Tag Archives: standards

Good for the Goose? Norman Tebbit’s Other Test⤴

from

When I was a boy in the early 1980’s, Norman Tebbit was an almost permanent feature on the news and airwaves. He was, from 1981 to 1987, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. He was considered by his critics to be uncompromising, unforgiving, and unyielding; but for those same qualities he was as loved as he was loathed.



If there's one single test associated with Norman Tebbit it is undoubtedly his infamous 1999 cricket test. Coined by him, it arose because of the perceived lack of loyalty shown by South Asian and Caribbean immigrants for the English cricket team. Tebbit controversially suggested that the test should be applied to the children of these immigrants to assess whether they had genuinely integrated into this country.

However, in this post, I'm going to focus on an entirely different test: one that Tebbit failed twice, and one which, I hope, illuminates the assessment principle of reliability and one of the responses to unreliability; generosity.

Upwardly Mobile


I'm going to begin by relating a story that Tebbit tells in his 1989 autobiography Upwardly Mobile. The date is 1953, and Tebbit was flying high as an officer in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force. He was an ambitious young man and he wanted a job as a pilot for the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).

At the time, BOAC policy was to train its pilots to be multi-skilled; able to fly the plane and if necessary navigate it as well. Consequently, to become a fully-trained pilot Tebbit had to become a fully-trained navigator. The technical examination for the navigation licence was, he tells us, of a very high academic standard with, all told, twenty weeks of intensive instruction and many hours of swotting at home.

Thankfully, he passed all the components of the exam, all that is except one - the signals practical. That’s not a bad outcome; he’d learned the necessary discipline of self-study, and now all he had to do was focus his attention on the remaining, outstanding component. The requirement of the failed assessment was to send and receive six Morse code words per minute sent by an Aldis lamp or flashed by airfield beacons. Tebbit says that he found the six words per minute requirement difficult enough without the added difficulties of the media. And so, he failed his second attempt.

Not unsurprisingly he was nervous when he went for his second re-sit. He took his seat in a large hall with forty other candidates, and to his great surprise the examiner called him out to the front.

—You know the rules, don’t you?
—Yes Sir.
—If you fail any subject three times, including this practical one, you have to retake the complete examination.
—Yes Sir, I do.
—Then you mustn’t fail, must you?
—No Sir, except, you see Sir, I’m not much good at this.
—I know that, so if you miss anything give me a nod and I’ll repeat it - oh and if all else fails I’ve put you next to an RAF signaller!

Needless to say, he passed. 
Or did he? 
Did he pass, or was he passed?

Unreliability and Generosity


Let’s consider the helpful examiner’s actions. How would you describe what he did? Cheating? Forgiving? A lowering of the academic standard? A helpful hand-up to someone who was obviously capable of flying a plane? Does the answer depend on your political prejudices?

Reliability is defined by the Cambridge Assessment Network as the extent to which the results of an assessment are consistent and replicable. So if an assessment is highly reliable it means that if a student took a different version of the test, or if a different examiner marked the test, they would get exactly the same result. I’ve written more about reliability here.

However, when assessors consider an assessment to be unreliable, generosity is used as a compensatory technique. Did the examiner think it ridiculous that pilots should be fully-trained navigators as well? Or, did the examiner disagree with the two-strike rule? Did he think it overly harsh, an inefficient waste of everyone’s time?

On using Generosity to Combat Unreliability


Tom Benton in his Cambridge Assessment Network paper On using Generosity to Combat Unreliability begins from an acceptance that no assessment system is perfect and that by focusing on the risk for individual students, we might logically decide how much generosity is required. In particular, Benton examines how to adjust assessment grading when reliability decreases, such as during unforeseen events like exam cancellations. (The COVID lockdown carry-on is the obvious context). The article proposes different strategies for setting grade boundaries, including maintaining the original grade distribution, ensuring no student is disadvantaged by being awarded a lower grade than deserved, or maximizing overall classification accuracy. It introduces concepts like "true scores" versus "observed scores" and quantifies the impact of various reliability levels on misclassification rates across different grades. It can all get statistically complex but ultimately, Benton argues that a logical application of "benefit of the doubt" can lead to justifiable changes in grade distributions during periods of lower assessment reliability.

