www.theBulldogSolution.com

I’m reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the moment. It’s a bit of a classic, so I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to it.

Last night, I came across the following passage. It must be quite famous as I’ve stumbled across it before:

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

This made me think about Purpos/ed. Andy and I are often asked when we’re going to produce a manifesto, or what the ‘next level’ is. Well, that’s the kind of thinking that got us here in the first place.

Pirsig reminds us that even things that seem purely physical (such as steel) are nevertheless human constructs. Despite seeming permanent and ‘natural’ steel is not a substance that exists in nature. It’s the product of human imagination.

Likewise, there is no ‘state of nature’ for education systems. No natural way that we should organise learning.

We’d do well to remember that sometimes.

On Thursday, Mark Clarkson wrote a blog post that started off like this:

I seriously considered leaving education today. And if I had a viable exit strategy I might have taken it further.

Note the end of that sentence: a young, talented teacher with so much to offer the world feels like he has no ‘viable exit strategy’. There are thousands of teachers up and down the country feeling the same thing.

I should know. A few years ago I was one of them.

You should go and read Mark’s post. If you’re currently a classroom teacher you’ll be nodding your head at the bullet point after bullet point of bureaucratic, administrative nonsense he (and most other teachers) put up with. And if you’re not a teacher, you’ll be shocked.

On top of the ridiculous workload teachers like Mark experience each year, he notes that the benefits aren’t exactly stellar:

At the same time I am told that I will have to work for another 36 years. That I will receive less pension than I was promised… That tests are too easy. That my subject is not good enough. That I need to solve gaps in parenting. That I should receive performance related pay. That teachers are paid too much. That public sector workers in the north are paid too much. That teachers ‘cheat’ when the watchmen come. And today I’m told that ‘teachers don’t know what stress is‘.

I’ve been out of the classroom for just over two years now. And already my wife, a Primary school teacher, has to remind me what it’s like. I consider setting off together for work five minutes late a minor inconvenience. But for her, and many teachers, it can make or break their day. I’m fairly sure teachers know what stress is.

Although I would say this, I think we need a review of what we’re doing when it comes to schools. We can’t keep cannibalising the goodwill of people in an underpaid, overworked, increasingly-attacked profession. I think we need a public debate about the purpose(s) of education.

I’ll give the last word to Mark. He echoes something I used to say repeatedly – until I decided enough was enough:

I’m not leaving teaching today, because there are still too many moments that I enjoy.

…

TEACHING is a great activity. Teaching, at the minute, doesn’t always feel like a great job.

 Image CC BY-NC paulbence

I’m co-kickstarter (with Andy Stewart) of an organisation called Purpos/ed. We’re trying to provoke and sustain public debate around the question What’s the purpose of education?

We’ve had a number of campaigns (and a conference) since we started in February 2011, including a very successful one last year where people contributed 500 words on what they believe to be the purpose(s) of education.

I’m delighted to draw your attention to #500words Take 2, running throughout May 2012. You can see the schedule here: http://bit.ly/purposedu500

If you’d like to follow what’s going on, why not subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter (or the hashtag #purposedu), or add us on Google+ or Facebook?

(PS You’re very welcome to send us an ‘unofficial’ contribution – email us at countmein@purposed.org.uk with the link!)

I was delighted to be asked to participate in a DML Central Connected Learning Google+ hangout about Open Badges yesterday. The recording should be embedded above, but if not try clicking here.

The session featured a presentation by Erin Knight, Senior Director of Learning at the Mozilla Foundation, and was facilitated by Howard Rheingold.

If you like this, you’ll also be interested in the webinar Erin and her colleague Michelle Levesque ran for the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme last Friday. In that session, they discussed Mozilla’s work around web literacies.

Check that webinar out here, along with Erin’s write-up.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m dipping into P2PU’s School of Webcraft. I actually know how to do most of the stuff so far asked of me in the tasks, but I really value four things involved in the process.

1. The social element (you don’t seem to get this at, for example, Codecademy)
2. Filling in gaps in my knowledge (I didn’t learn any of this sequentially; sometimes I’m missing some building blocks)
3. Reviewing other people’s work (some people obviously do the bare minimum, others are super-dedicated)
4. The opportunity to become a mentor (once you’ve learned something, there’s the opportunity to then teach it)

An example of the second item on my list is the P2PU task Some Tags for You to Meet. I learned about the <time> and the <q> HTML tags, the former being used to provide a machine-readable way of parsing the start of, for example, an event. The latter is used for short quotations that are included within a paragraph of text. Handy.

