IntroductionI’m writing this, as is now almost traditional, during my Black Ops period. It’s the time during the end of the year where I try to take a personal digital hiatus, a time when I refrain from replying to non-work emails as well as swearing-off social networks. As it happens, it’s turning out to be more of a digital communications hiatus. It’s pretty difficult to not look at screens when you work for an organisation like the Mozilla Foundation!

This year has been one of the best of my life. I moved jobs, joining a non-profit that almost exactly matches my beliefs in political, technological and social spheres. My family, including my parents, went on a fantastic holiday to Gozo - a little island off Malta. It was two weeks of pure sunshine and relaxation. I also got to travel to some wonderful places to meet some extremely interesting people.

In terms of the main themes that I write about on my blog - education, technology and productivity - there have been some fairly large changes. The biggest of these I feel has come in education where the idea of for-profit formal educational institutions no longer seems odd; in fact I would predict that if things keep on going the way they are that’s exactly what almost all of them will be by 2020 - both schools and universities.

A second, related, change in education has been the rise of viable alternatives to the system we’ve got currently. Of course I’m going to mention Open Badges and the potential they have, but it was also the year that MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and the idea of the ‘flipped classroom’ (video-based instruction for homework, activities in class) really took

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hold. I’m not sure any of the early entrants such as Coursera and Udacity have got a sustainable business model, but it won’t be long before (so long as you ‘sell’ your data) online higher education will be free.

Technology is, of course, no stranger to disruptive change. If 2007 was the year of the netbook then 2012 was definitely the year of the tablet. We may have had the iPad prior to this year but, to be more specific, this was the year of the mini tablet, the year of the 7-inch, take-everywhere tablet. Apple felt so threatened they launched the iPad Mini.

Looking back at my introduction to Best of Belshaw 2011 it doesn’t feel to me that we’ve had the degree of social unrest this year that I described back then. That may be because everyone’s too busy just trying to get by or, more worryingly, it could be that people have come to accept the neo-liberal view of the world. I very much hope it’s not the latter.

Doug BelshawDecember 2012

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About this bookThe Best of Belshaw moniker I use for the title of this book is actually a bit of an historical artefact. Between 2009 and 2011 I used an algorithm by PostRank to measure engagement (in the form of comments, links, social media mentions and so on) and to ascertain my ‘best posts’. Unfortunately the company behind the algorithm were bought by Google and now they’ve completely shut down the service. I haven’t come across anything similar, really.

A better title for the collection of posts featured in this book, therefore, would be Blog posts by Doug Belshaw that he thinks were better than average and that translate well to the printed form. That, however, sounds a bit wordy!

Finally, I’ve taken the opportunity provided by reviewing the posts I’ve written as a coherent body of work to re-organise things under slightly different categories than they appear on my blog. For example, I’ve written enough on both Web Literacies and Open Badges for them to be considered in separate sections to ‘Education’.

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Contents

EducationYou need us more than we need you.!13

Journals, academia and the ivory tower.!15

Beyond academic journals?!18

Conferences as Catalysts for Educational Innovation and Change!21

What's the point of education?!24

Tools and processes!26

Education: it’s what you can’t see that counts.!28

Impact: the most important reason for working in the open? (#openeducationweek)!29

Obliquity, PISA, and ‘shareholder value’ in education.!32

Beyond the Textbook?!34

This is why teachers leave teaching.!38

Changing thinking vs. Changing systems.!40

Why the knowledge vs. skills debate in education is wrong-headed.!42

Some clarification of my position on private schools.!44

On the important differences between literacies, skills and competencies.!46

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Is Michael Gove systematically dismantling English state education?!49

On (not) working in academia.!52

On private schools becoming academies.!55

My high school report.!57

Time, innovation and funding.!61

What Constitutes 'Rigour' in Our 21st-Century Educational Systems?!63

Time for a NICE-r kind of education?!66

Educational TechnologyResurrect computer science – but don't kill off ICT!70

On the Importance of Webmaking!73

Some thoughts on the Department for Education’s consultation on ‘Parental Internet Controls’.!77

How to implement technology successfully in your organisation.!79

Why a ‘mixed economy’ of digital devices is best for your educational institution.!83

Game design, gamification, game mechanics and games-based learning.!85

Mozilla, Webmaking, and the Architecture of Participation!88

BYOD and cross-platform tools for learning.!91

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My response to the ICT Programme of Study consultation!93

Some Thoughts on iPads and One-to-One Initiatives!97

Some thoughts on learning technologies in the classroom!101

Why we need more e-learning staff tutors!109

TechnologyBeyond Elegant Consumption.!115

Platforms as standards? 10 days with the Nokia N9.!117

3 principles for a more Open approach.!122

Wordle-like Twitter screens for conference keynote presenters?!124

Project Reclaim: experimenting with openphoto.me!127

Commodification, consumerism and the new ‘Retina’ MacBook Pro.!128

On digital ownership. This is HUGE.!129

Mac OSX Mountain Lion 10.8: vendor lock-in for the masses?!131

A few brief thoughts on the Google Nexus 7. [REVIEW]!134

What is ‘technology’ anyway?!137

Want a tablet? Choose your vendor lock-in.!140

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ProductivityStripping back: #divest12!144

The Essentials? (#divest12)!147

Getting back on the productivity wagon.!150

On routines and rituals.!154

Productivity 101: calendars (nouns) and reminders (verbs)!156

Productivity for what?!159

Open (and Webmaker) BadgesGaining Some Perspective on Badges for Lifelong Learning!164

#OpenBadges through the rear-view mirror?!170

Getting up to speed on the technical side of #openbadges!172

Informal learning, gaming, and #openbadges design!176

What we’re up to with Mozilla Webmaker (Open) badges.!179

Open Badges, Clay Shirky, and the tipping point.!184

On the ‘openness’ of Open Badges.!187

Webmaker badges are GO!!190

How to make #openbadges work for you and your organisation.!192

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Digital and Web LiteraciesWeb literacy? (v0.1)!199

Why the REMIX is at the heart of digital literacies!201

Web Literacies: What is the 'Web' Anyway?!203

Digital Literacies and Web Literacies: What's the Difference?!207

Everything ElseThanks for waiting! Dr. Belshaw will see you now.!213

9 ideas in search of a blog post.!215

3 rules for our five year-old (that work!)!217

On writing every day.!221

Arson at Ellington Nature Reserve.!224

Why I’m becoming a MoFo(er).!226

Doctor Doug.!227

Working for an Academy vs. working for JISC infoNet [visualisation]!228

Aim for the high ground, not the high horse.!231

Doug’s new #shoffice!233

Evaluation: the absolute basics!240

Famous for 42 seconds!247

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Some thoughts on time, performativity, and the State.!249

On the mental cost of inventing new categories.!254

Blog redesign: October 2012 edition!256

A #shoffice update (October 2012)!261

#BelshawBlackOps12 has started – see you in 2013!!265

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Education

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You need us more than we need you.21st January 2012

I’ve exhorted readers of this blog more than once to subscribe to Dan Meyer’s blog. It’s ostensibly about the teaching of mathematics, but the tangents are just fantastic.

Read the following, taken from a panel session Dan took part in (he’s now a PhD student):

I’m a grad student in my second year and I’ve never shared this with anybody here, least of all my adviser, who’s in attendance, but I don’t understand the incentive structure for what you do and what I may do someday. You write amazing things and you study amazing things and you write them compellingly in journals that are not read by practitioners very often. They affect a lot of policy, which I think is a really good, top-down approach. But then I’m over here and I can post something that’s seen by 10,000 people overnight. That’s the number of subscribers I have to my blog right now. Or any number of these things. So the incentive seems strange to me. Like I don’t understand this brass ring I’m chasing. It seems like a strange prize at the end of a finish line of grad school. So there’s the question and then there’s also the encouragement. You have so many soapboxes available to you. Find a kid like me and ask him how to do a webcast or something. You have so many — and to restrict yourself to peer review, I don’t know. There’s very little upside to me, it seems.

I feel this, and so do many others my age and with similar higher level qualifications.

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So what are you (the academy) going to do about it?

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Journals, academia and the ivory tower.22nd January 2012

So how did academic journals come about?

Until the late seventeenth century, communication between scholars depended heavily on personal contact and attending meetings arranged by the early learned societies (e.g. the Royal Society). As the membership of these societies increased, more people could not attend the meetings and so the Proceedings, usually circulated as a record of the last meeting became a place to publish papers that had not been presented at the meetings at all and moved towards what we now recognise as scholarly journals.

(Wells, 1999)

So journals are a replacement for personal contact.

Are they good for anything else? Brown (1997) cites the following:

1. distributed (many copies are stored in many places)

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2. scholars trust and understand the system

3. journals have prestige built up over many years

4. portable and easy to read

Which of the above benefits either (a) cannot, or (b) are not currently able to be replicated by another system?

Some would argue that an important difference between (for example) a blog post and a journal article is that the latter has been formally peer reviewed.

However, as even the editor of The Lancet points out:

The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.

(Horton, 2000)

Just how big do the cracks in the ivory tower have to get before the whole edifice tumbles?

Odlyzko (September 1997) points out that there was an “extensive resistance to print by scholars” in Gutenberg’s time which included calls to ban the new technology because only trash was getting into print and books were not as durable as parchment. The reaction to the Web of today’s scholars has

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largely echoed the reaction of scholars to the printing press in the 15th century.

(Well, 1999)

Is the only reason we persist with journals and their articles is because they provide a convenient means to weigh the pig?

Image CC BY-NC-SA Lal Beral

References:Brown, S.A. (1997). Scholarly publishing using electronic means : a short guide. Newcastle: Northumbria University

Horton, R. (2000). “Genetically modified food: consternation, confusion, and crack-up”. MJA 172(4), p.148–9

Wells, A. (1999) ‘Exploring the development of the independent, electronic scholarly journal.‘ Sheffield: University of Sheffield

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Beyond academic journals?25th January 2012

To find a new enlightening and inspiring idea (as distinct from finding a recipe for getting safely through the peer-built barricade), browsing through thousands of journal pages is all too often called for. With my tongue in one cheek only, I’d suggest that were our Palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would still be sitting in caves…

(Zygmunt Bauman)

In my previous posts on academic journals I’ve compared them unfavourably – either explicitly or implicitly – with the kind of informal ‘peer review’ that happens through blogs and social media. Some commenters have assumed that this means that, like Bauman (see above) I’m completely against peer review. I’m not.

Peer review is valuable. In fact, it’s so important we need a (re)new(ed) academic ecosystem to protect it.

I’m all for new systems such as hypothes.is which provides an open, distributed peer review layer for the web. Although I don’t want to go into it in too much depth here, academia is one of the few unreformed areas with outdated power structures and glass ceilings.

As Stephen Thomas pointed out in the comments to my previous post, academic journals have, and still do, play an

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important role in both establishing precedent and providing a quality filter. This is important (most of the time).

But, as Dan Meyer pointed out in the quotation making up the bulk of my first post in this series, it’s the edifice that’s built upon the academic journal system that’s problematic:

The incentive seems strange to me… I don’t understand this brass ring I’m chasing.

(Dan Meyer)

This academic edifice is built upon other perceived ‘advantages’  of academic journals, including:

• Dissemination of work

• Status

5. Career progression

• Contact with others inside and outside field

Academics, unfortunately, have ended up inventing a stick with which they can be beaten. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a crude instrument looking a research outputs. Career progression (and therefore status) depends upon disseminating work in journals that are, all too often, closed and paywalled.

Part of the answer, I agree, comes through academic journals becoming open access. That’s a step in the right direction (even if it does smack a little of Henry Ford’s ‘faster horses‘). Going further, something more like Alan Cann’s experiments around open peer review could work. But, realistically, we need something a bit more radical. 

How can we save peer review whilst democratising and reforming higher education?

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I leave you with the words of Frances Bell, who commented on my previous post:

What I suspect is that more research needs to be done on how, for example. scholarly societies can support research, scholarship and practice in a digital age.

(Frances Bell)

Amen to that.

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Conferences as Catalysts for Educational Innovation and Change1st February 2012

[Published at DMLcentral]

Last year I attended, on average, a conference or similar event every other week. As part of my role as Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet it’s an important part of what I do: finding out what’s going on in the UK education sector and disseminating our (publicly-funded) work.

The face-to-face nature of conferences is, I believe, of even more importance in an extremely digitally connected world. Whilst it’s often the case that you can get to know people very well online, there’s something about embodied interaction

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that makes your knowledge of that person three-dimensional. I don’t think one method of interacting is necessarily ‘better’ than the other; a blended approach is best. This, I suppose, is why social media is so popular.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been extremely fortunate to meet in the flesh some fantastic educators and thinkers. Just last week, for example, as a speaker at the free festival around the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London, I got to mix with and talk to people such as Mitch Resnick from MIT, Keri Facer from MMU and Mark Surman from Mozilla. There’s so much potential in the ideas shared at conferences such as these that I feel a responsibility to help get key messages to practitioners. Conferences, after all, should affect and influence educational practice.

I’m delighted, therefore, to be attending the DML Conference 2012 (which is organized by the same group of people that produces this blog, DMLcentral, I should point out). Running March 1-3 in San Francisco the focus of the conference is Beyond Educational Technology: Learning Innovations in a Connected World.

When discussing it last week with Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla, he told me how much he was looking forward to the conference. “It’s the one place where those of us who think that learning can and should be different come together to build stuff,” he said. That excites me.

The themes of the DML Conference 2012 are:

1. Making, Tinkering and Remixing

2. Re-imagining Media for Learning

3. Democratizing Learning Innovation

4. Innovations for Public Education

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5. Digital Media and Learning

The idea with the most potential to positively disrupt education that I’ve come across recently is Open Badges. I’ve written about this extensively on my blog and for this site here. In a nutshell, a badge is a validated indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. As with all of the best ideas it’s simple, but with far-reaching implications and room for nuanced discussion. Badges have also got some heavyweight backing from the MacArthur Foundation, the US Department of Education, HASTAC, Mozilla, NASA, and others.

I’m delighted, therefore, to be on the judging panel for the final stage of the DML ‘Badges for Lifelong Learning’ competition. On the day before the DML Conference I’ll be meeting finalists who have come up with badge systems to credentialize learning and potentially change the educational landscape. Throughout it all I’ll be blogging, tweeting and otherwise amplifying the event as much as possible to those on the front lines in classrooms and lecture theatres around the world.

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What's the point of education?9th February 2012

[Published on the Guardian Teacher Network blog]

What's the purpose of education? Is it inculcation? Is it to pass on important values and ideas?

Or is it more developmental? Is what we're looking for in education the "drawing out" of innate abilities and interests? Is the important thing to find what is unique about every individual and focus upon that? Or is a broad education more important?

Is there one purpose of education? Perhaps there's one particular, fundamental purpose that trumps all of the others? Which of the many 500 word contributions on the Purpose/ed website would you agree with? Would you perhaps concur with Dave White from Oxford University who suggests education is about "disruption"?

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Or what about Josie Fraser's idea of giving young people access to things "unimagined and unencountered"? Is the purpose of education to develop "inquistiveness" (Paul Simbeck-Hampson)? Is it to "cradle happiness" (Tom Barrett)? Perhaps it's about "building character" (Cristina Costa)?

Was your education satisfactory? Was the purpose of it ever spelled out? Was there a disconnect between what your parents/guardians thought was the purpose of education and what your school believed? Was the "deep grammar" of schooling different from the explicit aims of the school? What would you change if you could go back and take charge? What would you focus upon?

So, what's the purpose of education? Do you consider it, as we do at Purpos/ed a question worth debating? Would you like to take part in one of our campaigns? Have you got something to say in the comments below? Are you willing to sign a HM Government e-petition calling for a national debate? Would you go to Purpos/ed petition and add your name? Will you spread the word?

Do you see now why the purpose of education is worth debating?

(with apologies to Padgett Powell's ‘The Interrogative Mood: a novel?’)

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Tools and processes21st February 2012

I see this a lot.

I appreciate the sentiment here. It’s an educator trying to share some tools in an organised way with some other educators. But mapping them against Bloom’s Taxonomy. Really?

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives within education proposed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom.

[...]

It refers to a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). Bloom’s Taxonomy divides educational objectives into three “domains”: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/

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hands respectively). Within the domains, learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels.

(Wikipedia, accessed 21 February 2012)

Why is Flickr under Remembering when it can be used for mashups under a Creative Commons license? Surely VoiceThread can be used as much for Evaluating as Creating? How does Google Earth, in and of itself, promote Analysing?

Tools, by themselves, rarely develop higher-order thinking skills. It’s all about the processes around them and the context in which they’re used.

I’ve seen lessons and lectures that were captivating and really pushed students forward using no more than a blackboard and a piece of chalk. Similarly, I’ve seen some that used almost every conceivable piece of technology under the sun and students made little or no progress.

So educators, if you’re going to use a specific framework to present some tools or some ideas, please make sure that you understand the nature of that framework.

Image CC BY-ND Samantha Penney

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Education: it’s what you can’t see that counts.3rd March 2012

I had a great, wide-ranging discussion last night with Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher), Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) and Steve Hargadon (@stevehargadon) after the second day of the DML Conference 2012. Much of it focused on the role of technology in educational reform with much of it sparked by an excellent keynote panel of which Connie Yowell (MacArthur Foundation) was the star.

To me, the whole problem with educational reform is that what matters can’t be seen or touched. It’s physically intangible.

What do we tend to do? We focus on the things that we can see. As Bud pointed out, teachers in his district will sometimes point to discrepancies in access to technology as being a limiting factor on their performance. Others look at the material conditions of one learning environment and attribute ‘success’ to these easily-observed factors.

We should be used to this by now. Living in a world of networks (and networks of networks) we know that it’s the invisible bonds, the weak ties, that connect us to people and ideas. As Connie Yowell pointed out it’s this kind of innovation that scales. Audrey Watters extended this point when she commented that technology scales vertically, whereas people scale horizontally.

So what can we do about this? The first thing we need to do, I’d suggest, is to surface processes and networks. These both need to be as open and inclusive as possible and we need ways to talk about them to make them more tangible.

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Impact: the most important reason for working in the open? (#openeducationweek)9th March 2012

“A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.”

(Father Strickland)

Working in the open comes naturally to me. I’ve never jealously guarded ‘my’ work and really cannot comprehend a person who would rather work in a closed and restricted environment.

Both this blog and my doctoral thesis are CC0 licensed, which means that I’ve donated them to the public domain. If you want to take my work, copy it word-for-word and pass it off as your own or sell it, that’s fine. Seriously. Do what you like. I’m flattered you like it.

I found out today that the minor rewrites I submitted after my thesis defence have now been accepted. I now go onto the ‘Pass list’ at Durham University meaning that I can call myself Dr. Belshaw. This makes me happy.

Another piece of news I received today was via Twitter from Joe Wilson attending the NAACE conference 2012 (#naace12). NAACE is a membership organization for those involved with ICT education in the UK and beyond.

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(Note: Joe made a typo in his haste – I’m actually @dajbelshaw)

This came as a bit of a surprise. Whilst I’m aware of people referencing my work, I didn’t realize that NAACE as a body knew of/was using it. Certainly their press release (if that’s the right one) doesn’t mention anything. But to insist on acknowledgement (see discussion here), I feel, is a form of ownership. And no-one owns ideas.

The most important value of working in the open for me? Impact.

I write about things that interest me and ideas that I hold to be good in the way of belief. As a consequence, and like most other people, I think the ideas expressed in my work may be of use to others. If ‘impact’ is getting others discussing, debating and accepting your ideas then, yes, I want to impact other people.

Academics in UK universities will soon have to demonstrate their ‘impact’ under the terms of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). I can’t help but think that one of the best ways for academics to achieve this is to dramatically improve the accessibility of their work. The easiest method? Release it under the least restrictive license you can. This seems so obvious to me as to be a no-brainer.

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There are some caveats, of course: less restrictive licensing may be problematic for commercially-sensitive areas and huge fields.

Let me explain.

There are two main reasons why I can ‘afford’ to give my work away without asking for attribution or compensation:

1. I know that most people will, actually, reference it (and there’s a large chance that those who don’t will be called out by others in such a relatively small field)

2. I have a salaried occupation that does not depend upon me attracting funding to commercialise my ‘Intellectual Property’.

Perhaps I’m young and naive but I can’t help think that, if you can, you should give away your work. For free. Without copyright.

That’s how ideas gain traction.

This week is Open Education week. There’s lots of stuff on the JISC website about it.

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Obliquity, PISA, and ‘shareholder value’ in education.13th March 2012

At TEDx Warwick last Saturday I was first up, meaning I could sit back, relax and listen properly to the other speakers. Whilst I could write several posts about floating islands, medical implants and sustainability, I want to focus on just one of them.

John Kay, author of Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly, gave what I considered to be a fascinating talk. His book has been on my Amazon wishlist almost since it came out and I’ve now got several more reasons to read it.

Before I go any further, the stimulus for writing this post comes from the TES article ‘Wales asks schools to teach to the Pisa test‘. As I mentioned in my recent Purpos/ed Ignite presentation, education is under the control of governments, and PISA is pretty much the only tool they have to compare educational outcomes. Unfortunately, it focuses on a very narrow aspect of education and is accused of using discredited statistical techniques.

John Kay’s key point was that we often achieve the ends we desire indirectly. He summed this up perfectly by his example of ICI, the chemical company. I haven’t got the exact quotations he used, but in the 1970s ICI’s mission statement focused firmly on innovation and customers. ‘Shareholder value’ was merely a by-product of the core function of the company. By the 1990s this had reversed, with ‘shareholder value’ being the number one priority.

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Of course, ICI no longer exists having lost its innovative edge. Likewise, if we focus on narrow and questionable measures of education to make comparisons with other countries, we miss the point of learning. PISA is the educational equivalent of ‘shareholder value’. Focusing on the by-product rather than the core mission is worrying.

Perhaps it’s time to take education out of the hands of politicians?

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Beyond the Textbook?21st March 2012

A couple of days ago I noticed #beyondthetextbook emerging on Twitter. It turns out that this hashtag related to an gathering sponsored by Discovery Education in Washington D.C.

