Memorable Open Offline Coffee

Today’s mystery acronym is MOOCs, which know-it-all All Change Please! can proudly reveal stands for Massive Open On-line Courses. And when they say Massive, they really do mean Massive – the size of enrollment often ranges from 10,000 to 80,000 students.

Such things have been called into existence for two main reasons. The first is to enable access to learning to anyone, anywhere, anytime, which is of course a great idea. And the second is to enable Universities to market themselves as being at the forefront of the use of new technologies, and if they just happen to generate some extra funding to compensate for the reduction in full-time student numbers, then that’s all to the good too. Having said that, they do require a lot of initial up-front investment, except that seems to be increasingly being supplied by commercial publishing companies who are obviously going to prescribe their own online textbooks, and as a result the courses are somewhat likely to become more Closed than Open.

Meanwhile, clearly any A level student about to make a decision to apply to university needs to be well informed about the variety, type and quality of MOOCs being offered by different institutions and of the impact they are having on the more traditional lecture and tutorial content of the courses. It appears that there is not just one species of MOOC in existence, but a diverse range of the gargantuan creatures. Donald Clark – quite possibly the Darwin of MOOCs – has recently identified the following taxonomy of mutations and cross-species:

• transferMOOCs – the transfer of existing courses into an online format
• madeMOOCs – less formal, including software driven interactive experiences
• synchMOOCs – have fixed assignment delivery times, course start and end dates
• asynchMOOCs – have no fixed assignment delivery times, course start and end dates
• adaptiveMOOCs – uses algorithms and data analytics to provide personalised learning experiences
• groupMOOCs – small, collaborative groups of students that come together for short periods of time
• connectivistMOOCS – MOOCs that attempt to harvest and share knowledge, rather than teach pre-defined knowledge
• miniMOOCSs – short-term and intense courses in specific subjects, often commercially run

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/moocs-taxonomy-of-8-types-of-mooc.html

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/moocs-more-action-in-1-year-than-last.html

http://futurelearn.com/

http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2013/05/12/participate-or-perish/

Although currently the play-thing of Higher Education establishments, MOOCs are an approach that can’t at some point be ruled out for secondary education, because computer terminals are cheaper than teachers, especially as it’s administrators and accountants that make the decisions these days. And just as with any style of teaching and learning, on-line courses suit certain types of students, but by no means all types – indeed course-completion rates are apparently low, with many students complaining they found the courses ‘boring’. On-line learning is also clearly most appropriate for knowledge transfer, and not so good for practical, experimental and creative work. But do the administrators and accountants know that?

Now All Change Please! has nothing against MOOCs – apart perhaps from their rather silly name – providing that is they don’t end up being the be-all and end-all of education, in which the poor sit in front of a computer terminal all day and the wealthy get to be taught by real teachers. MOOCs have a positive contribution to make, but it’s only a contribution and not a substitution for the real thing. Indeed just the other day All Change Please! enjoyed its own disruptive variation in the form of a Memorable Open Offline Coffee in town with two former colleagues, both from different subject disciplines. Over the course of two hours current educational theories of learning, Lord of the Flies, Postmodern Design and Music, and Dark Matter were all rigorously discussed and debated. As we departed we all agreed we had each learned and understood more in the past two hours than any textbooks, day-long series of lectures or on-line courses could have provided.

While one day computer technology might facilitate such a rich and compelling dialogue, All Change Please! suspects it’s still some way off. There’s the possibility of video conferencing, but it somehow just isn’t the same as real-life interaction and cappuccino. But that’s how people really learn – not just by being ‘taught’ facts, or even doing practical work, but informally discussing and exchanging ideas and information with the opportunity to explore challenging questions with people they know personally.  Teaching and learning at its best is a two-way, almost mystical process of an exchange of brain waves that produces permanent change in each other’s minds.

It seems that Plato bloke really knew what he was talking about when he said:

‘The teacher must know his or her subject, but as a true philosopher he or she also knows that the limits of their knowledge. It is here that we see the power of dialogue – the joint exploration of a subject – ‘knowledge will not come from teaching but from questioning’.

Another Massive Mocha anyone?

Don’t say:

‘A Mini Mooc was a popular beach buggy made in the 1960s.’

‘Don’t Mooc now! is a terrific film made in the early 1970s’

‘It’s a mooc point, but…’

‘Have you ever watched the Moocs of Hazard?’

Image credit: All Change Please!

A beginning, a muddle and an end?*

The doctor who doesn’t seem to care about the narrative

Now All Change Please! is not exactly stupid. It even has a number of your actual original, authentic Gold Standard O levels and A levels, taken in the days before they were supposedly dumbed down and made so easy that a child of five could pass them. Not to mention a proper degree from a time long ago when there were real lectures and weekly tutorials to attend, even if you didn’t.

