Now build it out with an evocative vision. Improvise progress by tinkering: with lots of trial and lots of error. The not knowing is the best bit: the mysteries the surprises, and from time to time the windfalls!
Hello there, I'm Steve Collis!
Click on "contact", won't you, and wave right back at me?
Imagine a Primary student who is extremely reluctant about writing...
...composing a careful, polished, 10 minute script where two individuals dig deep in their quest to understand what 'democracy' really is, invoking history and the original Greek root of the word in the process, and all this in every day language!
How is this possible?
Well, via a little tool called 'Xtranormal'. Xtranormal allows students to compose a comic film, including camera angles, actors, speech intonation, and so forth.
The student in question chose to make the conversation to be between Queen Elizabeth II and, well, some guy on the street. It is actually very witty, to boot.
In the first 45 seconds or so it's a bit slow to start, but the rest is pure gold:
I've created a video tour of our Open Sim virtual world in its current state. We opened it to student leaders 6 months ago, and then to any student a few weeks ago, and momentum has now built up.
The island is available 24/7 and is slowly being built by its student population.
To me, this space exemplifies 'community of practice' learning processes. Behaviour is self-regulated. Learning is organic, spontaneous and authentic.
In the video:
0 min - I walk through the initial forest, through the 'sandpit' where anyone can build,
1 min - to Booralie Metropolis, where teams of students claim land and put up buildings.
4:30 - I show the process by which objects in the world can be programmed.
5:30 - Next, I fly around the entire island showing some class projects, including quiz chairs linked to Moodle using SLOODLE.
7:30 - Finally, I conclude with some comments about the nature of learning and power of 'community of practice' learning. I think schooling as we know it needs to go extinct as soon as possible. Schooling has toxic elements that breed passivity and alienation in a good proportion of the students... students who will otherwise go on to have highly successful lives. A 'learning village' model has been articulated and is long overdue.
I’ll start with myth, which I will define as the archetypical stories and collective schema that tend to cross all time, space and culture, and somehow collect and distil rock-bottom basic aspects of our experience of existence.
By ‘collective schema’ I mean that we share these myths around. ‘Superman’ is a myth. We all know the myth. Like many myths it explores what we are not, which creates a contrast for us with what we actually are. If you walk out of a ‘Superman’ film wishing you too could fly, you’re more keenly aware that you can’t fly. The myth accents your non-flying essence.
Our society is woven together with myths. Democracy is mythic, and so is money. They’re both a collective hallucination. Luckily, we all appear to be hallucinating simultaneously.
This morning I was exploring recent internet ‘memes’ – you know, those highly popular, repeated images, videos, emails & whatnot?
I landed on this sophisticated discussion of memes, which included a link to this tool for exploring the take up and repetition of key phrases in the media, such as “our entire economy is in danger”.
A meme might be a cat that plays the piano, or a political explanation that everyone adopts and repeats.
What if we thought of memes as neurons in the collective hive-mind? What is ‘Twitter’ if not a hive-mind? The shape of the twitter conversation seems to me not dissimilar to the shape of our own personal internal dialogue: contradictory, messy, replete with tensions, misinformation, fears, unwitting gaps, idealism, factoids and fun.
With a computer processing metaphor, we all replicate the conversation locally.
Think it through: you can’thave a thought that someone else hasn’t already had, because we think with language and symbols that have been inherited from our culture and communities of practice.
You know what a midlife crisis is, right? Well, you couldn’t have had that thought before 1970, and here is proof. Do you think ‘adolescence’ is a salient and useful term? I certainly do, but I would not have in 1800. Which is more discussed in our society, heaven or hell? Do you prefer to use the term global warming, or climate change? We are like lego builders with an inherited set of lego.
Individuals are actually variations on a theme, rather than stand-alone universes. The melody of your mind is ever-so-close to the melody of mine. We play the same notes.
