Is it true that the digital world values information rather than ideas?

Neal Gabler argues in the New York Times that thinkers and ideas are harder to find in the public sphere than in the past, not because they are not there, but because they are swamped by our hunger ofr information, no matter how trivial.  He suggests that 'we prefer knowing to thinking becaue knowing has more immediate value.  It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends...ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward'.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?_r=1

Gabler's careful not to argue that people have got less attentive or more stupid, just that there's a lot more to be distracted by.  I like some of Jaron Lanier's suggestions for using the blogosphere in such a way as to promote ideas rather than distraction:

• Create a website that expresses something about you that won't fit into a template available to you on a social networking site
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection (You are not a gadget, Penguin 2011)

These ideas suggest that the problem is that when technology makes writing and publishing so easy and immediate, there is a danger that we assume it has to be done quickly, ie without reflection, without taking time:  'Never mind the content, feel the speed we got it to you!'   This links nicely to my arguments in earlier posts about the craft attitude, and the importance of time in the development of skills and expertise, and in the development and maturation of ideas too. 

The 'modern' argument against is that the web allows ideas and products to be developed collectively, by groups of people who may not even know each other, and that apart from anything else, innovations produced in this way will have fewer bugs because more people have contributed to their development.  This is the argument made by Eric Raymond more than ten years ago, in his important paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/) comparing the production processes of the Windows and Linux operating systems.  A key element of the Linux process, according to Raymond, is the regular publication of updated versions of the code, so that innovations in the design are available to be checked: this didn't happen with Windows because, of course, the Windows production process was and is secret, so as to protect Microsoft's profits. In this way, the web's ability to facilitate collective design and production is seen as intrinsically better than traditional, individually driven processes of innovation.

But this argument doesn't address the issue of time and maturation as key elements of quality processes: whether collectively or individually-produced, successful innovations are usually the product of processes that take time.  Lanier fulminates against the so-called 'wisdom of crowds' - a concept which may embody democracy, but doesn't at all guarantee quality or even factual accuracy, though it may guarantee a kind of bland acceptability.  Is this what we want?  Lots of stuff that's 'not bad', or 'will do'?
My view is in sympathy with Gabler's, but I would argue that even if the cultural sphere is dominated by trivialities, there's no reason for ideas not to thrive. There will always be discerning voyagers on the web, looking for material that is different from the noisy stuff that's on all the front pages.  It's up to those who think ideas and arguments are important to get active and contribute, and also to signal themselves clearly, so as to be found more easily by those looking.

Phacking

Is Britain or the USA in a worse moral state at the moment? http://videos.mediaite.com/video/Jon-Stewart-071111;recently_viewed

This gives an interesting perspective on how American more or less progressive opinion thinks about Britain - mediated through Mary Poppins apparently: 'We drop our consonants when we are 'elping 'eo'le' - you'll have to watch it to get this probably. 

But this is a very complete introduction to the key points of the phone hacking scandal.  It only omits one dimension I'm keen on - the link with Boris Johnson - too bad!

Great quote: 'Do you know how hard it is to disgrace a British tabloid?'

Montaigne on Education

'I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise but learned.  And it has succeeded.  It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology.  We know how to decline the Latin word for virtue: we do not know how to love virtue.  Though we do not know what wisdom is in practice or from experience we do know the jargon off by heart.....our education has taught us the definitions, divisions and subdivisions of virtue as though they were the surnames and the branches of a family-tree, without any concern for establishing between us and it any practice of familiarity or personal intimacy.  For our apprenticeship it has not prescribed the books which contain the soundest and truest opinions but those which are written in the best Greek and Latin, and in the midst of words of beauty it has poured into our minds the most worthless judgements of Antiquity.' (On presumption)

These arguments are very similar to those of modern educators and researchers who say that education has become much too focussed on learning that can be measured easily, at the expense of the education for moral and aesthetic judgement and of values: what is good (allegedly), rather than how to try to be good.  Another indication of how close we are to people of past ages - their worries are our worries too.