But despite all this, it still has problems making any sense at all of the plot of Doctor Who, which has itself been recently (and fairly enough) dumbed down to make it more of an adventure story for younger viewers. Except for the stories to work it throws in references to some highly sophisticated and completely unexplained notions of time and space, and of the nature of artificial intelligence and self-consciousness.

Take last week’s episode (Series 7, Part 5). The TARDIS (which apparently, like the rest of us, seems to have some serious reservations about the Doctor’s new companion) somehow gets dragged on board a passing space ship and is seriously damaged. A mysterious pair of legs are identified sticking out from under some debris, but are never referred to again. In an attempt to repair the TARDIS, despite lengthy and emotional protestations from the Doctor, some essential parts of its workings are stolen, but after a while this plot line simply disappears. Next, a character who ‘believed’ he was a robot discovers he is actually a real person, and yet seems to have no problem walking round a few minutes later having had his left entire arm amputated. Finally after meeting themselves from the future the Doctor throws a mysterious gizmo with a message on it through a rift in time back to himself at the start of the episode, somehow enabling him to prevent everything happening in the first place. Maybe there’s a 5 year-old out there somewhere who could kindly explain it all to me?

But of course it’s not just Dr Who where such liberties are taken. These days it’s all special FX and dynamic quick-cut editing that seems to count the most. It really doesn’t seem to matter whose shooting Who provided it’s visually dramatic enough. Meanwhile car chases have become sequences random incoherent and shots vehicles colliding of speeding seemingly of, or to put it the old-fashioned way, incoherent sequences of shots of seemingly random speeding and colliding vehicles. And, when the dialogue is actually audible, it’s usually not worth listening to.

Now All Change Please! hates to be a fuddy-duddy old killjoy of a Gove-sounding supporter who thinks we should get back to making movies and TV drama the way they did in the 1950s, but nonetheless it has to admit, in this respect at least, it is. It thinks children – and their parents – deserve better than this. Whether the stories are told backwards, forwards or inside out, all it wants is a half-decent plot where all the clues, red-herrings and loose ends are neatly tied up, with everything reasonably explained and edited together in a coherent richly-worded narrative that represents something more than just a beginning, a muddle and an end. With perhaps even the odd unexpected plot-twist or a ‘Or did they?’ thrown after the essential ‘They all lived happily ever after…’ finale.

While new interactive and personalised digital narratives will undoubtedly change the nature of storytelling in the future, it is important that new media companies continue to provide quality content. And more than ever before, teaching and learning media literacy is needed, yet it remains conspicuously absent from the National Curriculum. Somewhere along the lines the government seems to have lost the plot too. Perhaps someone should call for the Doctor?

Or maybe not?

*Possibly attributed to C E Lombard

Image credit: BowBelle51

It’s… Michael Gove’s Flying Circus

A prototype GoveAir flying machine: ‘No frills, no fun, just facts’

All Change Please! has learnt that GoveAir‘s CEO has announced plans to introduce a new fleet of ‘Back to Basics’ 21st Century flying machines, based on a random pick-and-mix assemblage of components from different countries across the world.  However, it remains to see if the idea will ever actually take-off.

The Heath Robinson-influenced specifications were drawn up over the weekend by a group of representatives from various passenger organisations and focus groups, and include the general requirements for important things such as wings, windows and seats, though it is thought these may eventually be red-penned by the CEO. To keep costs down further, curved surfaces or indents will not be allowed, and this will also apparently help ensure architects and designers don’t get any richer than they already are. Existing pilots, more used to flying modern so-called progressive planes, will be re-trained on Spitfires from the 1950s.

At the same time, flight times will be extended to last a whole day, and pilots’ holidays reduced. They will also be required to take on extra administrative duties, including collecting ticket money and refuelling the planes.

Pilots are naturally bitterly opposed to the plans and are likely to join rival airline marxyJet. According to GoveAir, this will fit in well with their plans to introduce easily re-programmable robot pilots over the next five years.

Controversially the Nation’s children will be expected to be on-board during the test flights. The CEO of GoveAir explained:

“Things have changed since the 19th century, and parents are just too busy now to look after their own children. And with the current completely unforeseen demand for extra school places it will help reduce the need for new school buildings. We also feel it is important to bring more rigour into flying, and to encourage youngsters to become pilots themselves we will be sending a letter of encouragement to all those who manage to survive the experience.  Of course, it would have been much simpler to rely on updating the current design of airplanes which has been successfully evolving over many years, but where’s the Daily Mail headline in that?”