I am not sure that you and I are different people. We have words for ‘me’ and ‘you’ but are we not both participating in an extremely similar human experience, defined by a common cultural legacy and a shared collective consciousness?
You might imagine why the following discovery left my jaw dangling several inches from my face:
When I lift my right arm, there are a whole bunch of neurons that, statistically, fire together. Now, when I see you lift your right arm, a subset of those same neurons also fire together. These neurons are called ‘mirror neurons’ and they are threaded through our brains. This is one basis for empathy: it’s not just that I imaginatively put myself in your shoes to feel what you are feeling, it’s that I fundamentally understand you in terms of my own experience. And why not? Your experiences of doubt, joy, anticipation and regret are the same as mine. These experiences are mythic.
We are iterations of each other. We are cells in the same body.
At our most fulfilled and most actualised, we perceive this commonality. The sense of being caught up in something greater than ourselves is in fact the feeling of ‘coming home’.
In emergent behaviour of crowds, mobs, communities and cults there is always a fine line between the sane and insane. We want a checking-mechanism, where we retreat into individuality, and independently sort through and renegotiate the connection between what I stand for and what we stand for. Otherwise… well there’s the Nazis, Rwanda, that group that bullied you or that you bullied with, or that bullies you or that you bully with. It’s one and the same – collective brutality is as common as our own individual struggles.
So I am not saying I am a subset of the crowd. Rather, we exist individually, yet independently resonate. Imagine that! Imagine that, travelling all the way out here into individuality, then opening my eyes and finding you right here with me? Uncanny…
Now introduce the concept of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ into our patchwork-quilt communities.
If I am a note in our collective chord, are you muffling me, or vice versa?
In the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus, Echo’s voice is a facsimile of Narcissus’. Have you ever been in a relationship where you were the Echo to someone else’s Narcissus? It’s a scary insight when it comes. You’ve internalised the language of others about you and this language has become you.
“You’re a bit of a flirt, you know.”
“Why do you have to upstage everyone?”
“You’re ALWAYS late!”
Or the opposite “You’re going to go far!” (But I don’t want to go far!) Or “You’ve gone quite far enough!” (But I want to go further. I want to be further.)
We get infected with a meme-virus. The infection comes from hearing portraits of ourselves in the words and reactions of others, and then our own psyche takes that self-simulation and co-opts it into the self-concept.
This means we construct each other.
If society is a shared hallucination then you and I are mini-tornadoes. To talk of ‘me’ in disconnection with my community is hopeless. I am nothing if not a Venn-diagram of overlapping discourses within which I am complicit, caught up, dependent and compelled.
Who do you Echo? For whom are you Narcissus?
I can’t get the myth out of my head because my wife has been studying Greek mythology and coughed it all up in this song. When she plays, each note has an echo, and I’m acutely aware that even in this blog post my every sentence is an echo of someone else’s clever thought. Life is one big mash-up!? The song captures the longing of the excluded. It is a beautiful work, if I do say so myself.
If you are a teacher, are your students the Echo to your Narcissus? If you keep your face can they also keep theirs? But that’s a baby-question – most (or many?) of us are aware of the damage and destruction our ego can do to the young ones in our care, right? We know that the great myth of TEACHER-POWER is destructive in its silencing of young voices.
In our society some have voice and some do not. Voice is currency. This is the ability to be heard. There is nothing worse than being voice-less. If you are voice-less you are less than Echo.
This is the power of the argument for the animal rights movement. A cow or a monkey cannot object. They can’t write a letter to the newspaper, they can’t negotiate, and they can’t pursue their case through the courts.
Hence the modern-myth "The Planet of the Apes" where we find ourselves in the same predicament.
The passion aroused over the plight of refugees is the same in nature.
Oh, and then there is the plight of women over most of recorded history. Edited into non-existence, it appears.
When we deny individuals a voice, we are denying them participation andactualisation. If life is communal, and society is a symphony, voiceless individuals are the ‘rests’. We are all the poorer for it.
