Learn 4 Life

The UK Education Tribes and why they should join together to effect real change

February 4, 2010 on 9:59 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Innovation, Learning Platforms, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Uncategorized, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, open source, pedagogy | 0 Comments

Image attrib.. Technokitten - Flickr

How do you change the learning landscape?

How do you make things happen that begin to change what people do in education and in society in general?

How does change come about?

Is it all necessarily good?

How can you scope effective exemplars of learning out to a wider audience and help people to become better at doing stuff well (forget the teaching bit for the time being…)?

I’m lucky - I get to play - yes play - in several educational arenas - each one has its own tribe and each tribe is highly effective in what they are trying to do but, at times, activities are virtually invisible to the mainstream teaching force.

Some tribes don’t know about each other - some do. Most of these tribes are connected on Twitter and loosely federated for big events at certain times of the year. Others don’t even exist online but have good traditional infrastructures and local lines of communication - what we need is for them all to meet up and organise.

So who are the tribes in the UK landscape and why should they join up?

First there’s TeachMeet which constantly amazes me - how people step up to the plate and deliver what is a completely distributed but highly organised management exercise resulting in quality CPD for teachers - it is nothing less than astonishing. No one person is in control and yet it seems to work. However most teachers still don’t know about TeachMeet - it hasn’t mainstreamed - why?

I would say that the hyperlocal links still haven’t been made and at the other end - organisations like DCSF, Teachers’ TV, Ofsted, TDA, Becta, NSCL, SSAT et al haven’t bigged it up as yet - trying searching for TeachMeet or Barcamp on any of those sites… I do think that may be about to change though as its popularity and efficacy as a learning platform gains currency in the UK Learning Landscape.

It’s a two ends of the telescope thing - you need local educators (and I wouldn’t limit that to teachers) to emerge and - people locally to show their expertise, but you also need top down facilitation and advertising of events from several other traditional and effective channels NOT just social media.

Tom Barrett, I think, had the excellent idea of asking for sponsorship money to leaflet schools local to the TeachMeet event so that people could at least be intrigued by what it might be that was happening down the road - at least they knew “something” was happening locally - it might only be on the fringes of their radar now but if they came across references both locally and nationally then, at least, they might have some inkling - at present they have none. Simple strategies like contacting the local newspaper can be highly effective and it goes without saying that local LA’s could play their part.

Believe it or not most teachers are still not on Twitter and they don’t really care about Social Networking if it’s not of immediate concern. However, tell them there’s a social “do” that they might like to come to, down the road, they might just turn up. What might be even better is if people were given accreditation for organising an event or turning up and presenting at one - Drew Buddie has been suggesting that for years. Even better would be some kind of action research branching out of this…

The other Tribes and groups like

MirandaMod, ETRU, Amplified, TEDx, Open Source Schools are all variants or like minded communities and the same issues often apply. How do we get people out to these events to share and how can we mainstream them or at least scope them out to a wider audience and participants to effect change; to build effective learning communities where people share in the spirit of moving learning on in highly dynamic and engaging ways?

Forward thinking organisations like

Creative Partnerships

Wise Kids

RSA

ALT

and a host of others are all looking for the same El Dorado - why can’t all these tribes work together to try and effect some change at local level and have a nationwide infrastructure?

It does seem to me that TeachMeet is now an effective means of professional development - every time I hear new people at a TeachMeet event say - ‘That’s the best CPD I have had all year’. I think - then why don’t we build on what works and not on what doesn’t? Why isn’t this process better known - why haven’t we been reaching out beyond the electronic ghetto?

The truth is we have been hard wired to sit around a fire and tell each other stories for millennia - so let’s revive some of that community spirit - let’s have the courage and imagination to build such an infrastructure. Let all the Tribes join up and give it a go. What is there to lose?

How would you do it?