet another outcome of the conformity doctrine. Schools are meant to be places where children can gain education for the whole person, preparation for life. And yet standardised testing, in all its forms, is designed to capture a narrow, quantifiable impression of children's abilities. More often than not, it is a memory test, a snapshot of what they know there and then. Teaching to the test is a symptom of that doctrine. It's a way of ensuring that a school's achievement record is kept within the parameters of standards demanded by the funding body. It's where hard pressed and stressed teachers simply cover what is expected to come up in the exams. It's like teaching students to paint one picture over and over again, at the expense of learning the art of painting.

We are all different and have different interests, but somehow, school has succeeded in compartmentalising these interests into subjects, and this militates against holistic understanding of the world. How will children know that science and art have many connections, or that music and physics have a lot on common, if the subjects are taught differently, at different times and in vastly different environments? How will children express their individuality and creativity, if they are all expected to produce exactly the same products to 'prove' their learning, in identical formats, at precisely the same time each year?

It is clear that schools should be founded on diversity not on conformity. Yet to achieve this involves not only a strong consideration of the development of individuals and their specific abilities, but also on the need for each school to create its own distinct identity within its community. How can this be encouraged and supported?

Firstly, schools need good leadership, and each school leader needs to understand that school is only the beginning of the journey of lifelong learning. Get it wrong in school, and young people can be turned off from the joy of learning for a life time. Get it right, and children grow into informed, responsible adults whose innate curiosity and creativity are perpetuated for a life time. School leaders who understand this will do all they can to ensure that the school environment nurtures curiosity and transforms it into enquiry based learning of the highest order. Head teachers and principals who embrace the ethos of diversity will encourage their teams to provide opportunities for children to be creative, whatever the subject, wherever they are.

Secondly, educational systems need to change. Once and for all, we need to reject the standardised testing and 'terminal' assessment approaches to measuring children's knowledge, and instead concentrate on developing fair and appropriate testing that is continuous, ability specific and personalised. I wrote previously about some alternative assessment approaches in a blog entitled Fair Measures some time ago. Let's stop branding children as failures during their formative years, and instead celebrate their successes against their own previous attainment levels.

Thirdly, we need to celebrate diversity in all its forms. Every child has something to offer, a unique capability, a special contribution they can bring. As psychologist Carl Rogers once argued, all children should be unconditionally accepted with positive regard. Children need to know that they are valued for who they are, not just for what they do, and that they are accepted into the community of learning. They need to know that school is just the start of their long journey to discovery, and that failure is just another way of learning how to get it right in the end. Teaching them tenacity, patience, the ability to apply creative solutions to problems and positive regard for their peers is infinitely more rewarding than teaching them multiplication tables.

Rant over. What are your views?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


Diversity or conformity? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sharpest tools in the box

One of the longest running radio programmes on the BBC is Desert Island Discs. It has been on air almost every week since 1942, and it's remarkable to see that it has maintained its popularity for over 70 years. The secret of the programme is in its simplicity. Each programme features an interview with a celebrity, who is invited to bring a list of their 8 favourite music tracks and during the show they talk about why they chose them, thereby giving their listening audience an insight into their lives.

It would be easy to reproduce the same radio format using other favourite items. How about 8 favourite movies, or 8 favourite TV programmes? It would perhaps be interesting to hear about people's 8 favourite meals, or the 8 books they couldn't do without. What about technology? If I were to ask you what are the sharpest tools in your box, what would you say? What would be the 8 technologies you couldn't possibly do without?

Here are my 8 essential tools:

