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?
Below is an interesting talk from a well respected professor of linguistics, born in 1941 mind, on text messaging and tweeting.
I watched it on my iPad while washing up lunch today. (The kitchen window and frame act as a natural amplifier for the sound! #hackthesystem)
I'm a bit late to the party with this video. I stumbled on it by chance but have since realised various others in my PLN have been nattering about it.
It struck a particular chord for me because I've recently re-read 'The Brain that Changes Itself', which is compulsory reading, and finishes with a chapter on how external media rewires the mind. I've heard it said that the human brain is perfect for becoming a cyborg. We don't need bits of wires connected to our actual brain cells to become cyborgs. The input/output comes through our hardwired USB hub: hearing, sight, & all the other senses. I find it perfectly accurate to talk about my iPhone as an extension of myself. Most tech is like this. Ever since clothing.
Our brain USB hub is hardwired but the CPU is softwired. The brain adapts to input.
I can't help but disagree with the professor on one point! He says near the end that 20 years is not long enough for the brain to be rewired. The revolution in neuroplasticity suggests otherwise.
How has the media changed our brains? Is 20 years of the internet long enough? Or is 2 months long enough? And how are our brains changing?
Lookk, before you do anything, just watch this footage. Then, optionally, read my waffle. But watch this footage. As jaw-dropping to me as any TED talk. Try to spot the teacher. OHHHH there aren't any. Yet the kids are working in synchronicity. WHY? HOW? Answer this, and you've cracked the paradigm-change nut we're smack-bang in the middle of:
We're talking DAY 3 of the year 2012, with 90 Year 6 students being joined by 90 Year 5 students. The Year 6s have been used to radical self-direction for 12 months, the Year 5s are more or less the newbies.
So this is establishment phase, okay? The most crucial time in any community. It's when the DNA, the starting-culture, is settled on. Happens everywhere: workplace, school, church, sport. In 2012, Week 1 of the year for many classes in Australia must have consisted of the teacher 'framing' the class; establishing a narrative for who they all are and where they're going. Heck, I just did this with my Year 8 French class.
Yeah, person up the front framing the context for the many, the crowd, the younglings. Classic one-to-many relationship that so often characterises schooling. If you spot rows of desks, you'll know immediately that's the frame. "Look to ME for your reality."
Before I introduce the Most Audacious Class I've Ever Seen, can I quickly clarify this is NOT a Montessori school. This is NBCS, where I've worked for 10 years, a traditional High School that decided to throw away the map and start again. We have no notions of the noble savage and we don't put kids in a vaccuum. (I'm not saying the Montessori schools do). We use a 'landscape/frame/gateway' approach that overlays freedom and agency onto a sophisticated curated learning landscape that takes 100s of hours to set up.
So, day 3 of the year. 180 kids, 90 new, 90 veterans. Establishment phase.
Here's the premise: you have crashlanded on a desert island. There are no teachers.
How on earth, logistically, did they manage this? Well you should ask them on Twitter. From what I gather and observed (I spent about 30 minutes of the day in attendance in person): the 6 teachers hid outside the open space, observing the kids via video links and open windows. They tweeted clues in via a large twitter screen that acted as a well of knowledge. They used a P.A. system to phone-in further clues. They had established rules: students must remain within 2 metres of their team. Students must ignore 'spies' (adults who entered the space, dressed in costumes). It was pretty much pure game-based-learning. Simulation. Here's the environment we've curated, now prove yourselves. And LO AND BEHOLD, they did!
Audacious. 180 kids, 1 space, NO TEACHERS. They put precautionary measures in place. No gap in duty-of-care. But: one huge risk. An audacious risk. Step back. Create space. Allow agency.
Truth is, for the rest of the year it will be: 180 kids, 6 to 8 teachers, 1 space, and a virtual learning platform to rival the Khan Academy.
