Twitter as a professional development tool. Love it or hate it?

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This week I attended a conference about professional development in Scotland.  The participants were Community Learning and Development workers (CLD). I was there to show how the various ways in which a SMARTboard could be used for teaching, training and groupwork. There was also a focus on the use of ‘social media’ as a professional development tool and a way of engaging with individuals.

What struck me most forcefully is the way in which ‘social media’ (mostly defined as Facebook and Twitter), polarised the audience, with strong emotions on both sides. Many were strongly in favour of these engagements, but others felt ‘social media’ is more of a force for harm than good. Many of the debates were about using social media to connect with young and vulnerable people, a topic which does require sensitivity, and which is not the focus of this blog post. Instead I choose to focus on social media as a tool of professional development, an aspect which I think the conference neglected.

During the debate, I chatted to a participant who said: ‘you don’t do that twitter, do you?’  I felt a bit like the man who was asked ‘when did you stop beating your wife?’.  The question felt very leading, and the questioner was fully expecting me to confirm that whilst ‘cruelty to animals’, ‘being a Jedward fan’ and ‘parking in disabled spaces’ were all little vices of mine I was happy to admit to, I would not be caught dead sending a tweet. Awkward.  I shrugged and admitted that I did go on a twitter ‘a little bit’, which got me a very disappointed look.

But I can totally understand hostility to twitter, especially when its use is brought up within the context of a professional community with a vague but palpable notion lurking in the background that people should really get an account and start tweeting.

Twitter is opaque in the extreme to the outsider; a welter of unfathomable terms and a clique of weird rituals.  Evoking religious metaphors is not completely out of place here.  Just as believers wrap themselves in a cloak of flim-flammery which makes it hard for neophytes to penetrate, so twitter users appear as a ‘cult of the initiated’ in which newcomers are bound to make fools of themselves.  And twitter is very like Marmite, most people have a sufficient taste of it and declare themselves to love it or hate it.  Paradoxically for the social network which appears the most ephemeral (140 characters shot out into the ether), twitter requires hard-work and a strange dedication for it to work, and this contributes to the ‘love it, or hate it’ vibe.

Twitter can be a fantastic professional development tool though. I can think of no other way to find people working in your own area so quickly and have such a direct contact with them. They will tweet links and articles and thoughts which will be immediately useful to you. It’s like duplicating yourself many times over. The slight time penalty of checking your timeline should be more than paid off with your enhanced view of what is happening in your area right now. And the paradox is that you can do this without ever sending a single tweet. Simply follow people who tweet about stuff you are interested in and these benefits will accrue immediately.  Some will follow you back, some won’t.  But you get to earwig the conversation like a bystander at a cocktail party. Once you start to tweet, your following should increase quickly and you’ll be drawn into the virtuous circle of sharing, debating and conversation which is twitter at its best.

But explaining the power of twitter to those who have not tweeted is a little like forcing toast and marmite into the mouths of your breakfast companions whilst shouting: ‘taste this you bastard, it’s bloody gorgeous!’

In other words, not the done thing.

London 2012 and the Talibrand

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London 2012. The Olympics. The Greatest Show on Earth. Now we’ve started.. or at least the UK-wide torch relay has, winding its way up and down the nations so it travels within one hour of 95% of the population (unless they are on mobility scooters, in which case they are part of the 5% who won’t get to see it, they probably should be out looking for a job anyway).  The olympic flame, according to the Torch Relay website stands for ‘peace, unity and friendship’, and the torch bearers are 8000 truly inspirational people, 7852 of whom have eBay accounts, with the rest asking their kids to set them one up as soon as possible.

If you detect cynicism in my tone, then have a ‘gold medal’, sorry ‘star’. Part of the cynicism is just default Britishness. We don’t celebrate our national cynicism the same way we do our creative arts industries or ‘ability to invent great things and never make any money from them’, but we should do, as we are, as a nation, great at being grumpy about things.  But default British cynicism was not enough to push me into posting; what pushed me to the keyboard is the antics in the early days of the relay of the torch relay team and LOCOG, the overarching organisation body for the games.  LOCOG want, according to their website, to make this ‘everyone’s games’. Which is bullshit when you think about it, complete and utter bullshit. Something for everyone would be rubbish, you can’t let everyone take part as the whole point of the Olympics is elite sporting competition, and some people just don’t like Sports in the same way I don’t like boiled eggs. Thrust them in my face and I’ll gag, I would pay extra in a restaurant for a dish which came with a boiled egg to not have the boiled egg. Some people are like that with sport. End of.