1) Twitter, because as I recently said in a YouTube video, it is immediate, social and personal. It connects me to my personal learning network (PLN) and is simple to use.
2) My laptops. I have an old, faithful laptop called Keith, which is now sadly in retirement, but still used occasionally to write a blog post. I also have a Netbook (known as Nigel), which is now on more or less permanent duty connected to my flatscreen television to display large screen live Twitter feeds in my home office. The laptop I now work on most of the time is my Chromebook (which has no name - it would be silly to give a Chromebook a name; they have no memory, they have no soul).
3) My iPad, which accompanies me on all my travels, keeping me in touch with e-mail, Twitter and other sites I visit regularly during a working day. It's all about connection.
4) Blogger, my blogging tool which hosts this blog and several more I run. My blog is my publishing tool, allowing me to get my thoughts and ideas out into the public where they can be discussed with others in my PLN.
5) YouTube. I discover so much great content on YouTube, and am also increasingly using it as a platform to share my own video blogs. YouTube is so simple to use, and so versatile and becomes a personal television broadcast channel for many. OK, there is a lot of rubbish on there, but if you use your digital literacies to discern the good from the bad, you'll find it is an incredible resource for learning and teaching.
6) My iPhone. I only use it for phone calls and texting and it's now officially obsolete, because it is an iPhone first edition. It may be worth something in a few years time, mainly as a museum piece.
7) Google. Many of the Google suite of tools have become quite important in my working day. Google Docs is great for sharing and collaborating on documents, and Google Scholar is good for keeping up with citations, publications and metrics. It goes without saying that Google search for me, is still one of the most powerful and far reaching tools I have discovered online.
8) My multi-standard power plug adaptor. It can be used in any country, and can connect any device to the power source of the country I am visiting. It has multiple interchangeable inputs and outputs. It even houses two USB connectors for my iPhone and iPad to charge up. I travel the world, and wouldn't be able to use any of the above tools easily if I didn't take it with me everywhere.

So those are my top 8 tools. Those are the 8 technologies I take with me everywhere I travel. Sure, I could do without most, if not all of them, but it would take a lot of adaptation, and I'm finding it hard to remember a time when I didn't have them, they all make my working life so much easier. What have I left out? Well, email and the Microsoft Office certainly, because Google tools can replace them easily. What are your 8 top tools?

Photo by Eric Bjerke


Sharpest tools in the box by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Life thru a lens

Frequent visitors to this blog will have noticed that over the last few weeks I've been videoblogging (or vlogging). I first started playing with video in the late 1970s, when I began to use it to train teachers. That was where I first learnt about editing, lighting, audio recording and producing video content. I decided some time ago that when I had some time, I would get back to my roots, and put together a series of '101' type short videos on subjects that relate closely to education and technology. That opportunity arose during the summer holidays of 2013. I wanted the videos to be watchable, so to simplify the process and product, I decided that each video would feature just 3 key points - '3 things you should know...' - and I ensured that none of them was more than 3 minutes in duration. So far I have produced 4 videos and there are several more in the pipeline. I was quite surprised by the quick success I achieved when I posted them up onto YouTube. In just two weeks, there have been over 8,500 blog visits and over 2,500 views YouTube views. That may not sound like many in the grand scheme of viral videos, but for a specialist, niche subject, that ain't too bad.

The four videos, in their sequence are 3 things you should know about Twitter, 3 things you should know about blogging, 3 things you should know about digital literacies, and 3 things you should know about Edupunk. The first was recorded in one single take, which is easier said than done. For the rest of the videos I enlisted the support of my 18 year old son Sam, who is excellent behind the camera, and makes some creative suggestions during shooting. I have kept the production simple too. I write a simple script with a few guideline points and follow it loosely during recording. We shoot the videos out of sequence, using a Flip Cam, and I edit them using Microsoft Moviemaker, and then upload them straight to YouTube. The Edupunk video has been the most challenging to date, because I wanted to shoot it and edit it in the style of the punk genre, with plenty of fast edits, moving images, grafitti wall backdrops and edgy camera angles. I'm very pleased with that one. It's quick and dirty, amateurish and in keeping with the 'do it yourself' ethos that was epitomised in the punk rock movement of the 1970s.

Now I would like to enlist your help too. I'm looking for my next challenge. What other subjects would you like to see covered in the series? I will consider all and any topics, provided they are relevant to learning technology, school or education, and treat them in the same style, with '3 things you should know...' points succinctly made. Please let me know what you think of the videos, and also what you think I should cover next.

Photo by Popperipopp


Life thru a lens by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Enjoy your trip?

A recent BBC news article highlights the persistence of negative school experiences in the memories of adults. Recollections of bad experiences like being bullied or pranked tend to linger longer in our minds than much of what we learnt in the classroom, it suggests. It rang true with me. Things that seemed amusing to other children left emotional scars on me. Being deliberately tripped up in the corridor, falling flat on my face in front of several dozen laughing classmates, and then being asked 'did you enjoy your trip?' was humiliating.

