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Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught me by Kate Clanchy
There’s 12 hours reading here even if you pause to make notes, make lunch and walk the dog. Kate Clanchy has been my weekend read. I go through most of it on one of those ‘stay in bed’, wet mid-December days in 2020 when bedtime became most of the time – at least for me, when not at work in the spare bedroom next door.
I’ve reached the point of maximum hunger when it comes to learning about teaching. I will snatch at anything related to the subject if it is waved in front of me. This is the danger of shopping online; it knows my desires.
I like this on teaching
‘It’s a bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper, or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents and occasional sublime flights which leave you either crippled or changed’. (p.1)
Can teaching online via webcam be such a bodily experience? An ‘out body’ experience perhaps? It is not helped where none of the students are present – all have their webcams turned off. Like playing blind-man’s buff in a classrom – and at first, just as scary. Yet you are in your own space, not a darkened room.
Does teaching have to be negotiated when we each in our own domain? Who knows if the student is comfortable on the sofa, in bed, the back of Dad’s car, at the kitchen table or the only one in college at a desk in the learning resource centre?
‘All children will behave perfectly … if they want to know something very much, about sex or anything else, and an adult sincerely sets out to tell them.’ (p.15) Kate Clanchy makes this optimistic remark about her students (she teaches in school). This confluence is surely a difficult one to achieve? ‘if they want to know something’ she states. It is the perennial ‘if’ which is too often answered by, ‘but they don’t’.
How do we know what they want to know? Are we more often than not trying to impart in them knowledge and experience that they feel is unnecessary or not for them? Yet they’ve signed up for a course. There is of course choice when it comes to HE, less so at FE and little at all in school.
What if neither the teacher not the students want to know?
Take ‘Black Lives Matter’. Not my view, but I have had others ask why it is being taught to a group of all white students – or harder, how to teach it to a class where one student is black. Should it be awkward? Would it be like teaching menstruation to a class of predominantly boys with one girl present? What if the class was entirely black but for one white kid? I think the teacher missed the point, the institution failed in selling the purpose of teaching the class on Black Lives. It is about diversity, respect and community. It is about difference, teasing and bullying. It is about the history of all people on a small planet. That we are all black – afterall, we all came out of Africa. Should it not be the case that only those who know what they are talking about get up to teach? Governments and institutions can be overly prescriptive. And why should a tutor in construction be taking such a lesson?
For ‘Inclusion’ read ‘Exclusion’
A further insight into the students comes where the Kate Clanchy sums up her experience of working with students who had been isolated in the ‘inclusion’ portacabin on the other side of the playing field. These children had misbehaved so badly or so often that they were separated from the rest of the school. Kate Clanchy is a saint; she has a lot to teach us. She tells a story of how she encouraged them to write her notes and put them anonymously in a box. Those that were scrumpled up and dropped in the bin proved more revealing as it told stories of physical and mental abuse and neglect. We know that how children are raised has a profound impact on their behaviour and response to the wider world.
‘No one is bad, though many are sad, and a few are mad’ she writes on page 56.
I’m ‘consuming’ a lot at the moment. This is my immersion in learning without the ‘e’.
In between reviewing a 1 hour 42 minutes talk by Dylan Wiliam on ‘Formative Assessment’ and the need for actions in schools to be based on evidence and checking through Dave White on ‘Visitors and Residents’ in the digital world, I riggle my way through the rest of Kate Clanchy.
There are no surprises that she uncovers systemic racism in poetry competitions she enters her pupils for; no surprises at how awkwardly church schools fit into secular and multiracial Britain; nor how middle-class parents point their kids towards middle-class and aspirational schools so extracing ourselves from the wider population and in this country leaving us unnecessarily fragmented. What unites the United Kingdom? Not much.
Very Quiet Foreign Girls is worth Googling for their poems.
Like ‘Dead Poets Society’ this is a group of underprivileged girls, rather than privileged boys, who met to read and compose poetry. The multiracial and international mix of students is extraordianry: Khurds, Iranians, Somalians, Poles and Hungarians, Moroccan, Afghan, Indian and Pakistani – a few Brits of Afro-Carribean, Irish and Scottish heritage with a suitable mix of relgions across branches of Islam, as well as Hindu, Cathollic and no religion at all.