Where it starts to get interesting though, is the behaviour of LOCOG around the massive corporate sponsors of the games as the suspicion grows that the ‘everyone games’ may not be all they seem. LOCOG have a brand protection document which you can view in full here. It states:

Our Partners contribute very significantly to the staging of the Games through the provision of funding, goods and services. Without them, the Games could not happen so preserving their exclusive rights is essential.

It all sounds reasonable enough, the phrase ‘very significantly’ makes it sound like they dug deep into their corporate pockets for big buckets of cash, and without this the Olympics would just be a hop, skip and jump competition on Wimbledon common with a can of fanta for the medal winners. But it’s simply not true. Without getting sidetracked into the murky byways of Olympic funding, believe me when I say the best figure I could get for ‘partner’ money was 8% of the total cost of the games (very very generous), and the lowest was 2%, and the real answer by process of triangulation is probably about 5%.  So now we know that 5% is very significant in the wonderful world of LOCOG. Let’s hope they don’t take up drug trials or safety testing, it’s normally the other way round, with a figure of 95 or even 99 per cent being described as significant. Let’s be very very generous and say that if the partners were putting up 51% or more of the total cost of the games then we could say this was ‘very significant;. But if they have stumped up £6.5Bn between them then they’ve kept this rather quiet.

So we have established that the Partners of the game are contributing a ‘small’ amount to the total cost of the games, a games which would in all reasonable worlds, be perfectly viable without their cash, as the UK taxpayer has virtually unlimited pockets when it comes to Olympic funding and with our current strong economic growth and positive headwinds, we could easily chuck in an extra billion to get to see Chris Hoy hammering down the back strait. The partners may be lighting the candles on the cake, but they didn’t decorate it, and they didn’t bake it. and they didn’t leave the deposit for the stand either.

All the more strange then is the aggressive and almost puritanical fanaticism of LOCOG to protect the investment of the partners. This vignette is from the early days of the parade as it passed through Devon:

A glimpse of the ruthless efficiency of the torch operation was in evidence before the arrival of the phalanx of Metropolitan police officers who ferried the flame to the Life Centre to light the first torch of the day. Before they did so, Locog officials in grey uniforms swiped leaflets advertising an “Olympic breakfast” and “flaming torch bacon and egg baguette” from the centre’s cafe, on the grounds they contravened branding guidelines. (http://bit.ly/Jr9Mli).

Seriously? A cafe can’t try and make a few extra pence with a leaflet for an Olympic breakfast and even the words ‘flaming torch’ bring down the wrath of the LOCOG enforcers.  This isn’t brand protection, it’s brand fascism; the fetishisation of erstwhile commonplace words in a mangled corporate miasma of misplaced greed and self interest.

And it’s stupid too. Very stupid. Radio 4 had a feature today on how the Brain’s beer signs on Cardiff bridges needed to be covered up because they were within the Millennium Stadium Olympic Exclusion Zone. The signs have been their years, I bet the locals don’t even notice them anymore, although paradoxically covering them up and uncovering them once this olympic madness passes will bring them alive in the minds of the population and probably rejuvenate sales of the local brew.  LOCOG should pay attention to this, they should consider razing the brewery to the ground during the games as this will of course ensure that no commercial benefit accrues to a ‘non-sponsor’. And pity the 5 or so ‘Olympic garages’ along the torch route (as far as I could see on Google maps), they are just asking for trouble. And what about Mr and Mrs Torch of 78 Chorley Road Bolton: who can vouch for their safety from the Talibrand of LOCOG if they try and make as so much as a single penny from the games as they pass by their front door.

