Multitasking

The PBS public affairs series Frontline recently aired, Distracted by Everything, the first episode in digital_nation – life on the virtual frontier about multitasking.

Henry Jenkins has a word of warning about the program though, he suggests the documentary ‘panders to the biases’ of viewers. His analysis of how students multitask is important and comments about the dangers of envisaging a ‘national norm’ sage.

My own position on multitasking depends, of course, on context.

Personally, if I really need to complete a task quickly, and well, it is best to focus on the job at hand. I rarely do this though. Usually, I multitask. Word processing, email, twitter, Facebook, the kids, my partner, music, iPhone, occasionally tv in the mix too. Basically, it makes life more pleasant. I ‘work’ on several things at once. I am listening to the end of the documentary as I type now – and tweeting.

I use my iPhone in meetings and while at conferences but put it aside when I really need to concentrate or etiquette demands. I find the (hyper)connectivity makes me feel happy.

In my classes, students are not permitted to listen to music or use their phones. It is a simple rule. Students compose, discuss, listen, create, read, collaborate, present, synthsesise, analyse, evaluate and laugh. We usually have internet access. They are free to listen to music in their own time and multitask all they want and often, other teachers permit this in their classes too but I have felt for many years that we can do without this in my English class. We need to concentrate!

Fascist?

Personally, I prefer to read a novel in quiet but that is for my own enjoyment more than anything else. I used to always play music reading but not anymore. Often though, I have a break and use my iPhone to check twitter, Facebook and email – or look something up.

Screenshot from the documentary

The conclusion, increasingly being reached, maybe simplistically, is that multistaskers are bad at multitasking. Read more here and here. However, I suspect that, like most things, it is in the balance.

Your views on multitasking?

Collaborate and Prevail

I found this 4-minute video at Jane Hart’s site and recommend you watch it.

It is advertising for the Internet Time Alliance but explores many of the most important concepts relating to social media, particularly networked economies. Note the reference to Darwin’s theories and that those who learn to collaborate most effectively, prevail.

Social networks and social learning are changing how we work and grow our knowledge. Networks and trust are critical. It is important that we assist colleagues to participate for the health and relevance of our workplaces.

The presentation is not dynamic but the intellectual understanding of our new times is deep. I particularly liked the use of Marshall McCluhan’s theories in the presentation.

McCluhan's laws of media are useful for reflecting on our networked era

 

Code of Conduct

The NSW DET Code of Conduct  was updated and took effect last week. The changes are sensible and staff at school have been briefed.

                                          page 16 of the NSW DET Code of Conduct

 

The major additions relate to social media and are not draconian like those announced in Queensland last year that Kelli wrote about with such eloquence and passion. There was also an ethics poster added to outline the philosophical underpinnings of the code.

The basic message re: social networks is do “not invite students into your personal network site, if it contains personal information or inappropriate comments or images”.

My personal system is that I do not add students to my Facebook while they are students. I usually see the kid at school who ‘added’ me and explain my personal policy. I have quite a few ex-students though, which is great!

Thoughts about the ‘code’?

What’s your policy?

MySchool: Part II

The MySchool site lists each Australian school in a group of 60 ’similar’ institutions using the ‘Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage’ (ICSEA). As explained at the site:

The performance of schools on NAPLAN tests is greatly affected by a range of student intake and school location characteristics. When comparing schools, it is important to compare like with like. The My School website allows and encourages comparisons with schools that are statistically similar in terms of a range of factors known to affect test performance.

This has led to Ms Gillard often using the phrase, ‘comparing apples with apples’ in an attempt to validate the data. The line is very much to say, it may not be fair to compare a wealthy school with a one from an impoverished area of the country but just look at the similar schools comparison and you can see how your place is doing. It is a fair and just comparison!

Here is further explanation of how ICSEA is supposed to work.

However, this has been widely criticised with some quite embarrassing media stories about the problems with the statistically reliable measure of similar schools. When you look at the website and see the ‘value’ of a community:

it feels wrong, and terrible. Most schools score between 900-1100 with 1000 being the average. It feels like communities are being ranked and assigned ‘a value’. The justification, of course, is so the school can be compared fairly with another. I doubt this is possible, or desirable, for a range of reasons. Trevor Cobbold, an economist for the Australian Productivity Commission for more than 30 years and convener of the Save Our Schools public education advocacy group, has been trenchant in his opposition to the New York model and wrote a thoughtful article early last year covering a range of these issues.

