Yacapaca

So once again, half of England lies paralysed under an inch of snow. I find myself reminiscing about January 1967, when, as a 10 year-old boy, I walked to school along paths cut through snowdrifts that lifted well higher than my head. All through that bitter winter I didn’t get a single day off.

Were we tougher in those days? Actually, no. My primary school was only a quarter of a mile from my house. All the pupils, and enough of the teachers, lived locally. That’s still the case, and indeed I believe that a greater proportion of primary schools than secondaries stayed open today.

Immunity to bad weather is one of the lesser benefits of local schools. The greatest benefit is the way they underpin the community. A primary school typically serves one parish, having largely taken over from the church the role of community centre. And the parish has endured since Roman times as a fundamental unit of our society – it’s that stable.

Why, then, do we wait until our children are almost adolescents, and then pull them out of this supportive structure by sending them to secondary school? Historically, it was because each town could only support one fee-paying grammar school for its elite, and that was small enough. Now, the argument is to do with economies of scale. A small local school can’t support a specialist Geography teacher, say.

The arrival of the internet in schools changes all of that. Specialist teachers can teach remotely – through IM, video links, message boards and half a dozen other appropriate technologies.

Certainly there’s still a need for some shared facilities; top quality gymnasia for example, but it will be cheaper as well as socially more cohesive to minibus students to those when needed. Economies of scale are no longer a reason to continue to undermine local communities.

Technically, how soon could we see a return to community-focused (and community-fostering) local schooling across the age range? Where there are available buildings, we could do it right away. How soon before we really see the first one? Rather longer, I fear.

This Times Online article asks us to

IMAGINE A SCHOOL where the children decide what to learn and how to learn it, where the teachers act as facilitators, not instructors, and no one has to ask permission to go to the lavatory.

It’s a report on the work of Berry Mayall, professor of sociology at the Institute of Education in London. This isn’t new thinking – Summerhill espoused it decades ago; Notschool more recently and even more radically. And its’ the Notschool examples that triggers my concern about prof Mayall’s ideas.

Successful implementations of the ‘child in charge’ philosophy are very radical. I fear that an attempt to move conventional schools just a little bit in that direction will fall completely between two stools. Teachers won’t get behind it, children will get confused, chaos will ensue and and the sceptics will have a field day telling us they were right all along.

Perhaps its better to keep conventional schools as they are, but to make sure that the radical fringe is sufficiently funded that it can grow the demand for it is there?

Earlier today, I was chatting to my colleague Alex Koval, the creator of the software on which this site was built. Alex lives and works in Kharkov, Ukraine so to save the phone bill we each keep instant messaging (IM) software open on our respective desktops and chat via that. We find IM quick, convenient (or ignorable when inconvenient), and handily self-documenting.

By contrast, most schools ban instant messaging outright, for fear that students will chat to each other rather than paying attention in lessons. Which many will, of course, but I still think banning IM is an overreaction.

For one thing, IM encourages students to write. Not the approved content, nor with the approved grammar, for sure, but write nonetheless. For themselves, without compulsion. And a teenager who writes for pleasure will write for life.

But that’s not the main reason I champion IM in schools. I want to see schools harness the power of IM as a teaching tool. Schools constantly struggle to deliver specialist content with (frequently) non-specialist staff. Appropriate, expert, staff are available, just not in the right part of the country.

Imagine the case of a school that wants to deliver a Latin GCSE, but has no Latin teacher. A good languages teacher can get a long way, but ultimately you need a Latin speaker to give students conversation practice. Here are some choices:

1. Hire in a specialist for a day a week
2. Videoconference to a specialist for (say) two hours a week
3. Hold instant messaging conferences between students from different schools, moderated by a specialist for two hours a week.

With only a few pupils in the course, option 1 isn’t affordable. Option 2 requires specialist equipment which is expensive to run, though it certainly has merits. Option 3 requires no new equipment and allows one teacher to effectively moderate a class of up to 20 as they practice written Latin communication. I don’t present it as the complete solution, but rather as the missing piece of the jigsaw that, along with more traditional tools, can cost-effectively deliver specialist teaching into any school in the country.