Were you there at the time? Are you happy for your child to fly with Gove Air? Please send us your comments and experiences…

Facts contained in this post loosely based on the following sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22202694

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/apr/17/teachers-more-clerical-work-review

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10004236/Ministers-urging-more-bright-pupils-to-apply-to-university.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/shortcuts/2012/oct/02/michel-goves-war-on-architecture-curves

http://www.guardian.co.uk/local-government-network/2013/apr/10/rising-demand-school-places

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/gove-fun-is-a-relic-of-history-2013041966164

Image credit: Flickr Redteam http://www.flickr.com/photos/redteam/267389212

The Campaign For Real 21st Century Education

So what’s the problem? You can always buy the skills you need on Amazon…

Now one could be forgiven for thinking that schools across the country are busy putting away their toys and girding themselves up for a major onslaught of facts to throw at their poor unsuspecting students who, at least up to now, had found their education to have been of at least some interest and relevance. And while some schools are probably doing just that, there’s a growing underground resistance movement of teachers who are preparing themselves, or rather their students, for what are secretly known as ‘21st Century Skills‘ which are to be delivered using ‘21st Century Technology‘ through a mysterious process known as ‘21st Century Learning‘. And when Herr Gove finally surrenders and realises that he can’t win the war without any troops behind him, there’s a strong possibility that the resistance movement will emerge victorious and schools will start to move forward again.

But what exactly are these 21st Century Technologies, Skills and Learning of which they speak? A simple enough question indeed, but not so simple to answer. Well the first bit – 21st Century Technology – is relatively easy in that it’s widely taken to refer to the use of computers and the internet, even though it does not necessarily follow that the technology is being used to deliver appropriate 21st Century learning and skills – but we’ll save that discussion for a later post.  However what there definitely isn’t is a single, nicely defined, commonly agreed, all cleverly packaged-up in a box designed by Apple statement as to what what 21st Century Skills and Learning actually are. Here therefore is:

All Change Please!‘s Beginners’ Guide to a Real 21st Century Education

First, one of the most common classifications of 21st Century Skills builds on the 3Rs by adding the 4Cs:

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Creativity and innovation

All Change Please! can’t help having a slight issue with the first of these however, in that critical thinking and problem-solving, while related, should be separated – problem-solving needs to be more closely linked to creativity. And then there’s the ‘I’ word – Innovation, which is often associated with creativity without any clear understanding of the difference between the two, and in reality has more to do with business practice.

Meanwhile abandoning the simplicity of the 4C’s, in this account here we see the welcome addition of Information Literacy and Responsible Citizenship to the list (Surely Citizenship is by definition responsible? Discuss.)  Hmm, with a bit of re-writing we could have a more memorable and marketable different set of 5Cs: Critical thinking, Communication and Information literacy, Collaboration, Creativity and problem-solving, Citizenship.

And here’s another approach:
Ways of thinking: Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning
Ways of working: Communication and collaboration
Tools for working: Information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy
Skills for living in the world: Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility

which has further evolved into:
Collaborative problem-solving. Working together to solve a common challenge, which involves the contribution and exchange of ideas, knowledge or resources to achieve the goal.
ICT literacy — learning in digital networks. Learning through digital means, such as social networking, ICT literacy, technological awareness and simulation. Each of these elements enables individuals to function in social networks and contribute to the development of social and intellectual capital.

And how about this account of 21st Century Learning?:

‘Equally important to 21st century learning is the application of learning science research and principles to learning methods and the design of learning activities, projects, assessments and environments. Principles of effective learning important to 21st century education practitioners include:

Authentic learning – learning from real world problems and questions
Mental model building – using physical and virtual models to refine understanding
Internal motivation – identifying and employing positive emotional connections in learning
Multimodal learning – applying multiple learning methods for diverse learning styles
Social learning – using the power of social interaction to improve learning impact
International learning – using the world around you to improve teaching and learning skills’.

All good stuff of course, and just a small sample of the wide range of indicators that 21st century learning is, or isn’t, taking place in a learning organisation. However, as All Change Please! has discussed before in 21st Century Schizoid Learning, most of these skills and approaches to learning were being explored back in the 1970s and 80s and so perhaps should more appropriately be called ‘End of the 20th Century‘ skills and learning – what schools should have been delivering from around 1975 to the turn of the millennium.

In the first decade of the 21st century a number of significant things have emerged. First, the advent of rapid change (predicted in Alvin Toffler’s FutureShock in 1973) is finally coming to pass: organisations and companies – and indeed educational establishments -  now need to be able to respond to changing needs and markets with new products and services potentially within around six months. For All Change Please! then, one of the essential things missing from so-called 21st Education is the notion of helping children learn how to deal with rapid, discontinuous and unpredictable change.

Secondly the impact of the internet has become a widespread disruptive force, changing the behaviours of the mass-population through social and commercial media. Although hinted at in some of of the accounts above, ‘media literacy’ (ie how digital content is produced, manipulated and distributed – and how to create it yourself) also needs to be a major priority.

