AIMS Fails Learning 101

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The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) has just released its report about our public education system. On the local news, the Director of AIMS urged the New Brunswick Government to bring back standardized testing. The Minister, Kelly Lamrock, is supposed to reply this afternoon. We’ll see what stuff our politicians are made of.

So what does it matter that our local high school received a C+? About as much as the fact that I got a D in Grade 9 French class. I now speak French fluently. I also got an A in Grade 12 Algebra and my math is abysmal, even after two years of university level math. Face it; in the long run, there is no correlation between success in life and the grades you got.

Creating a lovely matrix filled with absolute numbers may look pretty and may get you some press time but it fails to inform us about the state of our education system. The time to measure is several years after graduation, when all of the short-term test results are irrelevant and what you really learned is what you have left.

Our neighbour to the South has been pushing standardized testing through its “No Child Left Behind” legislation, and look at the results, according to Monty Neil:

Key problems with the law include over-emphasizing standardized testing, narrowing curriculum and instruction to focus on test preparation; over-identifying schools in need of improvement; using sanctions that do not help improve schools; inappropriately excluding or retaining in grade low-scoring children to boost test results; and inadequate funding. The law not only punishes schools, it damages educational quality, particularly for those the law purports to help – low income children, children of color, those with learning disabilities, and those who are just learning English.

Is this the direction that AIMS wants to take our system?

Standardized tests tell us little about learning, and report cards for schools only create “talk points” for partisan debate about education. Standardized tests, for students or for schools, are all about control. Yeats said that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. Fire is much harder to control.

Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth and The Case Against Standardized Testing, has this to say about grades:

Second, I’d been looking for an alternative to grades because research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. The ultimate goal of authentic assessment must be the elimination of grades.

In another article, Kohn refers to a Journal of Educational Psychology study that examined just how actively students were engaged in learning while taking standarized tests:

To be sure, there are plenty of students who think deeply and score well on tests—and plenty of students who do neither. But, as a rule, it appears that standardized-test results are positively correlated with a shallow approach to learning.

Therefore, I will not grade the AIMS report, but rather examine it from a performance-based pass/fail perspective:

  • Does the report help policy makers to improve learning in the educational system? Fail
  • Does the report inform the general public about the core issues in public education? Fail
  • Does the report raise the public profile of AIMS? Pass

Phone oligopolies ask to deregulate

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I came across this PR piece from Bell-Aliant on TechEast today:

Aliant announced today that it has applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for forbearance from regulation of local residential telephone service in nine competitive exchanges in the Halifax area. [snip] With forbearance, customers in these areas will experience the full benefits of competition, with greater value through increased choice and flexible offers that can be delivered in a more timely manner.

A little more digging and I connected to an article on CBC:

The Conservative government’s move last week came against resistance from the CRTC, whose rules were intended to handicap the big telephone companies until they lost 25 per cent or more of phone users to competitors.

[Industry Minister] Bernier expects that the decision to liberate the big players will result in rapid price reductions, but consumer advocates fear the established operators will use their new freedom to squelch emerging competitors.

I don’t feel that competition is real when you only have a few companies in the market. For example, there is little competition for wireless data in Canada, as shown in this graph by Tom Purves:

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I’d like to re-iterate a post I wrote last year, which discussed the April 2006 edition of The Atlantic. It included five past articles on the subject of Markets & Morals. Here are two pertinent quotes, from the 19th and 20th Centuries respectively.

Henry Demarist Lloyd wrote in March 1881, “When monopolies succeed, the people fail”  and that “The nation is the engine of the people”, in his piece denouncing the practices of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. There is little doubt today about the world wide power and influence of monopolies and oligopolies.

In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith warned of the dangers of blindly having faith in our industrial/corporatist systems:

The greater danger is in the subordination of belief to the needs of the modern industrial system – These are that technology is always good; that economic growth is always good; that firms must always expand; that consumption of goods is the principal source of happiness; that idleness is wicked; and that nothing should interfere with the priority we accord to technology, growth, and increased consumption.

Just as each generation must work to preserve its democracy, so we have to constantly keep corporate interests at bay, for no matter how much NewSpeak they put forth about the “full benefits of competition”, the truth is that we, the citizenry, are being hornswoggled.

