Tag Archives: audience

#28daysofwriting – it starts with one⤴

from @ Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

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A confession: our team at NoTosh has had blog guilt for years, and we keep having tense conversations about why we can't better share the amazing work the team and our clients get up to.

We developed a new website two years ago, with a flurry of writing, but haven't updated it half as much as we'd want to. We all have our own individual blogs which we update when... we have a holiday. If our time is not spent in the high energy, high adrenalin of engaging with thousands of teachers at an event, or the intensity of one business leader over the table, it is in the deep troughs of loneliness and boredom that come with sitting on planes for hours, or facing off the computer screen at the home office. 

Well, I know one thing: a good idea never came out of a computer. Great ideas come out of people's heads, and they come from experiences that have provoked them, jarred them, annoyed them, made them laugh or made them cry. The most vibrant of these experiences are not found on our Facebook walls; they are in the world around us.

My colleague Tom, who came up with this idea of 28 minutes of uninterrupted writing over each of February's 28 days, has kicked off what might become a kind of 'writers' anonymous' (indeed, I've fallen off the wagon twice already in this paragraph, helping my daughter work out how to programme her Dash and Dot). A group of fellow bloggers - writers who share their stuff straightaway - who can provide the mutual kick up the backside that no-one else is going to give you.

What do I plan to do with my 28 days? I have no plan at all. Most of my writing is planned - my 60,000 words of book writing was planned. Most of it is to deadlines - while I wrote my book I underestimated the effort it would take to also write 50,000 words of a new Masters course. A large chunk of my writing just needs done (if you've had an email from me this past week, that's you).

But my 28 days of writing, no matter how much arse-kicking my fellow blogging travellers give me, does not need done, and this is no doubt what will compel me to thump out my 28 minutes, every day, without fail.

My only foreseeable challenge with this 'writers' anonymous'? My writing is akin to an alcoholic's drinking - I go cold turkey for weeks on end, but once I start, I find it hard to stop. Keeping to just one 28 minute stint a day will be the challenge.

Here endeth the lesson / the first 28 minutes.

When is failure a failure? Maria Joao Pires has an answer…⤴

from @ Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

The 1st Movement of Mozart's D Minor Concerto is an obsession about feeling loneliness and despair. That is exactly as virtuoso pianist Maria Joao Pires must have felt as she realised that she had practiced the wrong concerto for a summer concert series.

This clip is a wonderful example of agile leadership. In the moment of panic, the conductor takes control, not with a baton or by stopping the orchestra, but with a beautiful embracing smile, and a jovial reassurance that she would manage.

Pires then takes the leadership role on, summoning her memory, her expertise, talent and prior learning, to tackle the new concerto she hadn't been prepared to play in the first place.

When we talk about failure in learning, it is vital that we talk about failure and what we learn from it. Failure for failure's sake is a tragedy. Pires had 'done her homework' and knew the other concerto (and probably many others) by heart, from experience. She had also done her homework in being able to 'make the show go on', regardless. But no doubt, she'll rehearse with the orchestra before future live performances, she'll make the time to have that preparatory phone call. Thankfully, her learning gives her the opportunity, post-performance, to try again and get it right.

Most learning in school, though, does not give time for failure to be learned from. Instead, even though half or more of the students in the classroom may have scope for improvement, teachers feel compelled to "move on", to "get on" to the next piece of content, or to get onto the test. Really, in an ideal world, the student makes the decision about when they are 'done', ready to move on to the next thing, and often they will know what that next thing is.

Where the teacher holds all the planning in their hands, though, when the teacher perceives curriculum and success criteria as teacher-destined documents, and not as documents to flesh out hand in hand with students, this 'ideal world' does not happen.

Make the first step of 2015 towards letting students really do their homework: give them the curricular and success criteria tools we've normally kept behind the teacher's desk, and work out with them how their projects, their ideas and their ambitions meet them halfway.

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Inside Out Thinking Down Under - provocation for learning

Inside Out Thinking Down Under – provocation for learning⤴

from @ Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Provocations lead to deep, broad learning, and students tend to learn more, faster as a result. I've been showing educators how this is so, and how to do it, for the past five years with my motley crew. New Zealand educator Rob Ferguson woke me up this morning with a tweet, about how a provocation (the video, above) led to his students not just "doing art" for their 10th Grade assessments, but "doing art" to make a difference, as part of a global movement of artists:

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This might seem simple, but at play is some good, deep thinking. The provocation, through the video clip, comes at the beginning of learning, along with many other resources and content sources in an immersion that will contradict, delight, frustrate and generate a discord. This is not PBL where the teacher creates just one problem or open-ended 'essential' question, but a more realworld scenario where conflicting and provocative takes on several subject matters create confusion and discord. This discord is what sets students off to "problem-find" for themselves, seeking the genuine core of the many problems and many potentially 'essential' questions being presented. Having synthesised down to their own problem, or "how might we" statement, students will set out to ideate and prototype their solutions to the problem, or their way of showing off what they have learned. Often the ingredients used in the provocation will reappear in the prototypes, of which the photo above is one example.

Simple on the surface, deep, complex, frustrating, confusing learning on the underbelly: that is what we mean by design thinking for learning. And not a 3D printer or robot in sight!

You can read more about the use of provocation to create innovation in your school in my latest book, How To Come Up With Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen.

Who worries or cares about what you’ve written?⤴

from @ ICT-Echo


I pose this question partly because I've returned to blogging, after spending 20 months only tweeting. The other part is an awareness of the quality of writing that is posted online and offline by students, academics and colleagues.

Where do I start? Julie Andrew's would suggest at the very beginning.

When I started blogging I strongly believed (and still do) that you need an audience. See my first posting: I think you're crazy just like me. But what should the audience care about when reading a posting? Should they be judging the author by the quality of their writing or the standard of written English. As the author should I worry about what readers think of me as they read my rantings? Well if I want to raise my profile and esteem then I have to worry about finding, keeping and influencing my audience. And to that end I need to self-edit my work. I definitely need to spellcheck it. And I seriously need to proof-read it.

So why doesn't everyone take care with their online writing. I appreciate it when reading student essays and assignments when they have bothered to take time with their writing. As I often say, "Nobody teaches you to read bad writing; so learning to read and assess poorly written essays takes some time to master." When I struggle to make sense of a 10 line sentence or translate the phonetic spelling I'm wondering who this student is and what they were thinking when they wrote the essay. I wonder if it was in the early hours of the morning or if they have done any reading. And I wonder why I have to read this bad writing.

But let me stop picking on my students they are learners after all and are on a journey to improve their writing. Let me turn my attention to my colleges: those who one might assume know better. The academics have been through University and have submitted numerous essays. They have written articles and reports and authored books. They have developed their skills in written communications. But these skills have been crafted in the analogue world: pre-digital. These colleagues are now being let loose on the web.

Because digital is easy to edit and amend they seem to have reduced their care in the work they post to the wide world. They give little thought to what the audience will think because if anyone comments on an error it can be removed in a moment  from the offending page on the web. But it only matters if there's an audience.

This audience has two options: prejudice or protest. With prejudice you can judge the author as poor and assume future work as being unworthy. We do this with music, film, television and books. Obviously this will tarnish the author's esteem and ultimately their reputation. With protest you can spend time engaging with the author to alert them to the error of their ways. But why should we care about the quality of the work when the author hasn't; why should we be the editor?

So to my colleagues I say: "take care of what you write and learn the rules (guidelines) for writing online." Then I won't think less of you than I already do ;)