Deprivation can be a shocker
We get the social worker’s inside view of the way some children live, their poverty, how treated at home. Clanchy makes the point that the uniform is a release for a child from having to find anything special or different to wear, shoes in all weathers a pair of flip flops, travel to London from Essex, let alone ‘abroad’ a signal of something ‘beyond’ and out of their reach to the point of feeling like impostors to be with anyone so privileged.
‘Poverty is stronger than plumbing’ Kate Clanchy writes (p.160), ‘stronger than medicine, stronger than art’.
[The first taste I personally got of a sense of poverty was on benefits in London in April 1985; not an expected path for an Oxford graduate who’d been spoilt for choices at the end of the Milk Round the Year Before. Then doing odd jobs, in a flat in Willesden and joining the Tricycle Youth Theatre and being around as many black faces as white. I’d not lived; I’d not travelled in my own country. I’ve been rubbing off the all-male public school experience ever since. I has taken a long time to reclaim Oxford too; I’d had a tendency of late to state that I went to ‘college’ – even university was a confession too far for a period.]
Education is national, it is the community, it ought to be a melting pot, it ought to be a leveller.
It should not be the fragmented, privileged, excluding, isolating experience that it is in Britain where too many children’s experience is amongst ‘their own kind’ geographically, and by race, religion, class and wealth.
Kate Clanchy has made this a weekend
My working week extended with the Dylan Wiliam SSAT keynote online talk to digest (it will take three passes through my gut like a cow chewing the cud). What surprises me is when out of the blue Kate Clanchy drops her thoughts on poetry and the Inclusion Group and macks into Black and Wiliam and Formative Assessment (WALT) with the enthusiasm of a vengeant pugilist.
I like her for it. My first notes on Wiliam are to question the keynote I have just sat through as a self-serving literature review which makes a lot of poor research conducted in the States so that it provides him with something to destroy. More of Wiliam elsewhere – I applaud ‘evidence based’ responses to any problem, though not, Kate Clanchy would say, if this is at the expense of creativity and poetry. Is Wiliam and his brand of formative assessment most suited to math and engineering rather than the arts? Would fine art, pottery or make up courses benefit from or be destroyed by formative assessment?
At what point, by way of example, does formative assessment in the training of a competitive sailor have to give way to intuition, for the musician to play the piece their way? Is formative assessment the scales and these alone will make for a dull clone?
We get into the apostrophe in English as a defining standard for how well it is taught, or not, and taken up by Grammar Schools but not the Comprehensive – or not. It is a detail too far for me. I take her point that the simplest advice to those in doubt over the use of the apostrophe is to never use it.
From p.207 to p.217 the PostIts I used to indicate where I need to quote and make notes cover most of each page. Her attack on formative assessment is heartfelt. I have, in the US parlance, a lot to ‘unpack’. Kate Clanchy ‘began teaching thirty years ago’ (1990s). Since when there has been ‘the inexorable rise of the thing called ‘formative assessment’, and its lumpen classroom equivalent, the WALT’. ‘(p.207)
WALT stands for ‘We Are Learning To …’
They should head a trainee teacher’s lesson plan and guide any observation.
The theory goes, Kate Clanchy explains, is that WALTs ‘interact seamlessly with the curriculum and let everyone know where they are at’.
‘They break up the lesson into simple learning objectives that the children themselves understand’. (p.207)
‘This is formative assessment because it forms and changes he student as well as marking them’. (p.208).
[I can only think in terms of old school essay writing for homework. Formative assessment at its most successful, for feedback and differentiation – surely? And then the five hundred year old Oxbridge tutorial were students armed with essays debating one with their tutor and mentally marking their own effort as excellent, average, mediocre or non-existent, while forming a view of their own months, even years before any summative assessment into a formal written exam].
‘Formative assessment does not allow for ineffable processes,’ she writes (p.210) as she expands on a case study of a student who grew into himself and developed self awareness and confidence as a result of his creative writing, something she is sure would have been stymied by WALT and overly prescriptive formative assessment.
She has a dig at something called the ‘Black Box’ which is an idea that Black and Wiliam also developed around WALT and formative assessment; I am currently ignorant of it. She argues that often there is less need for this kind of formative assessment and a greater need for summative assessment in the form of a concluding ‘well done’. (p.210).