If you analyse schools with this apparatus, you get a game of ‘winners and losers’. Winners are Echo. Examinations are Echo-checking devices.
Schooling is a game, and it teaches young people how to win at the schooling game. Is the student who sits at the front of the class and Echoes the status quo really being actualised? Or is this one big exercise in complicity?
Went to school and I was very nervous,
No one knew me, no one knew me.
Hello teacher, tell me what’s my lesson?
Looked right through me, looked right through me.
This is no promotion of brutal individualism. The ability to resonate with others is crucial; to Echo them, resonate with them, and work with them to create something new. After all, I started by emphasising our collective consciousness, where we each Echo each other, and something amazing emerges.
So, the myth that I propose for the future of schooling, in unison with many others, is the myth of community. It works as well for young people as for adults.
It is the great return to the pre-industrial mode of existence. It is post-factory. Post-institution. Post-modern. Post-Christian. (But not post-Christ. Christ is post-Christian. If anyone was edupunk…).
At a recent Christian symposium on the future of education my colleague invoked some thoughtful silence by suggesting we need ‘anarchy’. He said this in reaction to a discussion that had taken hold on ‘accreditation’.
Accreditation, timetables, uniforms, bell times, standardised testing, examinations, rules, reports, syllabi, and a tribe of mini-kings called teachers.
As I type I am suddenly distracted by my distracting reference to Christianity. And then I thought: I might as well be talking about churches as about schools. It’s the same situation. I’ll leave that there.
What if school were a village?
Some had skills and could model them for others?
Some were great leaders?
Some were great supporters?
Some loved to live at the fringe, and were given space to live there, and celebrated for their wonderful fringe-ness?
Some sprinted. Some dawdled. Many did both, in rhythms and cadences that we’d all recognise as native to the breadth of the human journey?
A village of overlapping Echos?
I’m not sure you’d need payed individuals. I’m not sure there would be a distinction between staff and students. I’m not sure you could delineate the learning village from ‘the rest of life’ in a meaningful way or that it would start aged 5 or end aged 18, or be centrally located.
Or accredited. Or run from Monday to Friday.
How would structure arise in this situation? How would the ‘anarchy’ be anything other than ‘anarchy’?
My colleague proposed ‘anarchy’ as a relative juxtaposition in absolute terms. There is no such thing as anarchy! Birds fly in V shapes, and humans form quasi-neural networks like cells in a body.
We can't help it. You don't need to enforce it with bits of paper or Skinner boxes.
The structure in a learning village will come from the same impulse that makes me say “SHHHHH” to the guy in the cinema who answers his mobile phone.
That’s how communities work.
Did you get your job on the strength of your HSC examination results? Or because you connected meaningfully and convincingly in your interview? It is a travesty that universities accept students on the strength of their ability to play the school game.
The only game in town is community, our only dream is belonging, and our only aspiration is participation.
That is my myth.
And to the extent that ‘schooling’ distorts it, I say schooling must go! Let’s close all schools next Monday, stop for a month and have a very honest think.
Then, with fear and trembling, let’s start from scratch with nothing sacred except
P.S. This sound too abstract? Check out Bianca Hewes, who is coming over all praxis with this stuff: http://biancahewes.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/this-is-my-classroom/ . We put the same mythic concepts into action at my school too, and I hope they spread like the best of all memes.
- ok so what range of characteristics do classrooms tend to have?
- go to www.realaudienceproject.com and click anywhere to see how my school uses virtual 'stage' space where the students are positioned as performers for a global audience.
- go to www.secondlife.com and get an account, download the software, and start exploring.
- read below to find out ahead of time what Steve will say! Press play on the videos, but turn your sound down!
Intro: Technology is Space
Technology is space. Space mediates relationships. The question for any technology, including virtual worlds, is “How does this space mediate relationships?”