My (remote, somewhat helicopter-like) contribution, was pretty much summed up by the following:

After reading Audrey Watters’ post about the gathering (as well as those by others), I’d like to expand up on that and highlight some thoughts from others with whom I’m in agreement.

Trojan textbooksI want us to weigh classroom practices, power, authority, politics, publishing, assessment, expertise, attribution, and the culture(s) of the education system. I would argue that the textbook in its current form — and frankly in almost all of the digital versions we’re also starting to see now — is tightly woven into that very fabric, and once we tug hard enough at the “textbook” thread, things come undone.

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(Audrey Watters)

The textbook is easy to talk about. It’s a physical thing that people have known as students and, for some, as educators. The trouble is that, just as with any technology, it’s difficult to separate the thing from the practices that surround the thing.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with textbooks – especially if you define them as Bud Hunt does as “A collection of information organized around thoughtful principles intended to provide support to instruction.” I’m not so keen on the word ‘instruction’ (I’d substitute ‘learning’) but like his basis in ‘thoughtful principles’.

Getting assessment rightOne of the reasons I’m such a big fan of badges for lifelong learning is that assessment is broken. I don’t mean ‘broken’ in the sense that a bit of a repair job would fix. I mean structurally unsound and falling apart. Liable to collapse at any moment. That kind of broken.

It’s a problem I felt as a classroom teacher. It’s an issue I had to deal with as a senior manager. It’s evident in my sector-wide role in Higher Education. The hoops through which we’re asking people to jump not only don’t mean anything any more, but they don’t necessarily lead anywhere.

To me, that constitutes a crisis of relevance. So when we’ve got textbooks solely focused on providing content in bite-sized chunks in order to allow people to pass summative tests, then we’ve got a problem. A huge problem.

But let’s be clear: the problem is to do with the high-stakes assessment. It’s akin to the current attacks on the efficacy of teachers. The problem isn’t with (most) teachers, it’s with what

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you’re asking them to do. Likewise, with textbooks, it’s not the collecting of information in one place – it’s what people are expected to do with that information.

Open content and the blank pageI’ve seen many state their belief that the best kind of textbook is the blank page. By that, they mean that textbooks should be co-constructed. I certainly can’t argue with that, but we must always be careful that we don’t substitute one form of top-down structure with another.

Back in 2006 I wrote a couple of posts on my old teaching blog. One covered the idea of teachers as lifeguards, and other focused on the teacher as DJ. In the former I talk about the importance of teachers ‘knowing the waters’ so that they can allow students to explore the waters, growing in confidence (but be there when things go wrong). In the latter I discuss the similarities between teachers and DJs around ‘tempo’ and ‘playlists’.

Both the lifeguard and DJ analogies work with textbooks, I think. The difficulties are always going to be around time and competency. It’s all very well for those new to the profession, willing to burn the candle at both ends to remix the curriculum and create their own textbooks to move #beyondthetextbook. But that’s a recipe for burnout.

ConclusionAs usual, I’ve more questions than answers, but if I have one contribution to the #beyondthetextbook debate it’s that our current use of textbooks is a symptom of the problem,

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not the problem itself. It’s difficult to debate nuanced things online, and even more so via Twitter.

I think we need a renaissance in blogging – and the kind of blogging where we reference other people’s work. If we’re going to debate problems in education, let’s do so at length, with some nuance, and in a considered way.

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This is why teachers leave teaching.12th May 2012

On Thursday, Mark Clarkson wrote a blog post that started off like this:

I seriously considered leaving education today. And if I had a viable exit strategy I might have taken it further.

Note the end of that sentence: a young, talented teacher with so much to offer the world feels like he has no ‘viable exit strategy’. There are thousands of teachers up and down the country feeling the same thing.

I should know. A few years ago I was one of them.

You should go and read Mark’s post. If you’re currently a classroom teacher you’ll be nodding your head at the bullet point after bullet point of bureaucratic, administrative nonsense he (and most other teachers) put up with. And if you’re not a teacher, you’ll be shocked.

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On top of the ridiculous workload teachers like Mark experience each year, he notes that the benefits aren’t exactly stellar:

At the same time I am told that I will have to work for another 36 years. That I will receive less pension than I was promised… That tests are too easy. That my subject is not good enough. That I need to solve gaps in parenting. That I should receive performance related pay. That teachers are paid too much. That public sector workers in the north are paid too much. That teachers ‘cheat’ when the watchmen come. And today I’m told that ‘teachers don’t know what stress is‘.

I’ve been out of the classroom for just over two years now. And already my wife, a Primary school teacher, has to remind me what it’s like. I consider setting off together for work five minutes late a minor inconvenience. But for her, and many teachers, it can make or break their day. I’m fairly sure teachers know what stress is.

Although I would say this, I think we need a review of what we’re doing when it comes to schools. We can’t keep cannibalising the goodwill of people in an underpaid, overworked, increasingly-attacked profession. I think we need a public debate about the purpose(s) of education.

I’ll give the last word to Mark. He echoes something I used to say repeatedly – until I decided enough was enough:

I’m not leaving teaching today, because there are still too many moments that I enjoy.

…

TEACHING is a great activity. Teaching, at the minute, doesn’t always feel like a great job.

 Image CC BY-NC paulbence

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Changing thinking vs. Changing systems.15th May 2012

I’m reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the moment. It’s a bit of a classic, so I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get around to it.

Last night, I came across the following passage. It must be quite famous as I’ve stumbled across it before:

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

This made me think about Purpos/ed. Andy and I are often asked when we’re going to produce a manifesto, or what the ‘next level’ is. Well, that’s the kind of thinking that got us here in the first place.

Pirsig reminds us that even things that seem purely physical (such as steel) are nevertheless human constructs. Despite seeming permanent and ‘natural’ steel is not a substance that exists in nature. It’s the product of human imagination.

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Likewise, there is no ‘state of nature’ for education systems. No natural way that we should organise learning.

We’d do well to remember that sometimes.

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Why the knowledge vs. skills debate in education is wrong-headed.26th June 2012

Back when I was a lowly trainee teacher I engaged in a debate with someone high up in the local authority after a training session. They were arguing that ‘skills’ are all we need to teach young people. I argued (as a History teacher) that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

Now, however, I realise that we were both wrong.

This post by Oliver Quinlan about A.C. Grayling’s presentation at the recent Education Festival got me thinking. Especially this bit:

What we should be looking for is not the acquisition of knowledge, but the acquisition of understanding. Many

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schools recognise that theory of knowledge and learning about learning are supportive of the rest of the curriculum. Grayling feels that this should be at the centre of the curriculum, not as an added extra.

And then yesterday, Tim Riches tweeted me the link to this post, pointing out how scary it is that the government are preventing people from talking about ‘skills’ in a curriculum review:

Among the wilder, though double-sourced by me, rumours I’ve heard about the curriculum review were that the word “skills” was banned from any documents by ministers, simply because they wanted to emphasise “knowledge”. While I am not going to get into the knowledge versus skills debate here, suffice it to say that most university prospectuses stress the importance of both.

But then I realised. What we should be developing in young people are capacities. Skills and knowledge flow from these.

It’s what employers look for when hiring people. It’s why we have phrases like “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” We recognise that certain people have greater capacities in certain areas than others.

I look forward to seeing an education system that promotes capacities.

(oh, and when we get there, we should award badges)

Image CC BY-NC-SA amy_b

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Some clarification of my position on private schools.1st July 2012

After mentioning in today’s newsletter that I was getting more militant in my opposition to private schools, I received some pushback and a request for me to explain my position.

I don’t like people paying for their children’s education.

I don’t like people having to pay for their own education.

I don’t like school league tables leading to ‘parental choice’.

I don’t like education being used as a ‘political football’.

I don’t like people moving houses to get their children into ‘good’ schools.

I don’t like selective schools, such as grammar schools, that ‘cream off’ the ‘best’ students.

I don’t like faith schools, especially when it leads to parental hypocrisy.

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----------

I do like people sending their children to the local comprehensive.

I do believe in a broad education.

I do like schools at the centre of communities.

I do like people getting involved in the education of not just their own children, but that of other people’s.

I do like the state paying for education to whatever level you want to aim for.

I do like people refusing to compromise on their educational values when it comes to their own children.

I do like people walking the walk.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Norma Desmond

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On the important differences between literacies, skills and competencies.12th July 2012

I’m currently knee-deep in web literacies stuff for Mozilla.

Or should that be web skills?

Or perhaps web competencies?

It’s a complex, contested, and nuanced area. The differences between literacies, skills and competencies shouldn’t merely be glossed over and ignored. These differences are important.

Let me explain.

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LiteraciesLiteracy is the ability to read and write. Traditionally, this has meant the ability to read and write using paper as the mediating technology. However, we now have many and varied technologies requiring us to ‘read’ and ‘write’ in different ways. As a result we need multiple literacies.

Because literacy depends upon context and particular mediating technologies there is, to my mind, no one literacy to ‘rule them all’. Literacy is a condition, not a threshold.

SkillsA skill is a controlled activity (such as a physical action) that an individual has learned to perform. There are general skills (often called transferable skills) as well as domain-specific skills.

Skills are subject to objective thresholds. So, for example, badges awarded by Scouting organisations signify the reaching of a pre-determined level of skill in a particular field.

CompetenciesA competence is a collection of skills for a pre-defined purpose. Often the individual with the bundle of skills being observed or assessed has not defined the criteria by which he or she is deemed to be ‘competent’.

Competencies have the semblance of objectivity but are dependent upon subjective judgements by another human being (or beings) who observe knowledge, skills and behaviours.

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ConclusionThe important point to make here is that whilst competencies can be seen as ‘bundles of skills’, literacies cannot. You cannot become literate merely through skill acquisition – there are meta-level processes also required. To be literate requires an awareness that you are, indeed, literate.

That sounds a little weird, but it makes sense if you think it through. You may be unexpectedly competent in a given situation (because you have disparate skills you have pulled together for the first time). But I’m yet to be convinced that you could be unexpectedly literate in a given situation.

And, finally, a skill is different to a literacy in the sense that the latter is always conditional. An individual is always literate for a purpose whereas a skill is not necessarily purpose-driven and can be well-defined and bounded.

Does this resonate with you?

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Is Michael Gove systematically dismantling English state education?28th July 2012

Is Michael Gove systematically dismantling state education in England?

I’m not sure.

To believe so presumes competence, intention and strategy on his part. Most of what I observe is an ill-informed sociopath flapping about at seemingly-random educational targets.

See what you think by looking at these BBC News stories since the beginning of the calendar year:

1. Michael Gove: Academy school critics ‘happy with failure’ (4 January 2012)

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2. New yacht for Queen’s jubilee, suggests Michael Gove (16 January 2012)

3. Michael Gove labels academy opponents ‘Trots’ (31 January 2012)

4. Most GCSE equivalents axed from school league tables (31 January 2012)

5. University-led secondary PGCEs face uncertain future (8 February 2012)

6. Gove tells head teachers school reforms need to be accelerated (24 March 2012)

7. Michael Gove wants universities to create new A-levels (3 April 2012)

8. U-turn signalled over no-notice inspections for schools (5 May 2012)

9. Schools get King James Bible to mark 400th anniversary (15 May 2012)

10. Michael Gove pushes for performance pay for teachers (16 May 2012)

11. Plans for O-level-style exams to replace GCSEs (21 June 2012)

12. Governors hit back at Gove’s ‘badge of status’ comments (6 July 2012)

13. Gove turns down group’s bid for extra education funding (14 July 2012)

14. Academies told they can hire unqualified teachers (27 July 2012)

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So no need to be a qualified teacher in England any more. This news, of course, was buried by being announced on a Friday in the school holidays, on the very day of the Olympic Games opening ceremony. Perhaps that was to avoid another strike by teachers like the one in November 2011?

From where I’m sitting, this looks like part of a wider move to centralise schooling in England. There were huge financial incentives for schools to become academies. Now, even if the money’s not there, there’s certainly political and other kinds of pressures bearing down on headteachers and governors.

Once English schools all become academies they’re outside of local authority control but under the direct control of Whitehall. Gove may bleat that academies have powers to do this or that, but when there’s no buffer between the headteacher and the all-powerful politician in control of the money, there’s no real contest.

Michael Gove is the most power-hungry, dangerously reactionary, and misguided millionaire Secretary of State for Education we’ve had a for a long time. He proposes yachts for over-privileged, taxpayer-funded families and gives out religious texts inscribed with his name. Meanwhile extra cash for the most deprived boroughs is turned down and, in the midst of one of the most sustained attacks on the profession in living memory, teachers are expected to roll over and accept performance-related pay.

Who will rid us of this troublesome beast?

Image CC BY-NC staticgirl

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On (not) working in academia.4th August 2012

I’m with Doug Pete in really liking the Zite app.

Although it’s a proprietary, closed product I haven’t come across anything close to it for discovery. Take, for instance, a post entitled On Leaving Academia by Terran Lane, someone I’ve not come across before. He’s an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico.

Terran is off to join Google.

His post is neatly organised into section titles listing the reasons he’s leaving academia to join Google:

1. Opportunity to make a difference

2. Workload and family/life balance

3. Centralization of authority and decrease of autonomy

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4. Funding climate

5. Hyper-specialization, insularity, and narrowness of vision

6. Poor incentives

7. Mass production of education

8. Salaries

9. Anti-intellectualism, anti-education, and attacks on science and academia

I’ve written about this kind of thing before in You need us more than we need you. As Terran explains, it’s not (just) about money.

Whereas he’s decided to quit academia, I’ve made a conscious choice from the start to stay on its sidelines. Around the margins. On the edges. Whilst the logical thing to do after my doctorate would have been to apply for a research position or lectureship at a university, I decided against it.

Why?

Not only would I be earning half the amount of money I am now – and less than when I was teaching in schools – but it seems a spectacularly bad time to decide to become a career academic. No money, no status, no freedom. And with the introduction of a market into UK Higher Education it’s increasingly difficult for academics to even claim the high moral ground.

That’s not to say academics aren’t doing good, publicly-useful work. Of course they are. It’s just crunch time in their industry.

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I think we’re going to see a lot more of this talent-drain from academia. In fact, we’re already seeing a new generation of people not satisfied with traditional career structures and ways of working. I’m not sure if this is good or bad in the scheme of things, given the direction the universities (in the UK) seem to be headed under the current government.

What I do know is that universities need to do something, and fast. The Bank of Goodwill doesn’t have infinite reserves…

Image CC BY-NC-SA Patrick Gage

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On private schools becoming academies.20th September 2012

The King’s School isn’t too far away from where I live. It’s about to merge with a local primary school to turn from being a £9,990/year private school into an Academy.

I have mixed feelings about this, for a number of reasons. But first, a couple of (massive) disclaimers:

• I attended a session for ‘potential Oxbridge candidates’ at The King’s School when I was 17 years old and felt very out of place

• I used to be a senior leader in an Academy and didn’t have the happiest of times whilst I was there

If you’ve read what I’ve written for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m against private schools. So a school moving from independently-funded to state-funded status, should be a win – right?

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I’m not so sure.

First of all, the Academy system as it now stands is problematic. It strikes me that the current government have taken the previous administration’s programme and turned it into a trojan horse to remove the power of Local Authorities, to eventually disapply the entire school population from the National Curriculum, and to create a pseudo-market in state-funded education.

Second, as one parent mentions in the Guardian article it’s not a good thing if a private school merging with a state school is being done “to prop up a school that’s failing to recruit enough students”. Could it be that, like banks, private schools could see government funding as a ‘bailout’?

Finally, and this is something that many people have reminded me of in my attacks upon private education, nothing happens in a vacuum. Compared to the local area, Tynemouth is already an extremely expensive area in which to live. My family certainly couldn’t afford to live there. Chances are that selection-by-fee-paying will be replaced by selection-by-house-price.

So we have a fudge. A pseudo-market in a pseudo-state system with pseudo-traditional examinations.

Perhaps it’s time to move to Scotland.

Image CC BY-NC Paul Thirkell

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My high school report.24th September 2012

Update: Some people have asked about my use of ‘high’ school in an English context. We had (and to a great extent still have) a three-tier system in Northumberland.

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My parents, who live five miles away in the house where I grew up, are having a long-overdue clearout of their attic. A few days ago they brought round my National Record of Achievement. It’s a faux-leather folder with embossed letters that we used in high school to collate, well, anything other than demerits.

I opened mine and flicked through the meaningless bronze and silver awards, the certificates for things that didn’t need certificating, and the various proofs of things done I’d long since forgotten about.

Then, near the back, I came across my Year 11 report from the February of my last compulsory year in school.

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Let’s have a look at some highlights, shall we?

English – “Although he tends to waste time in class, Douglas has produced all the coursework required so far…” - I wasted time because I finished all the work set and the lessons were formulaic in the extreme. I was forced to think ‘inside the box’ and I was bored to distraction.

Biology – “Douglas is able to grasp topics very quickly and shows a very good understanding. I have always been worried by his arrogant attitude…” – Why? Because I dared to go beyond the textbook we used every lesson? Because I asked hard questions that the teacher couldn’t be bothered to answer?

Physics – “Douglas shows interest in some topics but he prefers to get involved in ‘idle’ chatter too often. He has ability in this subject but he must be prepared to work harder.” – Physics was one of my favourite subjects. I just didn’t like working in an atmosphere where silence was expected (if rarely achieved) *all* of the time.

French – “In discussion with Douglas [notice never 'Doug'] he agrees that so far this year he has been content to produce work that is just satisfactory and shows the minimum of effort.” – That might be because the closest we got to real-life French were laughably outdated videos. The (compulsory) language class felt like an irrelevance.

Life Studies - “Douglas has understood the issues raised and contributed sensibly to some of the discussions but he has not yet fully learned that there are no simple answers to complex issues.” Ouch! I saw this teacher a few weeks ago for the first time since school. I went out of my way to thank her for lending me a copy of Sophie’s World, which eventually led to me studying Philosophy at university.

Senior Tutor – “Well done, Douglas. This is an excellent report, I am sure you have a bright and interesting future

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ahead of you.” – Well, it *wasn’t* an excellent report, and I ultimately underachieved, but the ‘interesting future’ bit was spot-on.

The rest of the teacher comments were mainly bland and generic, focusing on me needing a revision plan and to work harder. I don’t really blame my teachers – it must have been a fairly tough place to work.

When I talked through my report with my wife it was interesting how we came at this from different angles. Given that I’ve gone on to achieve a doctorate and done reasonably well career-wise I saw the above as evidence of the disconnect between school and ‘real life’. She on the other hand, wondered what I could have been.

Of course, we’ll never know the counter-factual. We’ll never know what would have happened if I’d gone somewhere different than a school where only 25% achieved 5+ A*-C grades (the national average at the time was 45%). And, anyway, what would have constituted a ‘better outcome’? More money? More status?

I’d wager that the biggest differentiator and predictor of ‘success’ in life (whatever that is) is parental expectation. OK, so my father was Deputy Head of the high school and my mother worked in the school office, but it wasn’t their presence that kept me on the straight-and-narrow.

What kept me honest was the expectation that I would attend university. And to attend university you have to jump through the flaming hoops of examination systems. So I jumped through the hoops. I may have almost burned my bollocks a few times, but I got through in the end.

Others didn’t. Primarily, I’d argue, because they weren’t expected to.

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I’m still thinking through all this and what it means for my own children, so in lieu of a neat conclusion I’ll leave you with the wise words of John O’Farrell:

Children from advantaged backgrounds are going to do much better wherever they go to school – that is module 1 of a GCSE in The Bleedin’ Obvious. If you read to your children from an early age, if the poor things are dragged round museums every other weekend, if you have the time and energy for them and are not leaving them at home alone every evening because you have a second job cleaning floors at Heathrow, then your children will do better academically. If your local comp got 50% five A-Cs including English and maths, that doesn’t mean that your child has only a 50% chance of achieving that over-simplistic benchmark. What parents generally perceive as a “better school” usually means a school with an intake that is easier to teach.

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Time, innovation and funding.26th September 2012

I’ve worked in both schools and universities. In the former the ‘barrier’ to innovation is usually said to be time. In the latter it’s usually seen as the trials and tribulations of getting funding.

Whilst I agree that teachers work crazy hours and that both schools and universities are generally underfunded, I can’t help but think that the real reason institutional innovation is stifled is because of permission-seeking.

We all know that the worst kind of censorship is self-censorship – the fear that your actions might bring displeasure or punishment. People, I’m sad to say, don’t tend to give themselves the permission to innovate.

It might be slightly controversial to say so, but it’s easy to ask for time and money in an attempt to ensure a project is a success. And it’s also easy to say that something’s ‘not possible given current resources’. But time and money do not in and of themselves lead to successful projects.

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What I think people are hankering after when they ask for money or time for innovation projects is approval. Might I suggest that truly innovative projects are unlikely to get such approval?

Some projects need huge levels of buy-in and support and funding and scoping. Most don’t.

Just get on and do it.

Image CC BY-NC Wiertz Sébastien

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What Constitutes 'Rigour' in Our 21st-Century Educational Systems?26th September 2012

[Published at DMLcentral]

Recently Michael Gove, the English Secretary of State for Education, announced the Government's plans to "restore rigour and confidence to our examination system with the introduction of English Baccalaureate Certificates in English, maths, the sciences, history, geography and languages." Modular assessment with the opportunity for student retakes is out, three-hour final examinations are back in. The number of top grades that are awarded will be limited.

This approach is actually a toned-down version of Gove's initial proposals which were leaked back in June. At the time both Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime

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Minister Nick Clegg disavowed any knowledge of the plans, with the latter stating that he was against  "anything that would lead to a two-tier system where children at quite a young age are somehow cast on the scrapheap." The original system effectively sought to bring back the old-style O-levels for 'more able' students and CSEs for the 'less able'. It also proposed abolishing the National Curriculum for secondary schools. This is now rather a moot point with more and more schools effectively forced into Charter school-like 'Academy' status. Academies do not have to follow the National Curriculum.

Gove's proposed new system (still under consultation) would be introduced in September 2015 with the first new-style examinations taking place in 2017. Although promised 'further announcements' have not yet been forthcoming, the expectation is that the current marketplace for examination provision will be abolished with only one exam board provider per subject. Curiously, given the rhetoric in almost every other sphere of government (and educational policy) Gove has recognised that such competition leads to 'malign effects'. As in the US, some private companies are making a lot of money through educational testing, attracting customers (i.e. schools) by finding ways to get more students to achieve higher grades.