And there does not appear to be any mention of the concept of Lifelong learning? At the same time there remains a need to completely redefine what might be considered as ‘basic’ knowledge, distinguishing between the grasp of essential underlying concepts and the facts that can now be easily found on the internet. And another thing – again something being anticipated back in the 1960s and 70s (and All Change Please! should know as it was there at the time) – are the 3Rs of Sustainability: Recycle, Re-use and Reduce. Ever read the Waste Makers?

So All Change Please!’s Campaign For Real 21st Century Education includes the need for:
• critical thinking
• creative, active, open-ended problem solving
• collaboration and competition
• flexibility in response to rapid, unpredictable change
• digital media / technological literacy
• initiating sustainable change
• 21st century knowledge
• learning how to learn for oneself

And finally something else that is still far from being a 21st Century solution is the process of the assessment and examination of learning which appears to be regressing into little more than a series of electronically generated and scored knowledge-based multiple-choice questions and answers. Only the e-scape project seems to offer a vision of completely new approaches to processes of assessment that utilise emerging technologies, rather than simply seeking to automate the old ones. Just as business now needs to rapidly respond to emerging fast-changing markets in an agile way, so does educational assessment. The model of developing a pre-specified, fixed course and final examination that takes five or so years to write, get approval for, publish, give schools adequate time to prepare for, and then commence delivering a two year course is no longer appropriate. A more flexible approach is now needed that is capable of responding much more quickly to learning emerging knowledge and skills, using computer technology to create new forms of examination or validation of what has been learnt, rather than what was specified to be learnt many years previously.

The sad fact is, despite having had more than 30 years to get ready for the challenges ahead, we’re still totally unprepared for the opportunities and threats of living in the 21st Century.

And finally, here are some people who for some strange reason don’t seem to agree with any of the above!

Michael Gove’s planned national curriculum is designed to renew teaching as a vocation
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/04/michael-goves-planned-national-curriculum-is-designed-to-renew-teaching-as-a-vocation/

The philistines have taken over the classroom | Frank Furedi | spiked

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13497/

Pass Notes: There’s no business like…

In this post All Change Please! turns its attention to another important school subject to see how it fares in the proposed new draft National Curriculum.

Ah, finally – Business and Economics. That’s one of the most popular subjects students study at university isn’t it?

Yes, by quite a big margin – nearly twice as many as History.

And absolutely vital to the nation’s future growth and prosperity. So I suppose you”ll be telling me that the DfE has included some daft content inappropriately placed in the wrong key stages and written in a way that relates more to business practices of the 1950′s?

Errr, no I won’t be actually.

You mean they’ve managed to get this one right? That’s a turn up for the textbooks.

Well, no, not really. You see, Business and Economics is not part of the National Curriculum at all.

What? So let’s get this straight. Business and Economics is the most popular university subject, and the basis of the future economic success of the country, and we don’t teach our children anything about it at all while at school?

Yes, you’ve got it one.

Ah, well, I suppose it could be argued that we have such well organised management systems and a highly motivated workforce that the basic principles do not really needed to be introduced in schools.

Well you could argue that but in most cases you’d be wrong. Just the other day I heard about someone who works for a leading UK global company. He’s very good at bringing in new clients, but the problem is that this means more work for the delivery team, so they’ve just got rid of him. And then I know a manager of a small business who can’t manage to recruit employees with a good work ethic – it seems they just want to do the least they can get away with, without realising that unless they all work together to help build the business and keep it going, they will soon be out of a job. At the same time too many business are running on out-moded management and administrative structures, and are likely to fail in the next five to ten years unless they completely transform their culture. And do you really think the current economy is being well-handled by the government? So there is definitely an absolutely essential need for children to understand how businesses work, how money is made and lost, and that teamwork and collaboration are essential.

So why aren’t business leaders making more of a fuss?

That’s a very good question. At least Sir Richard Branson managed to express his concerns last week and revealed his usual insightful grasp of the situation when he said:  “Some of the things people study at school are not particularly relevant for when they actually leave school.”

Gosh. Next I suppose you’ll be telling me there is no media studies to give children at least some insight into the way in which the information they consume is created, manipulated and distributed, and no engineering on the curriculum either, despite the fact that engineering is one of the priority professions for UK immigration.

Yes, you guessed it!

Talking of which, I hear chicken sexing is another of the priority professions for immigrants. No chance of that being included in the National Curriculum I suppose?

Well, I expect they could probably find some space for it in D&T…

Do say:  Mind your own business.

Don’t say:  Pass the Branson Pickle, would you?

