Author Archives: fred6368

From Access to Content to Context

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Beyond Open; #fslt12 MOOC Reflections

Overview; This is my fifth in a sequence of six reflective blog posts on how I developed my teaching and learning practice and reflects on my practice in the noughties. I spent time running workshops in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in Community Learning, become a Culture Online with Visioneer.  The DfES asks to me develop a ‘Digital Divide Content Strategy’ and we start the Metadata for Community Content modelling informal e-learning.  I start work on the Cybrarian project, a Facebook for e-learning that has a working prototype built by Fujitsu before Zuckerburg starts his “Hot or Not” coding. It’s rejected on the advice of consultants, we form lastfridaymob, which reconfigures as the Learner-Generated Contexts Research Group. We present the Open Context Model of Learning at the launch of Open Learn; John Seeley Brown call it the ‘most exciting thing happening in England’. The OU refused to publish it.

Developing informal e-learning nationally; The £250m Community Access to Lifelong Learning (CALL) initiative followed the school-based NGfL and the College-based FERL (VLE’s & Learning Objects) creating Community Learning. The 4th e-learning initiative from the government had a fourth pedagogy (which is good) and was a joint initiative between NOF (your lottery £s), DCMS, MLA, Becta and the DfES, which made it interesting. New Centres were funded, Community Grids for Learning were created, new content (NOF-DIGI) commissioned with UKOLN (Brian) & AHDS (Alastair); complex. The DfES were in charge of the buildings (yep, buildings – government gets worse, much worse in this story, nope it gets much, much, much worse).

Culture Online; So for my tangential involvement in NOF-DIGI (which had technical digital standards but no learning model) I was invited to be a Culture Online Visioneer & ended up dwinking champagne for breakfast with the Hollyoaks & Brookside crews (the fragrant Claire Sweeney) but that’s salacious. Given £100m to develop the online resource for the Cultural sector its future was cut away by the Foot & Mouth epidemic of 2001 so instead of building an ongoing digital cultural offer £90m was diverted to burn cows. I think we have a global lead on government investment on burning cows, we spent £8bn in total; pity the cultural sector is still a long way behind digitally. Mind you Jon Drori and his crew did a good commissioning job with the residual £10m, BAFTAs won, but were probably over the hills and far away from SOP. The £90m could have built ongoing expertise across the sector instead of beacon of brilliance (fires burning bright today)

Metadata for Community Content; One Tuesday in February, 4 months ahead of the 2001 election I received phone call from the DfES asking if I could develop a “digital divide content strategy”, “oh, yeah, that would be really interesting”, “Good! Can we have it by Friday please?” Which means it’s a manifesto headline call, not a thought through initiative. “Well actually the Children’s Partnership have just done something similar in the USA, which they researched for a year; I think we need to do some research first”, “Hmm, we’ll get back to you”. Phone rings Wednesday, “We can spare you £85,000, can you do anything with that?”, “Yeah sure (my catch phrase)” “good, we need it spent by the end of the financial year.” Click! And so began the Metadata for Community Content project, which Ronan O’Beirne and I have just written about for Stewart Hase’s (author of “From Andragogy to Heutagogy“)  forthcoming Bloomsbury book “Self-determined Learning”.

Why Context is Queen; I could say a lot more about the MCC project but in terms of this OAP project I will confine myself to the following points. Firstly CALL was an Access initiative back in the day that Open Access was thought to be socially inclusive and the Digital Divide Content Debate was the element that started it off. This was an online conference over a week debating how we created “killer” content that would solve the digital divide. We came to 4 conclusions, captured in this talk that I gave at Oxford Universities Shock of the Old conference in 2008. They were open access only created a new problem of appropriate content and commissioning that wasn’t the best solution, rather we needed context-specific content as part of a “community-responsive curriculum” (Alistair Clark’s – one of the MCC – phrase). We needed a “fit for context” solution;

1) Tools & Skills (not pre-written content)

2) Content Creation Toolkits & training

3) Local content for local people; the co-creation of content

Hence we discovered that rather than “content being king” as Time-Warner, AOL (remember them), Facebook, Huff Post, and now the Big Famous, and newly into “open” “learning”, Universities, and many more, tell you but both pre-Web and post-Web 2.0 “Context is Queen”

The UK Facebook for Learning; The Learner-Generated Contexts group of 10 people emerged from the failed Facebook project, and our ideas about learning being a “coincidence of motivations leading to agile configurations” were discussed at a talk we gave at the launch of Open Learn in 2007. One of the key issues we discovered when we organised an away day to discuss how best a Learner-Generated Context was that we had all failed in the formal education system, then designed our own way through it. Apart from me this included Professor Rose Luckin, Professor John Cook, Dr Drew Whitworth, Dr Tom Hamilton, Dr Wilma Clark, Dr Judy Robertson, Dr Peter Day, Nigel Ecclesfield, Jon Akass, who have all become successful despite early ‘failure’. We all wanted to design a better education system, based on felt learning experiences, than the one we had experienced; it had to be learner-centric. In fact we wanted it generated out of shared learning needs which would be supported by agile institutions rather than institution-centric serving academic careers..

The Open Context Model of Learning; Actually I was going to discuss this in-depth here, but I have written about it a lot and I finally covered it really well in Heutagogy and the Craft of Teaching which I gave as a Salford Method talk, invited by Cristina  Costa because David Roberts wanted to investigate heutagogy. So don’t read this read that.