Dilbert and data-fetishism

Found at Larry Cuban's blog: http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/

Tesco town

My response to Neal Lawson's post at http://www.allconsuming.org.uk/:

Isn’t Tesco one of best and most successful examples of the logic of capitalism: relentlessly pursuing market dominance – presumably no one in their boardroom could argue against it without appearing to have lost their marbles. TESCO corporate strategy is pursued with the logic of mass production – efficient achievement of measurable goals, elimination of the human and particular in the process of making that strategy, which tends to produce the same effects in the world – the elimination of the human and particular.


I’m not against mass production in principle (at least I don’t think so at the moment) but I suggest we need to ask ourselves the question: which stuff is it Ok to mass produce, and which is it not? Maybe lightbulbs and pants are OK, but presumably no one would argue that our school system should be organised on mass-production principles?

Teacher professionalism and craft: a view from TLRP

A recent publication from TLRP, a Commentary on Professionalism and pedagogy, which I wasn't aware of when I wrote my paper on craft (see post before this), seems to me pretty compatible with it - here is a quote from the introduction:


'In a world-class educational workforce – Finland might be used as an example – teachers are the ones who initiate discussions about pedagogy, and then evaluate and critique the ideas they develop. This ‘pedagogic discourse’ aspires to be explicitly grounded in the scrutiny of ideas, theories, ethical values and empirical evidence. It goes well beyond simplified prescription, for instance of ‘what works', and supersedes reliance on centrally-imposed performance targets. In their place is greater trust in teachers’ capacity for self-improvement as an inherent element of their professional identity. However, this trust has to be earned – hence the focus in this Commentary on the nature of pedagogic expertise....

Teaching is a professional activity underpinned by qualifications, standards and accountabilities. It is characterised by complex specialist knowledge and expertise-in-action. In liberal democratic societies, it also
embodies particular kinds of values, to do with furthering individual and social development, fulfilment and emancipation.

‘Pedagogy’ is the practice of teaching framed and informed by a shared and structured body of knowledge. This knowledge comprises experience, evidence, understanding moral purpose and shared transparent values. It is by virtue of progressively acquiring such knowledge and mastering the expertise – through initial training, continuing development, reflection and classroom inquiry and regulated practice – that teachers are entitled to be treated as professionals. Teachers should be able and willing to scrutinise and evaluate their own and others’ practice in the light of relevant theories, values and evidence. They should be able to make professional judgements which go beyond pragmatic constraints and ideological concerns, and which can be explained and defended.

Furthermore, pedagogy is impoverished if it is disconnected from the capacity and responsibility to engage in curriculum development and to deploy a range of appropriate assessment methodologies....

Pedagogic expertise can be thought of as a combination of science, craft and art; this notion helps us to understand the complementary needs for collectively created knowledge, professional skills and personal capacities. It is also important to remember that all these are grounded in ethical principles and moral commitment – teaching is never simply an instrumental activity, a question just of technique.

One of the challenges for pedagogical discourse is to distinguish between what is known in a scientific sense of being explicit, cumulative and generalisable, and what are the irreducibly intuitive and creative elements of teaching.

It is generally accepted now that good teaching requires strategic decisions informed by evidence. But it also requires a large number of implicit and often instantaneous judgements and decisions. These are responses to the dynamic situation in the classroom, often shaped by the ‘community of practice’ to which the teacher belongs. They are also expressions of each teacher’s individual relationship with his or her pupils: how s/he generates a positive classroom climate or takes advantage of unexpected teaching and learning opportunities. This is the ‘craft’ and the ‘art’ of teaching.

And we all need to acknowledge this paradox of teaching – that the more expert a teacher becomes, the more his/her expertise is manifested in sensitivity to contexts and situations, in imaginative judgements in-the-moment sourced from tacit knowledge. The importance of these forms of expertise is often underestimated. Indeed, they often become so embedded, instinctive and taken-for-granted that they are barely recognised.'

This takes the discussion in my craft paper (earlier post) much further into the nitty gritty of teaching expertise, and while using the new government's language of craft, is also aiming, like me, to prevent a reductive use by politicians of the concept of craft in relation to teaching. I am particularly pleased to see them call for teacher profesionalism that goes beyond the 'what works' idea, which now seems to me to rather facile.  Given that this seems to have been published in June 2010, I'm hoping it might be sign that a rich version of the craft metaphor for teaching might be a little bit of zeitgeist!