Then she bemoans how an English test has been reduced to using a Wikipedia entry on Titanic to compose a nonfiction essay. A task that she considers thin and limited because it starts from not much and has little opportunity to flower the way the simple experience of listening to a poem and then writing one of your own can have. (p.211).
‘In my dreams,’ she writes on p.212, ‘we never need to write another WALT. In my dreams my colleagues are trusted to choose great, rich texts to teach, and we all trust the texts to teach the children. We assess both creative and critical responses to them as their final exams’.
Some decades later Kate Clanchy spotted this her most promising student from those days of poetry and creative english. She got up the courage to contact him by LinkedIn.
‘When we read books with you,’ he wrote, ‘the world opened up. Your lessons were I learnt who I was,’ he continued, ‘became conscious of myself, grew up. That time was important to me, a free space’. (p.217) She goes on to provide illustrative anecdotes for dyslexia and ASD I like that as much is devoted to what those with such issues can do, rather than what they can not do. Then we cover body image, the Audrey Hepburn like nymph who gains weight so quickly and others too, another raped and a third caught up a child marriage or engagement in Pakistan.
And so endeth my weekend of learning about education. I read Kate Blanchy cover to cover. I took copious notes on a second viewing of a 1 hours 42 mnutes Dylan Wiliam lecture then Q&A on the woes of education in England and how Fomative Assessment is the cure-all … and I even foundd time for a fourth or fifth viewing of Dave Williams on his ‘Visitor vs. Resident’ thesis that provides a simplified description of how we behave online – we are task orientated or live there, and can wear different hats when we do so.
Talking it through
When Stephen Hawking lost the ability to speak in 1985 he realised with great frustration that he could no longer talk through a problem with others and in so doing clarify his thoughts.
For a student to be able to talk through a subject with tutors and fellow students is a vital component of learning that risks being absent where e-Learning is supposed to provide all of that. Face to face in tutorials and at other events, such as in a debate or subject-some specific society is ideal. The next best thing is having formal a Google hang-out and other interactions that are live (synchronous) as well as asynchronous.
Start writing fiction: a free MOOC through FutureLearn with The OU
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| From E-Learning V |
Fig.1 Something I wrote 40 years ago ! (age 13)
The last five weeks I’ve been following the FutureLearn MOOC ‘Start Writing Fiction’.
Extraordinary. I’m on my second pass. I came through early, and now return not wanting to get ahead of the conversation. Particularly useful as I am actively writing at the moment, so this is the best of all learning because it is applied. Regarding character it about giving them shape, depth and ‘points of interest’ – more 6D than even the 2D we are asked to get away from. I visualise characters as hedgehogs with many prickles, but only a few of these matter to the story – though all of them matter to the notebook which I’m gradually coming to care about more and more, cursing the times I ‘have a thought’ and don’t get it down somewhere safely. I am hugely pleased to be here and very proud to be an OU graduate already – not, sadly, from this faculty: yet!
I’m finding the oddest of balances in my life too:
- Writing for myself from 4.00am to 8.00am.
- Picking up work from 10.00am.
- Evenings from 5.00pm to 9.00pm
I am often ‘poolside’ teaching or coaching swimmers.
Delighting yesterday evening to be back with some squad swimmers I last saw four years ago – now in the mid teens, some achieving amazing things in the water, all at that gangly stage of youth development my own children have come through in the last year.
The issue then is how or where or why I fit in the OU module L120 I committed to. Learning a language is daunting and outside my comfort zone. What I do know now, not surprisingly, is that all learning comes about as a result of concerted and consistent effort over a long period of time.
War breeds hate; hate festers and breeds war.
Fig.1 At the war memorial to the Machine Gun Corps (MGC) on Hyde Park Corner, 1991. I’m with my late grandfather – dark suit and beige shoes, fourth in from the right. That’s me on the far left of the line in the glasses holding the standard. (Volunteered about five minutes previously) Marking the 75th Anniversary of the formation of the MGC in 1916.
I’ve just completed fascinating couple of weeks, often gruelling on The OU’s World War 1: Trauma and Memory on the FutureLearn MOOC platform.
My love for The OU is restored. Everyone should pick a course from FutureLearn to understand where learning is being taken. You cannot go wrong with an OU lead and designed one of these – some of the others are re-versioned books, leaflets, extra curricular workshops and lecture series, not embracing the affordances of the platform at all.
