disrupt learning!

It’s a good job everybody had already made their bonfire night plans cos after yesterday I suspect that many schools would have come back after half-term to find smouldering piles of Interactive Whiteboards littering their playgrounds. Certainly wasn’t a lot of love around for the old IWB yesterday on Twitter.

The starting point for the discussion was this article which looked at the £253k being spent by the EEF on a tablet project. On the face (see details on EEF site here) of it the project appears to be a proper research effort rather than a way of buying more iPads. Personally, I think that this is a step in the right direction. There is at least some sense in coming up with a proposition and testing it. Time will tell if the research design is up to the task.

Consider how most organisations decide whether to change…

Despite my experience raising five kids aged 3 to 18, I’ve been using ineffective parenting techniques for a very long time. As Einstein might have said, I’ve been insane. In trying to shape my children’s behavior, I’ve been doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

And yet it’s not just me, but other parents and, overwhelmingly, other managers. Though the techniques we’ve used for decades are ineffective at best and dehumanizing at worst, we keep using them.

Recently, I learned that animal trainers have known about better ways for decades.

Don’t Shoot the Dog

Karen Pryor is a behavioral biologist, a pioneering dolphin trainer, and an authority on applied operant conditioning—the art and science of changing behavior. In 1984, she wrote “Don’t Shoot the Dog” which describes her behavioral methods and how they apply even beyond animal training.

“I began to notice some applications of the…

“We are educating people out of their creativity”

Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas on education are not only impractical; they are undesirable.

If you’re interested in education, at some point someone will have sent you a link to a video by Sir Ken Robinson, knighted for services to education in England in 2003. He has over 250,000 followers on Twitter, his videos have had over 40,000,000 views online, and his 2006 lecture is the most viewed TED talk of all time. The RSA Opening Minds curriculum his ideas are associated with is taught in over 200 schools in the UK. He clearly has some influence.

What explains such iconic influence? Like a magician’s performance, explaining the magic helps to dispel it. Humour, anecdote and charm combined with online, animated media explain why it’s gone viral. Jokes get contagious laughter from his audience in the video, and…