Technology as Magic Dust

It ain't magic dust. And if you construe it as magic dust it will become pure poison.

Have you ever had a conversation around "how to get teachers using technology" or "how can we increase technology integration"? To me, these questions are somewhere between nonsensical and downright hazardous. 

You better watch out if you don't ask some pretty basic questions about technology first. What is this beast? And it is a BEAST.

It is our making, our undoing. We're extended through technology. We make it. It makes us.

Subtle...​

Our joy, our despair, curing diseases & promising hope, lobotomising, alienating, destroying & saving lives via proxy. Amplifying, dissolving. Scaling beyond design specs...

Have you got a philosophy of technology? Metaphysics even? If you like, theology. A robust master system?

Anything other than fish-in-water will do. Fish swim default, get caught.

These words are in your brain, munching on your neurons. How did they get there again? You have information about what I typed at my kitchen table, yet I don't even know who you are. How very asymmetrical. ..

Alice Leung Does Stochastic Tinkering

I noticed Alice Leung tweeting about tinkering with the configuration of her classroom:

There developed a lovely conversation between her and @sarahjohanna :

Now I really resonated with what was going on here  and what I often notice in Alice's tweets: a constant energetic questioning and tinkering, and then reflecting on the results. Apart from anything else, I just want to shout a hearty 'hear hear!' and celebrate the moment.

The exchange also sparked some associations and I've thrown them here below: 

"Stochastic Tinkering"

I picked this lovely phrase up from Nassim Taleb in his books "The Black Swan" and "Antifragile". By stochastic he means random. For me, the word has connotations of deliberate intent to shake things up... staccato stabs at innovation. 

Stochastic tinkering isn't far off notions of edu-hacking. 

Taxonomy of Frames

In my 'frames' taxonomy for innovation, Alice is tinkering with "o-frames" - organisational frames. In this case, they are the physical frames in her learning space, consisting of furniture, empty space, etc, within the broader o-frame of the classroom building itself.

Alice observes that "HS teachers don't really think about learning space layout".  

My aspiration for the 'frames' taxonomy is to expose these arbitrary elements and make them more susceptible to innovation. Alice, of course, does this instinctively.

Frames are for edu-hacking, stochastic tinkering.

Design Thinking  vs Hacking

I've noticed Design Thinking is getting more and more traction in educational circles. Indeed I myself have become rather besotted by it.  I suspect that within a year or two it will have the same horrible simplistic buzz word status as flipped learning, PBL, gamification. 

All these models wander in and out of the edu-zeitgeist.

As much as I love Design Thinking, I wouldn't want it to become a dogma to replace "fly by the seat of your pants" hacking/tinkering.

So much of life, experience, and nature, and everything is composed of ad-hoc tinkering.

Hacking is immediate, contextual, empowered, and subversive! It provides its own research data, because it either works immediately & sticks or it doesn't and doesn't.

A blog post contrasting Design Thinking with hacking is here, with lots of further links.

Google 20% Rule in Schools - Project Breakthroughs

Since 2011 I've been posting occasionally on our experiment in Years 9 and 10 and my school to see if we could apply the fabled Google 20% Rule - students spend 20% of their time on a blank slate passion project.

NSW Board of Studies No Barrier

We are exploiting the fact that in NSW, the Board of Studies (BOS) does not require Year 9 and 10 students to fill their school hours entirely with B.O.S. endorsed courses.  Once all the boxes are ticked, there's still at least 500 hours across the two years available as a blank slate. You can do a lot with 500 hours!

Building a 'Soft' Syllabus / Assessment Grid

My colleague Talar Khatchoyan has done a wonderful job creating a 'soft' syllabus & assessments to suit the course. I mean 'soft' as in 'soft-coded' - the outcomes adapt to any project!  

Which is fortunate, because from previous posts you'll see we've had social justice campaigns, albums recorded, robots constructed, novels written. So I thought I had seen it all, when I recently read a proposal by a student to study and decode horse body language. What an amazing idea! "Approved!"

2013 Example - Jacob's Ultima-Bot

Here is one example of a project - a ridable robot:

Jacob's project has these elements, typical for the program:

• a learning log - http://reminvent.weebly.com/ultimabot-blog.html (please do drop by of course)
• expert input 'pulled' from appropriate sources as needed (contrast to schooling where expertise is 'pushed' out on a teacher's schedule)
• ongoing mentoring by experts, sought out by Jacob. (Since 2011 where I mentioned the 'granny cloud' we now ask the students to seek out an appropriate expert mentor wherever possible, and this is working very well, very efficiently)
• a project mentor, in Jacob's case this is me, who is separate from an expert in the field. The project mentor acts as a kind of Socrates, asking questions about planning, materials, skills needed, identifying 'unknowns' and areas for further inquiry, setting targets and defining concrete 'next actions', setting the bar ever higher, looking for opportunities for publication, etc.  

Field Expert versus Project Mentor

Notice we deliberately separate out the two roles  of:

subject expert,

from

project mentor.