An eye opener for anyone studying learning – go over there anyone studying education.
At the end of each week, which officially run for the five working days of the week, we are invited to reflect on the lessons learnt. A very significant part of this are the ‘massive’ conversations that follow each ‘activity’.
A week of looking at and contemplating the dead from violent conflict I conclude that ‘war breeds hate; hate festers and breeds war.’ Unless the population is wiped out, or dived between the conquerors. Or unless the conquerors stay put – the Normans eventually subjugated England and Scotland and 1000 years on some of them still rule and own the land.
Responses to hatred are diametrically opposed: forgiveness and peace, blame and violent conflict. Has humankind moved on that far from the tribalism of one or two millennia ago? If young men, the typical combat soldier truly understood what could happen to them would they still go? It applies to every kind of risk, and testosterone fuelled it is more of a male thing? This willingness to take outrageous risks believing that it ‘won’t happen to them’. And of course, commemorating ‘our glorious dead’ and ‘returning heroes’ risks celebrating war rather than being a period of reflection and commemoration. A veteran of WW1 my grandfather never used the term ‘heroic’. Do young people joining up think that if nothing else, wounded, or dead in a coffin, they will at least come back ‘a hero’ – making it OK? And yet, however frightful, violent conflict remains a way that peoples, people, cultures attempt to resolve their differences.
It’ll continue until the world’s resources and ‘life chances’ – are fairly distributed. I feel the awakening of a burgeoning political sensibility that may wobble towards republicanism and socialism.
Three reasons to revitalise, reinvent and revolutionise education
Fig. 1, Ken Robinson: On education … and a fix for the huge drop-out rate in American Schools.
An excellent TED lecture. Worth taking notes. These are mine.
Offered by fellow student Marshall Anderson on the H818: The networked practitioner journey.
Worth listening to a couple of times (as I have just done).
Music to my ears, though I am not a teacher and have given too much of my career to the mechanised teaching he knocks … digital and interactive learning is and has been, surely, a product of the mechanised approach? But you don’t question the legitimacy of e-learning in an e-learning agency and suggest that a blended approach would be better.
They have one product on the shelf.
Which puts me at odds with the hand that has fed me for the last couple of decades. Next stop Finland? There is of course an answer here and that is recognising, please, that children, whilst deserving a better education system and approach, are NOT always at school … this curiosity and motivation can be developed at home if and where a family have parents with the time and inclination and where, ideally, they also have contact with grandparents and even cousins, and especially friends.
FIG.2. TED Lecture with Ken Robinson
Ken Robinson is right to celebrate the human side of the child, that:
- human beings are naturally different and diverse
- that ‘lighting the light of curiosity’ is key and that
- human life is inherently creative.
For the moment my interest is with my 17 year old daughter and 15 year old son … hoping and helping them to find and know what motivates them. It is this that will get them through school, a worthwhile goal beyond the barriers that exist in formal education – you still have to satisfy the standardised tests in order to get a place at university. Which is another schooling environment Ken Robinson doesn’t touch upon – you can give us human beings too much freedom. Parameters are stimulating, both the negative and positive ones.
A struggle makes something worthwhile.
It helps to create a common memory too. Fundamentally this reminds me that any learning and especially e-learning needs to be seen in context – an e-learning platform or project is never exclusive, it is always part of what else is going on in the participant’s life.
Blended, rather than pure e-learning is surely therefore the way forward?
Wise words put succinctly and with wit. Common sentiments that we struggle to realise. Privately educate? Home educate? Or move to Finland, Canada or Singapore?
Reflection: we are all so very, very, different when it comes to learning
Just ten minutes. A live presentation. Why for me should it be such a big deal?
I said to my wife that I have not problems delivering other people’s words (acting) and I have no trouble writing words for others to speak (speech writer, script writer), but what I loathe and struggle with is delivering my own words on any kind of platform.
Big fails on this count, emotionally at least would include:
My grandfather’s funeral
My groom’s wedding speech (I was pants at proposing too)
My father’s funeral
My mother’s funeral
…
Because it matters to me far too much when, and only when, the words that I give seem to emanate from my soul.
Let me blog, let me write letters, let me smoulder from my ears into the atmosphere with no expectation of feedback.