What concerns me about Gove's proposals is the assumption that rigour consists of a very particular method of assessing young people's knowledge, understanding and skills. I say this as a former teacher and senior leader, as someone who is currently involved in education on a national and international level and, most importantly, a parent. The ability to sit still and concentrate for three hours on examination questions testing feats of memory does not sound to me like a 21st century skill. Which pieces of the complex puzzle of

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human knowledge, skills and understanding are not captured under such a system? I'd suggest many.

The first examinations under the new system are slated for 2017. When I was growing up, the year 2017 was a year only dreamed of in science fiction books: a time of flying cars, thought transfer and personal robotics. Yet it seems that if Gove has his way the only 'thought transfer' technology that will triumph in 2017 will be young people channeling memorised 'facts' through their pencils onto regulation-sized paper. Thankfully we have a general election before 2015 and enough time to think bigger -- perhaps like our Scottish neighbours' Curriculum for Excellence.1

So what does constitute rigour in 21st-century education? Unfortunately we liberal educators have not done a good enough job in recent years of spelling this out. We have talked of young people requiring skills for jobs that don't yet exist. We've talked vaguely of new literacies, of human flourishing, of the social and emotional aspects of learning, of the reality of the digital world and the need to equip young people to use technologies in meaningful, constructive ways. Meanwhile, reactionary conservative politicians have been elected into positions of power, promising to 'restore confidence' to the examination system and return to 'traditional' values. At times of economic uncertainty such 'solid' qualifications in knowledge and skills familiar to previous generations sound like they lead to jobs and success. But will they? I have more than a few doubts.

My challenge to us all, therefore, is this: what can we measure to communicate effectively the things we believe to be most important in education? What does count as 'rigour'? And how might we assess that?

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1 http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/thecurriculum/

Time for a NICE-r kind of education?21st October 2012

Teaching may be as much of an art as a science, but there’s stuff that we know works in education.2 Whilst context definitely matters there are things – like timely, formative feedback – that can be done well no matter where you are and what situation you’re in.

To my mind, we should have something like the NHS Evidence website3 for things relating to pedagogy. It could provide answers to questions like:

• Where’s the evidence for using tablet computers in education?

• Where can I find out more about different forms of assessment?

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2 http://www.teacherstoolbox.co.uk/T_effect_sizes.html

3 http://www.evidence.nhs.uk

• Is there a sound research basis for giving homework?

The NHS Evidence website is provided by NICE – the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. We have nothing similar for education. Although health is as much of a political football as education, at least they’ve got a research basis.

If there’s no political will to separate politics and education, perhaps it’s time for a non-profit to do this kind of stuff? Or perhaps they are and they need more publicity?

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Educational Technology

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Resurrect computer science – but don't kill off ICT22nd January 2012

[Published on the Guardian Higher Education Network blog]

Michael Gove recently labelled the current provision of ICT in English schools as "dull' and argued, schools should have the freedom to teach computer science. The education secretary's speech came after a Royal Society report which mentioned that computing science is seen as a subject about basic digital literacy skills such as how to use a word-processor or a database.

Much is wrong with ICT lessons in schools. This is beyond doubt. The subject is taught predominantly by non-specialists and involves the mastery of skills required in the 1990s (when the programme of study was originally put together). This was a world before broadband, social networks, tablets and smartphones. However, the original aim for ICT lessons to develop in pupils "the knowledge, skills and understanding

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needed to employ ICT appropriately, securely and fruitfully in learning, employment and everyday life" remains aspirational.

The work of the Royal Society is undoubtedly an attempted rebranding exercise for computer and digital-related areas in schools. As such, we welcome that. However, it is a great shame that at the same time as doing so, both the society and Gove, have chosen to relegate the concept of digital literacy to mere basic skills.

Much has been done in the area of digital literacy that could be of great benefit to schools. The work JISC consultant Helen Beetham has carried out with and behalf of JISC, a government-funded body promoting innovation in post-compulsory education, bears this out. Indeed, the JISC developing digital literacies programme recognises that digital literacies are always plural and are highly context-specific. They go well beyond the 'basic skills' mentioned in the Royal Society report.

The digital world is not a single, homogenous space and, as a result, the literacies we require to traverse and interact in this space vary enormously. This does not make for an easy, one-size-fits-all knowledge transfer approach but it certainly recognises the diverse world in which we live, both online and offline. The digital landscape changes rapidly meaning that young people require not a static functional literacy, but a critical and creative set of attributes that help them to navigate various networks. Computer science may give some young people a deep technical understanding of these matters, but educational institutions exist to prepare young people for the world generally, not just for specific jobs. Digital literacies add the human element into the mix.

To pin our hopes on computer science as the knight in shining armour for ICT in schools is to make a twofold error. First, instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we

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should revisit the initial aims of the ICT curriculum. Are the aims of computer science as inclusive as the aims of ICT (however poorly delivered)? Would learning an arcane programming language from a series of worksheets really be better than disjointed lessons on how to use Microsoft Excel? So much depends upon the delivery of knowledge and skills and, with so few computer science graduates in the teaching profession, how can most schools deliver the subject in an inspiring way?

The second error in hoping that computer science will solve our ICT woes is that of focusing on a single, homogeneous set of skills. In 2012 we should be welcoming diversity, personalising learning and insisting on a rigorous programme of digital literacies for our young people from when they start school to when they (potentially) leave university. By all means encourage schools to run computer science lessons, but let us not pretend that this is a solution to those still-relevant issues raised in 1999 by the QCA.

Everyone, young and old alike, needs to learn how the web works, the ways ideas proliferate through networks, and to use digital tools to work purposefully towards a pre-specified goal. None of these skills, however, are in the domain of computer science. Welcome though it is, computer science needs to be augmented by a focus on digital literacies for the world in which we all (increasingly) inhabit. We need computer science and to develop digital literacies in schools.

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On the Importance of Webmaking19th June 2012

[Published at DMLcentral]

I’ve come to realize over the last couple of years just how important the Open Web is for online innovation. It’s a standards-based platform that allows anyone to use relatively low-cost technologies to connect things and people together in new ways. It’s radical in its egalitarian, open, and democratic approach.

But it’s under threat.

When Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone only five years ago in 2007 he emphasized the importance of getting Web browsing right on a mobile device. Hot on the heels of the announcement, of course, came the wildly successful App Store. A few days ago Tim Cook, the new CEO of Apple, announced that this is now “an economy in and of itself.” And,

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despite the App Store’s popularity, this is an ecosystem where Apple take a 30% cut and decides what is and what is not made available to end users.

At least with Apple there is an obvious monetary transaction taking place. You choose to purchase an Apple device and you choose to purchase various apps vetted for inclusion in the App Store. With Facebook, and to some extent Google, however, it’s a different story. Their services are provided ‘free of charge’ to the end user. No money changes hands (ordinarily) between you and these publicly-listed companies who, at the end of the day, exist to provide shareholder value. What is being sold to advertisers, of course, is your attention and your online habits.

What concerns me, and I am fully aware that I may come across as a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist at this point, is that much of our online interaction takes place in public but privately-owned spheres. Twitter, despite being seen as helping revolutionaries, is no different in this respect. If you fall foul of the rules, if an organization takes a disliking to you (or your pseudonym), then you’re out. You’re on private land using tools that may be revoked at any time. Oh, and those tools are increasingly non-user-upgradeable, proprietary, and closed-source.

I came across a great quotation towards the end of a Wired magazine article about Apple’s new MacBook Pro. Now I’ve nothing against Apple or their devices -- I own several myself -- but the following sums up nicely how we’ve lost our way:

We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable. But we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more

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robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?

Every time we buy a locked down product containing a non-replaceable battery with a finite cycle count, we’re voicing our opinion on how long our things should last. But is it an informed decision? When you buy something, how often do you really step back and ask how long it should last? If we want long-lasting products that retain their value, we have to support products that do so.

Today, we choose. If we choose the Retina display over the existing MacBook Pro, the next generation of Mac laptops will likely be less repairable still. When that happens, we won’t be able to blame Apple. We’ll have to blame ourselves.

We’re being turned into an audience, an audience that passively consumes a shiny, commoditized, ersatz version of the Web in return for a veneer of sociality, connection to celebrity, and/or perceived ease of use. Meanwhile, our data is being sold to the highest bidder, we’re becoming used to surveillance and a lack of privacy, and any digital skills we had are atrophying.

There is another way.

Thankfully, efforts are underway to avoid the next generation being one of consumption over creating. The Mozilla Foundation (which I am proud to be joining next month) is campaigning for a ‘generation of webmakers’ to come together to make something amazing with the Web. This summer a huge effort is underway through a Summer Code Party to help people young and old take their first steps in learning to code a little. You can find out more and get involved at Webmaker.org.

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You can learn see how web pages are put together using X-Ray Goggles, learn the basics of code using Thimble, and even create amazing hyper-video mashups using Popcorn. All of this is free, open, and provided by a non-profit organization steadfastly against Web users being tracked.

The Web wants to be open. The Web wants to be free. The Web wants us to connect to collaborate to make awesome things together.

Will you join us to help protect it?

Image CC BY paul_clarke

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Some thoughts on the Department for Education’s consultation on ‘Parental Internet Controls’.28th June 2012

If you’re in England and a parent, guardian and/or educator you should be responding to the Department for Education’s consultation on Parental Internet Controls.

The assumptions behind it are quite staggering.

It would appear that the government believes that the best way of ‘protecting’ young people is to shield them from ever accessing ‘inappropriate’ material online.

This is wrong for several reasons:

1. Despite your best efforts, all young people will at some point come across inappropriate things online

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2. Any tool you use to block inappropriate sites will be a fairly blunt instrument leading to false positives

3. Blocking tools tend to lead to a false sense of security by parents, guardians and educators

4. Who decides what’s ‘inappropriate’?

The best filter resides in the head, not in a router or office of an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

I don’t want my internet connection to be filtered in ‘the best interests of my children’. I don’t want to be subject to censorship.

I’ve responded to the consultation. I’ve pointed out that their questions are sometimes unfairly worded. For example, I want to respond for one particular question that I don’t think ‘automatic’ parental controls should be in place in any households.

It’s about education, not censorship. Make sure you respond to the consultation, please!

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How to implement technology successfully in your organisation.8th August 2012

I spent some time in a local school this week talking to some members of staff about implementing educational technology. It made me realise that I haven’t talked nearly enough here about how to do that successfully. It’s simultaneously straightforward and painfully difficult.

Let me explain.

Technically, pretty much anything is possible. Short of thought-transfer and teleporting to the moon we live in a world with endless possibilities on the technical front. Whatever it is you want to do is probably possible.

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Successfully implementing technology in your organization is therefore not a technology issue. Yes, it’s important to get right. But no, if you just focus on that your technology implementation will not work.

Here’s some advice for those seeking to introduce a new technology into their organisation.

1. Solve other people’s problemsThis is the number one priority. If technology isn’t solving someone’s problem somewhere, somehow, then it’s superfluous. My experience is with educational institutions where I’d very much focus on solving teachers’ problems if you want any meaningful traction.

2. Get other people to evangelise for youIf you’re known as technically competent, then any success you have with technology is not necessarily seen as replicable by others. Get influencers on board. Embrace skeptics. Again, solve their problems.

3. Embrace constraintsYou will always face constraints. These could be financial. They could be political, social, emotional or hierarchical. Whatever they are, if you can’t change them easily there’s no point whinging: you need to use the difficulty.

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There might be a certain technology you’re being forced to use. So use it.

There might be some awkward members of staff or departments. So convert them or avoid them to begin with.

Strategise.

4. Have a strategyThis is blindingly obvious, but if you don’t have a strategy you can’t be strategic about your deployment of technology. “We want to introduce iPads to improve engagement” is not a strategy. It’s a hope. It’s a wish.

Strategies should be user-focused and have appropriate timescales. There’s a lot of talk around technology changing so fast that most strategies are meaningless.

Bull.

When technologies evolve rapidly, then strategies are more important than ever. They’re not perfect but use research such as the yearly (free!) NMC Horizon report4 to see which way the wind is blowing.

5. Turn on everything / default to openYou don’t know where innovation’s going to happen. In fact, it usually happens at the edges, at the places where you least expect it. That’s certainly been my experience.

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4 http://www.nmc.org/horizon-project

So, when you’re deciding which features of a platform to turn on, first look at your strategy. If that doesn’t tell you what to do, turn the feature on. Let the users drive the innovation.

And, finally, default to openness. It’s what makes the world go around. Don’t hide behind e-safety. Don’t hide behind ignorance. Don’t hide behind what you think other people will think. You’ll be pleasantly surprised if you let go of the reins a little.

Image CC BY Veribatim

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Why a ‘mixed economy’ of digital devices is best for your educational institution.29th August 2012

Earlier today, on Twitter, I mentioned that the 64GB version of the BlackBerry Playbook is now at the scandalously low price of £129. They’re practically giving it away.

I mentioned that for some educational institutions that would be a really good fit, especially given that you can side-load Android apps. Eventually, I should imagine, you’ll be able to dispose of the BlackBerry OS altogether and just go with Android for the entire system.

Bill Lord, a Primary school headteacher, replied that he was looking at a ‘mixed economy’ of devices for his educational institution, adding that he had three main reasons for this approach:

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2. Staff needs (confidence/competence)

3. Vagaries of the market

I’m with Bill. To my mind, being an ‘iPad-only’ school makes no sense. It’s replicating the Microsoft vendor lock-in all over again. Since when was school about teaching young people how to use particular types of devices?

Instead, it’s better to look at the affordances of each device. That doesn’t mean how much it costs, but rather what it allows you to do. The BlackBerry Playbook at £129, for example, has front and rear-facing cameras and a high-definition screen. Sounds like an opportunity.

It’s OK to build learning activities around specific devices some of the time, but I wouldn’t want to be doing it all of the time. Why not focus on building and using things that are device-agnostic? Surely that’s a more sustainable option? Use the Web, for goodness’ sake!

Finally, if you’re reading this in the UK you should really stop by HotUKDeals5 every now and again. I’m on there at least three times a day – and not just to find cheaper stuff than usual. I also find it really enlightening in terms of what people are interested in but, more importantly, the comments people leave and the context they give. There’s some serious expertise there.

Image CC BY-NC reebob

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5 http://hotukdeals.com

Game design, gamification, game mechanics and games-based learning.2nd September 2012

In a couple of weeks’ time I’ll have the privilege of attending the Scottish Learning Festival (SLF). It’ll be my fourth consecutive time and one of the educational highlights of my year.

Something I’ve learned at SLF is how effectively video games can be used for learning. The main man in this regard is Derek Robertson along with the people he’s inspired.

My interest in games-based learning was piqued a little late in my teaching career to be of much use, unfortunately, but it has come in useful as a parent. My son’s favourite games at the moment are Minecraft and Little Big Planet – both games are focused on building things and being creative.

But what about me?85

I enrolled recently on the Coursera Gamification course led by Kevin Werbach not really expecting much. After all, it’s just a bunch of videos and some multiple-choice quizzes, right? But I’m actually enjoying it. 10-minute videos featuring an engaging speaker suits my attention span just fine.

As a Philosophy graduate I had been intrigued by Kevin Werbach’s reference to Wittgenstein’s problem of defining what constituted a ‘game’.

I was even more intrigued when he made reference to the work of Bernard Suits that claims there are three constituent parts that make up games:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

As a casual gamer I tend to play games that are easy to pick up and put down. So over the past year I’ve been playing mainly Battlefield 3 and Burnout Paradise as well as unsuccessfully curbing my 19-year addiction to Football Manager.

But the gamification course made me really think about game design and game mechanics. Instead of watching a film tonight I went looking for a new game. I came across Journey.

Oh. My. Goodness.

It took about the same amount as watching a film for me to complete. I don’t have the words to describe how magestic it was, how it managed to play with my emotions, and how cleverly-designed the overall experience felt.

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There’s no explicit communication in Journey. Nor are there any written or verbal instructions. Other players who are online at the same time as you pop-up on occasion to join you for a while. There’s simultaneously endless possibilities in a vast lanscape and an unfolding narrative. The whole thing is cinematic.

At times I felt uplifted; other times confused, surprised, shocked, relieved or just happy and relaxed. It’s a game that really does play with your emotions.

The experience of playing Journey has made me reflect about not only game design, gamification, game mechanics and games-based learning but also learning itself. To my mind effective learning is about a series of impactful, memorable experiences -  and I certainly had an amazing experience playing Journey this evening!

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Mozilla, Webmaking, and the Architecture of Participation10th September 2012

(I’m currently at the Mozilla All Hands meeting in Toronto)

Last week I attended the inaugural EduWiki conference run by Wikimedia UK. It was a curious mix of Wikipedians, educators and academics who came together to discuss how Wikipedia could be used in more formal educational settings.

Martin Poulter, the organiser of the conference, was at pains to point out that Wikipedia isn’t phenomenally successful just because it allows anyone to edit. There’s a structure, albeit a fluid one, behind it all.

It got me thinking about an article from 2004 by Tim O’Reilly.6 He talks in that article about the importance of designing in ways for users to contribute effectively:

I’ve come to use the term “the architecture of participation” to describe the nature of systems that are designed for user contribution.

Tim’s focus is upon the architecture of the web and how openness of both attitude and technology allows for participation by more than just geeks:

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6 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html

HTML, the language of web pages, opened participation to ordinary users, not just software developers. The “View Source” menu item migrated from Tim Berners-Lee’s original browser, to Mosaic, and then on to Netscape Navigator and even Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Though no one thinks of HTML as an open source technology, its openness was absolutely key to the explosive spread of the web. Barriers to entry for “amateurs” were low, because anyone could look “over the shoulder” of anyone else producing a web page. Dynamic content created with interpreted languages continued the trend toward transparency.

Any project starts off relatively small and needs enthusiastic individuals (and usually some money) to get things started. Wikipedia, for example, had Jimmy Wales and the money he had made from previous ventures. But even if you do get initial funding, you still have to make things sustainable:

In this context, it’s worth noting an observation originally made by Dan Bricklin in his paper, The Cornucopia of the Commons. There are three ways to build a large database, wrote Dan. The first, demonstrated by Yahoo, is to pay people to do it. The second, inspired by lessons from the open source community, is to get volunteers to perform the same task. The Open Directory Project, an open source Yahoo competitor, is the result. (Wikipedia provides another example.) But Napster demonstrates a third way. Because Napster set its defaults to automatically share any music that was downloaded, every user automatically helped to build the value of the shared database.

We at Mozilla are hoping to help create a generation of Webmakers. By this we mean people who can not only elegantly consume, but help make the Web. To do this we need to get things right from the start: by building stuff,

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handing it over to the community, and supporting their efforts.

And of course, we’ll give them badges.

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BYOD and cross-platform tools for learning.23rd September 2012

I had a really interesting conversation on Twitter with Fraser Speirs and Dave Major this morning about ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) and cross-platform tools for learning. You can see that conversation ‘storyified’ here.7

I’ve blogged before about why a ‘mixed economy’ of device is best for educational institutions and I’d like to expand upon that briefly with three main points:

1. Learning is something that happens in the brain of learners. You might be able to give them consistency of device and platform but you can’t guarantee that they will have the same experience. Therefore, using that as a reason to go with one particular device is problematic.

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7 http://storify.com/dajbelshaw/byod-and-cross-platform-tools

2. Educators need to focus on activities rather than tools. One of the examples that Apple advocates often give of the superiority of iPads is GarageBand. It’s an awesome application, but it’s not a learning activity. I’d be really interested in discovering which learning activities can only be carried out on one type of device. I suspect you won’t find any.

3. What we do in classrooms is linked to, but should not be driven by, market forces. We can only buy and use what’s available, but we don’t have to be taken in by the rhetoric of companies. After all, they’re in it to make money. How the world turns out is much more in the hands of educators than anyone else.

Remember that.

Image CC BY Domenic K.

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My response to the ICT Programme of Study consultation4th October 2012

Note that this is my personal view. But I’ve got my Mozilla hat on half-cocked, as it were.

ContextThere’s currently a review of the ICT Programme of Study (PoS) underway in England. Tomorrow (Friday 5th October 2012) is the last day to give feedback on the first version of the draft, with a further chance to comment on the full draft in November and then a public consultation in Spring 2013. The review, commissioned by the Department for Education

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(DfE), is being organised by the British Computing Society (BCS) and Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng).

One problem they’re having particular problems with is what to do at Key Stage 4 (KS4) with 14-16 year olds who are doing specialised GCSEs in Computer Science or Information Technology. If that satisfies the statutory requirement then how should the PoS for KS4 be expressed? There’s also the issue of students who don’t take any ICT-related qualifications at KS4 currently being forced to take a token course.

The points around which feedback is currently sought are:

1. What to do with KS4 (see above)

2. Other strategic issues

3. Personal vision for success in 2016 – what would you see in ICT lessons from KS1 (5-7 year olds) through KS2 (8-11), KS3 (11-13) and KS4 (14-6)

One final thing before I dive in: changing the name of the subject from ICT (‘Information and Communications Technologies’) to anything else would require primary legislation. In other words, it’s not going to happen. As a result, three strands have been proposed in the RAEng report8 from earlier this year. I quote them verbatim:

• Computer Science (CS) is the subject discipline that studies how computer systems work, how they are constructed and programmed, and the fundamental principles of information and computation, in both artificial and natural information processing systems.

• Information Technology (IT) covers the use and application of computer systems including the Internet,

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8 http://royalsociety.org/education/policy/computing-in-schools/report/

to develop technological solutions purposefully and creatively.

• Digital Literacy (DL) provides a critical understanding of technology’s impact on society and the individual, including privacy, responsible use, legal and ethical issues

My responseAs someone who worked in English schools for seven years (teaching some ICT), have subsequently worked in Higher Education with JISC and now work for an IT company (Mozilla) I feel qualified to weigh in on this consultation. I also have an interest as a parent to young children whom these reforms will potentially affect. Finally, I wrote my doctoral thesis on the topic of digital literacies.

