/GAT Project/ The Granny Cloud

If this is the first you've heard of the GAT Course (I haven't revealed what it stands for - can you guess?), it's an experiment at creating a school learning structure that is NOT programmed ahead of time, and is radically student-driven. One student is studying photography, another is writing a book, and another is running a social justice initiative. We hope to grow this structure to encompass all of Year 9 and 10 by 2013. 

New South Wales readers might ask me "Is it a Board endorsed course?" I'm not telling. You can guess!

The Granny Cloud

In my second post (this is post #4) I discussed bureaucracy and paperwork. I want the bureaucracy around the G.A.T. Course to be empowering.

I heard the term "Granny Cloud" at the MYSA conference last term. Using the metaphor for cloud computing, the speaker spoke of that 'cloud' of expertise and availability of retirees; of 'grannies'. 

I have interpreted the term to include non-retirees; anyone 'out there in society' with expertise and a willingness to share their know-how with students in schools.

Primary schools often do this well already. We have volunteer mums and dads who come on site to give individual support to students to develop their reading skills etc. When I was a tiny thing I still remember a mum correcting me that 'island' is pronounced 'ayland' not 'eezland' in a one on one session. Bless her for volunteering! 

In the GAT Course we have students with a variety of interests and projects. After three lessons, students have written up contingent 'project plans', which are very simple, changeable summaries of what they want to create and what skills they might work on along the way, with due dates to help create coherence and momentum. 

Meanwhile, I've sent word out to our wider school community: WHO HAS A SKILL THEY'RE WILLING TO SHARE? I've defined different levels of sharing: volunteers can sign up for an occasional phone conversation, or giving occasional feedback on student creations, or offer to create one of our online 'skill badges' (see last post), or run a workshop. 

Here is part of the google form they use to volunteer:

Their responses go into a google doc which we, as mentors in the course, can use to match to student projects. 

Katrina's Story

For me, Katrina's situation pretty much sums it up. She loves creative writing. She writes lots of stories. She writes lots of novellas. In fact, Katrina has already developed, by herself, the habit of carefully recording and cataloguing her ideas, and even entire passages, in a trove which she can then consult and draw from in future. She might write a passage that just occurs to her, disconnected from any context or broader narrative. She's intuitively realised that a subset of the creativity skill is the habit of treasuring and protecting all ideas without judgement, knowing that they ferment, and recombine, and may prove fertile ground for a new direction at any time.

What good is school, if school gets in the way of the development of Katrina's writing? She doesn't need a teacher. She doesn't need assessment tasks. She doesn't need a sequence of learning activities.

Katrina needs:

- an audience of readers who can feed back to her better information about how they are engaging with her stories.

- a community of fellow-writers, such as those that exist in internet forums, to support each other, egg each other on, applaud each other, and set the bar higher and higher.

- industry-level advice on how to get published.

- to attend local writers workshops.

- to teach other students writing skills and creativity skills.

- well-informed technical review of her best work.

As one of the 'teachers' of the GAT Course, the best thing I can do for Katrina is make these things happen for her.

Can you see where our Granny Cloud fits into this picture?

Last week, Katrina brought in a 100 page document and asked for feedback. I can't be the person to do that. I've got to create structures that allow the GAT project to scale up to 300 students. I have in mind one 'teacher' for 20 to 25 students. 

But now I can outsource the feedback to the Granny Cloud. In the Granny Cloud I have every confidence I can provide Katrina with industry-level advice, feedback, a passionate readership, and publishing opportunities. 

My first announcement calling for volunteers is only a few days ago. The first responses are trickling in. 

Here is a peek at the google doc so far: (no grannies yet, actually, but I love the term Granny Cloud so much that I'll stick with it).

I'm getting shivers down my spine just reading that now!

What will occur in the students' minds as we link them up in a collaborative alliance with industry experts? How will their horizons expand? The whiff of the possible? The sheer REALITY of their learning, with applicability just at their fingertips; tantalising, seductive?

The insanity of the school-bubble can be burst. This isn't an artificial institution, but a launch-pad of careers.