And finally,  if you haven’t already done so, don’t forget that your country needs you to vote for your least favourite subject in the Grand National Curriculum Consultation competition. The bookies have History as odds on to win, with D&T coming up quickly on the rails. Let’s just hope that Secretary of State ridden by Michael Gove out of Government falls at the first and has to be inhumanely put down. Talking of whom, if you’ve not seen it yet, this is worth a watch…  http://www.goveversusreality.com/

 

Image credit: http://pixabay.com/en/arrow-business-crisis-decline-15630/

E.T. Phone Home….

Q:  What have cars made from the 1920s by the Morris Garages company, an Extra-Terrestrial being, a Decision-feedback Equaliser and a Networked Computer got in common? Oh, and a Blob from outer space, but we’ll come to that later.

The answer is – not a lot, unless of course you take their initials, M.G. and E.T. and put them together in the DfE and ask them to re-write the NC. Which, it increasingly seems, is exactly what they did. All by themselves, with no help at all from anyone else – presumably lest they be accused of cheating, which would never do, would it?

First the rumour turned into speculation, which nearly transformed into a possible fact on Wikipedia, before becoming what will very probably be an urban myth. And the rumour was that, dissatisfied with the work of all the special advisors he had appointed, Morris Garages actually wrote the revised Networked Computer History curriculum himself as part of his weekend homework assignment.

And then there’s been the rather awkward question of who it actually was who put together the daft draft proposals for Design and Technology, which has led to a series of increasingly convincing conspiracy theories. It was always fairly obvious from the terminology and language used that it was probably written by someone who had themselves had a fairly unfortunate teenage experience of a typical ‘Can’t Do That’ department in the late 1980s and early 90s in which girls did the cooking, arranged the flowers and sewed on buttons while the boys made and mended things in a jolly useful sort of way. Which became an even more interesting theory to consider when Extra Terrestrial revealed that she had herself studied D&T at her former Yorkshire girls’ grammar school, at exactly this sort of time. And there was further evidence on her website that she indeed comes from another planet, where everything is simply wonderful down on Jollity Farm:

Anyway, in case you missed it, the good news is that E.T. has publicly stated in a recent commons debate that the daft D&T proposals (recently appropriately described as being ‘unfit for consultation’), will be the subject of ‘serious consultation’, and that this time the advice of DATA and other people who actually know something about the subject will be considered. Well, a bit anyway. Maybe. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps….

And in a confused and misleading speech earlier in the week, E.T. made some confusing and misleading horticultural references:

“Government has a part to play in setting out the trellises and marking out the footpaths. How the garden grows is for schools to decide. And in order for teachers to be able to give life to the garden, government has to give them freedom: freedom from excessively prescriptive top-down diktats and the freedom to innovate.”

Before going on to highlight the importance of the relationship between D&T and computers:

“Design and technology offer a reminder of the interaction between subjects. Computers have a central role in design and technology these days and our new, more challenging computing programme of study is designed to prepare pupils to work in the cutting-edge industries of the future.”

Hmm – now here’s a thought. Perhaps D&T and IT should be combined into one area. Now what shall we call it? Ah I know – how about ‘Technology‘? Extra Terrestrial, even if you won’t phone home, maybe the time has at least come to phone a friend?

Meanwhile Morris Garages was brought up sharply on the motorway by a letter to the papers written by a ton-up of 100 academics who hoped to overtake his fact-filled curriculum by coming up fast on the left-hand lane. So MG quickly checked his right-wing mirror and came to the conclusion that obviously these must simply be the ‘wrong sort of academics’. Or, as the Daily Mail, drawing on the full might of its great intellectual wisdom, cleverly called them on Friday – ‘nitwits‘. But by the Mail on Sunday MG was clearly pressing his right foot down hard on the accelerator pedal, driving completely out-of-control and shouting ‘Poop-poop!’ while attacking the 100 academics as being ‘The new Enemies Of Promise…who seem more interested in valuing Marxism, revering jargon and fighting excellence.’ and imaginatively identifying them as the so-called ‘Blob’ -  which actually turns out to stand not for something from outer space, but for Big Learning Organisational Bureaucracies that have absolutely nothing to do with Marxist Enemies of Promise. But, as someone pointed out on Twitter, perhaps the most alarming indication of the current decline in standards was that the Mail on Sunday’s editor missed the opportunity to use the headline: ‘Marx out of a hundred?’

Now All Change Please! had previously assumed that the purpose of MG’s crusade was to provide more opportunities for everyone to become an academic, whether they wanted to or not.  But it now seems our children are not just all destined to become failed academics, but failed right-wing academics. And MGs inaccurate and nonsensical rhetoric is daily gaining the increasing support of the masses who fail to grasp that his real agenda involves a great deal more than simply teaching children how to read, write and do sums. Oh, and learn how to cook and grow their own food.

