Archive for the ‘Education politics’ Category

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‘Doubt’ movie trailer remix by meg

October 4, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the movie ‘Doubt,’ starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann. The IMDB summary for the film reads,

“Set in 1964, Doubt centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him of abusing a black student. He denies the charges, and much of the play’s quick-fire dialogue tackles themes of religion, morality, and authority.”

Great film, a proper morality play. What I also loved about it was the way it commented on new technologies and the changing times. So I thought I’d do a remix along the lines of a movie trailer, as seems to be all the rage (check out Scary Mary Poppins … it’s a cack!). Here’s the radio edit … I made a dance mix too, but I prefer the shorter version, myself :) . Hope you like it. I think it’s kinda fun!

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Posted in Digital literacy, Education politics, Opinion, Technology | 3 Comments »

Opinion: The merit of study

October 23, 2008

This morning, I attended (and briefly presented at) the start of the Australian National University’s ‘Festival of Teaching.’ The focus of the two-day gathering is explained in the program’s descriptive title: “Linking research and teaching to benefit student learning.”

OK, so the language is typical of inelegant edubabble everywhere, but, that aside, I want to take issue with how the trendy focus on ‘research-led teaching’ and ‘research-based learning’ (the latter of which includes the equally graceless terms ‘inquiry-based learning,’ ‘case-based learning,’ and ‘problem-based learning’) shifts our attention away from the merit of study. Plain, old-fashioned, sit-on-your-backside-and-attend-to-a-topic … study.

Of course, I understand why there’s all this hoo-ha about ‘research-led teaching’ — it’s no doubt a reaction to so-called ‘transmission teaching’ or the ‘banking concept’ of teaching, as Freire would have it. And I certainly understand and commend the pedagogical worth of using research (on this meaning, the collection, collation, interpretation and presentation of data) as a basis for teaching in the university setting. But I fear that, just as in the past we surely over-valued the ‘sit-down, shut up, and learn’ philosophy of education, we may now begin to over-value the role of student ‘research’ in university learning at the undergraduate level.*

For there is a lot to be said for apprehending study on its own terms and not just as a part of a broader research process. I know that, for myself, I cherish the few moments I get in my week to sit down and apply my mind to the close examination of a subject. Quiet study — study for its own sake, meaning for the sake of intellectual cultivation and enrichment — allows room for contemplation and consideration, reflection and reverie. In other words, study is more than an ancilliary of research. We need to slow down the train hurtling down the research-teaching and -learning track and gain a correct balance in our intelligent endeavours.

In my previous post, I called for a properly holistic appreciation of knowing. Here, I would like to suggest that we embrace a similarly holistic approach to the educational enterprise as it is undertaken within the Academy.

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*Notice my deft qualification there? ;)

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Opinion: Who’s making what money?

September 26, 2008

Many teachers want to know how cool, free, online software services such as (Wetpaint, WordPress, Wikispaces, Netvibes, SlideShare, Clipmarks, whatever) make their money. ‘Contextual advertising’ is normally the answer.

But before we get that leg swung too far over the moral high horse, consider this: the company supplying the Learning Management System (LMS) that your institution uses is also likely to be making a nice quid — except that in this context, many LMS companies are making money explicitly out of education, rather than out of advertising.

Some LMSs, such as Moodle and Sakai, are free and open-source (and we approve of that ;) ), but others (Black$Board, Web$CT, My$Classes) are asking budget-bedevilled schools, unis, etc., to fork over for what is, in fact, some pretty poor product. Some of these wretched companies have even used money earned from education to sue smaller competitors!

So, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because something is supplied by your institution that it automatically holds the moral high ground over the free stuff. There’s more to it than that.