Unlike others who studied useful stuff at university I was fascinated by language and meaning, and schools of thought such as structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction which all attempted to explain how language worked (or didn’t). Early doors (1910ish) was a guy called Ferdinand de Saussure with an explanation of how the word tree (in either written or spoken form) was linked with the mental concept of tree in a way which made communication between people possible. His main insight being that the arrangement of letters or the sound of the word was arbitrary, it carried no meaning in and of itself, it only worked because ‘tree’ was different to other words (‘free’ for instance).  Later French hotheads came along smoking brown fags and pointed out that even one-to-one correspondences between the signifier (text or sound symbol) and signified (mental concept) were problematic and they showed how multiple meanings could attach to a single world. So a ‘tree’ could be an object in your garden, a symbol of strength, a biblical term (tree of knowledge) or a metaphorical tree (family tree, mug tree (ok, not mug tree, the French only drink out of cups).

Language is playful, sinuous, slippery, uncontrollable. Master it, only to see it disappearing over the horizon playfully flashing its arse at you whilst your leaden brain struggles to comprehend how it got free. And brands are just words too. Product names and slogans, but no more exempt from  language’s carnival than words like austerity or turnip or God.  By and large only totalitarian regimes seek to impose drastic constraints on language, either in the name of religion or political control or both. Mature democracies have moved beyond this, consumers are alive to the ways in which meanings can be manipulated.  For instance most people know that if you don’t buy Coca Cola the ‘holidays are still coming’. Buying 2 litres bottles of brown sugary liquid is not an offering to the Gods for a few days off work.

So LOCOG, why don’t you treat us with a little more respect, a little more dignity and a little less fanaticism, after all, we paid for your fcuking games.

‘I can politic’ scheme to give all politicians a sound basic education

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 An initiative which seeks to tackle the chronic problem of low levels of education amongst politicians and their seeming lack of grasp of reality has been launched.  Titled ‘Can Politic’ it combines a friendly and targeted approach to ensure that all politicians, regardless of party, are familiar with some of the basics, such as maths, english, basic health and safety, and some rudimentary sociology.

The president of the scheme Dr Ed Nobles said: “We hope this scheme will make politicians who have to attend basic education classes as normal and pleasant as going to cookery or line-dancing classes.  They will get a voucher worth £100 which they can take into their local branch of Boots and cash in for training courses at their local academy or free school.  In many cases politicians seem to be wilfully ignorant of the basics, so urgent remedial work on maths and understanding basic economic concepts is needed.  Sometimes it’s a lack of understanding of quite easy to grasp principles which can hold these politicians back such as thinking that negative growth is a  sign that economic policy is working.”

Other learning needs are more specialist, such as ‘storing petrol at home safely’, and ‘knowing what day of the week it is’; and the organisers believe that these courses we be useful for politicians who have shown confusion about these issues in the recent past.

Bad politics is blamed for everything, from obesity to last year’s riots to the complete and utter shambles that the country is in. This massive state intervention to improve the quality of politicians may seem a huge waste of money in the midst of the biggest recession since the 1930s, but few of us want to see a continuation of what have been dubbed ‘Yes Minister’ relationships, where one generation of feckless, simple-minded and devious politicians produces the next.  We must break the cycle of politicians breeding more politicians and living inside a Westminster bubble where nothing makes any sense unless you are also inside that bubble.

Dr Noble continues: “Obviously for the scheme to be successful we need to reach the right politicians. Some have proved to be very difficult to educate, and continue to hold reckless and factually wrong attitudes despite mountains of empirical evidence and research to the contrary.  One high level politician believes that social mobility can be improved without tackling income inequality and appears to be wholly ignorant of decades of social research and evidence which suggest the two are very strongly linked.

In some cases we have politicians whose basic maths is so poor that they believe that 62% and 142% are the same number, and are comfortable stating in public that the UK and Greek levels of debt are the same as a result of this misunderstanding. This obviously makes them look foolish, and by association the country too, so ‘Can Politic’ is a targeted initiative designed to tackle ignorant politicians and stop them talking rubbish every single time they open their mouths.

(you may find this link helpful if not all of that made sense)

iPads do not have magic learning dust coming out of the back vent

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“The iPad is just a neat tablet computer, it does not have magic learning dust coming out of the back vent” was a tweet I sent yesterday and which I wanted to follow up with a more substantive post. Being an avid twitter kind-of person, I read quite a few tweets about the iPad in education and teachers eager to introduce these to their classrooms, and it was one of these which pushed me into the mini-rant you see encapsulated above.

