Read the story here: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2341549.htm

 The theory behind this decision was that this would allow the school to assess skills that were relevant to the modern world. Rather than just sticking to 19^th century style pen and paper no-info-allowed-in-exams to test how good your memory is, this style of assessment aims to test students’ ability to find information, assess its reliability and cite it correctly.

This makes perfect sense. I remember a wonderful story about Henry Ford I once read. During the war, a Chicago newspaper published editorials calling Henry Ford (among other things) an ‘ignorant pacifist’. Ford objected and brought a suit for libel. The paper’s attorneys placed Ford on the stand to prove he was ignorant and fired off a rapid series of questions at him including things like ‘Who was Benedict Arnold?’, ‘How many soldiers did the British send over to America to put down the rebellion of 1776?’. Eventually Ford tired of this and basically replied (not exact sorry as from memory): ‘Look, if I really wanted to answer any of these foolish questions, I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk and by pushing the right button I can summon to my aid men who can answer any question I might have. Why should I clutter up my mind with general knowledge when I have men around me who can supply any answer I need?’

And our ‘electric push buttons’ have come a long long way since Ford’s time.

Our assessment system in Australia needs a radical overhaul. Although the NSW Year 12 HSC exams do test more than just memory skills (you do have to be able to apply the information) there is still a large component of memorization necessary. So you may be a fabulous essay writer, but if you don’t have the content packed away in your head, if you haven’t memorized the dates and the quotes, then unfortunately your wonderful essay writing skills are all for naught.

The other issue teachers face is that the syllabus is packed to the rafters with content. It would be lovely to be able to go off on a tangent and explore more relevant skills but the reality is that in the senior years teachers have a duty of care to prepare students for what is essentially a set of university entrance examinations. It is a challenge to just complete the course in most subjects, much less do anything extra.

Something else that concerns me is that the university entrance mark is composed of 50% exam mark and 50% school based assessment. My understanding for this change (when I did the HSC it was 100% based on the final exam) is that it allows students who do not perform well in exams to showcase their abilities in other forms of assessment. It was also supposed to take the pressure off the one big final exam (although my observation is that all it has done is take the pressure that students used to feel at the end of Year 12 and spread it over the entire year so they are just as stressed as they were before but now it lasts all year long – but that is a topic for another day). There are guidelines in place to try and make sure that these assessments do not just become a series of additional exams – I would question how effective these guidelines really are. When we are so focused on the final exams it is difficult to make decisions (on what to teach, how to teach and how to assess) that are not influenced by the knowledge that students must sit these exams.

So hats off to PLC for being brave enough to take a risk and try something new. If the decision makers are not going to recognize the need for updating and innovation, then it is up to the grassroots to lead the way for change.

In addition to the jokes about educators which are very amusing, the funny stories about drawing a picture of God and the perils of being Shakespeare’s English teacher, and comments on male/female differences, there were some really fascinating points made in this video about creativity and education in schools by education guru Sir Ken Robinson.

These were the main points that caught my attention from Ken’s talk:

• the incredible capacity for innovation of children
• all kids have talents and it seems we squander them
• creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it as the same status
• kids will take a chance, if they don’t know, they’ll have a go
• if you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original
• if not careful, we ‘educate’ children out of creativity
• our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability
• hierarchy of subjects is that the most ‘useful’ things for work are most important subjects (ie don’t do music cause you are not going to become a musician
• what are degrees worth now … the process of academic inflation
• we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence: it is diverse (we think in lots of different ways just like we experience in different ways), it is dynamic/interactive, it is distinct
• creativity – process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things
• we need to celebrate the gift of the human imagination
• we need to see our creative capacities for the richness they are
• task is to educate the whole being of students

And in particular:

“..the academic view which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence as the universities design the system in their image. If you think about it the whole system of education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not. Because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued or was stigmatized.”

Wow. Some incredible thoughts here. It is true that some students just have a miserable time at school because they are simply not academic. Then they leave and they find they have all these amazing talents!

I spend my time helping students find ways to make the most out of the system – they are in this school system that assesses their ability in subjects that perhaps they have no interest in. I try to help students get the best results they can given the system they are in.

But it doesn’t mean that I like or agree with the system….. I am a realist. This is the way it is, in the immediate future the best thing I can do is to help students navigate the system and showcase their abilities as best they can. But I have often thought that by having a system where university entrance (which is still viewed as the ultimate goal) is assessed through a series of exams and assessments in Year 12 that this is driving the way teachers have to teach and the way students have to learn. Teachers can’t always just go off on an interesting diversion that has captured the imagination of the class as they HAVE to get through the syllabus. Students are forced to spend lots of time in memorization activities as opposed to true learning experiences as this is they way they will be tested. The ends are driving the means.

Unfortunately I do not have an alternative practical suggestion. And really, neither did Ken. I think everyone must agree with the points raised and that our education system is long overdue for a radical overhaul. But if we revolutionized the education system and focused on developing creativity, we still don’t solve the problems that will arise when the universities say ‘but how do we know who to let in’. It comes back to Ken’s earlier point – our system was developed by academics with the end goal in mind of academic entrance criteria. I can’t see how we can ever hope to radically change the system without first dealing with this issue.

I must admit in the back of my mind there is a niggling thought that one day I am going to have to step up and make a significant push for change in some way…..

You probably think you own the rights to your Facebook content. Well read on, you might be surprised….

Social Networking sites are definitely here to stay. But do users really think about who might be looking at their information and what it could potentially be used for? If we want to use social networking sites in the e-learning process we need to be aware of potential issues.

• We need to think about safety. Obviously one should never give away personal information (particularly home addresses) – students especially need to aware that the people they are interacting with may not necessarily be who they represent themselves to be.

