Wilfred Rubens recently wrote a (Dutch) post asking whether the current cloud computing trend will influence how we learn. I posted a reaction in the comments linking to a couple of Kevin Kelly’s posts on the Technium (if you haven’t subscribed to the Technium, you should right now).
Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice. Some things become easier and cheaper, others become harder and more expensive to do or prevent under different technological conditions. The interaction between these technological-economic feasibility spaces, and the social responses to these changes -both in terms of institutional changes, like law and regulation, and in terms of changing social practices- define the qualities of a period.
So, I know for a fact that cloud computing technology will create new feasibility spaces for social practice and I am sure that this will include learning. The question is not whether cloud computing will change the way we learn, the question should be how will it change the way we learn. In that regard, I think George Siemens has started asking the right questions.
Just over a year ago I wrote a Dutch newsletter post about the State of Moodle in the Netherlands, Belgium and Surinam. I said that I would repeat the exercise in a year’s time. So here we go.
First a table showing the growth of Moodle and the Dutch Moodle user association (Ned-Moove) in these three countries:
Country
31-12-2007
06-01-2009
Change
Registered Moodle Sites
Netherlands
441
653
+48%
Belgium
124
157
+27%
Surinam
4
3
-25%
Total
569
813
+43%
Ned-Moove Members
Netherlands
86
110
+28%
Belgium
14
17
+21%
Surinam
8
8
–
Total
(includes other countries)
108
135
+25%
Ned-Moove Small Sponsors
Netherlands
3
6
+100%
Belgium
1
1
–
Surinam
0
0
Total
4
7
+75%
Ned-Moove Large Sponsors
Netherlands
5
4
-20%
Belgium
0
0
–
Surinam
0
0
–
Total
5
4
-20
It is easy to see that Moodle has grown significantly in the last year. I am a bit disappointed that the growth in Ned-Moove memberships has not kept up with the growth in registered websites. This is something that I will try and change for next year.
I have created two montage images of the Belgian and Dutch registered Moodle sites. They give you a general idea of which colours and themes are currently the most popular (click on the images to enlarge them, note that the first one is 3.8 MB and the second one is 12.6 MB). Just like last year, I noticed that many of the sites use a standard Moodle theme (e.g. formal white, custom corners) with some very minor customisations. To me this means that Moodle HQ should make sure that all packaged standard themes are of a very high quality (currently they are not) and that some of them should allow for easy switching of the header image.
Belgian Sites
Dutch Sites
We all know that many schools in secondary education use Moodle. What some people might not know is how many other organisations use Moodle for their learning, training or teaching needs. I have gone through most of the registered sites and want to highlight some of the more interesting ones for you to peruse at your leisure:
The one site that I probably like the most is In de Groep. Jaap Marsman has done an excellent job creating a site geared for primary school students. He is pushing what he can do with the platform and that is great.
In de Groep
On to the State of Dutch Speaking Moodle 2009-2010!
More than 140 well known authors have answered the question and it provides for fascinating reading. What struck me was how many of the writers see some technological development as game changing.
The mobile phone. Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own one. (Neither the pen nor the typewriter came even close to that level of adoption, nor did the automobile.) That puts global connectivity, immense computational power, and access to all the world’s knowledge amassed over many centuries, in everyone’s hands.
Many match a development in technology, to a change in how we educate and improve our knowledge (usually to then make this world a much better place; most of these writers are very optimistic).
Chris Anderson (curator of the fabulous TED) has a very rosy-eyed view on how the low physical cost of digital distribution will transform global education through the dissemination of knowledge and inspiration:
Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students.
Of the six billion people on our planet, at least four billions are not participating in the knowledge revolution. Hundreds of millions are born to illiterate mothers, never drink clean water, have no medical care and never use a phone. […] The “buzz words” of distant learning, individualized learning, and all other technology-driven changes in education, remain largely on paper, far from becoming a daily reality in the majority of the world’s schools.
He then asks a very interesting question:
How come the richest person on the globe is not someone who had a brilliant idea about using technology for bringing education to the billions of school children of the world?
Next he posits that the time does seem ripe for this to change:
Globalisation forces us to see the enormous knowledge gaps in the world.
Technology advances make designing tailor-made solutions for schools and education worth considering.
The generation that grew up with computers is know turning up to teach in the classroom.
Children participate in web-based social networks forcing education to radically adapt.
A connected child cannot be taught the same way people were taught decades ago.
Do you think Harari is right? Will we live to see a game changing development in education through the use of technology?
The index looks at the ability of thirteen European Union countries to develop and deploy their human capital. Human capital is defined as:
[..] the cost of formal and informal education expressed in euros and multiplied by the number of people living in each country.
[..]
Specifically the index identifies and defines four types of human capital and analyses the way they collectively contribute to the wealth of European citizens:
Human Capital Endowment. This figure measures the cost of all types of education and training in a particular country per person active in the labour force [..]. Specifically, we look at five different types of learning for each active person: learning on the job, adult education, university, primary and secondary schooling and parental education. The figure is subsequently depreciated to account for obsolescence in the existing knowledge base and some level of forgetting.