A Learning Village

Time again I think: our society is recovering from industrialisation. Industrialisation was our adolescence, but now we're overturning its artificiality and returning to mythic, tribal modes of relating. Tribal, but not regressive. Mythic, but not mystic; I simply mean a cure for institutionalisation. Wikipedia is a community, not a company, right?

When school is at its best it is a community. At its worst it is an institution. 

The more school can be integrated with wider society, the less of an institution it can be. A million ideas are now on my mind but I will say only this: when school has truly become a learning village, an integrated component of local society, where a love of learning is kindled and expertise is shared freely by whoever has it, then we won't need the word 'school' any more.

The granny cloud is a delightful step in that direction! 

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts entitled /GAT Project/ They will appear regularly at this website, categorised under 'GAT Project'. If you'd like to receive future posts, you can:

- click here to subscribe to Steve's blog in general by email, or here in a reader.

- click here http://www.happysteve.com/contact/ and indicate 'GAT Posts Only' in the message body - I'll email you when I update the GAT Project just for the duration of the series.

- or regularly check this link for new posts: http://www.happysteve.com/blog/tag/gat-project

/GAT Project/ Visualising the System

Here's a very rough model for how this crazy G.A.T. course will function.

I've brain-dumped the draft system we're working with into this video.

Key secondary systems that emerge are:

- an ecoystem of 'skill badges' that will grow the longer we run the course.

- a growing network database of local experts in various fields. These experts may be other students, staff, friends, family, or local high-achievers such as published authors or successful business people.

- a growing public 'body of work' which may exist in disparate forms: websites, print books, special events, cultural shifts and so on, but which we will try capture and publish as far as possible in a system likely to be similar to our already existing Real Audience Project

...more coming soon. We launch on Friday afternoon.

This is the third in a series of blog posts entitled /GAT Project/ They will appear regularly at this website, categorised under 'GAT Project'. If you'd like to receive future posts, you can:

- click here to subscribe to Steve's blog in general by email, or here in a reader.

- click here http://www.happysteve.com/contact/ and indicate 'GAT Posts Only' in the message body - I'll email you when I update the GAT Project just for the duration of the series.

- or regularly check this link for new posts: http://www.happysteve.com/blog/tag/gat-project

/GAT Project/ Steve's Philosophy on Bureaucracy & Gamification

This is blog post #2 on the /GAT Project/ series. (In short, I'm working with a colleague to create a course for Year 9 and 10 that is radically student-directed, and easily scalable.)

Before the course starts, I want to proclaim my distrust of bureaucratic systems as a 'means of control' or 'means of measurement'.

Consider:

- a prospective employee has a great CV, and is ok in interview, but turns out to be a poor performer. The CV was a poor measurement (and so was the bureaucratic and artificial interview process).

- a teacher has fantastic program documents but is a poor practitioner and the students are uninspired.

- another teacher has poor paperwork but students testify their lives have been changed forever.

- a student gets top marks in an exam but goes on to flunk university.

- another student performs poorly at school but goes on to become Prime Minister, or found the Virgin empire.

- there is an official school policy that no one follows.

- a student has messy 'bookwork', and is censured for it, but is highly gifted in many areas. 

Paperwork and bureaucracy are not functioning well in these scenarios. They certainly do not merit the investment and confidence often put in them. 

So, you can imagine my cynicism when my school is 'inspected' and the inspectors, just doing their jobs, spend three days in a room ploughing through paperwork.

Frankly, I've achieved much of whatever I've achieved so far in my career by tactically ignoring or 'fobbing off' bureaucratic systems in order to invest time and energy in initiatives I deem far more worthy. 

I see bureaucracy and paperwork as existing in a kind of parallel universe to 'the real world'.

In the worst case scenario, 'the system' is mistaken for the real world. 

I have two observations for how 'the system' might mesh nicely and serve us rather than distorting us.

Observation 1. Culture When paperwork does match reality, it does so because of the pre-existing culture that leads to the paperwork in the first place.