There’s plenty more of these on the Mozilla Developer Network but, for the time being that’s enough.

If you’re an educator you should be all over P2PU like a rash. Seriously.

Lisa Phillips is a Masters student in the Learning & Technology programme at the University of Oxford Department of Education. She got in touch with me yesterday asking for some help.

Busy with the scoping part of her MSc, Lisa is looking for ‘rebellious’ approaches to educational technology – “approaches that challenge, subvert or transform educational norms.” She wants to understand how these approaches came about and what prompted/enabled individuals to think ‘outside the box’.

I’m really interested in this.

Instead of just give her my response and limited expertise, I thought I’d open it out to my readership. Here’s how you can help:.

1. Read the following:

Many different groups, such as policy makers, educationalists, teachers, and the business sphere, generate ideas about how to incorporate technology into education. Yet, a critical look at the field would note that the majority of ideas in educational technology exist within a set “box” of education norms, replicating class-based, teacher-led, subject-specific delivery norms in the current education system. Therefore, approaches to integrating technology tend to reflect and reinforce the education structure that already exists. This dissertation will look at approaches to using educational technologies that have the potential to challenge, subvert or transform some aspects of school practice; what I choose to call, for the purposes of this study, “rebellious” approaches. An abstract is attached.

2. Answer the questions in the Google Form below. (not showing? click here)

Thanks for your contribution!

Image CC BY-NC-SA Leonard John Matthews

Over the weekend I had a discussion with Dave Cormier in the comments section of my DMLcentral post Gaining Some Perspective on Badges for Lifelong Learning. I wanted to capture it here and add a couple of additional comments.

Dave seems to have taken issue with the ‘over-simplification’ of badges. I think he’s arguing that (informal?) education is too complex a problem for badges to be the solution.

The more I think about it, the more I think we were talking at cross-purposes. He was (again, I think) talking about explaining complexity whereas I was talking about solutions towards solving complex problems. I may be wrong.

Additionally, I have read precisely zero articles or books on complexity and chaos theory. Dave probably has read lots.

I’d love to know what you make of it.

Dave:

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the foil. Everything i see here, however nicely argue and layer out, still leads to the same thing. Someone has to agree on what the targets are.

In the ‘automatic/skill’ sections, they are only automatic in time, at some point, someone had to create an artifice that separates the world into things that ‘can be reached’

In the application/Community section, the rewards are going to be as much about sociality and power than they will be about ‘recognition’. The problem with the badge in this case, is that it divorces the ‘reward’ from the context of power and sociality.

I don’t see how any of your practical applications allow us to apply badges to complexity. Given this… we move things towards simple knowledge. This is not the direction I”m hoping to go in… how about you? Do you see a way that badges can support complexity?

Doug:

Hi Dave, thanks for the comment.

In response:

1. For something to be credentialised there has to be a ‘thing’ to be credentialised. That can be a target set by anyone – but yes, there needs to be a target. Otherwise there’d be no point in the credential, right?

2. I find the ‘X will be Y’ part of your position problematic. As I’ve argued above, I see badges as an emergent ecosystem. I agree there’s going to be issues around power and control. But then, *every* system has those issues. Don’t they?

3. I believe that the ‘answer’ (if there is one) to complexity is simplicity. It’s something tangential to badges, as far as I see them, but to assume that complex problems require complex answers needs a bit more explanation/evidence to my mind.

I’d love to discuss this synchronously sometime.

Dave:

Hey Doug,

1. Credentialing requires a thing to be credentialised. Maybe not… at least not rings in terms of small pieces of knowing. I’m not purposefully trying to split hairs here, but I feel comfortable with someone who knows how to do something saying “that person over there can now do this thing”. That’s how mentorship and apprenticeship tends to work. We went down the DACUM road, for instance, to try and break that into pieces that could be ‘things to be credentials’. Many colleges have moved away from this because it kinda misses the point of knowing things. I see badges as a potential return to the DACUM view of the world.

2. Badges may or may not be part of an ‘emerging ecosystem’ whatever that might mean, but no, not every system has the same issue. Some systems try to leave things IN their context so they can be understood as part of a whole. Others are designed to REMOVE them from context. I think that’s pretty different.