For example, YouTube may contain world-class quality explanations of key concepts in various fields. This space establishes a new relationship between the creator of the resource and the students, even though they have never met (an author/reader or surrogate teacher/student relationship) and reframes the relationship of the local school teacher to the students (reframing the teacher’s role as ‘mentor’ or ‘troubleshooter’). Interesting this relationship-shift can occur without the local teacher being aware of it. I mean, the student realises they don’t need the teacher as a source of information or explanation, but the teacher is unaware their assumptions about their role are redundant.
3D Virtual Worlds
‘3D Virtual Worlds’ is a broad description. All kinds of commercial (World of Warcraft) and non-commercial (Minecraft) games, and self-consciously educational (Quest Atlantis) spaces fit this description. What is a game? What is a space? Plenty of blurring here, and vast numbers of young people gain a wide variety of skills in these environments with no involvement by school at all. (It should make us go pale to consider our school could be the place the young person goes to where the learning ceases for 6 hours a day).
At my school, I have driven the establishment of two 3D virtual world spaces, the first with ‘Second Life’ and the second with ‘Open Sim’. Second Life have closed their teen service, so now we are left with ‘Open Sim’.
The two look similar, and in fact you use the same program on your computer to access each: the ‘Second Life’ program.
How We Set Them Up
With our original Second Life island (run by the company Linden Lab), we payed to have a locked-down space created for us, although we had account-control, i.e. I could set up accounts manually for our staff and students only.
With Open Sim, we pay a company called ‘Reaction Grid’ to run the main program on their computer server, and then students connect by running the Second Life program on their computer, with a special redirect option that links them to our server. Again, we have account control. We pay about $175 a month for this.
We’ve then asked Reaction Grid to set up for us a mass-import tool so I can set up, for instance, an entire year group of students. The tool also allows us to preconfigure what new users will look like and what objects they will have in their inventory.
Finally, Reaction Grid installed ‘Sloodle’ on our server so that we can integrate our 3D world with our Moodle learning management system.
Frankly, both Open Sim and Second Life are dogs of programs. They are not elegant, or reliable, or easy to set up, or easy to access.
However they also allow for hyper-engagement, -creativity, -collaboration. For me it’s well worth the trouble for the benefits, but I can’t pretend it is an easy project.
How We Keep It Safe
Let me be brief:
- We induct volunteer leaders who are particularly protective of the space.
- Everyone agrees to a behaviour charter before getting an account. Download The New Booralie Charter. It is extremely strict and enforced harshly.
- Leaders wear special leadership-hat, and students logging in from home wear a special log-in-from-home hat. They get these items from me. This makes it easy to identify them.
That’s about it. The space is safe because of the culture maintained by our leadership group. Once a week the leaders and anyone else who wants to meet up with me at lunch. Students swap information and techniques and showcase their work.
What Happens in the World
The best way to understand this is through this video:
In summary:
- Students learn to build, and code the world, and run their own incredible projects. They teach each other, and make it all happen under their own steam.
- In addition, teachers run directed, structured activities designed to promote understanding through discussion, and also to drill or explore basic skills.
A New Possibility – 3D Courses Using Sloodle
‘Sloodle’ is a series of 3D manifestations of Moodle tools, such as the ‘assignment’, ‘choice’ and ‘quiz’ tools. The student self-registers by clicking on a booth in the 3D world. From then on, when they interact with the special 3D tools, data comes in from Moodle and is returned to Moodle on their behalf.
For instance, this is footage of my Year 8 French students sitting on a quiz chair. As they answer the questions, the chair goes up into the sky if they get the answer right:
I have now set up special towers which students ascend via three tiered quiz chairs. Right up the top of each tower is a special password – their quest!
There is incredible potential for 3D courses to be developed. Students could explore the course in 3D space, like a pilgrim, and the journey of learning could move from figurative to literal, in a space that is virtually physical. I know of cases where this sort of thing is happening in universities, and there must be other High School examples too. For us it is the next step, and for me the French towers are the beginning of something very exciting.
