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Conrad Wolfram – Maths Reimagined

Conrad Wolfram, Founder of Wolfram Research Europe and Computer Based Maths, tells me that we spend around 21,000 average student lifetimes per year teaching the wrong thing in school and calling it mathematics. “Maths” he tells me, “is taught as if it were a dead language”, and I have to say from my own experience that I agree with him.

 

In my mind school maths, like its stablemate science, has what a marketeer might call “poor brand value”. When I was a kid, before health and safety were invented, science was something I did when grown-ups weren’t around, when I wasn’t supervised. They had something at my school called science but it wasn’t the kind of adventures that I was having making discoveries of my own. Unbeknownst to my parents I was experimenting with gunpowder, making fireworks, taking apart engines and electronics to see how they worked, making new ones, playing with all manner of chemical reactions. It was a childhood of self-directed discovery driven by my own curiosity and a boyhood fascination with how the world worked. The kind of things I called science as a child would probably get you arrested today.

 

Maths, I found out much later in life, is also something of beauty and of discovery rather than the kind of parroting of times tables and remembering of formulae to solve abstract questions that had made me and the majority of my peers disengage from the subject. I only re-engaged with maths as result of becoming inspired in the creation of digital music and art but even then I wasn’t really aware that I was “doing maths”.

 

The siloing of maths and other disciplines is what sucks the joy, discovery and relevance out of them. The lack of application to something that I had an interest in, that excited me or had relevance to a problem I wanted to solve meant that I missed out on the adventures that could be had within the world of maths.

 

Conrad, through initiatives like Computer Based Maths, seeks to transform the way in which our young people engage with mathematics. He suggests that kids in school spend 80% of their time concentrating, and more importantly being tested, on the wrong thing – calculating. Arguing that computers are much faster at calculating than people he proposes that we allow kids to develop more useful skills around defining and solving problems where computational tools are available to them.

 

It may be, of course, that we cling onto the notion of maths as calculating because it makes it easier to measure when it comes to testing but one has to ask whether such tests have any relevance to the real world or tell us anything useful about the student.

 

In my interview with Conrad he tells me:

 

“I think what’s often happened in maths is they’ve used the technology to try and replace the teacher with the wrong subject, and it’s failed. Maths is a system. In fact, you could argue it’s the best system of logical problem solving that the humans have ever invented.

 

That hasn’t got across to people. They see these abstract procedures that they have to apply. They don’t relate to the real world. The abstraction, I think, makes them fearful of it. They don’t understand it in many cases. Therefore, they don’t like it. They don’t do well at it. In fact, indeed the teachers don’t understand why they’re teaching it either.“

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Sir Ken Robinson – The Education Economy

It has often struck me that a conflict of interest exists across education systems, state or private, where the awarding bodies of high stakes examinations are also owned by the very same companies who sell the content, that must be learned, to pass the test.

 

Such an end to end business model would make a lot of sense for the entrepreneurially minded and quite possibly create very large enterprises as a consequence. The “big edu” of the learning sector, if you don’t mind indulging my conspiratorial whimsy for a moment longer.  Imagine if automotive companies were owned by the oil industry. We would still be driving around in cars that did 5 miles to the gallon with no sign of a real commitment to clean, sustainable energy in sight. End to end business models, cartels and monopolies tend to be bad for innovation and progress. Even Apple doesn’t own all the companies who make apps for it’s platforms.

 

A similar conflict in the education sector, if it existed, would surely mean that change would be slow coming and that our schools would be held in a kind of persistent groundhog day for, say, 200 years or more. Should there be a shift in technology then no doubt these advances would be deployed to maintain the status quo, whilst reducing cost and improving efficiency. Perhaps the content could be digitised and fed to children using advanced computer algorithms that search for patterns in the data trail of its usage so that there would be a feedback loop to ensure every kid past a standardised test. Teachers optional.