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Posted in EduBusiness, Education politics, LMSs, Opinion | Leave a Comment »

Opinion: Barriers to teaching online

July 9, 2008

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Me mates at education.au have released a report on Educators and ICT usage and one of the most interesting things it points to are the barriers that educators report to thier teaching and learning with online technology (p. 33). Here are the main hindrances they’ve identified, plus my reasons for why all of these, excepting the final barrier, should not be barriers at all:

  • 41%: Poor infrastructure, bandwidth, equipment reliablity, accessiblity of logins, permissions. Discounting the bandwith issue, the ‘poor infrastructure’ barrier can be largely blamed on unwieldy and user-unfriendly Learning Management Systems (BlackBoard, MyClasses, WebCT …) that school and some university administrations insist teachers use. Logins, permissions, reliablity, blah blah blah, aren’t an issue with most online applications that can be turned to an educational use.
  • 40%: Blocking/filtering of internet content. See above, with an especial emphasis on ‘administration’ — namely, the reluctance and/or unimaginativeness on the part of ‘admin’ to come up with policies and guidelines that manage risk.
  • 21%: Limited access to computers or internet connection. Will Ruddy’s digital education revolution sort this one out? There’s no excuse for its not doing so.
  • 20%: Limited confidence or expertise in the use of compter technologies. See above and above and above. Teachers need PD in this stuff and it needs to be paid for, but, really, the main reason they’re spooked is that they’ve only ever had experience with dead-awful LMSs and they subsequently don’t know how easy the Web could be if only they were allowed to use it.
  • 12%: Lack of relevant resources on on the internet. You could say that there’s not much you can do about this one … except why not create such resources yourself? :)

What a dire set of results! But as a South Aussie, and as someone who passionately believes in the value education, not firewalls, I’m pleased to say that South Australian educators were most likely to name blocking of internet content as a barrier to teaching and learning online, at a respectable 67%.

Come on, education leaders! Start being a bit creative and pro-active on these issues! Decide where your priorities need to be with online teaching and learning and develop policies to manage risk. Employ people who know this stuff from an educational point of view and who can teach the teachers and who can defreakify things for them. Get yourself educated on online technologies and their use in education. Students, parents and teachers are relying on you to be across the issues and to start finding solutions that will work in the ‘real world’ of the Web.

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Posted in Education politics, Learning online, Opinion | Leave a Comment »

EdCom: Commercialisation and the university

July 2, 2008

PodulesLogoLawyer Priya Subramaniam, who also tutors in Law at Flinders University, is my guest on EdCom this month. In this episode, Priya describes her experiences as both a student and a teacher, and identifies some of the changes that she’s noticed over the past 15 years or so in the Academy. Priya also discusses her thoughts on the increasing pressures that are placed on academics to meet bureaucratic — rather than intellectual — targets, and tells us why she’s chosen a career in law over a career in the Academy.

For more information, keep listening to EdCom and visit www.meganpoore.com.

File size: 14.9 MB
Running time: 18.40

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Posted in EdCom, Education politics, Podcasts and podcasting | Leave a Comment »

Target: Getting some perspective on schools’ cyberfears

April 28, 2008

Target ImageIn the wake of the ‘Order for Closure’ fiasco that was visited upon Al Upton’s poor Mini-Legends, I’ve been doing some reading of the cybersafety research, trying to get some perspective on schools’ and parents’ cyberfears. The Creating and Connecting (pdf) report, put out in 2007 by the National School Boards Association in the US, makes several significant points in relation to students, social networking, and school responses:

  • School policies and fears are out of whack with students’ and parents’ experiences of problems such as cyberbullying, cyberstalking and unwelcome encounters. Only a minority of students reported having had any kind of negative experience with social networking the previous three months, and even fewer parents reported that their children had had such experiences over the previous six months (p. 5)
  • The problems encountered by young people online were the same as those encountered in any other media or in everyday life, namely inappropriate pictures and language (p. 5-6). Personally directed incidents were relatively rare, although of serious concern (p. 6).
  • The majority of students are engaging in safe online behaviour, says the research (p. 6). This is also backed up by the Pew Internet Project’s Digital Footprints report, which shows that younger users of online sites are more to restrict access to their profiles and to withhold ‘hard’ information about themselves than are older users (pp. 21-22).
  • In a pronounced example of schools’ misunderstanding of young people’s online behaviour and their attendant cybersafety awareness, the report demonstrates that fully 52% of school district leaders believed that “students providing personal information online has been a ‘significant problem’ in their schools”; and yet only 3% of students claimed to have ever handed over to strangers any personal information, including things such as their email address, IM details or chat name (p. 6).

