Towards the end of last year I received a request from a teaching colleague about providing a bit of technical assistance for one of her students with a video project. The student, whom I will simply refer to as Joanna, was studying the HSC Extension 2 English course and had set herself a fairly grandiose goal for a movie project. Ext2 English is a very demanding course, and Joanna had elected to create an elaborate video as part of the package of material she was submitting for assessment.

Joanna’s goals for the movie were considerable. She had a number of special effects in mind to help tell the story she wanted to tell, but she had very little actual experience in movie making. Some of the effects she was proposing were very sophisticated, with visions of a very dreamlike sequence and some unusual effects… effects that were far beyond those available in entry level video editing software. She came to me to ask for some advice about the best tools to use and how she could learn to use them, and I quickly worked out that Joanna would not be prepared to compromise or “dumb it down” to make it easier on herself. After a bit of discussion about what she was trying to create I recommended she think about using Sony Vegas. Vegas is a sophisticated non-linear video editing application with a fairly steep learning curve. Joanna took the task very seriously however, and was not daunted by the enormous job in front of her. She obtained a copy of the software, enrolled in a 2 day course in Sony Vegas, watched a couple of training DVDs, and asked me lots of questions. During the project she had numerous technical hurdles to overcome including a couple of major project rebuilds due to lost resource files, not to mention dealing with the logistical nightmare of a final working file of over 30 Gigabytes! After all the tears, sweat and love, the result of her work, a video piece called The Sounds of the Silent, earned her one of the highest marks in the state for the subject and contributed to an outstanding HSC result.

What I find most fascinating about all of this is that Joanna’s desire to produce this video far outweighed her own technical knowledge about how to do it, as well as her teacher’s technical knowledge, and it certainly stretched my own technical knowledge as I tried to assist her through the hard parts of the project. The important lesson from this is that if you want something bad enough then you will figure out how to make it happen. Once you have the “want to” you eventually work out the “how to”.

That’s an important lesson for us as educators. We sometimes feel our students need to know all the information before they can proceed, or that acquiring the facts is the important part of learning. Not always true. Sometimes the acquisition of knowledge or facts is the least important factor in success… the really important factor is something much simpler - just a desire to create, to learn, to express oneself.

Perhaps we should be thinking about how best to create in our students this desire to find out the “how” by igniting their sense of “why”. If we continue to give our students a strong sense of why they need to learn things by giving them real-world tasks that they genuinely care about, the mechanics of how they learn would almost take care of themselves.

Today is Australia Day here in Down Under land. It celebrates the arrival of the first fleet into Botany Bay, marking the beginning of white mans’ occupation of Terra Nullius - literall meaning “Empty Land”. Quite a large presumption really, and to the aboriginal people who had already lived here for over 40,000 years it was not quite such a cause for celebration. Even today, Australia’s indigenous population still refer to it as Invasion Day. Anyway, that could be the subject of a whole other discussion …

The point is that January 26 in Australia is celebrated as Australia Day and a quick visit to the Google Australia home page at www.google.com.au has the Google logo swapped out for another one with an Australian theme. Swapping the Google logo for temporary logos derived from the original one is not new… Google does it all the time and you can browse the collection of past special logos in their Holiday Logo gallery.

The logo being used today is a little different… it was designed by Janelle San Juan, a Year 6 student at the School of the Good Shepherd, in Victoria, Australia. Janelle’s logo was chosen from a competition run by Google Australia called Doodle for Google. Watch the video below to find out more about the logo, the competition and how it all happened.

You can see from watching the video that it must have been a wonderful experience for the students involved, getting them to create and collaborate on an authentic, real world task that was not just about producing work to make the teacher happy but rather to meet a genuine design brief for a genuine problem for a genuine company with the opportunity for their solution to be displayed to a genuine audience. We need to think about how we can create more opportunities for this type of learning in our classrooms.

Congratulations to Janelle and all the other kids who took part, and good on you Google Australia for running the contest. We need more of this sort of thing.

My friend Anne Baird blogged today about her insights regarding the use of Creative Commons as a form of managing the usage rights to creative works such as music, pictures, video or writing. For many people, the only law they have ever heard of in regard to using the work of others is copyright law, and this is usually interpreted as “you cannot use this!” That’s not exactly correct of course… copyright means “you cannot use this without asking my permission”. Unfortunately the process of getting that permission is usually not so simple, so for most people the choice is to not use the work at all, or to use it illegally.

