Ednography

This is described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book, The Black Swan. It is about our tendency to give undue weight to purely random events which he calls this tendency the narrative fallacy.

[Surprise is about] getting off your pedestal of certainty and being ok with the fact that something unexpected is going to happen. [The trouble is that] creating surprises for companies, means team-building events, but that meant people where not willing to be surprised as it takes a lot of courage and trust in the team to be willing to be embarrassed in front of them team. Being surprised means being vulnerable. - Tania Luna (Psychologist & Surpriseologist)

[Surprise is different for introverts and exroverts.] It seems that introverts are more easily stimulated by their environments, if you give an introvert a lemon they will salivate more. Introverts are more easily excited. - Hega Nowotny (European Research Council)

Notes on Russell Stannard’s plenary at Digital ELT Ireland, 31st Oct 2015

Creativity: Where is it coming from? The opportunities that are open to us now. Make the links between everything. Technology means that ideas that wouldn't have been feasible 20 years ago, can now be put into practice.

Collaboration: This is the key (in learning and business) - in keeping with Vygotsky, task based training & CLT. A complex world requires sharing

Tony Wagner - Need to lead by influence, not command and and control, not positional authority. Ability to engage and ask the right questions. Passing authority and control over to the students.Starting point and then pushing to make it more collaborative.

In L1 people are collaborating and sharing and working across using the internet.

Learner autonomy: Will be continually having the study new subjects and up date skills.

Tony Wagner - continual learning. Structure and strictures of school is dead or dying and learning is beginning.

The key to transformation is Creativity, autonomy & collaboration.

More and more opportunities to work in small business depend on these.An education system that doesn't encourage the links, that is being challenged. The use of technology doesn't have to be transformative, we need to think about how to make it so. Is it creative collaborative and autonomous? Make it more creative collaborative autonomous. Also help the students to Reflect on this.

Russell has been using blogging as an assessment tool since 2007. Saw that students were chatting about the blogs. Realised the need to make them aware of this process they are going through. => Give opportunities to Reflect. Other wise they are not aware that they are doing the learning.

Dr. Steve Mann - Give structure and break it down into stages. E.g. Video project; Pitch, Storyboard, Script, Film. At each stage build in opportunities for dialogue which goes across from one student to another. Not just dialogue with the teacher. Get the students to reflect in groups / individually in class or at home, discuss the task and record it. Podcast is a great tool for practicing speaking. Think about what they were doing, highlight it and how they collaborate. Continual dialogue (two-way).

Teacher  - Student feedback is not very transformative. What if I could get them to do the feedback? They go through and evaluate their own work. Pass it through for evaluation from the teacher. Means cognitive engagement, forcing the student to think about it. Shifting responsibility over to the student. Students go through writing process, evaluate their own work and choose the ones they want to put forward for assessment.

If schools are flipping the lessons then the assessment needs to reflect that building up an e-portfolio is the key to aligning assessments.

Teresa McKinnon - E-portfolios are the key. Capture and document the activities they have done, reflect upon that and look back over their learning. Analysis of and critical thinking about the learning. Connects them with the nature of the skills of language learning. Need to signal the skills they may be developing (Reflection) and think about how they might apply it to the wider world.

In Conclusion: 1. Think about how to make the activities we do transformative (creative, collaborative, and autonomous)

2. Give opportunities for reflection

3. Align assessment with this

Sir Kevin Robinson: Bring on the Learning Revolution (TED Talk Feb 2010)

Contributors to this BBC radio discussion on the genetic basis for traits like irrationality on this programme hit upon something that’s important to the future of education.

We still don’t know the best way to run a school, the best way to inspire kids, the best way to teach kids because those basic questions don’t get that much attention and it seems to me that that’s the really important stuff, because that’s where you can change people and make the difference. And by focusing on genes and genetics and brain structures it’s all fine but where does it get you, what do you say when you are standing in front of a class of kids? Do you say some of you have the right genes and some of you don’t, right end of lesson?