3. I don’t know what “simplicity is the answer to complexity” could possibly mean… so i’m assuming we don’t mean the same thing when we say complexity. If answering the question “how do I raise my child to be a good person” (in my mind, a very important, and obviously complex question) has a simple answer I’d love to hear it.

I imagine the ‘parenting badges’ that would be the response to that, and I imagine them forcing ‘parenting types’ and ‘parenting stages’ and ‘child types’ and ‘child stages’ on the world.

Doug:

Hi Dave,

1. So the person over there who can now do this thing gets the Dave Cormier seal of approval. That may or may not be a badge. I don’t know.

2. I’m unsure of your point here – especially given that there’s an evidence layer to badges? Isn’t that the context right there?

3. I’m guessing you haven’t got a parenting manual. Certainly my two didn’t come with one. So I’m approaching them with love. A simple answer to complex behaviours. Working OK so far…

I’m definitely *not* of the opinion that badges are the answer to everything. Nor do I believe that badges should replace the existing qualifications/credentials/awards we’ve got. What it *does* provide, however, is an alternative that we all get to shape.

And I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.

Dave:

Well… a little rhetorical bantering and heart string tugging.

On twitter… you say “i’m falling into the either or camp”

Whether i am or not is not relevant to the discussion here. It’s a nice rhetorical move, but it doesn’t change the discussion. I have concerns about badges and the oversimplification of knowledge and attainment particularly as it decontextualizes power, social-ness and privilege.

1. Yes. a dave cormier seal of approval (assuming a community thought i knew anything) would be just fine. I don’t think that’s ‘badge’ as you have defined it here. Badge, as I understand your interpretation, is an ‘agreed upon standard’ by some standard agreeing upon group.

2. No. an ‘evidence layer’ is not what i mean by context. Context is the space in which the learning/knowledge/thingy was negotiated. Not the ‘things that the standards group decided was evidence’.

3. Love is a very nice sentiment… but all it means is that i have to move to a different example. How about the world energy issues or something else. Do you comune with love to decide whether it makes sense for you child to have a cupcake… or do you think about the balance between their wanting it and enjoying it and the sugar it contains.

I have in no way suggested that they aren’t an interesting option we should try. You have read that on to me. I have said that in your commentary you haven’t addressed complexity. You have responded by saying ‘complexity doesn’t exist, your jus tasking the question wrong’.

If that is your position… cool. But is it really? Do you really think the world is a simple place where simple answers to questions like poverty, overpopulation, education i the third world will actually work?

I got asked recently “how do we go about training 500 million new people in the next 9 years?’ Complex problem. Simple solution?

Doug:

Hmmm… this is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid. :-/

“I have concerns about badges and the oversimplification of knowledge and attainment particularly as it decontextualizes power, social-ness and privilege.”

If you say that ‘X means Y’ and I disagree, then we’re falling into opposing camps. Neither of us can point to any evidence. Because there isn’t any. Yet.

“I have said that in your commentary you haven’t addressed complexity. You have responded by saying ‘complexity doesn’t exist, your jus tasking the question wrong’.”

Where/when did I say ‘complexity doesn’t exist’? I’m fairly sure I said that the way to approach complex problems is to try to apply simple solutions. That’s vastly different.

And the answer to your question about training 500 million people in the next 9 years? One person at a time. Not as facetious as it sounds.

Dave:

doug.

Re: x means y. There is always and never evidence. I have described how i think it moves towards the simplification of knowledge. Badges are not exactly ‘new’ in concept just because they’ve been branded differently.

re: complexity – if you are saying that ‘there are simple answers’ then we aren’t using the word ‘complexity’ the same way. If you say ‘apply simple solutions’ you are changing the meaning of complexity. Something that is complex, like a weather pattern, doesn’t have a simple explanation. If you say it does, we’re having two separate conversations.

Saying it has a ‘simple solution’ is saying it is not ‘complexity’.

If it’s not facetious, i don’t know what it is. 1 at a time isn’t not a scaling solution for India’s education problem.

Doug:

I’m not quite sure how we got from alternative forms of credentialing to weather patterns, but hey.

You’ve subtlely shifted from ‘solving problems’ to ‘explaining them’. They’re two different beasts. I can go to umbrellatoday.com to solve my immediate problem of whether to take an umbrella to work with me or not. I don’t need to explain how weather systems work to do so. It’s a simple solution to a (potentially) complex problem.