This positive light on generosity has implications for how it is managed. Should it be left to individual examiners, as it seems in the case of the signals practical resit, or should institutional authorities transparently bake generosity into their assessment strategy?

One might easily think that that question would depend upon the social significance of the assessment. Is it easier to tolerate generosity in a low-stakes school assessment but not in assessment taken by an apprentice electrician if the outcome is that he might electrocute himself, or worse, others, as a consequence of being passed rather than passing? It’s probably worth remembering that Tebbit’s examination was to allow him to fly passenger jets. There are no easy or obvious answers.

‘You're certainly relatively competent': assessor bias due to recent experiences


One further interesting area of possibility is to be found in Yeates et al's academic paper, ‘You're certainly relatively competent': assessor bias due to recent experiences. This research paper sheds an interesting light on the psychology of how assessors make poor judgements.

The study's context is medical education, where inter-rater score variability is a known challenge. The researchers conducted an experiment with consultant doctors assessing videos of medical trainees. They split the assessors into two groups: one viewed trainee performances in descending order of proficiency (good, then borderline, then poor), and the other viewed them in ascending order (poor, then borderline, then good).

The study found significant "contrast effects" in assessors' judgement. This means that assessors who had recently seen better performances tended to give lower scores to subsequent candidates, while those who had recently seen poorer performances tended to give higher scores to subsequent candidates. This poor judgement was found to be present involving perceptual judgement and judgements about abstract concepts alike. In essence, differences between the current candidate and recently seen candidates were overemphasized, leading to scores that unduly diverged.

Yeates et al identify a number of key findings that could shed some light on the examiner's actions. The most relevant for this post include:

Normative vs. Criterion-Referenced: The findings suggest that assessors often use "normative" (comparative to others) rather than purely "criterion-referenced" (against a fixed standard) decision-making, and that these internal "norms" are easily influenced by recent experiences.

Lack of Insight: Interestingly, the assessors' confidence in their ratings did not correlate with their susceptibility to this poor judgement, suggesting a lack of insight into how their judgement might be influenced by prior candidates.

Within their “lack of insight” finding, there might be further possibilities such as: 

Lack of Professional Reflection: Assessors, like professionals in many fields, often operate under time constraints and may not be explicitly trained or given the structured opportunities for deep, critical self-reflection on their assessment practices. If they lack the "tools" (e.g., frameworks for poor judgement detection, consistent feedback on their own ratings) or the "time" (owing to workload pressures) to engage in meaningful reflection, then their lack of insight into their own poor judgement is less about malicious intent and more about systemic limitations. In my experience, while reflection is encouraged in principle, the practical support, training, and protected time for truly meaningful self-assessment and debriefing are often scarce. This points to a need for better professional development, support, and a culture that values reflective practice in assessment. If assessors aren't equipped to critically analyze their own judgement and the factors influencing them, unconscious poor judgement are much more likely to persist unchecked. 

Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how people with low ability at a task often overestimate their competence, precisely due to their lack of metacognitive ability to recognize their own errors. Conversely, highly competent individuals may underestimate their relative competence. In the context of the Yeates et al. paper's finding that assessors lacked insight into their susceptibility to poor judgement despite their confidence, it directly aligns with the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon. If assessors are unconsciously incompetent at detecting or mitigating their own poor judgement, they may confidently believe they are fair and objective even when they are not. This "unrealized or unacknowledged" lack of competence in poor judgement mitigation could be a significant factor.

Ultimately Yeates et al conclude that these cognitive predilections can significantly influence assessors' judgements in ways that are unfair to candidates. There is a question here begging to be asked: unfair to which candidates?

Whilst Benton introduces "generosity" as a logical response to unreliability, the Yeates et al. paper delves into subconscious poor judgement that could contribute to an examiner's subjective decisions. In this new light, the decision of Tebbit's examiner might not have been a deliberate act of "generosity" or "cheating" in the conventional sense, but perhaps an unconscious "contrast effect." If the examiner had just come from assessing candidates who performed significantly worse, Tebbit's "not quite good enough" performance might have seemed "relatively competent" in contrast.