Personally, I can also recall some of the bad teaching experiences quite vividly. It wasn't just the contact with certain overbearing teachers that had an effect on this diffident child. Looking back, I can also recall some of the poor pedagogy that we were subjected to. Whenever I see the Simpsons kids going on a school trip to the box factory, I remember the day trip we took to Wilton carpet factory when I was in Year 5 at Cherhill Primary School in Wiltshire. On reflection, I can't remember a thing we learnt about life, science or culture. All I remember was being shepherded around a huge hot factory full of noisy machines, whilst one of the employees assigned to be our guide droned on and on (inaudibly) about the manufacture of floor coverings. We were just glad to get outside into the clear air and away from the noise. All I learnt from the trip was that I never, ever wanted to work in a hot, noisy factory. This leads me to ask a question: Are school trips worth the effort and the expense? What exactly do these realia experiences actually help children to learn? More cynically, are school trips simply a way for teachers to 'take a day off' from teaching?

I'm being provocative of course, but let me answer my own question by recounting a school trip I enjoyed when I was living in Holland. It was 1973 and I was in my final year at AFCENT International School (now AFNORTH) in the South of Holland, and my entire year group went for a day trip to the futuristic, Philips Evoluon (pictured) in Eindhoven. At that time, the Philips 'Flying Saucer' was a science and technology museum and demonstration centre. Rumour had it that the Dutch electronics company had built it as a tax dodge, so it could lose money and then claim back on the loss. Instead, the Evoluon became a roaring success and people travelled from all over Europe to see it. Starting at the ground floor reception, we were all issued with a pair of headphones and a cassette tape player, on which a guide (in our own language) talked us around the exhibits. This was in itself quite a departure from the museums of the time, most of which simply handed you a leaflet to guide you around. We then proceeded to the glass lift (yes, it was totally transparent) which took us up to the top floor. Emerging, we explored the history of technology, from the cave dwelling art of Neolithic times, right up to the most recent, and proposed technological developments, as we progressed down, floor by floor.

Certain experiences from that day are still vivid in my memory. I saw videoconferencing for the first time, and used it to talk to my friends who were in a room just down the corridor. It was a crude representation of what would eventually be possible, and was simply a camera, TV and microphone connected to the other room, but it captured our imagination, and I remember thinking that this would one day be how we communicated with each other across the globe. Out imagination was fuelled even more when later that year we saw the first episodes of Star Trek, where people conversed with each other with full motion sound and vision. Whenever I see or use a video link today, my thoughts go back to that first experience in Holland.

Other exhibits also caught my attention. There was a demonstration where one of the staff bounced a rubber ball on the floor, and then immersed it into liquid nitrogen. Seconds later, he retrieved it and smashed it on the floor as though it was earthenware. I also remember watching a robot very slowly drilling holes in a piece of perspex that eventually became a graphic representation of the Evoluon.  I waited patiently for about 20 minutes until it had finished, and was then rewarded when it deposited the perspex in the receptacle. I took it home with me, and was offered tempting sums of money by some of my friends on the bus home to part with it. I still have that robot created piece of art in my possession to this day.

The entire experience at the Philips Flying Saucer changed me. I only spent a few hours there, but it is still massive in my mind, a lifetime later. I became interested in science and technology and began to collect books, models, artefacts, experiments - and I avidly read more and more about technology and the future. I really believe that that school trip was the catalyst that shaped me into who I am today. It is ironic that I failed all my science exams and left school later that year with very few academic qualifications. That didn't matter to me. What was most important for me was that I had the seed of ideas in my head, and a new found fascination for discovering new things. I now had a passion for science and technology, that became the drive for my later career as an academic working in technology and education. It's just a pity that kind of school trip didn't take place earlier in my school career.

You see, I made the link between the school trip, and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It excited and inspired me. For me, that is the power of the school trip. But it has to be meaningful to be effective. It has to have some sound pedagogy to underpin it. So dear teacher, the next time you plan a school trip for your students, make sure it is to somewhere exciting, relevant and potentially inspiring. No more carpet factories please!

Photos by Lee Morley and Stephane Gaudry


Enjoy your trip? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

3 things you should know about Edupunk

Following on in my series of short '3 things' videos, I thought I would have a little fun (well, I am on holiday right now), and so I went out and recorded this video on Edupunk. Although it's treated in a fun way, Edupunk has a serious underpinning. Those who are involved in the 'do it yourself' approach to learning will tell you that there is quite a struggle going on right now between institutions and individuals over what tools to use for the serious business of lifelong learning. Should we use centralised services and endure all the constraints that accompany them, or should we instead use our own patchwork collection of tools, loosely aggregated social media and handheld personal devices that give us freedom, but at a price? There is also a belief that, just as the music industry of the late 1970s was stagnating, so the education system of the early 21st Century is in need of a reboot. Punk rock revitalised the 70s music scene and, say its adherents, Edupunk can do the same today with our tired education system.

