Ewan McIntosh - Communicate.07 introductory video
Video transcript for Ewan McIntosh's introductory speech
March 17 2007
2007 marks an important landmark for education. It's the first time that 16-year-olds entering the job market have been brought up entirely in the era of the internet. Five-year-olds heading into primary school have been brought up entirely in the age of one-click publishing. Meanwhile, UK Local Authorities are busy creating 20-20 visions which, while well-meaning in purpose, serve only to miss out an entire generation.
Teachers, and particularly those teaching foreign languages, stand in the best position to act now, without waiting for someone else to give them the nod.
The changes have happened already; we are unlikely to be able to control change and the way children are in the 21st century. Maybe it's high time that we should instead start to think about the attitudes we have towards increased connectivity and parents', teachers' and the wider education community's roles in finding the balance between control, personalisation, rigour, the reality of the time and financial constraints imposed upon us, and the fact that more students every day find the link between learning in school and living outside school is widening beyond recognition.
There are four factors that Communicate.07 will tackle:
1. Personal identity
Kids have the need to feel valued, to have their place. In their peer groups, this exists to a greater or lesser degree. In school it can flourish, given the right circumstances and given ever improving personalisation of our education programmes.
To value kids more means doing something about the parts of their school lives which they find unengaging or which, deep inside, we may find to be irrelevant. Languages, in the way they have been taught in the past, were not suited to the majority. New assessments, new languages, even, are attracting more, but we need to evaluate what is more important for children: being plurilingual or getting a qualification in a language they will rarely use?
However, the greatest manifestation of this desire to be valued, and the ultimate quenching of that thirst, is taking place online.
2. Online identity
Kids' online spaces, whether they are Instant Messenger, Bebo homepages, websites, forums or photo-sharing sites, give them the opportunity to be who they want to be, to have headspace to present the image they want - it is real, very real. Most networks are face-to-face at some point, too. It's not that online communication replaces face-to-face, it's in addition and compliments face-to-face interaction.
I said (slightly glibly) that I'd rather my kid spent 200 minutes a night of interaction in front of the computer instead of 200 minutes’ passiveness in front of the telly. To be honest, what I think or what you think of that statement doesn't matter. The kids are doing this, will be doing this and it's down to parents and teachers to consider their roles in understanding and directing this 'play' rather than criticising, limiting or banning it.
And what is interaction in front of the computer? Creating stories in the online game Myst, playing sports games and working up a sweat with the Wii, working out a homework problem with a mate on Instant Messenger? 75% of those 200 minutes is actually spent doing homework - how much of that in your schools is spent doing MFL?
3. Schooling identity
The need for an audience is not satisfied; Bryan Appleyard expressed his disgust at the ‘excessive self-esteem’ in online communities, but perhaps this is making up for a lack of it elsewhere.
Powering down mentally and technologically as they enter the classroom, some teach clicks and buttons instead of the responsibilities and opportunities this connected online world can bring to the students. You will see technologies today that come with inherent risks: mobile phones, online social networks, filming and podcasting. What we have to realise is that risk is generally a positive thing. A mountaineer won't do very well if risk stops all activity. An explorer won't get very far either. The impact of everything you see today will outweigh - is outweighing - the risks we all face if children leave school without knowing how to use those technologies for their own good. Social networks are amongst the top appearances on Google searches for people - do they want those pictures of their weekend up town or an online multimedia portfolio of their amazing modern languages progress to show up first?
But how, in this particular moment, can teachers teach it and students learn it, when neither understands it fully? It's not that young people aren't interested in engaging with politics - it's that they don't know how (protesters in the street are told to go back to school by the First Minister). It's not that our learned elders hate new technology and the fact that kids spend so long on the computer, it's that they don't understand or know what is being done in that period.
Yet the ability of humans to make sense of information and synthesise it quickly will become the most valuable skill of the next five years. More than 60% of that online information is now produced in languages other than English. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and French are the main languages of growth in the blogosphere.
The digital divide is not hardware, it's understanding (not knowledge). It's knowing how to collaborate, how to come up with new ideas and applications, how to synthesise.
4. What of work identity?
There is currently a lack of value attached to online non-establishment resources. Deprofessionalisation of 'social' work (blog is secondary to edited peer reviewed content). Qualifications are commodities and worth less than ever. When you're sitting there getting something that's no longer going to guarantee a job, that is the divide. Creatives: music, art, drama, dance... first to go when money's tight, but perhaps where the most value for our future employment lies. The creative industries - not engineering or the financial services - are the UK and the US's fastest growing industries. If MFL doesn't help show the relevance of MFL in the context of creative, multimedia work, then we are missing a trick.
By ignoring these four factors we will incur huge problems. The first is that we end up stuck in the vicious circle of uncreativity: groupthink. The managers will always end up being digital immigrants, regardless of their age, because that ‘is how they were taught at school’.
Also, we still ply old things in new ways: intelligence = IQ, Mensa. Knowledge of stuff, concentration on 'usefulness' of learning. When do we take the risk of getting students to make a film without lists of vocabulary and a grammar guide to support them? That is a far more useful skill than knowing how to read vocabulary lists and remember words out of context or only in the context of ‘Here's a question, you answer it.’ Learning how to answer the questions we pose ourselves is a) more difficult b) the most creative way to learn.
Our understanding of concentration and intelligence is based on an understanding of the brain which is in itself out of date. By analysing living brains instead of cutting up dead ones we have come to understand the unused potential of much of our brains. Schools reinforce this continued untapped potential.
Nevertheless, attempts are made to do new things new ways: ScotEdupedia allows the real experts - teachers - to write what the education system, pedagogy and all things learning is about. They will hopefully seize the opportunity and carry out the task with more thoroughness, more speed and perhaps a little more messiness than any group of centrally assembled experts will muster. We are also attempting to frame the User Generated Content of teachers, making their YouTube and blog material more accessible to those new to the medium. By doing so, we can help add value to their already strong examples of interesting pedagogy and lobbying for potential curriculum change (this service gets launched in the next month by LTS).
MFL teachers, especially those in Scotland over the past three years, are renowned for being at the forefront of new ways of teaching and learning, using technology where it makes a difference, allowing us to do things we couldn't do on paper and pen.
The main message here is not ‘go away today and learn how to use lots of tools’. The main message has to be ‘go forth and start thinking, thinking about what can go, what can stay, what can be done better and in a more relevant way.’
This group constitutes the most likely group of modern languages teachers in the country to take these risky, adventurous and, dare I say, fun ideas and convince those around them to take them head on. Enjoy today – I only wish I was there learning with you. No doubt, however, that I'll see what waves we can make on the MFLE forums, on your blogs and on your personal websites.
Ewan McIntosh, Vaarwel van Noordwijkerhoot, Holland, March 17 2007