Or, had he, perhaps, seen Tebbit’s scores for the other components? Were Tebbit's scores perhaps higher than his peers and that through experience the examiner recognized Tebbit’s potential? Under those circumstances, did he think that the assessment was unfairly disadvantageous to a perfectly good pilot? We, of course, cannot know. But it is not insignificant that these questions come so easily to mind.

This latter possibility raises a further intriguing question about the assessor decision-making process: could a similar psychological effect, when an assessor views the same candidate's strong performance in two or three components of an assessment, influence their judgement of a weaker performance in an another less well performed component? In other words, is it possible that the examiner, knowing Tebbit's stellar performance in previous sections, was unconsciously swayed to pass him on the final component – a fascinating area we'll delve into in a future post.
 

Unfinished Business


Nearly forty years after his BOAC assessment, Tebbit left front-line politics. In the final chapter of his subsequent 1991 book Unfinished Business, Tebbit set out the direction of what a post-Thatcher Tebbit government would have looked like. I agree with much of it. But something very particular caught my attention. 

Tebbit correctly frames his criticism of the contemporary regretful state of the education system on the socialist reforms of the 1960's. Without lapsing into nostalgic sentimentality, Tebbit praises the one-time tripartite structure of grammar, technical and secondary modern schooling which, in their own ways, served the best interests of their pupils and their country coalescing around achievement and meritocracy. The socialist ethos sought, and for that matter still seeks, to slur the distinction between failure and success. The quicker pupils have to be held back to accommodate the pace of the slowest. What could not be achieved by the many was put beyond the reach of the any. He then continues:

Despite the overwhelming evidence of falling standards a quite contrary picture is displayed by the architects of these disasters who point to statistics of ever-increasing examination success. Closer examination shows that the biggest examination cheats are not students but examiners, teachers and educationalists who simply water down standards to ensure that the appropriate quota of examinees achieve success.

That's how I remember him. Totally unafraid of left-wing intellectualism, he doesn't just pour scorn over their false gods, he pulls them down and tramples on them unmercifully. When will we see his like again. And yet. What are we to conclude about that hand-up given to him in an assessment that he simply wasn't good enough to pass on his own merit? 

One shallow, simplistic solution would be to point a finger at him and cry out “hypocrite”. It would be an answer that tells us nothing. Let us however aim for something a little more complex. In their paper, Yeates et al identify unfairness as one of the consequences of assessor poor judgement. Helping Tebbit to pass let him think that he had passed. It allowed him to forget, consciously or unconsciously, the hand-up. It admonishes Tebbit from the charge of hypocrisy but it doesn't get him off the hook that his critique is made from a position of unrealized privilege.

And finally, if we consider the Assessor's action as a form of lie, we can genuinely see how the lie distorted Tebbit's reality. The very act designed to help him inadvertently harmed his self-perception. It is a tragedy of good intentions. This is then the painful irony of the examiner's actions: that the person treated most unfairly was Tebbit himself.


Reference


‘Reliability’, Assessment 101 Glossary: 101 words and phrases for assessment professionals (nd), The Assessment Network, University of Cambridge, p.10

Benton, T. (2021). On using generosity to combat unreliability. Research Matters: A Cambridge Assessment publication, 31, 22-41

Tebbit, N.
- (1989) Upwardly Mobile, London, Futura Publications 
- (1991) Unfinished Business, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 

25 Years of Ed Tech: E-Learning Standards⤴

from

When Clint Lalonde came up with the crazy and wonderful idea of recording a serialised audio version of Martin Weller’s 25 years of Ed Tech book and asked if I was interested in getting involved, I knew right away which chapter I wanted to read. And I also knew it was one of the chapters no one else was likely to volunteer for – E-Learning Standards.  That’s not to disrespect to Martin’s writing, it’s more a reflection of the fact that the standards that he highlights in this chapter were never particularly successful.  The reason I was so keen to read this chapter though is that I spent 15 years of my life working on various learning technology standards projects, mostly focused on resource description, metadata, and controlled vocabularies, including some that Martin critiques in the chapter. On pretty much all of these projects I worked with Phil Barker, so it seemed only natural to invite Phil to join me for the recording, which he kindly agreed to do, despite claiming not to enjoy audio recording :} 

Another reason I thought it would be fun to record this chapter is that people used to find the way I pronounce “metadata” absolutely hilarious.  To this day, I have no idea why, however I used to get frequent requests from American colleagues at ed tech standards meetings to “say the word metadata.”  Admittedly standards meetings could be pretty dull, so we had to make our own entertainment.