Reports such as this one show that the same ‘stranger danger’ messages that we’ve always used with our kids also work online, and that children haven’t all of a sudden lost their ability to identify dodgy types, just because things are on the Web these days. Policies that prevent student access to the internet are reactive, arbitrary, unimaginative, and primarily about legal bottom-covering, rather than the realities of online life. Education is the key, and it seems to be working amongst parents and their children. Schools need to learn from that.

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Posted in Being social, Education politics, Net Gen, Target | Leave a Comment »

Opinion: Education must claim its market share

March 28, 2008

Education is notorious for being slow in its business reponses. We buy a system (e.g., Black$Board or My$Classes) and stick with it foreverrrrr. Same with infrastructure. When was the last time you saw a truly innovative teaching space instead of one with rows of chairs and desks? (Ngunnawal Primary School’s Redwood Teaching Unit is my answer … what’s yours?)

Some of this can be put down to budgeting issues and a lack of funding in general. But not all of it. Perhaps not even most of it. Indeed, often let slide are the poor business and product decisions made by educational administrators and management, who (perhaps through their not being on-the-ground teachers themselves), lack the vision required to make the creative, anticipatory, adventurous decisions that teachers need them to make. Add to this the reconciled acceptance of second-best on the part of wearied educational leaders and we have fine mix, conveniently self-adjusted for exploitation by business. In other words, business has come to rely upon our own ordinariness.

So, why not claim our market share? Why can’t we start demanding quality products and products that give us what we want? And why can’t we demand that they be free? In fact, it’s the ‘free’ bit that I’m really talking about here … The market capacity of education is huge, and yet are we so ‘umble as to not think that we can’t start demanding what we want — for free?

Why can’t we ditch expensive, unweildy learning mangement systems such as Black$Board and go for the free stuff? Is it because the free stuff won’t let me link in with my student database? Then demand that it can. Is it because the free stuff might have privacy and security issues? Then get the assurances you need.

We like to think of education as being ‘different’ or ‘singular’ and, of course, we are in the sense that what we do is for The Greater Good. But when it comes to business, we need plain, old, hum-drum canniness — nothing special, nothing exceptional. Young people demand stuff for free out of their web-based services all the time — and they get it, too. We need to start being a bit smarter in education about how we get what we want.

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Opinion: Mini Legends madness

March 18, 2008

Al Upton has become a victim of his own classroom blogging success. Al’s been using blogging for some time as a major educational tool with his ‘Mini Legends’ year 3 class. Now, he’s been ordered to close the Mini Legends site down: apparently, one parent became concerned when his child’s photo appeared on the site — this is despite Al’s gaining parental permission slips. As Kerry Johnson says in a blog post about the Mini Legends’ closure, Al has broken no laws.

To read people’s comments on the whole shameful situation, visit Al’s blog.

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Posted in Blogs and blogging, Education politics, Opinion | Leave a Comment »

Opinion: Black$Board in court

March 15, 2008

I can’t believe that educational institutions happily do business with companies like this! Black$Board is using school and higher ed $$$$$$$$$ to fund legal actions against smaller companies such as Desire2Learn (D2L).

Black$Board has managed to patent a system that allows individual users to log-in with a single procedure to access multiple courses. What a joke! I can’t believe they’ve managed to patent that! I can access my multiple blogs and wikis through single log-in procedures! WetPaint and WordPress watch out! Black$Board might be taking you to court soon because they’ve just succeeded in arguing that D2L has infringed Black$Board’s patent rights.

Our educational leadership signs contracts with mobs like Black$Board, and then spruiks how being involved with them is much, much better than using something free and more agile as an LMS (such as a wiki or blog). These LMS companies (including D$2L) are just rorting already-underfunded educational institutions out of money that could be going to professional development or improved infrastructure. Black$Board is just in it for the money, don’t kid yourself. In that sense, they are no different from any other internet company — except that their product is waaaaaaay poorer than most, they have hoodwinked educators into believing it’s all about the learnin’ (when it’s not — it’s all about the $$$$$$$$), and they have a monopoly over the market. It’s a disgrace.

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Opinion: Web Two Wowsers

March 14, 2008

In the course of my work as an online education designer and as an educational consultant, I come up against some Pretty Daft Arguments as to why teachers and managers shouldn’t use free, online applications, such as wikis or blogs, in our classes and for our work practices. Those making the Pretty Daft Arguments are what I would call ‘Web Two Wowsers’ — people who want to spoil it all for the rest of us: they are Web One people stuck in a fast-changing world, and they haven’t done any research or investigation into (let alone thinking about) how the new systems work. Thus, you’d think it would be safe to say that their opinions are un- and ill-informed and thus really should carry no weight in decision-making.

