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Douglas Harré

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Douglas Harré

Ten Trends 2012: Personalisation

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Douglas Harré


There is a growing awareness that one-size-fits-all approaches to school knowledge and organisation are increasingly ill-adapted both to addressing individuals' needs and to the knowledge society at large.

As teachers, therefore, we strive every day (well…most days) to provide some degree of individualised approach to our teaching in the classroom—to hopefully interact with each student on an individual basis, and to provide something that meets their particular needs.

Over the past 10-15 years many governments have tried to create social systems with the citizen at their centre, challenging the ‘old’ model, and developing systems that are more responsive to individual needs: "a system that responds to individual pupils, by creating an education path that takes account of their needs, interests and aspirations." (See link to document below.)

These governments are usually in OECD economies where the need for this approach is probably better recognised, and where educations systems have (in most cases) moved on from the provision of education at a massive scale, or where the Millennium Development Goals are still a target to be reached.

In the same way that many of the current aspects of our “modern” education system grew out of the needs for trained workers for the UK's Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, the newer, more personalised, approach can be seen to be allied to the economic changes that have been at work in the last 10–15 years.

Now, in 2012 as the centre of Henry Ford's "any colour as long as its black" approach to mass production moves from Europe and the USA to those nations where total costs are lower, so the new economic model for “a modern economy” moves towards a more personalised, consumerist approach. In the education sector this
 new approach to personalised learning followed the emergence of the term (as we know it now) in the UK in 2004. The move beyond uniform, mass provision of education can therefore be seen in a wider sense as "personalisation" of consumerism (entertainment and advertising in particular) and of public services more widely.

Noted UK educationalist David Hargreaves acknowledged this in 2004 (PDF) by observing that "customisation in business is where goods or services are tailor-made, in contrast to the mass production of good or services. Mass customisation means providing goods or services at the prices of mass production. Personalised learning is an educational version of this, and means meeting the needs of every learner more fully than we have in the past."

His vision was still somewhat controversial some years on.

So where we did (and do) have individualisation of education—providing (essentially) the same objects for all learners, the trend to personalisation—is predicated on providing differing objects for all learners. ‘If I can have a mass production car built to my specification, why can my child not have a mass production education built to his?’

Personalisation in the business world is about creating the illusion of individuality for the consumer while giving the producer the advantages of mass production. Personalisation in education, though, means pupils get what they need, not what they want. It is not the pupil's decision, but someone else’s.

Ninja Google Masters such as yourselves will quickly find a range of approaches to personalisation that rise out of the work of practitioners such as Benjamin Bloom (Mastery Learning) and Howard Gardner (Multiple Intelligences). Additionally, there is the ongoing debate that has been happening since the 1980s around the benefits of mixed ability teaching morphing into a range of 1990s differentiation approaches. While all of these still play their part in classrooms around New Zealand (and the world) every day, in the 2010s it is the inexorable rise of digital technologies such as that is playing a pivotal role in enabling this new degree of personalisation to occur.


Broader tools that fit into this category include:

  • Learning Management Systems—delivering what your student needs/wants in terms of curriculum material provides flexibility in curriculum delivery timing but is it personalised?
  • ePortfolios—"a record of the best work that I have produced over time and that I can take with me as I transition from one education organisation to another. In New Zealand this usually means Mahara (or the version supported by the Ministry of Education, MyPortfolio) and often supported by the work of people like Dr Helen Barrett
  • Personal computing devices—the BYOD-mania / 1-to-1 computing trend that is sweeping the world (or parts of it).

At the leading edge of larger online systems (past that usually seen in New Zealand), there are the types of larger “personalised”, adaptive, learning systems from vendors such as Pearson or McGraw Hill (Learn Smart). These are like LMSes-on-steroids and have the capital, and are designed to deliver at scale (i.e. to cohorts of schools and students in excess of most schools in the New Zealand system). 



Summary: As noted above, the trend is to no longer have a one-size-fits-all approach—the classroom is going mobile. These trends will only increase as broadband and wireless speeds increase, and as student initiated learning and pathways become more commonplace. Education will be the great differentiator of the 21st century, and New Zealand schools will need to continue to lift their game in the face of a series of global challenges.

How this will play out in a post-global financial crisis and a more Asia-centric world will be interesting to watch unfold.



What are your views?

 

Information about CORE's Ten Trends

  • An introduction to CORE's Ten Trends for 2012
  • An explanation about CORE's Ten Trends

 

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Cyber Security Awareness Week: 11-15 June

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Douglas Harré

Netsafe Security Central

This week Amy Adams, Minister for Communications and Informations Technology, along with NetSafe kicked off New Zealand’s first Cyber Security Awareness Week. Cyber security is a major issue nationally and internationally, and poor cyber security practices cost New Zealanders around $625 million in 2011 (Norton Cyber Crime 2011 report).

To coincide with the launch, NetSafe have created a website that addresses cyber security issues in a very user-friendly way. The site has some helpful suggestions for how to keep you and your computer safe, visit the new web site.

In a recent New Zealand survey only 2% of users knew about turning on Auto Update for their computer, and less than 50% knew if their antivirus software was up to date. At the launch of the Cyber Security Awareness Week there was a demonstration of how to easily hack someone’s Facebook account using a wireless sniffer that is easily available for download on the Internet (hence the need to have suitable wireless security in place). This is incredibly concerning.

Now is a great time to consider how you keep yourself, your students and your teachers’ cyber secure. Remember the following 4 key things you can do that actually address the majority of cyber security issues faced by users:

  1. Update everything – make sure all software is up to date, including your anti virus
  2. Backup your files – regularly copy your files and ensure they are stored in different locations
  3. Secure your wireless network – use a strong password and long passphrase for your router
  4. Use strong passwords – include a mix of lower case and upper case letters, symbols and numbers and try to use a minimum of 15 characters

What are you doing to ensure your school and students are cyber secure?