I don’t think India’s education problem has much, if anything, to do with badges directly. If you’re saying that it’s an example of a complex problem then, yes, I’d say that you/they/whoever are looking at it in the wrong way.

I’m out. Perhaps we could follow this up with blog posts?

Have YOU got any comments on our discussion? I’d love to hear them!

Image CC BY-NC-SA Dunechaser

PS The exchange inspired Terry Wassall to write this post.

My latest post about Open Badges has gone live at DMLcentral. In it, I argue that we don’t need to take entrenched positions towards what is, after all, an emergent ecosystem. I also give an example of badges in practice through Chicago’s Digital Youth Network.

Click here to view the post.

A couple of weeks ago I presented at TEDx Warwick. The video is now available:

I’d love your feedback on this.

A couple of days ago I noticed #beyondthetextbook emerging on Twitter. It turns out that this hashtag related to an gathering sponsored by Discovery Education in Washington D.C.

My (remote, somewhat helicopter-like) contribution, was pretty much summed up by the following:

After reading Audrey Watters’ post about the gathering (as well as those by others), I’d like to expand up on that and highlight some thoughts from others with whom I’m in agreement.

I want us to weigh classroom practices, power, authority, politics, publishing, assessment, expertise, attribution, and the culture(s) of the education system. I would argue that the textbook in its current form — and frankly in almost all of the digital versions we’re also starting to see now — is tightly woven into that very fabric, and once we tug hard enough at the “textbook” thread, things come undone.

(Audrey Watters)

The textbook is easy to talk about. It’s a physical thing that people have known as students and, for some, as educators. The trouble is that, just as with any technology, it’s difficult to separate the thing from the practices that surround the thing.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with textbooks – especially if you define them as Bud Hunt does as “A collection of information organized around thoughtful principles intended to provide support to instruction.” I’m not so keen on the word ‘instruction’ (I’d substitute ‘learning’) but like his basis in ‘thoughtful principles’.

One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of badges for lifelong learning is that assessment is broken. I don’t mean ‘broken’ in the sense that a bit of a repair job would fix. I mean structurally unsound and falling apart. Liable to collapse at any moment. That kind of broken.

It’s a problem I felt as a classroom teacher. It’s an issue I had to deal with as a senior manager. It’s evident in my sector-wide role in Higher Education. The hoops through which we’re asking people to jump not only don’t mean anything any more, but they don’t necessarily lead anywhere.

To me, that constitutes a crisis of relevance. So when we’ve got textbooks solely focused on providing content in bite-sized chunks in order to allow people to pass summative tests, then we’ve got a problem. A huge problem.

But let’s be clear: the problem is to do with the high-stakes assessment. It’s akin to the current attacks on the efficacy of teachers. The problem isn’t with (most) teachers, it’s with what you’re asking them to do. Likewise, with textbooks, it’s not the collecting of information in one place – it’s what people are expected to do with that information.

I’ve seen many state their belief that the best kind of textbook is the blank page. By that, they mean that textbooks should be co-constructed. I certainly can’t argue with that, but we must always be careful that we don’t substitute one form of top-down structure with another.

Back in 2006 I wrote a couple of posts on my old teaching blog. One covered the idea of teachers as lifeguards, and other focused on the teacher as DJ. In the former I talk about the importance of teachers ‘knowing the waters’ so that they can allow students to explore the waters, growing in confidence (but be there when things go wrong). In the latter I discuss the similarities between teachers and DJs around ‘tempo’ and ‘playlists’.

Both the lifeguard and DJ analogies work with textbooks, I think. The difficulties are always going to be around time and competency. It’s all very well for those new to the profession, willing to burn the candle at both ends to remix the curriculum and create their own textbooks to move #beyondthetextbook. But that’s a recipe for burnout.

As usual, I’ve more questions than answers, but if I have one contribution to the #beyondthetextbook debate it’s that our current use of textbooks is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. It’s difficult to debate nuanced things online, and even more so via Twitter.

I think we need a renaissance in blogging – and the kind of blogging where we reference other people’s work. If we’re going to debate problems in education, let’s do so at length, with some nuance, and in a considered way.

Thanks for reading this far. I’d love to read any comments you have below!