Reflections on this post; I’ve realised that this is about teaching practice, so I will comment more on how we involved teaching practice with technology in the MCC project

To be completed and include COP & Identity (Gotcha!)



An Internet Model of Learning & Teaching

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Somewhere in the 20th Century

Overview; This is my fourth in a sequence of six reflective blog posts on how I developed my teaching and learning practice and reflects on my practice in the 1990s. I become aware of the Internet in the 1980s and discussed its social impact before incorporating it into course design.  I looked at the technical architecture of the net and the Web and started to developed early courses for the Internet and the web, including the MirandaWeb award-winning TaLENT Community Grid for Learning project in Lewisham; Teaching and LEarning with Educational NeTworks. I look at how this new learning design required new learning literacies.

A Global Information Utility (GIU) was posited by Yoneji Masuda for the Japanese Government as a key characteristic of the global future in the 21st Century when he was at MITI in 1981; the English translation was published in 1986. As an ancillary to my future vision NeXT 2021 I wrote a handout on the technical possibilities of building the infrastructure to support a GIU in 1989. As the possible platform I ranked the low-bandwidth Internet third behind the higher-bandwidth multi-media SONET & ISDN which had greater controls and costs. However it was the “self-booting” character of the internet and the freedom of users to create tools, such as HTTP, the web and browsers, and upload them for others to use, that meant its bandwidth limitations were circumvented (who has heard of SONET?). It is this creative flexibility to develop and evolve that the Internet incorporates that underpins the “net neutrality” debates, the work of the Berkman School at Harvard like Lawrence Lessig, and its UK offshoot the Open Rights Group, and the Human Knowledge Project of @sivavaid. It is also why Americans, who have a constitution (again see NeXT 2021) are passionate about the ongoing debates on the business issues (say, Schmidt and Zuckerburg now, and the old-school Gates and Jobs) the political issues (say Lessig, Zittrain, and Dr Wu) and the technology issues (see Vincent Cerf, Eli Pariser, Howard Rheingold) and even knowledge issues (@sivavaid & ds106). These issues got a rare airing on this side of the Atlantic recently, where we really aren’t bothered about it, when Sarkozy took on Schmidt on who builds the digital infrastructure for 21st citizens at the e-G8 summit on May 24/25 2011.

Internet-based courses; In the early 1990s when the Internet began to take off I tried to add practical elements of it to courses that I taught. I finally adding a Unit called “Businesses Uses of the Internet” to the HNC in Systems Analysis in 1995. A student assignment on that course produced the first web-site for the Docklands Light Railway in London and he got an interview with the Managing Director to explain the future of business; cool! Diana Laurillard published her Rethinking University Education in 1994, the seminal work in this area, and In 1995 John Cook ran an online course out of TVU; it was hard and lonely out there in cyberspace back in the day. I developed a second Internet course in 1997 called Information Systems in Society (they were seen as confined to business up until then), and decided to run it as a blended learning unit. I block booked the new computer lab and then realised I had to design an introductory portfolio based on the new learning skills students would need online. They were, Search, Evaluation, netiquette, moderating discussions groups, working collaboratively and supporting others. These 6 elements constituted digital literacy as I saw it in 1997.

National Grid for Learning; In 1997 the government under Tony Blair launched the National Grid for Learning, a programme to put all schools on the Internet. I got involved with the roll-out in the London Borough of Lewisham where, unusually, an NGfL Curriculum Committee was set up as well as the project management crew responsible for the box and wires. I was on that committee and I also attended a NIACE conference in spring 1997 called Information Superhighways of the Future with a keynote by Josh Hillman who did the conceptual work on the University for Industry (UfI - learndirect) Gordon Brown’s pet project; exciting times. The NGfL was essentially lesson plans on the web with little thought to pedagogy, learndirect was content-driven courses. The Lewisham Curriculum Committee, also unusually a joint project of Goldsmiths, Lewisham College and LBL Inset team, thought we needed a CPD programme to develop staff skills and won project funding to do this from the NOF ICT Literacy programme for teachers.

TaLENT; Originally the Teaching and LEarning with Educational NeTworks project, TaLENT, was an Intranet I built at Lewisham College. I stole some space on the K drive and set up a directory K:links> and just started building web pages for various people, events, resources. Then I persuaded the college to link with The Wirral Metropolitan project the Learning Web and started building dedicated learning resources for various departments; dance, plumbing, construction, theatre, computing. I learnt a lot. I was on Kinshuk’s Athabasca Technology & Society discussion group involved in social and learning technology discussions globally; I learnt more. Tom Boyle and John Cook asked me to deliver that part of the Interactive Multimedia Design Unit MM220 at UNL that dealt with social and cultural impacts of technology.  I was asked to be on the EU project GALA (the first EU XML project) as Accessibility & Usability Consultant, This was also a part of the Citizens Connect project in the London Borough of Lewisham looking at the impact of e-government on peoples lives. Within that we developed the Community Grid www.talent.org.uk (now removed) for the ICT Literacy for Teachers training programme. As we had a lot of experience within the TaLENT group we designed the training around what Thomas Cochrane now calls “intentional” Communities of Practice, but we did it around National Curriculum subject cohorts.

