Month: September 2015

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ACE 2015 National Conference: Educators on the Edge

Last week I attended the ACE (Australian College of Educators) National Conference in Brisbane. The conference theme was ‘Educators on the Edge: Big ideas for change and innovation’. I created a Storify of my tweets that you can find by following this link.

screenshot-storify.com 2015-09-27 23-34-45

I’d encourage you to take a look. As I’ve said before, my tweets are the notes I take at conferences, and I try to source links to what presenters are referring to. I took quite a few photos of presenter’s slides and they are attached to these tweets so it’s quite a rich source of information about what was being shared in the presentations I attended. Some of the presenters included John Hattie, talking about ‘What is the role of students in the learning and teaching equation?’, Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz who discussed ‘Moving Naplan online’, and Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission discussing ‘Innovative technologies and human rights education’,

I’d like to spend some time here mentioning the presentation that I thought was worth the visit to Brisbane. Dr Paul Browning from  St. Paul’s School in Queensland delivered a presentation entitled, ‘Future planning: The school of 2028’. Here’s the conference abstract:

Futures Planning: The school of 2028

In the words of Al Gore: ‘the future that is emerging will be extremely different from anything we have ever known in the past… There is no period of change that remotely resembles what humanity is about to experience’ (p. xv). Two critical uncertainties are converging right now, both of which will significantly disrupt education and schools as we know them now: technology and employment.

St Paul’s School has just completed a scenario planning project, imagining the world of 2028 when its youngest students reach their final year of school. 30 global leaders participated in the development of four scenarios, or stories that describe that world including: Professor Pasi Sahlberg, Professor Yong Zhao, Professor Andy Hargreaves, Saul Eslake, Tim Costello, David Price, Mark McCrindle and Andrew Fuller.

This interactive workshop will present the process of scenario planning and share with the participants the four scenarios. Participants will be asked the question: “if these scenarios are true, then what are the implications for education; for their school?”

Gore, A. (2013). The Future. NY: Random House.

Paul shared this video that explains the process followed with scenario planning.

And here is the video their students produced as a result of the process.

What a wonderful way to involve your current school population and engage the wider community with your school’s thinking about the directions you will be taking into the future. Paul is an enigmatic presenter – I’m sure he is an inspiration to his school community. To find out more about St. Paul’s and the thinking that drives their community, visit the Centre Online, the site where they explore research innovation and future development. While in Brisbane, I also had the good fortune to meet Jon Andrews, who I discovered is Executive Director of Teaching and Learning at St. Paul’s. Jon is one of my ‘go to’ people on Twitter- he shares wonderful resources and challenges my thinking. What a think tank at St. Pauls – a school to watch.

Side note. My very good friend, Cameron Paterson, from Shore School in Sydney, was awarded a Fellowship of the Australian College of Educators at the conference dinner. It was wonderful to see a teacher who is an inspiration to many educators be acknowledged. I was very pleased that I was able to be there to take some pics. Very well deserved Cameron. 🙂

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School’s out Friday

I wish I was as confident as Hank Green in thinking that Yellowstone National Park poses no threat to our current existence.

When the Tsunami struck on December 26th 2004, I remember taking Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ off my bookshelf to see what he had to say about Tsunamis. What that led me to was his description of Yellowstone National Park and what this place actually is. Here’s an extract, thanks to a posting on www.delanceyplace.com.

“In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, Bob Christiansen of the United States Geological Survey became puzzled about something: … he couldn’t find the park’s volcano. …

By coincidence, just at this time NASA decided to test some new high-altitude cameras by taking photographs of Yellowstone, copies of which some thoughtful official passed on to the park authorities on the assumption that they might make a nice blow-up for one of the visitors’ centers. As soon as Christiansen saw the photos, he realized why he had failed to spot the [volcano]: virtually the whole park — 2.2 million acres — was [a volcano]. The explosion had left a crater more than forty miles across-much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans.

Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone’s vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. … Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. …

Since its first known eruption 16.5 million years ago, [the Yellowstone volcano] has blown up about a hundred times, but the most recent three eruptions are the ones that get written about. The last eruption was a thousand times greater than that of Mount St. Helens; the one before that was 280 times bigger and the one before was … at least twenty-five hundred times greater than St. Helens.”

Bill Bryson (2003) A Short History of Nearly Everything  Broadway Books, P.224 – 228.

Comforting, huh?

What this has done is make me attuned to any news that is reported as coming from Yellowstone National Park. When I saw a video posted on YouTube in 2014 purportedly showing Bison fleeing the park, I thought end of days was coming. Turns out, the Bison were running into the park! Verification matters, especially when you’re thinking a cataclysmic event is on the horizon!

But Hank’s message is a good one. After completing a term in a new school, I’m very aware that change is a constant. And when you’re working in the kind of job I have, you’re in a constant state of helping people try and get comfortable with change. Not always easy, but necessary!

Coincidentally, in terms of the Yellowstone connection anyway, I was driving to work today listening to a podcast called Snap Judgement. First story was about Yellowstone National Park, and a legendary female wolf who researchers dubbed ’06’ – her birth year. It’s quite the extraordinary tale, so follow this link for your listening pleasure. Do partake, and have a great weekend. 🙂

 

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The ease of taking a trip down memory lane…

In 1973, this was the toy I got for my eighth birthday. I remember how desperately I wanted it, and how disappointed I was when I finally got it. What looked amazing on the television ad paled in comparison to the clunky experience it was in real life.

I was talking about this to friends last night over dinner (can’t recall what spurred the memory!) and no-one at the table could remember this toy. So of course, as you do in today’s world, we retreated the Internet to help fill the gaps. And it didn’t disappoint.

This began the search for other childhood memories. Drowsy, my close friend’s favourite childhood doll, was found.

Smash up derby cars, a boy’s dream.

And then we found the ultimate object of desire for young girls in the early 1970’s. Chrissy, she of the hair that extended when you pulled her ponytail. I vividly recall standing in a local store looking longingly at this doll, hoping that it would be mine one day.

We had so much fun recalling childhood memories, and the experience was made that much better because we could find the original television ads. TV, the visual medium we consumed as we used up our cognitive surplus sitting in front of black and white screens in the early 70’s. The new medium our children consume is what we sourced last night. The difference for the children of today will be that they are less likely to be exposed to the repetitive screening of ads selling them a message. What will their memories be like when they are older recounting their youth. Will they be recalling memes? YouTube stars? Apple ads?

Who knows? Even more intriguing, what will they be using to revisit those memories?