This sort of thing stands and falls on several ingredients, as far as I can tell:
1. A physical space that encodes agency.
2. A highly developed and painstakingly curated virtual learning environment. (We use Moodle).
3. A hyper-activated team of teachers. Ohhh do not for a moment suspect that teachers get a break in this environment. They end up working harder than ever before, moving from interaction to interaction, on the shoulder, just where they are needed, like Superman, swooping in to trouble-shoot, diagnose, stimulate, guide, mentor.
4. A culture of entrepeneurial self-starting self-direction.
It is around #4 that this day was based.
The DNA of industrial-era schooling basically positions students as obeyers-of-instruction. Turn to page 54. Copy down questions 1 to 10. Okay now be creative and write a story.
Look to the authority figure to be prompted. Great if you aspire to work for Foxconn.
So, we raise a generation of robots. I have no beef with this, historically. It has provided us with roads, dental care, superannuation, insurance, and miraculous foods.
But, if you haven't noticed, we're currently undergoing a second industrial revolution. The top-down hierarchy is shifting to a bottom-up system. It's hippies, all over again, but this time it's savvy-hippies. Why? Because education has sky-rocketed, and the internet has accelerated collective intelligence in an exponential fashion. Blink, and the game has changed. Lucky that the brain is soft-coded or we wouldn't have gotten this far!
We're shifting to a mode of emergent-agency. I mean: every individual acts according to their own local insights and value-driven ambitions. Times a million. Something wonderful bubbles up.
Watch the video. Notice the interactions. Notice, bizarrely, how several students, independently, make 'Lord of the Flies'-type noises at the camera when they notice it. But this ain't chaos, and it ain't anarchy (despite this website). This is organic, community, hopeful. Culturally-embedded hopefulness.
You have crashed on a deserted island with no teachers.
I am delighted to announce my launch of "Innovate Five": a 15-session live video-conference series focusing on 'capacity to innovate'.
Click here for the official SCIL page where you'll find the registration links.
I'd appreciate you passing on word about the course to any colleagues who might be interested. It is open to everyone from any walk of life.
Read on to hear a more personal account of it.
The Heart of Innovation
Whether you're a teacher, a mum or an executive, a broader capacity to think and act innovatively opens new opportunities for making the world a better place. Innovation keeps society flexible, agile, ready to meet the future. I love innovation. I value it. I want to grow it in myself, and I love collaborating with other innovators.
What is ‘Innovate Five’?
The course has grown out of my quest for mental toolkits that help enable creative thought, clarity and capacity to take initiative to 'get the show on the road' quickly.
The word 'capacity' sums it up for me; the shift from 'survive' to 'thrive' implies a sense of spare capacity.
I don't want to lead a reactive life. I want to be calm, centred and purposeful. Otherwise, in the noise of 2012, I'll just get blown away.
An Inventory System
I call Innovate Five an ‘inventory system’, because the process is aimed squarely at developing a meta-cognitive scanning process across five domains, which leave you with an inventory for future growth.
I’ve clustered toolkits under self, work, people, change, space:
Self
Work
People
Change
Space
Wakefulness
Hooks
Shadows
Culture
Physical
Mindfulness
Upgrades
Mimetics
Forces
Virtual
Meaning
Hacking
Currency
SCIL
Information
You want as many of these kits working in your favour as possible. The greater the mastery of more of the toolkits, the greater your ability to nurture and maintain capacity in trying circumstances.
You might already be instinctively strong in some areas, but less ‘awake’ to others in the grid.
An inventory gives you a chance to identify what you don’t know that you don’t know, but also what you did know but brushed aside, or have been too busy to act on.
What is the format of Innovate 5?
60 minute video-conferences, once a week, in groups of up to 10, with presentation & discussion/debrief.
The course will include an optional reading program and optional homework tasks.
You need a computer with a reliable broadband Internet connection.
Who is it for?
Anyone seeking to develop their capacity to generate and implement ideas to improve the world.
Not limited to educators.
Is this a leadership course?
No.
Is this a personal development course?
There is an overlap, especially in the 'self' dimension.
However, I frame personal development narratives in a strongly utilitarian fashion that may be unsettling to some. I emphasise a process of alienation that helps generate new insights and perspectives. And yet, this process is not designed to make you more vulnerable, but more profoundly safe; safe to be creative.