Blogs that get you thinking

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I’ve been tagged with the thinking blogger meme, which asks you ” … to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all – blogs that really get you thinking!”. This came via the screaming pages, and I must say thanks for the recommendation.

In what I believe is the spirit of this meme, I’m not going to tag any of my standard and essential blogs, like Jay, Jon, Rob, or Stephen (he’s already been tagged anyway).

Here are five highly-recommended blogs that make me think:

  • Nine Shift has strongly influenced my perspective on the changes that we are witnessing as a society and an economy. It’s also changed my understanding about why change happens. I would recommend the book and the blog for anyone in North America interested in community development.
  • Donald Clark’s Plan B is filled with thoughtful and sometimes contrarian opinions about the learning field. He has taken on Bloom’s taxonomy, instructional design, education and Freud.
  • The Eide Neurolearning Blog, written by two doctors, is a wealth of information about how the brain works. The scientific studies reported here should be required reading for all educators.
  • I have saved and tagged more articles from Anecdote than any other blog. This Australian multi-writer blog is filled with practical information about the power of narrative for organisations and learning.
  • The name tells all, with think:lab by Christian Long. I don’t know how Christian can write so much and so well (perhaps they have 26 hour days in Texas) but he covers all aspects of learning environments, from the physical to the ephemeral.

Take these five blogs, plus the other 145 that I read, and there’s plenty to think about.

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Here are the rules, should you wish to continue this meme [I always wonder if propogating these memes is a good thing or not, but I figured in this case it may introduce readers to something new or different, so that can’t be bad]:

  1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
  2. Link to the original post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
  3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

Grassroots Social Software

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Meredith Farkas has created Five Weeks to a Social Library, a site that includes many knowledge artifacts from a well-structured online course. The material is not just for librarians, with an outline that looks like this:

Introduction
Week 1: Blogs
Week 2: RSS & Social Bookmarking
Week 3: Wikis
Week 4: Social Networking, Flickr & MMOGs
Week 5: Selling Social Software
Final Project
Successful Completion List

The structure is similar to the informl learning unworkshops we conducted last year, but what I really like about this site are links to the participants, their blogs and their final projects, so you can follow the learning process. The site is built on Drupal, an excellent system for multi-user blogs and community resources.

Note that Week 1 covers blogs, which I have come to see as the primary building blocks for the social web. One reason that blogs are so persistent is because they are personal, and owners take pride in their maintenance.

Conversations

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Blogs are great for conversations, but often fall off the radar screen when they go beyond the first page and are left dangling.

One of the older conversations here is about Aliant’s connection speed. I had some woes with my ISP, which were finally addressed after a year of complaints and figuring out if anyone else had similar problems. My recent problems with Skype (last post) may be related to my ISP and it seeems that others have problems with Aliant’s service, namely that XBox live doesn’t work with their fastest service.

The homework question has garnered a lot of comments, as had earlier posts on homeschooling. Most of us have gone though the public education system and many have an opinion. I have come to believe that the core of the problem is an education system that was created for very different reasons than what we need today. Many “educational” activities are ineffective or counter-productive to learning, yet they continue based on tradition instead of sound science. If the evidence shows that an activity has little purpose, then we should abandon it. Homework is only one activity that lacks evidence to support its continuance. Subject-based curriculum, age-based cohorts and reliance on unsound models like Bloom’s Taxonomy to prescribe learning activities are other examples. This conversation on homework has been picked up in the community and we may even have a radio spot in the near future.

There also have been some comments to an older post on Education’s Three Conflicting Pillars. It’s great to see new discussion after several months of quiet, which is why I keep comments open.

This week there were some updates to the state of the NB elearning industry, thanks to Ben. Companies come and companies go, but many of us choose to stay. I’m on my third business card since I retired from the Army in 1998.

Finally, I’d like to quote Shawn, at Anecdote, on the importance of conversation, “… most learning comes through interacting with people. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.“

Packet Shaping

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Michael Geist reports that Rogers engages in packet shaping on its network:

For the past 18 months, it has been open secret that Rogers engages in packet shaping, conduct that limits the amount of available bandwidth for certain services such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Rogers denied the practice at first, but effectively acknowledged it in late 2005. Net neutrality advocates regularly point to traffic shaping as a concern since they fear that Rogers could limit bandwidth to competing content or services.