Community Grid for Learning; As Community Projects Co-ordinator at Lewisham College I worked on a range of community projects, not just computing, and was also a Trustee of the Creekside Education Trust which built the Creekside Centre concerned with Urban Ecology and Environmental Education. I also learnt a lot about running (volunteer) community centres. However thanks to our links with the Council TaLENT were given a server and we bought a VLE First Class so we could build a Community Grid for Learning during 1998/9. We also set up a mixed Apple (hypercard) & Wintel lab in the INSET PDC and started running our training courses and building up online groups around the subject cohorts. It was a long and hard coding and learning curve, but luckily, I learnt a lot.

Becta; In 2000, having launched the FE version of the NGfL called FERL (I helped in the set up of its original discussion group) the government decided to launch the £250m CALL Community Access to Lifelong Learning programme which had a strand about developing Community Grids for Learning across the country linked to ICT Learning Centres, which got renamed UK Online Centres. The plan was for 700 centres in the countries most deprived neighbourhoods but 7000 were set up, not least because of the People’s Network going into every public library. We later built an interactive UK Online centre for training purposes. Whilst writing a bid for a UK online centre in Lewisham I also applied to be Head of Community Programmes at Becta and got the job, largely because I had already built a CGfL, and quickly wrote an information guide on how to build one. I soon won a contract from the DfES to build the support website for CALL (HelpisatHand.gov.uk) and suddenly had a team of 11 and my own technology to play with; interesting, very very interesting…

Reflections on this post; Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams was Steven Spielberg’s CGI Artist on Jurassic Park and trained at the Sheridan College Canada who run an animation course. He gave a talk at the the London Film Festival in 1992 about his work, especially on Terminator 2 and was asked whether future CGI artists should learn a CGI tool or start with animation. His answer was to learn animation as CGI was a tool that let you do stuff that you worked out as an animator, but you needed the craft of animation to make the most of CGI. I think the same applies to TEL, technology-enhanced learning. Your craft as a teacher needs to pre-date the way you use technologies. Admittedly technologies offer affordances, especially collaboratively, that extend your capabilities, but you must have a sense of what constitutes good teaching and learning, including what Jephcote calls an “ethic of care”. I was lucky to have worked out my style as a teacher in 1988 (brokering learning) and my view of the social impact of digital technology in 1989 (NSU) and so I have had an interpretive framework to help me make sense of new technology developments.

NeXT; what I learnt about open learning and social inclusion on the CALL programme, and why when William Goldman says “nobody knows anything” in Hollywood it is true of any large information eco-system.


The Craft of Teaching

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Brokering Learning; reflections for #fslt MOOC

Overview; This third reflective blog post on my learning and teaching is about how I developed my professionalism as a teacher in the After Math of beginning to teach computing in a UK college instead of politics in a USA University; it’s how the light gets in. I think I eventually developed a craft of teaching which, as Malcolm Gladwell and Richard Sennett argue, takes 10,000 hours.

Getting by on teaching alone; Intrigued by my Greek friend Eli Georgeadou’s suggestion that my teaching skills alone enabled me to teach Computing, and also being unemployed with a baby on the way, I decided to take up her offer. Unsurprisingly I got Mathematics (Numeracy Skills), Organisational Theory and English (the Americans had failed to overthrow English), on Computer Studies and Systems Analysis courses. That year was more terrifying than delivering my first class with my arm in a sling after a car crash as I KNEW NUFFINK! No back-up, de nada. I did learn to be completely honest and absolutely transparent with my students; and they trusted me. If I didnt know something I promised to look it up. I became the learners delegate back into the accreditation system. At the end of that blizzard of a year I asked myself what was the difference between rich kids in an American University and poor kids in an FE College. In my opinion; nothing in terms of capability, everything in terms of confidence. The trick was to work on their motivation. In fact I developed a mantra; if I could only work on either developing learner motivation or providing subject information then developing learner motivation without providing subject info would transform their learning. I built on that.

Getting ahead of pedagogy; You might notice a pattern here, dive right in, get out of my depth, look around or call for help and then *start solving the problems that emerge* This requires several characteristics, a kind of dumb fearlessness, resilience, creative problem-solving and the kindness of others. Whilst I “act on my own recognisance” I’ve learnt most from my colleagues, even when I move on from what they have taught me. I decided that I was personally more motivated to teach poor kids in Lewisham and started acting on my insights and experience. The first of which was to get control of the curriculum of any subject I was delivering. I have always been happy to be on course review & redesign teams; I’d done this as a student rep on my politics degree. Second of which was to examine if there was any overlap between computing and politics. I decided it was on the social impact of technology and wrote a unit called Information, Technology and Society in 1984, which accidentally prepared me for the Internet. The third was to teach any unit for three years so I could use my playwrighting development strategy of repeat, modify, then redesign pretty much everything I did, which I think is a key craft of teaching skill.

Working with my students; After four years of teaching I finally got to post-grad teacher-training (Garnett) College only to be told that they couldn’t teach me anything as I was so experienced! Big disappointment! So I just continued being curious, but now I made things up with confidence. I also worked with great course teams at Lewisham, especially Janet Posner and Richard Jones, with whom I helped redesigned some courses and was part of the Associate College submission to Greenwich University (always do the dirty work, it pays off later with your freedom); and embrace serendipity. I was Mr Yeah Sure; doing lots of subjects no one else wanted to, such as accountancy, but like a good chef nothing you do is wasted if you want to improve your teaching; push yourself and taste it all, even ladysfinger. Most of all you throw yourselves on the patience of learners. However you teach students will cut you some slack if you have something to offer; they trust you to teach them. You lose students, not the other way round. I also loved the casual equality of the American model; first name terms, chatting in the corridor and especially treating students as equals. Whatever you give out you get back big time.