Every now and again I look at the Google Analytics profile of this blog. I’m usually pretty surprised by what I find.

I write predominantly about education, technology and productivity. With a little bit of other random stuff thrown in. So guess which blog posts have been consistently in my top twenty most accessed?

These ones:

• Daniel Goleman on Leadership and Emotional Intelligence (2009)
• 5 ways to make ‘textbook lessons’ more interesting (2008)
• Learning objectives: the basics (2009)
• Everything that’s wrong with educational management, summed up in 3 Dilbert cartoons. (2009)
• Interesting Ways to Use Netbooks in the Classroom (2008)
• What is a VLE? (2008)
• Flow and the Autotelic Classroom (2009)
• How E-Learning can contribute to raising achievement (2009)

Notice that these were all written in 2008 or 2009, a time when I was first E-Learning Staff Tutor at at school in Doncaster, and then Director of E-Learning at an Academy in the North East.

So it turns out that people like practical, research-based stuff they can apply immediately. My inaugural reader survey told a similar story. Perhaps I need to re-focus my efforts. Which is difficult when I’m an office-based researcher…

One of the main prompts for my getting started with evangelising Open Badges last year was stumbling across P2PU’s School of Webcraft pilot. It was rough around the edges, but the idea behind it was awesome: peer recognition of skills that can quickly go out of date.

I was delighted, therefore, to discover that not only has the Open Badges website been updated, but so has the School of Webcraft. It’s now possible to earn badges on both sites.

This post is actually part of Webmaking 101.

Why not join me on a quest to find out more about how the Web works?

At TEDx Warwick last Saturday I was first up, meaning I could sit back, relax and listen properly to the other speakers. Whilst I could write several posts about floating islands, medical implants and sustainability, I want to focus on just one of them.

John Kay, author of Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly, gave what I considered to be a fascinating talk. His book has been on my Amazon wishlist almost since it came out and I’ve now got several more reasons to read it.

Before I go any further, the stimulus for writing this post comes from the TES article ‘Wales asks schools to teach to the Pisa test‘. As I mentioned in my recent Purpos/ed Ignite presentation, education is under the control of governments, and PISA is pretty much the only tool they have to compare educational outcomes. Unfortunately, it focuses on a very narrow aspect of education and is accused of using discredited statistical techniques.

John Kay’s key point was that we often achieve the ends we desire indirectly. He summed this up perfectly by his example of ICI, the chemical company. I haven’t got the exact quotations he used, but in the 1970s ICI’s mission statement focused firmly on innovation and customers. ‘Shareholder value’ was merely a by-product of the core function of the company. By the 1990s this had reversed, with ‘shareholder value’ being the number one priority.

Of course, ICI no longer exists having lost its innovative edge. Likewise, if we focus on narrow and questionable measures of education to make comparisons with other countries, we miss the point of learning. PISA is the educational equivalent of ‘shareholder value’. Focusing on the by-product rather than the core mission is worrying.

Perhaps it’s time to take education out of the hands of politicians?

If you’re interested in debating the purpose(s) of education, you might want to join the debate at purposed.org.uk. Look especially at our call for more #500words contributions!

“A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.” (Father Strickland)

Working in the open comes naturally to me. I’ve never jealously guarded ‘my’ work and really cannot comprehend a person who would rather work in a closed and restricted environment.

Both this blog and my doctoral thesis are CC0 licensed, which means that I’ve donated them to the public domain. If you want to take my work, copy it word-for-word and pass it off as your own or sell it, that’s fine. Seriously. Do what you like. I’m flattered you like it.

I found out today that the minor rewrites I submitted after my thesis defence have now been accepted. I now go onto the ‘Pass list’ at Durham University meaning that I can call myself Dr. Belshaw. This makes me happy.

Another piece of news I received today was via Twitter from Joe Wilson attending the NAACE conference 2012 (#naace12). NAACE is a membership organization for those involved with ICT education in the UK and beyond.

Doug Belshaw's work on digital literacy being referenced at #naace12 as basis for new national standards well done @dbelshaw

— Joe Wilson (@joecar) March 9, 2012

(Note: Joe made a typo in his haste – I’m actually @dajbelshaw)

This came as a bit of a surprise. Whilst I’m aware of people referencing my work, I didn’t realize that NAACE as a body knew of/was using it. Certainly their press release (if that’s the right one) doesn’t mention anything. But to insist on acknowledgement (see discussion here), I feel, is a form of ownership. And no-one owns ideas.

