I accidentally found myself listening to Jaron Lanier on the radio today, and not having come across him before I was instantly intrigued by his common sense views on technology and how naïve technologists are about it. He argued that far from being especially intelligent, technology has a tendency to impose stupidity on human beings  that  all too easily manifests itself as mob mentality. The technology background in his bio makes impressive reading indeed, and after listening to him I found this article from the Wall Street Journal, which is an invitation to read his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, published by Knopf.

I’ve made my views on Wikipedia clear in The Good-morrow before, so it is gratifying to discover someone with such hefty web credentials agrees with me. But there are some things he writes which just seem to me to be kind of sad, because they sound so naïve. For example he writes,

When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation. If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries.

Any teacher of music, literature of art I have ever known would have recognised this as a statement of the blindingly obvious. That’s why you teach children about rhyme and rhythm in poetry, about form and structure in painting and harmony and key signatures in music. The more I begin to look at the world of educational technology, the more I believe we have recently witnessed one of the most amazing periods of Emperor's New Clothes in the history of education, and the more I feel like the little boy whose voice isn’t easy to hear above the noise of the crowd.

I was especially impressed with his conclusion to the Wall Street Journal article where he writes:

Youthful fascination with collectivism is in part simply a way to address perceived "unfairness." If everyone shares, then a young person arriving on the scene fresh will not have less than an older person who has been around for a while.

This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in dangerous ways. I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they'll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and their children will thrive, but so that they won't become a mob, which, as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human nature.

Ironically, he is absolutely right to point the finger at youthful naivety. One of the things I’ve noticed about so many of the keenest educational technologists is they exhibit that embarrassing desire to be regarded  as “cool”, which that awful teacher who wants to be like the kids so often exhibits.

One of the phrases which educational quangos who deal with teachers relish as though it somehow smacks of professional standards, is "reflective practice.” Are you a reflective practitioner? they ask, as though it were even vaguely possible not to reflect on the amazing things you see and hear in any school day after day. A few weeks ago I was having a meal at a pizza parlour and found myself sitting close to a table of about ten or a dozen young teachers out for an evening meal. Every single time I overheard a word, they were talking about school or children.

So I came across this wonderful example of reflective practice last week, and offer it as a model of its kind.  Why I hate Interactive Whiteboards. You may have to register to read the whole article but here is his reflective conclusion.

I think Sylvia Martinez, who writes at Generation Yes, said it best: “You can’t buy change. It’s a process, not a purchase. The right shopping list won’t change education.”

Most of the time, interactive whiteboard programs are, in fact, nothing more than vain attempts to buy change. Rarely paired with a clear vision of the classrooms we’d like to see, a set of tangible objectives that can be measured, or any systematic attempts to evaluate outcomes, these high-priced contraptions are sad examples of the careless decision-making and waste that are crippling some of our schools and systems.

Sadly, I suspect the author wouldn’t get much in the way of marks if he handed this into any teacher training institution jumping to the beat of the current CPD drum.

This week I was contributing to a discussion on Linked In by people in a Technology in Education group, when a contribution was made that I felt was so acerbically apt, I asked the author for permission to reproduce it here. It followed a number of contributions extolling the virtues of entertaining digital natives with anything they want. So here it is.

To win a video game I must
1 Kill
2.Cheat
4 Break social rules
5 Join other people in killing one another
(I guess this is project based learning)
6 Have zero consequences for any of it.
AND each version of the game must get more extreme than the next!

I know marketing people in the field. Everyone wonders how extreme can they go?

So what's wrong with that? The other option is to dance around Second Life with no clothes on when mom's not looking.

Our children are not living in our world.
MY feeling is ISTE and NEA could make public statements and make a stand. But they are afraid to. If every school in the US stopped buying Sony and Microsoft products until they dumped the violence from the games we would see a change. But that is unlikely.

The author is Richard Close, and you can learn more about his own organisation and technology background here.

There was a gem of an educational research story this week, which suggested that mobile phone texting by young children, improved their literacy skills. Radio 4's Today programme covered it with a healthily balanced discussion.

I’ve read the entire paper published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, "Exploring Relationships Between Traditional and New Media Literacies: British Preteen Texters at School" by Beverly Plester & Clare Wood, and putting aside the incredibly low numbers of children tested, cohorts in the 60s and 80s, nothing it says particularly surprises me. If you are going to be playing around with a mobile phone at the same time as you are learning to read and write, and you come across a subset of language which uses abbreviations and other odd little phonological jokes, isn’t it pretty much common sense that you will be able to show a reasonable level of skill with spelling and vocabulary? David Crystal, who I have enormous respect for as a serious researcher, and the paper often mentions, has always said this.

One of the paper’s conclusions is this:
We began studying in this area initially to see if there was any evidence of association between text abbreviation use and literacy skills at all, after such a negative portrayal of the activity in the media. We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children. Texting also appears to be a valuable form of contact with written English for many children, which enables them to practice reading and spelling on a daily basis.

Usefully, the 8.43am Today discussion also pointed out that the research also suggested high use of texting, the number of texts you send, is linked to lower scores on CAT tests.  And I could be really uncharitable, re-highlight the issue about digital illiteracy and say I’m not especially impressed by a research paper on children’s literacy that contains this sentence: Anecdote and supposition are not sufficient to inform sound educational practice, nor is it reasonable to hold out of school literacies more or less irrelevant to school contexts of literacy.

But what intrigued me most of all, was that although the researchers seemed entirely happy with the children handwriting some text messages as part of the experiment, itself incredibly suspect as a method of measuring their texting habits, nowhere in the paper do they ever mention or even show an awareness of predictive text, or attempt to account for its impact. Sigh!



Last week I made this comment on John Connell’s blog after visiting the BETT show.

At one point I stood on the balcony and the sight of all that misguided investment just dismayed me. If the same money and energy just went into recruiting great teachers, imagine the difference!

So today’s election headline, that the Tories plan to make teaching an elite profession started my week off on a high note. It is such a relief to hear them using a word that for the past decade has been a dirty word in UK education. Their emphasis on the requirement to have higher entry qualifications is so badly needed, not least because I don’t think they have fully understood just how under attack the entire profession is, especially by the technology industry which is busy undermining the entire concept of schools and teachers through facile nonsense such as peer assessment and fun learning. That repugnant cliché Guide on the side: not sage on the stage only ever uttered by individuals who were never  anyone’s guide or sage, is sadly still far from dead, although it should have been strangled at birth.

Michael Gove said some extremely pertinent things this morning on the Today programme (8.30am slot) about the profession and respect. I know when I joined the profession, it was like the vast majority of other teachers, a negative choice. I entered the job market when there were hundreds of applicants for every job, and opted to study a Masters when I couldn’t find the job in publishing I thought I wanted. The last straw was coming second after three interviews for a job on one of the dreariest trade magazines imaginable. I still have the letter after all these years. I tried teaching as a fall back and discovered, not only was I good at it, but it was incredibly rewarding. In many ways exactly mirroring the experience of many of the Teach First graduates I tutored a few years ago.

However, what I wasn’t prepared for was how the public, the people I met in day to day life and work, reacted to me once they knew I was a teacher. The disrespect and disappointment was almost tangible. It was in fact something I don’t think I ever came to terms with. It certainly fuelled my academic writing and may well have ultimately contributed to my decision to leave the profession for business.

So anyone who is courageous and intelligent enough to grasp this subtle problem, merits my continued attention and interest.