10,000 hours; So having finally got ahead of the jargon in my given subject I had enough experience, expertise, resources and strategies to make good on my promise to motivate students by getting them to think for themselves. I gave them freedom AND started playing with them (you’ve still got to push). You’ve got to treat the class as an entity with shared goals and EVERYONE as an individuals full of differences. I think Cristina Costa calls it embracing diversity with passion. I gave them freedom by letting them decide what assignments they could do, I would provide assessment frameworks up front and we would negotiate the work. We made all coursework meaningfully related to the real world. I minimised lectures and mixed up my sessions. In the end I would do a cycle of workshop, seminar and then lecture. If you’ve played a game that te lecture is based on you get the abstract ideas straight away as you are drawing on your own experience, not a text book. Most of all I always built a supportive learning community first in any of my classes and then threw the workload at them, which was always a stretch. I also said I would take as long as it took to get anyone through a class; the deal was my classes are hard but I’ll make sure you understand them. This was part of a technique I developed called “front-loading” in which I spent the start of a course building my students ability to manage their own learning. Exam-based learning is “end-loaded” the longer it goes on the more intense it becomes and everyone is manic; front-loading becomes ever more serene as students “own” their learning. In ITS I even developed a technique of deconstructing the learning material so that the students could see how the “learning objectives” emerged. They knew exactly why I assessed them as it was a flipped curriculum with self-defined learning objectives that they had worked. Demystify the assessment process and students work really hard; most of all they hate being cheated in the assessment process. I always said work more and you’ll be rewarded more, and showed them why and how. Together this represents a craft that I call brokering learning.

1989; Luckily for me I had this all in place by 1989 before the Internet impacted on learning. By 1988 I had developed a synthesised model of socio-technical change that I called NSU; Networks Services Users that tried to envision what 2021 might look like. I liked my students to finish thoughts off for themselves, often in lectures I would refuse to answer various question and would reply that they were smart enough to work out the answer by the next class, which they were, but I always checked. That’s how you design for “ah-hah” or Eureka moments; do less – takes nerve. However the NSU model was a bit complicated to extrapolate from so I wrote a story called Homi & the NeXT One for a Masters paper to indicate my interpretation. As I had been kicked off a Bachelors, a Masters and a Ph.D I actually finished this Masters in Information Technology; eight years after I started teaching it. The story is here and gives you an idea of how I thought the future of Internet-based learning might look back in 1989.

On reflection – books;  I’ve realised that unlike others on #fslt12 (hi Eleni!) I havent talked about books and pedagogy (that’s next). Having been involved in political activity the corollary of that is *endless* theorising; I’ve done theory. Actually I am a big fan of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. Kropotkin was also a respected scientist, invited to join the Royal Society, and he “corrects” Darwin’s simplistic view of competition in nature with processes of mutual co-operation. He moved his ideas into Fields Factories & Workshops, inspiring Ebenezer Howard & Garden Cities; Welwyn Garden CIty and Hampstead Garden Suburb. I also had a scholarship to do Town Planning at UCL researching “Advocacy Planning” where experts are socially responsible, but Colorado got me. At the Anarchist Symposium were Murray Bookchin, his Urbanisation without Cities updates Kropotkin, and the wonderful Ursula Le Guin, whose novel The Dispossessed became a set text on my course; as did Aldous Huxley’s Island. You’ll have will heard of his dystopian Brave New World, but Island is his utopia and is built around a theory of education. Written in 1962 this includes a model of completely socially responsable learning by doing and reflecting which also rethinks families, relationships, responsibilities and rights. Together they inspired my own unfinished novel Nestor; Material Detective which continues to inspire me! As I also taught constitutional politics and the Federalist Papers in the USA, which are about how you pull a constitution together, my thinking on education has always been you need to design learning for the society you want to live in. I’m with Freire, and even Dewey, on that. Identify what society you want to live in; then build the education system that will realise it.


Curious & Confident (2)

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Initial Teaching Experience #fslt12 reflections

Overview; This is my second reflective post (the first was on learning) and is quite complicated because I was the alternative education officer in a Student’s Union when I was 19 then, when I was 28, had an offer to be a teaching assistant in the USA where I started teaching Politics, then when I was back in the UK, had a very significant phone call asking me to teach Computing. Resolving those differences lead me to become a good teacher IMHO, the significant aspects of which I will pick up tomorrow.

Education Officer; In his recent brilliant book, Together, Richard Sennet analyses how we might make co-operation work. He argues that we need to understand dialogic, or collaboratively driven, processes, rather than dialectic, or rationally resolved, processes. He argues that the history of left-wing behaviour in the twentieth century was one of dialectical left rather than “social left” politics. This was because, after the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx and the First International rejected the idea of a social revolution. If you ever get a chance to hear Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) of BBC’s Newsnight give his brilliant talk on the social organisation of the Paris Commune go along, he is riveting. Luckily for me I ended up being a part of a social left commune quite by chance when I was 19. Having moved to London to become a drummer by enrolling on a degree (yep Mathematics) I was asked by the Students Union if I would take over editing the paper 6 weeks after I arrived. Why? Because I played the drums and was reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce in Maths classes! So, as the only arty guy in a Polytechnic devoted to science, they thought that I obviously knew how to edit papers; so now I got journalism.