My previous writings around Edupunk can be found in Edupunk stalks the institution (which details the tensions highlighted above) and also elsewhere on this blog. I hope you enjoy this different, 'bricolage' approach to making videos - it's not perfect, but it was never intended to be. Please let me know what you think about the concept and its treatment in the comments box below.

Photo by Steve Wheeler



3 things you should know about Edupunk by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

3 things you should know about digital literacies

This is a continuation in my '3 things' short video series. If you follow this blog you will know that I wrote a series of posts last year on digital literacies. Many people confuse literacies with skills or competencies, but as you will see in the video I made below, they are different. For me literacies go beyond and deeper than skills and competencies, enabling users to assimilate into unfamiliar and challenging new cultures and environments. We have a bewildering array of digital media at our fingertips, but to use these tools effectively takes a lot of practice, critical thinking and immersion in the culture before we can claim to be literate in them. Also, many of us need to be able to discern the difference between good and bad content online, to be able to navigate effectively around digital spaces and to be able to create, remix, organise and share content effectively. How much practice do we need using these tools before we can claim to be literate? Below is a short video which I hope will help people to deepen their own understanding of what it really means to be a digital citizen. As ever, your comments are most welcome in the comments box below.



3 things you should know about digital literacies by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Go your own way

Here's a little confession: I have always been a bit of a rebel. I'm not keen on too many rules and structures being imposed, and I have a healthy disrespect for authority. I have always been that way, and I don't mind admitting it. I have been labelled an Edupunk because I practise bricolage, the 'do it yourself' approach to personal learning, and this manifests itself in my professional practice too. If someone says to me 'it can't be done', or 'you shouldn't do that', I will probably try to do it anyway (sometimes twice) just to prove them wrong, because I'm bloody minded like that. Give me a boundary and I will try to climb it, undermine it or circumvent it in some way. That's just the kind of person I have turned out to be. This personality trait doesn't endear me to particular people, and I'm not that popular in certain circles, but I don't lose that much sleep over it. From as far back as I can remember, I have not been dependent upon other people, and although like everyone else, I care what others think about me, I have always gone my own way regardless, choosing the way that in my judgement, I think is best for me. That is the reason I have evangelised for personal learning environments, and have openly criticised many of the institutional constraints I see being imposed upon learners of all ages.

It was with great interest then, that I read Helen Crump's blog post today. Entitled Rhizomatic me, a learning nomad, it focuses on self determined learning, and draws on the work of Dave Cormier (and the theories he drew on from the post-modernistic thinking of Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari around Rhizomes, nomads and schizos). In this form of learning, as Helen explains, we each take on the disposition and behaviour of a nomad, (or indeed the Flânerie of Charles Baudelaire) wandering seemingly aimlessly in the space we create for ourselves, to discover what is important for us. This is reminiscent of the personal learning pathways I described in one of my own past blogposts. Helen explains:

'According to Dave Cormier, nomads (or those with a disposition for play as exploration) “have the ability to learn rhizomatically, to ‘self-reproduce’, to grow and change ideas as they explore new contexts”. So, what does “to learn rhizomatically” actually mean? And, where does the term come from? Well, rhizome refers to a way in which certain plants spread. Often understood as a creeping root stalks, rhizomes go out horizontally and interact with their environment. Certainly, they’re messy, disorderly and difficult to control, but at the same time they’re resilient and have a lot of important qualities, which allows them to adapt within their ecosystem. As such, rhizomes have come to represent a model for learning for uncertainty and, like the learning process of life itself, they’ve no beginning or end either.'

The rhizome is certainly a powerful metaphor for chaotic learning, and is personified in the nomad. Nomadic learning clearly appeals to many in the digital age, whether or not they recognise that that is what they are in fact doing. They don't have to be rebels or Edupunks either. Self directed creation, repurposing, organisating and sharing of content (i.e. user generated content) is one of the dominant modes of technology use in both formal and informal learning, and is increasingly pervasive throughout the Western World. The tools nomads have at their disposal (smart phones, mobile devices, social media) enable them to learn on the move, whenever they wish, in their own idiosyncratic styles, and at a pace that suits their personal preferences and lifestyles. As a result of this, some are questioning the future of formal education and the nature of knowledge and learning is being redefined. For many, 'going your own way' is becoming a very important lifestyle choice. How about you?

Photo by Kris Williams


Go your own way by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.