Enter the world of Creative Commons. Creative Commons, or CC for short, was launched in 2001 and is a licensing model for defining how an artistic or intellectual work may (or may not) be used. It sits in that void between the restrictive copyright model and the free-for-all that is the Public Domain. Too often people assume that because they found something on the Web that they have carte blanche to use it any way they like. Not so. By default, every creative work is instantly and automatically covered by copyright as soon as the author creates it so the right to borrow, steal, reuse or adapt these works is automatically forbidden. Aside from the sometimes vague notion of “fair use” and some specific exceptions, you are generally NOT entitled to reuse someone else’s work without their express permission. Added to the sometimes seemingly illogical restrictions that copyright imposes are the significant variations in the way copyright law is applied from country to country, providing a recipe for general confusion about what you can and can’t do with someone else’s work.

Perhaps Creative Commons licensing can be best summed up from this description on their own website…

“Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which “all rights reserved” (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.”

There are also some excellent videos on the CC site which make it much clearer what Creative Commons licensing is all about, including this one…

If you look back the the development of art, architecture, design, cinema or literature of the last century, much of it was shaped by the ability to build on the work of those that went beforehand. Impressionist artwork inspired the Post-Impressionists, which in turn inspired others to create the movements of Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Dada. Each of these movements was built on the ideas and work of those that preceded it. As Picasso noted, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Some of the most influential works of art in the last century were only possible because the artists were able to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them and build on their ideas. Some, like Marcel Duchamp, were able to change the course of artistic history with acts as simple yet profound as painting a moustache on Michaelangelo’s Mona Lisa, causing an entire generation of artists to deeply question the notion of what art was really all about.   Indeed, the very notion of appropriation - using the work of those that came before you as a basis for you own work - is a fundamental characteristic of Post Modernism.  And you have to ask yourself, if the notion of copyright as we understand it today had existed in the earlier part of this century, would we have had any of this intellectual and artistic explosion of ideas?  Or would Picasso have been threatened with legal action after painting Le Demoiselles d’Avignon because it borrowed too heavily on the art of Africa, or the work of Georges Braque?

CC licensing adds some common sense back into the way content creators allow others to use their work.  It adds some balance and moderation, letting content creators decide just how restrictive or not they wish to make the reuse of their work.  We have allowed ourselves to become a society where we legislate against nearly everything, and in the process we have lost some of the humanity that goes along with sharing and spreading ideas and mentoring to the masses.

Many of the senior courses I have been teaching over the last few years have really harped at the students about the idea of respecting copyright, as they should. But I’m realising that I have not paid nearly enough attention to the alternatives to copyright such as Creative Commons or Copyleft. If you’ve also not paid attention to these alternatives, now is the time to start looking at them seriously.

By letting our children stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them we give them a broader perspective and a deeper creative vision for the possibilities.

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother’s Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work.

In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task… it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I’d try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do).

They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written response as usual, but many said it was really useful being able to hear the task explained again from home. After they submitted the written task, which I thought they mostly did pretty well, I got them to record some of their responses as audio files which we uploaded to Voicethread along with their photo. This ability to upload audio to Voicethread instead of having to record it directly onto the page is a feature of a Voicethread Pro account, which is available to educators at no cost. I found it made it so much easier to collect the audio comments, especially since this class is not in a room with computers. I use my MacBook Pro to record their audio to QuickTime, convert it to MP3 using QuickTime Pro, snap a photo using Photobooth and then I do the uploading after class or whenever it’s convenient.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here are some of their observations so far… if you want to leave an encouraging (moderated) comment for them that would be wonderful…

It will be interesting to see if the quality of their speaking and recording changes once they realise that they have an audience…

PS: Thanks to @nzchrissy via @alannahk for pointing me to the solution to embedding these Voicethreads into the blog like this. Nice!

Blogging started for me as a way to document a year living overseas, and although many serious bloggers sneer at the idea of using a blog for something as lowly as a simple travel diary, I found it a wonderful jumpoff point into the wider world of blogging. Not only do I now have a permanent record of a wonderful year in Canada, but that blog got me into the habit of writing regularly. And really, getting into a habit is an important part of the whole blogging experience. I guess, I’m writing this now because I hadn’t written a post for a few days and I was starting to think that I needed to! Not for you. For me. This blogging thing has become an integral part of who I am, and when I go for a few days without writing it just doesn’t feel right.