Polytechnic of North London; 8 weeks and 2 bog-standard issues after I took over editing the paper the Students Union went into an extra-ordinary occupation that lasted five months. I wont go into the issues although they were very significant, but I will examine the process as it has affected my practice ever since. We did not interrupt a single class but we took over all of the admin offices, the switchboard, the theatre and, crucially, the canteen which we ran as a workers co-op for 5 years Not only did we never give the canteen back but running it turned us into a social co-operative. In 1971 pubs closed by 10.30 and were only open from 11.30 to 14.30 at lunch time. Our canteen was open officially from 8am to 6pm but a rule that it could stay open for an extra hour if any one customer (student) would do an extra hour meant it stayed open til at least midnight and often til 3am. Suddenly it was more interesting to stay on campus, even in London. Rock bands moved in and squatted with us so we had free concerts before Union meetings and, as Communications Officer on the Occupation Committee, I became involved in organising an alternative education. A key aspect was organising a week-long Community Festival with local residents to replace rag week. I was introduced to Vanessa Redgrave by the Black Panthers and she organised and paid for a week long film festival. Why? Because Drop Out, a film she had made with Franco Nero with whom she was living, was refused British distribution because she was living “in sin” with a man to whom she was not married! (Can you believe that? Think how many Hollywood films would be blocked if that was applied today!) So we hosted the British premiere of an Italian film with some of the cast, and so on for months. I got used to ringing people up and asking for favours, which they graciously granted (only Jonathan Miller refused help). Critically I had learnt that to effect change we needed to carry everyone, we had massive Union meetings and typically voted to continue the occupation with 85% of students voting in favour. Most of them served in the canteen too. I didnt know it but I had learnt something about dialogic processes and the value of co-operation

Boulder, Colorado; I arrived in Boulder, Colorado as a Teaching Assistant in Political Science on the doctoral programme the day before Labor Day 1979 and went in to report for duty on the Tuesday September 4th. I was assigned my first class on Tuesday September 11th On the Friday night I was a passenger in a car that swerved off the highway at 55mph and was a write-off (totalled) and was discharged from hospital before I had fully regained consciousness. Nonetheless I went and delivered my first fifty-minute class on 9/11 and boy was I rubbish! I managed 10 minutes before giving up (well it felt like 50 minutes). I’d never lead a seminar based on a professors’ lecture before, didnt know how to turn questions back to students & be discursive; as an experienced learner I knew nothing about teaching. Being a learner gave me very little in fact. Fortunately my department were great. I asked everyone about everything, went to some other TAs seminars. Best of all my department (19 doctoral students all teaching) met socially on a regular basis. A permanent Tuesday night table at a Mexican restaurant, Boulder Inn disco Fridays and Saturdays, monthly Bar-B-Q in the park, bi-monthly dinner at a staff house, regular pot-luck parties. Social left dialogic behaviour; brilliant! I got less worse as a teacher.

Within a month I was asked to be on the Graduate Student Advisory Council responsible for reviewing departmental practice (I got Theatre – what else) I became a Governor on CoPIRG, the most brilliant student organisation ever, involved in socially responsible public research (it was a “Nader Raider“). I got into the NOAA soccer team and also became a soccer coach for South Boulder High under-14 team (they did the double). Oh and as the University didn’t have one I set up a Student Union and called it PIGS (for Politics in Graduate Studies); comprising me (and three friends). One friend lived in a Mennonite Commune with the Boulder-Denver Socialist Feminist Guerilla Theatre Collective, so I moved in (still my favourite line in the story of my life). PIGS affiliated to the Caucus for a New Political Science and published a research journal which I edited (I’m guessing you’ve spotted the editor/theatre tropes right?) and I also set up the Politics and Film project with the great Stan Brakhage in the Film Department (I had organised a British film premiere!).

Teaching Practice in USA; In my second year I was promoted to Graduate Instructor and got to teach my own classes, yay! I had been the teaching assistant to four different professors by then and had picked up some good points, and bad points that students didnt like. Good point; the whole department had developed a polity approach (European-style) based on understanding the culture of countries rather than the fantastically boring institutional approach favoured in England, so you could tell stories. Bad point; marking to the curve of the Normal Distribution – how you get promotion; students HATED that. When you deliver your own classes in the States you write the syllabus. It then goes through a quality assurance process called a Graduate Curriculum Committee so you can almost do whatever you want; mind you I was delivering Poli. Sci 101 Introduction to political science so I was limited. However you get your September class approved in May and by then you must work out every class, every teaching resource, back up reading for each week, the book list and make sure the book store has it. My strategy was to have the cheapest collection of paperbacks and get the cheapskates to choose my class. As I had given a paper at the First International Symposium on Anarchism in Portland Oregon in January 1981, I had became the visiting temporary assistant anarchist professor covering that class for everyone else. Boy do you meet a lot of wierdos that way.

