Lots of testing, very little learning.

"I don't understand why I have to do all these tests. I mean, it's not as if I'm learning anything."

These were the words of my son, a few days ago.

My son is in P7, his final year of primary school, and so far his year has been blighted. Blighted by tests, dozens and dozens of them. Blighted by the incessant, soul destroying grind that is the transfer test, formerly known as the 11 plus.

Since Easter, the entire focus of his schooling has been working towards the transfer test in November. The intensity is building up. First practice tests completed in April, May, June. Then, the summer revision pack, "just to keep his eye in". And now he's in P7, all systems are go: 2 practice tests a week, another to do at home at weekends. When he's not doing a practice test, he's reviewing a completed practice test or practising for the next practice test.

The tests he does are either numeracy or literacy or both and that is all he does; day in, day out. And all because of the transfer test. And when I say transfer test, I actually mean transfer tests, 5 of them! 12th November, 19th November (2 tests), 26th November and 3rd December.

And then there are the parents! Crazy, stressed, panicking parents, desperate for their little darlings to live up to their parents' aspirations - tutoring, extra revision, pressure, pressure, pressure. We've not gone down that route, which makes us feel intermittently smug that we're not succumbing to the system and intermittently guilty that we're not good parents seeking to do the best for our child!

"And what's it all for?" I hear you ask. Well, it's all about getting a place in grammar school. Despite the fact that the final official 11-plus took place in 2008, no satisfactory measures were put in place to deal with the transfer of pupils from primary to post-primary education, as the grammar schools insisted that they continue to have the right to select pupils on the basis of academic assessment.

Northern Ireland has, notionally, a two tier post-primary education system; grammar schools and secondary schools. In theory, grammar schools are elite academic institutions while secondary schools pick up those who do not wish to pursue an academic career or who fail to achieve the standard required to enter the grammar school. I say in theory because, as Slugger O'Toole points out in their article on grammar school intake, many grammar schools accept pupils who are well down the academic scale. Equally, many secondary schools offer A-levels and the best secondary schools achieve results that can often compare with those of grammars.

As a result of this, my son has to take two different types of entrance test - one offered by a local consortium, the Association for Quality Education and the other by GL Assessment. One of the schools he is likely to be applying to can be seen in the Slugger article above to accept pupils from right across the academic scale. The other only accepts high achievers, creaming the top 170-odd pupils from the 400-ish 10 and 11 year olds who sit the test.

My son will probably do pretty well, possibly very well - he's bright and able - unless he has an off-day; starts to daydream; spots something interesting out the window. (cue onset of parental panic...) He's aiming for the high achieving school. If he fails, he will most certainly do well enough to get into the second choice. He'd have to mess up big time for that not to happen. His primary school knows this. The teachers in the school know their pupils and know who is academically able and also who has strengths in other areas. But the test is king and must be obeyed. In the meantime, in the words of my son, he's not been learning anything.

So we're up early tomorrow morning for the first of the four Saturdays of testing hell. We all can't wait for it to be over.

I wish it wasn't this way, but it is, so all I can say is "good luck wee man".

Call me a pedant...

Alastair Darling spoke on Eddie Mair's show on Radio 4 this evening. He was talking about the steps George Osborne is taking to address the banking system and its perceived problems. In relation to these steps, Mr Darling said that "no banking system can ever be safe" but that any steps being taken should be intended to "make the system safer".

Clearly this makes no sense. If the system cannot be safe, then surely it cannot therefore be SAFER ie more safe.

Call me a pedant Mr Darling, but I think you meant that the steps would make the system less unsafe.

I just hope I haven't made any spelling or grammatical errors in this post!

That is all...

Thought of You

Been away from here for a very long time, so here's something beautiful to start again. Thanks to Alec Couros (@courosa) for bringing it to my attention.

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Just saying...

I found myself perusing Microsoft's Innovative Education Forum website earlier today to see what was what and I thought I'd have a quick look at the FAQs. And then I came across Question 12...



Now, I'm not making a major point here, but it just jarred somewhat to see these restrictions placed on a conference aimed at celebrating innovation. Not even a sneaky wee photo of a key note speaker to pop onto Flickr or a handy flip video of a top demonstration to share on YouTube??? Wouldn't that create a bit of buzz and excitement? Guess we'll never know! Hmmm....

Dr Richard Schwier, Informal Learning and My Web

Way way behind in commenting on the goings on in eci831, but it's been another busy week. This past week I have listened to MP3s of George Siemens' session on Connectivism, and Richard Schwier's session on Learning Communities. I also watched the Elluminate recording of Sue Waters' session on Educational Blogging where she posed the question "what are your thoughts on educational blogging?".

There has been lots of food for thought from all 3 sessions and it's very difficult to summarise where I am with it all. A few key points would be:

- I'm a lurker, but hopefully not a loafer

- I DO feel engaged, with the learning if not so much with my fellow learners

- I'm a 'not for credit' student - what I'm involved in is definitely non-formal learning with the odd informal moment along the way.

- I feel connected to the course and the social element is something I am conscious of and engaged with on the periphery. I wish I was more engaged, but there are several reasons why I am not. I'm in the wrong time zone - the live Elluminate sessions are at 2am. Not a good time when there's work in the morning! The archive is fantastic, but a live session would be better. I hope to join a live session before the course ends. To lurk in person would be so much better than my current archival lurking! Twitter lets me follow some of the activities of the other students and reinforces the concept of community. There's no doubt that the community and the connections it facilitates generate a new way of learning and accessing knowledge. It's a few years since I studied Piaget and Vygotsky and their theories of constructivism, but the new thinking of connectivism put forward by Siemens makes a lot of sense in the Web 2.0 world.

- I'm a rubbish blogger - I blog too infrequently and when I do blog I do so ineffectively. However, it does force reflection and evaluation and I hope some day to do it better.

- I'm interested in how schools can blog effectively and Jan Smith's approach to safety and parental involvement is admirable. In my work we are trying hard to open up access to blogging sites and many of our schools are certainly involved in looking at what they can do with blogs as a core part of learning. As a key tool in constructing knowlege and reinforcing learning it's hard to beat.

- Richard Schwier talked about how the web has developed into a social web, and reflected on the top sites presented by his browser. For what it's worth, my top 8 sites (as appearing in Google Chrome) are:

netvibes: all my feeds, mail, social networks gather here

twitter: no explanation needed - I guess it's the hub of my PLN...

flickr: less for social networking purposes and more as a simple home for my photos, the vast majority of which are private for family consumption only.

St Johnstone FC: probably the finest footie team in the world

eci831: well, I must be engaged if I go that often to the site!

amazon: it just has it all

linkedin: not so much social networking as business networking - keeping fingers in pies...

google: the launchpad for so much - mail, docs, alerts, reader...oh and the odd search!

A notable absentee from this list would be Facebook, partly because I don't use FB that much, but probably more because I access Facebook in several other ways (via the widget in Netvibes, via Tweetdeck or via the app on my Blackberry).

My final observation would be that I am filled with admiration for those playing a full part in the course, keeping up with the reading and posting and blogging. For my part, I will read more, and I will continue to follow and try to turn my engagement into active participation.

School report: could do better!

Social Media and Open Education - getting started...

So, I signed up for a Social Media and Open Education course (EC&I 831) as a non-credit student. The course is being run by Alec Couros from the University of Regina in Saskatchewan (which always makes me think of the Proclaimers song "Cap in Hand"), but that was a several weeks ago. Since then, I have, for various reasons, done nothing...

Now, I'm catching up!

Easy stuff:

• Follow all the people from the course who are following me, and follow a few extras. I didn't opt to follow everyone - not sure why not, but I imagine it's because I just felt slightly intimidated by the sheer numbers of them. I'm sure I'll add a few more over the duration of the course as I get to see who's doing what and who has interesting things to say. Mind you, if others use the same criteria, I'm not sure I'll generate many new followers!
• Sort out Twitterdeck - new Twitter column for course related activity. This should help me to keep track of what people are saying
• I've already added a tab to my Netvibes page, and I have the course blog and wiki feeds in there. This helps me keep up with the course stuff and the aggregated contributions by all the other participants' blogs. I'll probably do that little by little over the coming weeks...

Now to the course:

Week one stuff:

Intro and Grad course movie trailer - check - good movie

Listen to the week one Elluminate archive - great to hear the class session and very interesting to experience Elluminate for the first time - the organisation I work for has provided Marratech to all our schools, but this has since ceased to be developed (by its owners, Google) so we are now looking around for alternatives. Elluminate is in the frame so good to get some first hand experience, albeit asynchronous/historic. Timezones permitting, I must try to join one of the live sessions at some stage...

With regards to the Elluminate session, it's useful to hear the archive session, and most of this blog post is being written while listening to Alec. I'm listening and reflecting and writing all at once. As I listen more I go back and edit some and then write and listen and reflect more. Also very useful to be able to pause the session when I am interrupted by miscellaneous family demands!

The Elluminate archive is a very powerful learning tool - the fact that I can pause, rewind and review at any time, watch participants' comments, hear them asking questions is phenomenal. My previous experience of real online learning was when I completed my masters module in Open and Distance Education with the Open University (in 2002) - The main collaboration tool for the course then was First Class with discussions which could be live, but were mostly asynchronous. Access to the tutor always seemed remote - no 'live' communication, all asynchronous, either by threaded discussion or by email. One of the main issues for me as a student was a feeling of isolation. I get the strong feeling from Elluminate that this is much less of an issue. Simply to hear the tutor's voice is a major factor, not to mention hearing the other students. Mind you, Twitter didn't exist at the time, blogs were unusual and the web was still web 1.0!

The great thing here for learning is the potential for learning connections. I'm just listening to Alec (the tutor) asking people what they think about the course and how they find the level. To me, the level will be the level you want - by making connections with media and interacting with people I think you create your own level.

Sorry I wasn't able to respond to the Twitter shout out - I was tucked up in bed at the time!

Going to have to watch Michael Wesch - The Machine is (changing) us , but that will have to wait for another day - much too tired now and work in the morning...

Anyway, week 1 was for credit students only, so this was just a wee practice for me!

Tomorrow....week 2! Hmmm....

Bing v Google

On the face of it, this battle is still no-contest, however...

I came across an interesting item on the RIA Journal blog pointing out that Facebook now uses Bing to power their extended search results and not Google. This possibly goes some way to explain the apparent optimism detected by Rory Cellan-Jones when he recently met with some Microsoft executives. As Rory points out however, Bing has only 3.3% of the market, with Google retaining an impressive 84%. Rory makes the point that he, like many, tried out Bing when it first came out but then reverted back to Google and that Bing’s biggest challenge would be to break down that user inertia. Basically, why bother going to Bing? If Bing can get itself “institutionalised” by becoming embedded in major tools like Facebook then it stands a chance. If it can’t, it will remain insignificant.

The big question I have is why did Facebook choose Bing?