But the habit is not just about writing, it’s about thinking. It’s about engaging with ideas that you read on other blogs, or through listening to podcasts, or even from trawling through Twitter posts. It’s about simply not being able to let that river of ideas flow past you without having to respond in some way. I can’t imagine being exposed to this rich smorgasbord of ideas without having some reaction to them, and responding via a blog seems like such a natural thing to do. It’s definitely about the thinking and not the writing… (in fact if you only knew what a lousy typist I am, you’d realise that the actual writing is a real pain!)

So I blog. I can’t help myself.

What’s become really interesting though is the environment that the blogging habit exposes you to. Without realising it, I look at my feedreader these days and it amazes me just who I have been inviting into my world, and even more amazingly, who has been inviting me into theirs. Browsing through my Skype contact list is like a who’s who of incredible educators from all around the world. My Twitter feed is a rich tapestry of deep thoughts, trivial chatter and personal relationships, but it’s engaging me with these constant ideas about learning, teaching and the relationships we form with kids in our classrooms.

Having just gone through the process of applying for another job, it really struck me just how much my online world has contributed to who I am as an educator. I don’t have a string of letters after my name, in fact I’m not even teaching in the same discipline as I was originally trained. I’ve occasionally considered going back to university, doing some further study and becoming a bit more learned, but I look at the idea factory surrounding me and can’t seem to justify the time and cost involved… and although I’m not sure how I’d ask the question, I suspect my new school saw enough of this world reflected in my interview that it played a big part in them offering me the position.

I did go back to university a few years ago to do part of a masters course in educational technology. It was a good experience, and forced me to start reading literature about learning that I wouldn’t have done otherwise - Negroponte, Papert, Stoll, Cuban, Spender, etc - all names that I had never even heard before despite having been a teacher for many years. It was this exposure to ideas that flipped switches in my head and caused me to rethink a few things about school and learning. And it made me realise that many teachers never do this sort of thing at all. Try going to work on Monday and when your colleagues ask what you did on the weekend, tell then you went to an education conference (in your own time!) or read a book about learning theory, or chatted with other teachers about how to make learning more relevant, and see the sorts of odd looks you get, or the sarcastic “gee that must have been fun!” comments.

The thing is, I don’t mind learning. In fact I can’t imagine not learning. And exposure to this stream of ideas and thoughts and opinions is quite possibly the best environment for learning I’ve ever come across.

So maybe that makes me dysfunctional or just plain boring, but I really do enjoy the feeling of being stretched by new ideas all the time. I don’t like to be the same today as I was yesterday, I want to be growing all the time. And one of the most rewarding and amazing ways of getting that constant stream of brain food is through the blogging and the writing and the reading and the podcasting and the sharing and the conversing with other people who I think are some of the smartest, brightest, cleverest people I know.

Tags: blogging, pln, pd

I had the good fortune to attend a talk this evening by Greg Whitby, the Executive Director of Education for the Catholic Education Parramatta Diocese. Greg was the special guest of the Australian College of Educators, and was speaking to a cosy little group of teachers at St Cath’s Waverly.

Greg is one of those larger-than-life characters that has some fairly strong ideas about how education should look for the 21st Century, and I was pretty keen to hear him talk since I’d read quite a few articles about him. His views on school reform and his somewhat radical ideas on redesigning schools are aligned with a lot of my own thinking.

The talk focussed around a few key areas, among them the need for schools to reinvent themselves or to become dangerously irrelevant to our students, the need for teachers to engage in ongoing professional learning for themselves in order to truly embrace the notion of being a lifelong learner, and the way in which technology is simply an amplifier. Too often, says Whitby, the technology is seen in isolation as the “solution” to a school system’s problems, whereas in truth it does little except to amplify what is already happening. His talk was peppered with examples of schools who have done a lot to put the technology in place but very little else to change the underlying paradigm of learning in order to leverage the effectiveness of that investment.  What a waste.
There’s no doubt that Greg is an idealist and an optimist, but maybe we need more of them in the senior levels of educational administration. He can certainly lay claim to putting the talk into action, and taking a really holistic approach to school reform. It’s not about just the technology, it’s about the pedagogy, the PD, the architecture, the social design, etc… rethinking school really does mean RETHINKING school. That means taking a clean piece of paper and asking the hard questions about redesigning the process and every aspect of supporting that process, in order to better answer the fundamental question of “How to we improve the learning outcomes for every student?” That is a worthwhile goal, and really comes down to the heart of what education should be about… it’s not about remembering lots of stuff, not about getting better test scores, not about meeting some arbitrary standard… it’s just about improving the learning for every kid that goes through the process. And the first step in making that happen is to deconstruct the entire process from ground level, accepting no preconceived notions about what already exists, and to question every assumption about what we mean by “school”.