There is a kind of mass-complicity that occurs, and this complicity allows the bureaucracy to function. For example, tax returns. The tax system works well in Australia because there is a sufficiently honest, complicit culture of wanting to contribute fairly. In Greece, it appears there is less complicity in the tax system, and to that extent the system is less successful. Money, and democracy are two other examples that come to mind. My point is, it's the culture that matters, not the bureaucratic system around it.

This is why it is so very difficult to impose a democratic bureaucracy on a country that does not have a democratic culture. The democratic systems only work if there is an underlying complicity.

A school that, culturally, understands bullying and does not tolerate it, will obviously have an established and published procedure on the issue. Another school might have a published procedure, but it's irrelevant because it is ignored, or followed in a lip-service fashion.

So, don't talk to me about paperwork, talk to me about culture and complicity. 

For the /GAT Course/, I'll be looking for culture and complicity, not bureaucracy and paperwork.

Observation 2. Concretisation Everyone likes a tick in a box! We can generate extrinsic/concrete systems in local ways as a deliberate 'life-hack' fuel for our current ambitions.

When someone awards me a certificate, or gives me an 'A', or writes me a letter, or pays me money, or when I dress in a suit, or write a 'to do' list, or graph my car's tripometer, or get retweeted, or when I get a high score on Angry Birds, or when I successfully avoid walking on any lines on a concrete path... in all these diverse situations there is a process I'm going to call concretisation or externalisation.

What I mean is making sense of life, the universe, and everything by creating externalised measurement scaffolding.

Because life is insanely subjective. It's pure subjectivity. How, for instance, am I going to answer the question "How am I going here? Am I doing well?" For me it's an unanswerable question. For, in my internal reality, philosophically, there are no landmarks on my journey. I'm like a passenger on a train travelling through a countryside with no features - I have no way to guage speed or progress. Someone else with the same opportunities as myself might have achieved a lot more than I have by now. For this same reason I find the question unanswerable for others, too. I have no apparatus for measuring other people. I can only assume they're doing the best they know how, like I am. 

We all intuit this, don't we? Ask someone who has been deemed by popular opinion to have 'made it' whether they feel like they've really 'made it'. The answer will be 'no'. There is always another challenge, another goal, another ambition.

Yet there are others, and I aspire to be one of them, who have not by popular measurements 'made it', but reek of peace, centredness, and serene authenticity. 

So, personally, I give up on any abstract philosophical sense of 'progress'. I want to exult in the joy of life, connect with other people as if the moment stretched to eternity, you know, all that funky stuff!?!?

And another thing I love is a tick in a box, or to cross off an item on a 'to do' list, or to receive a certificate, or get retweeted. I love the view I get from the top of a look-out, especially after I've cycled up there. I also love levelling up in the 'Dark Age of Camelot' game. Beautiful music plays, lights come down from heaven and saturate me, and my avatar gets more power to kill more badies!

I have a project list which defines what I am trying to achieve in life at work and at home. I use this externalised system to track progress in each area, and I celebrate my progress at arbitrary but predefined check points.

We all love a tick in a box. We don't have to take it too seriously. It's not measuring absolute or philosophical progress, but that doesn't mean it's not a useful tool to move in meaningful directions.

I can use reward systems, intrinsic or extrinsic, as a kind of 'life-hack' to fuel my motivation and sense of momentum in directions I want to embrace, and I can train students to do the same. I can use the infrastructure even while I subvert it. It's cheeky. It's transcendant. 

This is where a bureaucracy can be used purposefully, as a means to an end. The levelling system in 'Dark Age of Camelot' is no less bureaucratic than my tax return or end of year examinations. Surprise, surprise, it depends entirely on how the process is framed, not on the process itself. When we discuss 'gamification' (a term so recent it doesn't even feature on Google ngrams), we must acknowledge that school is already a game, and that every human reward system gamefies life to some degree. 