Meanwhile, back at the Department for Education, it is thought that officials recently discovered that in fact the initials DfE actually stood for something quite different: Design focused Evaluation, which it seems is concerned with the effectiveness of constructive alignment in an educational course.  However, they are obviously trying to keep very quiet about this in case anyone else finds out.

Do say:  My life’s work is ‘intergenerational ethnography of the intersection of class, place, education and school resistance’

Don’t say:  ‘We are Blob’

Background MG Badge Image credit: Brian Snelson

Can I see tea?

Over recent weeks All Change Please! has posted about the draft National Curriculum requirements for Design & Technology, Art & Design, and History. Now it’s time to look at the new-fangled Computer studies (or as a DfE press release recently called it, ‘Computing Studies’), and to help us we’re delighted to welcome back the wondeful spirit of Joyce Grenfell, who is leading today’s Key Stage 1 lesson.

“Ok class, let’s all gather round. Today we’re going to learn about computers. I expect you already know a lot more about them than I do, don’t you? Well at least I’m rather hoping you do. Now, first make sure your smart phones and tablets are all switched off please – you’re not really supposed to have them in school are you? No, I’m sorry Larry you’ll just have to finish working on your facebook hacking app later – which reminds me, you really must tell me what a hacking app is. Anyway just so long as it doesn’t involve shooting people with guns – we wouldn’t want anything nasty like that now would we?

What’s that Steve? You’ve got an apple for me? How thoughtful. Oh! It’s not that sort of apple. Still, never mind – Yes, Pierre, you’re right, I can always sell it on eBay.

No Sergey, you can’t be excused to go and do a google.

Right, let’s see what it says here. Ah yes. Now, who can tell me what an algorthim is? Ah, that’s good to see how many hands are up!

So, Jeff, what do you think it is?

A type of alligator you’d find in the Amazon? No I don’t think so Jeff.

What’s your answer Ada?

A special type of rhythm used in music? No, a very good guess dear, but not quite right I’m afraid.

No Bill, I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with Al Gore. And please stop looking out of the windows and try to concentrate.

Oh dear, I was afraid of that, none of you know what an algorthim is, which is a bit awkward really, because I don’t either. Let’s see what it says here. Hmm – it seems that it is basically a simple or complex process automated by a computer programme. Well that’s not very helpful is it children? Still never mind. I’ve got a better idea, let’s all learn how to spell it instead. Well would you believe it, they seem to have spelt it wrong here. I’m sure it must be algorhythm.

No Salman, you khan’t do that here. Wait until you get home this evening.

Well, nearly time for you to go out and play. Now, next week’s computer lesson looks more fun. Apparently we’re all going to make a tasty Raspberry Pi. Really, these computer geeks are not very good at spelling are they? I suppose that must be cleverly linked in with the new requirements to teach cookery – or Design and Technology or whatever it’s called now…

Ah, break-time at last. Can ICT out ready in the staff room?

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely intentional.

D&T: pushing up the daisies?

‘I come to bury D&T, not to praise it’

There have been recent reports that the draft Design & Technology National Curriculum is in fact to be seriously reviewed by the DfE. It would however be unwise to expect that what will be eventually published will be substantially different from what is there already. For example, given the weight of the pressure group that got it there in the first place, horticulture is likely to remain. Meanwhile the extent of the document is unlikely to occupy much more than its current length, providing little opportunity for all the detail that die-hard D&T-ers would perhaps like to see included. It’s almost as if, having spent the past 20 years complaining about the extent of the requirements in the specification, D&T teachers somehow can’t seem to live without them.

At best the given examples might be changed to be somewhat more rigorous and ‘hi-tech’, and the relationship between problem-solving and growing food and learning how to cook it made more clearly separated. While this will doubtless please many within the D&T community, the danger is that it heralds a future in which D&T continues on pretty much as before. It remains to be seen whether D&T can fully recover from its currently proposed portrayal as a hi-tech subject reduced to planting, growing and flower-arranging, but at the same time it has been disappointing to see the outright rejection of horticulture and the potential of repair and maintenance activities as possible worthwhile content. Maybe now is actually the time to bury D&T and see what might emerge from the soil instead?

While there are a number of schools that have succeeded in developing show-case D&T departments that demonstrate what could have been, there remain too many that still provide an incoherent, meaningless learning experience that fails to deliver successful designing or making. The reality in too many D&T departments is that the teaching of high-level craft skills has been replaced by the teaching of low-level design skills. And even where it is currently delivered well, is it still appropriate education for the 21st century – or will it just become an initial training ground for those interested in working in hi-tech engineering-based industries? All Change Please! somehow rather doubts D&T will suddenly start to embrace and emphasise collaborative, sustainable design and a DIY approach centred around localised production using 3D printing, not to mention the discussion of the development of the broader skills of analytic and creative thought and action along with the understanding of the relationship between people and technology that everyone is going to need to survive during their coming lifetimes.