It is no longer a practical necessity for teachers to teach outside of their specialisms, nor for students to struggle through specialist courses without expert support on hand. All that it takes is a reevaluation of schools’ traditional blanket bans on IM. So what are you waiting for?

Carpe diem.

Last Friday’s TES contained an article “Vocation for the amateur” that set me thinking. At first glance I thought it was just more Voc Ed-bashing, but actually it poses a very tricky question; how do you cope with the fact that very few teachers have actually done for a living the skills that they teach?

Under the traditional apprenticeship model, we had the opposite problem; skilled, experienced men (mainly) who couldn’t teach for toffee. Now the boot’s on the other foot. Teachers with purely academic background struggle to bring the real world into the classroom.

I am part-Danish, and in Denmark we have less of a problem with this. The British education system, at least at Secondary level, remains largely modelled on the public schools that once turned out young men fit to run the Empire. Generalist, abstract thinkers make superb administrators – provided they are supported by a plentiful supply of native servants.

Denmark has no natural resources and no significant army with which to carve out an empire. As a result, the Danes value most highly the practical skills of the artisan as being the best route to national wealth. Denmark’s secondary schools grew directly out of apprenticeship system, and they retain their vocational bias today. As far as I can see, there is no downside to this. Danish education certainly isn’t ‘dumbed down’ in any way. I would like to see the government here paying a little more attention to the Danish example; we could learn a lot.

SCORM – the Shareable Courseware Object Reference Model is a standard for interchange of web-based learning materials. It is strongly promoted by Becta and Curriculum Online as the enabler of a golden age of e-learning in which teachers will have access to an inexhaustible supply wonderful interactive multimedia thingies that that will bring joy, light, good behaviour and quick learning to every classroom.

I, on the other hand, am a little sceptical.

I have long distrusted SCORM for two reasons. First, it was invented by and for the US Navy. The Navy invents new ways to kill people so frequently that classroom instruction just can’t keep up. The big problem is that what the military wants to teach is nearly all procedures. Remember Kipling’s “Today we have Naming of Parts”? It’s a great poem for anyone whose life depends on being able to assemble his rifle in the correct order, but you have to admit it’s not very strong on evaluation. SCORM, as a standard, has a strong bias towards learning procedure – and hence a bias against more complex learning styles.

The second reason is the SCORM objects I see at shows like BETT. At first glance, they look great. They are typically written in Flash. They are colourful, animated and have lots of drag-and-drop animation. This in itself is a good thing – but it’s achieved at the cost of shallowness. Research, empathy, debate, higher-order learning of all kinds are squeezed out, because the standard won’t support them. To add insult to injury, the graphics that so impress a middle-aged man like me cut very little ice with a teenager raised on the complex 3-D gameplay of Sega and Nintendo. The hoped-for engagement very quickly wears off.

Now it turns out there’s some academic thinking to back up my skepticism. In a paper called Three Objections to Learning Objects, Norm Friesen of Athabasca University cites a growing body of research that suggests SCORM is not the panacea it was once cracked up to be. Most tellingly he says

Dan Rehak, one of the “chief architects” behind SCORM, has stated that this framework, has “a limited pedagogical model unsuited for some environments” (as cited in Kraan & Wilson, 2002). “SCORM,” Rehak says, “is essentially about a single-learner [whose learning is] self-paced and self-directed. This makes it inappropriate for use in [higher education] and K-12” (Kraan & Wilson, 2002).

SCORM isn’t necessary to making elearning work in schools. I argued two years ago that much greater richness could be achieved if we simply put the interoperability at a different point in the process, in a white paper called Enabling e-learning success through a richer mix of learning processes (PDF) The principles I laid out are now enshrined in a thing called the “Schools Interoperability Framework”, though I can’t claim anything more than an indirect influence on SIF’s creators.

But that’s for another post.