In applying this to the /GAT Course/ I'll be looking to teach the students to understand how the joy of learning can dovetail seamlessly with the life-hack of concretisation. They can make road-maps, celebrate milestones, win badges, and leave their own badges behind for other students to win too. It will be just like scouts! Students and staff can define, and redefine, and deconstruct, and reconstruct the game in a local, improvised, and collaborative fashion.

I wonder if I've lost you on this second observation. Does it sound like post-modern fluff for Generation Entertain-Me-Now? 

Have a look at Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development.

In the modern era we were infatuated with A System. A criticism of the modern era is that we mistook The System we discovered as final, objective, universal reality. 

To flourish in the aftermath of the modern era we can do better than a bureaucracy. We can work locally, meaningfully, with our eyes on invisible things, and clothing and reclothing ourselves in visible systems only to serve what we stand for. 

Why can't we help every student to reach stage 6 or 7 in Kohlberg's model? Why not aim that high?

Yet, how often does the school system operate at stage 4, and encourage the students to do the same?

We can do better.

This is the second in a series of blog posts entitled /GAT Project/ They will appear regularly at this website, categorised under 'GAT Project'. If you'd like to receive future posts, you can:

- click here to subscribe to Steve's blog in general by email, or here in a reader.

- click here http://www.happysteve.com/contact/ and indicate 'GAT Posts Only' in the message body - I'll email you when I update the GAT Project just for the duration of the series.

- or regularly check this link for new posts: http://www.happysteve.com/blog/tag/gat-project

/GAT Project/ Intro - Steve Puts His Money Where His Mouth Is

O hai everyone! Welcome to the revamped website!

This is the first in a series of posts tracking a radical new school structure I am pioneering with my colleague Ms Talar Khatchoyan in Years 9 and 10. It's a pilot program that could become universal.

We're calling it the GAT Class, for reasons I shall explain one day. 

The premise: No program. No tests. No teacher talk. No outcomes. No bureaucracy.

The students will show up on day 1, and will begin to define their own learning pathway as they find clarity regarding where they want to go.

We're starting with a modest number of students, with an entire spectrum of academic track records. In fact, during the pilot, the students themselves will help equip the structures around the course.

Structure?! Well, yes, of course: structure is the million dollar question.

Structure does not equal bureaucracy or paper work, does not need to emerge from the teacher, does not need to be the same for each student, does not need to be set in concrete.

Structure, rigour, pressure, accountability, wild ambition, real-world application, light-bulb moments at two-a-penny. All this and more, is the aim. / GAT / is going to be nitro-learning, steroid-learning; the sort of learning that happens when you're obsessed and in love and are veritably seduced by the process.

More, I cannot tell for the moment. Stand by for the unfolding saga! Talar will post her thoughts here too, as will students. We'll document the whole journey and hopefully we'll see how structured learning can be without any of the standard structures we associate with schooling.

This is the first in a series of blog posts entitled /GAT Project/ They will appear regularly at this website, categorised under 'GAT Project'. If you'd like to receive future posts, you can:

- click here to subscribe to Steve's blog in general by email, or here in a reader.

- click here http://www.happysteve.com/contact/ and indicate 'GAT Posts Only' in the message body - I'll email you when I update the GAT Project just for the duration of the series.

- or regularly check this link for new posts: http://www.happysteve.com/blog/tag/gat-project

ES4A Conference Presentation Notes: Technology as a Game-Changer

Technology as a Game-Changer

(presentation at the ES4A conference)

I videoed this presentation and broadcast it live. The quality is likely to be quite poor, but if you're interested, here it is: 

Introduction:

Technology is space.

                        Space mediates relationships.

By this measure, school space alienates.

New technologies have created new spaces. New genres. New rules. Game-changers.

Game-changing spaces:

1. 1.      Feral Space / Lord of the Flies

Students should not have to explore the new spaces alone. When they do, they go feral.

1. 2.      Information-space.

Get rid of presentations or teacher-talk. Someone, somewhere, has done a better job.

‘Flip’ the classroom – i.e. you meet face to face to collaborate, debrief, trouble-shoot.

Douchy’s Biology Podcast: http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/douchys-biology-podcast/id112457795 (Andrew Douche podcasts his entire biology course.

Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/ and http://www.khanacademy.org/about. Interesting criticism here: http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/.

Salman Khan explores the site here, and talks pure sense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C7FH7El35w

He captures the sheer absurdity of current educational structures. “Why does a 300 person lecture even exist anymore?” I would ask the same about teacher talk at school.

Free MBA from London School of Business & Finance https://www.facebook.com/LSBFGlobalMBA?v=app_4949752878

So what role does the teacher have? A relational, mentor role, offering life-wisdom and expertise on the process of learning, but not source of information.

1. 3.      Collaboration Space.

In the industrial era, we worked for money, which is an extrinsic reward. Now we’re rich enough to work for the joy, interest, fascination and desire to contribute. These are intrinsic rewards.

If you think we’re not rich, check www.globalrichlist.com No one has to work if they don’t want to.

Obviously, Wikipedia. Something more novel: http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Our virtual worlds:

Second Life: http://www.youtube.com/lestep

Open Sim (cheaper but buggy): http://youtu.be/IXKjN19D1nY

Minecraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txXJbUJP9tU

Interview with student.

Collaboration space for teachers: twitter, the blogosphere, infinite online conferences and collaboration tools. A hive-mind of teachers, buzzing with creative thoughts about how to transform education.

Teachers on Twitter collaborate and contribute for the joy and meaning of it, not to please their boss or pass registration.

1. 4.      Game Space

Intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards: climbing a mountain to see the view or to get name in the paper.

‘Gamification’ is controversial, but it is just a new word for extrinsic rewards.

Behavioural psychology will tell you there is nothing wrong with extrinsic reward mechanisms.

School is already game space. Competition for marks and for teacher praise.

Winning at the school game does not equal winning at the game of life.

If you haven’t played a MMORPG such as World of Warcraft, or a Facebook game like Farmville, then unfortunately you’re ignorant about a learning revolution that has happened under our feet.

Khan Academy badges: http://www.khanacademy.org/badges/view

A Google Tech Talk on Gamification: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O1gNVeaE4g

This is scary. Fast forward to the last 10 minutes if you want a shock: http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

Another aspect to all this is that our world is far more ‘entertaining’ than it was. Teachers aren’t interesting enough to compete. Don’t bother trying!

1. 5.      Performance Space

www.realaudienceproject.com – create a central website linking to all your school publishing projects. This creates momentum. We have over 30 publishing projects, from Kindy or Year 1 http://learningin10.wordpress.com/ to older students: http://nbcsnews.wordpress.com/

www.makeavoice.com to launch your own internet radio station.

Or school podcast. Ours is: http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/booraliefm/id389724084

Students can publish print books with: www.lulu.com/

Our school version of Amazon is: http://stores.lulu.com/realaudienceproject

1. Physical space.

The configuration of physical learning spaces is just as much technological as any Web 2.0 tool or computing device.

We’re reconfiguring our school space in a ‘learning village’ model. http://imaginelearning.tumblr.com/ and Channel 9 news: http://youtu.be/ohnC3sURgKU

          No walls.

-          Lots of nooks and crannies.

-          Lounge room furniture.

-          Excellent sound boarding.

-          Students working on groups on bean bags, the floor, steps, tables, lounges.

We base many of our spaces on these mythic concepts:

-          the water hole, where we feed on expertise.

-          the camp fire, where we discuss, explore, collaborate.

-          the cave, where we bunker down as individuals.

Most of our school walls are now giant paper napkins, covered with ‘Idea Paint’ that turns them into whiteboards.

The Future: A Learning Village:

No bells, no discrete lessons, no 9am to 3pm.

No clear distinction between teachers and students.

No clear distinction between ‘school’ and ‘real life’.

No set timetable. Various experts available.

No year groups. Students cluster together to achieve projects and progress through a very wide array of learning paths.

Teachers as mentors, students as entrepreneurs.

Various physical locations for learning, becoming a new key community space for people of all ages. A new neighbourhood watering hole. A centre-of-gravity for young people and adults alike.