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Can we just not.

This happened on twitter earlier, because it’s edutech o’clock, but it could be any day, any conference, any speaker.

https://twitter.com/sthcrft/status/872719682058338304
Can we please just stop with the inspirational change porn, presented via the medium of exactly the same damn lecture we’ve done for centuries. Call it whatever you like, call it all manner of buzzwordy euphemisms I see in conference programs these days, call it a TEDx, they’re all just theme and variations on the lecture. Which of itself isn’t inherently bad but when those snappy sans serif words on the slides talk about doing things differently or change or disruption or paradigm shifts I start wondering exactly why we haven’t already drowned in our own irony.

Note to six words guy – it’s not you. It’s the system. I get it.

Why do we assume the only way to transfer information of worth to others face to face en masse is some variation of a lecture? Why do even the most hardcore disrupters (sorry. drink.) default to slide decks? (I’m not exempt from this btw, god knows I have some slide decks in my closet). I just fail to understand why, in an age of edu-evangelism and futurists, we have yet to progress beyond the assemblage of people to receive information spoken to them by someone on a podium with a slide deck, side serving of death by vendor.

Why not an event where people are herded to whatever city but your information of worth is posted sentence by sentence around the place and people walk round with a google map to piece together what you have to say? Why not an event where your ideas are in the form of a Cards Against Humanity style game and they remix your inspirational stuff into their own? Why not an event where you have to knit as a metacognitive exercise? Something that’s actually a step outside the box rather than the vague gestures of sessions called think tanks or fishbowls or whatever, where it’s really still just some people talking at some other people +/- audience speaking.

Surely, by now, we can do better than this.

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Front-ending student generated content in WP: A story slightly more exciting than that title suggests

If you’ve been paying attention to my work for any period of time you’ll be aware that me working on student-generated/collaborative content in WordPress is nothing new. But when I started doing this years back, I was using a centrally-administered WP install over which I had no admin rights and no ability to customise. Which meant creating student accounts, teaching them how to use the back end of WP to post content, and a whole bunch of compromises. Ultimately it worked and many good things happened but it was a PITA and huge time sink and ultimately not particularly sustainable or scalable.

Fast forward several years after I’d gone more cowboy and learned how to be my own sysadmin, I can run pretty much whatever I need to now off my own rogue hosting. I once again was approached about making some kind of *thing* where students generate all the content. In this case, a collaborative database for maritime archaeology fieldwork. Moodle database tool was immediately voted off the island for being boring, inflexible and both temporally and physically locked. Plus it just looks a bit crap. Sorry Moodle. I naturally then turned to WP, but recalling the pain of managing student logins and training last time, and the knowledge this time that when you go cowboy, you’re the only support you’ve got, getting students to use WP in the standard way didn’t really seem viable.

Enter WP User Frontend Pro (standard version is free if you don’t need the extra features, I needed gmaps and pagination and things so actually spent some money for once). Not the only plugin around that allows people to post content from the front end of course, but this one works well and served my particular needs. This allows students to create posts via a standard (well, conceptually standard, fields are custom) web form served on the front end, no need to log in or learn the WP admin interface. Now admittedly I’m working behind password protection atm so I’m not sure how hard this gets hit by spambots in practice, but that’s a bridge crossed easily enough later. Ultimately I’d rather have to slay some bots than provide bespoke tech support to a whole cohort. At any rate the form works nicely and the pro version allows you to get quite complex in the number and type of fields you use.

Now that the ability for students to post from the front end with no special knowledge or logins is go, the further question is – how much control do we want to give students over metadata and taxonomies, given it’s supposed to be kind of proper database-y and will have potentially 300 entries? Folksonomies giveth, and yet folksonomies with 300 misspelled and typoed tags that are conceptual duplicates taketh away. Asking students to enter post tags manually seemed like a slightly bad idea. Enter custom taxonomies. Again, a number of plugins exist that can do this job, I’m using Custom Post Type UI. A couple of hours* with a cup of coffee and some data entry later, you can have a whole host of custom taxonomies to play with. And both plugins play very nicely together so you can then ask students to categorise their posts in multiple and flexible ways using finite dropdowns or checkboxes instead of free text input. The end result of which is a really robust structure that allows eventual public visitors to explore and filter the content in multiple ways, and also makes export of content to other systems (if necessary) more effective.