 We used Zencastr to record the chapter, which worked pretty well, however for reasons of acoustics I ended up having to record my audio in my bedroom rather than the open plan office downstairs were I usually work.  Sitting on the bedroom floor reciting the elements of the Dublin Core was definitely one of the more surreal moments of lockdown.

Recording this chapter also put Phil and I in the interesting position of reading Martin dissing several standards that we had been responsible for developing, particularly the UKLOM Core.  Although we both felt that some of Martin’s criticism of Dublin Core really applied to the IEEE LOM, the cause of this confusion highlighted exactly what was wrong with many e-learning standards; too many of them were overly complex and educators should never have been expected to get to grips with them in the first place.  Phil and I had an opportunity to discuss these and other issues in an entertaining Between the Chapters discussion with Laura Pasquini.  Phil has already written a blog post about this discussion here, Reading one of 25 years of EdTech, which I can highly recommend reading, particularly if you want to revisit the dawn of EduProg.

From my perspective, I think one of the most important points Martin raises in this chapter, and which we discussed in the podcast, is that although many e-learning standards didn’t really work, we learned from our mistakes, and went on to lay the foundations for the emerging OER movement.  The UKOER programme is a perfect case in point. When the programme was launched in 2009, Phil and I had already contributed to the technical strategies for a number of JISC development programmes and we knew from painful experience that expecting educators to understand baroque metadata standards and provide meaningful descriptions for fields such as semantic density (memorably described as “the poster child for useless metadata elements”) just didn’t work.  Application profiles such as the UK LOM Core were an attempt to simplify these complex standards, and make them more human friendly and interoperable, but even these profiles were woefully complex.  So when the UKOER Programme came along, we decided on a completely different approach.  (You can read the original technical requirements on my old Cetis blog here: OER Programme Technical Requirements.) Rather than mandating the use of a specific metadata standard and application profile, we simply told people what information to record (title, author, date, url, basic technical info), we didn’t tell them how to record the information, we left that up to them.  The only metadata item that we actually mandated was the programme hashtag, #UKOER.  There was a lot of discussion about the wisdom of this approach, web 2.0 was still in its infancy, and people were only just beginning to get to grips with new-fangled approaches to resource description such as community generated metadata and folksonomies.  Some people also complained that using the hashtag for resources as well as information about the projects would muddy the water and make it hard to find content.  Another radical approach we recommended for the UKOER programme was that projects could share their resources using “any system or application as long as it is capable of delivering content freely on the open web”, on the proviso that they also uploaded their OERs to Jisc’s national learning resource repository Jorum for safe keeping.  I’m not going to go into the reasons why central learning resource repositories are a bad idea, that’s a whole other blog post. Suffice to say that Jorum has long since been consigned to the annals of ed tech history. 

The technical strategy we developed for the UKOER programme, was really our first attempt at using the open web as technical infrastructure and by and large, it actually worked. Almost ten years after the end of the programme, if you search for UKOER, you can still find some of the project outputs on the open web and on sites like Flickr and YouTube.  And what is even more remarkable is that, despite there being some heated discussion at the end of the programme about whether the UKOER hashtag should be retired, people are still using it on twitter to this day.  All of which backs up Martin’s closing point that: 

“not only did some of the ideas from learning objects and standards later evolve into the work on open educational resources (OER) but many of the same personnel were involved; for example, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, Lorna Campbell, Brian Lamb, and Sheila MacNeill all contributed to this early field and then became significant voices in open education. This demonstrates that while some approaches do not achieve the success envisaged for them, the ideas and people involved develop the key ideas into more successful versions.” 