The discursive and conversational genius of Scott Warren; reflecting back on the first draft of this I realised that I had mentioned Scott and that, previously, I had said that no teacher had inspired me at school. Nor at undergraduate level (I’ve failed a few). However Scott was genuinely inspiring; he was massively open back in the eighties. Scott’s brilliant class in Critical Theory (not an easy subject) was opened ended and discursive. It started at 3pm and officially lasted until 6pm. At which point some of us would go down to the office and bring up a mixture of drinks & nibbles that kept us going til about 8pm. Hunger then forced us out. We would head to town to get food and keep going til about midnight. Three hour classes might seem long but those 9 hour ones just fly by. Thanks Scott.

Class Size; I felt the class sizes were too big (125) so on the advice of my Supervisor Scott Warren I created a course committee of 6 who could review everything I did and I met them once a week. They offered me sex and drugs, which is very American, and I discovered that I was very English; fortunately we have similar languages so I got by. Then an amazing thing happened. I hated the two-part exam-based assessment process, a mid-term and a final. When I moaned about this someone suggested asking if they wanted a term paper. This is a voluntary extra piece of work like an assignment. So I prepared a handout indicating what I wanted and how it should be prepared. I negotiated it with the course committee and then my beautiful students said, more work? Yes please! Critically, as I felt such generosity required an equivalent gesture, I said that they could do a paper on the politics of anything they wanted, as long as they agreed the title with me first. Several of them did a politics and film paper; Nicholas and Alexander and the Russian Revolution, The Marriage of Maria von Braun and the German economic miracle. My favourite was two lads who did a collaborative paper “U2 as the quintessential punk band” back in 1981; brilliant! My favourite excuse was the couple who did a collaborative paper and phoned me up the night before it was due in to let me know that they BOTH had herpes; somehow a deadline extension solved the problem of that STD. However the critical lesson for me was that if you set your learners free they will return your generosity in abundance because they want to learn stuff so bad; just not your stuff.

Back in the UK of E Well those of you who spotted the student union trope know what comes next. Despite being the only doctoral student to get a paper into an International Conference (and meeting film director Eduardo de Gregorio there and working on a film with him) AND the only person, Professors included, who got a Senator from Washington (Tim Wirth) to give a lecture in his class (I was sleeping with his campaign secretary – dont let anyone tell you that sex and politics aren’t intimate in the USA) I was kicked out. I got 0% on my doctoral exam on Political Philosophy because “this paper attempts to overturn Western Philosophy; and is wrong” Which allowed me one final lesson as I could appeal. In my appeal I said several things, one of which was that the Ph.D is an inappropriate form for the transmission of knowledge. If you had new knowledge to impart you should be able to say it in one sentence not in 80,000 words. Mind you I had been a playwright and that is about compression. We shall return to smart-ass one liners that get you kicked out of University. Back in the UK I finished my doctoral research in my own time and found the one sentence that summarised it. Whilst unemployed I also wrote a book with my ex-wife about the Middle East in our own time, which is now a set text at SOAS and Columbia University, and then I got a fateful phone call from a friend asking if I would take a class for her even though I still hadn’t had any teacher training.

“What’s the subject?” I asked her. “Computing”, she replied. “I don’t know anything about computing, I taught political science” I responded, “I’d have one class on systems theory  and then I’d run out of material”. “Ah yes” she sighed portentously, “but you know how to teach…”


Curious & Confident (1)

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My life as a learner: reflections #flst12

Overview; This is my opening blog post for the MOOC First Steps in Teaching and Learning and we have been asked to reflect on our practice as learners and teachers. I will cover 4 points, my learning experience, my initial teaching, my practice after understanding teaching (brokering learning) and my open context based practice in a post-Web 2.0 world. Having commenced this process with this blog post I have now decided to do this as 4 daily blog posts; this is part 1.

My learning experience; Actually I have written a complete reflective novel on my experiences of learning called 63/68 A Visceral History. This is a novelisation of the Open Context Model of Learning (ref below) which, like most of my work, was rejected by people in authority in the UK; in this case the Open Universities Open Learn team (how ironic, how elitist too). We had it accepted as a chapter in an Australian book on Web 2.0 based e-learning; finally published 3 years after we gave our talk! It was this ridiculous time delay, in a Web 2.0 world, of publishing a paper likely to be read by perhaps 20 people that prompted me to write a novel reflecting on my own learning, in what Ronan O’Beirne deliciously described as a “pre-theory” story. He’s right! All theory has been removed (though it is loaded with that) and so you have to work out the meaning of the stories for yourself. You know what? That is how I teach. I structure activities but you have to find the meaning in it; that way you own your learning and you dont owe anything to me or “my” “knowledge”.

Schooling; I went to 11 schools as a kid, 8 primary schools in 3 different countries (Hong Kong, England and Germany) and 3 Secondary. After 11 I first went to a day Grammar School in Harrogate, then a Comprehensive Boarding School in Germany for Army kids (my favourite school), finally I ended up in the boarding wing of a day Grammar School in York; a post-puberty nightmare. All completely different experiences for me, all exactly the same in NOT explain learning to you. The story HELP! is about how I made mistakes in trying to fit in when I moved to Germany by trying not to repeat the mistakes I’d made in trying to fit in at Harrogate (where I was caned, sort of for not being top).