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Schools surviving the Christchurch earthquake: Update from Douglas Harré

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Douglas Harré

Earthquake damaged schools force closure of schools

Parts of Christchurch do feel somewhat otherworldly at present, so I thought I would take a moment to report on one part of CORE Education’s support for schools in that still somewhat beleaguered city

I am back working with the Ministry of Education over the next couple of weeks to assist with getting the ICT systems of damaged schools up and running, although, it is likely that the schools will need a large amount of ongoing assistance for a couple of months.

As you will be aware, there are many more schools badly affected by the February 22 quake (up to 30), compared with the September 4th event (only 2 local schools closed after that event).

What options available to schools without a school?

The Ministry of Education and local schools and their Boards of Trustees have been working hard to find space for schools that have been given the dreaded red sticker, and are therefore out-of-action in the short to medium-term.

Shared space option

The result is that many schools will be sharing space in the interim—it looks as though primary and intermediate schools will share space at the same time, and high schools will split their day around 50/50.

St. Mary’s Primary moving to another school hall

About 100 students from St Mary’s Primary are, therefore, moving into the hall of another unaffected school nearby—the hall will be divided into five partitioned zones that teachers and children will work in until the fate of their own school becomes clear. The school needs to have broadband, power, data, and a wireless network put into the hall…. “And, oh!” said the St Mary’s principal (with a hopeful smile on his face), “if you can get us ten desktop PCs, that would be greatly appreciated”.

The case of Heaton Intermediate

Heaton Intermediate School damaged in earthquake

Heaton Intermediate (500 students) was the next school to visit. Their three-year-old, stylish, angular, steel and glass admin block and staff room doesn’t look too bad from the driveway, but once inside, you can see how walls have come away from floors, things have a generally Pisa-Tower-ish look to them, and the staff room has an unappealing layer of detritus that came up through the floor boards and oozed everywhere within 10 minutes of the quake. Broken glass is still strewn across the floor from when the dishwasher door flew open and disgorged its contents at the peak of the shaking.

Heaton’s Year 7s are off to Casebrook Intermediate, and their Year 8s to Breens Intermediate—each of those host schools are working hard to find space (old rooms, garages, spare prefabs, large cardboard boxes) and facilities for 250 students and their teachers, who are about to turn up later this week.

Fortunately, Heaton managed to get their servers out. Plus, they had a backup (yay!) and a proper offsite backup also (double yay!!), so they are looking good…. Now we just need to get the infrastructure and associated hardware going, so we can use it in the host schools. Because the Heaton teachers have been using eTap (a hosted SMS) and KnowledgeNet (hosted LMS), they will be able to continue to use those products in their new location. Cloud computing is looking increasingly attractive to those schools with email servers buried under a steel beam or in a location with no power. :-)

…and secondary schools: Avonside Girls High moving to Burnside

As an example on the secondary front, Avonside Girls High School is moving to the Burnside High School site—the high schools are going to run consecutively rather than simultaneously—so it looks as though Burnside High School will operate between 8am to 1pm, then Avonside Girls High School moves in from 1.30pm to 5pm. Avonside Girls High School has managed to get a lot of their PCs out of their outlying buildings, but about 30 TELA laptops remain trapped and alone in the badly damaged admin block (generally with a multitude of teacher resources on each one). As you can imagine, this is one more stressor for teachers who may also have power or water off at home, or be dealing with injured family members.

I was able to acquire laptops direct from Equico for those teachers, so they are being couriered down to Burnside High School over the weekend, re-imaged Monday–Tuesday by IT staff to make them ready for the Avonside Girls High teachers. What we can’t do is replace the resources on the laptops (if they aren’t backed up), so we will see how that unfolds over the next week or so.

Inside the CBD: Unlimited and Discovery 1

Last example is Unlimited and Discovery1—the two schools in the heart of the CBD. Six hundred and fifty staff and students in a modern, vertical, concrete and glass structure—state-of-the-art ICT facilities, fast fibre connection, and with the city as their learning-environment. They are in the Red Zone, so is off-limits— all teacher laptops, school computers and servers (and backups) inside…a sub-optimal scenario to say the least.

Those two schools are being relocated for the next month or two to a rural, horizontal, one-story school on the outskirts of the city—an interesting cultural change for students, who may not have seen a cow for some time, or felt grass between their toes, and, who may now have to travel 3 kilometres for a double trim latte—but as many have said “needs must”—and (hopefully) a fantastic learning opportunity for all concerned.

Ministry of Education logistical challenge

There’s a big team of Ministry of Education people there also, but spare a particular thought for Bernie Scannell (the Queen of School Transport), who has been living out of a suitcase in Christchurch while trying to organise the dozens of buses that will be required to pick up 6-7000 school kids twice a day and deliver them to and from their new schools, across a pretty broken transport network.

…and help from around the country

In the midst of all that is happening in the wider Christchurch context, I would really like to note the rallying of teachers and schools together to support one-another. In all my conversations with principals and teachers last week, there was a very supportive atmosphere. This has been aided and abetted by the sterling work of numerous CORE staff around the country, who are contributing in a variety of ways —the rapid development last week, of the school resource wiki being an excellent example. People in the schools are very appreciative (and aware of) the work occurring nationwide to assist them.

I hope this has provided one small set of examples concerning the challenges schools are facing in the city. Morale is generally pretty high, but people are very realistic about the challenges ahead. How it will all play out in the longer term regarding the provision of education in the city, as a whole, is an as yet unanswered question.

Cheers,

Douglas

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