…
Both positive and negative feedback, especially if constructive, sends a shiver through my bones. Why is it that I crave confrontation, that I want to be mentally smacked around the head, then kicked up the arse and sent back into the fray to deliver some amazing show of ability?
…
We are all so, so, so very different, yet how we are taught, or expected to learn seems so very contrived, so set by context and numerous parameters.
I would prefer to be stuck in a cabin for a couple of weeks with an educator who hasn’t a clue about the subject, but is a natural educator, than someone who has ticked a collection of boxes in order to obtain their position. The natural educator can teach anything. The subject matter expert thinks they know everything. eLearning can be the subject matter expect – ‘IT’ (literally) thinks it knows it all.
So, connect me, and for me connect students and educators – worry only about the desire and ability to teach or transmit and manger those hungry to gain knowledge, and for students concentrate almost entirely on motivation. If they want to learn pores will open up in their skull so that you can pour in the information and they’ll never be satiated.
Leveraging mobile technologies and Web 2.0 tools to engage those with an interest in the centenary of the First World War in the stories of the people of the era using strategically placed Quick Response codes.
Jonathan Vernon at the Design Museum. J F Vernon (2011)
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Fig. 1. Lewes War Memorial, East Sussex, England 
The problem with war memorials is that those named on them risk becoming forgotten words on a list.
By using the Web we can find out who these people named on the war memorials were and where they lived; we can try to put a face to the name and a story to the name … and then we can share what we find.
There are more than 54,000 war memorials in Great Britain, most of these put up after the First World War. There is barely a community without one. Significant interest already exists, especially as we approach the centenary of the First World War making this initiative a potentially easy one to add to what is already taking place.
Fig. 2. British Legion Poppy featuring a Quick Response Code
In his 2011 book ‘The Digital Scholar’ Martin Weller shares the thoughts of Brian Lamb to describe those technologies that ‘lend themselves to … the networked and open approach’ as ‘fast, cheap and out of control’.
It was with this in mind, taking an interest in the centenary of the First World War and obsession with war memorials that I started to think about using Quick Response codes as a personalised entry point to the Web that anyone could generate in order to share a story about someone who served in the conflict, and to do so both online and on the street.
Quick Response codes are fast, they are free and their potential in learning has yet to be realised.
Worn in this way, featured in the center of your commemoration Poppy, you can share directly with others the person whose life you wish to remember, as well as directing people to the content online and inviting them to ‘adopt’ a name from a war memorial themselves. Though exploiting the Web, this is designed as a ‘blended’ experience that uses face-to-face, community and classroom experiences, as well as taking people outside to monuments, buildings, streets and battlefields.
Esponsorvik (2014 )
Fig. 3. Toyota Quick Response Code and Using a TV remote control Espensorvik. Flickr
‘QR codes’ are a product of the car manufacturing industry. Faced with increasingly complex components, Denso, a supplier to Toyota, came up with what is a 2 dimensional bar code in the 1990s (Denso, 2010). Made free of patent, and using free software anyone can now generate their own unique QR code. You can even print them out on standardised sticky label stationery.
Fig. 4. Google Search ‘Quick Response Codes Education Images’ (2014)
There are a myriad of uses for QR codes, from embedding information that is read and stored by the device to a quick link to rich content online. Barrett, 2012). The interest here is to use QR codes to link to learning resources, in mobile, or ‘m-learning’ contexts in particular and for users to both read and write such context.
I liken QR codes to using your phone as a remote control to click to a TV channel (Fig 3) . You point a smartphone, or tablet at the QR code to read it and go instantly, pretty much, to a web page.
Their use in education in the last decade has been limited. ‘Refereed (sic) papers are few’ (Gradel & Edson, 2012), but between these and other published reports, suggestions can be made regarding their strengths or weaknesses.
If QR codes are to be used successfully then champions need to be identified to take up the cause in schools, colleges and local associations. Whilst QR codes use the power of the Web to connect people to rich content, that they may create themselves, a good deal of thoughtful planning will be necessary ‘in the classroom’, not just explaining how to make use of QR codes, but also working them in, where appropriate to current learning schedules where QR codes used in this way will meet clear learning objectives. Support online could be provided in a short eLearning module.