Psychologist Richard Wiseman

That’s not necessarily because scientists have been spending all their time studying genetics, it’s because educational researches have become victim to a certain postmodernism and a lack of appreciation of doing things like randomised control trials of new ideas in education and so on. [...] There is a dreadful postmodernism and an actual aversion to doing this sort of research but I think that’s changing now. There are conferences popping up of teachers getting together who want to run experiments in their schools and try the latest teaching technique and so on. I think we are going to get out of that pretty soon and I am quite optimistic about changing those things exactly as you are saying about how to run a school ...

Neuroscientist Stuart Ritchie

All educators have come across learners who act as if the ideas that were painstakingly teased out in the previous had never been mentioned to them. Also from BBC Radio 4′s ‘Is Ignorance Bliss’ this is Professor of Behavioural Science Nick Chater on why we often ignore important information.

Nietzsche once wrote that ignorance is a structured as knowledge, we choose the things we don’t want to know.

We can see our desire to avoid information as part of a larger battle between the short-term self which is looking for immediate comfortable experiences and to avoid discomforting difficult things. And our longer term self who have the interests of our whole life and our future in its hands. Those can come into real conflict some times.

The short term self will have a strong to put difficult information to one side and undoubtedly in the moment will feel happier. The longer terms self is battling for control and is trying to force the longer term self to face up to the problem. It is that tension that is at the heart of a lot of human behaviour problems. It is often very difficult to get our immediate emotional short-term self to play the appropriate role that our long-term self needs it to.

One of its most important consequences of this is the tendency of information avoidance. The fact that we tend to avoid unpleasant information however important it may be to us. The other thing is that we are also unhappy about information that challenges our perspective. We have a simple perspective on the world around us, we don’t understand the world very well, that’s true for everyone. When find information that makes us realise, or makes us suspect, that our perspective may not not quite right often we want to push that information aside. It is extremely hard for us to overcome this aversion to disconcerting information. We are also very keen on information that fits our current perspective and not very keen information that doesn’t.

One strategy is to try and think in the long term. Ask yourself, “What would I rather I had done.” Or ask a friend for advice. This breaks us out of the dominance of a moment.

This is a very interesting idea about how learning is necessarily difficult and that when the answer comes too easy we are not left with anything. Does this mean that having the internet as a tool runs contrary to learning? This following is a transcription of the contribution of Dr Lisa Son Associate Professor of Psychology to BBC Radio 4 Programme, ‘Is Ignorance Bliss?’

Metacognition is how you think about your thinking, it is really a self-reflection ability that humans have. Rather than I think therefore I am, I can think about my thinking therefore I am. A little piece of metacognition is the sense that if you are handed information on a plate then because you didn’t do the thinking on your own this puts you at risk of forgetting it really quickly. The learning isn’t very deep.

There is something known as “desirable difficulty”. This was a term that was first talked about by Robert Bjork who is at UCLA in Psychology. There is this idea that the more effort you put in, meaning the more you try personally to remember or retrieve a particular item or target from your mind the more likely your are to be successful in retrieving that same item later on. If it is easy you can just looking it up on google or wikipedia or someone gives you the answer, you didn’t really try to retrieve it on your own then that means it was just superficial and it didn’t really get encoded into your long term memory.

The goal of learning and education is that they retain this information for the long term, because if we don’t have long term knowledge we are not going have creativity. We have to be able to have long-term knowledge to continuously think in novel ways, We want to be well-rounded and want to be able to think about new ideas. We experience problems throughout our lives and really life is about problem solving. We see problems that are in all different areas of knowledge.

I am one of the kinds of people who do not want my children to be on the internet or on the ipad at all. I want them to be on paper and pencil and books. I want my kids and the students that I teach to value the thinking process and not feeling like they have to know everything perfectly at every moment. But before the internet world things took longer to learn. This allows you to think I don’t know this particular topic or concept but that’s ok I have time to learn.

Is Ignorance Bliss?: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0639xsw

Dr. LIsa Son: https://psychology.barnard.edu/profiles/lisa-son

I understand that schools need have a high standard and have to make sure that their students never have cause to question whether their teacher knows what they are doing, but I don't believe that making “native speaker” a recruitment criteria is the best way to do that.

In practice it means one or all of these things: - Your parents spoke English at home. - You did all your schooling through English (Pre-school, primary, secondary?). - You are a citizen of a predominantly English speaking country. - You look Irish / English and have an Irish / English name.

More rational criteria would be: - You have successful completed a third level qualification through English OR Have lived in an English speaking country for at least five years. AND Have a level of accuracy and intelligibility that offers students an excellent model (Holding a certificate from public exams with a spoken element can be a useful indicator here).

The job of ADoS is not only about keeping materials and resources in order, and providing administrative support to the DoS and helping out with placements and certifications. That is not even the most important part.

The ADoS job is also about being a bridge between the staff room and the office and prevent an us and them thing developing (or helping to heal it if it is already there). The ADoS does not manage teachers but supports them and keeps an eye out for who might need support, but is saying nothing. 

Assessment needs to be guided by principles of transparency and consistency with an emphasis on formative feedback.

Transparency means that the assessed outcomes, the criteria for assessment and the grade descriptors should be made available to course participants and explained to them and that when they are asked to reflect on their own performance they use a similar instrument to that used by their assessors. As a result course participants should understand the meaning of the grade they are given, what the basis of it is and how an improved performance might be described. In addition they learn from this model about how an assessment system is constructed and operated.

Consistency of approach is based on the view that it is better to offer a single standard to be aimed for at the start of the course and provide less and less support in the realisation of each assessed task while making the tasks more complex as the course progresses, rather than increasing the standard of the assessment. Lowering the ground, rather than raising the bar. This gives a consistent target to be aimed for and a consistency the task feedback on how to reach it.

Notes I took at the mobile learning workshop that I attended at the conference organised by the LT Sig of IATEFL with the help of ELT Ireland and MEI in Dublin on the 22nd and 23rd of Nov. Overview We've always been distracted. It's different forms.

Using mobiles is good if it is for discrete units of time for a purpose.

Avoid cutting down time when they are doing what they want to do, communicate.

There can be a complex tech eco-system where the teacher has to support technical issues.

It's a big moment for the students when they are told get your phones out.

Why take tools away from people and make tasks as difficult as possible?

Writing and speaking teachers intervene well on correction and learning in class.

With reading and listening we can't help as much.

As long as it is on target language-wise, inspectors will be happy.

Add a tech column to the syllabus.

What can tech bring to that unit?

Always tell the students why they are using phones and what they will get out of it.If the teacher doesn't believe in it it will never work.

Language level can be an issue. Start slowly with simple tasks.

Using mobiles

Explore the devices, what can they do and what you can do with them in your learning.

Have an acceptable use policy everyone signs a list of things it is alright to do and things it is not. No bans.

Still insists on students taking notes on paper, it forces then to think about content. Taking a photo you'll never look again.

Experience the joys of language from their mobile device. Explain to them about what we are using and why.

Using text messages

Texting is way of playing with language. Know the rules in order to break them. Texting didn't destroy English despite predictions.

Useful to explore what is acceptable in the different genres. Will have to use IM in work scenarios. Consider register and appropriacy. 

Phones great for dictation. Autocorrect will fill it in for them.

Using Images

Pick a photo on your phone - share it and explain what's going on. Give a day's warning. Prompt with a list of generic photo types.

Give Prompts to find something and take a pic. Not all is useful but it is more memorable if the collect their own data.

Flickr. Students have password. Students upload pics for new Vocab. Have access to a vocab bank when you go home.

Using Audio Record and send student language production.

Make a short recording describing something. The others guess what it is.

Can record and rerecord outside class.

Record and upload on Audioboom, max 10mins. Listen and comment.

One task was to give greative reasons for why they don't do their homework. 

Interview your host family on your phone. Share in class.

Using Video

Language practices comes in the prep. And storyboarding in the class. You can steer people.