The bluebell wood above, seen in West Sussex yesterday afternoon, sems to me  good image for 'irreducibly intuitive' elements of the expertise of teachers.  You can't really explain it - you just have to stand and admire....

Teaching as craft

My paper exploring craft as a metaphor for teaching was published this week in Adults Learning.  Here it is, though please do buy Adults Learning as well: it also contains chapters on why the tax relief system should be reformed to support workplace learning for the low-paid and lowskilled, on adult education and the Bog, sorry Big Society, and intriguingly, on the 'Men's Sheds' movement in Australia.

Teaching as craft?
Jay Derrick, Institute of Education


Introduction

Is it useful to think of teaching as craft? It is according to Michael Gove, the Coalition Government’s Secretary of State for Education: ‘Teaching is a craft and it is best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’ (Gove 2010). John Hayes, Minister for Business and Skills, seems to agree: ‘The instinctive value we feel for craft must be reflected by our education system….this is, this must be the age of the craftsman’ (Hayes 2010). Hayes entitled his speech ‘Craft so long to lerne’, from the first line of the Parlement of Foules by Chaucer, itself a translation, via the latin proverb Ars longa vita brevis, of part of a Greek verse by Hippocrates, the father of medicine:

Life is short,
the craft long to learn,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment fallible,
judgment difficult.

Hippocrates was referring to his work as a doctor. How valid is it to use the word craft to describe teaching? Can Hippocrates’s somewhat world-weary sentiments be applied to teaching? And if we agree that teaching is craft, what implications does this have, for example, for the way we organise the training and development of teachers?

This question is not the same as suggesting that teaching is like this or that craft: conducting an orchestra, for instance, or gardening, though both of these are quite effective metaphors highlighting different aspects of teaching. I want to explore the idea of craft as a generic concept, to see how useful it might be to apply it to teaching. This approach avoids arguments about whether this or that human activity is or isn’t a craft, or about the difference between art and craft. Such discussions are interesting, but don’t help us much in trying to understand the nature of teaching, the kind of people teachers need to be, and how best to train and support them throughout their careers.

This is a timely question, and not just because the comparison has been made recently by members of the Coalition government. The nature of teaching as a profession has been the subject of intense debate for many years, driven by the developments in digital technology, both in terms of the technology people use in everyday life and work (such as mobile phones, facebook, the internet etc) and the technology now available to support teaching and learning (again, mobile phones, facebook, the internet etc). These developments have raised fundamental and new questions about the role of teachers in general (for example, do we need them at all?), and have simultaneously created a wave of new possibilities in terms of learning activities and classroom organisation, which teachers are expected to learn how to use proficiently. At the same time, accelerating globalisation is increasing the cultural diversity of student groups, enriching the resources available to teachers but also creating challenges in terms of expectations and assumptions. This paper is intended to be a contribution to the debate stimulated by these and other developments.

Craft as an attitude

The fact that ‘craft’ is used in relation to many and very different human activities, suggests that rather than being a distinct category which includes some and excludes others, the idea of craft is more helpfully understood as an attitude: as something referring to the manner in which we approach an activity or discipline, or to the way we value it – the way in which we see it as ‘worthwhile’. The idea of craft, from this perspective, puts the spotlight on the human agent, the craftworker themselves, their motivation and dispositions, rather than on the particular activity involved, and still less on the objects or outcomes produced by that activity. The key to craft, and to teaching, I suggest, is not so much what the craftworker or teacher specifically does (though this is of course very important), but the kind of person they are. The first task of craftworkers, from this perspective, is to produce themselves.

So what does ‘the craft attitude’ involve? I think it has six key aspects: attitude to quality, to practice, to learning and teaching, to the workshop (the craft environment in its broadest sense), to time, and finally to mass production. Let’s look at each of these in turn:

1. Quality: the craft attitude implies an absolute commitment to the pursuit of quality, with the practical recognition that this may not always be achieved to the same degree. Edmund de Waal bluntly describes this as ‘a contempt for shoddiness’ (de Waal 2011). Secondly, it seeks to work as efficiently as possible, in terms of time, the cost of materials, and the sustainability of the workshop, as long as quality is not compromised; and finally, it assumes that the ultimate arbiter of quality, efficiency, and mastery in general is the community of practice, ie other practitioners.