What has been shown repeatedly, in museums and ‘out in the field’, is that simply ‘put out there’ the QR codes are ignored (Gradel & Edson, 2012). An innovation such as this requires considerable promotion and support. This makes the idea of wearing your own QR code on a Commemoration Poppy all the more appealing, as each person becomes an ambassador on the ground, for that nugget of information, especially if they are responsible for creating and hosting that content.
The opportunity exists, therefore, mentored and guided by educators, with support online, for schools, colleges and associations to engage people in bringing the stories of those named on our war memorials alive. In this way a deeper and more meaningful connection is made with the past and our relationship to it.
Copyright © 2010, The New York Times Company. Photography by Jim Wilson
Fig. 5. Handheld curator: IPod Touches and visitors at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (The New York Times)
According to the 2009 Horizon report (Horizon, 2009) the following would be of growing significance in teaching: mobile devices, clouding computing and the personal web. As an innovative approach, QR codes exploit all three of these developments.
Use of QR codes in learning however has had mixed results. Simply putting a QR code in front of a museum artifact, as they’ve done at the Museum of London and did at the Design Museum does not work (Vernon, 2013) – there is plenty already, there is little to attract or promote their use, not everyone has a smartphone or tablet of course and the technology is often not robust – ‘out of use’ signs are familiar. Outdoors QR codes added to signs in the South Downs National Park, for example, barely received a view a day during a three month trial and in some instances there was no signal at all (Kerry-Bedel 2011; South Downs, 2012).
Where QR codes have been successful is in targeted learning experiences in schools (Tucker, 2011; Gradel & Edson, 2012), where the affordances of the QR code have been exploited to form part of an engaging, constructive and collective learning experience. To be effective this initiative with war memorials requires galvanising people to take part in a joint exercise – easier with a class in school or college, less easy with the general public unless it is through a national, regional or local community association or interest group.
Examples where QR codes work include where participants are ‘equipped’, and where they can take an active role, such as in ‘on the spot’ surveys or quizzes, where they are prompted into cooperative learning and where timely ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ are given. (Awano, 2007: Information Standards Committee 2008; So 2008; Robinson, 2010; Hicks & Sinkinson, 2011; Ryerson Library & Archives, 2012.)
K Lepi (2012)Copyright 2013 © Edudemic All rights reserved
Fig 6 . A Simple Guide to Four Complex Learning Theories. Lepi (2012)
The theory behind the idea of using QR codes in a mobile and open way, is that in the digital age ‘connectivism’ is the ‘modus operandi’. In this diagram (Fig. 5) from Edudemic (Edudemic 2012) traditional and digital theories are concerned. All are relevant, each has its place, with the digital environment offering new and additional approaches to learning.
Whilst traditional learning methods have their role in schools, lecture halls and with mature students too, the complete learning package requires a level and quality of interaction and connectedness that can only be achieved on the Web and be effective where the body of learners is large and their approach is open and shared so that knowledge acquisition comes through the challenges and rewards of such intercourse.
Connections won’t occur however unless they are nurtured. By way of example, wishing to support and promote the combat memoirs of my late grandfather John Arthur Wilson MM (Vernon, 2012) a number of organisations will be approached up and down the UK in relation to his experiences in the Durham Light Infantry, Machine Gun Corps and Royal Air Force. The Web will both help identify, forge and maintain and develop first and subsequent connections in what would hopefully be, to be effective, a two way, shared, open and reciprocal relationship. The beauty of having content already online is that others can quickly view it and images, text and sound files, even video, adjusted to suit different audiences, or uses – and used freely where appropriate copyright permissions are given.
Fig 7 . Creators, commentators and readers – how use of the Web stacks up. Vernon (2010) after Nielsen (1999)
This degree of connectedness does not come naturally. Just as there can be no expectation that people will use a QR code because it is there – they won’t. With an innovative approach such as this promotion is crucial. Significant time, thought and effort need to be put into letting people know what is taking place and supporting their participation.
Only a fraction of a population are naturally inclined to generate content.
Jakob Nielsen (1999) would suggest that as few as 1% create content (Fig. 6). If content is therefore to be created by participants then very large numbers need to be made aware of the initiative. Online, openness helps when it is massive. Participation is improved where it is supported and moderated. Creators, commentators and readers each have a role to play.
The balance needs to be found between the qualities of a tool that is fast and cheap and where out of control means that something isn’t used in a way to benefit a formal learning requirement. On the one hand those who want to generate content can be encouraged to do so, while in a formal setting the intention would that everyone generates content of some form in order to receive feedback and assessment.