Looking for video tools that don't get in the way. So most of the energy is spent on the languages. e.g. Imovie

Vine, 6 second video. Something personal. Gather clips around town. Gather useful information - put them in a wiki. Contribute to global knowledge of the school.

Forces people to look at things and think about them a bit more.

Hardware

Mirroring with Xmirage via desktop

Reflector - works with androids.

Laptop connected to a projector.

Connect your IPad to the same network. Wireless v Wifi connection

Routers in each room ...

Hard wired the whiteboards.

Separate teacher and student connections.

Other Apps & Sites

My word book, British Council

Lyrics traing - website

TED-Isub for subtitles

Gobby - chilli-o-meter - Only from US app store

Dragon speech to text transcription - Only from US app store

Post it - Converts reals post-it notes to virtual   

Wiki - peer correction - keeps every revision.

I have recently been involved in moderating a synchronous online chat for English language teaching professionals on a fortnightly basis, called #eltchinwag. This takes places on twitter and what I have found over the last four weeks is that there is much more to the task than meets the eye.

First there is all the communication that has to happen around it in order to define and publicise the topic. Because this is a voluntary professional development activity you can never assume there will be participation, you have to contact potential participants, engage their interest and remind them that it is on. In order to attract new-comers it is necessary to repeatedly explain in simple terms how to they would do about joining the conversation. This pre-discussion communication has to happen across a number of platforms, facebook, linkedin, and website, as well as on twitter itself. In the hour beforehand you have to tweet every quarter of an hour to let people know you are there and remind them to join when the time comes.

The job of the moderator once things get underway is to welcome participants as they appear and to pose questions that will encourage discussion, and ask follow-up or clarifying questions where those are needed, or referring people to the relevant comments of another participant, where you have managed to spot them amidst the continuous flow of the chat.

Every 10 to 15 minutes you need need to move the discussion on with a fresh question. It can take a few minutes for this to get picked up and unless you have an able wing-man ready to respond as soon at they arise and seed the discussion, then you need to operate a second twitter handle and respond to you own questions in order to get the ball rolling. Where these responses are directed to someone they will be more effective, but that means know your participants enough to be able to target it effectively. There is too much going on however, to allow yourself to really get drawn into a discussion, you just have to hope that someone else picks it up.

About 50 minutes in you draw the discussion to a close with a round up question and invite someone to summarise. Volunteers are not usually forthcoming unless you have laid the ground work in advance and asked someone directly. Once the hour is up, the good byes have been said, and the trickle of last-minute questions has come to an end, then you have to set about extracting the summary from twitter so that it can be archived and made available to the person who is going to do the summary.

Where it falls to you to do the summary of the chat, what's involved is dividing the tweets up under the various questions and looking for the common threads in the discussions and responses. Because the discussion is multi-layered and simultaneous, always amazes me the tangents that you didn't notice at the time, which only come out in the summary.

These discussions when they have enough active participants, have the capacity to spark ideas and connections that you would not have seen otherwise and a good one will send me away inspired. The experience is intense though, and you have to be fully focused in order to participate, never mind to moderate.

My recent studies have often been coloured by a tendency to dismiss enlightenment thinking as narrow and mechanistic and to dub any approach which did not sit with this view as positivist. We have heard how positivists were mistaken and how we now have a more nuanced view which respects the inescapably of subjectivity and takes it to be a valid research perspective, known as phenomenology. When deciding on an approach to our research the subtext always seemed to be that we could choose any perspective apart from a positivist one.

I was spurred to examine this further when we started the new academic year by restating that knowing both your ontology perspective and your epistemology stance was fundamental to any choice of methodology. The use of this terminology made it seem quite impenetrable, but what it comes down to is this; it is important to know where you are coming from, and what you think constitutes reliable knowledge.

Ontology means working out what is, how to categorise it and how it came to be. Other approaches to the study of existence either infer an origin from the end point (cosmological) or from the purpose (teleological) whereas the ontological approach is based on coming up with accurate definitions. What we are doing here in applying it ourselves and our research is to define who we are in the world how we came to be that person or fill that role and work out how this relates to our research.