Huge thanks to Martin for chronicling the history of ed tech with his brilliant book, to Clint for making this amazing project happen, Laura for being such an engaging podcast host, and last but not least, Phil for putting up with me for 15 years of metadata projects!

Visiting as metaphor – developing a framework for reflective practice⤴

from @ Cat's eyes

Gillies, D., 2016. Visiting good company: Arendt and the development of the reflective practitioner. Journal of educational administration and history, 48(2), pp.148-159.

 

 

 

Hannah-Arendt by POLISEA – CC BY-NC-SA

This paper offers a critique of the notion of ‘reflective practice’ in the context of initial and early-stage teacher education. Reflective practice is a term which is frequently used throughout the career of a teacher; it is a practice which is encouraged in teacher education programmes on campus and in school experience. It is also a requirement of students and serving teachers if they are to meet the standards for registration, as stipulated by the General Teaching Council of Scotland (GTCS). They are exhorted to: ‘reflect and engage in self-evaluation using the relevant professional standard’ (GTCS 2012a), and for the standard of Career-Long Professional Learning, to ‘develop skills of rigorous and critical self-evaluation, reflection and enquiry’ (GTCS2012b). In spite of this central focus on reflection, aspects of teacher development and practice may leave some students and serving teachers feeling that there is insufficient discussion in their instructional and practical experience of what reflective practice is or how it might be achieved. Neither do systems and cultures best support reflection in context: the current emphasis on the evidence-based, best practice or ‘what works’ agenda supports the technical-rational–instrumentalist emphasis on craft, skills, and a cause and effect approach to practice, which leaves little room for consideration of wider aspects of pedagogical approaches.
Gillies (2016) draws on Arendt’s theory of enlarged thought –a theoretical concept with considerable philosophical pedigree, as it relays back to Kant and Aristole – to offer a conceptual framework which supports a progressive development of reflective practice, especially with regard to early-stage teachers and student teachers. This, to me, seems to be an extremely helpful mechanism in teaching and learning about the practice of reflection, developing experience in the consideration of alternative perspectives (‘visiting,’ loosely, in Arendt’s terms), and coming to judgement, as a key component of reflection, of the value and merits of the perspectives under consideration.
Engaging with these perspectives, in Gillies’ and Arendt’s terms, is the ‘company’ we keep; however, there are caveats. Keeping company of only known perspectives might limit our reflections and leave us in an echo-chamber, where our own biases and beliefs are confirmed and justified. That might be a comfortable environment for some, but for others this is an opportunity for challenging, professional conversations and debate; for contesting accepted beliefs and for ‘enlarging our thoughts,’ in  Arendt’s terms.
Here is Gilles’ framework for reflection, based on the ‘visiting’ metaphor, offered by Hannah Arendt (Gillies, 2016, p157).
gillies

I’d urge you to read the article if you have, like me, wrestled with the disconnect between expectations and support for the development of reflective practice in the early stages of learning about teaching.

P.S. Hannah Arendt was a political theorist known perhaps most widely for her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism. This Open Culture link provides useful insights to her thinking via an interview and further links.

References

GTCS. 2012a. Standards for Registration. Edinburgh: GTCS.

GTCS. 2012b. Standard for Career-Long Professional Learning. Edinburgh: GTCS.

Gillies, D., 2016. Visiting good company: Arendt and the development of the reflective practitioner. Journal of educational administration and history, 48(2), pp.148-159.

 

23 Things: Thing 6 Accessibility⤴

from

Thing 6 is all about web accessibility and it’s a thing I have had a very on and off relationship with over the years. Despite the fact that I am fully signed up to the belief that accessible design is good design for all, I think I probably pay less attention to accessibility online than I did ten or fifteen years ago. When I used to build websites for other people, I made a point of trying to ensure they were as accessible as possible within the constraints of the web browsers of the day. It’s a long time since I actually built a website though, most of the content I now put on line appears on blogs or social media platforms which come with their own user interface or stylesheets. Consequently I’ve got very blase about accessibility because the design of the user interface is usually beyond my control.  However I know I’m just being lazy and there is a lot more I could be doing to make sure my blogs are accessible, so it was really interesting to run one of my blogs through the Web Accessibility eValuation Tool.

wave_outputThe blog I chose was the Open Scotland, a simple WordPress blog running on Reclaim Hosting and you can see the results here.  To be honest most of the errors and alerts didn’t surprise me as they relate to heading abuse and images without alt text.  One thing that did surprise me though is that justified text is problematic.