 

My musing on this subject may seem somewhat fanciful but we have undoubtedly entered a new age of “evidence based practice” where the data can not lie. I’ve often thought that “evidence based practice” was a clever slogan whose rhetorical effect was to discredit  opposition. After all, who could possibly argue with the evidence and the data or that practice could be based on intuition rather than “the facts.”?

 

Well that’s an argument for another day but whilst interviewing Sir Ken Robinson in Los Angeles for Learning {Re}imagined we discussed what we agreed was a “tyranny of testing“. The pre-occupation with high stakes testing at young ages, when kids are in high school or earlier, seems patently detrimental to learning and, of course, teaching, providing a false metric for the success of a school or indeed the nations that depend on them.

 

Here is an excerpt from my interview. Robinson draws parallels between “big education”, “big pharma” and even “big tobacco”, suggesting that there is gold in maintaining the status quo for those who stand to benefit financially. He says:

 

“I do think we live under a tyranny of testing. I think there’s no question about that. It’s not totally benign. An interesting parallel to me is the drug industry. Depression is now a worldwide epidemic. It’s anticipated that within about 20 years, according to the World Health Organisation, I’m told, that depression will be the single largest cause of mortality among human populations. Depression.

 

Well, the drug companies profit hugely from depression and all that kind of related, ancillary commercial interests. It doesn’t seem to me that they’re very keen to cure depression. Why would they? It’s not that the people who produce acid reflux pills out trying to cure acid reflux. They want you to keep taking it, so you can keep buying their products.

 

Like cigarette manufacturers aren’t trying to wean you off cigarettes. There’s a kind of benign view of testing which is that it fulfils necessary purposes in relation to keeping track of standards, accountability in providing certification and qualifications for progress through the system. There’s a benign way of looking at them saying, well, it meets those important purposes in education, and there’s something to be said about that. What’s also true is it’s a massively profitable enterprise for all publishers. It’s one of the engines of the education economy.“

Have a look and tell me what you think

 

 

Graham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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11 billion reasons to learn STEM

Tomorrow I’m leaving London for New York where I will be participating in a number events during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) week. It is a week when the largest group of  world leaders, states people, lobbyists, leading thinkers and global opinion formers gather to discuss some of the most pressing global issues and, with hope, form some consensus that will lead to positive change. Amongst the global priorities that will take centre stage next week are education, environment and population, and these are the principal reasons that I will be there.

 

I will be at UNGA working with the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) to help launch theGlobal STEM Alliance, a collaboration between governments, companies, schools and NGOs to increase access to great STEM education for kids around the world. STEM, for those who aren’t familiar, stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. The majority of engaged parties in this movement  acknowledge that the arts and design disciplines form a vital component in the real world application of STEM so let’s not get into a playground debate around STEM vs STEAM as acronyms, you’d have to be myopic to not value the application of STEM through art and design without which global innovators such as Apple or Dyson wouldn’t exist.

 

But why is learning STEM so important? Didn’t we read somewhere that there were more than enough STEM graduates in the western world and besides, don’t our best minds end up working for Google figuring out how to sell more advertising or at the NSA reading your email?

 

Well it’s true that there are plenty of STEM graduates in the world but the reality is that they are not evenly distributed about the planet nor are we using anything like the right metrics to decide whether we, as a global society, are sufficiently equipped to face the very real challenges ahead that confront our species.

 

Take the continent of Africa, the 2nd largest continent on Earth, home to nearly 1.2 billion people and, depending upon whose map you believe, 47 countries. It is a continent of abundant natural resources; oil, gold, food, minerals and the birthplace of humanity. Yet Africa has not yet entered a single university into the global top 100. How can that be possible?

 

The result is that students from the African continent, who can afford it, will travel to foreign universities to gain their world class degrees and most often stay there, having been picked up by corporations and governments seeking advantage by hiring the worlds brightest minds. Some might argue that this brain drain is another example of an unfair exploitation of African resources that leaves a continent where many of it’s nations are poor or diseased or at least, without the skills to extract their own minerals or develop medicines, facing unfair competition from the west. Thus, this imbalance serves to concentrate global STEM expertise within specific global locations.