I’m happy that the three strands of CS, IT and DL have been proposed, and delighted that the definition of DL proposed involves “a critical understanding of technology’s impact”. I’m also pleased that there’s a specific recognition of the creative use of ICT and a recognition of the value of everyone knowing enough code to be able to tinker.

I do, however, have five specific recommendations:

1. That the use of ‘Digital Literacy’ be replaced with ‘Digital Literacies’ to recognise the multiple literacies required to be effective in the digital world. For example, web literacies (which I’m currently working on for Mozilla) can be seen as a subset of digital literacies. I go into much more detail on this in my thesis and it also reflects current thinking in the area of New Literacies.

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2. That DL (pluralised) should form the majority of the statutory PoS for ICT at KS4 – and that those who wish to specialise in CS and/or IT be given the chance to do so through discrete GCSEs.

3. That ICT be linked explicitly to English Baccalaureate (EBacc) subjects in order to raise the status of the subject as well as suffuse those subjects with the excitement and creativity that ICT can bring.

4. That specific mention be made of the collaborative and emancipatory power of the web. Learning HTML, CSS and Javascript could fall within the realm of DL (pluralised) and provide a coherent route to CS at KS4. See Mozilla’s Webmaker programme for more information.

5. That specific mention be made of the burgeoning work around Digital Making by organisations such as Nesta and the Nominet Trust, and that such language (of ‘digital makers’ and ‘digital making’) be included in the ICT PoS from KS1 to KS4.

I’d love any to hear any other ideas you have!

Image CC BY dgray_xplane

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Some Thoughts on iPads and One-to-One Initiatives18th October 2012

[Published at DMLcentral]

In my experience, there's broadly three ways to relate to any kind of educational technology:

1. Technological - decide on the technology (for whatever reason) and that determines what you do pedagogically

2. Pedagogical - settle upon the pedagogy and then look for a technology that fits

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3. Ecological - combine pedagogies and technologies to promote certain kinds of behaviours.

I'd like to think that most of what I've done so far in my career, from training teachers to implementing multi-site learning systems to evangelising Open Badges, has been focused upon evangelising this 'third way' of approaching educational technology. In order for this to be successful, however, educators have to have a large enough 'toolkit' of both pedagogical and technological approaches to promote desired behaviours. After all, when all you've got is a hammer (so the saying goes) all you see are nails.

Since Nick Dennis introduced me to it a few years ago I've been a big fan of Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model:

What I like about this model is that it is clearly and unambiguously focused upon learning activities with the technology as an enabler toward that end. Unfortunately, most of what I've seen when it comes to iPad and other 1:1 initiatives doesn't even make it onto the SAMR model. It's not even Substitution, it's 'look at these shiny devices: what shall we do with them?'

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When it comes to educational technology, academics often talk about affordances. An affordance is "a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action." Mobile devices have many affordances lending themselves to new forms of learning. Unfortunately, many people tend to consider these affordances in a vacuum, as if their effective use wasn't context-dependent. So we get slogans along the lines of ‘iPads improve learning’ - as though they were some kind of glistening panacea for learning.

I've got nothing against iPads. In fact our family owns one and I encourage my five year-old son to do everything from update his blog to play Minecraft on it. But there are no 'best technologies' for learning. In fact, I'd argue that, Pragmatically-speaking, there are no 'best pedagogies' for learning: everything is both bounded and catalysed by context. A learning theory or a device in one context is not the same thing as in another. There are many, many other things to consider -- infrastructure, motivation, personalities...the list is pretty much endless.

One of the few really thoughtful and balanced books about technology I've read over the last few years is Douglas Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. It's a short, fairly cheap book which you should go and purchase right after finishing reading this post. What I really like about Rushkoff's work is that he talks lucidly and concisely about the biases inherent in technologies:

A bias is simply a leaning—a tendency to promote one set of behaviors over another. All media and all technologies have biases. It may be true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”; but guns are a technology more biased to killing than, say, clock radios. Televisions are biased toward people sitting still in couches and watching. Automobiles are biased toward motion, individuality, and living in the suburbs. Oral

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culture is biased toward communicating in person, while written culture is biased toward communication that doesn’t happen between people in the same time and place. Film photography and its expensive processes were biased toward scarcity, while digital photography is biased toward immediate and widespread distribution.

There’s no doubt that Apple (iOS), Google (Android), and Microsoft (Windows Phone) are creating ‘verticals’ across which it’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. It’s much easier to deploy, for example, a single type of device across an institution rather than take a ‘mixed economy’ approach. But to do so, in my opinion, would be to repeat the mistakes we made around Microsoft Office in the last 15 years or so. Locking yourself into one vendor may lead to a short-term gain but I can almost guarantee it will be a long-term loss.

Choosing which tablet devices to deploy - or indeed whether to deploy them is more than a hardware and/or software decision. It’s a series of decisions about pedagogy, about learning, about how we want to relate to each other as human beings. Particularly in a school environment we’re promoting and encouraging behaviours not just for now but for the future.

Diversity is a good thing. You don’t have to be a cheerleader for the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) agenda to recognise that giving young people a range of tools (with their different affordances and biases) more closely resembles the world they will inhabit when they leave your walled garden. This may be a less shiny approach. It might make educational technology more boring. But at the end of the day an ecological approach, taking into account the behaviours we want to promote, not the technology we want to paw, might be a better way forward. Don’t you think?

Image CC BY Sean MacEntee

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Some thoughts on learning technologies in the classroom17th November 2012

I was invited to participate in a panel session as part of the inaugural London Festival of Education today. It was a great event with some big name speakers as well as thoughtful contributions from those at the sharp end in the classroom. I’ve written it up in a combined post with MozFest on my conference blog.9

As ever with panel sessions I didn’t get a chance to say all I wanted to say about the topic of the session, which was entitled How learning technologies are changing teaching. The session description revealed more: “Slates and chalk have been replaced with iPads, and blackboards by interactive whiteboards. But is it the same old teaching just with fancy new kit?”

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9 http://dougbelshaw.com/conferences/2012/11/17/mozfest-and-the-london-festival-of-education-

lfe2012/

Writing up the notes from this session in an organised, coherent way would require a book. And I’ve already got one of those to write. So I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with the following:

• Wouldn’t it be great if we had a national agency to advise schools on how to use technology effectively? Although it was far from ideal, Becta was that agency. And we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

• The classroom is a symbol of intergenerational solidarity and conflict. Because it symbolises a shared experience it’s a contested space everyone thinks they’re an expert upon.

• Focusing on specific examples can be limiting. I caught the end of a discussion as part of the Today programme BBC Radio 4 on Thursday morning. The representative from Nesta was asked for an example of ‘a really good lesson’ using tablet computers. Quite rightly they didn’t attempt to answer the question. I think I’d have been tempted to throw the question back at them and ask what a really good lesson using pencils would look like.

• Technologies are more than just tools. And they’re not ‘neutral’. They were designed by someone, or a group of people, or a multi-national profit-seeking organisation for a particular purpose.

“A bias is simply a leaning – a tendency to promote one set of behaviours over another. All media and all technologies have biases. It may be true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”; but guns are a technology more biased to killing than, say, clock radio. Televisions are biased toward people sitting still in couches and watching. Automobiles are biased toward motion, individuality, and living in the suburbs. Oral

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culture is biased towards communicating in person, whilst written culture is biased toward communication that doesn’t happen between people in the same time and place.”

(Douglas Rushkoff)

• Different technologies have different affordances. They may look the same and be put in the same categories by retailers and reviewers, but the opportunities they afford are different. This isn’t to do with cost, it’s to do with the logic of the device. So with some devices the trade-off you get for them being extremely easy-to-use is being locked into a proprietary ecosystem.

• Technologies do not operate in a vacuum. How, why and where technologies are used depends upon our values, expectations and motivations.

“When technologies are released, they are adopted and appropriated within existing social values, structures and expectations; they are shaped and reshaped by beta testers, early adopters and marketers; and they come to mean different things and be used for different purposes by different people. Different social, religious and cultural values, for example, pattern the uptake of medical technologies… [and] domestic technologies are appropriated into the existing values and cultures of families.”

(Keri Facer)

• We can’t engineer future-proof schools. The future doesn’t just happen, it’s created by all of us. We shouldn’t be at the whim of people trying to make a profit by selling things.

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“Rather than envisaging a ‘future-proof school that tries to insure itself against socio-technical change, therefore, we have the opportunity to create future-building schools that actively support their communities to tip the balance of socio-technical change in favour of fair, sustainable and democratic futures.”

(Keri Facer)

• Doing the wrong thing faster or better isn’t progress. Going further down a wrong road doesn’t mean you’re going to get to the destination you had in mind. We need to re-think how we measure learning. If educators feel that something is valuable but it doesn’t necessarily lead to better test scores, then we need to re-think the tests.

“You can’t take on twenty-first-century tasks with twentieth-century tools and hope to get the job done.” (Cathy Davidson)

“As Internet analyst Clay Shirky notes succinctly, “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

(Cathy Davidson)

• Spending all day looking at screens is a bad thing. But technology can augment what we do. Think of sports tracking utilities that enable you to compete against yourself. Or track the number of steps you do and upload it to a website. Personalised, embedded technologies are a huge leap forward in terms of what we can do with learning and teaching. The example usually used is having a search engine in your pocket, but infinitely more powerful is a network of people – human agency – on tap. It can turn everyone into a superhero, compared with the 20th century.

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• Concerns about the impact of technology on the brain are often misguided. The brain is supposed to rewire itself. How else could you learn anything?

“Many of our anxieties about how the new digital technologies of today are “damaging” our children are based on the old idea of neural development as fixed, or “hardwired.” and on notions of distraction and disruption as hindrances instead of opportunities for learning. Our fears about multitasking and media stacking are grounded in the idea that the brain progresses in a linear fashion, so we are accumulating more and more knowledge as we go along. Most of us, as parents or teachers or educational policy makers, have not yet absorbed the lessons of contemporary neuroscience: that the most important feature of the brain is Hebbian, in the sense that the laying down of patterns causes efficiencies that serve us only while they really are useful and efficient. When something comes along to interrupt our efficiency, we can make new patterns.”

(Cathy Davidson)

• Instead of platforms as standards we should focus on standards as standards. We like to belong to things that are popular. That’s why technologies – including social networks – have a tipping point, but also a lifecycle. Just as an example, go to a conference and ask if anyone can lend you an iPhone charger. You’ll be inundated. Yet there are actually more phones with micro-USB chargers – and, in fact, it’s an EU regulation that users can use this standard to charge their phone. It’s a less extreme example of breast milk versus powdered milk in developing countries – there’s no-one to champion the former so those peddling the latter make millions.

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• We need mind-expanding education and critical thinking skills, but we don’t need to regurgitate facts. There’s a quotation on the side of the British Library that I like:

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”

(Samuel Johnson)

“The biggest problem we face now is the increasing mismatch between traditional curricular standards of content-based instruction and the new forms of thinking required by our digital, distributed workplace. at any level – blue collar or white collar – those jobs requiring “routine thinking skills” are increasingly performed by machines or outsourced to nations with a lower standard of living than [us].”

(Cathy Davidson)

• Technology can be used well and technology can be used badly. Technology may have biases and affordances, but it can be bent to the will of human beings. There are rich, innovative, exciting and liberating uses of technologies. And there are dull, pointless, soul-sapping use of technologies. We need to use technology mindfully.

“The mindful use of digital media doesn’t happen automatically. Thinking about what you are doing and why you are doing it instead of going through the motions is fundamental to the definition of mindful, whether you are deciding to follow someone on Twitter, shutting the lid of your laptop in class, looking up from your BlackBerry in a meeting, or consciously deciding which links not to click.”

(Howard Rheingold)

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• We need to invest in training and peer assistance. Teachers are insanely overworked: no other industry would stand for it. And teacher CPD – especially around technology – is poor. More recently there’s been a fashion to say that learning technologies should be as easy to use as Facebook which is ridiculous. Most people were introduced to Facebook by family, a friend, or a colleague. They forget the learning curve and the constant re-learning they have to do when the interface and controls change.

• The skills, competencies and literacies we need now are different from those required in the past. It’s like a huge Venn diagram that’s constantly overlapping and moving. We’d do well to remember that we’re not trying to create adults like us but adults that will have the skills appropriate to the world in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time.

“I didn’t let my child loose on the streets without teaching her about traffic and looking both ways. Similarly, I don’t like to see otherwise well-educated people loose in digital culture without knowing something about what makes a small-world network work or why a portfolio of weak ties is important.”

(Howard Rheingold)

“In previous eras, it may have been true that “it’s not what you know but who you know.” Today how you know what you know matters as much as who you know, and one of the most valuable traits a person could have in a twenty-first-century organisation is a knack for knowing “who know who knows what.”"

(Howard Rheingold)

• We need names for things so that we can easily have conversations about them. Take, for example, the

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concept of the flipped classroom (where content is ‘delivered’ at home and activities take place during lesson time). Forward-thinking educators have been doing that for years, but now it has a delivery channel (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) and a name. It’s a thing.

• Learners will almost always know more about technology than their teachers. That’s not a reason to avoid using technologies, that’s a reason to embrace them. It’s empowering and demonstrates the teacher as lifelong learner. It’s scary to let go of the reins, but hugely beneficial and changes the dynamic of the classroom.

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Why we need more e-learning staff tutors19th November 2012

In February 2008, whilst walking back from the staff room to my classroom I knocked on the door of my Headteacher’s office. At the time I was teaching History with a bit of ICT at Ridgewood School in Doncaster and had noticed that the school wasn’t using the technology it already had very effectively. The ‘five minutes’ I asked of Chris Hoyle (one of the best leaders I’ve worked for) turned into a fairly epic conversation. In fact, when the bell went and I rose to go and teach Year 9 for the last lesson of the day, Chris buzzed through to his secretary to get someone to cover my lesson.

Chris and I agreed that the problem was that teachers, busy at the best of times, needed showing what could be done with technology. He asked me to write a job description that I thought would help improve the situation. I did so (with the help of others10) and, once he’d toned it down from a senior

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10 http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2008/06/03/help-me-write-my-job-spec-for-next-year/

leadership position(!) we agreed upon my becoming e-Learning Staff Tutor starting from the academic year 2008-9.

I’ve still got the overview of what I got up to during my first term in the role, where I spent 50% of my time teaching History and ICT, and the other 50% of my time teaching the teachers. I had a small budget (a couple of thousand, from memory):

Activities

• Lunchtime staff sessions (two per week) on web applications and free resources that enhance teaching and learning.

• Advice to staff via email

• Face-to-face advice and guidance of an informal nature

• Preparation of resources for staff training sessions (online and print)

• One-to-one booked sessions on self-identified areas of development defined by members of staff

• Involvement in ICT Management Group

• VLE training for Years 7 and 8 during Form Period

• Involvement in Becta award-winning Humanities project convened by Balby CLC

• Involvement in Open Source Schools, a Becta-funded project (speaking at BETT 2009 as a result of this)

• Research into new technologies and pedagogies resulting from these technologies

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• Implementing and feeding back on new technologies (e.g. purchase and use of six netbook computers).

Successes

• X members of staff have attended at least one lunchtime e-learning session*

• A total of X members of staff have booked X one-to-one sessions

• Email is now being used by the majority of staff within school

• Every department in the school has had some contact with e-learning sessions, with the exception of Drama and Music

• There are in excess of ten subject-related blogs around the school

• The RE department are now using their new interactive whiteboards to enhance teaching and learning after requesting some training

• Smaller issues relating to the school network not picked up on the ‘big sweep’ have been identified and are in the process of being rectified (e.g. location of network points, ability to print to network printers)

Areas for Development

• Number of staff attending lunchtime sessions tailed off as term wore on – strategies to prevent this?

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• Ability to visit other schools and conferences for research and development limited by impact on teaching Year 10 GCSE History students. Currently only practical time available is Thursday afternoon.

• From informal conversations, it is clear that staff would welcome an extended amount of time spent with them as a department. This time needs to either be carved out of a school day, INSET day or arranged in an after-school context.

*obviously there were real numbers here but I can only find the draft of this document!

With an increasing number of schools considering going one-to-one with devices and/or considering a ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) approach, the need for positions like the one I had for a year at Ridgewood is increasing. Many people will have seen the way the press picked up on the recent Nesta report Decoding Learning. Unfortunately they got it wrong: it’s not necessarily that schools are buying useless gadgets it’s that not enough time and money is being spent on showing teachers how learning gains can be made by using the technology effectively.

I’d love to see schools not only have a senior leadership position for whole-school technology/ICT strategy but, in addition, someone (or a team of people) with the skills to not only teach young people but teach teachers. Get that mix right and technology really does have the potential to transform learning!

Image based on an original CC BY-NC Computing At School Scotland

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Technology

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Beyond Elegant Consumption.30th March 2012

At the Mozilla Festival last year, Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker stood up and gave a short talk. Something she said really resonated with me. In fact, it resonated so much that I baked it right in as a central message of my TEDx Warwick talk.

We need to move beyond mere ‘elegant consumption’.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with elegant consumption in and of itself. Reading, watching and experiencing other people’s creations put together in a thoughtful and delightful way is joyful. But if that’s all we’re doing, then we have a problem.

I’ve championed Apple’s hardware and software since buying my first MacBook in 2006. I love the way that their offerings are so easy to use. At some point over the past six years I think I’ve owned or used pretty much their whole product line.

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So why this week did I install Pinguy OS (a Linux distribution) on my iMac and trade my iPhone for the open-source Nokia N9?

Until last year, it was possible to swap out almost any hardware and software and still have a functioning ecosystem. An individual or organization could first decide what they wanted that ecosystem to look like and then invest in the constituent parts of that ecosystem. I feel like that’s changed. Now it’s a case of choose your vendor lock-in. And worryingly, that choice seems to be increasingly an aesthetic choice.

Yes, it’s nice that Apple, through iCloud, auto-syncs all of my stuff everywhere. And it’s wonderful that Google can present me with a (mostly) seamless experience on their combination of hardware and software. But I don’t want to have to buy into their whole ecosystem to get the functionality I require.

I’ll tell you what I want. I want interoperability. I want standards. I want a world where I can plug one thing into another and it (mostly) works. And if that world is slightly less shiny than it might otherwise have been? Well, that’s fine with me. At least I’ll have learned to start worrying and love my data.

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Platforms as standards? 10 days with the Nokia N9.8th April 2012

Last week I ordered and received a Nokia N9 smartphone. You can’t buy them in stores in the UK as Nokia has since decided to go with the ‘Windows Phone’ mobile operating system.

This has led to some interesting reviews:

4. Slashgear

5. The Verge

6. Gizmodo

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Essentially, they all say that the phone is gorgeous, both in terms of hardware and the swipe-based MeeGo operating system.

But.

The Nokia Ovi store contains very few apps as Nokia has effectively abandoned the platform (although they are supporting it until 2015).

That hasn’t stopped me getting two significant updates to the phone in the short time I’ve had it. The latest update was awesome and included built-in DLNA streaming to devices such as my Playstation 3.

Quite why a closed app store equates to a successful mobile device is beyond me. The only two apps I’m actually missing are two you probably don’t use: Path and LastPass.

I want to credit Amber Thomas with a throwaway comment she made during our Skype conversation earlier this week. She talked of the worrying tendency of people to treat ‘platforms as standards’. Hence the title of this post. What I’ve realised is that Apple iPhone app makers love to create silos for information. It makes their apps profitable.

On the other hand, I like my workflows. And the best mechanisms for making those workflows as smooth as possible? RSS and email. Which, given Project Reclaim, is just as well. :-)

I’ve spent a small fortune on apps for Apple devices. And to what avail? I don’t need a dedicated special ‘distraction-free’ iPad app to write well. I just need to find an environment conducive to writing and get on and write. I don’t need a fancy to-do list with heatmap colours. I need a list of things to do. Paper and pen’s working well.

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The N9 has apps and accounts that are integrated into the operating system itself. The Twitter app is great and the Messages app integrates SMS, Google Talk, Skype and other instant messaging platforms:

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Connecting your accounts enables you to import and export from almost any app. I added the Evernote and MeeIn (LinkedIn) functionality through the Nokia Ovi Store. It’s not completely barren.

This isn’t a review of the Nokia N9. Nor is it a post comparing it with my previous smartphone: an iPhone 4. The reason for this post is to point out a couple of things:

1. To what extent do we (myself included) treat platforms as de facto ‘standards’? Is that healthy? Is it sustainable?

2. To what extent does our tool use affect how we see the world? Do we need to change the tools we use to see the world in a new light? If so, how often?

Finally, the change has made me think about web apps. Cross-platform, browser-based HTML5 applications. Why don’t companies go down that route? Well, perhaps because anecdotal research shows that people only tend to look in app stores rather than on the Web for such apps. And second there’s the issue of monetisation. There’s money in those iOS and Android hills.

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I can’t help but think, however, that initiatives such as Mozilla’s completely Web-based operating system Boot to Gecko (B2G) will lead to greater cross-platform compatibility. As the fortunes of large companies such as BlackBerry, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple wax and wane, so too will the desire of consumers to lock themselves into one ecosystem. I don’t want to have to re-purchase all of my apps just because I buy a new mobile device.

The future is more democratic. The future is more open.

Eventually.

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3 principles for a more Open approach.9th April 2012

This exchange on Google+ with Rob Poulter (referencing my previous post on platforms and standards) got me thinking. The highlights are below.

Rob:

Ultimately I don’t think the problem is between native vs web, the problem is one of closed vs open, and not in a Google PR way. The things we tend to care about in the online world are services, not apps. Services see us passing responsibility for our data on to a third party, and usually based on features rather than interoperability or longevity. At the end of the day, if there’s something which we would mind losing, it’s our responsibility to keep it, not some third party.

Doug:

My issue, I suppose is platforms becoming de facto standards because ‘everyone uses them’. Kind of like Dropbox and Twitter and so on…

There’s definitely an elision which I need to resolve in my thinking between ‘HTML5 webapps’ and ‘openness’. Thanks for the pointers!

Rob:

The standards thing is tough I guess. Who wants to be the business that boasts of how easy it is to jump ship? Especially

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for social applications like Twitter, Facebook, G+ etc (Dropbox and other personal services not so much since they tend to compete on features and can’t rely on “hey, all your friends are here, you’re not going anywhere”).