The organising principle of 'Innovate 5' is capacity to innovate, not personal development.
I've been meaning to post this for ages! I'll do a rush job, okay?
Okay - the best professional development strategy for teachers is, without doubt, getting connecting in a Personal Learning Network, in any form. Twitter has proven remarkable for teachers in their ability to reach out and connect, in very real and authentic collaborative learning relationships. For years now my motto has been "if I can get a colleague onto Twitter, they'll never be the same" (like me!!)
But now there is something even better. It doesn't replace Twitter, but it works very similarly. It is the teachmeet movement. Launched in the UK in an initiative by Ewan McIntosh, the idea has spread and is now gaining traction in Australia: organise local face to face meetings of teachers to swap ideas and reflect on practice. The notion is so powerful: you don't have to wait for permission or for top-down policy change. Join the grassroots tribe and transform education from the inside out.
It is a bottom-up movement - teachers can just go ahead and organise a teachmeet. Wonderful people in Sydney, Australia have launched the teachmeet movement here. Lots of colleagues have worked hard to make it happen. I take my hat off to them. I wonder if they understand the energy they've unleashed!
Check out the events here: http://tmsydney.wikispaces.com/ and consider if you might like to attend or organise a teach-meet of your own!
So much buzz and energy and passion for change was harnessed in 2011 in Sydney thanks to the teachmeets!
One indicator of this cascading excitement is a HUGE Sydney Teachmeet planned for Friday, March 2. In fact the ambition is to make it a WORLD RECORD for the most teachers yet at a teachmeet event.
Click here to read more about it. COME ALONG! Doesn't matter if you don't know anyone else. Come join the tribe. As the poster says "FREE EDU EVENT run BY TEACHERS FOR TEACHERS". What an empowering notion!!
For years now at NBCS our professional development has been almost entirely in-house and almost entirely consisted of cross-pollination and crowd-sourcing. We have no IT integrators. We have an executive structure but the emphasis is on distributed leadership and spontaneous "DO IT NOW" collaboration and innovation.
Our full-staff PD day last week included this creative collaboration:
And then the next day staff grouped themselves up and selected their own mini passion project, to be completed in a whirlwind within 4 hours.
Our Stage #3 team were inspired by Yayoi Kusama's "Obliteration Room", and managed to whip up their own in no time (Skender ran home to get an old table... someone must sourced white paint from somewhere):
The students will add stickers all over the place (earning each one, mind you, via a gamified structure).
Elsewhere, Ben Hedstrom, Amanda Hill and colleagues are redeveloping the music rooms to an open-plan student-directed structure. They will crush the distinction between year groups: different classes and ages will share the space simultaneously, forming a semi-professional studio, the older mentoring the younger.
Another team made a boredom buster station:
I'm not sure what this was but it looks fantastic:
Some Visual Arts staff recycled their own previous works, I believe by cutting it into strips and mashing it up again. Their vision for the art spaces is busting them open into a Parisian studio, with no clear distinction between the inside and a creative, rive gauche esplanade in the open air.
Tim Barrett and colleagues made some new furniture, and videoed the process!
The day ended with some crowd-sources post-it thoughts:
The crowd-sourcing of teacher development is the most powerful PD you can offer. Teachers have limited need for outside experts - a more pressing need is space to collaborate, then cross-pollinate.
Two weeks ago I worked with two Brisbane schools for a day. Walking in as an outsider to a new context, I took a hunch on the crowd-source/collaborate/cross-pollinate processes and allocated three sessions in the day for them. It worked a treat, and I don't see why it won't work anywhere. I think it's fine to have top-down leadership: we all want to look up to a leader to help steer the ship, BUT what joy and power there is in grassroots, bottom-up collaboration. No one controlling, no one waiting to act.
It's beyond the scope of this post (it's dinner time) but it's fascinating watching the business world shift in the same direction, to the same distributed-leadership model. All about agility, flexibility, contextual-leadership etc.
And on that note I will abruptly finish this post. I have a roast waiting!