Mathematics; Ironically I was a Mathematical Wizard at school. This was because my Dad gave me an absolutely brilliant picture book called Mathematics for the Million when I was 9. This was written by a communist Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University Lancelot Hogben in the 1930s who was appalled that the working classes didn’t know mathematics when it was so easy (left-wing Dons do have their uses). And he made it easy to learn Mathematics on my own. Four years later I was asked to explain Pythagoras to my classmates and it help me get 770/800 in my numeracy GRE which helped me get onto a doctorate in Political Science at Colorado University in Boulder USA.

Books & TV; I barely watched TV when I was a kid, but my Mum took over the army camp library when we moved to Germany and I’ve read voraciously since I was 7. My Kindle has dozens of books open, David Graeber’s Debt the first 5000 years, Lennon by Tim Riley, Wired for Culture by Mark Pagel and Beyond The Hole in the Wall new mini book by Sugata Mitra on Self-Organised Learning Environments! Physical books I’m reading include Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright, e-learning Theory & Practice by Caroline Haythornthwaite, Rebel Cities by David Harvey and Obama Music by Bonnie Greer (I used to live in Chicago). Like Lennon’s Julia my Mum loved music and I used to help her buy records, staring with the Everly Brothers and the cinema was massive, and Hollywood had the first cultural impact on my sub-conscious (I still kiss badly). 63/68 is about the impact of the Beatles, and much other pop music. In Harrogate we watched Dr Who (I saw the very first one where the Tardis was the punch line – you can only do that once) Dixon of Dock Green (coppers in London – scary) Morecambe & Wise and the Royal Variety Performance. That’s it! My brother and I were sent to bed at 7pm and allowed to read as much as we wanted. In Germany we didnt have a TV – except for the World Cup which we won. In York at boarding school the only TV was in the Physics lab and we had to get permission to set it up. Apart from seeing the Beatles play Hey Jude live on the David Frost show in 1968 I didnt really see any TV. I was 18 and living at home whilst working on the buses before I had regular access to a TV, and I preferred going to the cinema or driving to York to see a live concert anyway.

Primary School; Having gone to 8 primary schools, sometimes two in a year, my memories are very scattered. I remember learning the alphabet by chanting and being taken to the beach in Hong Kong, reading Janet & John books in England playing sports in Germany and going in by bus. Mostly we were feral kids; educated but feral – Swallows and Amazons without the boats. I often lived on the edge of town, or in a village, and groups of us would disappear to play for hours then come home to read or play board games (there is a book chapter on that). I’m sure that was why everyone at primary school was in the Cubs or Brownies so we could get out of trouble in the forest or on the hill or by the streams where we spent our time playing. The only teacher I remember was the 2 teachers in the small village school in Radnage I was at for 15 months and they loved and encouraged all of us, which was great

Secondary School; Saw the tyranny of curriculum-driven education imposed ad teachers disciplining you to do better. I realised recently that when I passed the 11+ and went to Harrogate Grammar School (the 63) it was my 3rd school in the previous 12 months and I’d only been in town for a few months, so it didn’t impress me much. I refused to do homework as I read in my free time and so I was caned (for not doing homework!) and moved out of the top class; as a punishment for reading (no wonder librarians are so quiet). I retaliated by getting 100% in the next Mathematics test and winning every long distance run we had to do. Most significantly it seems now I was so annoyed that the Grammar School played Rugby that I organised a soccer league, aged 11! We played on the Stray in Harrogate, my team was the Bilton Dynamos (then Dynamo Athletic – named after the Moscow Dynamos of course) and the league functioned (for one year) because the lovely Dad of the captain of the Harrogate Harts booked all the pitches.

Think for Yourself; Thanks to my absorption in the Beatles, pop music, and the raging debates about what fab new thing was best for various reasons I ended up deciding when I was 12 that I had to act on my own recognisance. You cant expect some external authority to know better than you, they always reflect local conditions anyway. You had to decide for yourself what mattered and what had value. My Dad has described me as “stubborn” ever since, but it is what the 63 part of 63/68 is about. With a friend I invented a cricket game, derived from Owzat, as I had been a scorer for my Dad’s cricket team, and I organized a games club at school one year as well as a games club in my neighbourhood.

Germany; Like the Beatles in Hamburg living in Germany as a teenager taught me a lot. Firstly you can drink from fourteen (which the school sort of allowed – dont ask), secondly that German boys wanted “our” English girls because they were “easy” (ask Julien Temple). The school itself kept us ferociously busy, we had Saturday morning classes, because we had Wednesday “free” sports time. We had evening classes 2 nights a week, Monday was Public Service night and Thursday was sports nights, and we had House competitions in everything all the time. I slept well.  They had a cinema every Saturday night and we had regular official parties with our sister Girls School. These were chaperoned and you were allowed one kiss during the closing slow song (Britain had just ended rationing, but not for everything). Public Service trained me as a referee and an umpire and in my second year I was officiating in junior house games whilst I went on to do the Duke of Edinburghs (because you went to the Harz Mountains for a week on expeditions, turning a whiter shade of pale in the process). I had one teacher who took interest in me, Mr Lees, who decided I and two others were so good at Mathematics that we should do A levels instead of O Levels, causing further problems in 1968 (see the story). German kids spend the summer at the swimming pool or at the lakes which is what my brother and I did. As I was a nervous about swimming at first I read books by the pool, light books like Death of a President (we were all obsessed with Kennedy) and Plato’s Republic (at 15). When I finally got onto a political philosophy class at Uni I’d read all the books; I’ve been a great believer in the flipped curriculum since back in the day.