I pointed out that Google Takeout actually does allow you to export your data from Google to other platforms. But, as Rob responded, not the comments on other people’s posts.

All of this made me think about my principles for using software and web services. It reminded me of Baltasar Gracian’s constant reminders in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (which I read on constant repeat) that it’s easy to begin well, but it’s the ending well that counts.

So, I’ve come up three principles to guide me:

1. I will use free and Open Source software wherever possible. (I’m after the sustainable part of OSS, not the ‘free’ part)

2. If this is not possible then I will look for services which have a paid-for ‘full-fat’ offering.

3. I will only use proprietary services and platforms without a paid-for option if not doing so would have a significant effect on my ability to connect with other people.

What’s in and what’s out? I’ll stick with Twitter and Google+ (but will try to connect with people I follow in additional ways). Evernote, Spotify, Skype and Dropbox are fine for the time being (I pay for them). I’ll try and move away from GMail and Google Calendar.

Any suggestions for replacements?

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Wordle-like Twitter screens for conference keynote presenters?21st April 2012

I’ve been at the PELeCON conference this week. After her keynote, Keri Facer mentioned in a couple of tweets that the Twitter wall being visible to the audience but not the speaker can be problematic. Everything was positive in Keri’s session, but this isn’t necessarily the case for everyone.

So it got me thinking about what I’d like, as a presenter, when doing a keynote. There’s lots of different reasons tweet about a session using the conference hashtag. For example:

4. To let those who aren’t there know what’s being said

5. To give a voice to the livestream audience (if applicable)

6. To provide links to what’s being discussed

7. For banter/puns/general merrymaking

8. For agreement, disagreement and questions

…and many more.

Whilst you’re presenting there’s no way you can keep up with the stream in the same way that you (potentially) can when in the audience. But it would be nice to know the gist of what people are saying in the backchannel.

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Thinking about it, I casually remarked that some kind of Twitter screen in front of presenters would be useful. And if those tweets that had been retweeted (RT’d) several times could appear bigger, so much the better.

Chris Atherton mentioned this sounded a lot like Wordle and Pat Parslow riffed on the idea talking about the potential for sentiment analysis.

That idea look something like this with traffic light colours for sentiment:

The trouble is, that’s still too much to take in whilst you’re presenting. So, thinking some more, I reckon all that’s needed is the top three most RT’d tweets. Which would look something like this:

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What do you think? Would this be useful?

How hard would it be to make it a reality?

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Project Reclaim: experimenting with openphoto.me7th May 2012

As part of my ongoing Project Reclaim, and spurred on by D’Arcy Norman’s recent post on abandoning Flickr, I’ve been playing with openphoto.me.

In a similar way to the idea behind Unhosted, you bring your own data (i.e. photos) and the application does something with it (i.e. display them nicely, allow you to share them easily). I’m using Dropbox, but you can use Amazon S3, Box.net and more.

I like openphoto.me. I’ve uploaded two sets, one public and one private. The private one is of my children and shared only with family. The public one is of some photos I took down at Druridge Bay yesterday.

Where do you store your photos? Why?

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Commodification, consumerism and the new ‘Retina’ MacBook Pro.18th June 2012

Kyle Wiens from Wired magazine on The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable:

We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable. But we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values?

Every time we buy a locked down product containing a non-replaceable battery with a finite cycle count, we’re voicing our opinion on how long our things should last. But is it an informed decision? When you buy something, how often do you really step back and ask how long it should last? If we want long-lasting products that retain their value, we have to support products that do so.

Today, we choose. If we choose the Retina display over the existing MacBook Pro, the next generation of Mac laptops will likely be less repairable still. When that happens, we won’t be able to blame Apple. We’ll have to blame ourselves.

This is less about Apple and hardware and more about a consumerist, short-term attitude that over-privileges form over function. And, of course, this applies to the Open Web too.

We need less commodification, not more.

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On digital ownership. This is HUGE.5th July 2012

If I buy a physical book from a bookshop I can lend it to someone else. And, when I’m finished with it, I can sell it.

If I buy an e-book from, for example, the Amazon Kindle store, I can’t (in the UK, currently) lend it. I can’t sell it.

The same is true of most digital formats.

That’s something that bothers me: how come I don’t own a digital copy in the same way as a physical copy?

Well, thankfully, that may soon change. A recent EU ruling about computer programs could have far-reaching consequences:

The first sale in the EU of a copy of a computer program by the copyright holder or with his consent exhausts the right of distribution of that copy in the EU. A rightholder who has marketed a copy in the territory of a Member State of the EU

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thus loses the right to rely on his monopoly of exploitation in order to oppose the resale of that copy… The principle of exhaustion of the distribution right applies not only where the copyright holder markets copies of his software on a material medium (CD-ROM or DVD) but also where he distributes them by means of downloads from his website.

So a publisher’s distribution rights end when they sell a computer program or game for the first time.

Furthermore:

The Court observes in particular that limiting the application of the principle of the exhaustion of the distribution right solely to copies of computer programs that are sold on a material medium would allow the copyright holder to control the resale of copies downloaded from the internet and to demand further remuneration on the occasion of each new sale, even though the first sale of the copy had already enabled the rightholder to obtain appropriate remuneration. Such a restriction of the resale of copies of computer programs downloaded from the internet would go beyond what is necessary to safeguard the specific subject-matter of the intellectual property concerned.

In other words, publishers can’t expect to make a profit every time a new person plays a game (or reads a book).

Hurray for common sense prevailing!

Image CC BY-NC-SA …-Wink-…

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Mac OSX Mountain Lion 10.8: vendor lock-in for the masses?3rd August 2012

Chris Betcher on his problem with upgrading to the latest release of the Mac operating system:

It’s not that I don’t like their products. I do. I have several Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Apple TVs. Walled garden or not, they build beautiful products that –  for the most part – do exactly what they claim… they just work. While I don’t always approve of their proprietary attitude to the way they build their products, I understand the design goals that such a hardware and software symbiosis achieves, and I would still ra use a Mac than any o machine.

It seems from the lengthy Ars Technica review of OSX Mountain Lion 10.8 that Apple’s betting on locking into iCloud. Big time:

The overall message from Apple is loud and clear: thou shalt save thy documents in the iCloud, and thou shalt interact with those documents primarily through the applications that created them. (Thou mayest still employ the old ways by clicking “On My Mac” ere opening or saving documents. But seriously, consider using iCloud instead.)

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At the same time, the Mac App Store is starting to look a lot more like the iOS store – i.e. telling developers that unless Apple can take a cut of their profits, they’re unwelcome on users’ systems:

One of the attractions of using Apple devices is that you can get stuff done on them without having to worrying, for example, about random blue screens of death. However, it seems that those who do know their way around a computer are increasingly frustrated by Apple’s approach. Back to Chris Betcher:

I’ve been using personal computers for a long time. I’ll happily admit to being a “power user” and I rather object to Apple’s insistent belief that they need to dumb down my computer because they think I can’t cope with a file system, or that I should suddenly start scrolling in the opposite direction because it’s more “iPad like”, or that I should have fewer

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choices available because I need to have the software decide what’s best for me.

I’m all for making it easier to get things done with computers and o digital devices. What I’m not in favour of is simultaneously creating a walled garden for vendor lock-in. There are other ways – open standards anyone?

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A few brief thoughts on the Google Nexus 7. [REVIEW]27th August 2012

I don’t know about you, but it’s the things I expect to be awesome with which I end up being most disappointed. Unrealistic expectations, I suppose.

A case in point would be the Asus Eee Pad Transformer that I bought last October ostensibly as my ‘conference device’. On paper, it’s got everything you would ever want: hi-res touchscreen, gargantuan battery life, relatively lightweight, lots of ports. But it didn’t quite cut it for me. I can’t quite explain why.

I’ve already bought its replacement, a Google Nexus 7. I was very tempted to buy another iPad (our family already has one, used mostly by our five year-old son for his blog) but former JISC colleague Zak Mensah showed me his Nexus 7

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when we met up recently. I’d heard nothing but good things about it online, but was sceptical.

(It’s funny how I didn’t need a tablet device a couple of years ago whereas now I feel like I require something to read things from my Pocket account, etc.)

So I’ve had my Nexus 7 for about about three weeks now. I wish it had a rear-facing camera for sharing photos and videos on Path. I wish it had 3G, or at least the ability to tether to ad-hoc networks like my phone. But other than that, I’ve no complaints. The screen is fantastic. And it’s fast. Really fast. Like, haven’t-yet-experienced-any-lag fast. Android apps make sense on it. And it was fairly cheap – the 16GB version is £199.

We’re in a post-technical specifications era, I reckon. Seriously, the toss I could not give as to which processor and how much memory this thing has. So long as it’s quick enough, can store enough of my stuff, and is ‘open’ enough for me, that’s fine. I’m interested in what I can do with it.

I’ve been using my Nexus 7 mainly for the following:

9. Email – it’s great for a heads-up on stuff or to fire off quick replies

10. Social networking – Twitter and Google+

11. Reading – usually the Pocket, Zite, Feedly and Kindle apps

12. Listening – audiobooks through Audible and music via Last.fm, Soma.fm and Spotify

13. Playing – Football Manager 2012 (need I say more?), Minecraft  – and a few others

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14. Messing about – the camera icon isn’t present by default, but you can activate it (complete with big nose / small eyes / other effects!)

In future I’ll be using additional apps on it such as Evernote and Astrid, but it’s still early days. The Nexus 7 is so small and light that it’s a no-brainer to take it with me almost everywhere I go. Android feels like a viable platform – which has made me re-think sticking with my Maemo-powered Nokia N9 mobile phone. To be honest, it could be going the way of my Eee Pad Transformer before long…

So overall, I’m pleasantly surprised with my Google Nexus 7. I had fairly middling expectations from it and it’s far surpassed them. It’s not perfect, but it’s meant that most days I don’t bother borrowing the family iPad!

And finally, given that some people will inevitably ask me about their use in schools, I think these kind of devices make much more sense than iPads for the classroom. Why? They use an operating system that isn’t device-specific. They’re cheaper. They don’t take up as much of the desk or other surface. And they’re less shiny.11

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11 http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2011/03/03/less-shiny

What is ‘technology’ anyway?21st November 2012

At the London Festival of Education on Saturday I was on a panel about learning technologies in the classroom. You can see my notes in a previous blog post.12 One of the questions I received (or chose to respond to) was from a self-proclaimed applicant for a ‘bolshy questioner’ badge. Whilst I dismissed his main question as unhelpful, he did make one very good point: I hadn’t defined what I meant by ‘technology’.

It’s human nature to focus on negative feedback – perhaps it’s evolutionary, I don’t know. Whilst it can be destructive if dwelt upon (see this Oatmeal cartoon13, for example) it can also spur your own thinking. And that’s what I’ve been doing over the past few days, until I stumbled across the following in Kevin Kelly’s book What Technology Wants.

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12 http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2012/11/17/some-thoughts-on-learning-technologies-in-the-

classroom/

13 http://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things

To make the lengthy quotation slightly shorter, I should explain that techne is a word the ancient Greeks used for art, skill or craft. It’s closest to our word for ‘ingenuity’:

In the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was one of several revolutions that overturned society. Mechanical creatures intruded into farms and homes, but still this invasion had no name. Finally, in 1802, Johann Beckmann, an economics professor at Gottingen University in Germany, gave this ascending force its name. Beckmann argued that the rapid spread and increasing importance of the useful arts demanded that we teach them in a “systemic order.” He addressed the techne of architecture, the techne of chemistry, metalwork, masonry, and manufacturing, and for the first time he claimed these spheres of knowledge were interconnected. He synthesised them into a unified curriculum and wrote a textbook titled Guide to Technology (or Technologie in German), resurrecting that forgotten Greek word. He hoped his outline would become the first course in the subject. It did that and more. It also gave a name to what we do. Once named, we could now see it.  Having seen it, we wondered how anyone could not have seen it.

Beckmann’s achievement was more than simply christening the unseen. He was among the first to recognise that our creations were not just a collection of random inventions and good ideas. The whole of technology had remained imperceptible to us for so long because we were distracted by its masquerade of rarefied personal genius. Once Beckmann lowered the mask, our art and artefacts could be seen as interdependent components woven into a coherent impersonal unity.

If you want to follow this up I recommend reading Cathy Davidson’s Now You See It for more on how ‘attention

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blindness’ can lead to bad consequences in technology and education.

I’ve said time and time again since writing my thesis that we run into problems when talking about things that can’t be pointed to in the physical world. If I point to an object for sitting on, for example, and say ‘chair’ you may be able to call it something different but (unless you’re an existentialist) can’t really deny its existence. That’s not the case with concepts such as ‘digital literacies’ or even ‘openness’ and ‘Bring Your Own Device’. We can argue what these things are, and what they mean, precisely because we don’t know where the boundaries are.

So technology is the name we give to a loosely-related, amorphous mass of stuff. The word is what William James would call ‘useful in the way of belief’ in that it provides with a way of talking about – a conceptual shorthand for – the kind of things that we’d otherwise have to explain in wordy blog posts like this one.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Andrea in Amsterdam

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Want a tablet? Choose your vendor lock-in.24th November 2012

Ever wondered why Mozilla’s Firefox web browser exists? It’s because about 10 years ago Microsoft had sewn-up about 90% of the market and was creating vendor lock-in through anti-competitive practices. You can read about this in the History of the Mozilla Project.14 Happily, Mozilla were successful and now there’s at least two high-quality alternatives to Microsoft Internet Explorer – which itself has become more aligned with web standards. It’s a win for everyone who uses the web.

The next battleground is mobile. Although Google’s Android mobile Operating System (OS) is billed as ‘open’, for example, it’s not really developed in the usual Open Source way: the source code tends to be released long after each iteration of the OS. Apple, meanwhile, maintains a notoriously closed ecosystem with a stringent procedure for inclusion in their

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14 http://www.mozilla.org/about/history.html

App Store. They also control how you can get things on and off iOS devices in order to make money from the iTunes store.

Amazon, meanwhile, is a fairly new to the mobile device game. They’ve taken Android and significantly modified it – including defaulting to their own app store. They’ve slashed the price of the Kindle Fire 2 (with, cleverly, ‘special offers and sponsored screensavers’) for Black Friday15 making it a loss-leader. They’re betting on making the money back through Kindle book purchases, Amazon Prime subscriptions, and Lovefilm streaming.

So even though we may have multiple vendors it’s essentially similar problem to the Internet Explorer issue ten years ago. You may get shiny new ways to consume things that the vendor is selling you, but it’s not a great situation, overall.

You want a tablet? For Christmas 2012 that means you’re going to need to choose your vendor lock-in.

Thankfully, all this is set to change in 2013. Why? Two reasons. First, Mozilla are working on Firefox OS built entirely of standards-based web technologies. Secondly, Ubuntu Linux is being developed for mobile devices like the Nexus 7 and (even more excitingly) you’ll soon be able to run an entire desktop OS from your docked smartphone.

My conclusion? Buy a tablet if you have to, but be aware that real choice is around the corner…

(this was an attempt to write my version of the NSFW (but excellent) post by Terence Eden16)

Image CC BY-SA tribehut

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15 The cynical nature of this marketing ploy is bad enough when tied to American Thanksgiving. It’s

even worse when standing alone in the UK context.

16 http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/i-dont-want-to-be-part-of-your-fucking-ecosystem/

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Productivity

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Stripping back: #divest1229th January 2012

I like the idea of minimalism. I always have done.

Just look at this:

But it’s difficult, isn’t it? You collect things that are necessary at some point in your life (or that you desire) and then end up hanging on to them. Usually the reason we do this is because they have monetary and/or emotional value.

Back in 2009 I decided to spend a week ‘divesting’. Amongst other things I got rid of hundreds of CDs and books as well as really focusing on the software and hardware I use day-to-day. It was a liberating feeling getting rid of so much. I realised that, in effect, I was a librarian for my books rather than a reader of them. The relationship was the wrong way around. The same went for CDs, DVDs, and other stuff I owned.

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Now fast-forward to last week when I ready about Andrew Hyde’s extreme minimalism. Never mind 100 things or 50 things, he owns 15 things. Yes, fifteen. Here’s his ‘floorderobe’:

If what I’m doing is the thin end of the wedge, this is very much the thick end of it!

I suppose the question everyone wants to ask is What counts as ‘one thing’?

The “rule” of ownership is the express-lane checkout rule. If you were checking out in a grocery store, what would be counted as one item in your bag? A six-pack of beer would be one, right? I count my things as resellable items I would be pissed if someone took.

Coffee cup? No. Jacket? Yes. iPhone and headphones? One thing. Simple enough?

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Whilst 15 things is not my ultimate goal, I am making a conscious start to declutter and divest. Yesterday alone I took two bin bags full of clothes to the recycling bank, identified 52 books from my study to get rid of, and made an inventory of my electronic gadgetry with a view to consolidating.

I’d like to:

1. Reclaim some physical space

2. Feel less of a ‘curatorial’ burden

3. Be less concerned about the monetary value of my stuff

Want to join me? Add a comment below, write about it on your own blog or just use the #divest12 hashtag on Twitter or Google+!

Image CC BY Andrew-Hyde

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The Essentials? (#divest12)1st February 2012

Following on from my ‘stripping back’ post I’ve been thinking about what I need in life, over and above those things I share with my family. What are my bare essentials?

I suppose it’s kind of like zero-based budgeting:

In zero-based budgeting, every line item of the budget must be approved, rather than only changes. During the review process, no reference is made to the previous level of expenditure. Zero-based budgeting requires the budget request be re-evaluated thoroughly, starting from the zero-base.

So if I was starting again, knowing what I do now, what would I need?

Everyday bag1. Laptop (+charger)

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2. Mobile phone (+charger)

3. Kindle (+charger)

4. Headphones

5. Notebook

6. Pens

7. Bank cards, library card, gym card, passport, etc.

8. Card case

Clothes9. Shoes

10. Trainers

11. Thick socks

12. Coat

13. Underwear x7

14. Jeans x2 (+belt)

15. Trousers (+belt)

16. Shorts

17. Shirts x3

18. Jacket

19. T-shirts x5

20. Swimming shorts (+goggles)

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Health/hygiene21. Towel

22. Sports towel

23. Contact lenses

24. Glasses

25. Flannel

26. Migraine medication

27. Inhalers x2

28. Toothbrush

29. Toothpaste

30. Multivitamins

31. Deodorant

32. Moisturiser

33. Razor/beard trimmer (+charger)

My aim with #divest12 isn’t to go ultra-minimalist, but rather to reflect upon what is absolutely necessary to maintain my current lifestyle.

58 items, I reckon.

Have I missed anything?

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Getting back on the productivity wagon.17th March 2012

Productivity, as I’ve explained many times (and especially in my free e-book #uppingyourgame), is a virtuous spiral.

BackgroundAt the beginning of the year I decided upon the following exercise regime: The Amphibian. This would lead to a fitter, happier Doug:

• Monday: Swimming

• Tuesday: Running

• Wednesday: Swimming

• Thursday: Running

• Friday: Swimming

• Saturday: Kettlebell

• Sunday: Weights

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I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of weeks I’ve managed to do this. Sometimes it’s because I’m away from home during the week. Other times it’s lack of discipline.

On the other hand, I have managed to do at least a moderate amount of exercise every week throughout the winter. Lunchtime swims along with a SAD lightbox and Vitamin D tablets has meant that I’ve had a much more positive (and less ill) winter than usual. Mega.

But I’ve fallen off the wagon in the last couple of weeks. I assumed that the hotel for the DML Conference in San Francisco had a swimming pool when, in fact, it didn’t. Jet lag and then preparations for TEDx Warwick have meant a couple of weeks with only two exercise sessions.

I’ve noticed in the past week or so that I’ve consumed more alcohol and eaten more sugar than usual. I’ve also been ill and off work for three days. I’ve been short and bad-tempered with people, and have procrastinated with tasks.

This isn’t the Doug I want to be.

3 steps to get back on the productivity wagonThankfully, with a bit of reflection it’s fairly straightforward to get back on track. Here’s how.

1. Make a commitment

I’m going to re-commit to The Amphibian exercise regime outlined above. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t actually reached that target yet.

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The commitment is a line in the sand.

If you let someone else know what you’re doing (or make it public) it’s an even bigger commitment. Accountability reduces shirking.

2. Start exercising

Guess what? I really don’t want to do any exercise today. But I’ve made a commitment, and told both you and my wife that I’m going to do some. So that’s what I’m going to do.

It’s a beautiful day today, so even though it’s Saturday and I’m supposed to be doing my kettlebell, I’m going for a run. That’s a good idea given that I’m going to be in London for a couple of days this week.

3. Set SMART targets

SMART targets are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Timely

I had intended to do a sprint triathlon this year. That would have been a SMART target on three fronts (running, swimming, cycling).

Realising that I need something to work towards, I’ve just registered for the Great North 10k in July. I ran it two years

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ago in 49:30 which wasn’t too bad but this time around I’m aiming for 47:00.

I’ve got 16 weeks to get myself into shape.

ConclusionI’m at my happiest and most productive when I exercise regularly. In fact, every person I know who’s both happy and productive does so. I don’t know if it’s the endorphins, the small victories, the metabolism boost, or all three, but there’s an symbiotic link between productivity and exercise.

The commitment bit is the hardest. It’s easy to make vague promises to do more exercise, but much harder to commit to a regime. Once that mental block is out of the way, it’s just a case of getting on with it and having a target to aim at!

What’s holding you back?

Image CC BY-NC-SA rosipaw

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On routines and rituals.10th May 2012

I’m a great believer in routines.

I’m a believer in them because I think that innovation is predicated upon standardisation. In other words, routines afford us the spare capacity to think about things other than (repetitive) tasks at hand.

Routines provide spare capacity by removing, or narrowing, choice.

Take my morning routine, for example. Granted, having children means that no two are identical, but every day I’m at work in the office at JISC infoNet Towers, I do the following:

1. Have a cold shower

2. Eat eggs (either scrambled on toast or an omelette)

3. Listen to the same ‘Train’ and ‘Walking’ playlists via Spotify (albeit on random)

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4. Read Baltasar Gracian’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom on the train

Of course, it’s not necessary to have to undergo a commute to have routines. They’re just things you do at the same time and/or place.

So far, so obvious.