Skype is a peer-to-peer application and one which I have used for several years, though it doesn’t seem to work on my Bell-Aliant Ultra DSL connection. Some people have suggested that Skype’s service is just getting worse, but my experience is that it works for everyone on my contact list but me. When I talk, my speech is broken. At the same time, Google Talk works just fine. I’m wondering if Aliant is testing out packet shaping on our local switch and has yet to roll it out to the entire network.

Anyway, it’s clear that telecom oligopolies like Rogers have no problems applying these dirty tactics in their search for profits. According to NetNeutrality.ca:

Net Neutrality in Canada is the principle that consumers should be in control of what content, services and applications they use on the public Internet.

It’s a simple concept that has wide-ranging implications on how the Internet operates.

“When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end” – Sir Tim Berners Lee.

It is our belief that the Internet is more than just the physical infrastructure over which it operates. It is a vibrant marketplace and an entirely new format for free expression, even a political landscape and a tool for free organization. Some ISPs in Canada however, are overstepping their role and cannot separate their participation in this network from their component ownership and commercial interests.

Community Supported Agriculture

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We had our first meeting of the Sackville Food Co-op last night, with about 25 people in attendance and several more stating their interest. A couple of local farmers were there too, and it seems that we will get the operation going within the next month. We’ll have a website up soon and I’ll post the link here.

My own interest in the co-op is to develop our local agricultural sector. Getting good food right now is a secondary issue. A term that I heard for the first time last night was community supported agriculture (CSA), what I believe is the essential component of this endeavour:

In basic terms, CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. Typically, members or “share-holders” of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer’s salary. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s bounty throughout the growing season, as well as satisfaction gained from reconnecting to the land and participating directly in food production. Members also share in the risks of farming, including poor harvests due to unfavorable weather or pests. By direct sales to community members, who have provided the farmer with working capital in advance, growers receive better prices for their crops, gain some financial security, and are relieved of much of the burden of marketing.

I’m sure that the co-op will be an active member of our Commons, once it’s built.

CGI Informal Learning Case Study

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Jay Cross refers to the March Issue of CGI Technology Viewpoints, which covers this Canadian company’s experience in implementing informal learning practices. CGI is discussed in detail in Jay’s book.

This is a good reminder for the naysayers (it can’t be done here) to see what a large corporation can actuallly implement. Here is CGI’s “bottom line” on informal learning:

  1. When creating an environment that blends a rich mixture of available technologies to drive optimal collaboration, organizations don’t need to invent anything fundamentally new.
  2. Be creative, taking advantage of what’s already in place within the enterprise, and look at open source options as an inexpensive but viable way to build a robust collaboration infrastructure.
  3. Collaboration doesn’t require a large systems integration exercise when you leverage what’s already readily available and proven.

LCB Big Question for April

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The Learning Circuits Blog asks, what should Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and Off-the-Shelf Content Vendors do today in the face of more demanding customers, lower margins and more competition?

I’m not sure what vendors should do, but as their business model has been declining, some of us have been promoting open source technologies and business models as well as do-it-ourselves informal learning approaches. During my exploration of shareable digital content, through a Creative Commons search, I came across this photo:

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Here’s a post I made a couple of years ago on This New Business of Learning.

Jumping In

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Imagine walking into a cocktail party that has been going on for a few hours and jumping in to the conversation. Blogs are like that. They flow along and different people join in the conversation from time to time. I monitor about 150 blogs and even if I don’t read each post, I have a general idea of what’s flowing by, so that I can jump in when I feel like it.

Behind most blogs lies the story of the writer and the community.  Shawn, at Anecdote, has this to say about stories, “Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.”

To use blogs for learning effectively, you have to jump in and go with the flow for a while. Understanding what is behind the writing as well as the conversations around each post then gives the necessary context.  Learning with blogs isn’t just about finding a useful fact here or there, but more of engaging in multiple stories that flow by, sometimes mixing and other times diverging. Following these flows is an acquired skill. It’s a meta-learning skill for the internet age that just might be worth developing. Jumping in is the first step.