This particular project is still only at proof of concept stage and won’t run with actual students for another month or so, but I’m hoping this setup will really streamline the experience of student-generated bodies of work, not only in terms of student UX but my own workload and sustainability and scalability.

*Probably won’t take you that long if you don’t have 200 different kinds of boats to enter.

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The Moodle Dailies and Coffeecourses: A retrospective

Having been contacted again recently by people who are implementing the Moodle Dailies concept and the Coffeecourses concept at their own institutions, I’ve been reflecting on both the excellence of the internet and the depressing ironies of institutional politics, as well as the concept of ‘impact’. Since both projects are at least 5 years old now and not currently active in my neck of the woods I thought I’d tack the word ‘retrospective’ on this post and waffle self-indulgently for a bit.

The Internet – 5/5 would use again

These two projects I think were good examples of how organic online networks can really get shit done and make things become things. For both I ruminated on my design processes out loud on here and input from peers, primarily Twitter peeps, helped me refine the design into their eventual final forms. Then it was Twitter (probably also Google+ a bit, back in the day, anyone remember that? Good times) who started disseminating my work, putting me in touch with a bunch of interested people who wanted to take what I’d done and run with it. Yay for the internet. Boo for institutional policies that try to shut that down because branding and control issues.

Impact – She Tweeted A Thing And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!

So there’s impact and there’s impact. One is a factor and measured via citations, and the other is people actually visibly benefitting directly from your work. I care about the wrong one of these to ever get much of anywhere in academia. I’ve never published a thing on the Moodle Dailies and I’ve only ever written one conference paper on Coffeecourses. Doesn’t count for a damn thing in the real world except one lousy E1. But here’s what actually happened:

The Moodle Dailies – at least 5 institutions that I’m aware of, not all higher ed, definitely not all in Australia (my recent chats have been with a university in Belgium), implemented courses based on or conceptually similar to the Dailies. I consulted with the DET (or whatever it’s called these days) on developing PD for teachers based on the concept.

Coffeecourses – At least 4 different institutions in Aus/NZ (Deakin, Waikato, ANU, USQ) implemented their own Coffeecourses. Two that I’m aware of are currently active, and ANU’s seems to have been going successfully for quite a while now. And while mine were running, I had all sorts of people from around the world participate and people in other sectors (primarily K12 but also VET and industry) took the courses and seemed to get something out of it.

Plus I did a bunch of masterclasses and presentations and blog posts and things so quite a few other people heard or read me bang on about them. Several other people contacted me independently to chat about the concepts. All of which was far more visible and meaningful to me than locking stuff up in a journal somewhere just to get the institutionally quantifiable kudos.

Institutional Politics – 0/5 would not recommend

The great irony of all of this, of course, is that both projects got barely any traction or recognition in my own institution. Exactly zero people ever did the Moodle Dailies here. Zero. People did sign up for Coffeecourses internally, because for a little while it was part of a requirement for new teaching staff on probation, but I have my suspicions that they mostly just signed up and never actually looked at the content, let alone participated. Then when I got workplace changed out of my former role, all my projects were dropped and no longer run.

I’ve never really decided if this meant the projects were a failure or not. Coffeecourses at least did achieve its aim here for a while, but the Dailies were The Greatest Project That Never Was. Failed utterly at its goal. But does the influence it had on people’s pedagogical thinking mean they were successes? How much resentment should I bother harbouring that they basically had no value within my own institution?

Here endeth the retrospective rumination. In terms of future stuff it would probably be interesting one day to curate all the different iterations of things into one place and map the progression of an idea, and I keep promising my PhD supervisors I’ll eventually write something on the Moodle Dailies. Also I never know how to end these things so here’s a cat:

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Thinking inside the box

I’ve been doing this PD-genre gig for close on 10 years now. And largely, my efforts have to date have focused on either satisfying the demand for F2F standalone workshops, or venturing outside the box with almost exclusively online nonstandard stuff. Which has seemed logical to me, online stuff is flexible, accessible and low cost. But what it also is, is ignorable. When you live and die by the provisions of the clock or lack thereof, it’s easy – too easy – to delete an email, forget to visit a website, say you’ll access a webinar recording after the fact and never do, swipe away a notification.

So one asks – how do we make things harder to ignore?

For this I’m starting to stuff my thinking back *into* boxes – literal boxes, and figurative boxes.