Routines gain power by becoming rituals. For example, there’s something about the first cup of coffee in the morning. It has a ritualistic element; it symbolises waking and the liminal space between home and work.

Whilst routines are easy to create and maintain on an individual level, rituals are slightly trickier. This, I believe, is because rituals involve gathering. It may be people who are gathered together, it may be thoughts. Rituals pull together and coalesce disparate elements.

Organisations and educational institutions are extremely well-placed to turn individual productive routines into collective rituals. One of the best places to start is often around food. At JISC infoNet we have a weekly Cake Club: the cake serves as a convenient hypocrisy for a kind of gathering we otherwise would not necessarily experience.

What kind of routines could you or your organisation turn into rituals?

Image CC BY visualpanic

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Productivity 101: calendars (nouns) and reminders (verbs)14th August 2012

My parents upgraded their iPad last week so I spent part of the weekend showing them some of the newer features. My Dad decided he wanted to get to grips with using the Calendar and Reminders apps so I verbalised for the first time something I’ve only known implicitly.

Calendar items are for events and therefore should be organised around NOUNS.

The advantage of this approach is that you can enter specific times for the event. This can then generate ‘remind me 30 mins before’ functionality, etc.

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Reminders or To-do list items are for actions and therefore should be organised around VERBS.

The thing I tried to get across to my Dad is that if you need to include a time in your to-do list or reminder then it should be a CALENDAR item.

Personally, I use Google Calendar (events in blue) and the Tasks functionality (in red):

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Hopefully that all makes sense. Separating out your verbs from your nouns can help enormously with productivity! :-)

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Productivity for what?1st October 2012

I’ve written before about the stuff I had to unlearn from my teenage years. But there’s a bigger thing behind all of that, something that’s so important they should run workshops on it not only in schools but in businesses. Perhaps they do in the forward-thinking ones.

For the past five years or so I’ve been reading productivity books, magazines and blog posts. Occasionally they produce new insights (which is why I keep on reading them) but a lot of them are about reminding you about fairly self-evident things: eat well, sleep well, plan, etc. It seems to me that the biggest saboteurs of productivity aren’t external forces but ourselves. Call it procrastination, call it subconscious normalising to the mean – call it whatever you want but it’s something from which we should all break free.

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Productivity has to have a purpose.The buzz-phrase of the past 10 years seems to have been ‘work-life balance’. It’s a concept difficult to disagree with, until you analyse the assumed dichotomy at the heart of it. The assumption is that work is something ‘other’ – something that you have to conform to, the imposition of someone else’s priorities over your own. But what if (at least most of the time) both your priorities and the priorities of your organisation were in harmony? That’s the promise and lure of many third-sector organisations.

But just as businesses need strategic goals to direct the energy of employees so we all, in our personal lives, need to feel like what we’re doing is purposeful. We may win the battle of getting to ‘Inbox Zero’, but are we fully aware of the war we’re fighting? Whose side are we on? How many ‘troops’ of attention have we deployed and why?

Productivity has to be FOR something.If, for some reason, you didn’t have to work today, what would you do? Where would you go? Who would you talk to? If you’re not clear on what makes you happy in life and what gets you out of bed in the morning (as I haven’t been at times in my life) then you should think about that as a matter of urgency. Otherwise all of this getting faster and more capable at stuff won’t have a purpose.

And that would be a tragic waste.

Image CC BY captainmcdan

Update: Ben Witheford asked on Twitter what I’d do if I didn’t have to work today. Probably five things, if I were at home:

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1. Go for a long walk at Druridge Bay (less than two miles from my house)

2. Play football with my son and hide-and-seek with my daughter

3. Drop the children off at my parents’ and take my wife out to dinner

4. Start a project – maybe with the Raspberry Pi I bought last week (I’ve got an idea for a information station by our front door)

5. Phone lots of people to see how they’re doing

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Open (and Webmaker) Badges

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Gaining Some Perspective on Badges for Lifelong Learning30th March 2012

[Published at DMLcentral]

I first read about the idea of Open Badges back in the middle of last year. It excited me. One thing I’ve always been interested in is how to shift the power dynamic within classrooms towards learners in a positive way. Changing (or at least providing additional) ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and understanding is one way to do that.

Using Mozilla’s Open Badges infrastructure, any organization or community can issue badges backed by their own seal of approval. Learners and users can then collect badges from different sources and display them across the web—on their

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resume, web site, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.

(OpenBadges.org)

In a previous post on DMLcentral I tried to reframe the debate around badges by showing that we do, in fact, have a problem with assessment -- and education more generally. The trouble is that people fall into the trap of becoming either advocates or naysayers from a very early point. We all like to have a ‘position’ on major developments in our field, so it’s a brave soul who is willing to suspend judgement:

“I worried that we were moving reward stickers and gold stars online, and I wasn’t impressed with how well those worked in the face-to-face classrooms. But as I realized how ignorant I am of explanations of what and how people are motivated, I thought it was worth keeping an open mind about.”

(Andrea Zellner)

In other words, Andrea was willing to suspend her initial skepticism and, as an educator, discuss the potential of badges with others, and think through the (somewhat nuanced) issues involved.

Getting Practical (and Visual)To my mind the idea of badges showed promise from the start, with the rough-and-ready P2PU School of Webcraft Badges Pilot in 2011 enough to demonstrate that peer-to-peer badges could be used to allow students to validate each others’ learning. Since then there’s been some great ideas for using badges for lifelong learning -- not least those submitted as part of the DML Competition earlier this year.

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As fantastic as some of the discussion and debate about badges has been, I do like visuals and the practical implementation of ideas. One of the best diagrams I’ve come across for visualizing the ways in which badges can be used in practice is the one below from the Chicago Digital Youth Network (DYN) in partnership with Doblin:

What I like about this diagram is that it recognizes that a wide variety of badges can and will be awarded using Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). Gaining different badges for different types of activity allows for a much more holistic

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view of individuals than the traditional forms of assessment we’ve inherited as a legacy from previous centuries.

Interestingly, what DYN and Doblin did was to look at ways in which they could use Mozilla’s OBI to credentialize journeys that their learners had already undertaken.

After working out how Sannya, the real-life student in this example, could have earned badges during her time with DYN, they approached her with the results. She gave them feedback as to which badges would have been meaningful to her and which she would have chosen to display in her Badge Backpack at any given time.

The Importance of ContextWhat impressed me about this example was the thoughtful way in which badges had been applied to an existing context. Unlike traditional assessment, there is no one-size-fits all

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model here. Using badges to capture the learning journey and credentialize meaningful knowledge, skills and understanding requires a deep understanding of the context in which it took place.

Applying badges to existing learning and teaching scenarios is relatively unproblematic. The issues, and division lines, come when we start talking in hypotheticals about badge-based ecosystems of the future. There have been some critics of badges who have been concerned about it replicating (or magnifying) existing power inequalities, some who have worried about the potential commodification of informal learning it could represent, and some who have equated badges with mere ‘gamification’.

My response to this is best summed up by Alex Halavais who is actually rolling up his sleeves and getting his hands dirty implementing Mozilla’s OBI. In one of my favorite posts on badges, he reflects on his experiences and the arguments of others, stating:

I have no doubt that badges, badly applied, are dangerous. But so are table saws and genetic engineering. The question is whether they can also be used to positive ends.

(Alex Halavais)

As Donald Rumsfeld famously pointed out, there are ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’. I believe badges fall into the latter camp. We simply don’t know how people will use Mozilla’s OBI to credentialize learning. It’s a world that would have different gatekeepers. It’s a world where learners get to choose to display different facets through profiles in various places. It’s an ecosystem where anybody and everybody can

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set up a system that has the evidence for the achievement baked right in.

ConclusionIf Open Badges were an initiative being forced through by a government department or even, in fact, a for-profit organization, the fruitful discussion and debate we have witnessed so far would all be for naught. There would be a goal, an end point to work towards that marked the end of the project which would be implemented no matter what. As far as I understand it, that’s not the approach that the MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC, and Mozilla (the main backers of Open Badges) are taking here.

Instead, we have an Open Source technical framework upon which an emergent ecosystem is developing. Requirements from both formal and informal learning are being considered; money has been provided to both research and implement badge frameworks; high-profile names are being recruited to back the system to drive adoption. And all of this is voluntary. There is no big stick with which people are being beaten.

Where will Open Badges end up? What will the landscape look like in a couple of years? Five years? Ten? Badges could be everywhere. Or they could go nowhere and sink without a trace. Alternatively, badges could be useful in particular situations and scenarios. The thing is that we don’t need to decide the outcome and ‘choose a side’ on this one. We can choose, if we wish, to suspend judgement and explore.

Image CC BY VinothChandar

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#OpenBadges through the rear-view mirror?29th June 2012

Marshall McLuhan:

The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

People need metaphors to understand unfamiliar concepts. We tend to talk about new things using metaphors, similies and analogies. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that – in fact, it can be helpful!

David Wiley:

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Say your friend buys you an Amazon or iTunes gift card for your birthday. When your friend buys the gift card, they are required to provide your email address, both so that (1) the store knows where to send the gift card and (2) the store can verify you’re you when you come to claim the gift card. After your friend completes the purchase, you receive an email containing a special code. To redeem the gift card, you go to a website, verify your identity, and enter the code. After you enter the code, a certain amount of credit appears in your account, which you can spend however you like.

I think that’s rather a useful simile for Open Badges.

What do you think?

Image CC BY exfordy

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Getting up to speed on the technical side of #openbadges2nd July 2012

Today is my first day of work at the Mozilla Foundation as ‘Badges & Skills Lead’. I’ve been evangelising Open Badges for about the last year but have very much focused on the disruptive and pedagogical aspects rather than the technical side of things.*

Given that Mozilla very much encourage you to ‘think out loud’ and over-share, here goes my attempt at getting my head around the technical side of the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI):

The specification found here defines the information, or metadata, that must be included in a badge for it to be considered OBI-compliant. Each Open Badge carries all the information needed to understand that badge as it is transferred throughout the ecosystem. This includes how it was earned, where it was earned, who earned it, if and when it expires, etc. The specification ensures that badges are interoperable with other Open Badges and Badge Backpacks.

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The Open Badges metadata specification is available under a set of open licenses.

So badges are images that have the metadata encoded into that image. The process of encoding that metadata is called ‘baking’ and Mozilla are doing this on behalf of issuers during the beta period.

OpenBadger is an OBI-compliant badge issuing system that will be ready towards the end of 2012. Right now, though, because the OBI is an open specification, others are available such as badg.us. These are fairly straightforward and easy-to-use if you want to get started issuing badges.

Badges are currently displayed through Mozilla’s Open Badges backpack:

A repository for collecting and displaying badges from a variety of sources, the Badge Backpack is a user management interface where the Earner can delete badges, import badges, set privacy controls, create and publish groups of badges, etc. Eventually, many entities may choose to host Badge Backpacks, but to start, Mozilla is hosting a reference Backpack (the “Mozilla Badge Backpack”) that can be used as a model for other Backpack Providers.

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I’ve dragged some of the Open Badges I’ve been awarded into the groups shown in the image above. In addition, I’ve made each group public so here, for example, is my Mozilla & P2PU badges portfolio page.

You may have noticed that I’ve currently got some Open Badges embedded in the sidebar of this blog. I used Dave Wiley’s BadgeWidgetHack to do that, but this will get easier over time through WordPress plugins and the like.

The thing I didn’t get at first was the link between an individual’s email address and their badges. For example, my Hybrid Days key speaker badge was created for my old JISC infoNet email address and so I asked the issuer to re-create it for my personal email address. I could, however, have added my JISC infoNet email address to BrowserID account.

Finally, when it comes to UK educational institutions, I’m going to have to do some research. The Open Badges FAQ states the following to comply with the United States FERPA (privacy) legislation:

If you are an educational institution, the criteria for earning badges may list required grades or minimum grades but the badge itself may not contain any information indicating the actual grade received by that Earner. For more information, see the FERPA FAQ.

I’m not sure that applies over here?

Additionally, the United States COPPA legislation means that the Open Badges aren’t designed for those under the age of 13:

The Mozilla Badge Backpack is not available to users under the age of 13. If you have users under 13 who are earning badges, then do not allow those users to push badges to the Mozilla Badge Backpack.

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However, it’s entirely possible to circumvent this by building your own backpack for use within an educational institutions.

Open Source FTW.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Daniel*1977

*I should probably explain that there’s a whole Open Badges team and everyone’s a ‘Lead’. You might

want to follow Planet OpenBadges if you’re interested in this stuff – my blog posts will begin to appear

there soon!

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Informal learning, gaming, and #openbadges design19th July 2012

One of my favourite games for the PlayStation 3 is Burnout Paradise. Apart from the racing and being able to take down cars in spectacular ways, one of the reasons I love it is because it’s a non-linear game.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that after a (very) lightweight introduction, the whole map is open to the player. You’re guided through the mechanics of the game as you play it, and you can choose what you want to do next. If you just want to drive around, that’s fine. In fact, there’s ‘challenges’ to complete (smashing through billboards, etc.) if that’s all you want to do. By driving around you actually discover some of the ‘formal’ challenges like races as well as the auto repair shops.

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Every now and again, either through winning races or completing stunt challenges you’ll unlock a new car. But you still have to go and find it and take it down. And there’s also the ‘stealth’ achievements you unlock unexpectedly. It’s a compelling, very rewarding game in its own right, never mind being able to play live online against other human opponents!

Recently, within the Mozilla Learning team we’ve been discussing the non-linearity of badge systems and how interest-based learning can be scaffolded and assessed. Obviously the assessment is ultimately going to lead to Open Badges, but a few of us feel that we can’t merely replicate the existing structures found in formal education. There’s not much point in using badges if the learning design still talks about a ’101′ class or uses a Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced approach.

The question has come up, as it always does, about pre-requisites. There’s no getting away that some learning is built upon prior knowledge, the argument goes. That’s certainly true, but there’s ways of motivating the learner to want to

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undertake that prior learning. That way is by appealing to their interests.

As with anything new, the easiest way to get at what we can do is through metaphor. In this case, I think that a video game serve as a very useful model for what we want to do. Start with the player (in this case the learner) and scaffold experiences around them.

Does that make sense?

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What we’re up to with Mozilla Webmaker (Open) badges.15th August 2012

Update: I don’t think I make it clear enough in this post that this is an example of Mozilla ‘eating it’s own dogfood’. We’re using a Mozilla-developed technology (Open Badges) for a particular purpose (to badge Webmaker skills). Hope that makes sense!

BackgroundI work for the Mozilla Foundation as part of the Learning team. More specifically, I’m part of the recently-created Open Badges subset of that team. In practice, however, there’s enough cross-pollination to make the boundaries between sub-teams very hard to see.

Mozilla wants to create a generation of webmakers. As it states at webmaker.org:

The goal: help millions of people move from using the web to making the web. As part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission, we want to help the world increase their understanding of the

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web, take greater control of their online lives, and create a more web literate planet.

That web literacies piece is at least half of my time as Badges & Skills Lead. But what does that mean in practice?

It means a lot of Skype calls . That’s for sure. Oh, and more Etherpads than you can stick a shake at.

Mozilla Webmaker BadgesThe Open Badges ecosystem is a new way of signalling and credentialing achievements on the web. You can see me attempt to explain it quickly and concisely in this video.17

What we’re trying to do as a Learning team is to identify Web Literacies, Competencies and Skills that can be badged. We’re organising these into ‘constellations’ as my colleague Chloe Varelidi so eloquently puts it18 – learning pathways that allow learners to follow their interests.

Chloe’s post has more gorgeous visuals than mine, but the mindmap I above (made using XMind) gives a widescreen view of what we’re trying to do:

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17 http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/an-elevator-pitch-for-openbadges-v0-2-video

18 http://chloeatplay.tumblr.com/post/29356744058/we-are-all-made-of-stars-designing-

constellations-for

1. Granular skills badges are awarded for micro-achievements whilst using, for example, Mozilla Thimble (e.g. adding three <p> tags)

2. The granular skills badges count towards accumulative Web Skills badges (e.g. HTML Basics)

3. These Web Skills badges collectively count toward Web Competencies badges

4. In turn, these (after peer assessment) lead to the awarding of one of five different Web Literacies badges

We’re going to be iterating this in the open, because that’s how Mozilla rolls. So we’ll have some Web Skills badges ready for the Mozilla Festival 2012 (London), with Web Competencies badges in place for the DML Conference 2013 (Chicago).

At the same time as all of this, Jess Klein has been working on the user experience (UX). She’s got a great idea for what she calls Webmaker+ (inspired by Nike+) which would provide a dashboard for learners within their Open Badges backpack. She’s working on the first sketches (including the one below) which you should definitely go and take a look at:

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The dashboard would suggest badges to learners as well as show them various analytics and data about what they’ve achieved so far. The inspiration here is (to my mind) Khan Academy’s knowledge map19 and Duolingo’s20 learning pathways.

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19 http://www.khanacademy.org/about

20 http://duolingo.com

I think it all looks awesome. I hope you agree.

Top image CC BY-NC-SA Chloeatplay

Dashboard image by kind permission of Jess!

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Open Badges, Clay Shirky, and the tipping point.15th October 2012

The great thing about thinkers such as Clay Shirky is that they can put into pithy, concise quotations things that remain latent in our collective thinking. You know, things like:

We’ve reached an age where this stuff is technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.

I first used that quote in a post four years ago when I called for technology to be so commonplace and ubiquitous that it’s not considered a thing distinct from human interaction. Technology should be woven into the fabric of our identities not something set apart, alien and ‘other’.

Four years ago social networks weren’t woven into society the way they are now. Nowadays, of course, hashtags accompany the opening credits to television shows so that they can be discussed in a ‘channel’ on Twitter, it’s entirely normal to whip your mobile device when standing in a queue (instead of

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talking about the weather to a stranger), and you’d be shocked if brands didn’t encourage you to follow them on Facebook.

One way to explain this is through Clay Shirky’s lens: these things are now technologically boring enough to be socially interesting. You can assume that almost the man or woman on the street knows what Facebook, Twitter and mobile devices are for without having to explain them first. That means we can talk about the next layer up- i.e. what we do with those tools.

Open Badges are still quite technologically interesting. There’s several aspects of them that the average person wouldn’t understand without having it explained. For example:

• What metadata is

• How an Open Badges consists of ‘baking’ metadata into an image

• That anyone can host a badge backpack because it’s Open Source software

• What is means that the various badge backpacks will be ‘federated’

Now, we could go about a mass education program and (relatively speaking) spend a lot of money helping people to learn about these things. But that’s not how things reach a tipping point. The way people become proficient with tools like social networks or Open Badges is because they scratch an itch (solve a problem) or because there’s a ‘hook’ interesting enough for them to be dragged, Alice in Wonderland-like into a deep rabbit-hole where they can find out more.

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So in a UK context, Stephen Fry’s 2009 video interview where he explained his love of Twitter in layman’s terms meant that many people were provided a hook. In fact, this is how advertising and celebrity endorsement works: “I like Person X, and Person X likes Thing Y, so therefore I should find out more about Thing Y.” With Facebook, it was an itch to be scratched: when you’re excluded from a conversation because you’re not using a particular social network, then there’s a powerful incentive to join the tribe. Especially as the nominal cost of entry is ‘free’ and the difficulty level is ‘super easy’.

What we need with Open Badges, and which we’ll certainly have by early 2013, are compelling examples of how they can be used in education and other contexts. At the same time we’re working on ways to make ‘onboarding’ easier for issuers, displayers and endorsers. We’re also working on the UX and UI for badge earners. In other words, we’re ready for badges to be huge next year.

Watch this space.

Image CC BY Joi

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On the ‘openness’ of Open Badges.18th October 2012

Yesterday, on the Open Badges community call, we discussed briefly the ‘openness’ of Open Badges. To my mind there’s a dangerous conflation happening at the moment around ‘open’ and ‘free’. I want to take a moment to parse those two concepts. Bear with me.

The most common definition of ‘free’ is ‘free of charge’. In my experience, many (if not most) ‘open’ things are free in this sense. That’s not because things that are open have to be free of charge, it’s just that often the philosophical position taken by the person creating the thing that’s open often leads them to also making it free of charge.

Let’s take Pearson’s OpenClass21 as an example. They describe the product as being ‘open to everyone, easy to use, and completely free’. The phrase ‘completely free’ here actually means ‘free of charge at the point of entry’. Cost is

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21 http://www.openclass.com

actually not one of the four essential freedoms, as set by the Free Software Foundation:22

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

I’m fairly sure that Pearson doesn’t mean ‘free’ in any of these senses. So it’s merely ‘free of charge of charge at the point of entry’. Caveat emptor.

Moving on to what we mean by ‘open’ it’s more of a philosophy, an approach to the world than anything else. So when Pearson say that OpenClass is open because it is ‘open to the world’ that’s a bit of a misnomer. That’s like saying their business is ‘open’ because they don’t turn away customers. They’re conflating ‘open’ with ‘free of charge at the point of entry’.

On the Community call yesterday, Erin Knight very helpfully pointed out the various ways that Open Badges (and the badge backpacks) are indeed ‘open’:

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22 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

• Open as in free (anyone can create an account)

• Users completely own their data

• Anyone can push badges into it

• Federation/open source infrastructure

• Everything being planned publicly, working in the open!

We do, of course, welcome Pearson as a user of the Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) and I was only really using them as an example. What we do need to be careful about going forward, however, is to be precise in our terminology and not to commodify (unintentionally or otherwise) words signifying important concepts.

It benefits everyone in the end.

Image CC BY-NC tanakawho

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Webmaker badges are GO!11th November 2012

I’m absolutely delighted that this weekend that we at Mozilla have launched the first iteration of Webmaker badges. You can get started earning them right now by going to http://thimble.webmaker.org:

More here: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/10/webmaker-badges/

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Webmaker badges, in part, are based upon the work I’m doing around Web Literacies:

You can find out more about that Web Literacies framework at http://mzl.la/weblit

(and badges are coming soon in Popcorn Maker23 – now at v1.0!)

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23 https://popcorn.webmaker.org/

How to make #openbadges work for you and your organisation.26th November 2012

“Hi, I’m Doug Belshaw, Badges and Skills Lead for the Mozilla Foundation”

“Oh, so you’re the guy heading up all of the badges work? I really like what I’ve seen so far.”