The most important value of working in the open for me? Impact.

I write about things that interest me and ideas that I hold to be good in the way of belief. As a consequence, and like most other people, I think the ideas expressed in my work may be of use to others. If ‘impact’ is getting others discussing, debating and accepting your ideas then, yes, I want to impact other people.

Academics in UK universities will soon have to demonstrate their ‘impact’ under the terms of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). I can’t help but think that one of the best ways for academics to achieve this is to dramatically improve the accessibility of their work. The easiest method? Release it under the least restrictive license you can. This seems so obvious to me as to be a no-brainer.

There are some caveats, of course: less restrictive licensing may be problematic for commercially-sensitive areas and huge fields.

Let me explain.

There are two main reasons why I can ‘afford’ to give my work away without asking for attribution or compensation:

1. I know that most people will, actually, reference it (and there’s a large chance that those who don’t will be called out by others in such a relatively small field)

2. I have a salaried occupation that does not depend upon me attracting funding to commercialise my ‘Intellectual Property’.

Perhaps I’m young and naive but I can’t help think that, if you can, you should give away your work. For free. Without copyright.

That’s how ideas gain traction.

This week is Open Education week. There’s lots of stuff on the JISC website about it.

I’ve spent the last week in that weird and wonderful place that is San Francisco. Weird because, well, the number of homeless and obviously mentally ill is quite staggering. Wonderful due to the weather, friendliness of the people, and the obvious unstinting commitment to liberal democracy.

My reason for being there was the Digital Media and Learning Conference 2012 (#DML2012), something I was invited to attend as a writer for the DMLcentral blog. Whilst I was there I also helped judge the DML Competition around Open Badges, which was a privilege and a pleasure. More about that another time, perhaps.

I wrote a day-by-day overview of my experiences at #DML2012 over at my conference blog:

• Day 0
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

However, I wanted to take 500 words or so here to go through my highlights. I’m all about convenient hypocrisies when their useful so, for the sake of this post, I’m using a ‘Top 5′ construct. Here’s my top five takeaways from #DML2012.

The whole point of conferences is to meet other people and talk about important stuff. I was delighted to meet people I’ve interacted with online for years for the first time face-to-face, such as Bud Hunt, and people who have come onto my radar over the last year or so like Audrey Watters, Rafi Santo, Jeff Brazil, and Richard Scullin. The Mozilla crowd (Mark Surman, Erin Knight, Matt Thompson, Jess Klein) were there, of course, as was Cathy Davidson.

I managed to snag an enjoyable conversation with Howard Rheingold, but didn’t dare approach danah boyd or Henry Jenkins. Thankfully I got to hang out with Richard Mills, a PhD student who is being funded as part of the DML Badges research strand, as well as Jamie and JP from BuzzMath, which more than made up for it.

DML launched their Connected Learning initiative at the conference along with Spigot (a news aggregator). I could attempt to explain these in detail, but it’s probably easier if you just head over the respective sites to take a look and get involved!

I thought it started slowly, but by the end, John Seely Brown’s opening keynote had me captivated and buzzing with ideas. You can watch Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century below:

As I currently work for an organisation that is part of a larger one that funds projects (JISC), I’m always interested in the rationale behind how money is distributed. Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation, a philanthropic charitable organisation gave a wonderful, lucid, coherent and incisive display on the panel during Day 2. Her reasoning was so fantastic it put the other panellists in the shade, I thought.

More on that panel in my Day 2 write-up.

Having put my name forward for an Ignite talk at #DML2012 I was surprised and delighted when first of all it was accepted, and then second, I was to present to the entire conference. Wow. There must have been close to 1,000 people in the room when I gave the following talk:

My fellow Ignite-rs (20 slides, 15 seconds, auto-advanced) were just delightful. A highly recommended format!

As you can probably tell, I had a ball at #DML2012 and can’t wait for #DML2013 in Chicago. I’m going to get there by hook or by crook! I’d like to thank DML very much for making it possible to be there, and HASTAC for inviting me to be on the judging panel for the DML Badges competition (which is another blog post in itself!)

I had a great, wide-ranging discussion last night with Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher), Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) and Steve Hargadon (@stevehargadon) after the second day of the DML Conference 2012. Much of it focused on the role of technology in educational reform with much of it sparked by an excellent keynote panel of which Connie Yowell (MacArthur Foundation) was the star.