This is in no way an anti-iPad posting (although I imagine some will interpret it as such), it is simply a request that as educators we assess the potential of the iPad in an objective manner and learn some lessons from great education technologies of the past which promised a great deal and delivered somewhat less.

First of all, let’s start by praising the iPad and Apple’s legendary focus on usability to create iOS (the operating system which powers the iPad and the iPhone). I grew up programming in basic (I’m looking at you Clive Sinclair), graduated to strange prompt based operating system and strange winking cursors at DOS prompts, before beholding the first colour computers (an RM Nimbus in my mum’s classroom) and then machines running Windows (but never forgetting those DOS skills, because Windows was always a huge pack of cards built on top of DOS), a breath of wind in the wrong direction and you were back to C:/ and a sense that the computer was having so much more fun than you were.

So basically old gits like me have grown up accustomed to having to cajole and curse (in equal measure) our computers to get them to do ‘stuff’. Computing was never meant to be easy, it was like hand-cranking a Ford Model T, it took lots of practice, it often did not work, and the likelihood of injury was high.  When you give an iPad to someone like me, it’s like smashcutting the cave painters of Lascaux into the centre of the Sistine Chapel; their mouths hanging open in wonder as they behold their humble tools transformed into a heady display of celestial beauty. I cannot believe how easy it is to do stuff on the iPad and how the Operating System seems to anticipate so much of what you want to do. The video at the top of this blog is my daughter who is able to unlock the iPad, start YouTube, go to history and choose her favourite videos. She is 2 and a half years old. And she’s never had a single iPad lesson in her life.

All of this usability (whether you are 2.5 or 42) makes the device very productive in a range of contexts, from taking notes in a meeting, to tweeting in front of the telly, to doing some basic video editing, to writing this blog (albeit with a grown-up keyboard bluetoothed to it). The iPad is shiny and sexy and desirable and it carries that heady promise through into the user experience and there is little wonder that some teachers have been seduced by it and speculated about the impact it could have in the classroom.

But of course the fetishisation of technologies which are new on the scene  is a recurrent theme in education technology.  When the first CD-ROMs came out (the ones which needed a ‘caddy’), there was much hype about how they could transform learning.  Suddenly a single Microsoft Encarta disc could bring an entire encyclopedia to your computer screen with multimedia (sound and pictures in old money) to boot.  Surely the kids would start learning now the theory went, what can hold them back, with these resources at their fingertips they’ll be surging ahead, what could possibly stop them? If you  wind back time to the advent of educational television you would see similar sentiments being expressed about this.  In fact you can take any new technology device and see that it will be hyped as heralding a learning revolution. The same was true of the hype around Interactive Whiteboards during their first wave of implementation in British schools.

Hype is not necessarily a bad thing though, it’s just that the temptation exists to fetishise a new technology as providing all the answers to the learning problems we face.  But once the honeymoon is over and the incredible promise is not delivered, we often turn away from that technology and seek the next big thing. But part of the hype is normally always justified, the technology does indeed have transformative potential, the trick is sticking with that particular technology and extracting maximum benefit from its residual potential. A case in point is the interactive whiteboard.  Originally hyped to a point where the technology could never cash the cheques which the advocates were writing, the IWB is now a device which is extremely useful in teaching, with the right training for the teacher and pedagogical vision of how to use it. And if you disagree with this and think the iPad is a credible replacement for the IWB, then I’ll come and do a teach-off with you, me on the IWB, you on the iPad!

So here’s the thing. If you put iPads into your classroom expecting them to be magical learning devices, then prepare for disappointment; there is no magical learning dust. The only magical device in a classroom is the teacher whose imagination can create new pedagogies and the students who can enter into these pedagogies and make them work. And if you think iPads are magical learning devices, also be prepared, after the bitter recriminations about why they did not work,  to be seduced by the next big shiny thing coming over the horizon.