2. Practice: this is firstly about a particular orientation towards the discipline of practice, by which I mean respect for the hard, repetitive work required to move towards mastery, commitment to improving practice and knowledge over extended time periods, respect for other practitioners, for the materials and for the tools of the trade; secondly, readiness to collaborate in making, learning, and teaching the craft to less experienced work colleagues; thirdly, seeing accidents, mistakes and less than perfect work as opportunities for reflection and learning; and fourthly, acceptance of a more or less informal hierarchy in the workshop, based on length and breadth of experience, but also on the continuous collective evaluation of the quality of work.

3. Teaching and learning: the craft attitude embodies deliberate and continuous learning through work, with the recognition that this can be both formal and informal; that teaching and developing less experienced colleagues is recognised as an essential part of craft and of improving one’s own practice; teaching and learning is structured around the continuous search for new and better techniques, practices, and tools; and finally that the work is central to the craftworker’s identity: that the character of every worker is embodied in their work.

4. The craft workshop is an environment organised around the needs of practice, as determined by the practitioners, the materials and the tools involved. A key aspect of the workshop is its culture: the extent to which it fosters and supports authentic communication between practitioners, and a mutuality which enables constructive evaluation of each other’s work. This is the team scenario in which there is creative tension between individuals’ strength and weaknesses and the collective expertise of the team as a whole. This has been described as an ‘expansive’ as opposed to a ‘restrictive’ learning culture (Evans et al 2002, Fuller and Unwin 2008). The dynamic of the workshop also reminds us that although craftworkers typically have a main field of expertise, they need to know about related areas as well: beautiful and useful products are often worked in different materials, and need the combined application of very different skills and knowledge. Craftworkers are specialised, their skills have limits, but they are continually learning more about related fields, they work closely with different specialists, and are curious about their work. Workshops facilitate this interdisciplinary practice as far as they can, and continuously evolve so as to do so.

5. Time: it is an inherent quality of craft that knowledge, skill and expertise are hard-won, through long hours, days, weeks, months and years of practice. The craft attitude is suspicious of easy achievement, precocious skill, any work which seems to have been achieved by cutting corners in terms of time. It recognises that while tools make work easier and quicker, the tools themselves have been developed through extended processes of experimentation by hundreds of practitioners, perhaps over centuries. In general, it is an axiom of craft that time is a sine qua non for the sustained achievement of high quality work, and that it is time, filled with sustained practice and learning, that confers expertise – there are no short cuts to mastery.

6. Mass production: the aim of craft is not to produce wholly standardised artefacts, but to reveal the potential of material worked by knowledgeable practice; mass standardised production eliminates the human and the particular from the production process (these are seen as embodying ‘error’): its products are in a very real sense ‘lifeless’, whereas craft aims to maximise the human and the particular in the production process, and embody these in artefacts. Dickens implies all of this in his condemnation of teacher training systems in the mid-nineteenth century:

‘So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs.’ (Dickens 1854)

This quotation is of course from a novel in which the factory system, and the moral philosophy which generated it, is quite clearly delineated as anti-human. The same ideas are explored by Kipling, from a slightly different perspective in which the craft attitude is shown as being distorted and undermined by the institutionalisation of demarcation between different craft specialisms, first in the mediaeval guilds, and later in some aspects of early twentieth-century trade unionism (Kipling 1910). It is an irony that one of the main areas in which the concept of craft survives in the 21st century is in thinking about industrial work which is demarcated into separate crafts for the protection of employment. This point is not just a historical one, but highly topical: there are indications that digitisation of craft expertise in the ‘brainwork industries’ (including teaching) may be leading to social and political consequences similar to those produced by the division of labour and the subordination of humans to machines within the factory system (Brown et al 2011). What Dickens and Kipling remind us so powerfully, however, is that these are moral issues, not merely matters of efficiency or ‘what works’.