Which is why it was initially refreshing to read the Design Council’s Bel Read presenting a new, more balanced agenda for Design Education. To summarise, essentially what is proposed is a programme involving design awareness, the application of user-centred design methods, a multidisciplinary approach, the development of technical skills and an industrial, academic and cultural framework.

All Change Please! has no problems with this of course – indeed it’s not that different from what was being proposed and pioneered in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, on reflection, it’s not nearly as simple as it seems (though, to be fair, the article is intended as a starting point for discussing rather than as a final specification). First, there’s a notable infrequence of the use of the word ‘creativity’, which is an essential component of design activity, and one that desperately needs to be more evident in our schools. Secondly there’s a complete absence of the word ‘sustainability’. And finally no reference to collaboration. So as such it continues to reflect an extension of 20th century professional industrial design practice, rather than something that might prepare all children for the future. And of course it entirely ignores the central issue of exactly who is going to deliver this enlightened approach. Not to mention what the DfE’s response might be.

Design Education has an essential contribution to make in the preparation of all today’s children to live and work in tomorrow’s post-industrial society. Its future lies out beyond Planet D&T as currently charted, engulfing the spiral arm of the galaxy located in regions known as art & design, business education and computing, and indeed all of the existing curriculum clusters.

Meanwhile, in other news, DATA have just published their draft response to the D&T proposals. It can be downloaded from their site here.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Sue Murray

What Becomes of the Broken Art Ed?

All Change Please! has always found it a bit strange that novelists, journalists, historians and other wordsmiths are not required to explain and discuss their work using just visual images. Or to put it another way, why are artists expected to explain and discuss their work using a verbal rather than visual language? If a picture is worth a thousand words, why do they need to find a thousand words to go with it? Not of course that All Change Please! would itself ever think of just using words to raise important issues about teaching the visual language. Hmm.

Thus All Change Please! finds it curious that visual arts examination specifications and national curriculum requirements are entirely defined by words rather images. And of even greater concern is just how poorly those written statements manage to describe the vibrancy of the creative process and the effective use of the visual language. It’s almost as if the curriculum has been translated from, say English to French by someone who can’t speak English and translated back by again by someone who has no fluency in French. And this could not be better exemplified than in the recent curriculum proposals for Art and Design. They provide an entirely inadequate description of what the subject involves. If there’s one thing worse than an artist trying to describe the creative process in words, it’s an entirely non-creative person trying to describe it. For example…

‘Art and design embody the highest forms of creativity’.

That’s a very subjective statement for a start. I’m not sure Einstein, Shakespeare or Stravinsky would agree.

‘Art and design teaching should instil in pupils an appreciation of beauty and an awareness of how creativity depends on technical mastery.’

Art and design involves a lot more than acquiring an appreciation of beauty. And creativity certainly does not depend on technical mastery.

‘Using clay and printing to a large scale and in 3D’ .

Large scale printing in 3D anyone?

‘using a range of media, such as painting with oils…’

Just how many art departments have a budget that enables them to supply oil paints for their Key Stage 3 pupils?

As might be expected, it’s a dry description of an academic 1950s art curriculum, with the exception of the inclusion of ‘video and installations’. But it could be worse – at least there is no requirement to teach a highly specified history of art, architecture and design in chronological order and write essays.

But one artist who is clearly fluent in both the visual and English language is the sculptor Richard Wentworth. Writing in the Guardian he was asked to comment on the proposal for Art and Design, His response is delightful, skilfully ignoring the actual content but instead picking up on the proposed requirement for the inclusion of horticulture in Design and Technology to provide a coherent account of what art education might actually be about.

‘A great art education is not a machine for producing artists, it should be a generous system of gardening to cultivate a diversity of achievement and a celebration of the climate the “plants” share. Staying alive involves collaboration and invention. There’s no reason why there couldn’t be a growing medium called problem solving – you’d get inventors, engineers, poets, philosophers, agronomists, and gardeners too. Designer (with a small d) is a term for anybody who can think through something and resolve it imaginatively.’

So what is to become of Art Education? (Art Ed = Hearted. Get it?)

If Michael ‘Angelo’ Gove seems determined to turn the clock back to the 1950s, let’s look at what then happened in the 60s and 70s, when ‘National’ and ‘Curriculum’ were just twinkles in politicians’ eyes. Under the emerging influence of the idea of the Bauhaus, the majority of teachers were successfully exploring the inclusion of product, graphic and interior design, stagecraft, ceramics and architecture and the built environment into the art curriculum.  Faculties of Design, often led by the more visionary Head of Art, were established in many schools in an attempt to facilitate this expansion, although in the majority the distinction between art and woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing and cookery often remained. It was in the late 1980s the separate national curriculum requirements for art and for design & technology drove a wedge between the two again, with art assuming that design would be covered by d&t, leaving d&t struggling to deliver a suitably creative problem-solving and aesthetically-led experience.