Like many Australians, I have looked closely at all the schools personally known to me, dating back to my own kindergarten days, including the ones surrounding them. After a while, I started to notice some oddities with the lists of similar schools.

Here’s one, as an example: choose a selective school in NSW. Look at the similar schools and check who they are compared; see if there are other selective schools in the group. The first example I found was ’similar’ to a regional high school and one on the outskirts of Sydney. Both were comprehensive, co-educational, non-selective schools. It seemed difficult to imagine they were in any way similar. Of course, the selective high school was way above the other similar schools in the group. Adding the selective high school’s data must have made it challenging for other schools in the group to ‘compete’ with an ‘elite’, creamed off by testing in Year 6. Or, have I got this wrong?

What have you observed when looking at similar schools? Please be sensitive and sensible when posting.

What should we, as a nation, be most ashamed about with our education system? Inequality? Party political politics that has led to, what Professor Barry McGaw has said, that poor Australian children are less likely to do well at school than disadvantaged children overseas. I find it difficult to imagine that any Australian can live with that stark comment, priding ourselves, as we do, on having an egalitarian society.

There are many, simple and complex, reasons that this has developed and the MySchool website is going to result in many unintended outcomes. The best possible outcome from the publication of the NAPLAN data at the MySchool website would be government levelling the playfield. Considering how funding works at a federal level and the electoral pressures of continuing to fund wealthy private schools at the rate of the previous Liberal/National government, one hopes that the hidden agenda is to address this funding issue.

The Deputy Prime Minister’s agenda, expressed here in a mid-2008 lecture, is now in a crucial phase and leaves us with many questions. She said, in the lecture:

How can we hope to address the needs of individual students and whole communities if we are not using the best possible information as the basis for our decisions?

We need all of this information, not for the production of crude league tables but to inform a real program to address disadvantage. And we need all of this information, and more, in the public domain to inform parents and teachers in their efforts.

It is only with this information that we can truly assess the work being done by schools, their strengths and their weaknesses. And it is only by having this information we can look at comparable schools, compare results, understand different patterns of disadvantage, identify the best teaching practices and share them.

Ms Gillard will have to be skilful to avoid, what she said of John Howard’s government education policies:

…division (is) the Howard Government’s legacy to the nation in education

Read MySchool: Part 1

No laughing matter…

Satire, has long been humanity’s answer to limited, ignorant public policy. Enjoy this parody of American educational policies that have failed.

MySchool: Part I

I support transparency, governments sharing information with citizens and believe schools must improve by using data, along with a range of other innovations.

I applaud the Federal Government’s Digital and Building Education Revolution policies, while recognising far greater vision is needed, as they go nowhere near far enough in regards to innovation or funding.

I believe that Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard have a passionate understanding that education must improve in Australian schools and are energetically leading, asking schools to re-invigorate and enhance learning opportunities for our communities.

However, the deeply flawed, controversial policy of releasing school data, that was never designed for this purpose, at the MySchool website has the potential to create exactly the opposite conditions needed in schools to develop an educated citizenry, healthy communities, love of life-long learning, quality teaching, a strong economy and development of 21st century curriculum.

 
 
What will happen?
 
What will be the intended and unintended consequences of the Deputy Prime Minister’s reform? I am certain she intends it as a game-changing innovation to improve the quality of schooling and wants to break through the clay layer. Ironically, the data from the US and UK does not support Ms Gillard’s position - which seems to be that the ’sunlight’ of publicly available data is ‘the best disinfectant’. 

This vexed issue must be discussed intelligently, not with 5 second news bites by politicians, unions and parents filmed at the front gate, picking up their kids. One hopes that the ensuing conflict, brewing between the Federal Government and a range of parents, professional associations and educational unions, will see some intelligent ways forward. Most likely, the NAPLAN tests will be banned across the country and despite Ms Gillard’s suggestion she can organise for them to be invigilated, teachers and parents will lose data that has been used successfully to diagnose student needs. This will be a lose-lose scenario.

The countries that have the most impressive educational data, for example Finland, have a completely different approach and explanation of why they have such quality learning outcomes.

What’s wrong with league tables?

