Author Archives: Crispin Weston

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About Crispin Weston

I taught History and Philosophy in the UK from 1990-2006, with an interest in education technology and data interoperability standards. In 1996 I became involved in the British Education Suppliers Association standard for Open Integrated Learning System specification (OILS). In 2002-3 I sat on the UK DfE's Technical Standards Working Group (TSWG) and Learning Platform Stakeholders Group (LPSG) for the Curriculum Online initiative, helping to develop an interoperability framework for learning management systems (LMSs) that referenced the US-based SCORM standard. In 2007 I founded the Suppliers Association for Learning Technology & Interoperability in Schools (SALTIS) as a working group of BESA, referring the government agency BECTA to the European Commission for a breach of public procurement rules in its Learning Platform framework of that year. In 2008, I was hired by BECTA (probably with the encouragement of the Commission as a way of resolving the complaint) to help address the underlying problem with the data interoperability of LMSs. But BECTA was not interested in addressing the real problem of encouraging the development of interactive content, preferring to commit the UK to following an unsatisfactory off-the-shelf solution for expositive content called Common Cartridge, produced by the US-based IMS consortium. This battle was never finished because BECTA was abolished in early 2010 (a move that I strongly supported). SALTIS also closed and I became Chair of IST/043, the British Standards Institute's committee for IT standards in learning, education and training. But the new Conservative government was not interested in edtech, so it was not possible to make any progress with data interoperability. I wrote this blog in order to develop and articulate the theoretical basis for a new approach to edtech. At the same time, I came out of education for my day-job to run oXya UK, the UK-subsidiary of oXya France, a Hitachi Group company providing technical administration services for medium-to-large companies running SAP landscapes. I still look for opportunities to persuade government of the potential for a radical new policy for edtech, but am no longer actively writing this blog.

Five principles of pedagogy

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Teacher at blackboardPeople talk a lot about “pedagogy”—but what do they actually mean? In this post, I suggest five principles that might help clarify matters.

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, as a condensed conclusion from my long essays, Education’s coming revolution and In the beginning was the conversation. But the the spark that has persuaded me to get it down on paper was given to me by a Twitter conversation with Pete Bell, an ICT Examiner, who quoted J Bruner saying “Teaching is the canny art of intellectual temptation”. The argument of this post is that teaching is a lot more than that.

I propose the following five key principles of good pedagogy:

  • motivation;
  • exposition;
  • direction of activity;
  • criticism;
  • inviting imitation.

These principles may of course overlap and/or be sub-divided into sub-principles.

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“ICT” and “digital literacy” RIP

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Still from the film "The premature burial"The term “Information and Communications Technology” (ICT) has referred to the curriculum subject taught in UK schools. As advocated on this blog, it is now being changed to “Computing”.

I laid out the reasons why the term “ICT” should be abolished in one of the earliest posts on this blog. The Royal Society made a similar argument at about the same time in its report “Shut down or restart?”. Yesterday, the Department for Education announced that it was initiating the the legislative process required to change “ICT” to “Computing”. It also suggested a surprising response to the debate over “digital literacy”—one that is equally welcome as far as I am concerned.

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Round-table with Ian Livingstone at Computing magazine

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Round-table at Computing magazineWhy I disagree with Ian Livingstone (and why we should continue the discussion)

Last month I participated in a videoed round-table at Computing magazine’s offices in Soho, chaired by Peter Gothard. The panel included Ian Livingstone (the father of RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons and co-author of the Nesta NextGen report), Phil Bryant of OCR, and Joanna Poplawska of the Corporate IT Forum.

Part 2 of 3 of the conversation was published yesterday. Part 1 contains the panelists’ opening remarks and part 3 will address BYOD. It is this second part that contains the heart of the discussion.

I was a little taken aback, when I showed the video to my work colleagues yesterday, that they all complained that we were all far too polite to each other. “Where’s the passion?”, they complained. I assured them that this was not my normal reputation when discussing Learning Technology (indeed, I boasted, I had recently been threatened with legal action for defamation). But I can see what they meant. Maybe the shortness of the recording session and the unfamiliarity of the studio setting made us all a little stilted.

So, while there was much that the panel did agree on, I write this piece to highlight my disagreements with Ian Livingstone. They are generally disagreements of degree rather than of category—but they are significant nonetheless. When you add them together, they become pretty fundamental—and I would not want the importance of this disagreement to get lost in the civilities of the TV studio.

With all quotes coming from his first speech, I disagree with Ian…

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Computing in the National Curriculum

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Michael Gove leaving a platform on the National CurriculumMy response to the Department for Education’s consultation on the draft National Curriculum

Following my previous posts on the review of the National Curriculum (Digital literacy and the new ICT curriculum and Good lord! Where’s the digital literacy?), I submitted the following response to the DfE’s consultation on the National Curriculum, with particular reference to Computing.

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Public sector productivity in education

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Policy Exchange's digital government consultationA copy of my response to the public consultation by Policy Exchange on digital government

The think tank Policy Exchange has been running an online consultation on digital government (closing at midnight on Friday, 20 April). Most of the questions are about central government but question 4 is relevant to education technology: “How might modern tools and platforms help enhance public sector productivity?”

I am copying my answer, which provides a summary of the argument that I have developed on this blog.

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Managing progression in LAPland

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Reindeer in the snow in LaplandWhy Learning Activity Platforms (LAPs) are required, if we are to make sense of sequencing and progression management.

My piece yesterday on the iTunes model of learning content makes two presuppositions:

  • that by “learning content”, everyone understands me to mean “learning activities” and not “expositive resources” – see What do we mean by “content”? if this distinction does not make sense to you;
  • that disaggregated learning content needs to be built up into coherent courses, programmes of study, or short activity sequences for a single lesson or homework—this is what has often been referred to as sequencing, though I think I prefer “progression management” as being more unambiguously applicable to activity rather than information.

This post continues to inform the conversation on Daniel Clark’s blog, about his post on Key issues on OER and how we might overcome them.

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The iTunes model in education

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iTunes gift voucherDeveloping a marketplace for micro educational software and content

In response to my post MOOCs and other ed-tech bubbles (which listed OER as one of three significant “bubbles”), Daniel Clark (LearningShrew) posted an interesting piece on Key issues in OER and how we might overcome them.

Recognising that there was a problem with quality control, Daniel advocates an education equivalent of Google’s App Store. This would enable OER authors to market their products as a sort of cottage industry. The micro-market would produce a selection process, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and would incentivise authors to improve the best.

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Good lord! Where’s the digital literacy?

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Tintin, Captain Haddock, Professor Tarragon and Snowy find that the mummy has disappeared, from Tintin and the Seven crystal balls by HergéThe most recent draft of the Computing Curriculum for England and Wales has majored on Computer Science at the expense of Digital Literacy. Before we can discover where the latter has gone, we will need to agree on what it is we are looking for.

In November I posted an article on Digital literacy and the new ICT curriculum, which argued that:

  • the review of the ICT curriculum would allow us to disentangle the teaching of technology (“Computing”) from the use of technology to improve learning (“education technology”);
  • this opportunity was not yet being realised because teachers’ representatives were still led by adherents of the old conception of “ICT”, which deliberately conflated these two separate objectives.

The supporters of the old consensus have been arguing that there is no need to change the old ICT curriculum at all because all was well with the status quo. In response to some misleading information that suggested that this view had the support of OFSTED, on 5th February I wrote an opinion piece in Computing Magazine, clarifying OFSTED’s position and summarizing what I see as the problem with the debate over Digital Literacy.

This article gives some more background to the position described in Computing. It will:

  • analyse the current draft of the DfE’s Programme of Study (PoS) for Computing;
  • review the theories that lie behind the definition of “digital literacy” put forwards by the advocates of ICT;
  • restate the case for the adoption of the definition of “digital literacy” put forwards by the Royal Society;
  • propose a set of amendments to the current draft of the ICT programme of study, bringing back what I suggest is the right sort of digital literacy.

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In the beginning was the conversation

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conversationThe most fundamental of all pedagogical patterns is the conversation—and it is this paradigm that needs to inform the implementation of education technology.

Grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable! At 12,000 words this is the longest of my posts so far. But right now, it seems as if it is my most important, so I think it will be worth the read.

In 2012, I have addressed what I see as deficiencies in many of the current ed-tech theories and processes. Last month, in Education’s coming revolution, I made the general argument that education technology provided the only plausible, long-term solution to what are endemic problems in our schools, introducing a systematic approach to education that contrasted with the model of teacher-as-craftsman.

This post describes what I think those systems will look like. They will be grounded in reputable educational theory, and in particular on what is the essential design paradigm for all learning: the conversation.

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