Section 1: Literal boxes

I’ve been watching, lately, the subscription box trend. People pay a certain fee to have a box with unspecified contents of a certain genre sent to them each month. Adult kinder surprise, if you will, except instead of horrible chocolate and nasty little toy*, you get a selection of food or wine or makeup or whatever. The novelty here of course being both the anticipation of discovering unknown contents, and the promise of trying something new that perhaps you wouldn’t have chosen on your own. Plus the ability to post twee unboxing videos on instagram or facebook or wherever.

So I started thinking – what if you did subscription boxes for PD? People would sign up for a physical box to appear in their pigeonhole each month, contents entirely unknown. Maybe one month it’s coffee, biscuits and alternative assessment strategies, maybe one month it’s a pack of cards to start thinking about games-based learning, maybe one month it’s Google Cardboard and an edict to explore low cost VR. Who knows. But it would be a physical box occupying physical space with an element of curiosity and potential promise of novelty, and that’s somewhat harder to ignore than the 9 millionth email or portal site in Moodle.

The tricky part is thinking about how work that is largely conceptual and theoretical interfaces with physical space and objects. How do you put thinking in a literal box? I don’t actually know but it seems like a fun thing to try.

Section 2: Figurative boxes

Somewhere on the list of thingshipsterslike.tumblr.com is maker spaces and gatherings. Probably. Not maker spaces in the hackerspace sense so much, but more in a bunch of people knitting in a pub sense. We have one here that meets in the campus bar, you probably do too. It’s a dedicated time blocked out in whatever convenient space is available, where people turn up, hang out and make stuff. A figurative box in the calendar. Specifically, a regularly occurring figurative box. Anyone who’s worked in a university for any length of time knows that things don’t tend to happen unless you block that shit out in the calendar, and that’s the main issue anyone who might be vaguely inclined to make change to their teaching practice runs into.

So what would happen if you took a ‘if you make them come, they will build it’ approach? Schedule a small block of time every week or fortnight for people to come to a room, bribe with treats, enforce a Pomodoro-style no distractions or multitasking policy but allow them to work on whatever interested them just for that period of time. C.f. the standard higher ed type of workshop which is mostly a euphemism for a lecture and is never spoken of again the second everyone leaves the room. Really, just being an agent for boxing out the time people can’t make for themselves, then being on hand to facilitate thinking and creating. Could even change my job title to Change Agent or Innovation Catalyst**.

Both are mostly just vague, un-fleshed-out ideas at this stage. At any rate though this is where my thinking is going this year. Boxes. Call it analogue PD, call it Strategic Alignment™, call it futility in the face of the eternally unsolvable, call it yet another painful pun opportunity, but boxes – there may just be something in it.

*Hat tip Bill Bailey

**Kidding, srsly

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Second verse, same as the first

So the PhD is a thing again. I’d put it on suspension for a year while I had a kind of mental sabbatical, but now I’m back at it again with the white vans (oh god please stop with the outdated meme references).

The essence of my PhD is unchanged, which for those of you who haven’t been playing along since back in the day when I started a masters is ‘ok how do we do some cool stuff while everyone around us is simultaneously banging on about innovation and not giving anyone any funding or support?’. But out of necessity the structure and focus has changed so I thought I’d tell you some stories about that.

The key problem I have is that because a) the work that I do and the sphere that I work in means the stuff that I do is very much of a time and prone to becoming outdated very quickly and b) I am angling for what feels like the world’s longest candidature – if I get it in under 10 years I’ll be happy; current trajectory is 8ish years. And I went back to what I’d written and the projects I was doing when I first started out and it was kind of like when you look back on photos of what you were wearing in high school or find an old journal full of teen emo poetry. There was no way I could submit that as some kind of endorsement of my current thinking.

Since starting again from scratch was approximately as appealing as dental surgery, my solution is to approach my PhD as a kind of longitudinal autoethnography in the form of project case studies. Longitudinal because I’m taking a freaking long time to do this thing, auto because the projects I’m writing about are the ones I’m involved in and ethnography because that’s how the case studies will tell a story. A story of how grassroots innovation happened in the changing climate of higher education and what we might be able to learn, or not, in terms of how to actually do innovative stuff, from each of the case studies.