“Large blocks of justified text can negatively impact readability due to varying word/letter spacing and ‘rivers of white’ that flow through the text.”

This made me very sad, because I love justified text and I justify all my blog posts and documents.  I will have to try and wean myself off justification, starting here today.  I still think unjustified text looks messy though.

Also as an aside, when I used to work in technology standards development I had a very peripheral involvement in some of the web accessibility standards groups.  I was never actually a member of any of the working groups but I was occasionally called in to comment on metadata issues. Negotiating consensus in standards working groups is never an easy task but in the accessibility groups it could be particularly fraught, so kudos to all those to worked hard to bring these standards to fruition.

23 Things: Thing 5 Diversity⤴

from

“A lot of communication online is now via the mode of emoji/emoticon images. Traditionally these have been displayed as a yellow standard, but recent releases of more diverse emoji choices have raised a number of conversations. Read the two articles on reactions to the Apple and Facebook release of diverse emoji/emoticons in 2015 and 2016. Now consider the emoji alternative Bitmoji
Thing 5 

To be honest I’m not big on avatars and emjois.  I used the same twitter avatar (a rather fetching picture of the back of my head) for nine years and only got round to changing it a couple of months ago :}  I also don’t use emojis very often so I’ve never really given much thought to who they may or may not represent.  Now I stop and think about it though, that lack of regard is a clear reflection of my own position of privilege.  I may not use emojis, but if I ever wanted to, it wouldn’t be difficult to find plenty that would broadly represent me.  So the article about the furore surrounding Apple’s multicultural icons certainly gave me pause for thought.  It also made me think of the recent news articles about Rayouf Alhumedhi, a Saudi teenager living in Germany who has submitted a proposal to the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee for the inclusion of hijab and keffiyeh wearing emojis. Motherboard Alhumedhi as saying

“Emojis can seem like a trivial topic but people use emojis to represent themselves and their lives. When the different couples and different skin tone emojis were added there was a huge buzz, and this was because people finally felt represented and acknowledged, which is the same case with the headscarf emoji.”

Rayouf Alhumedhi

Rayouf Alhumedhi

There are several things I find really inspiring about this story. Firstly it’s about choice and empowerment.  Here is a young woman who felt she lacked representation online and took it upon herself to change that.  And secondly it’s about diversity and engagement with standards bodies.  The way that Alhumedhi went about creating an icon that represented herself was by submitting a proposal directly to the formal standards body that governs unicode emojis.  That takes some doing.  I worked with technology standards bodies for many years, though admittedly not the Unicode Consortium, and to say that women are underrepresented in these bodies would be something of an understatement. I got so used to being the only woman in the room that I stopped even noticing and I don’t think I ever encountered a woman of colour in any of the standards working groups I was involved with over a period of about fifteen years.  So more power to Alhumedhi for taking her campaign for representation straight to the body that governs the standard.  If we had more people like Alhumedhi involved in the the development of standards and software perhaps the web would be a more diverse and inclusive place and companies like Apple wouldn’t find themselves in such a mess when it comes to dealing with issues of race, representation and diversity.

Links
The Hijab Emoji Project
The Unicode Consortium
Unicode Emoji Subcommittee

 

New blog! lornamcampbell.org⤴

from @ Open World

After months, if not years, of procrastinating, I’ve finally decided it was about time to start practicing what I preach and I’ve moved this blog over to Reclaim Hosting.  Huge thanks to the guys at Reclaim for setting everything up for me so promptly!  My shiny new domain is

http://lornamcampbell.org/

I’ll no longer be maintaining Open World here at wordpress.com but I will set up a redirect shortly.

reclaim_hosting_2


This time it’s different⤴

from @ Open World

I’ll never forget that feeling the morning after Indyref. I just felt sad, so fucking sad that so much positivity and promise had gone to waste. It feels different this time round. Today I’m angry. But the worst thing is, I’m not surprised. There seems to have been a horrible inevitability to the result of the EUref. It’s like watching a carcrash in slow motion.