Ideas and practices in tension with the craft attitude

Another way of delineating the craft attitude is to look at aspects of life and work which sit uneasily, or are in tension, or even in outright contradiction with it. Among these are firstly, the idea that the outcomes of craft can be evaluated, compared and enumerated objectively. From the perspective of craft, quality is apprehended through the practice of judgement, usually by ‘masters’ of the craft. This judgement may be aided by numerical indicators, but is never determined solely by them, because craftwork does not intend to produce artefacts which are ‘the same but better’ than others, it aims to produce objects that embody the humanity of their maker, and which reflect the highly specific qualities of the materials being used. It is a central tenet of the craft attitude that although craft objects can be compared in a general way, they are not essentially comparable. Richard Sennett puts this another way:

What do we mean by good-quality work? One answer is how something should be done, the other is getting it to work. This is a difference between correctness and functionality. Ideally, there should be no conflict; in the real world, there is. Often we subscribe to a standard of correctness that is rarely if ever reached. (Sennett 2008)

There is therefore an inevitable tension between an idealised, static, ‘objective’ view of quality, and the actuality of a particular piece of work, which may, even if it appears not to be perfect, do the job perfectly well. If practice is systematically subordinated to the idealised perspective, then practice will quickly become restricted, and practitioners will be deskilled.

Secondly, the particular take on time and mastery that is essential to the craft attitude implies that apprenticeship is a long drawn out process and that its completion is only achieved, and arguably not even then, by attaining the status of ‘master’ as judged by peers. The modern idea that apprenticeship finishes when you start work, or even more when you gain your license to practice, is completely at odds with this. So is the modern practice by which apprenticeships within a particular craft are all the same length and contain the same content. Apprenticeship, from the craft perspective, cannot be embodied solely in a formal course of instruction with a fixed length: that is a mass production, rather than a craft model. We will explore the implications of this for teachers a little later. Sennett highlights the learning process itself, and in particular problematizes the tendency of our formal education system to divide and separate the intellectual curriculum from the practical:

Skill is trained practice; modern technology is abused when it deprives its users precisely of that repetitive, concrete, hands-on training. When the head and hand are separated, the result is mental impairment. (Sennett 2008)

Once again, we see that ‘craft’ is not a concept that should be restricted to thinking about ‘vocational’, ‘practical’ skills and occupations: this is a deformation of its true meaning. The craft attitude requires the intellectual and ‘practical’ to be integrated, as each is impaired without the other:

‘There is nothing as practical as a good theory’ (Lewin 1951)

Thirdly, the idea that you can make craftworkers produce better work, or work more efficiently, by setting them quantitative performance targets, is clearly at odds with the craft attitude. Sennett connects this with the promotion of competition over collaboration as the dominant feature of practice (Sennett 2008). Again, this tendency arises from the mass production model of work, and the desire of external authorities to control production and practice.


Implications of a ‘craft’ perspective on teaching

If the craft attitude outlined above is applied to teaching, a number of implications emerge, under each of the six aspects of craft I have discussed: I present a few here for discussion.

Under quality, we would see a confident move towards professional self-regulation by a teacher-controlled body. Self-regulation within the community of practice is an essential aspect of the craft attitude. This doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t be accountable: the issue is that they should be accountable to students first and foremost, and to their own community of practice. Bureaucratic attempts to measure the quality of teachers through a standardised framework and through counting qualifications would be abandoned as expensive, misleading, and damaging to practice and learners alike. Teacher training and development would foster ‘contempt for shoddiness’ (de Waal 2011). Teachers would be empowered to distinguish between unimaginative work that satisfies technical standards, and sustained high-quality work. Teaching would be celebrated as a moral and sustaining activity rather than an industrial and technocratic one.

Under practice, we would see a much greater emphasis on professional development through work, with policy attention shifting towards an enabling framework for supporting CPD rather than the present major focus on initial teacher education. There would be a much greater emphasis in the curriculum of teacher education, along with skills and knowledge, on developing learners’ capacity to judge the quality of work, through collective qualitative evaluation of collaborative projects.

Under teaching and learning, all experienced teachers would be involved in ITE for pre-service trainees and in mentoring new entrants to teaching. This teacher-education work would be completely integrated into their role and practice as teachers. Teachers would be seen as new entrants for at least 5 years after their initial training.

