order / disorder

Well no tweets from #herdsa. Why? Because there’s no freely available internet access in the conference rooms. We have broadband in the hotel rooms that works out at about $40 per hour; or we can pay for wireless in the conference lobby, but that doesn’t extend to the 9 different rooms that the conference is happening in. I don’t want to sound too cynical, but what the hell! I know that it’s not just me who feels that this is a significant oversight by the organisers.

Some folks who complained were told that this was a teaching and learning conference and not an elearning conference so what was the beef? Remember that people working in eLearning will continually be told that ‘eLearning is just part of Learning and Teaching”!

The fact that we are nearly a tenth of the way through the 21^st century seemed to cause no concern that a major conference in this country was not engaging with the landscape of learning and the range of tools that some of its attendees and presenters use in their everyday lives. The major theme of the conference is Engaging Communities and many of us felt that the eLearning community was being disengaged …

Tweets are just an example. There was live blogging, fact checking, research, etc, etc that folks wanted to do but couldn’t. And the thing that is ironic is that much of the live stuff was intended to share and engage with colleagues who couldn’t attend the conference. Several presenters giving papers with an eLearning or mlearning theme also complained that they had no internet access.

Are my expectations too high? Should I accept statements that “New Zealand is 5 years behind the rest of the world and that’s the way it is”? I hope not but I’m interested to know if you agree or disagree.

HERDSA’s wiki

New Zealand has an Enviroschool scheme where it tries to support schools with sustainability. One of the local schools here in Hamilton has just been on the telly detailing what they have been doing.

They started a garden to grow veg and teach the children elements of sustainability. The project grew as they decided that the kids could learn to cook too, using the veg that they had grown.

Now it was a project on a roll. How do you make sure that the plants are cared for in all conditions? Set up a weather station and start making your own forecasts. What can you do with the surplus of food? Sell them to the local community. How can the community find out? Set up a publicity machine that includes a local radio station for the school. The kids are doing all this and now they want to set up a 200 seat café so they can feed themselves at lunchtime!

What a range of learning opportunities developed through making a vegetable patch. And it’s all pretty authentic learning. I’m sure that there are some other great examples out there too. Feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Two days ago, six school children and a teacher were washed to their deaths in a flash flood on a NZ mountain stream (see stuff.co.nz and NZ Herald).  A terrible accident and it brings back poignant memories of a similar accident in the Yorkshire Dales, UK when two schoolgirls were swept to their deaths.  In both cases, the children were staying at an outdoor centre as part of a school trip.

One aim of such centres is to introduce kids to things in the outdoors that they might not normally have a chance to experience.  There is a sense of adventure and fun – climbing, caving, abseiling, kayaking, gorge-walking etc.  However, the more important goals are making the kids more self-confident as well as understanding the importance of the team, trust and camaraderie.  These are life skills that can be applied anywhere.  Working in the outdoors, in environments that are alien to most of the participants, forces kids to confront their fears, to rely on others and to help others in order to get through the day.  While outdoor instructors will not normally take kids into places that are overly hostile, often the environments can be outwith their comfort zones.  The sense of achievement that the kids have at the end of a day is palpable (without claiming that every kid will go away saying that they enjoyed it of course).

It is a shame therefore, that while parents and friends are grieving, before an investigation and inquiry have taken place, there are media pundits calling for such centres to be closed down.  This knee-jerk reaction is perhaps understandable but is doomed to be of the “Act in haste, repent at leisure” variety.  I cannot prejudge what any inquiry may come out with as I have only media reports to go on; an error of judgement may or may not have been made.  What hasn’t been mentioned are the thousands of kids that have passed through such centres without a scrape and come out the better for it.  The benefits are unlikely to be visible in an individual immediately at the end of a week; I think that a lot of that accrues when the child returns to their home environment and reflects on what they achieved.  There can also be the change in the group dynamic when classmates realise that they have revealed and seen in others quite deep emotions during these experiences.

Calls for OE centres to be closed are short-sighted, selfish and ill-informed.  I was in the UK when the Lyme Bay disaster happened.  Two things came out of that event: regulation of outdoor activity providers and a climate of institutions becoming risk averse.  My experience was in caving and many people came to caving through university clubs.  Suddenly that influx of new blood dried up as university athletic associations refused to provide support for anything that was seen as being a ‘dangerous’ sport.  Never mind that you were more likely to have a serious injury playing rugby or attending a football match in certain parts of the country.  With regulation, all instructors had to have a ‘ticket’ for any activity that they might lead.  This is positive in one way as parents can be assured that instructors have the correct pieces of paper.  It also meant that to get work, new instructors had to get tickets in a variety of activities.  People might be highly skilled at the main pursuits that they were involved in but still have to get other certificates to increase their chances of being employed.  While they could get those tickets, say in caving, they didn’t have the depth of experience to apply sound judgement in every situation that they might come across, especially where gross variables such as weather play a part.  Prior to regulation, that experience would be gained by mentoring from other instructors at a centre.  Post regulation and with increasing financial constraints, someone with 3 months caving experience and a cave leaders certificate could be ‘trusted’ on their own since the certificate said that they were competent.  They were in fact on an even keel with cavers with 10 or 20 years experience in terms of pieces of paper.

