Chalkface Blog

James Farmer is one of online education’s freer thinkers, and he’s recently speculated that the new technology might put us publishers out of business by letting teachers share work directly.

So, not thinking about putting Ian out of business, but I’m sure that people will have attempted a kind of open source lesson-plan / resource wiki kind of thing, but they can’t have been that successful because otherwise, I guess, I’d know about. Am I right? Do you reckon there’s wikipedia-esque potential for this kind of work?

The generic name for this kind of thing is disintermediation and it was very hot buzzword during the internet bubble (ahhhh….the good old days…). The great thing about the bubble is it was 5 years ago, and we are now starting to see which of its predictions will come true (we all buy airline tickets online now) and which won’t (clothes shops have stayed stubbornly in the High St).

Publishing is certainly getting pushed online, but its fundamentals have remained remarkably constant. I’ll refer to the case of educational publishing, but in fact the general principles hold true across the discipline.

Think back to the time when pupils learned from things called books. Publishers didn’t physically make those books (that’s printers) nor write them (that’s authors), so what did they do? Their primary role was to

• find someone suitably qualified to write a book,
• incentivise them to actually complete it more-or-less in time for when other teachers needed it
• reorganise it so that other people could actually teach from it
• pay an artist to illustrate it
• lay it out smartly to make it a better read
• make teachers aware that it was there and would be useful to them
• finance all the above well ahead of any sales, without any guarantee that money would be recouped.

Very little of this changes just because the content is online. Teachers are as prone as they ever were to starting a project, failing to finish it by the start of term, and then getting swamped by workload. Left to themselves, they also tend to write exclusively to their own teaching methods. You will have noticed that you can very rarely pick up work by another teacher from another school and just use it. With a good textbook (and certainly a good Chalkface pack) you can.

In fairness to James, he’s addressed some of these issues by suggesting the use of wikis or aggregation tools. Wikipedia, after all, is famously peer-edited. Wikipedia relies on a large number of contributors who do not themselves write new material, but who edit, collate and de-duplicate the work of others. That requires a mindset (a compulsion to detail, order and completion) that is almost the opposite of that required to be an effective teacher (massive tolerance of chaos and a focus on the process not the endpoint).

The bottom line is that to make James’ idea work, we’d need to pay someone to keep it all in order. And to make sure meaningful contributions were completed even after the start of term. And…

You get the idea; we’ve just reinvented the publisher. So Publishing is dead … long live Publishing!

Ruth Kelly, it would seem, is trying to cultivate the ‘hard bastard’ image that did so well for David Blunkett until his libido got the better of his career. Today she’s taking a pop a low-level disruption in the classroom ahead of Ofsted’s annual report due out tomorrow. Reading between the lines of the BBC’s report, her radical plan boils down to more sin bins.

I would have preferred it had she instead promoted the more rounded approach of Chalkface author Anthony Grunwell. He promotes a student-centred whole school approach, that encourages students and staff to examine their own behaviour and its effects on others.

By a curious coincidence, we have his book Improving Behaviour In and Out of the Classroom on half-price special this month.

I went through school believing that knowledge was something that came exclusively from outside my personal universe. It came in textbooks and it came in encyclopaedias. It certainly did not come from me or anyone I knew*.

That’s a poisonously disempowering distortion of reality. As an antidote, I recommend Wikipedia. Sixth form students, in particular, can and should be establishing their netizenship by actively contributing to it, not just researching from it.

The value of Wikipedia has been hotly debated ever since Robert McHenry (from the very threatened Encyclopaedia Britannica camp) labelled it “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia“, sparking a right old ding-dong in the pages of Corante, that’s still going on.

For most of us reading that debate the problem is that we don’t really understand how it works. Or even why it works, and why it doesn’t simply fall apart under the onslaught from all the sixth-formers I’m inciting to edit it.

This lovely Flash move from Jon Udell provides a superb exposition. If you have any interest in Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you spend the next ten minutes watching (and listening to) Jon’s explanation.

*Postscript: only after I’d left school did it sink in that my dad was (and still is) the expert on the vernacular architecture of the North Yorks Moors. Shame there are no A-Levels in that.

Most kids are now taught print-media literacy as part of the English curriculum. They can, for example, distinguish between editorial, advertorial and advert.

But what about on the internet, a medium far more important to most school students? This Pew Report and associated Wired article (thanks Stephen for the reference) suggests that very few people can actually distinguish between paid and unpaid (i.e. advertising) listings in a search engine.

So here’s my challenge: how many of your students can recognise the following, and understand the way in which someone is trying to influence them?

• Paid vs. unpaid listings in search engines
• Pop-up pages
• Pop-under pages
• 419-scam email (the infamous Nigerian con)
• Affiliate links (if you buy the linked/recommended product, the referrer gets a commission)
• Traded links (the website owner was paid to put the link there)