“Well actually my colleague Sunny Lee is Product Manager for Open Badges, and Carla Casilli is in charge of Webmaker Badges. I evangelise both badge systems in Europe and work on Mozilla’s Web Literacies framework.”

“Cool. I’ve been looking at badges for a while and was wondering how to implement them in my context.”

“I’m really glad you asked because I’m just about to write a blog post on that exact subject.”

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I’ve had the above conversation with many people over the last few months. They tend to go beyond this, obviously, but I do need a post to point people towards.

So this is it. :-)

The first thing to say is that there is no objectively-awesome way to issue badges. What works for one group of people in one context won’t necessarily work in another context. Having said that, there are some general principles which should stand you in good stead.

Second, you’ll find that it’s fairly natural for people to project their worldview into what is, after all, an open and emergent ecosystem. I’ve had people tell me that badges “will inevitably lead to X,” that “you can’t do Y with badges,” and that “Mozilla need to make sure that Z”. The great thing about the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) is that it’s a platform for third parties – including you – to innovate and think differently about their organisation is set up to do.

Third, there’s some criteria that are required for Open Badges and some that are optional.

The REQUIRED metadata fields are:

• Badge Title

• Description

• Criteria

• Image URL

• Issuer

• Issue Date

• Recipient

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The OPTIONAL metadata fields are:

• Evidence URL

• Expiration Date

What follows  isn’t the only way to approach badge design – my colleague Carla, for example, sometimes starts with the graphical element – but it’s an approach which has worked well for me over a series of conversations and workshops.

Here it is in the abstract, followed by a worked example:

1. Decide on some behaviours, skills or attitudes you want to promote.

2. Think of some criteria for a badge which would begin to promote those behaviours, skills or attitudes.

3. Consider if the criteria for the badge you’ve come up with can be broken down in more granular ways.

4. If (as is likely) you end up with multiple badges, think about multiple (potentially interest-based) pathways through your badge ecosystem. Ask yourself, which badges depend upon other badges? What are the relationships between these badges? (this24 may help structure that)

5. Get someone to design you an awesome-looking graphical badge and use a badge issuing platform such as badg.us, ForAllBadges, WPBadger or BadgeStack to issue badges

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24 http://wiki.teria.no/display/inloc/Home

This, of course, looks fairly easy but will take a decent amount of time from start to finish if done in a considered and collaborative way. Just to illustrate the point, my colleague Laura Hilliger and I are running a two-part, 5.5-hour workshop in Porto this week where we probably won’t manage to get the participants through all five steps in the time we have available.

Now, an example.

I’m always slightly wary about using examples as they tend to be held up as THE way to do things rather than A way to do it. With that in mind, let’s take as our example Alina who wants to start a new online community for teaching Webmaking skills. How could she use badges to promote the behaviours, skills and attitudes that she wants the community to embody?

1. Alina wants to encourage community members to level up in their web skills. She’s seen that Mozilla have started to provide Webmaker badges for that, so she decides to use those for the skills element. She decides to focus her efforts on badges to encourage mentorship and community etiquette.

2. New to the concept of badges, Alina thinks that one mentorship badge will be enough. The criteria she comes up with is that once a member has got enough ‘thank you’ upvotes using the forum software then they will automatically be awarded a ‘Mentorship’ badge.

3. A couple of days later, Alina talks through her idea for a single Mentorship badge with a member of the community whom she meets at a conference. They raise concerns that such a system would promote people ‘begging’ for upvotes and/or lead to reciprocal backslapping. Alina goes back to the drawing board and begins to come up with a system of badges.

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4. Reflecting on her own experience as a member of various online communities, Alina realises that there are different forms of mentorship and ways of recognising it. She proposes several different granular badges which aggregate to a larger mentorship badge in different areas of Webmaking. Alina then invites some community members who already show the behaviours, skills and attitudes she is looking for to an virtual workshop. As a result, she tweaks the number of badges and the criteria for each badge. Some badges they decide should be emergent, all should be peer-assessed, and some should expire. They decide that the inclusion of an evidence URL showing how the member earned the badge would be useful.

5. Alina announces the badge system to the wider community via a blog post and asks for feedback. She mentions that they haven’t yet come up with the visuals for the badges. A community member with an interest in graphical design volunteers to design the badges. Before long, the first iteration of the badge system is up-and-running using WPBadger, WordPress and BuddyPress.

I hope that helps. Badge ecosystem design is an iterative, emergent process. My main advice would be to make it an open, inclusive process involving the participants formerly known as stakeholders.

Image CC BY-NC AlbinoFlea

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Digital and Web Literacies

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Web literacy? (v0.1)30th January 2012

Michelle Levesque asked for feedback on this: Mozilla’s Web Literacy Skills (v0.1 alpha). I wanted to respond as soon as possible as I think she’s done some great work here.

I’ve visualised the text in her post and then tweaked it slightly to suggest the direction I’d take it:

Changes:

1. Added ‘participation’ to Exploring

2. Changed ‘bullshit’ to ‘crap’ to avoid offending some people’s sensibilities

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3. Changed ‘Restaurant HTML’ to ‘HTML basics’ in Authoring

4. Combined two blocks to form ‘Reacting to stimulii’ in Building

5. Removed ‘Receipe’ize tasks’ in Building

6. Added ‘Civil liberties’ to Protecting

7. Segmented sections into what would form a ‘Basic’ and an ‘Advanced’ badge’

What do you think? What have I (we) missed?

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Why the REMIX is at the heart of digital literacies12th February 2012

Since completing my doctoral thesis on digital and new literacies, I’ve been thinking a lot about how educators can use my work in a practical way.

In Chapter 9 of my thesis I come up with eight ‘essential elements’ of digital literacies, abstracted from the literature. I’ve presented these in various forms, my most popular slidedeck being available [on Slideshare].

After seeing me present on these essential elements, people tend to ask me one or both of the following questions:

1. Which is the most important element to focus upon?

2. How can I develop these in practice?

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I’m helping with the second question through my iterative e-book, The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, which I’ve just started (and you can buy into). The first question, however, about relative importance and focus has been bugging me.

On the one hand, I want to say that all of the elements are equally important – but that the relative priority that should be given to each will depend upon context. That’s true, but it feels like a bit of a cop-out.

So, after spending some time visualising Mozilla’s first attempts at defining web literacy, I think I’ve hit upon an organising concept: the remix.

Literacy is all about reading and writing. If we take ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ metaphorically (as we must when moving into the digital realm) then these become, loosely, understanding and processing and creating and applying.

This sounds a lot to me like remixing.

I’m going to be thinking about this further. It will form a central theme to my e-book, and I’ll be using it as an organising concept for my TEDx Warwick talk in March. :-)

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Web Literacies: What is the 'Web' Anyway?23rd July 2012

[Published at DMLcentral]

I’ve recently started in a new role for the Mozilla Foundation. At least half of my job there is to come up with a framework, a White Paper, around the concept of ‘web literacies’. It’s got me thinking about both parts of that term -- both the ‘web’ and the ‘literacies’. In this post I want to consider the first of these: what we mean by the ‘web’? I’ve already considered the latter in quite some detail in my doctoral thesis (available at neverendingthesis.com).

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Defining the WebSometimes it’s important to step back from the things we take for granted and look at them in a new light. Being born in 1980, I’m in the position of both having grown up with the web in my teenage years and still being able to recall pre-web days. Even so, it’s difficult to separate out the web from the rest of my adult life. It’s increasingly interwoven with everything I do on a daily basis.

Going back to basics, the current Wikipedia definition of the web is as follows:

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3) commonly known as the Web or the "Information Superhighway"), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks.

So it follows that there’s at least three important aspects to the web:

1. It’s a layer on top of the internet

2. Hyperlinks are central to its structure

3. It contains artifacts (multimedia) that are embedded or otherwise available via web pages

I’ve discussed before on DML Central the importance of webmaking and avoiding the commoditization of the web. That’s not my focus in this post, but it’s certainly there in the background. The important take-away from that discussion is that the web is built upon open standards for the good of mankind. These standards are looked after by an international organization called the W3C.

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Learning about How the Web WorksSo if we’re talking about web literacies, then we’re talking about ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the web in some way. The building blocks of the web are technologies built upon open standards such as HTML and CSS. Anybody can learn these ‘languages’ to build their own web pages. Fortunately, there are tools, both open source and proprietary that make this job easier. But, fundamentally, to be web literate means having at least some understanding of these building blocks of the web.

Over two billion people now use the web on a regular basis. For many people, like me, the web is a fundamental part of how they communicate - and, therefore, how they are. We create and sustain relationships through the web. We watch videos that provoke joy, laughter, sadness, and anger. We exchange artifacts and multimedia such as photos, memes, and audio files. The web is an inherently social technology.

As Mitchell Baker, chairperson of Mozilla, put it last year: “We need open, open-source, interoperable, public-benefit, standards-based platforms for multiple layers of Internet life.” Some of this learning about openness, about standards, about things that are for the public good, some of it won’t be elegant. Some of it won’t be easy. But we at Mozilla are attempting to at least make it fun. If you haven’t seen them already there’s a plethora of Summer Code Parties where people are coming together to make, learn, hack and share.

The tools being used at these Summer Code Parties are designed to do what all educators know works -- that is, putting learning in context. Mozilla has developed three tools so far to learn about the web: Thimble, X-Ray Goggles, and Popcorn. These can all be accessed at webmaker.org. The idea isn’t to make everyone a ‘programmer’ but instead give

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people an insight into how the web is made and, most important of all, show them that they too can contribute to it.

ConclusionAs fellow Mozillian Gervase Markham wrote recently the web is “one of the greatest drivers of human prosperity and happiness the world has ever seen.” The web empowers people - but only if they feel they have a stake in it. The three steps I would suggest for people to claim that stake is to first of all understand what the web is, what it does, and how people use it. Second, to learn how to both read and write the web using HTML and CSS. And, finally, to protect it; to fight for the web to remain open.

I think it’s fitting to give the last words to Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with ‘inventing’ the web. A man who refused to patent his invention but instead ensured that it was available to everyone:

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. 

Amen to that.

Image CC BY saintbob

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Digital Literacies and Web Literacies: What's the Difference?20th August 2012

I’m currently iterating some work around Web Literacies for the Mozilla Foundation. Perhaps the biggest consideration when dealing with so-called ‘New’ Literacies is distinguishing them from one another. As I've discussed many times before, without some clear thinking on this issue both theorists and practitioners alike tend to talk past one another using imprecise terminology. What I want to consider in this post is the relationship between Digital literacies and Web literacies. Aren’t they just synonyms?

The topic of digital literacies was the focus of my doctoral thesis, which is available to read online at neverendingthesis.com. The conclusion I came to after delving deeply into the research was that we need to always talk about literacies in their plurality and that there are broadly eight essential elements to digital literacies. My question when it comes to Web Literacies, therefore, is whether (a) they constitute a subset of Digital Literacies, (b) they are wholly distinct from Digital Literacies, or (c) there is some overlap between the two. These three positions are represented by the graphic at the top of this post.

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Let’s take the middle position first, as it’s perhaps the easiest to dismiss. If Digital Literacies and Web Literacies were wholly distinct from one another, then there would be no overlap between the practices they contain. This is patently false, as demonstrated by even the briefest examination of the eight essential elements of Digital Literacies I have identified:

1. Cultural

2. Cognitive

3. Constructive

4. Communicative

5. Confident

6. Creative

7. Critical

8. Civic

The Web is not only (as Cory Doctorow puts it) a giant ‘copying machine’ but it’s also one of the greatest methods ever devised for individuals and groups of people to interact with one another. In other words, the Web is inherently communicative. It also allows for human flourishing on a unprecedented scale through allowing human beings to be creative. And, as we have seen through its use for the Occupy movement, many people use the Web for important civic actions.

Given just these three examples, it’s obvious that Digital Literacies and Web Literacies at least overlap in some ways. The question to address now is to what extent they overlap. An easy way to do this would be to compare definitions of Web Literacies and Digital Literacies. Unfortunately, as this is a contentious area, to do so may be problematic. This was the

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reason why I avoided definitions in my thesis. Another approach might be to look at the essential elements of Web Literacies and compare those with the essential elements of Digital Literacies.

Building on the work of my colleagues at the Mozilla Foundation I’ve been looking at five different elements of Web Literacies:

1. Exploring

2. Authoring

3. Connecting

4. Building

5. Protecting

Without going into too much detail here (a forthcoming White Paper around Web Literacies by me will do this) I think it’s safe to say that it’s possible to map these five essential elements of Web Literacies onto the eight essential elements of Digital Literacies. Just as an example, ‘Protecting’ the Web correlates strongly with the ‘Civic’ element. Likewise ‘Authoring’ the Web correlates with the ‘Creative’ element.

If Web Literacies are wholly situated within Digital Literacies then our diagram looks like the following:

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This not only appeals to common sense but is consistent with my work in both areas. What remains an open question, and which I would greatly desire some feedback and opinions upon, is whether Web Literacies constitute either (or both) a necessary condition for Digital Literacies? In other words, could somebody claim to have developed Digital Literacies without having developed Web Literacies?

I’m fairly sure you can guess my answer. :-)

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Everything Else

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Thanks for waiting! Dr. Belshaw will see you now.1st January 2012

Well, almost.

I’m pleased to announce that I successfully defended my doctoral thesis at my viva voce on 12th December 2011. As expected, the examiners gave me minor rewrites but I managed to submit these to my supervisor before Christmas.

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Whilst I can’t officially call myself ‘Doctor Belshaw’ until I’m on Durham University’s pass list (and even then I’m probably not your go-to person for emergency tracheotomies) I’m delighted with the culmination of six years’ work into digital and new literacies.

It’s great to be back on social networks such as Twitter and Google+ and press ‘delete’ on hundreds of emails (well, I did warn people…)

Image CC BY-NC-SA Johan Prawiro

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9 ideas in search of a blog post.13th April 2012

Last month Seth Godin posted 9 ideas in search of a blog post. Here’s my version:

1. Formal education should probably be free up to whatever level you want (and perhaps only compulsory up to age 11).

2. 99% Invisible is the podcast that most often makes me see the world in new ways.

3. I still haven’t figured out how to balance my photophobia and SAD. Thank goodness for Spring (and f.lux)

4. Tools are constraining. This is both good and bad.

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5. Learning to touch-type at a young age (I think I was about 12) is possibly one of the best things I’ve ever done.

6. Things I Learned This Week is back, phoenix-like, as a free weekly newsletter.

7. There are no absolutes, only contrasts.

8. People tend to be skeptical about non-physically-obvious medical symptoms.

9. E-Prime blows my mind (via Simon Bostock)

10.Feel free to hit me up in the comments if you’d like me to expand upon any of these.

Image CC BY smlp.co.uk

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3 rules for our five year-old (that work!)18th April 2012

Last week I was cooped up indoors with my son.

Ben is an energetic five year-old on Easter school holidays whilst I was ill and off work. It rained most of the week meaning that there were fewer opportunities for him to get out of the house with my wife and Grace (our one year-old daughter). The temptation to let him just watch films and play on the iPad was quite high, to say the least.

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Thankfully, we’ve already laid down some ground rules for him that help manage his behaviour.

1. FoodYoung children can be inordinately grumpy if they’ve got low blood sugar. Actually, I’m inordinately grumpy if I have low blood sugar.

The first job for my son every morning is to eat some fruit. This is usually a banana. Given that he usually rises at around 6am, it stops him being super-grumpy before his breakfast at 7.30am.

I don’t care what anyone says about children and sugar: too much is bad for both their teeth and their mood. Ben gets that wild look in his eyes when he’s had too much. Fruit, however, contains fructose which seems to be a useful compromise.

2. Screen timeI have to admit, the notion of limiting children to a certain amount of ‘screen time’ seemed slightly ridiculous before we had Ben. But, oh my, you have no idea how more than 15-20 minutes on the iPad (or watching TV) has on his behaviour.

The rule in our house is that he’s not allowed on the iPad until after lunch. This means that at weekends and during school holidays he usually wants lunch at 9:30am!

Whilst Ben has got some games that are purely for entertainment (like Smash Cops which he got as a birthday

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present, or Gravity Guy and Sonic Racing), most of what he plays has a puzzle element.

His favourites?

1. Angry Birds

2. Aqueduct

3. Cat Physics

4. Cut the Rope (he recently completed this with some help from my wife)

5. Feed Me Oil

6. Feed That Dragon

7. Scribblenauts (he’s a little young for this)

8. Super Stickman Golf (an all-time favourite – we’ve completed it twice)

9. Tinkerbox

10. Where’s Wally?

He has periods where he’ll just focus on one game to the exclusion of the rest. And that’s fine (for 15 minutes at a time…)

3. EntertainmentPartly from necessity, partly from principle, we ask Ben to go away and play by himself every day.

We live in an age of mass entertainment when it would be easy to find him something for him to passively consume. When I was young I read books and played with cars because

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there was nothing more exciting to do. Now there’s a million TV channels, apps and digital distractions fighting for our attention.

Clay Shirky puts the problem well:

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

In a way, therefore, by insisting on analogue play (including reading and writing) we’re teaching mindfulness. It also reinforces the role of my wife and I as parents as opposed to mere babysitters/entertainers.

Are you a parent? What rules do you have in YOUR house? Do they work?

PS You’ll love Leo Babauta’s The Way of the Peaceful Parent

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On writing every day.27th April 2012

There’s two books I read regularly. Both of those books are by authors who evidently love the written word but treat it quite differently.

The first is The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracian, a 17th century Spanish Jesuit. I read his short, pithy maxims every single day on repeat. When I get to number 300, I flick back and start at number one again.

The second, which I’ve read many times is Michel de Montaigne‘s Essays. This rambling, inconsistent and charming tome is by a 16th century landowner and reluctant public

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servant. I (and others who have read him) feel like I know him personally.25

Both works make me want to write not just about the kinds of things I write about on this blog, but just for myself. Not necessarily for an audience, and about anything I want.

Ideally, I’d write in the series of journals I’ve kept since turning 18. Realistically, I write in there sporadically, and usually when I’m feeling down. I want more regular outpourings and means typing instead of physically writing.

I’m a fairly fast touch-typist. I used to be up to the heady heights of around 100 words per minute (wpm), but nowadays I’m happy with 60-70 wpm. That’s obviously way more than I’d get if I was scrawling: I’d be lucky to hit 30 wpm, and even that would be illegible.

Thankfully, and you’ll be delighted to know there’s a point to this post, I’ve re-discovered a place that embodies this ‘private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily’ element for which I’ve been grasping.

Not only is 750words.com extremely well-designed, but it’s got semantic analysis of what you write, co-operative style values and badges!26 The image at the top of this post shows some of the analysis the site does. There’s more than the limited amount I’m sharing there.

Read this for Buster’s (the site owner) reason for creating – and continuing to run – the site:

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25 I’m also greatly enjoying Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty

attempts at an answer.

26 Although not, sadly, of the ‘Open variety.

750 Words exists because of mutual good will between myself and the people who use it. The site wouldn’t exist without the generosity, patience, and humor of everyone involved. Rather than charge for the site, I want to keep the site free, and simply offer an opportunity for people who have the means and the desire to help keep things going. I don’t want to make a ton of money, I just want to have enough to justify the time, energy, and money it takes to build, maintain, and enjoy, while also keeping the spirit of it fun and friendly.

That’s my kind of site.

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Arson at Ellington Nature Reserve.30th April 2012

Yesterday, as I sat in my study finishing off some work, my wife called me into the lounge to look out the window. She and my two young children stood transfixed as black, billowing clouds of smoke drifted over our back garden. It was clear where it was coming from: the nature reserve close to our house.

Tragically, someone (or some group) had decided to set fire to the bird hide on the end of a jetty that goes out into the pond. By the time I’d called the fire brigade and got down there, all that the steadily-increasing group of concerned onlookers could do was watch as fierce flames consumed the wooden structure.

I overheard, but have not had confirmation, that the bird hide was doused in petrol before being set alight. In the end, the

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firefighters put out the fire and knocked down the hide. All that’s left are some wooden stumps.

My reason for writing about this is merely, at this stage, to document that it happened. I’m not sure who did it, nor why they did so, but feel sad that it happened. All my five year-old son asked yesterday was “Why would they do that, Daddy?” I didn’t know how to answer him but encouraged him to draw the picture at the top of this post to let out some of his emotions.

The nature reserve was opened last year after a community group secured National Lottery funding to transform the space. It’s a beautiful space within which to walk in this usually peaceful village. My children used to enjoy peeking through the windows in the bird hide.

Not any more. :-(

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Why I’m becoming a MoFo(er).6th June 2012

There’s something I’ve been bursting to tell people for the last few weeks. It’s something that will come as no surprise to some and a bit of a shock to others.

I’m joining the Mozilla Foundation.

I can’t tell you how excited I am! As ‘Badges and Skills Lead’ I’ll be both continuing the work started by Michelle Levesque on web literacies and evangelising Open Badges.

The last couple of years with JISC infoNet have been fantastic but I had to take such a wonderful opportunity! I’m fortunate to be both leaving and joining an extremely friendly, effective and forward-thinking team.

If you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them in the comments below!

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Doctor Doug.27th June 2012

Dr. Doug Belshaw with Prof. Steve Higgins

Today I graduated from my Ed.D. in the wonderful surroundings of Durham Cathedral (a UNESCO World Heritage site).

Both my family and my supervisor Professor Steve Higgins were there to witness it and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them all for their advice, guidance and support during the past few years. I’d also like to thank those who have cheered me on both here and elsewhere online. :-)

My doctoral thesis has been online since I began writing it. You can access it at http://neverendingthesis.com

This event has come at a great time between finishing up my role with JISC infoNet and starting with the Mozilla Foundation. Exciting times!

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Working for an Academy vs. working for JISC infoNet [visualisation]4th July 2012

Back in 2009 when I was Director of e-Learning of The Northumberland Church of England Academy I started tracking my own activities.