• We need to think about identity theft. This is a growing area of concern and too much publicly posted info makes it easier for the would be identity thieves among us. Reclaiming your identity can be a costly, time-consuming and frustrating process.

• We need to think about the future. There have been examples in the US where candidates were not hired as interviewers have examined potential employees facebook pages and decided that their personal life did not fit in with the image the company wanted to portray. Things lurk on the net for a long long time. You think you may have deleted a file but it could easily have been held in cache by google and be around for a lot longer. The best way to think about it is never to post anything that you wouldn’t want anyone in the world to see from now until the rest of your life (and beyond!). Because those funny-at-the-time MySpace photos could come back to haunt you when you are trying for the job or career of a lifetime….

AND IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH… THIS IS REALLY SCARY!

After listening to the discussion on ABC Radio, I went and checked out the terms page of Facebook for myself. Do you ever read through all the terms and conditions for anything? I know I don’t every time. Well perhaps we all need to start spending a bit more time on it. This is a section from the Facebook terms page (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php), think carefully about what the implications are:

“When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.”

This means Facebook has the right to use any of your content for any purpose at all. They could take all your photos and publish a book entitled ‘mad party animal people’. They could collate all the personal info you have posted and reformat it, take excerpts, use it any way they like – even granting sublicenses. Now while you might say ‘well I’m careful about what I put on the site’, do you really want to give that sort of power away?

Certainly something to think about.

PS. And here’s a tip – if you are trying to remove images, rather than deleting the image, upload a blank image with the same file name, this should then replace the old image so when you delete it hopefully only the most recent copy (the blank one) will have been archived. I also do this with files I want to delete that may have sensitive info. First I delete all the content, save the file as a blank file with the same file name, and then I delete it. Not that I am paranoid, but you never know….

Let me say upfront I come from a Catholic background. There are things I like about the Catholic church and things I don’t. One of the things I do not like is that the Catholic church seems so backward in things like the concept of women or married priests (in fact I sent the Pope a Christmas card this year, all the way to the Vatican, explaining that due to priest shortages my mother’s parish can only have mass every second week and asking if they could explain why we can’t have married and women priests – I just don’t get it. No reply yet but it is only 3 months, I am hopeful).

Anyway, this article astounded me. Despite being so behind the times in so many areas, the Catholic church has realised that if they can’t beat them, they have to join them.

So what has happened? Well a new social networking site for Catholics was launched yesterday: http://www.faithtrip.net/

It will be like any other social networking site – there will be blogs, music, forums : but with a religious theme. Founded by Australians (go us!) the aim is to create a virtual parish, harnessing technology to spread their message.

What amazes me is that a such a tradition bound organisation can realise and embrace the potential of technology…and yet our educational system is lagging behind. At a grassroots level we are doing well with individual teachers finding lots of ways to integrate technology but at a policy-making level we still have a long way to go.

So perhaps the Department of Education needs to follow the lead of the Catholic church (that just seems so wrong as I have not really ever viewed the Catholic church in my lifetime as ground-breakers) and create a similar social networking site for students where the discussions are centered around school and learning and teachers can have students interact in a safe environment without the problems that come with public sites like MySpace and Facebook.

One of the biggest concerns I see from parents and teachers is students’ use of technology like chat programs and social networking sites at home when they are also trying to do their schoolwork. One of the biggest problems students complain about is how to deal with the multitude of distractions when they are trying to make themselves do their schoolwork.

This video from Prof Michael Wesch’s Digital Anthropology class at Kansas State University is a powerful depiction of the issues students today face in their technology driven world and in a world where our students have changed and our systems are struggling to keep up.

If you haven’t done it yet, watch the video now before continuing to read this post.

How do we cater for a generation that might read ‘8 books a year’ but ‘2300 websites and 1281 facebook profiles’? We know technology is going to be necessary to help the current generation learn effectively but often the generation designing the instructional materials/processes is not immersed in the digital culture and unable to truly understand how to make the most of the technology available.

A message that stood out for me was the girl who had the message ‘I am a multitasker’, then flips over to ‘I have to be’. How much of the way students process today is purely in self-defence? My lecturer then raised an interesting point, what happens if students are not good at multi-tasking – where does that then leave them?

The video also emphasizes the need for students to ‘learn how to learn’. A content driven approach to learning will not cut it in today’s world which is why our schools now try to use content as a vehicle to teach certain skills, how to analyse, how to communicate, how to ‘learn how to learn’. Students today need to continually learn new skills, as the video pointed out: ‘when I graduate I will probably have a job…that doesn’t exist today’. So the question is, can we revolutionize the way students learn in order to take into account the particular features of the technological world they inhabit?

The good news is yes we can and we are moving in the right direction. The bad news is that it will take time, educational systems are conservative as we do not want to take risks with our students’ education (or do we?). I do not think there will be dramatic changes during the current generation’s schooling. While we remain in an exam driven system, the output required will to a large extent drive the style of the input.

So what should students do now?

At this point in time, it seems that it is not possible for students to integrate the two worlds they inhabit – the world of their school education and the technologically savvy world. Yes some teachers are taking amazing leaps about bringing these two worlds together, but the gap is still large and although much work is being done at a grassroots level it is at the bureaucratic level where serious reform needs to take place.

So how do parents and students cope right now? The problem is, students are trying to integrate these two worlds that are just not ready to cope with amalgamation. I currently recommend that students keep these worlds separate in order to work efficiently at home – work in half an hour blocks focusing solely on schoolwork, then have time where they do whatever they like. This is not ideal – but it is the reality of what students need to do to get through the existing school system. Yes they should still take advantage of the technology opportunities that exist to help them learn, but reality is they do not currently have the skills to discriminate between using technology to help themselves learn and technology becoming a time-waster.

So yes, this is something we need to keep working on with them.