My world on the web
The editor of a book I contributed to asked all of us contributors to send photos of our writing spaces. I usually write on my phone. I write my syllabi, my blog, entire book chapters and articles …
For me, innovation in education is about interrogating where voice, power and agency reside. It is worth asking: who has power and influence? Who has control of measures, expectations, systems, norms and processes? Who has autonomy, voice and ownership? And what can we each do, now, that is productive and meaningful for our students?
An ecosystem is a complex community of interconnected organisms in which each part, no matter how seemingly small, has an active, agentic part to play in the community. There are constant interdependent relationships and influences. The notion of an ecosystem of education resonates with Bob Garmston and Bruce Wellman’s third Adaptive Schools underlying principle of what they call ‘nonlinear dynamical’ systems: that tiny events create major disturbances. This principle reflects the way change often happens. The little things we change or do can have unexpected, chaotic, incremental effects that are difficult to quantify or not immediately noticeable.
Working as one of those ‘little things’ that come into the school it can be easy to bring in a script when arriving at a new school. The problem is that each school is made up of many other ‘little things’. I have therefore found it more useful to gauge as much about the school’s context as quickly as possible and then re-framing my message to fit.
Tom Critchlow describes this as ‘client ethnographies‘:
Every time you’re on-site with a client’s organization you’re studying the people, the behaviours, the motivations. You’re asking questions of as many people as you can.
While Doug Belshaw talks about the dangers of dead metaphors and failed frameworks:
So although it takes time, effort, and resources, you’ve got to put in the hard yards to see an innovation through all three of those stages outlined by Jisc. Although the temptation is to nail things down initially, the opposite is actually the best way forward. Take people on a journey and get them to invest in what’s at stake. Embrace the ambiguity.
Although it can be a challenge to find the time and resources, without it change is often frustrating to say the least.
The report proposed reducing more than 170 senior-level courses to a “limited set of rigorous, high-quality, advanced courses”. Vocational and academic subjects would slowly be brought closer so that eventually every course would mix theory and application.
HSC students would also have to complete a single major project, which would allow the development and assessment of skills such as gathering and analysing, as well as so-called general capabilities such as team work and communication.
Facebook allowed Apple and other device makers to have “deep” access to users’ personal data without their consent, according to the Times.
The Times said Facebook allowed companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent, even after it had declared it would no longer share the information with outsiders.
Archibong said the data was only shared with device makers in order to improve Facebook users’ access to the information. “These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.”
Establishing trust may take time, but when you are promoting growth and building teacher capacity, it is time well spent.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with a content curation site for the Google Apps Script community (see Apps Script Pulse – Sharing Google Apps Script community content). In this post I want to sha…
I get to choose my disposition. I can feel empathy for people that give themselves less choice than I have. I can move on after these interactions without feeling bad, if I know that I handled things as best as I could with the resources and experience that I have… and I need to remember that this applies to them too. They did they best they could, given their experiences and circumstances. I don’t choose to look back on this experience with anger. I’m not upset that I didn’t handle it better. I don’t pretend that it didn’t have an effect on me or I probably wouldn’t be writing about it now. But I will meet more angry people in my life, and I believe that I’m more resilient and more prepared for that time, thanks to this experience.
Although this is different from the situation you touch upon, both situations capture the challenge of communication in an online world. I find this a little easier when I have had the chance to meet the people who I maybe supporting in person. However, this is not always possible when schools are so geographically disparate.
This is the third article in a series in which I want to explain how you can use the various IndieWeb plugins with a WordPress site. Such as being able to log in to other sites with your own domain name, respond to other sites with your own blog and post new articles with other applications.
In this article you will learn how you can publish with a plugin very easily from other places on your own site. This is done via Micropub.
Ryan BarrettMastodon is now on Bridgy! Both backfeed and publish (aka POSSE) are fully supported. Feel free to try them out! And let me know if you hit any bugs, problems, or missing features.
Let the pangs come. I want to be hesitant before hitting publish. I want to feel the pressure to do well, to not make careless mistakes, and to look things over one more time. These pangs are a badge of honour that I wear as a blogger.
Many people have told me that they feel the dynamic kick in with even a tiny handful of viewers. I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million.
Donotpay started as a project to help people automatically fight parking tickets, before its then-teenaged creator, the UK-born Stanford computer science undergrad Joshua Browder expanded it to hel…
The full history of the Big Day Out
My highlights from 1999 was The Living End. I also remember being both amused by Marilyn Manson, but also a little bit disappointed at the same time.
In 2000, I remember Dave Grohl winding up the crowd waiting for Nine Inch Nails, being amazed by Primal Screams walls of sound (did they have five guitars? Felt like it), and Paul Dempsey asking us why we were watching Something for Kate, rather than Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
Confidence feeds competence, which feeds confidence…
To improve community structures with citizens’ input, the United Nations uses a computer game inspired by Lego.
The challenge of sustaining while simultaneously also evolving the organisational change is an art few have clearly mastered.
It is a markedly different art to that of making the initial change.
While the theory is important the sustaining, and the opportune revitalisation of the core change is an art that requires a macro understanding of whole school change and a recognition that this very much a political exercise. Sometimes it is small p political, but in mostly it is likely capital p political.
Ultimately it is about orchestrating electoral acceptability, governments winning and retaining office and the executive decision makers securing personal ‘wins’; an imperative rarely mentioned in the school or even the general change literature.
It’s not difficult to see the relevance of this episode today. Should Microsoft-owned GitHub provide software to ICE for possible use in the agency’s state-sanctioned persecution of immigrants and asylum seekers? Should Twitter allow Donald Trump to incite terrorism on their service? Should Google provide AI to the Pentagon for the potential development of deadlier weapons? And Christ, where do you even start with Facebook? Palantir, Apple, and Amazon have also been criticized recently for allowing unethical usage of their technology and platforms. “It’s just business” and the belief in the neutrality of technology (and technology platforms) have combined to produce a shield that contemporary companies use to protect themselves from activists’ ethical criticisms. And increasingly, the customers and employees of these companies aren’t buying it because they don’t want history to repeat itself.
According to a book by human rights journalist Edwin Black, Hitler needed logistical help in carrying out the genocide of Europe