You’ll all be surprised to learn the structure I have pitched is unconventional. While the thesis will be topped and tailed with normal bits like a lit review, the body of the thesis will be a modular situation, made up of ten tripartite case study sections. Tripartite because each will have an article describing the case study (may be published, may be not, you may have already read or seen me present on some of them), an accompanying exegesis that positions the case study in the overarching narrative – why this type of project with this type of thinking happened that this particular point in time, and what impact may have been had, and then the project artefact itself. Since all of these projects involve the creation of a site – Moodle Dailies, Coffeecourses etc etc – I feel like it’s essential to include the site within the work, much like a creative practice doctorate includes the creative product as part of the work. We – educators, ed devs/learning designers/academic developers/instructional designers/whatever you want to call our sort of people, researchers – frequently produce creative pedagogical output that is as valid as creative arts and design work and should be acknowledged as such. So I suppose it’s a portfolio of sorts, as well as an unconventional thesis.

At any rate, watch this space. Could be fun, could be terrifying. But importantly, could be a thing.

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Outside time

We didn’t let Hannah go outside before she was 2. Now we only let her go outside into a small area for 30 minutes a day. You really have to be careful with outside time. I know several people whose kids have fallen over and hurt themselves outside, sometimes even breaking bones. I even heard about a child who was abducted while they were outside. And bullying is a real concern, so much bullying happens when kids are outside. So really it’s for her own safety that we restrict and monitor her outside time. Not to mention the impact on literacy – kids just turn into zombies outside, playing on the same equipment in the same way over and over again. Parents really just use playgrounds as babysitters anyway. Plus kids get tired and irritable after being outside. When she’s older we’ll probably let her go outside a bit more but not without careful monitoring of everything she does.

If it sounds absurd, it’s because it is. And yet substitute the word ‘outside’ with the word ‘screen’ and everyone thinks it’s not only reasonable, but laudable. I suppose the policies of schools I taught in should have been a tip-off, but I didn’t realise before I had a child how pervasive the screen time demonisation narrative was, and how left-field, how utterly divergent, it was to not only allow screen time but afford absolute autonomy with it. I’ve written about it before, a couple of years ago, and not much has changed. Hannah is nearly four now and still has her own unrestricted iPad to which she has unrestricted access (although she does have a few “kid” apps on there now, as it turns out there are some excellent ones like Toca Lab). And in that time I have come across almost nobody, in parenting circles at least, who approaches technology the way that I do. I am a cowboy amongst parents.

Obviously my thinking in this regard is framed largely from an educational perspective (and partially from a ‘idk maybe treat kids as autonomous capable humans’ perspective), but this morning I came across an argument I hadn’t considered – a feminist perspective.

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/11/11607544/screen-time-kids-parents-feminism

It’s an imperfect article, in that it still operates on the underlying assumption that technology/screen time is probably a little bit bad, but it at least presents arguments outside of the narrative perpetuated everywhere else. Importantly, it also makes the point that there are key arguments missing from the current discussion, including that kids who have their online access severely restricted run into more trouble online. I mean, learning by doing is a basic educational principle but it’s still useful to see it articulated to a specific audience in this way.

I really think there’s room for some big and challenging conversations to start happening around technology in parenting spaces. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem at this point like many people are willing to have them.

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The boy who lived and other stories

I’ve been ruminating lately on the progression of a career, particularly in the management of identity and purpose over time. Social media has the habit of affording certain identities to people that aren’t as fluid as one might like. Sometimes when you do a thing, you become known as the person who did a thing, and then you become the person who did a thing. The Boy Who Lived etc etc. The problem is, I did a thing or two, but I’m not really that person any more.

I’ve only tweeted twice in two months. Blogged even less. I hesitate now before I hit post and more often than not, I don’t, in the end. If anyone asked you what I’d done lately, or even what my job title was now, you probably wouldn’t be able to answer. I seem to have hung up the cowboy hat; I don’t think I can trade any more on the strength of being an innovator or provocateur.

You could say it was because I’d had a child. You could say it was because I’d been dragged through a misconduct case for my use of social media. You could say it was because I’d been forced to change jobs. You could say it was because I’ve got older and (more?) cynical and jaded. But at the end of the day I don’t think it’s particularly any one of those things, or perhaps it’s all of them.

I was going to say something sage here about how one can sustain a fluid identity over time via ‘identity curation’ but The Shovel, in all its scathing glory, has ruined the term for me forever. But since ‘identity choosing’ is fairly awkward I’ll just go with the fact that sometimes it’s time to put the old in a box somewhere and start something new. I don’t want to be that guy who rides on the coattails of old news. I haven’t yet found my niche to carve out in my new gig, but it’s about time I started.