Technologies do not create learning revolutions, pedagogies do. And developing pedagogies is difficult, painstaking work.  Pedagogy is not a silver slimline minimalist shiny device in a cool case, ‘designed in Cupertino’; it is rather a messy, headscratching, ‘one step forward, one step back’ kind of a process which you have to inhabit, live with and work through.  Create a transformational pedagogy for your classroom and you’ll be able to sprinkle magical learning dust on just about any technology you give to your students.

NB: I know that technically the iPad does not have any back vents, as it cools via a heat sink rather than direct air circulation. But the tweet which initiated this posting was kind of ‘off the cuff’ and technical accuracy was sacrificed for twitter brevity!

Wilshaw and teacher bashing; what does it mean?

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Michael Wilshaw is the head of OfSTED and since coming to office has set about alienating and attacking teachers with what can only be described as a sense of twisted relish.  He came into office proud of his ‘Dirty Harry’ image and eager to present this aspect of his personality to the media (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15537037). This was not a chief inspector who was going to make emollient noises towards the teaching profession or offer any crumbs of comfort to struggling schools coming into the sights of his inspection teams.

This week he has popped up in the news again this time with a story about teachers and stress. Wilshaw contends that teachers do not know what stress is, and that they use stress as an unjustifiable excuse for poor performance. Likewise he argued that Head Teachers of today have never had it so good. In his early day of headship (1985) he describes how wildcat industrial action would leave him having to do lunch cover singlehandedly whilst a bunch of lefty teachers marched off the premises  because their entitlement to bourbon biscuits at afternoon break had been curtailed.  This is all faintly ridiculous, and quite rightly Wilshaw’s comments have been likened to the 4 Yorkshiremen sketch where the protagonists compete to show how hard their childhoods had been. It is clear to anyone who has ever been anywhere near a classroom, let alone taught, that it can be a very stressful business indeed.  Of course stress levels are highly dependent on context, but whatever the challenges of a particular class, the fact remains that teaching is a profession which relies on a kind of performance. It is a ritualised presentation of the self (or of a version of the self) to achieve a specified end, and for that reason the teaching itself is pressured as this performance has to be absolute. Even compliant children will seize on a weak performance and exploit it.  Yet teachers do many hours of this every day and for weeks on end.  If you read that last part and a Pavlovian bell went off in your head ringing ‘what about the holidays?’, then please please stop reading now, this article is not for you.  Outside the classroom a relentless pile of paperwork awaits, as endless political meddling in the business of schools has created layers of extra administration which all need completing.  Wilshaw said nothing of this in his glib speech, nor paradoxically of the rise of OfSTED as an adversarial agency of educational inspection, replacing the more consensual and developmental ethos of the Local Authority Inspection which proceeded OfSTED (pre 2001). It would be fascinating to have the exact number of teachers days lost to stress as a direct result of OfSTED inspections, and this would be a very high number indeed.

So why is Wilshaw attacking teachers and painting them as a bunch of whingers? His job is to raise educational standards, which suggests that keeping teachers on side rather than alienating might be the wise move, unless of course he is going to return to the heroic exploits of his youth and make it round to every failing school in the land to teach a few lessons whilst the teachers sit around in the staffroom and moan about how difficult everything is.

One explanation is that these kind of stories please his political paymasters back in Whitehall.  Characterising teachers as unproductive plays beautifully into one of the dominant narratives of the Conservative party, namely the myth of the unproductive and wasteful public sector. This narrative paints the public sector as a drain on the nation’s finances, with billions being wasted on second rate expensive services which could be delivered so much better by the private sector. It was this flawed logic which provided the flimsiest fig-leaf of justification for the NHS bill (ignoring the fact that the NHS is one of the most efficient health services in the world).

Teachers are a problem for the Conservative party. They are well organised and most belong to unions which offer support and a united front against the worst excesses of political meddling.  National pay and conditions have survived to date, as have national standards for teacher training and in the last decade, enhanced pay for exceptional teachers who want to stay in the classroom rather than pursue careers in management.  The political answer to this has been the Academies Programme where local pay and conditions can be set, breaking the national framework and weakening the collective bargaining of the profession.  With unions fragmented, the opportunity presents itself for the neo-liberal tendency to start picking off parts of education. You can see the promotional literature sent to heads in 4 years time: ‘Maths department failing? Well sack them all, and “Virgin Teaching” can step in and provide a team of teachers to bring it back up to standard’. At the moment this scenario is not a possibility (no doubt much to the frustration of Gove et. al).  Despite years of inexorable erosion of their status, teachers are still largely well regarded and too powerful to allow this kind of liberty to be taken.  Which is where attacks on teachers, such as those mounted by Wilshaw come into play. They aim to gradually weaken public support for universal education and for teachers as a national professional body.  If Wilshaw’s next speech opens with ‘teachers’ holidays are too long’, then I won’t be surprised, as such attacks play brilliantly to the indignant middle England Daily Mail crowd and increase the public perception that teachers have an easy life and the profession is ripe for reform.