Using a private WordPress-powered blog with the P2 theme, I quickly logged what I was up to, adding tags as I went. Below is the tag cloud after one month of using the system as a Senior Leader in an newly-minted Academy:

As you can see, the following tags were prevalent (I don’t think I included teaching in there for some reason!):

1. Google Apps (I was responsible for deploying it across the 9-site Academy)

2. Elearning (obviously)

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3. Meetings (lots and lots of these)

4. Email (a necessary evil)

5. Dan Brooks (an M.Ed. student from an Australian university whom I mentored during extended teaching practice)

6. Training (I led plenty of sessions)

The above screenshot is from yesterday, soon after finishing my two-year stint as Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet. Apart from changing my avatar and tweaking the colour scheme, what’s changed?

1. The email tag is much larger in this cloud. I was working in an office rather than a school, after all.

2. JISC, JISC Advance and JISC infoNet unsurprisingly figure a lot.

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3. Google Apps remains there as I implemented and supported the system for the 19 JISC Advance services.

4. Mobile Learning infoKit is there as it was a major piece of work for me during my time at JISC infoNet.

5. Digital literacies features due to my work in the area and programme support for the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme.

6. Patrick Bellis was my boss at JISC infoNet and Sarah Knight the JISC programme manager with whom I had the most dealings.

7. Other people’s names feature as well – interestingly Dan Brooks (M.Ed. student at the Academy) is still there three years later. Just goes to show how intense that period was!

Finally, you can see that wiki and Skype are small but significant in the tag cloud. I’ve never worked for an organisation that had better knowledge management and procedures than JISC infoNet. The internal wiki had everything you needed to work effectively and was an active, living repository of information. Skype is used extensively throughout JISC, sometimes for calls, sometimes for ‘backchanneling’.

If you’d done something similar which tags would YOU expect to show up?

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Aim for the high ground, not the high horse.15th July 2012

Yesterday, fellow Mozillian Gervase Markham wrote these lines:

The Internet is one of the greatest drivers of human prosperity and happiness the world has ever seen. The ability to communicate easily across long distances, for business or pleasure, has enabled unimagined trade, friendship and connection. It has empowered many people. However, the free Internet as we know it is under threat – from governments, businesses and organizations who want to control or restrict what information passes. And when control and restriction increases, for whatever reason, opportunity and innovation suffer collateral damage.

That’s why my ethical career choice is to work for Mozilla, an organization which aims to preserve and protect the open Internet as a level playing field where everyone can communicate, contribute and take full part – without having

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to pay gatekeepers, have a relationship with particular companies, or give up their privacy or security.

Working for a non-profit, just as being (for example) a teacher, or a doctor means occupying the high ground.

I believe we should all be aiming for the high ground.

You know, there’s a phrase in English “getting on your high horse‘. This indicates that you’re ‘better’ or ‘more intelligent’ than other people. That’s not what I’m getting at.

What I think we should be aiming for is individual and community flourishing. I believe that acting as though we’re in competition with one another damages this.

We’re all in this together.

Aiming for the high ground means acting in accordance with the Golden Rule:

One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.

So, no matter what your faith this Sunday, think about your career choices. Think about your shopping habits. And most of all, every time you’re faced with a choice, opt for the one that promotes human flourishing.

Image CC BY ^riza^

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Doug’s new #shoffice11th August 2012

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Yesterday local architect Mark Starford27 stopped by Chez Belshaw for initial discussions and measurements for my shed office (shoffice). As you can see from the photos above

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27 http://www.markstarford.co.uk

the previous owners of our house had built a bizarre (but awesome) underground concrete bunker, complete with power.

We’re going to use that existing structure as a basis to build upon. Mark’s very much into sustainable structures and I’m very into getting as much light in there given that we’re located in the North East of England!

The backstoryLast month I started work as Badges & Skills Lead for the Mozilla Foundation. It’s a great job that allows me to work from home. Whilst that means I’ve had to sell my awesome Ford Puma, it also means that I’m completely in control of my working environment.

After some discussions with my wife, Hannah, we decided that my existing study (which is a garage conversion) doesn’t quite do the trick. The conversion was done well – to such an extent it’s very much part of the main house. And therein lies the problem when you’ve got a five year-old and an eighteen month-old.

So we decided to look outside for a solution. Initially we were looking at shed-like structures. Hence the ‘shoffice’ moniker (which has stuck). However, we thought it would be a waste not to use the existing foundations under the patio to build something more permanent, comfortable and which would ultimately add value to our house.

You’ll not be surprised to hear that I made contact with Mark Starford, the architect we’ve asked to work with us, through Twitter. I think it was this map28 that alerted us to his

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28 http://goo.gl/maps/g0RJW

proximity. I checked out his website and then made contact on Twitter. That moved to email, he came around for a cup of tea and chat, and we got the ball rolling.

In turn, Mark’s recommended a structural engineer who in turn is going to recommend a builder. Yes, we could have got tenders and vetted people and all that sort of thing. But in reality, I want to work with people who want to work with me and each other. So it’s all good.

Mark spent a couple of hours at our house yesterday chatting and measuring and asking questions. He’s going to go away and make some drawings. I can’t wait to see them.

And, of course, I’ll share them here when he does (I think I’ve persuaded him to release his work under a Creative Commons license!)

Blogging this adventure comes naturally to me but I was definitely spurred on by Christian Payne blogging the process of creating his home office!29

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29 http://docuden.posterous.com

Evaluation: the absolute basics16th August 2012

Whilst I’ve done some work in the past around evaluation I’ve needed to brush up on it since joining the Mozilla Foundation. This post reflects some hours spent in Durham University Education Library earlier this week.

IntroductionEvaluation is a contested term. Even people involved in the field can’t agree what they mean:

“No single-sentence definition will suffice to fully capture the practice of evaluation.”

(Patton, 1982:4, quoted in Clarke, 1999)

However, the following general guidance is useful:

“The most important purpose of evaluation is not to prove but to improve.”

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(Stufflebeam and Shinkfield, 1985:2, quoted in Clarke, 1999)

And among the definitions I’ve come across, the one I like best is this:

“Evaluation is the systematic investigation of the merit or worth of an object (program) for the purpose of reducing uncertainty in decision making.”

(Mertens, 1998:219)

The ‘evaluand’Like every field, Evaluation methods has its jargon terms. For example, an evaluand is the subject being evaluated. The following are useful questions asked by Mertens (1998:231) in relation to the evaluand:

1. Is there a written description of what is to be evaluated?

2. What is the status of the evaluand? Relatively stable and mature? New? Developing? How long as the program been around?

3. In what context will (or does) the evaluand function?

4. Who is the evaluand designed to serve?

5. How does it (the evaluand) work? Or how is it supposed to work?

6. What is it supposed to do?

7. What resources are being put into the evaluand (e.g. financial, time, staff, materials, etc.)?

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8. What are the processes that make up the evaluand?

9. What outputs are expected? Or occur?

10.Why do you want to evaluate it?

11.Whose description of the evaluand is available to you at the start of the evaluation?

12.Whose description of the evaluand is needed to get a full understanding of the program to be evaluated?

Dimensions to evaluationThere are many dimensions to evaluation, the most commonly known being summative vs. formative evaluation. Whilst formative evaluation has as its audience those within the program being evaluated, the audience for summative evaluation is those outside the program (such as policy makers, funders, or the general public).

Other dimensions over and above formative vs. summative should be considered (according to Malla Reddy, 2000:3) including:

1. Inside vs. Outsider

2. Experimental vs. Illuminative

3. Democratic vs. Bureaucratic

4. Product vs. Process

5. Quantitative vs. Qualitative

The last bullet point of this list has many books and articles dedicated to each element. Very basically, quantitative

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evaluation focuses on ‘hard’ numbers, whereas qualitative evaluation focuses on ‘soft’ experience.

Planning an evaluationMertens (1998:230) suggests the following steps when planning an evaluation study:

Focusing the evaluation

1. Description of what is to be evaluated

2. The purpose of the evaluation

3. The stakeholders in the evaluation

4. Constraints affecting the evaluation

5. The evaluation questions

6. Selection of an evaluation model

Planning the evaluation

7. Data collection specification, analysis, interpretation, and use strategies

8. Management of the evaluation

9. Meta-evaluation plans

Implementing the evaluation

10. Completing the scope of the work specified in the plan

O’Sullivan (2004:7) gives a brief overview of the various evaluation models or approaches from which to choose:

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1. Objectives – focuses on objectives to determine degree of attainment

2. Management - focuses on information to assist program decision makers

3. Consumer - looks at programs and products to determine relative worth

4. Expertise - establishes peer and professional judgements of quality

5. Adversary - examines programs from pro and con perspectives

Participant - addresses stakeholders’ needs for information

To be honest, all of this seems a little over-the-top for some of the things I’ll be evaluating. That’s why I found Colin Robson’s book Small-scale Evaluation useful. Robson (2000:46) suggests using the following questions in an evaluation:

1. What is needed?

2. Does what is provided meet client needs?

3. What happens when it is in operation?

4. Does it attain its goals or objectives?

5. What are its outcomes?

6. How do costs and benefits compare?

7. Does it meet required standards?

8. Should it continue?

9. How can it be improved?

10.Structuring an evaluation report244

Robson also suggests how to structure an evaluation report (2000:122):

1. Heading – make it short and clear

2. Table of contents – simple list of headings and page numbers (without subheadings)

3. Executive summary - key findings and conclusions/recommendations

4. Background - one-page setting of the scene as to why the evaluation was carried out, what questions you are seeking answers to, and why the findings are likely to be of interest

5. Approach taken – when, where and how the study was carried out (detail goes in appendices)

6. Findings – the largest section giving answers to the evaluation questions with the main message going at the beginning and using subheadings where necessary

7. Conclusions/recommendations - draws together main themes of the report and their implications

Appendices – include information needed by the audience to understand material in the main report (references)

He also suggests including the names/contact details of the evaluators.

ConclusionThis brief overview of evaluation should enable me to be more confident when evaluating things for my day-to-day

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role. Hopefully it’s also given you enough of a starting point to carry out your own evaluations.

Image CC BY-NC-SA xiaming

References• Clarke, A. (1999) Evaluation Research: an introduction to

principles, methods and practice, London: Sage

• Malla Reddy, K. (ed.) (2000) Evaluation in Distance Education, Hyderabad: Booklinks Corporation

• Mertens, D. (1998) Research Methods in Education and Psychology: integrating diversity with quantitative and qualitative approaches, London: SAGE

• O’Sullivan, R.G. (2004) Practicing Evalution: a collaborative approach, London: Sage

• Robson, C. (2000) Small-scale Evaluation, London: Sage

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Famous for 42 seconds17th August 2012

Like tens of thousands of people around the world I’m a regular listener to the BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed podcast. In fact, as it’s usually around 27 minutes long it’s perfect for my 5k runs (including warm-up and warm-down, obviously…)

For those of you who don’t listen to it, Laurie Taylor – who’s voice makes the show worth listening to in its own right – divides the near half-hour into three sections. The first part deals with a recent paper or book in the area of Sociology, the short middle bit deals with listener correspondence, and the final part deals with contemporary issues related to Sociology.

The episode on 1 August 2012 was entitled Jobs for the Boys and is summarised as follows on the BBC website:

Laurie Taylor talks to Professor Irena Grugulis about her contention that working class people don’t get job opportunities in the UK TV and film industry because they don’t have the right accents, clothes, backgrounds or friends. The media expert, Sir Peter Bazalgette and Professor of

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Sociology, Mike Savage, respond to this research and explore nepotism, networking and discrimination in the media world and beyond.

As I walked back to my house after a run to the beach and back again last week I couldn’t help but think that the show had missed out something really important: the role of online social networking.To my mind, social networks like Twitter allow people to build up useful contacts and ‘Personal Learning Networks’ (PLNs) based on interest rather than class.

I quickly fired off an email to thinkingallowed@bbc.co.uk and low and behold it was featured in the middle bit of this week’s show! (15 August 2012: Breaking Rules – Wall Street women) I found out, fittingly, through various people telling me via social media.

You can download every episode of Thinking Allowed via the BBC website, including this week’s show. But if you’re interested in just the bit where I’m mentioned (of course you are!) then you can find it at the Internet Archive.30

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30 http://archive.org/details/excerptThinkingAllowed15August2012

Some thoughts on time, performativity, and the State.24th August 2012

Whenever I come across a longer article via Twitter, Zite, Feedly, Google+ or the other places that I browse headlines, I add it to my Pocket account. The advantage of doing this is not only that I can read those articles at my leisure (such as when I’m on a train journey) but also that the app formats them in a way that’s actually readable.

A while ago I added an article entitled Time Wars to my Pocket account. It’s by ‘leading radical blogger and professor Mark Fisher’ and is about the neo-liberal assault on time. I found it fascinating. You should go and read it.

In the UK at the moment we have the situation where the government has declared war on public sector pay and pensions. It’s dressed up to look like something different, of course, but even a quick peek behind the curtains reveals how ministers manipulate the levers in a futile attempt to make taxpayer-funded institutions cost the government less.

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Unfortunately, the ideology of the Conservative government (let’s face it, the Liberals aren’t doing much despite their coalition) is predicated upon a lazy idea of the market as the solution to every problem facing society. Climate change? Carbon trading! NHS costs rising? Bring in private providers! Educational ‘standards’ not improving fast enough? De-regulate everything!

The logic of Capital is everywhere. One very prominent and obvious effect of this is the increasingly casualised and temporary jobs on offer. Who has a permanent job with a guaranteed final salary pension these days? Which of us spend more than five years with the same employer? Where are the ‘good’ jobs (the ones that my Grandmother talks about) for graduates?

At the most simple level, precarity is one consequence of the “post-Fordist” restructuring of work that began in the late 1970s: the turn away from fixed, permanent jobs to ways of working that are increasingly casualised. Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from precocity. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of “continuous professional development”; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms.

Of course, there are massive benefits to the casualisation of labour. For example, I now work variable hours from home as part of a team that spans at least five timezones. I get to choose when to take my holidays. My performance is based upon my output rather than the number of hours I spend at my desk.

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But, there’s a creeping performative element to all of this. When you can work any time of the day, it’s tempting to work   more, not less – especially when you’re dealing with things you’re interested in. I’m fortunate in that I work for Mozilla, whose politics and communitarian approach correlate strongly with my own. But if I didn’t work for a non-profit (or a forward-thinking organisation such as Valve) then I think I’d be looking over my shoulder all the time. Self-regulation and censorship, as George Orwell showed in 1984 is regulation and censorship of the worst kind.

The casualisation of labour is great for those working in what is loosely (and imprecisely) defined as ‘the knowledge economy’. Give me a laptop and an internet connection and I can work anywhere. Others, however, depend upon being physically co-located with others to earn their money. Whilst the uncertainty that goes hand-in-hand with casualisation is great for those working in the knowledge economy, it’s a definite downside to those who can’t decide where and when they’re going to work. In fact, all they get is the downside, the uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a negative side effect that some of us are willing to live with because of the positives on the flip side of the coin. But that flip side largely doesn’t exist for those who rely on physical co-location to do their jobs. I’m thinking teachers. I’m thinking doctors and nurses and hospital staff. I’m thinking pretty much every job in the public sector. These aren’t occupations that we should be looking to casualise: we should be making people in these positions feel more secure, not less:

The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programmes and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-

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level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle.

Everything that can be outsourced to the market in our brave new Big Society is packaged up and sold to the highest bidder. Witness the G4S Olympic security debacle31, for example. At the same time, training and career development is also outsourced to the market. Instead of taxpayer-funded institutions such as hospitals and schools developing and keeping experienced, knowledgeable staff we’re increasingly faced with uncertain, temporary workers representing third-party organisations. Any ‘innovation’ within such organisations by necessity has to be top-down, as the mechanisms for grassroots innovation are stymied by HR practices:

The reality, however, is that innovation requires certain forms of stability. The disintegration of social democracy has had a dampening, rather than a dynamic, effect on culture in highly neoliberalized countries such as the UK. Frederic Jameson’s claims that late capitalist culture would be given over to pastiche and retrospection have turned out to be extraordinarily prophetic.

I’m not arguing for full communism now. Nor am I advocating a King Canute-style position against the incoming tide. What I am questioning, however, is whether the logic of Capital and private enterprise should be applied to the institutions of our state. Some things, after all, are public goods.

I’ll end where Mark Fisher’s article starts, commenting only that we live in an increasingly polarised society where the

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31 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/aug/14/g4s-olympic-effort-private-sector

haves get to choose what the have-nots get to do with their time:

Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given only a year more to live. To survive any longer, they must earn extra time. The decadent rich have centuries of empty time available to fritter away, while the poor are always only days or hours away from death.

Go and read the article.32 It’s worth it, trust me.

Image CC BY-SA Mr. Theklan

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32 http://www.gonzocircus.com/xtrpgs/incubate-special-exclusive-essay-time-wars-by-mark-fisher/

On the mental cost of inventing new categories.21st September 2012

Now that I get Seth Godin‘s short, frequent, musings sent directly to my Pocket account I’m back to reading most of what he writes.

Recently, he wrote a post called I want to put you in a category that resonated with me in terms of the Open Badges evangelism I’ve been doing recently:

When I meet you or your company or your product or your restaurant or your website, I desperately need to put it into an existing category, because the mental cost of inventing a new category for every new thing I see is too high. (my emphasis)

In fact, given that I’ve spent most of my adult life evangelising one thing or another, it really struck home.

Godin’s insight that got me thinking about my current work is his assertion that we should make it easy for people to

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categorise us and the work we do. What! But what I’ve got something brand new and never-been-seen-before? Then you need to be more careful. Why? The real danger is to be miscategorised:

“What is this thing? What are you like? Are you friend or foe, flake or leader, good deal or ripoff, easy or hard, important or not? Are you destined for the trusted category or the other one?”

No matter who we’re dealing with, whether internally within our organisations or externally to the rest of the world, I think it’s important to be aware of people’s existing categories and work with them, rather than against them.

Image CC BY ecokarenlee

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Blog redesign: October 2012 edition30th September 2012

I’ve felt for a while that I should make this blog better suited to mobile interfaces and, in particular, touchscreen devices. This is known as responsive web design and I’ve been particularly impressed with Microsoft’s ‘Metro’ design language33 leading to a tiled approach on Windows smartphones. To my eyes it seems streets ahead of Apple’s skeuomorphism.34

Yesterday, when I was browsing architecture blogs and came across the Contemporist site, it reminded me of that clean, touchscreen-friendly approach:

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33 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)

34 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

I did something I always do when I see blog themes I like: right-clicked to ‘View Source’ as you can tell which blog theme is being used. Judging by the CSS it’s a custom job, meaning I couldn’t simply download the same theme.

That was a shame, but it spurred me on to look for Metro-inspired blog themes. I was looking for something with a tiled, fairly squarish look but that didn’t scream Microsoft. Beautiful though it is, the Subway WordPress theme (from €39) was out of the question. I’d have looked like a Microsoft fanboi:

I also found the MetroStyle theme ($45), which I rejected for having too many boxes at the top:

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I downloaded and installed the WP Metro theme (£FREE), but I had trouble making it look decent with my content:

In the end, after considering signing up to a course to get the Anaximander theme, I decided to pay $35 for a WordPress theme entitled Metro:

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Like many premium themes it comes with an extremely easy-to-use configuration dashboard in addition to the usual WordPress options. Nevertheless, old habits die hard and I delved into the CSS to tinker about a bit!

I hope you like what you see, and if you want to see the ‘responsiveness’ in action, either resize your browser window or visit this site on a mobile device. It’s only my first attempt – I’ll be tinkering around making improvements here and there over the next few weeks.

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A #shoffice update (October 2012)10th October 2012

Back in August I posted about how working from home with my new job for the Mozilla Foundation means I needed a dedicated office. It’s just too distracting working in the main house when we’ve got two young children! I’m calling it a ‘shoffice’ as it’s a shed as far as planning regulations go (no-one’s sleeping in there) but an office as far as I’m concerned. :-)

Since August local architect Mark Starford has been drawing up draft plans from the detailed measurements he took on that sunny day. I’m delighted Mark’s agreed to allow me to share the drawings here under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. I’ve also introduced him to the delights of Pinterest via my Architecture & Design board. It’s useful to have a ‘mood board’ as it allows others to see the kinds of things you like by referencing extant things!

Below are the options Hannah, my wife, and I like so far. Mark gave us three options for the path and way down to the office. I’ve included the ‘dogleg’ version. We’re not so keen on the protruding skylight but are definitely in favour of getting as much north-facing light in as possible. Mark informed us that artists tend to favour this kind of light as it’s more constant and avoids the ‘hard light’ that distracts me when I work.

We definitely like the freestanding canopy-style protruding roof to shelter the stairs and we’re also thinking about potentially including an additional way to get down to the decking area. Hannah doesn’t want the decking to be my ‘outside office space’ and I can see her point. We’re also still

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thinking about the placement and shape of the windows to the west side (we don’t want any on the south side).

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If you’re struggling to understand how this works, it might help to know that our garden would be pretty much on a 45-degree slope if it wasn’t for a concrete ‘bunker’ under the patio. Also, the fence to the rear of our property drops down dramatically to a much lower garden level for our neighbours.

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#BelshawBlackOps12 has started – see you in 2013!1st December 2012

I’m composing this sitting cross-legged with my back to the wall in a hotel room in Porto. There’s an occasional gentle breeze that drifts through the open window that slightly chills the back of my neck. I expected Portugal to be warmer for some reason.

The cacophony of seagulls behind outside fades into the background as the sound of church bells fills the air. An earlier glance out of the window showed people getting ready for the day. They take for granted the magnificent, tall buildings with tiled facades; it’s no wonder the centre of Porto is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m going to spend the entire month of December being a lot more analogue. I’m really looking forward to spending that time increasing my mindfulness. I’ll still be performing my normal work functions for Mozilla, but will tend towards paper to get things done.

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Meanwhile, I’ll not be using technology for personal communications.

This means:

• I’m not looking at or responding to personal emails

• I won’t be active on social networks like Twitter or Google+

• No new blog posts or weekly newsletters in December

I intend to spend time with my family and read books that have been recommended to me. This digital hiatus is something I’ve done for the past couple of years and would highly recommend to anyone. At a time when I’m feeling slightly weary and cynical about the world it’s a period of rejuvenation that allows me to start the New Year with a bang.

See you in 2013!

Image CC BY NASA Goddard Photo and Video

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