The headlines and stories in Australian newspapers this week confirm what our former director-general in NSW, principals, teachers’ associations, parents, The Greens, citizens of New York  experiencing that city’s misguided reforms and education unions warned would happen – league tables. Slowly at first and then with frightening momentum, schools reduce curriculum experiences for children as teachers scramble to ‘teach to the test’.  Kevin Donnelly, originally an advocate of league tables, recants that position for what one assumes are intellectually honest reasons, rather than partisan politics, considering he was once a Liberal Party staffer.

This article is worth thinking about too, as it muses on the possibility of leagues tables in other areas of our community life? A good idea or not?

I recommend you read Lawrence Lessig’s lengthy, The Perils of Transparency. The article does not discuss transparency in education at all, as this one does but explores, from the perspective of a proponent of the transparency movement, his concerns at what is being unleashed. If you do not have the time or inclination to read the entire article, here’s a few important quotes:

Reformers rarely feel responsible for the bad that their fantastic new reform effects. Their focus is always on the good. The bad is someone else’s problem. It may well be asking too much to imagine more than this. But as we see the consequences of changes that many of us view as good, we might wonder whether more good might have been done…

The problem, however, is that not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it…people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response.

This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand…is almost always less than the amount of time required.

We see the attention-span problem everywhere, in public and private life. Think of politics, increasingly the art of exploiting attention-span problems–tagging your opponent with barbs that no one has time to understand, let alone analyze.

Considering the above comment, one hopes you have time to read the entire article by Lessig.

Some more reading on the issues of league table, standardised testing and accountabilty regimes can be found here.

I look forward to your comments and analysis. What is particularly of interest are thoughts on what may happen to 21st century skills and the stalled movement towards genuine personalised learning?

 

Read MySchool: Part II

‘How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?’

Here are the best answers you are likely to read, compiled by the Edge Foundation at their World Question Centre, to this important question.  

The following passage, from Tim O’Reilly’s musings on the question, Pattern Recognition, made me reflect about the challenges of staying ‘educated’ and being and ‘educator’ in our ever-shifting culture:  

“It used to be the case that there was a canon, a body of knowledge shared by all educated men and women. Now, we need the skills of a scout, the ability to learn, to follow a trail, to make sense out of faint clues, and to recognize the way forward through confused thickets. We need a sense of direction that carries us onward through the wood despite our twists and turns. We need “soft eyes” that take in everything we see, not just what we are looking for.  

The information river rushes by. Usenet, email, the world wide web, RSS, twitter: each generation carrying us faster than the one before. But patterns remain.  

You can map a river as well as you can map a mountain or a wood. You just need to remember that the sandbars may have moved the next time you come by.”   

This is at the heart of the challenge for schools. We do need to ‘map’ and assist students chart their courses but, it is fundamental to our role, that we keep remembering, the map is not necessarily the territory. *  

I continue to enjoy daily missives from Seth Godin, ostensibly an advertising and business ‘guru’, increasingly the source of some practical, coherent thinking about the impact of the internet on society. His latest blog post, about libraries, illustrates the point made by O’Reilly:  

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.  

Godin’s notion of a ’sherpa’ guiding others to the top of a well-known territory works for me. Funnily enough, although it more poignant for me than I care to detail, this made me think of a Michael Leunig cartoon, from many years ago, that really impacted on me significantly at a critical juncture in my life.  

From, 'Everyday Devils and Angels' 1992

Learning is similar. Triumphs have a way of just leading the thoughtful learner to more questing, often with a nagging sense that there’s just nowhere near enough time to explore all that fascinates (or is needed).  

What mountains to climb then? Is that the question a skilful teacher or librarian will be able to help their students understand, as they ascend?  

Enough of the sherpa thing. ;)   

The map has changed. The internet has changed the way we think, as we envision and navigate the unfolding text of our culture. The river will always have new sandbars; it flows rapidly. We need to be mindful that our old maps do not flush students into an ocean that is no longer there.  

Life-long learning in “twenty-ten”

I’ve decided to pronounce the year “twenty-ten”. Not sure what the popular wisdom on this matter will be but I suspect most will continue with the “two thousand and…” that we have been using for the first decade of the 21st century. “Twenty-ten” sounds like the never-arriving future is here - and I like that!

It is a minor matter.