 

The metrics used, to consider whether we have a sufficient number of graduates to meet global workforce demands, by many respected organisations and international monitors are wrong. Without exception they focus on the role of graduates and education within national economic development plans and GDP, i.e. how many workers do we need, of what standard, to achieve the plan?

 

The problem is that these plans almost always never include, or only pay lip service to, the elephants in the room. These elephants are population, environment and resources. The rest, in my opinion, is simply commentary designed to distract everybody to the point of somnambulism. But it’s time to wake up.

 

Today it has been announced, something which many of us already suspected, that the powers that be got their calculations wrong and that far from plateauing out at 10 billion citizens our population will reach 11 billion by 2100 with a 70% chance of continuously rising thereafter. This places enormous strains on Earth’s “carrying capacity“, our planets ability to sustain us, and if we burst this limit we potentially face a bell curve population meltdown of Malthusian proportions driven by disease, famine, drought and warfare. Take into account rapidlydwindling water supplies, failure of antibiotics and climate change and we’re looking at a tough millennium. Children born today will be alive by 2100 and will face the consequences of our inaction.

 

So why will I be in New York?

 

Well, I’d say that I have 11 billion reasons to be there.

 

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

 

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Julia Gillard – Education Activist

Julia Gillard served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia and was the leader of the Australian Labor Party from 2010-2013 prior to which she was Minister for Education. An active reformer, Gillard oversaw the governments “Building the Education Revolution” program, which allocated $16 billion to build new school accommodation including classrooms, libraries and assembly halls. As leader of the party Gillard stated “I will make education central to my economic agenda because of the role it plays in developing the skills that lead to rewarding and satisfying work – and that can build a high-productivity, high-participation economy.” Her government went on to extend tax cuts to parents to help pay for stationery, textbooks or computer equipment under the Australian Education Tax Refund scheme. In February 2014, Gillard was announced as chair of the Global Partnership for Education, an international organization focused on getting all children into school for a quality education in the world’s poorest countries.

 

I met Julia at last years WISE Summit and had the opportunity to ask her some questions about her inspirations for being an activist for education and how that translated into her achievements in office.

 

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Technology as a “Sat Nav” for learning?

Digital learning entrepreneur Donald Clark is someone that I find myself often in complete agreement with, or in fierce opposition, but always entertained. On the board of numerous e-learning organisations he is a bonafide contrarian, regular speaker at conferences, and a prolific blogger.

 

I’ve known Donald for nearly 30 years as we both ran digital design companies that produced learning materials since the 1980s when “new media” was genuinely new and came in the form of 12″ Laserdiscs. It has to be said that he was a more shrewd businessman than I and by focusing his attentions on the corporate training market while I decided to go and disrupt the music industry he made a tidy return when he sold his company, Epic Group, in 2005. He has won numerous awards for the design and implementation of e-learning, winning the ‘Outstanding Achievement in e-learning Award’ at the World of Learning Conference (WOLCE).

 

I met with Donald at the WISE Summit last year and asked him why he thought digital platforms had not made as much progress within our educations systems compared to their impact in other sectors. His position is that higher education and schools are resting on their laurels and tradition rather than embracing the future. Here’s a short excerpt from our conversation:

 

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Telepathic teaching

Last year I was interviewed by WISE on the present and future of educational technology. I expressed my frustration with the limited impact that digital platforms had achieved within mainstream education and wondered how they would respond when it would be possible for students to “routinely connect information systems directly into their amygdala”.

 

Surely, the idea of being able to access the internet and receive uploads of content directly into our brain is the stuff of science fiction portrayed in films like “The Matrix” or the Gerry Anderson TV series that I grew up on as a child, Joe 90.

 

Earlier this week an international team of scientists demonstrated what they call the first direct brain-to-brain communication, sending words between two people thousands of miles apart over what was effectively the internet, bringing the concept of direct to brain learning a step closer.

 

 

I think it’s not unreasonable to imagine that this technology combined with the expected exponential performance increase in digital processing systems will have developed significantly by 2030, i.e. the year that most children entering primary education this year will leave full time education.

 

My question therefore is, what are we doing to prepare our children and indeed our education systems for a future that might look like this?

 

Banning smartphones seems like fiddling while Rome burns against this background but it’s not simply the technological advances that I’m thinking of here but the ethical decisions that these children will need to make to protect their future.
 

 

Graham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Noam Chomsky on Assessment

Herewith another teaser from the Learning {Re}imagined transmedia project coming out on October 1st from Bloomsbury. This time is an excerpt from an interview with social and political theorist, Professor Noam Chomsky.

 

In this 7 minute excerpt I ask Chomsky about his thoughts on the value of the way we currently use high stakes examinations to test our high school students.

 

He says:

 

“Passing tests doesn’t begin to compare with searching and inquiring and into pursuing topics that engages and excite us. That’s far more significant than passing tests. In fact, if that’s the kind of educational career that you’re given the opportunity to pursue, you will remember what you’ve discovered. There’s a famous physicist, a world famous physicist right here at MIT who, like a lot of the senior faculty, was teaching freshmen courses, he once said that in his freshmen course, students will ask, “What are we going to cover this semester?” His standard answer was, “It doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover.”

 

That’s what teaching ought to be; inspiring students to discover on their own, to challenge if they don’t agree, to look for alternatives if they think there are better ones, to work through the great achievements of the past and try to master them on their own because they’re interested in them. If that’s the way a teaching is done, students will really gain from it and will, not really remember what they studied, but will be able to use it as a basis for growing, on their own. Again, education is really aimed to just helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own because that’s what you’re going to do for your life, not just to absorb materials given to you from the outside and repeat it.“

 

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Keri Facer – What do parents want?

Over the next few weeks whilst I finalise the digital resources and complete the coding for the app that supports the Learning {Re}imagined book (officially launching in October!) I’m going to tease and tantalise you with snippets and excerpts from the material that I and my photographic colleagues, Newsha Tavakalion and Raphael Yaghobzadeh, recorded on our recent global tour.

 

These last months I’ve been having a wonderful time re-tracing my steps going through more than 50 hours of video and audio recordings and thousands of photographs. This material has been percolated into the book that stands at nearly 350 pages of visual loveliness that comes with a free downloadable app (iOS and Android) providing exclusive access to more than 4 hours of video and audio recordings in the form of a digital cloud that sits above the printed page.

 

So while you’re waiting for the book (come back to this site in a week or two to find out how you can pre-order an exclusive hard back collectors edition) here’s an excerpt from my interview with Professor Keri Facer, Educational and Social Futures, University of Bristol and hear what she has to say about what she thinks parents really want from schools when they talk about qualifications.

 

 

Graham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Andreas Schleicher – What is the Point of PISA?

andreas-schleicher-wp-1It seems that OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) provokes strong emotions from educators the world over. Intended as a diagnostic tool to bring together policy makers into a dialogue about education and improvement it has become widely criticised as a league table that the very same policy makers use to beat up their respective educators in a kind of “must do better” end of term report.

 

Sir Ken Robinson recently criticised PISA for “squeezing out” other more creative subjects and creating an anxiety around education that was “grotesque”.

 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was the fruit of the US-funded Marshall Plan, intended to reconstruct European economies after World War II to prevent the spread of Soviet Communism. The objectives of the United States were to rebuild war-devastated regions, remove trade barriers, modernise industry, and make Europe prosperous again. Today, the OECD has 34 member countries that consult one another to identify challenges, discuss and analyse them, and promote policies to solve them. The US has seen its national wealth almost triple in the five decades since the OECD was created, calculated in terms of GDP per head of population. Other OECD countries have seen similar, and in some cases even more spectacular, economic growth.