Under the workshop: organisations employing teachers would be ‘expansive’ rather than ‘restrictive’ in relation to the learning of their staff (Evans et al 2002, Fuller and Unwin 2008). In relation to time, it would be recognised that there are ‘no short cuts to mastery’, that experience confers expertise that cannot be achieved any other way. And finally, any vestiges of mass production practices and procedures in teacher education would be eliminated: learners would not be expected to be standardised outputs, and would not be measured as such. Variations of practice would be welcomed and encouraged if they served quality, as would be the integration of intellectual and practical skill and knowledge. Efficiency and effectiveness would be measured by qualitative judgements rather than in solely quantitative terms.

All of these implications of adopting what I have called the craft attitude to teaching seem to me to be highly desirable: a great many of them are supported by research as well. The argument against mass production approaches to educational systems is made for example by Ken Robinson (Robinson 2010) on the grounds of its anachronism in the 21st century. Very many teachers, moreover, already have this attitude, and struggle to maintain it, and the quality of their work, in a technocratic system which tends in many ways to deskill them.


Conclusion: learners and teachers

If teaching is craft, learners are the material teachers fashion: they are the artefacts of teaching. However, learning is also work, it is work done by learners, with guidance from teachers. This suggests that we should see the work of teaching as helping learners produce and develop themselves, as individual mathematicians, plumbers, philosophers, nurses, etc, rather than standardised factory-output versions of practitioners of those disciplines, ‘like so many pianoforte legs’, as Dickens has it. At the same time, reflective teachers are continually producing and developing themselves as teachers. So the craft attitude to teaching sees it as a contribution to the collective work of being and continually becoming human; and at the same time as holding off, resisting, and repairing the social, cultural and political damage done by the dominant ethics of mass-production.


References
Brown P, Lauder H, Ashton D (2011): The Global Auction. Oxford, OUP
Dickens C (1854): Hard Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin (2003)
Evans K, Hodkinson P, Unwin L (eds, 2002): Working to learn. London: Kogan Page
Fuller A and Unwin L (2008): Towards Expansive Apprenticeships. London: Teaching and Learning Research Programme
Gove M (2010a): Speech to the National College for Leadership of Schools 17-06-2010, at http://www.michaelgove.com/content/national_college_annual_conference
Hayes J (2010): Speech to the Royal Society of Arts 26-10-10, at http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/john-hayes-skills-and-their-place
Kipling R (1910): The Wrong Thing, in Rewards and Fairies. London: Penguin (1987)
Lewin, K. (1951): Field theory in social science; selected theoretical papers. D Cartwright (ed). New York: Harper & Row
Sennett R (2008): The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane
Robinson K (2010): Changing education paradigms. Royal Society of Arts Animated Lecture, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=player_embedded
de Waal E (2011): With these hands, Financial Times 11-03-11, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f50d924-4b63-11e0-89d8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1H9ksDxWZ
Whitty G (2008): Changing modes of teacher professionalism: traditional, managerial, collaborative and democratic, in Exploring Professionalism, B Cunningham (ed). London: Institute of Education
Wilby P (2011): The awful truth: education won't stop the west getting poorer. The Guardian 01-03-2011

How the internet tried to kill me

I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool anti-digital prophet of doom (though anytime I try to put awkward questions about, say, Facebook and privacy to my son that's what he accuses me of) - anything but - so I'm sorry, I couldn't resist this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13rubin.html?_r=1

Maybe Mr Rubin failed (see my photo post recently).

More on the Wolf Report

I was recently at two seminars on the Wolf Report on 14-19 Vocational Education (see earlier post), one led by Ann Hodgson at the IoE, given as part of the 'Teach In' organised by the Students' Union on the day of the UCU strike, and the other led by Alison Wolf herself, also at the IoE.