J F Vernon (2011)
Fig 8. The Newcastle War Memorial by Sir William Goscombe John RA
The potential weakness of using QR codes are the requirement for participants to have a suitable device, say a smartphone or tablet and the possible communication fees when connecting away from a free wi-fi source – which is likely to be the case at a war memorial (Gradel & Edson, 2012).
Reading from and using a smartphone or tablet may also present accessibility issues, from the need for dexterity and reading content that isn’t offered in alternative forms, such as text sizes and background or audio alternatives.
There are many examples where local councils feel a war memorial or building is so important that they have invested in information placards on site (Fig. 7). As commemoration of those who served and died in the First World War is of local and national interest funding is potentially available to help support initiatives such as these through the Heritage Lottery Fund, while organisations such as the Western Front Association have funding for branch activities too.
If permission is required for personalisation of a British Legion poppy using a QR code, then alternatives may be required, from working with other suitable groups such as the Imperial War Museum or Western Front Association to putting the QR code on a badge instead.
Where used in the field it is likely that a teacher would put out sets of QR coded markers in advance and collect them afterwards. Where a photograph in a town featuring before and after views permission may also be required if any kind of QR coded plaque or poster is to be put up. Other inventive ways to use a QR code would be to attach them to an obstacle course like trench experience where each code triggers elements of a task, sound effects or narrative in keeping with the setting. By way of example, at the ‘In Flanders Museum’ in Ypres a number of exhibits require the visitor to duck, crawl or crane their neck before supporting audio or lighting is triggered by a Near Field code in a bracelet.
Fig. 9. The memoir of a Machine Gunner and RFC Fighter Pilot. ‘That’s Nothing Compared to Passchendaele’
In his 2011 book ‘The Digital Scholar’ Martin Weller shares the ideas of Robert Capps (2009) who coined the term ‘the good enough revolution’ – in relation to creating and sharing content in an open culture. This precludes being prescriptive or from expecting perfection.
Whilst output on the First World War from the BBC, the Imperial War Museum or the Open University should understandably attain a certain professional standard, the kind of creation required of those research names on war memorials should take inspiration from that is more than just ‘good enough, from ‘pinning’ names from a war memorial to a home address, to ‘pinning’ submitted World War One photographs to Google maps over former battlefields, as well as numerous inventive YouTube videos and memoirs presented as blogs.
REFERENCE
Awano, Y (2007). Brief pictorial description of new mobile technologies used in cultural institutions in Japan. The Journal of Museum Education, 32(1), 17-25
Barrett, T (2012). 50 Interesting ways to use QR codes to support learning. (Last accessed 6th Feb 2014 https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AclS3lrlFkCIZGhuMnZjdjVfNzY1aHNkdzV4Y3I&hl=en_GB&authkey=COX05IsF
Denso (2010a). QR Code Standardization. (Retrieved 6th Feb 2014, from http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/qrstandard-e.html )
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Three reasons to revitalise, reinvent and revolutionise education
Ken Robinson: On education … and a fix for the huge drop-out rate in American Schools.
An excellent TED lecture. Worth taking notes. These are mine.
Offered by fellow student Marshall Anderson on the H818: The networked practitioner journey.
Worth listening to a couple of times (as I have just done).
Music to my ears, though I am not a teacher and have given too much of my career to the mechanised teaching he knocks … digital and interactive learning is and has been, surely, a product of the mechanised approach? But you don’t question the legitimacy of e-learning in an e-learning agency and suggest that a blended approach would be better.
They have one product on the shelf.
Which puts me at odds with the hand that has fed me for the last couple of decades. Next stop Finland? There is of course an answer here and that is recognising, please, that children, whilst deserving a better education system and approach, are NOT always at school … this curiosity and motivation can be developed at home if and where a family have parents with the time and inclination and where, ideally, they also have contact with grandparents and even cousins, and especially friends.
FIG.2. TED Lecture with Ken Robinson
Ken Robinson is right to celebrate the human side of the child, that:
- human beings are naturally different and diverse
- that ‘lighting the light of curiosity’ is key and that
- human life is inherently creative.