And it’s a hard process. We had the chance at my school a couple of years ago to rethink what we were on about when we rewrote our strategic plan. We had consultants come in and try to help us work through that rethinking process, and they really did try to push us to question every paradigm, challenge every assumption. They kept pushing us to reinvent what “school” might mean for the future, but it seemed to have fallen on largely deaf ears, with very little substantive change taking place, and - I think - large gaps in our long term strategy simply because we were unable to step back and disassociate ourselves from our idea of “school” enough to blue sky about what it could really be like if we let ourselves dream a bit. Instead, we just reworded the Mission Statement, created some new levels of hierarchy, and produced a fancy brochure to proclaim our success. Such a missed opportunity.

I’m glad that people like Greg are in there, giving it a go. I’m sure that great success will ultimately emerge from the process, even if it is just through his sheer force of will. I just hope there is enough people who share his vision, and most importantly his determination to actually make it happen, that these initiatives continue to take hold in a big way.

Thanks for the inspiration Greg.

Tags: gregwhitby, ACE, school reform, reinventing school

While trolling through some old files today I happened upon this video of some Lego robotics projects done by my Year 10 students about five years ago. I recall that their task was to build a sort of merry-go-round device that conformed to a few specific requirements. From memory it had to have provision for two “seats”, and when a start button was pressed it had to rotate around align the first of these seats with a loading platform, pause, and then rotate to align the second seat. Once both seats were “loaded”, it had to pause, then start rotating slowly, then get faster, until it reached top speed and did a specified number of rotations. Once these were complete if had to slow down again to a stop, aligning the first seat, then pausing again and finally aligning the second seat.

Here’s the video…

It was an interesting exercise. The girls (it was an all girls class) initially struggled with the idea of gears and motors, and it took them a while, and a bit of guidance, to figure out just how a motor would be able to make something turn like a merry-go-round. I had come from an all-boys school the year before and was really struck by just how much more easily the boys seemed to find the mechanical part of this task. I don’t mean to sound sexist, but there really does seem to be a huge difference in the innate mechanical abilities between boys and girls. The boys didn’t hesitate to grab the motors, gears and cogs, and within minutes, most of them had rudimentary vehicles constructed. The girls, on the other hand, seemed to vacillate for ages before even wanting to pick up the Lego, and when they did, they took quite a lot longer to build any sort of device, much less one that was at all mechanically “correct” or usable.

However, once the girls got started, I found they came up with a much more interesting and creative approach to problem solving than most of the boys I’d taught. Perhaps this comes from a naiveté and a less developed understanding of what was “right”. Whereas the boys seemed to know that certain combinations of blocks and gears would not work, the girls seemed to be more able to just try things whether they worked or not.

Thinking about this now, some years hence from when that video was made, it reminds me of a book I read called Paradigms, by Joel Arthur Barker. In this book, Barker contends that some of the best problem solvers are those who are outside the prevailing paradigm… outsiders who, to the experts, “don’t really understand the question”. But it’s this not really understanding the question that leads to some of the most creative solutions to many previously “unsolvable” problems.

If you think about it, many of the best thinkers, the most inspiring leaders, and the people changing the world the most, are those who least fit our conception of who we expect them to be. Look at the Albert Einsteins, the Pablo Picassos, the Steve Jobs’s, the Richard Bransons of the world… the square pegs in round holes. People who challenge the status quo because they don’t know that what they are proposing is completely unrealistic. Most of the innovation and creative flow in our society comes from those who don’t know that what they don’t know doesn’t matter. So they invent the future anyway.

As educators, we have to make sure we don’t educate the creativity out of kids. I’ll finish with a link to a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, who expresses this notion far better than I could ever hope to. Every teacher - no, every person -  should watch this video…