It is disappointing that  Wilshaw, who holds a position of great responsibility and the chance to be a different kind of OfSTED working in partnership with teachers, is using his position to mount attacks on teachers to further the ends of this government and its neo-liberal agenda of the destruction of public services.

Image courtesy of Ian Boyd under Creative Commons Licence.                                     Available http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsaboyd/5397010770/

CampEd12…

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This weekend was CampEd12, a learning festival held, for the first time, near Oxenhope in Yorkshire.  The event was conceived after Tim Rylands commented that learning conferences were often too expensive and disappointing and he could run a better one from his shed.  The idea went viral on twitter amongst UK twitterers involved in education and the concept of ShedFest was borne, with a seamless change of name to avoid the conflict with a wine festival which had already ‘bagsied’ the ShedFest name.  Camped12 shares much of its DNA with ‘Learning on the Beach’ events (organised by John Davitt), and with the ‘unconference’ concept where the top down organisation and control of the conventional conference is rejected in favour of a looser structure, a more democratic mode of participation and a more affordable price tag to boot.

Thanks to the hard work and dedication of Dughall McCormick (@dughall), Bill Lord (@joga5) and Helen Daykin (@helendaykin); what started as a tiny little riff on twitter – 140 characters of aspiration with nothing solid behind it; turned into reality as a full education festival emerged complete with a tea urn, portaloos and people travelling from all over England to take part.  I was lucky enough to attend, and had a brilliant time, meeting new people, meeting people I had only before known from Twitter, and renewing acquaintances with people I know both in real space and on twitter.

Sat down on the final evening, chatting about CampEd12, @Dughall and I had a brief conversation about the event and the great opportunities it presented for both the children who came (there were lots, CampEd12 was a real family event), and the parents.  The kids got to do some really cool things such as: geocaching (using GPS to find hidden goodies on the site), den building, practical science, arts and crafts, astronomy and a game of perpetual football on the top field which would still be going on now if the parents had not hidden the ball. We then got to talking about how ‘middle class’ the event was. We weren’t completely consumed with guilt (I don’t think), that the event *was* middle class, but there was also a realisation that the children who could gain the most from #CampEd12, and see learning in a new light, set in the context of engagement with the outdoors and practical activities were also those least likely to ever have a chance to experience it.  Children trapped in urban poverty in Northern Cities just 30 minutes travel from the CampEd12 site, children whose parents for whatever reason, don’t have the social capital and networks to connect them into events like this or the required knowledge and confidence to take part.

I think that many (perhaps even ‘most’) teachers believe that educational opportunities should be available to all (regardless of background or economic circumstances), and therefore educators have a moral and ethical obligation to find ways of spreading opportunities to as many as possible.   So this lays down a challenge to CampEd.  What could be done to enable participation in this event for those least likely to ever come to it? Is that possible, and if possibile, is the desire there to make this happen? Is the CampEd ethos and methodology one which could somehow be tweaked to give the event a social impact far beyond its original ambitions?

The left hand image is of the campsite for CampEd12, the right hand side is a derelict community building in Bradford. The Bradford image is creative commons licenced and provided by kind permission of Tim Green on Flickr and is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/6882270649/

We’re going on a Gove Hunt

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Michael Rosen has written an open letter to Michael Gove this week (http://bit.ly/wOR2vl). Rosen is critical of Gove’s policy and approaches, I think it’s fair to say he’s not Gove’s biggest fan.  Rosen’s classic children’s book casts the bear in the role of the scary monster, but what if we were to face our modern day demons and go on a Gove hunt….