Ann's in-depth analysis of what is a very long and detailed report concluded that it doesn't address any of the fundamental problems of our education and training system, but does propose some tweaks aimed at making the present mess work a little better.  She pointed out that the very narrow brief of the enquiry effectively precluded proposals for systemic change, as the whole system is so closely interconnected: changes in one part would require changes in other parts too - not part of the brief.  Her view is that most of her recommendations would actually help

Alison Wolf gave a highly fluent and at times entertaining account of her work 10 days or so ago.  She also noted the narrowness of the brief, and pointed out the very short timescale for dealing with such a complex set of issues (6 months), and that the enquiry team consisted of little more than herself and a couple of civil servants - not exactly a vast team, although they were able to commission some specific research for the review.

She started by stating the key research findings she based her review on, which included:

• low average returns to NVQ
• high returns to apprenticeships, English and Maths, and employment. 
• young people change jobs, occupations and sectors very frequently
• there are relatively few genuine NEETs - most young people move in and out of education and employment continuously
• practical and vocational courses are not inherently more motivating for low-achieving students: what motivates students is good courses and good teaching
• what courses are offered by schools and colleges is determined largely by funding pressures and by league tables, rather than by what is good for students.

She stated that her basic assumptions (open to disagreement) were these:

• Early specialiation is undesirable: all 14-16s should follow a broad and largely common curriculum
• Increasingly important for employment and their future lives that all students should achieve A-C Maths and English
• Speeches about 'parity of esteem' make no difference to the respect in which different qualifications are held
• Good courses, ie those which teach difficult and valued skills to a high level, whether academic or vocational, lead to desirable future opportunities
• Local employers are the best source of quality control of vocational programmes
• Vocational programmes need to be taught by genuine experts
• Competition between institutions can be helpful provided the focus is on what is good for students
• Most students use information in a sophisticated manner

These preliminaries lead to the three main focusses of her recommendations:

1.   Conceptualising 14-19 education

• Qualifications on offer should be decided on at a local level
• Larger general education component in vocational education: say 80%-20%
• Bottom-up development of coherent programmes rather than random accumulation of qualifications

2.   Funding and institutional arrangements

• Address shortfalls in provision, especially apprenticeships and genuine work placements
• Improve quality of vocational instruction, by increasing teacher mobility and institutional collaboration
• Improving information

3.   Regulatory framework

• Rethink OFQUAL
• Rethink QA
• Rethink incentives built into accountability and league table measures

So far, apart from the acceptance of 4 of her recommendations at the launch of the report, there has been no response from the Coalition Govt to it.  Alison Wolf said she would be surprised if all of them were accepted and implemented, because it is such a complicated undertaking to make changes of more than a superficial nature to the education system - it is interlayered and interconnectd and so changes in one place require changes in others.  This can be done, but not within the lifetime of one government, and so these types of change will only happen with either very confident, or very radical governments.  I guess she was referring to her recommendations about the accountability system.  She was highly critical of the way the achievement of qualifications is used to accredit students and at the same time for funding purposes and for league table places: this leads to unintended outcomes, because institutions' success depends on these measures rather than on what is good for learners.  I was pleased to hear her say this so unequivocally, as I argued that funding and accountability should be detached from qualifications gained within Skills for Life a long time ago, in 'Testing, Testing, 1,2,3'  published by NIACE in 2004.  However, I guess she is right that we shouldn't hold our breath that this will be implemented during the present government's term of office, even if some of the less fundamental recommendations are. 

Most of these recommendations, accepting that they are not proposing fundamental change, seem to me to be broadly positive, and behind them is a strong call for the importance of 'really good teachers'.  Maybe one of the Wolf Report's legacies will be a debate about what makes a 'really good teacher', how these can be supported and developed, and what institutional and system factors make it harder for 'really good teachers' to practice their craft.  That would be a very positive outcome in my view.

Another key point she is making is against centralisation - identical standardised qualifications to be taken by everyone whatever their circumstances, the mass-production approach.  She asserted that 'the current centralised regime is expensive and sclerotic'.  Consistent with this, her assumption that local employers are the best source of quality assurance for vocational qualifications is controversial, but only in the context of the UK.  In Germany, planning for vocational provision is jointly carried out by employers, unions and local government in what is known as the 'social partnership', a concept more or less alien to the British way of doing things.  But at the same time, the German system has been held up for years as a model: if the Coalition really want to copy successful models from abroad, why not this one?