To me, the whole problem with educational reform is that what matters can’t be seen or touched. It’s physically intangible.

What do we tend to do? We focus on the things that we can see. As Bud pointed out, teachers in his district will sometimes point to discrepancies in access to technology as being a limiting factor on their performance. Others look at the material conditions of one learning environment and attribute ‘success’ to these easily-observed factors.

We should be used to this by now. Living in a world of networks (and networks of networks) we know that it’s the invisible bonds, the weak ties, that connect us to people and ideas. As Connie Yowell pointed out it’s this kind of innovation that scales. Audrey Watters extended this point when she commented that technology scales vertically, whereas people scale horizontally.

So what can we do about this? The first thing we need to do, I’d suggest, is to surface processes and networks. These both need to be as open and inclusive as possible and we need ways to talk about them to make them more tangible.

Any suggestions? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

If you’re an educator, if you’re a student, if you’re a parent – in fact, if you’re someone who walks around with their eyes open, you’ll have noticed something. Educational experiences in school and educational experiences outside of school are very different.

So far, so obvious. But what can we do about it?

I’m currently in San Francisco at the MacArthur-funded Digital Media and Learning initiative’s annual conference, #DML2012. As regular readers will know, I blog for DMLcentral and am a big fan of DML’s work.

Today, DML launched an ‘interest-powered, peer-supported, and academically-oriented’ model of learning called Connected Learning. Having been privy to some of the development behind this, I’m excited by the possibilities it affords.

Connected Learning is based upon open networks with a shared purpose to help learners produce things. It’s focused on answering the following questions:

1. What would it mean to think of education as a responsibility of a distributed network of people and institutions, including schools, libraries, museums and online communities?
2. What would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding youths’ active participation in public life that includes civic engagement, and intellectual, social, recreational, and career-relevant pursuits?
3. How can we take advantage of the new kinds of intergenerational configurations that have formed in which youth and adults come together to work, mobilize, share, learn, and achieve together?
4. What would it mean to enlist in this effort a diverse set of stakeholders that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?

This is a great time to get involved, if you’re interested. Go here for more information: http://connectedlearning.tv

Not only is it a great model, but educational legends such as Mimi Ito and Mitch Resnick are behind it – and will be participating in weekly webinars!

(for more on my involvement in the DML Conference, head over to my conference blog and/or follow #DML2012 and @dajbconf on Twitter)

The Guardian Teacher Network published my piece on the purpose of education yesterday. I like to experiment with new formats, so the whole piece is made up of questions – much like Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: a novel?

I’d be interested in your comments over there (I’ve turned them off here to encourage you to do so!)

My latest blog post for DMLcentral is now online: Conferences as Catalysts for Educational Innovation and Change.

A select morsel:

The face-to-face nature of conferences is, I believe, of even more importance in an extremely digitally connected world. Whilst it’s often the case that you can get to know people very well online, there’s something about embodied interaction that makes your knowledge of that person three-dimensional. I don’t think one method of interacting is necessarily ‘better’ than the other; a blended approach is best. This, I suppose, is why social media is so popular.

In addition, my opinion on Apple’s new iBooks Author was quoted on the JISC site this week. However, they mistakenly listed me as a ‘practising teacher’.

That little slip made me realise just how much I miss it…

Update: Michelle’s now created a diagram from her original post.

Michelle Levesque asked for feedback on this: Mozilla’s Web Literacy Skills (v0.1 alpha). I wanted to respond as soon as possible as I think she’s done some great work here.

I’ve visualised the text in her post and then tweaked it slightly to suggest the direction I’d take it:

Click through for a larger version on Flickr.

Changes:

• Added ‘participation’ to Exploring
• Changed ‘bullshit’ to ‘crap’ to avoid offending some people’s sensibilities
• Changed ‘Restaurant HTML’ to ‘HTML basics’ in Authoring
• Combined two blocks to form ‘Reacting to stimulii’ in Building
• Removed ‘Receipe’ize tasks’ in Building
• Added ‘Civil liberties’ to Protecting
• Segmented sections into what would form a ‘Basic’ and an ‘Advanced’ badge’

What do you think? What have I (we) missed?

(if you like this you may also be interested in The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies)