Derek’s Blog, launched in 2003, serves as a platform for sharing thoughts and reflections related to his work. It offers over 20 years of searchable posts, categorized by the tags below. Feel free to comment, as your feedback contributes to ongoing reflection and future posts.

What are the benefits?

I have a T-shirt that’s now well past it’s best-by date that has printed on the front “I’m older than the Internet“. While some will equate the Internet with the World Wide Web which had it’s beginnings in 1989. The Internet was actually developed in the late 1960s by the United States Department of Defence’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) as a means of communication that could withstand a nuclear attack. It created a global network of networks that connects millions of computers and other devices, while the World Wide Web (WWW) is a system for accessing and displaying information over the Internet using web browsers that came a couple of decades later.

It always gets a groan from my family when I wear it – but it reminds me of the privilege I have of actually having lived through the extraordinary developments in digital technologies over the past 60+ years, and the impact this has had on the way we live, work, communicate, recreate etc. Lots of reminiscing to be had – but that’s not the point of this post. It’s really about taking time to consider the relentless rate of change that has occurred since the world ‘went online’, and how we can’t ever consider anything to be ‘static’ and unchanging.

I’ve been having a number of conversations recently about this evolution in online technologies, and the implications for how we embrace that in education. A common theme in these conversations is the concern that we’re failing to ‘keep up’ with the changes that are occurring, particularly in understanding the impact they are having on us as human beings, and that includes the learners in our schools.

The recent politicisation of cell phone use in schools is a case in point. It’s yet another example of where some feel it is important to introduce standard practices across society in order to preserve public order and in the interests of all concerned. It could be argued that this is no different to the actions that were taken around the beginning of the last century when motor cars were introduced and there were concerns about the speed at which they were being driven, putting public safety at risk, and banning them was seen as an option to correct this.

While it’s inevitable, and indeed necessary, that we engage in debates about our adoption and use of technology in this way, it’s also important to ensure that not all of our responses are restrictive or constraining. We need to understand the future potential and to be able to monitor and respond to this as the changes occur. The reaction to the advance of AI is an illustration of what’s happening here at the moment.

In the past couple of years we’ve seen a number of reports that highlight just how important it is that we engage with what’s happening rather than (a) uncritically embracing every new and shiny thing that comes along or (b) resisting it and attempting to control, manage or even ban it.

So back to my conversations in the past week, about the need to not only ‘keep up’, but somehow ‘get ahead’ of where technology is taking us as individuals, school systems and society as a whole. While it’s highly unlikely we’ll every be able to say we’ve ‘gotten ahead’ of where it’s taking us, we can do a better job of anticipating what some of those changes might be.

A key thing to consider here are the potential benefits that a particular technology or technological advance may bring – alongside consideration of the downsides, of course. By focusing attention on the benefits we create space to begin thinking about the future we want to see emerge from our technology use, and to then plan more strategically about where we put our efforts in order to see these benefits realised.

So the overarching question is, ‘what are the benefits of engaging with digital technologies in education?’ – for teachers, students, administrators and for parents and whānau? When considering any form of technology it’s useful to start like this as it helps confirm the purpose behind what we’re considering rather than focusing immediately on the problems or concerns about doing so.

All of which was prompted today as I discovered a document in my files that I put together a few years ago to help the group I was working with to understand the benefits there might be to some technology decisions being made by them as they were considering to create a digital learning ecosystem, integrated a range of digital platforms and services within a “Connected Learning Environment” (CLE).

The specific components of the CLE being considered were:

Digital Identity – How users are recognised online. Authentication of users essential to ensure safe, secure and reliable access to online services. Digital identities and access systems are foundational elements of our shared digital future
Filtering Services – Vital for ensuring protection agains viruses, malware and ransomware affecting a user’s computer and leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.
Learning Management – A software application or combination of applications used for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational experiences (courses, programmes etc.)
Student Management – (Also known as a student information system or SIS) Maintains a record of all student information, and helps a school manage data, communications, and scheduling etc.
Learning Record – The combination of applications that provide a record of each learner’s educational journey. Includes applications used for assessment and reflection. Generally student-owned and managed to provide evidence of learning and achievement through their learning lifetime.
Curated Content – An online system that enables the process of organizing and consolidating pieces of content (text, graphics, and multimedia clips) and tagging schemes (XML, HTML, etc,) in the most efficient way and storing them only one time in a repository.

The chart I created to help focus on the benefits that might be accrued for different user groups are illustrated in the chart below, which you can download by simply clicking on it. I’m sharing it here as I believe it would be useful to apply our thinking in this sort of way to many of the things we are wrestling with currently, so that we are able to identify (or not as the case may be) the benefits we are seeking to provide. Working like this means that the way we address and mitigate the risks or concerns becomes framed within the view of the benefits and allows us to approach the task of finding solutions quite differently.

Click on image to download a PDF version

As the statements on the chart illustrate, by considering the positive outcomes (benefits) of having these technical solutions in place we can create a far more compelling story about why it is we are pursuing these initiatives in the first place.