York; My A-levels started badly. I wanted to do Mathematics and English and was told that was impossible I had to pick either the Arts stream or the Science stream. The strange mix of subjects bequeathed me by my sporting comprehensive school meant I could only do Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Physics (mathematics with noisy bits). It drove me nuts. Worse it was a rugby school and I just refused to play it. Even worse kissing was completely outlawed (see my story White Heat). Fortunately I got drama, directed a play  and then became a playwright, in the process also developing my 3-part technique for engaging with new subjects. Firstly do it as it is given to you. Secondly tweak, adjust and improve what you are working on, collaborating with others where possible. Thirdly re-invent it completely using the experience, craft and knowledge you have gained; act on your own recognisance…

Reference; Luckin, R., Clark, W., Garnett, F.,Whitworth, A., Akass, J., Cook, J., Day, P., Ecclesfield, N., Hamilton, T. & Robertson, J. (2010). Learner Generated Contexts: a framework to support the effective use of technology to support learning. In M. J. W. Lee & C. McLoughlin (Eds.) Web 2.0-based e-learning: applying social informatics for tertiary teaching. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Reflection on this reflection; In writing this I’ve realised that my Dad gave me Mathematics for the Million when he was doing teacher training himself in Beaconsfield in 1960/61. He also gave me a ‘programmed learning’ text which were fashionable learning resources then, in which you navigated your way through history answering questions at key points and moving to different pages depending on your decisions. He was testing quite sophisticated learning resources out on me when I was nine! On to my initial teaching experience.


Everything Unplugged

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Royal Festival Hall 2 May 2012

Everything meets every week and began as School of Everything Unplugged, emerging from Dougald Hine & Paul Miller‘s learning start-up as a kind of reflective space for ongoing discussions.  Any topic related to learning that members want to discuss that week is up for discussion; the subtitle is “learning conversations” This week it was stress and learning as a gently rambling group discussion, without any real lead (although proposed & explained by David Jennings. We also try to invite someone along almost every week to challenge us to broaden the discussions. If you want to come along you can join the group on Facebook

There are core members including me (now). David Jennings (@agilelearn) and Tony Hall (@tonyhall) have been there since the start on 9/9/9. Regulars include Annie, Lucy, Ian, Paul, Patrick, (yep it is a bit blokey), irregulars include Clodagh, Bronya and Sara. This week we were unusually reflective going back to the origins of the group, which I looked up and tweeted to some response namely “how we enable learning in extra-institutional contexts through conversations around people’s interests” what might be called Open Learning. There was a feeling that as a group we are all the same page when it comes to open learning but we have very diverse practice; home, cultural, contextual, agile, convivial, social media, school, doctoral, inclusion, policy, work-based. #extremecollaboration

Open Academic Practice; The new JISC funded project on Open Academic practice is underway and I have signed up with the Open Brookes project and their MOOC which runs from 21 May to 12 June 2012 and this blog will be where I feed my reflections back into the process. However I want to use the OAP initiative, which tends to interpret “open” as “access” to university, to examine broader issues of Open Academic Practice as Nigel Ecclesfield and I described in “Co-creating Open Scholarship” as I think open is currently defined far too narrowly. It is defined by Universities about their traditional education practice. It needs to be so much more…

Learning Conversations in times of Austerity; The Unplugged group collectively produced a newspaper a year ago called Agile Learning Unplugged to capture some of the discussions and the diverse range of ideas of the characters invloved . The idea of Agile Learning came together following David Jennings’s and Seb Schmoller’s discussions about the impact of austerity on learning provision and what responses might be appropriate . Their conclusion was that Agile Learning might “allow a scaling-down of learning to match the human experience rather than the scaling up of institutions attempting to engage with financial opportunities that globalisation seemed to offer” which we have continued to see following the Brown Review of HE which prompted the student occupations in 2010/11. #upthefees

Open Learning as principle. I see open learning in the terms I identified in the Emergent Learning Model, the self-organisation of social groups, like Everything Unplugged, coming first (as communities of scholars originally self-organised before Universities came along). Following the self-identification of their learning interests various resources might then be accessed or created. Access to resources in times of information scarcity was how Universities originally came about. Having a library of 30 books (Oxford University) or 135 books (Cambridge University – 1209) in one place was the original solution to information scarcity. In the present distributed collaborative world we have Information Obesity (as Drew Whitworth puts it) and can as easily create as consume. The Open Academic Practice initiative seems a belated and limited response to this information abundance based on Access to university, to which Khan has promoted the idea of the flipped curriculum. In this blog I want to look at new models of learning in a world where we are as likely to create as consume and to use collaborative tools as listen to experts; who created the failed world we now live in. As Ben Hammersley put it in An Internet of People we have to learn how to move from a hierarchical society to a networked one.

WikiQuals has emerged in the same way and I will be referencing our work as part of this blog. WikiQuals is interested in post-hoc accreditation strategies and approaches and includes some Everything Unpluggedstars. We have already been looking at the role of Affinity as part of learning support rather than competition as part of educational accreditation. I’ve already realised that WikiQuals reflects more of a rhizomatic approach than a massive online one as Affinity is about relationships. I love those guys!

NeXT I will be investigating these ideas in depth during the MOOC which runs from May 21st for 5 weeks.

@fredgarnett


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