One Size Fits All

Jeremy Hiebert links to this interesting article on the changing face of education. Kathy Seal is in agreement with Jane Gilbert, that is, industrial-age models of education which prepared students to meet the needs of an industrial society are no longer relevant.

The one size fits all, production line approach to education worked acceptably for most of the 20th century ensuring that all students received a reasonable standard of "comprehensive" education with higher education reserved for those deemed most able. Of course this scenario held true only while enough unskilled jobs existed to gainfully employ those who fell off the assembly line. Seal makes this point when she describes the trend in the US employment market:

…factory jobs accounted for 32 percent of employment in 1959, that figure plunged to 17 percent by 1997. Gone are the days when auto, steel and rubber tire factories hired "warm bodies," meaning just about anyone who could pass a physical.

What Seal doesn't make clear is the quality control role of curriculum in sorting students. I'd recommend looking at Jane Gilbert's ideas on knowledge and her call for a shifted curriculum in which we "think carefully about what we think students need to learn (and why)."

Once you realise that the objective of this "You can have any color as long as it's black" approach to education is to produce standardised students, you can share in Will Richardson's dry irony when lamenting public education (also via Jeremy Hiebert).

The End of Knowing

In E.M. Forster's A Room With a View, Mr Emmerson recounts his friend's metaphor for life: "'Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.'"

I was reminded of this dialogue when thinking about the concept of performativity—that knowledge is better linked to what it can do rather than object truth. Fred Newman and Lois Holzman are in agreement with Jane Gilbert's understanding of the changing nature of knowledge in their book The End of Knowing: And the Rediscovery of Development in the Performance of Conversation . From the Synopsis:

For centuries, knowledge has been thought to be the key to human progress of all kinds and has dominated Western culture. But what if knowing has now become an impediment to further human development? This text is concerned with the practical consideration of how to reconstruct our world when modernist ideas have been refuted and many social problems appear insoluble. The authors suggest that we should give up knowing in favour of "performed activity". They show how to reject the knowing paradigm in practice and present the many positive implications this has for social and educational policy.

Over the past two decades, a postmodern critique of the modern conception of knowing and its institutionalized practice has emerged. To many, this is a dangerous threat to the tradition of liberal education, strengthened by recent prestigious voices from the physical and natural sciences. The book challenges even the postmodernists themselves, rejecting the reform of knowing for a totally new performatory form of life. They support their argument with a new reading of Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Perhaps knowledge, not just life, can be likened to a public performance on the violin?

The Knowledge Society

Earlier this month I attended an inspiring presentation entitled The Knowledge Society, Schools and Knowledge made by Jane Gilbert of NZCER (which was based on a presentation made at the PPTA's Charting the Future Conference).

In recent years there has been a wealth of knowledge society rhetoric in New Zealand as in other developed nations. While there is general agreement that education is a key to entry into such a society, Jane pointed out the irony in these talkfests excluding discussion of the nature of knowledge or curriculum.

Jane posited that the meaning of knowledge is changing and that this has implications for education. She explored the industrial age model of education and noted the divisions caused by its application in a post-industrial society. What is needed is an educationally relevant theory of knowledge and pedagogies that are consistent with that theory. Reassuringly Jane believes the answers are already out there—but where?

Charting the future delegates would not have had to look far. Steven Arnold showed that at least some of the answers may lie outside of mainstream education, at schools like Athena Montessori College. Like Jane, he stresses none of this is new.

What is new is the integration of these ideas within a sympathetic environment. What is exciting is that online learning provides another such sympathetic environment. One in which we can demonstrate a significant difference if we can break free from the shackles of an irrelevant theory of knowledge and outdated pedagogies.

Truth and Lies

Here's a use for the hilarious Googlism website to which Alan Levine alerted me. It wasn’t until I was looking for an online icebreaker activity that I made the connection with the corporate training classic Truth and Lies.

• Search Googlism for your first name. (In practice simply using first names ensures plenty of comical results and avoids any possible social trauma if Google doesn't know of you or your namesakes!)


• Choose two false Googlisms to which you add one truth.


• Post your list to a public forum, and have fun trying to correctly guess everyone's true statement.

The group I trialled it with enjoyed it—just a shame you can't hear the laughter online.

You say Bliki, I say Bloki…

James Farmer links to Cardboard, a blog/wiki hybrid or bliki which reminded me of a similar collaborative web tool I had a play with last year.

Called Bloki, it has all the features you'd expect in such a hybrid (and then some): multiple authors, author permissions, versioning, annotations, page access controls, forums, blog comments, RSS for pages, blog entries and forums, site statistics, DNS mapping. All hosted for free… for now (and we all know about the downside of relying on free hosting).

The folks at Zapatec (the developers of Bloki) plan to release the software under an open source license, but for now Bloki remains in a state of perpetual beta.

Possibly the best kept secret on the net?! Now why aren't I using it?

Room with a VUE

Also via Ray Schroeder this link to Syllabus’ Phillip D. Long writing about Tufts University’s VUE software. I have long been an advocate of concept mapping in the classroom and I think concept maps have the potential to add much to the online environment.

VUE reminds me of IHMC’s prototype Learning Environment Organiser (LEO), part of the CmapTools package. LEO is described in this paper which also summarises the theoretical foundations on which concept mapping is based, and from which you can derive the advantages of mapping, some of which are noted by Long. One of the most compelling advantages is that concept maps move away from the linear lecture/book metaphor embedded in mainstream LMSs and instead show the conceptual relationships between topics.

When Long claims concept maps are “relatively static” I can only assume he has not used the CmapTools software to which he refers. CmapTools is much more than freely available concept mapping software. Leveraging the Internet, CmapTools allows users to build concept maps collaboratively by proposing and discussing relationships between concepts. I’m not sure you could get much more dynamic than this!

You can also attach resources to concepts in CmapTools, although not direct links to objects hidden inside repositories. This is where VUE, through its use of OKI’s Open Service Interface Definitions (OSIDs), differs. I’ll have to download VUE and have a play. More on that later.

[Update: If you're curious about OKI, Graeme Daniel provides a comprehensive introduction in this week's wwwtools For Education e-zine.]

What I Believe

Ray Schroeder links to this Webby award winning website promoting tolerence and provides me with an opportunity to make a connection and continue the Forsterian theme.

In his 1938 essay What I Believe, Forster suggests that “Tolerance, good temper and sympathy” are what really matter, “…and if the human race is not to collapse they must come to the front before long.”

Sixty-six years later I do not see much evidence of these qualities surfacing and goodness knows the world could certainly do with a generous helping right now.

Only Connect

The recent appearance of a couple of Kiwi edublogs (Kia ora Lisa and Derek) has provided the catalyst required to activate my very own blog with this—drum roll, please—my inaugural post.

For me life lurking in the blogosphere has been about:

• connecting with new and challenging concepts,


• connecting related concepts,


• connecting with original-thinking people, and


• connecting my colleagues with relevant information.

Hence the title of this blog—Only Connect—in which I hope (apologies to E.M. Forster) to connect prose with my passion for education and live in isolation no longer.

(Coincidently Only Connect is also the title of a paper on computer-mediated communities and community networks).

So here begins my more active participation in the edublog community, documenting and reflecting on these connections…