This has enormous strategic importance as we explore scaling the program up to encompass, potentially, hundreds of students, who at any given time might be seeking expert input from an ever-shifting veritable spectrum of disciplines, but can still be anchored to a generic project mentor.

Great Things Afoot

...I'll post more on the project soon! 

Learning Landscapes in Moodle - Three Prototypes

Whereas a yo-yo craze of late has been flipped learning, I prefer to talk about a "learning landscape", consisting of potential learning pathways and resources on demand anytime, anywhere.

In our case we present the 'learning landscape' via Moodle.

Crucial to blended learning is the visual laying out of this learning landscape: the resources and options that learners have available to them.

Anyone familiar with Moodle will nod in recognition of the "scroll of death" problem: endless links running down a page, baffling learners, creating drag, killing momentum and clarity.  

Revisiting a Year 8 unit this year we've gone back to the drawing board RE the visual layout of the learning landscape. Below I show the progression over the last few years:

2011

This plain text table was an easy first step to escape the "scroll of death". By simply adding a web page on Moodle, then inserting a table, I ca assemble hyperlinks in a visually intelligible structure. In this instance, notice that:

• the columns have names
• each challenge is worth a certain number of points, listed
• the challenges are also colour coded

In 2012, I wanted to create a graphic to replace the table. I also added additional resources and options and presented them all on this graphic. The graphic is clickable... for instance each different rung of each tree is hyperlinked to the right Moodle resource. 

My graphic designer friend can't bear this graphic, but hey, it was my next step and I'm pretty happy with it... it was better than the text table, surely!

I painted the trees on the 'paper' iPad app and then added clickable hotspots over the graphic using Adobe CS3, which is as easy as dragging a tool over the graphic to define the hotspot, then specifying the URL to go to, then exporting and uploading to Moodle. 

Many of the same activities from the 2011 text table are in this 2012 version but I have organised the graphic as a visual metaphor, with learners climbing (levelling up) different skill trees. Those skill trees are founded on (grow on) the foundational ground represented by the icons at the bottom: the performance of a play. 

This second effort did the job, but some clear shortcomings were that: 

• there was too much choice - about 50 different challenges were encoded via hotspot hyperlinks onto the graphic.
• learners couldn't preview the challenges... the only way they knew what was behind each hotspot was by clicking
• as mentioned, the graphic kind of sucks... what I called "clouds" at the top, other people saw as "smog"... NOT THE METAPHOR I was looking for!

So, this year, let's iterate the prototype! Back to the drawing board, and this is the result: 

This is my THIRD STAB at the graphic, and is superior by far!  

I created this one with "Snag It", which is a lightweight PC program that, apart from various easily visual editing options, allows hotspots. (The Mac version doesn't allow hotspots.)

Snag It not only allows hotspots, it allows me to create "pop up" images when the student puts their cursor over the hotspot. This solves the problem of learners not knowing where a hotspot will lead them. 

So when the cursor is over a spot, it looks like this (or 30 other things): 

Now Snag It exports SWF files which are flash files, not iPad friendly. This is not a problem for us. Although we are BYOD from Year 5 to Year 12, our learners don't bring iPads. 

I've also collapsed back some of the 50 choices in this graphic. 

So MY POINT!? Just that this has taken 3 years to get to a layout I am happy with. I dare say next year I'll go back to the drawing board again. 

And another point: if you're interested in personalising learning, especially via a web portal, you're going to hit this challenge: how to communicate the options. 

Think back to the classic old Bloom's / Gardner's matrices... but why stop there? Options can be laid out in lots of different ways, so suddenly, the teacher, who is no graphic designer, like me, is faced with a visual layout challenge!  

Prototype, test, iterate, is a great way of getting anywhere! I hope my versions, above, are encouraging to teachers just starting out on Moodle.  

Finally, if you've been reading my last few posts, please note that this visual graphic or table is an "organisational frame" or "o-frame".  

It is a crucial o-frame, because it allows different learners structured freedoms, that heighten agency without losing cohesion.  

Bye for now!

Frames versus Crazy Life

Optionally, see my last two posts for background: one, two.

Here's a doodle seeking to portray a distinction. 

Frames are discrete and identifiable components of our space and experience. In contrast, crazy life is beyond description!

The distinction is between complex, crazy life, which is unpredictable, organic, emotional and contradictory, versus the discrete components we can identify and manipulate in our environment.

My little 'frames theory' seeks to identify what we can and can't manipulate in our school environment - or any environment.

Fundamentally, I believe the problem with schooling is the attempt to control complex, crazy life. The factory frames of industrial schooling act as if human beings are products that can be operated on via a standardised set of frames. These frames restrict space for 'crazy life', agency and initiative.

In contrast I believe in broadening out the space for 'crazy life' and I am pioneering frames theory as a way of putting language around that.

For instance, in this video below there is a great deal of space of unpredictable and complex interactions by real breathing agents called human beings. Yet there are frames... some visible, some invisible. but the art form is deliberately designing physical, virtual, and cultural  spaces  to encourage self-actualisation in all of its glorious and subversive unpredictability.