- What is your pedagogy? At the very least, can you list your educational goals?
- What does it mean for your solution to work and how will this be measured in a way that is meaningful and reliable?
- How are your users supported to achieve their educational goals after the point of sale?
- How do your solutions interact with other offerings in the marketplace?
Microcast #004
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Is it really a ‘skills gap’ that we should be talking about? What’s the real problem here?
Links:
The horror of the Bett Show
I’ve been to the Bett Show (formely known as BETT, which is how the author refers to it in this article) in many different guises. I’ve been as a classroom teacher, school senior leader, researcher in Higher Education, when I was working in different roles at Mozilla, as a consultant, and now in my role at Moodle.
I go because it’s free, and because it’s a good place to meet up with people I see rarely. While I’ve changed and grown up, the Bett Show is still much the same. As Junaid Mubeen, the author of this article, notes:
It's laughable, it really is. I saw all sorts of tat while I was there. I heard that a decent sized stand can set you back around a million pounds.The BETT show is emblematic of much that EdTech gets wrong. No show captures the hype of educational technology quite like the world’s largest education trade show. This week marked my fifth visit to BETT at London’s Excel arena. True to form, my two days at the show left me feeling overwhelmed with the number of products now available in the EdTech market, yet utterly underwhelmed with the educational value on offer.
But of course. I felt particularly sorry this year for educators I know who were effectively sales reps for the companies they've gone to work for. I spent about five hours there, wandering, talking, and catching up with people. I can only imagine the horror of being stuck there for four days straight.One senses from these shows that exhibitors are floating from one fad to the next, desperately hoping to attach their technological innovations to education. In this sense, the EdTech world is hopelessly predictable; expect blockchain applications to emerge in not-too-distant future BETT shows.
I like the questions Mubeen comes up with. However, the edtech companies are playing a different game. While there’s some interested in pedagogical development, for most of them it’s just another vertical market.
Somewhat naïvely, the author says that he looks forward to the day when exhibitors are selected "not on their wallet size but on their ability to address these foundational questions". As there's a for-profit company behind Bett, I think he'd better not hold his breath.In the meantime, there are four simple questions every self-professed education innovator should demand of themselves:
Source: Junaid Mubeen
Can you measure social and emotional skills?
Ben Williamson shines a light on the organisation behind the PISA testing regime moving into the realm of social and emotional skills:
The OECD itself has adopted ‘social and emotional skills,’ or ‘socio-emotional skills,’ in its own publications and projects. This choice is not just a minor issue of nomenclature. It also references how the OECD has established itself as an authoritative global organization focused specifically on cross-cutting, learnable skills and competencies with international, cross-cultural applicability and measurability rather than on country-specific subject achievement or locally-grounded policy agendas.
I really can’t stand this kind of stuff. Using proxies for the thing instead of trying to engender a more holistic form of education. It’s reductionist and instrumentalist.
This project exemplifies a form of stealth assessment whereby students are being assessed on criteria they know nothing about, and which rely on micro-analytics of their gestures across interfaces and keyboards. It appears likely that SSES, too, will involve correlating such process metadata with the OECD’s own SELS constructs to produce stealth assessments for quantifying student skills.
If you create data, people will use that data to judge students and rank them. Of course they will.
However, over time SSES could experience function creep. PISA testing has itself evolved considerably and gradually been taken up in more and more countries over different iterations of the test. The new PISA-based Test for Schools was produced in response to demand from schools. Organizations like CASEL are already lobbying hard for social-emotional learning to be used as an accountability measure in US education—and has produced a State-Scan Scorecard to assess each of the 50 states on SEL goals and standards. Even if the OECD resists ranking and comparing countries by SELS, national governments and the media are likely to interpret the data comparatively anyway.
This is not a positive development.
Source: Code Acts in Education
Education is about the journey, not the destination
I’m a big fan of Cathy Davidson, and look forward to reading her new book. In this article, she explains that we’ve unleashed an ‘educational monster’ by forcing students to be memorisers rather than content creators:
Increasingly, we are shrinking educational opportunities for our youth worldwide, robbing them of the creativity of the arts, the critical thinking of the humanities and social sciences, and reducing all knowledge to test scores, despite repeated workforce studies stressing the importance of deep learning. The trend is to use standardised tests as the entrance to university and therefore to a middle-class future, even though we have ample research, extending back to the Hermann Ebbinghaus memory experiments of the 1880s, about the evanescence of knowledge crammed for the purpose of test-taking.As ever with Cathy's writing, it's a good and well-researched read. I'm not sure about framing it in terms of 'outcomes-based' education, however, as judging people by outcomes in the workplace is generally seen as a good thing. Perhaps emphasise that the journey is more important than the destination? That's why granular badges within a portfolio are a great alternative to letter grades and high-stakes testing.
Source: The Guardian
The Horizon stops here
Audrey Watters is delightfully blunt about the New Media Consortium, known for their regular ‘Horizon reports’, shutting down:
While I am sad for all the NMC employees who lost their jobs, I confess: I will not mourn an end to the Horizon Report project. (If we are lucky enough, that is, that it actually goes away.) I do not think the Horizon Report is an insightful or useful tool. Sorry. I recognize some people really love to read it. But perhaps part of the problem that education technology faces right now – as an industry, as a profession, what have you – is that many of its leaders believe that the Horizon Report is precisely that. Useful. Insightful.Source: Hack Education
Put a number next to someone's name and there will be pressure for it to increase
In her review of Daniel Koretz’s new book on testing in schools, Diane Ravitch reminds us of Campbell’s law:
In 1979, the psychologist Donald Campbell proposed an axiom. “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”Ravitch applies this to high-stakes testing in school, using a story from Soviet Russia to bring the point home:
The classic (and probably apocryphal) illustrations of Campbell’s law come from the Soviet Union. When workers were told that they must produce as many nails as possible, they produced vast quantities of tiny and useless nails. When told they would be evaluated by the weight of the nails, they produced enormous and useless nails. The lesson of Campbell’s law: Do not attach high stakes to evaluations, or both the measure and the outcome will become fraudulent.High stakes testing in schools is pernicious, Ravitch writes:
The children from elite homes are convinced by their test scores that they deserve their high status; their scores demonstrate their superiority. And children of the poor learn early on that they rank poorly; their test scores confirm their lowly status.Source: New Republic
Does it take Trump to make badges go mainstream?
Perversely, it might take something like the Trump administration to make Open Badges work at scale. Why? Because Republicans don’t trust Higher Education:
Is support for higher ed fragmenting along political lines? It is if you believe the recent Pew poll showing Republicans’ distrust of higher ed is growing relative to Democrats (on a nearly 2-to-1 margin) is not fake news... In any case, look for Trump’s Department of Education to push on the trend toward more “practical” vocational learning and not just apprenticeships. Higher Ed Act proposals this year may push to open up federal financial aid beyond the credit-hour.Things, of course, are different in the US to the rest of the world. In Europe I think we've always had a different, and more positive, relationship to vocational education.
Source: Education Design Lab