Epistemology on the other hand is the study of knowledge and it comes in three classic flavours; "I can only know from what I experience or observe" (Empiricism)," I can only think what I work out in my head" (Rationalism) and "I can't really know anything" (Scepticism). To this I would add Positivism, which is also fundamentally concerned with what we can know and how we can know it: I would define it as the belief that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws, and that empirical evidence, which is information derived from logical treatments and reports of verified data received from the senses, is the only source of all authoritative knowledge, while introspective and intuitive knowledge is rejected.

In order to determine my epistemological stance I am going to express my beliefs in the following paragraphs. This should also help to clarify my ontological perspective, as my ideas about what we can know and how we can know it arise from it.

- We cannot dismiss the possibility that there is no objective reality but as it can never be tested and it would negate anything we could do or think, it is not a useful hypothesis. We can, therefore, work on the assumption that there is an objective reality but it is often too complex and chaotic to be distilled into a simple explanatory narrative. The answer is more often going to be probabilistic than definitive. and may only be valid when applied to a representative sample and not be useful for the description of a single specific case. Despite these challenges in understanding the answers, questioning is the fundamental act of being.

- Intuition is not reliable unless it is based on considerable direct experience over time. Outside of this, intuition is inevitably flawed due to the inherent biases it is subject to, chief of which is the tendency to see patterns where there are none and wrongly attribute causes. Critical questioning must be applied to reduce the degree to which we are misled by these flaws in our intuition. This means that there is a methodological sceptism as I think that by carefully examining all claims to knowledge we can, and should determine which are false. However, this kind of evidence will only influence people when it confirms their intuitions, and only direct experience or narratives of others' experience can trump this. Telling people about the fact has little impact as an educational strategy, we must instead engineer learning experiences.

- The outcome of any system, biological, physical, or artificial is determined by its starting conditions, innate structural limitations and potentialities. Environment and experience influence how the system develops by activating different innate potentialities but this is restricted by the innate limitations. How people perceive what happens and what they learn form it depends on their, which are determined equally by innate and experiential factors.

- There is no over-arching purpose to anything, and no deeper meaning, we exist because we cannot do otherwise. To make meaning for and give purpose to our actions in spite of the overwhelming pointlessness of it, is a supreme act of creation. The collaborative and intergenerational creation of meaning is what separates humanity form the great bulk of unthinking existence.

So am I positivist? I do think that society like the physical world operates according to general laws, but like the modern understanding of physics, these are probabilistic rather than mechanistic and can accurately predict the behaviour of a population but no so that of a particular individual. If you want to make any know of claim about how things are, or how they work, then you have to present evidence and subject it to logical scrutiny. Opinions, feelings or intuitions do not count as evidence in this regard. However, these can be a useful starting point for collecting evidence and constructing an argument. I don't therefore reject introspective and intuitive knowledge, I just think we should know the limits of it. You may call this a soft or neo positivism, but I have yet to find a better way to describe my epistemological stance.

Recently, my Polish girlfriend asked her eight-year-old niece to teach me a few words in their language. The little girl, having introduced me to the number and the colours, began thinking about what should come next and followed with fruit and animals and after some more thinking forms of politeness (please, thank you etc.)

The principles of autonomous learning are that students should be given an input into the objectives, content and assessment of their learning, but it’s short-coming is that in order for this to be productive, learners need training in the skills and knowledge that will enable them to direct and regulate their own learning. Learners are often resistant to this, as they don't feel able to decide and they see it as properly the job of the teacher to make those decisions for them. There has also been a parallel movement in education towards collaborative learning and peer-mentoring, as the basis of what is variously termed problem-based or inquiry/enquiry based learning.

Taking some inspiration from Seneca the Younger, who says, in his Moral Letters to Lucilius, "Docendo discimus" (by teaching, we learn), I can see that there is a potential to combine both of of the trends mentioned above by involving students in the learning of others. This would make them aware to the processes involved and equip them to better regulate and direct their own learning. I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on how it could be made to work.