Change brings threats and opportunities. With the new requirements for D&T seemingly returning it to the cookery, craft and technical maintenance department, maybe now is the time for art and design teachers to re-assume the responsibility for delivering a high quality art and design experience that covers a wider repertoire than just painting and drawing. Indeed the inclusion of architecture in the proposed curriculum requirement helps promote this.

The particular wording of a curriculum statement won’t change a bad art and design teacher into a good one. Perhaps the most important thing is that teachers of art and design understand that while the National Curriculum defines what must be taught, it says absolutely nothing about anything that can’t or mustn’t be taught.  At the end of the day all that really matters is the provision of creative and exciting teaching that inspires and captivates students, and refreshes the parts of the curriculum other subjects cannot reach. And there’s absolutely nothing in the proposal to stop that happening.

Don’t confuse me with the facts…*

Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to remember the late 60s and early 70s were saddened last week to learn of the passing of Kevin Ayers. A founder member of the experimental and highly creative jazz rock group Soft Machine, he then went on to find greater success leading his own band, and releasing some 17 albums.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/20/kevin-ayers-dies-aged-68

Now All Change Please! was surprised to read in all the obituaries that appeared the next day that Ayers apparently attended the Simon Langton school in Canterbury, where he met the other members of the Soft Machine. Now it so happens that All Change Please! taught at this exact same school during the 1980s, and there is clear documentation and recall evidence from staff who were there at the time that the other two other members of the band were indeed pupils there in the early 1960s. However as far as All Change Please! is aware there is nothing to suggest Ayers ever attended as well. On the cover biography notes of the first Soft Machine album, while it states that the other two were at the school, it does not name of the school that Kevin Ayers’ went to. And indeed checking Ayers’ own account he states he attended a boarding school (which Simon Langton wasn’t) and that he met the others in completely different circumstances, as confirmed in the ‘official’ Soft Machine Biography published in 2005.

But within hours of the publication of the obituary, Ayers’ Wikipedia entry had been updated to state that he attended the Simon Langton school in Canterbury (as evidenced by the Guardian Obituary), where he met the other members of the band. As such this will now doubtless pass into history as a fact, which it seems quite clearly isn’t.

So, Mr Gove, is it right to just teach our children the so-called facts, when the facts are subject to such misrepresentation and inaccuracy? The Kevin Ayers example is in itself of no great importance, but others are. Surely what really matters is that children learn that there are no such things as facts? Sources need to be carefully analysed, cross-referenced, and potentially challenged. And they also need to be taught not to believe everything, or perhaps even anything, that they read in the papers. Or, for that matter, on Wikipedia.

Meanwhile it is the proposed new History curriculum that has been widely reported in the press (diverting attention away from the even more inappropriate proposals for Design & Technology). As discussed here:

Why Too Much History is Bad History: The Proposed History Curriculum
http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2013/02/22/why-too-much-history-is-bad-history-the-proposed-history-curriculum/

it is clear the authors of the curriculum have a complete lack of understanding of how and when children learn.

The linear chronology only gets underway in KS2, between the ages of 7-11, when kids are expected to grasp a huge swathe of history, beginning with the Greeks and Romans (though I see no mention of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese or Indus Valley peoples), and then bomb emphatically through British history’s trajectory, from Stonehenge to the Glorious Revolution, via all the headline history that a 1950s textbook might include.

By the start of KS3, kids are 11.  When I was that age, I distinctly remember making a project book about mummification and tombs in Ancient Egypt – one which I found creative and thrilling – but our youngsters will instead hurtle headlong into Clive of India and the Age of Revolution. Soon after, they will be grappling with the US Constitution and Enlightenment philosophy…

Teachers will no doubt endeavour to enliven their lessons, but with such a curriculum they will struggle to captivate the imaginations of their young pupils, and that will be a fatal tragedy for the subject of history.

Children do need to acquire a ‘time-line’ of history, but this is just not the way to achieve it. Acquiring so-called facts in the context of a time-line is very different from learning everything only in the order in which it happened. And that’s a fact.

*According to that highly reliable source of all knowledge Wikipedia, ‘Don’t confuse me with the facts. I have a closed mind already’ was said by Earl Landgrebe during the Watergate hearings in 1974.

** But according to the far more reliable source of all quotations “Quote…Unquote’, the phrase dates back to a 1945 article in an advertising periodical, and the saying appeared on a sign on a prominent Democrat’s desk in 1954.

Update 3rd March 2013. All Change Please! is pleased to be able to report that history has now been re-written, and the offending Wikipedia entry has now been more accurately updated!