What is more important than these semantics, from my POV, is personal renewal and direction. Last year, I posted about ‘directions and influencers’ but currently am endeavouring to reassess the larger picture for schools, especially mine. How to practically and effectively implement ‘a vision’, after a sound course has been charted, is always the challenge and pleasure of leadership. It is usually not so much a matter of a ‘new’ direction but confirming the route, with an eye on the horizon.

Digital technologies, advances in neuroscience, laptops, school infrastructure, web 2.0 and our 21st century tools are of great and continuing importance in the service of the ongoing challenge of maintaining and sustaining what is really important, our environment and civil society.

We are all going to need to learn, relearn, unlearn and want to learn!

Being traditionally, scientifically, digitally and, in fact, truly multiliterate is of the most profound importance, if we are to learn and grow. Reading is of fundamental importance. All humans must model and encourage reading for our personal and ever-widening interconnected web of interests to grow. It is pithy, and a reworking of a poster on a primary school door, but if we read, we will likely succeed!

Recently Dean Groom and Graham Wegner have posted about the lack of educational change in 2009. At my school, the last 12 months has seen more change than most teachers have seen in their career. Some of it has been superficial but mostly, significant platforms have been constructed for future progress.

Year 9 are flourishing! Their laptops have been a trojan horse and many are starting to understand the significance. Learning is personal and the teacher is there to help, instruct, model learning and facilitate. School now has endless windows, many of which can be fashioned by the learner, regardless of their status as ‘teacher’ or ’student’.

I believe ‘teaching’ will have a renaissance this century, as we co-operate and collaborate and the citizens of the planet have the need to solve the growing challenges we will have to overcome. This renaissance has already commenced but will become truly evident during this new decade. Skilled teachers are already at a premium but those with vision, relentless enthusiasm and who love to learn, challenge and be challenged, will insist on thriving!

Is this you?

POSTSCRIPT

We need to watch and participate in the development of the Australian National Curriculum and resulting assessment closely, to safeguard a potentially enlightened future. There is incredibly important opportunity in this change but many threats abound too.

A curriculum for the 21st, not a previous century, is what we need.

Optimism & Resilience

Our last day of the 2009 school year was spent at Nan Tien Temple. I’ve just made the pilgrimage home after a most satisfying day and felt the need to write a blog post about this uplifting, professional experience. I’d highly recommend the temple as a venue for professional learning and (re)growth.

The whole staff gathered this morning, many choosing to greet the day with tai chi led by Reverend You or a walk through the salubrious temple gardens. Our conference, Optimism & Resilience: Thriving as a teacher, administrator, as a learner was all about a holistic approach to school and individual wellbeing.

Dr Kathy Lacey gave a well-received keynote titled, ‘Revive’ which explored the nature of staying physically, emotionally and professionally healthy in the challenging role of being a 21st century educator.

Some good discussion took place following the keynote and into the second session, especially about leadership and mentoring.

A number of colleagues retired today and the school always has staff awards, as voted by the teachers. I felt that we celebrated excellence, past and present, very successfully and gave a great send-off showing heartfelt appreciation of quality work, over many years. Sally Golding and Ian Heffernan have worked at the school for 35 and 37 years respectively, Elizabeth Young since 1992. They have been highly valued colleagues and great assets to the whole community. Michelle Hartcher delivered a great speech, as did Janet O’Brien, who spoke ‘off the cuff’ with great eloquence.

To cap it all off the vegetarian lunch was superb, just superb!

I’d like to thank all my colleagues at Dapto High School for their collegiality and professionalism during 2009. Have a great holiday and a glowing New Year!

I look forward to to 2010 with great anticipation!

#nocleanfeed

Senator Conroy’s recent announcement about the censorship of the internet in Australia has disturbed and perturbed Australians who reflect intelligently on the nature of our civil society and the freedoms we enjoy.

The benignly titled press release, ‘Measures to improve safety of the internet for families’ has been released in the week before christmas in an attempt to escape analysis from a distracted public and journalists.

I would encourage you to read this post by @trib and applaud Penny Sharpe’s stand. Stilgherrian has been writing passionately about this issue in Crikey and at his blog all year.

Please find the time to understand this censorship and express your disgust! Consider emailing Senator Conroy about this fundamentally important issue of internet censorship in Australia via the GetUp site.

Many people have stopped following Kevin Rudd on twitter in protest too.

The #nocleanfeed hashtag on twitter and site will help keep you up to date and informed, as well as expressing our protests at this government folly.