Sadly, though, they do. In fact, these people seem to make up a large chunk of the leadership that is making decisions about what’s best for the rest of us. Rarely are they current teachers with on-the-ground, day-to-day experience of 1) how effective wikis and blogs can be as learning and management tools, and 2) how crappy LMSs such as MyClasses and BlackBoard are to work with in the classroom.

So, for your own edification and delight, here are some of the real doozies I’ve heard recently from Web Two Wowsers, and my responses to them:

  • “Free, online services are not secure”. Yes, they are. Do your research.
  • “Free, online services are not private”. Yes, they can be. Do your research.
  • “Free, online services are not reliable; their infrastructure might go down.” Yes, and so might Telstra’s, which is probably where your LMS is hosted. But how often does this happen with a reputable company? It is usually not the software company that owns the infrastructure. It is the telco. Same: your educational institution does not own the infrastructure, it is owned by the telco. The control you think you have over the infrastructure is an illusion — hosting something on your own site just makes you feel better, is all.
  • “They might sell your info to a Third Party.” Meh. Maybe. But that’s why you need to check out the Terms of Service when you register and you need to go with a company with a reputation. I’m not taking my car to Dodgy Brothers when it needs a tune-up. I’m taking it to Ultra-Tune or to an operator I trust. The Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of companies such as WordPress and WetPaint state unequivocally that they will disclose your info only to those who need it in order to work on the system (such as employees and contractors, who must sign non-disclosure agreements, anyway) and only if the law requires it. Do your research.
  • “This is changing the work practices of the entire organisation. You need permission from Those Up On High to do that”. (Frankly, I don’t know where in Hades this one came from, but I have heard it …) Two answers: 1) No it’s not changing the work practices of the entire organisation — just this class or project group. We want to work more efficiently and produce better-quality learning. 2) Why do we need permission to work better? The answer is ‘because Those Up On High signed a contract with this particular LMS company — a company that is making big bucks out of rorting already under-funded educational institutions by supplying poor-quality, ill-conceived, difficult-to-use products’. Mobs like WordPress, WetPaint, Google, WikiSpaces aren’t rorting the education system. You can at least say that much for them.
  • “I know nothing about this company”. So learn. You might find that you like their business model, ethics and mission. You might find that they have a published commitment to using your data in an ethical way — does your mechanic? WordPress.org, for example, promises to adhere by Attention Trust principles (don’t know what that means? Then learn …). Other mobs such as MyMindshare, and Wesabe, are up-front about their commitment to your rights to your information, and Open Social Web is working on A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. Do your research.
  • “They might go bust.” If the product is poor, then so they should go bust. If the product is good, then they won’t. The reason that companies such as WetPaint, WordPress, WikiSpaces, Google, Yahoo! etc., etc. have survived is because they care about their reputations and they know that if they make poor products, then their customers will be out of there like a shot. I ain’t sticking with a mechanic who can’t set the gap properly on me points. I’m going elsewhere. Web Two Wowsers seem to think that business on the Web is somehow ephemeral and that there is no such thing as reputation. Trust and reputation are the same concepts, regardless of where they occur.
  • “This company might get bought out by someone else … like … like … like Google!” Well, BlackBoard bought WebCT, didn’t it? Besides, if Google buys something, then it’s gotta be good. Who owns Arnott’s these days? Does it stop you from eating Scotch Finger Biscuits? Web Two Wowsers seem to think that the online world somehow is different from the ‘real’ world — that business models and practices that characterise the ‘real’ world suddenly change online. In fact, it seems to me that Web Two Wowsers don’t really have much idea about how business works at all.

So, leaders, get educated. Inform yourselves about how these companies and their tools work. And then think of creative solutions (as a TAFE college in WA did) as to how to integrate these things into your institutional framework. Once you have investigated these things properly, you will be in a position to make intelligent and legitimate calls about how the technology can and should be used in your workplace.

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Posted in Education politics, LMSs, Opinion, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

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