Martin Weller has already written a really powerful personal response to the result that really chimes with my own feelings. I work in open education, and I believe passionately that as educators we have a moral responsibility to work together to improve opportunities for all, not just for a select few.

The Scottish Open Education Declaration says

“Open education can expand access to education, widen participation, create new opportunities for the next generation of teachers and learners and prepare them to become fully engaged digital citizens. In addition, open education can promote knowledge transfer while at the same time enhancing quality and sustainability, supporting social inclusion, and creating a culture of inter-institutional collaboration and sharing.”

I wrote that. Those aren’t just words. I actually believe all of that. That’s what I work for.

The thing that really struck me about Martin’s post was his reference to Primo Levi’s The Drowned and The Saved and Levi’s anger at those who try to absolve their guilt by claiming that they didn’t see the evil when in actual fact they chose to look away. It struck me because I’m reading The Drowned and The Saved right now and Levi’s anger has stayed with me since I read that passage in Paul Bailey’s masterful introduction.

So yeah, I’m angry. Angry that we’re sleepwalking over the edge. Angry that we’ll let the unthinkable happen because we don’t have the courage and the honesty to open our eyes and think, really think, about the consequences of our actions.

I don’t know how to end this post, because I really don’t know where to go from here. I guess if there’s one tiny glimmer of hope in all this, it’s that I’m so fucking proud of Scotland right now. That doesn’t make me any less angry though.

 


Leaders and Monitors: The best and the worst of education technology⤴

from @ Open World

Last week I attended the Holyrood Connect Learning Through Technology event where I saw a rather jawdropping demonstration of the very best and very worst that education technology has to offer. The best, and it really was wonderful, came from teachers Natalie Lockhead and Nicola Paterson, and pupils Rebecca and Stephen from Kirklandneuk Primary School, who are part of the school’s Digital Leaders Network. The Digital Leaders Network encourages children who are confident with using all kinds of technology to support their teachers and peers by sharing their skills and knowledge, while at the same time enabling the children to develop confidence, literacy and skills for life.

Stephen and Rebecca stood up in front of an audience of over a hundred delegates and spoke confidently and articulately about the importance of the Digital Leaders initiative and how much they enjoyed and benefitted from being part of it. Inspirational has become a rather throwaway term used to describe speakers, but these young people really, truly, were an inspiration.

Their honesty, enthusiasm and willingness to share was in stark contrast to the previous presenters and event sponsors Lightspeed Systems who presented their “online safety and web filtering systems” for education. As well as just blocking content, Lightspeed’s Web Filter also incorporates hierarchical filtering “to keep students safe, even when they leave the classroom,” along with web activity reporting functionality “from the high level to the detail”. I presume in this instance “the detail” means individual students.

According to their press, Lightspeed Systems create tools to help schools manage and filter their networks as well as empower classroom learning. There  doesn’t seem to be any mention of trivial issues such as privacy, ethics and consent. One of their products, Classroom Orchestrator, is designed to allow teachers to monitor students screens and devices “making it easy to see who’s off-task, who needs extra attention, and who’s excelling”. Orchestrator allows teachers to view all students screens from a dashboard, “ensures safety by seeing who is protected by the webfilter and who isn’t”, and perhaps most worryingly, “record sessions to store a students activity to share or investigate.” This immediately rang all sorts of alarm bells; where is that data being stored, who owns it, who has access to it? Although Lightspeed’s products are primarily designed for use on schools’ own mobile devices, the presenter added that they can also be installed on children’s own mobile devices and can be used to monitor their web activity outwith school hours. Apparently they’ve had, and I quote, “Lots of positive feedback about teachers taking control of and locking apps on students’ mobile devices.” That was the point where my jaw really hit the floor.

