Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • Gordon Brown hiring 750,000 English teachers in India

    (click here if you can’t see the video)

    This is simply mind-boggling. Gordon Brown just promised to hire 750,000 Indian teachers to teach English to 1,000,000,000 Chinese, via the web. I have criticised the guy in the past for lack of vision, but I unreservedly withdraw that now. Whether the Chinese will welcome this, or see it as the biggest exercise in cultural imperialism since the Opium Wars, has yet to be seen.

    Let’s unpack one of the consequences of this. The programme is 15 times bigger than the entire UK school system (50k teachers). And it’s entirely online. If it can be done in China, at that scale, it’s impossible to argue that it should not be done here too, where we have much better infrastructure. Not unless Gordon is prepared to stand up at a Beijing banquet next month and say “well elearning is good enough for you lot, but we won’t do it at home”.

    So is he going to wind up the British school system? Sack all the the teachers and re-hire in India? Well no, of course he’s not. But this does auger well for a much more radical embracing of new technology than the current feeble ‘schools of the future‘ initiative.

    I have often been critical of technology adoption in education because it’s been structured to look like change without actually changing anything. This is different. Technology has created an opportunity to do something really radically new: turn the world’s existing most popular second language into a true lingua franca. I’m just enormously cheered that the government would go for something so bold, and I really look forward to the same scale of thinking being applied to education here in the UK.

  • Why do we bother with education?

    schoolI mean historically. For once, I’m not trying to be contentious, just to list the reasons we have chosen to make this enormous social investment.

    • The British Public Schools created a steady trickle of young men who had the skills and attitude to run the empire.
    • The apprenticeship system has produced artisans since the Middle Ages.
    • The 1870 education act put children into schools mainly as a solution to the scandal of child labour in factories.

    What have I missed?

  • TeachMeet 08 and an argument with Doug Belshaw

    Having sworn blind I’d never attend another BETT, I couldn’t resist going to TeachMeet 08 there on Friday. And what a treat it was. Short presentations from lots of people knew of, or knew online, but had never met.

    Doug Dickinson from FlickrMy favourite presentation was Doug Dickinson promoting the free ICT support from IctOpus. Ignoring all the technology on offer, he leapt from one side of the stage to the other holding up keyword flashcards, in complete silence. The old ways, sometimes, really are the best. Photo left; lots more event photos on Flickr.

    Highlight of the evening though was the argument I got into with top educational blogger Doug Belshaw, as we enjoyed pizza after the meeting. My ideal school contain only 200 pupils, and run right through from 5 to 18. Rather than try to base subject experts in the school, I would use technology to link them to the students. Meanwhile, the (generalist) teachers who are permanently based there have a chance to really get to know each student. Doug thought this was bonkers. Of course, he’s a teacher, and I’m not – but then again, perhaps he is too close to current practice to see the alternatives?

    Whose side would you be on?

  • Delivering AfL

    Dave Humphreys did this slideshow a while back, I’d guess as part of an INSET he was delivering. I should have blogged it a while ago (sorry Dave) but here it is now. You may need to click the link to see it – I can’t get it to embed reliably. From Slideshare itself you can download the original Powerpoint file to use/modify yourself.

    SlideShare | View | Upload your own

  • Do VLEs actually de-personalise learning?

    Train crashA well-known consultant* and I have been corresponding about the approaching train-wreck that is English schools’ generally panicked attempts to embrace VLEs ahead of the government deadline. He said:

    It occurred to me that Yacapaca could do a great VLE lookalike if you could upload (as SCORM compliant zips) into a Course structure…

    It is certainly true that we could do that technically, and it’s certainly quite tempting to stick Chalkface’s snout in the VLE trough when there is so much money being misspent. But we won’t do it, primarily because I still think that SCORM is a giant step backwards for school-age education. Here’s why:

    Take a look at a typical SCORM resource being flogged to work in your £10,000/year VLE. Nearly all of them are linear sequences of text to read and pictures to look at, perhaps leavened with a little bit of video. Opportunities to explore and discover are squished by ‘instructional design’.

    As teacher, your VLE will show you that the student has started and finished the ‘learning resource’. It won’t tell you how much, if anything was actually learned. Nor if the student was engaged and enthralled or, more likely, turned even further off formal education by the whole ghastly experience.

    So in what way is this personalised learning? Proponents would argue that if the teacher selected from easy/medium/difficult versions of the resource, that counts as personalisation. Matching the reading level to the student is no bad thing, but personalised learning it ain’t. Any good teacher knows that personalised learning is matched first and foremost to the student’s current enthusiasms.

    Let’s consider an alternative. Web quests have been around for a decade now. Web quests guide the learner but do not over-prescribe. Web quests work beautifully with ePortfolios, and I certainly will be integrating them into Yacapaca this year.

    Postscript: If you are wondering why SCORM is such a gross mismatch for school-age education, just look at its history.

    SCORM is a specification of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, which comes out of the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. Wikipedia

    Yup, it’s a military training system. And soldiers, as we well know, aren’t paid to think. Contrast this with web quests, which are based solidly in student-centred pedagogy.

    A real WebQuest requires higher level thinking, not simply summarizing. This includes synthesis, analysis, problem-solving, creativity and judgment. WebQuest manual.

    From which basis do you want to be teaching your students?

    * I’d better not name him as he has to say nice things about VLEs to some of his clients.