Human Capital Utilisation. This figure looks at how much of a country’s human capital stock is actually deployed. It differs from traditional employment ratios in that measures human capital as a proportion of the overall population.
Human Capital Productivity. This figure measures the productivity of human capital. It is derived by dividing gross domestic product by all of the human capital employed in that country. This diverges from traditional productivity measures, in that the figure takes account of how well educated employed labour is, instead of just how many hours are being worked.
Demography and Employment. This figure looks at existing economic, demographic and migratory trends to estimate the number of people who will be employed (or not employed) in the year 2030 in each country.
When the thirteen European countries are ranked on each of the four dimensions and then the rankings are summed the following table results (four is the best possible score, 52 the worst):
Rank
Country
Overall score
1
Sweden
8
2
Denmark
14
3
United Kingdom
19
4
Netherlands
21
5
Austria
23
6
Finland
29
7
Ireland
30
8
France
30
9
Belgium
31
10
Germany
36
11
Portugal
37
12
Spain
38
13
Italy
48
This policy brief is a treasure trove of fascinating and insightful statistical information. The author analyses the data and even gives some policy advice.
Did you know that Sweden invests 2.5 times as much in education as Portugal? The difference is biggest in parental education.
Did you know that the Netherlands leads in human capital utilisation? 64% of the total human capital stock is utilised. This is due to our policy schemes like the Life Course Saving Scheme (“Levensloopregeling”) and the abolishing of early retirement schemes in 2004.
Did you know that the rapid expansion of the utilisation of human capital has depressed the growth of human capital productivity? Only Sweden and Finland have managed to keep human capital productivity stable. The human capital productivity of the Netherlands is falling rapidly.
Did you know that (if current employment and immigration patterns continue) Germany and Italy will lose 8.7 million employees by 2030, together accounting for 70% percent of the total European drop? In Italy 60 year olds will outnumber 20 year olds by two to one in 2030.
Based on the Human Capital Index methodology a couple of policy recommendations are made. Some of these are obvious (increase the quality and the quantity of spending on education, Europe spend less on education than its OECD peers), others might be controversial (being open to immigration of skilled labour: “By 2030, can Germans or Italians learn to live in a society where every other 20-year old is a foreigner?”).
For most of the years that I worked as a teacher at the Open Schoolgemeenschap Bijlmer I was a part time coach for new teachers. The goal was to try and help them be a better educator in a new school. I always had the feeling that my input had very little effect: some teachers seemed to get it intuitively, others would never learn. Malcom Gladwell, author of the highly enjoyable The Tipping Point and Blink has written an article for the New Yorker titled Most Likely to Succeed, How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?. It partially addresses this question.
He introduces the topic by explaining how difficult it is for scouts to predict which successful college football quarterbacks will be successful in the National Football League (NFL). These scouts have developed different methodologies to select players for the draft, but they haven’t hit on a great predictor yet.
There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they how they’ll do once they are hired. So how do we know how to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching.
The quality of teachers is highly variable. There is a big difference between the best teachers and bad teachers:
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effect are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.
Bob Pianta is doing research by taping teachers as they explain things and interact with a class. They then closely watch these tapes and try to extract the competencies of a great teacher.
Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers – that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. [..]
A group of researchers [..] investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees and certifications – as much as they appear related to teaching prowess – turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
Koumin did research into desist behaviour (stopping some kind of misbehaviour). He found that teachers need to have an ability which he calls “withisness” which he defines as:
“[..] a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head’.” It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withishness. But how do you know whether someone has withisness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?
In the field of financial-advice, companies have the same problem: no one knows in advance who will become a high performing financial adviser. Recruiters in that field typically interview a thousand people (keeping the gates wide open) and pick out about 1 in 20. These recruits will go through an extensive training camp in which they need to obtain a minimum number of clients and have a minimum number of meetings in a certain amount of time. If they manage this, then they are hired.
This example suggest that for the teaching profession:
[..] we shouldn’t be raising the standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree – and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of [the financial-advice field’s] training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated.
Is this research valuable for the Dutch policy makers in trying to solve our looming educational crisis? I have to admit I haven’t followed Dutch educational policy very closely but I can imagine a couple of things that are relevant to this topic:
The Dutch currently have a shortage of teachers. This shortage will get bigger in the next couple of years. Schools have trouble finding teachers for certain topics, let alone find great teachers. Lowering the barrier for HBO and WO educated people to be let into the teaching profession might become a necessity. It is good to know that this will not necessarily be a bad thing for the quality of the teaching (my years as a coach confirm this for me).
How do you ethically arrange for affordable apprenticeships in schools? When the budding financial advisers fail, they only incur costs to the company that was trying to hire them. When an apprentice teacher fails, a whole group of children will have had a bad educational experience. We need a framework in which we can safely try and find out who is a great teacher and who isn’t.
Gladwell’s article refers to teacher salaries. These are currently extremely rigid. I used to say that I could predict what I would earn in 15 years time. If we want to rate teachers based on their actual performance, then we should also try and go to a system which rewards excellent performance in some way. The introduction of “scale 11” in the Netherlands has not had this effect. Which school in the Netherlands will be the first to pay their teachers according to performance? I would love to see that happen!