In some cases it might be that we are unable to identify any tangible benefits, and so it becomes easier to make the decision not to pursue this or to rate the implementation of that particular solution lower down our list of priorities.

Like the advantage I have of looking back to the beginnings of the Internet, it’s all about the bigger picture – the advantage of age and being able to look across a broad spectrum of activity and appreciate the benefits that may accrue, rather than becoming focused purely ‘in the weeds’ of the immediate and often distracting, detail.

Perhaps more importantly, as the chart above illustrates, the focus on benefits in this way is also an opportunity to ensure what we’re doing aligns with the broader philosophical direction we want to pursue. In this case you will note the focus on learner-centredness, life-long learning, participation and collaboration etc. The argument made here is that the development of a digitally connected learning environment, composed of these technological elements, will support the sort of future-focused teaching and learning we want to see more of in our schools and community.

Tags ecosystems, leveraging digital

Resilience Required NOW!

Photo by Wang Whale on Unsplash

What if 2023 is more disrupted than 2022? What if there are more of these empty desks? Would we be prepared?

Most who know me regard me as an optimist, someone who looks on the ‘bright side’ of things. Certainly, throughout my career I have had the privilege of being involved in a wide range of innovative and ‘hope-bringing’ initiatives. Some may say it’s a result of how I’m wired, and there’s bound to be truth in that. But another reason is that I’ve always had a fascination with emerging ideas and innovations, and have always been scanning the environment to keep abreast of trends and new thinking. – so my actions have generally been inspired or motivated by the things I see coming.

Right now, however, my sense of optimism is feeling ‘dented’. This time last year I wrote a blog post in which I outlined my concerns about the difficulties I foresaw in the coming year (2022), and introduced a paper titled Resilience Planning for Schools which outlined a series of things I believed schools could and should be considering in order to cope with the disruption that I believed we’d experience in 2022. At that time I was becoming agitated by what I perceived as a lack of real engagement with what so many ‘signals’ were saying, and a lack of forward planning based on the sort future they foretold.

Fast forward to February 2022 and suddenly these things began to impact schools and classroom teachers. My resources on resilience planning and hybrid learning were downloaded hundreds of times, the MoE began providing 25 hours of PLD for schools to prepare themselves for hybrid learning, various webinars and forums were established to share ideas and the MoE also added a section with advice on hybrid learning on their learning from home website.

Then, just as quickly as the interest in hybrid learning ramped up, by the second half of the year it waned, to the point that, by the end of the year it’s now hardly mentioned. In fact, in speaking to many of my friends who are parents and grandparents of tamariki in schools, the end of year messaging appears to have focused on the expectation that things will be able to ‘return to normal’ next year.

But what if that’s not the case? What if we’re failing to look up (again) and some of these signals actually manifest in more disruption in 2023? How prepared are we as educators, as schools and as a system to avoid this taking us by surprise? What strategies and approaches have we developed during 2022 that will ensure our resilience under such circumstances?

In the table below I’ve selected just a few of the things I’ve been reading about and pondering their possible impact on schools in the 2023 school year…

Now, I’m not wanting to paint a ‘doom and gloom’ picture at all here. We can be certain of none of these things, and the optimist in me hopes for the best. However, it’s a bit like making plans for the Summer camping trip. I always consult the weather forecast – both short term and long term, and consider the options that are presented from the forecasting modelling that is carried out. On that basis I go prepared for the conditions that I may encounter.

That’s what my plea is here. It may be that only some, none – or all, of these signals manifest themselves in 2023. But our responsibility as educational leaders is to ensure our learners can continue with their learning with the least amount of disruption or disadvantage. And the same applies to our teachers.

So there it is, my reflection here is; “have we fully taken advantage of the opportunity we had in 2022 to develop the levels of resilience in our schools and system to be able to withstand another year of disruption in 2023?” I fear not.

Of course, there have been many initiatives taken by schools around the motu, some of which have been documented on the MoE’s Learning From Home website, as well as the schools such as those in the Manaiakalani network which have been using digital technologies to enable seamless home-school learning for some years now. More recently I’ve had the privilege of working alongside a fabulous group of teachers who have explored a range of innovative ways to connect learners with their learning regardless of location which have just been published on the Tai Tokerau Hybrid learning Project website.

Despite all of this, I remain concerned about the lack of any real movement forward as a system to engage with the level of transformed thinking required to ensure the degree of resilience required. Sadly, with an election year coming up, it’s likely that many of these concerns, as legitimate as they are, will become weaponised as individuals and political parties appeal for support for their particular ideologies.

Rather than succumb to this, let’s build on the great work already done and the success stories we have access to – in NZ and internationally. There’s so much that individual schools can do to build a resilient approach and I encourage school leaders to embrace this challenge as they head away to a well-deserved break. Otherwise it’ll be my grandkids who again are left to ‘catch up’ as if it’s their fault there’s been such a lack of continuity in their learning.