For the moment my interest is with my 17 year old daughter and 15 year old son … hoping and helping them to find and know what motivates them. It is this that will get them through school, a worthwhile goal beyond the barriers that exist in formal education – you still have to satisfy the standardised tests in order to get a place at university. Which is another schooling environment Ken Robinson doesn’t touch upon – you can give us human beings too much freedom. Parameters are stimulating, both the negative and positive ones.
A struggle makes something worthwhile.
It helps to create a common memory too. Fundamentally this reminds me that any learning and especially e-learning needs to be seen in context – an e-learning platform or project is never exclusive, it is always part of what else is going on in the participant’s life.
Blended, rather than pure e-learning is surely therefore the way forward?
Wise words put succinctly and with wit. Common sentiments that we struggle to realise. Privately educate? Home educate? Or move to Finland, Canada or Singapore?
On access to uncensored, openly authored information
Fig.1 Open Education and learning online – is it the flight path to intellectual emancipation?
We’re considering the nature of ‘openness’ in education as part of this new Master of Arts in Open and Distance Education (MAODE) module. This is increasingly about ease of access to information, all of it, uncensored.
Often for ease of access and to gain a qualification with a marketable value, information that is packaged in books, journals and lectures, though increasingly in ‘sexier’ interactive and multimedia forms with the related ‘scaffolding’ that comes with learning design and planning. The natural tendency is to consider the hectic last decade of the Internet at the expense of the history of openness in access to information and an education over the last century.
A hundred years ago all but the most privileged were in the dark: leaving school after an elementary education, with reliance on biased newspapers, magazines and part works.
Libraries, BBC radio and affordable paperbacks, secondary then tertiary education, cinema and TV have each had a role to play, as has the Open University.
Does enlightenment come with access?
What does it say of power of information and ideas where access is controlled, as in China? Does connectedness within openness lead to even greater coalescing of likeminds in cliques, reinforcing stereotypical biases rather than exposing them to valid alternative views? Nothing is straightforward when it comes to people – heterogeneous by design, homogenous by inclination.
Are we at the Napster moment in Higher Education?
Martin Bean Key Note – notes from the 2012 HEA conference.
If there is a transcript please let me know!
Martin Bean, the Vice Chancellor of the Open University (OU) makes the point that technology in education has everything to do with brain-ware, not software, that ‘we thought our job was done when we got people plugged in’ – (he comes from a commercial technology background).
Martin Bean calls for educators in tertiary education to ‘do the right thing by our student’
Technology is the enabler – it still requires great teaching.
He is at pains to point out that our approach to education is stuck in the past, that it is NOT about rote learning to regurgitate in an exam, but helping students make sense of the information available to them.
Martin Bean is HIGHLY critical of research students who rely on the top 15 hits in Google Search and Wikipedia.
His handle on the current student is insightful.
He makes the point that ‘they want to blend their digital lifestyles with their learning – rather they would say it is ‘just the way they live’.
‘We need to create a trusting environment where the student can challenge the information’. Martin Bean
There needs to be deconstruction and reconstruction of the pedagogy to make it more relevant
Martin Bean calls for the ‘sage on the stage to coach on the side’.
He makes the point that the OU’s National Surveys say that our students want to spend time with us.
This human component is crucial for success and retention.
Martin Bean asks, ‘what would Steve Jobs do?’
- People and process remain more important than the technology
- What the OU does: relevant, personalised, engaging learning.
How do we inspire people in those informal moments?
The OU are lucky and unique to be able to work with the BBC on productions like the Frozen Planet …
- YouTube as an open education repository
- iTunes – 1:33 come in to find out more
- Apple authoring tools
The value and opportunity of mobile
- Akash – a tablet from India running on Android for under £50, so cheaper to give students one of these and access to the Internet than buy academic books.
- 400 eBooks. e.g. Schubert’s poems, listening to music, seeing the manuscript, reading annotations then looking at the original handwritten manuscript …
How do we as educators do what we do so well?
- MOOCs – engagement of hundreds of thousands, if not millions in meaningful ways.
- More than anything esle technology creates access
We are at the Napster moment in Higher Education
See the Hewlett Foundation website for the scale of OERs. 12,000 hours of OU Open Learn for example.
Nurturing powerful communities of learning
In his final remarks Martin Beans suggests
- Breaking the content down into shorter milestones
- And the need for qualifications with market currency
Mind Bursts 