Post Lyme bay, there was an element of knee-jerkedness (?!) which provided some benefits but generally was negative in terms of the risk averseness and false sense of security in bits of paper that it engendered.  After the Stainforth tragedy, there were similar calls and calls for the prosecution of the teachers leading that party at the time.  Stainforth was different since the group in the stream were being led by teachers inexperienced in that environment (See HSE report on Glenridding incident and Marcus Bailie report on Stainforth inquest) but tasked with undertaking it.  Fortunately the calls for summary justice were resisted in this case.  Kids from Leeds and Bradford are still able to go up to the Dales and stretch themselves and pump some adrenaline round their bodies.  We must hope that calls in NZ are similarly resisted.  That is not support for a gung-ho attitude but a recognition that kids need to learn at the boundaries and be physical as well as mental.  The centre involved is an Edmund Hillary centre, a man who is a  Kiwi icon, and his first experience of the outdoors was going on a school skiing trip from Auckland.  He reckoned that the most important thing that he did after that was not climbing Everest but helping others when they needed help.  Let’s not stymie others from extending kids education offline, out the class and firmly rooted in First Life.

Had some wide ranging conversations about various aspects of education in New Zealand today.  All are anecdotal and several relate to personal experiences of my family.

Before we emigrated to NZ, we read up about what opportunities there were in learning, elearning, learning technology etc.  The government made a big thing about how NZ was at the forefront of technology use.  One thing that sticks in my mind is a statement that major IT companies use NZ as a test bed for new technology and often NZ has things before anywhere else in the world.  That was mentioned in one of my conversations today and the comment was that NZ cherry-picks lots of fancy bits of technology, programs, etc but then doesn’t put in the infrastructure to support them.  The fancy bits can get used in an academic or commercial environment but there is no spread out to the general populace.

Broadband is a case in point.  At a very rough guess going from anecdote and support calls, NZ seems to be where the UK was about 5 or 7 years ago in terms of broadband provision.  I was told that Telecom used to advertise that you could get broadband anywhere in NZ.  This was by someone who has been told that they will never get broadband where they live (in the country but not remote).  They can’t even get satellite broadband because of the topography.  In terms of speed, home Internet connection seems slow here but that is perceptual as I don’t have any UK figures to compare with.  In relation to education (which is what this post is about!) there are effects relating to the disparity of access between people and locations.  Working in the tertiary sector, this is particularly evident where academics can access resources at LAN speeds and students at a distance are struggling with dial up.

You also have the effect that students aren’t exposed to the range of materials that they could be.  They get guided to standard resources through the LMS / VLE but much of the increase in quality learning should come through serendipitous and informal channels.  If you are on dial-up, not only is cost a factor but there is the tediousness of waiting for documents to resolve on your screen.  I remember that well.  Mentioning cost reminds me that students here are charged for internet access from campus if they are accessing any site that is outwith the university Intranet.  I was quite shocked when I first heard that and in fact still find it hard to come to terms with.  I’m not sure where the culture divide is – were we just mollycoddled in the UK are is NZ HE penny-pinching? Whatever, the result is a restriction on the resources that students could have access to.

Back in schools, access to computers by students seems limited, as is access to technology by staff.  There has been a scheme to provide laptops for staff but our local school doesn’t seem to have then been enabling in terms of letting staff use their laptops directly in teaching.  They can prepare and print but there are few data projectors, no digital whiteboards and no student access to computers in the class.  This of course is a single example and may be atypical – I have heard that there are clusters of schools with extra IT provision.  By itself, this doesn’t mean that education in schools is any less effective than what was happening 10 or 20 years ago.  It does seem to imply though that kids aren’t being exposed to the tools and resources that they might be expected to work with when they leave school or graduate.

The above might seem like a bit of a whinge and parts probably are!  Education and its environment in the UK wasn’t perfect by any means.  That doesn’t mean that comparisons aren’t worth making.  It also helps me mull over what are the really important changes and how that effects what we suggest as elearning options to staff.  There was actually a lot more said today which I’m too tired for at the moment.  It might perhaps come up in a later post with more reflection on my part.