For holiday reading I’ve listed below the resources that many schools found helpful in the early part of 2022 – perhaps they’ll be found useful again. In particular I’d recommend the one titled Being Resilient: Characteristics of Resilient Schools as a useful start point for conversations with your staff at the beginning of the 2023 school year, to evaluate how well your school, your systems and processes etc, are designed to meet this challenge.

Simply click on the image below to access the resource, or visit my Hybrid Learning page where these and other resources are linked.

Tags educational transformation, environment scan, hybrid learning, leveraging digital, school leadership

Pivot

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
Peter Druker

The announcement of the closure of the Ministry of Education’s head office in Wellington, Mātauranga House, due to earthquake risk came as a big surprise to everyone – in particular, the 1000 employees for whom that is their regular place of work. They were given just a few days to retrieve what they need and prepare to work from home for an unspecified period of time.

Déjà vu the 2020 lockdown! We all remember the sudden changes in our lives at that time which required us all to immediately find new ways of working. A new word was added to our vocabulary as we learned to pivot from one way of doing things to another.

The idea of pivoting isn’t unfamiliar – it’s likely that most of us have had some sort of experience in life that has caused us to do so, a change in career, a redundancy, birth of a first child etc. Each of these experiences forces us to ‘change direction’ in at least some way as we adapt to and embrace the change we’re in.

The sudden closure of Mātauranga House is a salient reminder that disruptive events are increasingly likely to impact our ability to continue as we have. The OECD identified this in a table titled Potential future shocks and surprises, plausibility and impact taken from their Trends Shaping Education 2019 document (pre-COVID!) as illustrated below (cited in their more recent publication on scenarios for the future of education).

More recently McKinsey published an article titled The resilience imperative: Succeeding in uncertain times, in which they demonstrate a number of ways in which disruption is becoming more frequent and more severe, including a dramatic 300% increase in reported natural disasters over the past 40 years.

Such evidence must inform the thinking we are doing about how best we prepared ourselves for this highly disrupted future. Being unprepared is without doubt a significant cause of stress and decline in wellbeing as we continually find ourselves ‘reacting’ to what is happening rather than having a resilience plan in place for the increasingly likelihood of such events occurring. A pro-active response is always best.

Which has me reflecting on the current situation as we navigate our way through the uncharted waters of change in what some refer to as the post-COVID times. Much of the rhetoric reflects an assumption that we’re only have a short time to persevere here and that there’s a time coming when COVID will be ‘over’ and we’ll be able to get back to normal.

The concept of post-COVID could be further away than we think according to a report released last week by New Zealand’s former chief scientist, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman titled Unprecedented and Unfinished.

In the report an international group of researchers outline the drivers and possible outcomes of the pandemic over a five-year horizon. The team used over 50 ‘vectors of uncertainty’ to identify three scenarios for the future illustrated here.

Long story short – the current pandemic situation isn’t going away any time soon, and the degree to which its impact is felt depends entirely on the extent to which we see a global collaboration around vaccinations and putting in place preventative measures.

“It’s fair to say that it’d be very foolish of governments within the multilateral system to see this pandemic as a single, exceptional event.”
Sir Peter Gluckman

So what does this mean for education? Sir Peter Gluckman’s quote above could apply equally for our education system and its leaders – at the national, regional and local level. We have to see this as more than simply a single, exception event that we can simply ‘get through’ and come out the other side. We see this sort of response so often – a school and community impacted by flooding, an earthquake, or other natural disaster for example. We respond as if we hadn’t expected it, and each time we’re challenged to find ways of catering for our learners while they can’t attend school – always as a short-term measure until they can return to school and ‘get back to normal’.

There’s nothing at all wrong with considering our young people attending a physical setting called school as the ‘normal’ we might aspire to. The problem is that this ideal is likely to be disrupted all too frequently, and we should be doing more to reconceptualise how we might operate as centres of learning so that each time such a disruption affects us, we are not thrown into a tail-spin, with systems and processes designed only for the on-site, in-person settings we’re used to. We need to pro-actively plan how we might pivot when the need arises.

This is where the focus on hybrid approaches is so important – not as an end in itself, but as a strategy for building resilience in our schools and our education system. Working to design and implement the elements of a hybrid teaching and learning approach is an effective way of ensuring that when the next disruption occurs, we’re better prepared to respond pro-actively, with strategies and mechanisms in place that can actioned as required.

Of course, there are lot of other benefits of putting the time into designing and implementing such hybrid approaches, besides being prepared for future disruption. These include:

Achieving greater coherence across a school and the system
Addressing systemic issues re equity and inclusion through learning design that is focused more intentionally on meeting the needs of all learners
Increasing transparency of systems and processes – for teachers, students and parents/whānau
Increasing professional collaboration to focus on what is important for student learning
Increasing the focus on developing learner agency and self-management
Improving links with parents/whānau and community as partners in the design of learning and support of learners
Reviewing what counts as success in learning, with more transparency in the assessment process
Taking a ‘systems’ view of our use of digital technologies to support and enable quality teaching and learning that is truly boundary-less

If the challenge of responding to disruptive events isn’t motivation enough for us to be exploring the hybrid learning alternatives, then surely the outcomes in the list above are?

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