 

I met with Andreas Schleicher, a German statistician and researcher in the field of education, in Paris to learn more about PISA. Schleicher is the Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills at OECD and the co-ordinator of PISA. I found my conversation with Andreas quite illuminating and whilst I have my reservations around standardised testing I was left without any doubt that Schleicher is one of the good guys. My full interview with Schleicher will be included in the Learning {RE}imagined book coming out this autumn but in the meantime I thought that readers of this blog would enjoy this short extract.

 

 

gbm-faceGraham Brown-Martin is the founder of Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global think tank that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas to transform the way we learn, teach and live. His book, Learning {Re}imagined was recently published by Bloomsbury/WISE and is available now.

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Digital Activism – Jake Davis

“You cannot arrest an idea”

 

Jake Davis

 

LulzSecOn July 27th 2011, Jake Davis was visited at his home in the Shetland Islands, a remote archipelago of Scotland that lie north-east of mainland Britain, by 6 police officers from London and arrested. Aged 18, Jake was accused and subsequently charged with a number of offences including unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency’s website.

 

Jake, as it transpired, had been playing with online activist groups including Anonymous and LulzSec, the latter being more akin to a team of digital pranksters sailing the waves of cyberspace rather than the kind of cyber-terrorists that certain parts of the media would have the public believe.

 

Under his online pseudonym , “Topiary” (@atopiary on Twitter), Jake came to prominence amongst the hacker community after participating in a live radio phone-in discussion with a member of the Westboro Baptist Church whilst their site was hacked and replaced with a message from Anonymous. The Westboro Baptist Church is widely recognised as a “hate group” for its extreme ideologies especially against the gay community as well as picketing the funerals of children and US military personnel. In this regard, whilst illegal in terms of the law, the live hack of the web site could be regarded as an act of protest within the digital domain against the proliferation of online hate speech.

According to Davis, LulzSec was formed during a moment of boredom within an online chat room with fellow users none of whom had met in the physical world nor knew each others real identity. The groups objective was initially to rail against what they saw as the absurdity of online marketing by using the digital world against itself. They launched a number of notable campaigns including the exposure of Sony Playstation’s lack of security for users confidential information, posting a fictitious story on the PBS site about rapper Tupac Shakur being found alive in New Zealand and hacking the site of The Sun newspaper in the UK where they posted a spoof story suggesting that its owner, Rupert Murdoch, had taken his own life as a result of the “phone hacking scandal” that had implicated his own organisation.

 

Each successful campaign brought the LulzSec group notoriety across global mass-media and, as if to prove the point about digital marketing, their @LulzSec Twitter account managed by Jake Davis accumulated more than 400,000 followers. Legality aside one can only admire the chutzpah of a group of teenagers using their laptops to create mischief within a digital world barely understood by their parents generation.

 

LulzSec only lasted a matter of months before the arrest of Davis but already there was disagreement within the amorphous group with the suggestion that government hired hackers had infiltrated the group to encourage less whimsical campaigns and more carnage.

 

After his arrest Jake was banned from using the internet for 2 years, wore a location tagging device that enforced a curfew and was sentenced to 37 days in Feltham Young Offenders Institute, a prison more commonly used to accommodate young people with a history of committing violent crime or narcotic distribution.

 

The inclusion of my interview with Jake Davis within a book about learning in a connected world is to give voice to the kind of learner whom we almost never hear from in the discourse about education particularly when we discuss digital. So often the young people of Jakes generation are described as apathetic and disengaged from the society around them. Whilst western nations describe the transformative effect of digital platforms within emerging democracies and, for example, the “Arab Spring” the flip side is that they are not prepared for protest or even pranks within the emergent digital economy. The brightest minds of Jakes generation are now actively nurtured and recruited by our respective intelligence agencies to commit acts of espionage and civil surveillance on behalf of their nations. So by interviewing Jake I wanted to understand more about the world in which current and future generations are expected to grow and demonstrate dissent.

 

My full interview with Jake will be published in the Learning {RE}imagined book later this year but in the meantime here is a short clip where Jake describes his experiences of schools that lead him to cyberspace.

 

 

Further viewing – Courtesy of BBC Newsnight