Last term, in the process of pulling together the 'Effectiveness' training day, I decided that thriving as a teacher boils down to these five elements, and in each of the five we face dilemmas and contradictions. In each of the five there is insight and clarity to be had: a path forward through the forest.
Below is a brain dump on them. I hope it sparks your own thinking. You might use the 5 headings as a way of gathering your own observations, insights and curiosity.
Oh and please if you're local to Sydney, come hang out with me on June 9 and we can explore them together!
Self
Almost every challenge is a self-challenge. Our biggest limitations are our self limitations. Our self-conceptions, self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-love, and so on, set the upper limit on all other development. For instance if a colleague or student really gets under your skin, the problem isn't with them, but with you. It simply gets projected outward onto what you perceive as reality.
I remember going pale with shock at a certain moment when I realised how much my 'self' was constructed by concepts of who I was that OTHER people had, and that I had then internalised and taken at face value. Rewrite the script!
Work
You have reports due Thursday, parent-teacher night tonight, three students you have to catch in the playground, a cheque requisition form to drop off at the office, two unplanned lessons, a conversation you have to have to with a colleague, a phone call to see a dentist, a stack of marking, and then when you glance up you realise there are 30 new unread emails! This is no caricature or hyperbole, is it? In fact I could go much further without exaggeration.
How can we thrive in the complexity and chaos of school? How can we be creative when we only get the top 5% of our 'to do list' done?
I have felt so much better since I cracked this one with the GTD methodology. Once again I recommend How to Get Things Done by David Allen. It is a life saver. Or... come to my next workshop!
People
All work is people-work, especially at school. Students are people. Colleagues are people. We convince, inspire, neglect, insult, deride, undermine, praise, negotiate with, get permission from, give permission to, equip, resource, empower, assist, mentor, damage, save and enable each other.
Picture a school as a network, focal points around optimists, pessimists, leaders, and gate keepers. Where do you fit on this map? What are you broadcasting? What are you known for?
A helpful tool I find is the notion of 'social currency'. What is your currency? Is it high or low?
How can you improve your currency? How can you use it to better shape your responsibilities? How can you use it to benefit others?
Change
Well everything is changing. Society is changing. Traditional schooling is a dead duck, plain and simple. The model we grew up with, and see in films and in soap operas, is bankrupt. Schools that don't come to terms with this will not survive another 10 years. I suspect many schools will indeed go under, while new schools will be seeded with a much different charter and radically different structures.
Much resistance to change comes from the reality that we are confident experts of the old model, whereas much of the new model is still to be worked out. If a teacher has spent 5 or 10 years of their career perfecting techniques for 'getting control' of their class, they may be reluctant to embrace a model where 'control' is not even sought.
It's not only starting from scratch, but it's going where no man has gone before. Yikes!
But then, who said we had a choice?
Space
I repeat this like an automaton now. I think these words are original, so yes you can quote me:
"Technology mediates relationships. Space mediates relationships. Technology is space."
Gettit? Two people in a meadow. Their proximity allows them to hear each other and have a conversation. The space mediates the relationship. If they stand further away they can't hear each other, so no conversation, so no relationship.
Ah, but if they use technology... such as smoke signals, or a telephone, then although they are not in the same physical space they are in the same virtual space. Technology is space. Technology creates space.
Furniture is technology and is also therefore space.
How does your classroom mediate relationships? The shape of your room is technology. The furniture is technology. The layout, centres of gravity, signs and decorations, doors and windows, are technology.
And yes of course the computers and internet are also technology, and are also therefore space. Does your class move through virtual space as well as physical? Do you help your students nurture a virtual persona? Do they publish online? Do they tweet? Do they Skype? Does each have a profile page representing their current learning? Do they answer questions from other students in other schools, and ask their own questions in turn?
Very tricky one, space. Whatever we do we mustn't take it at face value, or ignore it. Every decision about the physical space of the learning environment, from chairs to the internet, is laden with meaning and implications.