I made a point of asking during questions who owned and had access to the data that Lightspeed gathers. The reply was that the data is stored on servers in the UK and clients have the right to access this data under the Freedom of Information act. Seriously? I asked again if clients really had to submit an FOI request to access their own data and the presenter replied that they could just e-mail their sales representative for access. I lost the will to live at that point.

The contrast between the two presentations couldn’t have been more stark, and both demonstrated in quite different ways, why it is so important to engage children and learners in their own education, why we need to listen to them, not eavesdrop on them, and why we need to respect their privacy and consent. And most of all, it brought home to me just how critical trust and openness has to be in our use of technology in education. After all, if we don’t trust and learn from our children, how will they ever learn to trust and respect others?

NB Throughout the presentation, the Lightspeed representative seemed to refer to Classroom Orchestrator as Classroom Monitor. There is another UK based ed tech company called Classroom Monitor that markets an assessment platform for teachers. There is no link between Lightspeed Systems and Classroom Monitor and their products are not related.


International Women’s Day – Acknowledging the role of Women in OER⤴

from @ Open World

IWD-logo-portaitjpgI was surprised and delighted to be included in a blog post from the Open Educational Practices in Scotland project today marking International Women’s Day – Women in OER.  The post celebrates some of the women the project has worked with and I’m honoured to be named alongside such influential open education practitioners as Laura Czerniewicz, Josie Fraser and my old colleague Allison Littlejohn.

The post acknowledges the potential of open education to

“…widen access to education for women and girls, enabling them to access global thought leaders and subjects that might not be available to them locally. It also provides a platform by which women and girls can share their own knowledge and experiences.

There is a role for open education to contribute to closing the gender gap now, to ensure that all genders are treated equally, to facilitate women and girls achieving their ambitions, to challenge discrimination and bias in all forms, to promote gender balanced leadership, to value contributions equally, and to create inclusive and flexible cultures.”

If I can make even a small contribution towards furthering these aims I will be very proud indeed.


University of Edinburgh approves new OER Policy⤴

from @ Open World

edinburgh[Cross posted to Open Scotland]

As part of its on going commitment to open education, the University of Edinburgh has recently approved a new Open Educational Resources Policy, that encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience. The University is committed to supporting open and sustainable learning and teaching practices by encouraging engagement with OER within the curriculum, and supporting the development of digital literacies for both staff and students in their use of OERs.

The policy, together with supporting guidance from Open.Ed, intends to help colleagues in making informed decisions about the creation and use of open educational resources in support of the University’s OER vision. This vision builds on the history of the Edinburgh Settlement, the University’s excellence in teaching and learning, it’s unique research collections, and its civic mission.

The policy is based on University of Leeds OER Policy, which has already been adopted by the University of Greenwich and Glasgow Caledonian University. It’s interesting to note how this policy has been adapted by each institution that adopts it. The original policy describes open educational resources as

“…digitised teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released by the copyright owner under an intellectual property licence (e.g. Creative Commons) that permits their use or re-purposing (re-use, revision, remixing, redistribution) by others.”

However Edinburgh has adapted this description to move towards a more active and inclusive definition of OER

“digital resources that are used in the context of teaching and learning (e.g. course material, images, video, multimedia resources, assessment items, etc.), which have been released by the copyright holder under an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons) permitting their use or re-purposing (re-use, revision, remixing, redistribution) by others.”

This definition aims to encompass the widest possible range of resources that can be used in teaching and learning, not just resources that are developed specifically for that purpose. This description acknowledges that it is often the context of use that makes a thing useful for teaching and learning, rather than some inherent property of the resource itself.

Although open licensing is central to the University’s OER vision, this is much more than a resource management policy. In order to place open education at the heart of learning and teaching strategy, the University’s OER Policy has been approved by the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee. The policy is intended to be clear and concise and to encourage participation by all. By adopting this policy, the University is demonstrating its commitment to all staff and students who wish to use and create OERs in their learning and teaching activities, and who wish to disseminate the knowledge created and curated within the University to the wider community.

600x60-oew-web-banner