Gapminder: amazing resources for teaching

I have become a big fan of Hans Rosling recently after seeing some of his programmes about statistics on TV.  Today I discovered Gapminder, a brilliant site full of dynamic graphs and diagrams illustrating inequality between countries over time.  They use the power of statistics and of the internet to demonstrate how overall global prosperity has risen over the past 200 years, and how different countries' prosperity has risen, fallen, and risen again during wars, famine, industrial growth, political change, etc.  Rosling argues, unfashionably, that inequality is in many ways being reduced overall....and there are similar dynamic charts on HIV and on health.  This is the best site I have seen for a long time.      

Ingenuity in hard times, a new pamphlet from the RSA

http://www.thersa.org/projects/design/ingenuity

Is google changing the way we think?

This post was triggered by two separate stimuli: first, seeing a demonstration of one of google's development projects on machine translation, and secondly, reading Is Google making us stupid?, an article by Nicholas Carr published in the Atlantic a couple of years ago.

The notion that google seems close to being able to provide simultaneous translation between dozens of different languages is impressive enough, but the thouht that this is achieved entirely through processing power and straightforward statistical analysis of the way words occur in different language texts available to google search engines, is really stunning, at least to me. It was demonstrated on Hans Rosling's programme for the BBC on the importance of statistical data in the modern world. He texted deliberately obscure messages in Swedish to the google researcher in California, who produced more or less simultaneous translations (as far as we could see), that were largely accurate. Rosling tried to confuse the programme by using phrases such as 'bisexual bishop', but the programme was not fooled.

Carr's article is one of dozens of publications over the past few years pointing out what seems to me obvious: we are being changed by digital technology. In fact this type of article is implying two main questions: is digital technology changing us in any way, and if it is, is this a good or a bad thing? These articles argue, with more or less evidence and analysis, that we are being changed, but the vast majority I have seen, while strongly implying that this is a bad thing, don't provide evidence for this assertion.

It seems to me that the use of any tool over a long period will have the effect of changing the user, both physically and mentally. When I played tennis from morning till night as a teenager, my right forearm became much larger than my left. When I more or less gave up playing, in my thirties, they gradually returned to being the same size. Furthermore I think it is clear from all sorts of scientific research, as well as from common sense, that our brains get 'patterned' to a greater or lesser extent, by our activities - craft workers develop tacit skills and knowledge through using a small selection of tools over and over again on the same materials. If large numbers of people use particular tools this will quite naturally also begin to have an effect on the culture and organisation of the society they inhabit. The introduction of the printing press had an incalculably complex effect on the social and political history of Europe in the C15th, starting with its effect on individuals and local groups. Similarly, though perhaps much more quickly, we must expect the same process to operate with digital technology.

We need to remind ourselves that these processes are not evolutionary ones, in the technical sense of Darwin's theory, as far as we are able to see; this is because the time scales involved are too small for genetic mutations which might confer advantage in a digital world, to be observed as having done so. That would require thousands of years for the human species as I understand the theory of evolution.

So, technological changes and the use of new tools do bring about physical and cognitive changes in individuals and groups. If widespread enough, these can bring about observable changes in society and culture. But change is not necessarily a bad thing: few would now suggest that the printing press and books had negative effects on people and societies (though some people certainly warned about them at the time - they were afraid that people's capacity to memorise would be lost if everything was written down - this sounds uncannily similar to the kind of worry Carr has about the digital world). The question of whether such changes are positive or not is not a scientific one for the most part, it is a moral and political one. The question Carr needs to ask explicitly, and the one such articles should really be aiming to answer, is whether a digital world is a better world, and why.

Instantaneous machine translation would be a morally useful tool in my view because it would allow for easy verbal communication between any people in the world without the elimination or reduction of the vast range and diversity of different languages, each of which, in my opinion, embodies a particular view of reality and of moral issues: this variety, just like biological diversity, is actually a survival mechanism - we need it to remain human.

Britain under the Coalition?

Beware: assessment can be bad for your health

Seen in Hackney

How washing machines promote reading - NB this is not an April Fool joke

The wonderful Hans Rosling using terrific statistical graphics to demonstrate how important washing machines are for education, and why we need more of them: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine.html