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test-based accountability is “doing untold damage to the profession of teaching.”

The main thing that works is treating teaching as a profession, and teachers as professionals.

That means that teachers are as well paid as other professionals, that they have a career ladder, that they go to elite schools where they learn their craft, and that they are among the top quartile of college graduates instead of the bottom quartile.

When I suggested that American cities couldn’t afford to pay teachers the way we pay engineers or lawyers, Tucker scoffed. With rare exception, he said, the cost per pupil in the places with the best educational systems is less than the American system, even though their teachers are far better paid. “They are not spending more money; they are spending money differently,” he said.

Tucker would not abolish tests, but he would have fewer of them.

And they would have a different purpose: In the high-performing countries, the tests exist to hold the students accountable, rather than the teachers.

When a school falls short, instead of looking to fire teachers, the high-performing countries “use the data to decide which schools will receive visits from teams of expert school inspectors. These inspectors are highly regarded educators.”

Tucker envisions the same kind of accountability for teachers as exists for, say, lawyers in a firm — where it is peers holding each other accountable rather than some outside force. People who don’t pull their own weight are asked to leave. The ethos is that people help each other to become better for the good of the firm. Those who successfully rise through the ranks are rewarded with higher pay and status.

Would the teachers’ unions go along with such a scheme? The unions would certainly have to shed some of the things they now have, such as control of work rules.

fixation with test-based accountability

every other successful country has

whenever you’re thinking about nothing in particular

Universities, businesses and government agencies all compete for cognitive “talent,” and they frequently rely on intelligence testing to help them find it. Meanwhile, the evidence that intelligence testing may not work as advertised has been growing

you have to think of intelligence — when defined as problem-solving ability — not as a singular quality but as a spectrum. On one end is deductive, rules-based reasoning and on the other is imaginative, possibilities-based improvisation

our apparently mindless moments are actually humming with cognitive activity. Instead of letting moments of free time slip away, they say, our brains “capitalize on them to consolidate past experience in ways that are adaptive for our future needs.”

Like any human performance metric — IQ, LSAT scores, batting averages — the imagination quotient is intended to predict a competitive advantage

“If you have an imaginative capability to envision future possibilities, alternatives and scenarios — that’s going to be predictive [of success] across the board,” he says.

Design-based research requires interactive collaboration among researchers and practitioners

researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, who’ve been experimenting with computer-based learning for years, have found that when machine-guided learning is combined with traditional classroom instruction, students can learn material in half the time.

Top schools like Yale, MIT and Stanford have been making streaming videos and podcasts of their courses available online for years, but MOOCs go beyond this to offer a full-blown interactive experience.

Teens now approaching college age are members of the first generation to have grown up conducting a major part of their social lives online. They are prepared to engage with professors and students online in a way their predecessors weren’t

What is emerging is a global marketplace where courses from numerous universities are available on a single website. Students can pick and choose the best offerings from each school; the university simply uploads the content.

The era of online education presents universities with a conflict of interests—the goal of educating the public on one hand, and the goal of making money on the other.

One potential source of cost savings for lower-rung colleges would be to draw from open-source courses offered by elite universities. Community colleges, for instance, could effectively outsource many of their courses via MOOCs, becoming, in effect, partial downstream aggregators of others’ creations, more or less like newspapers have used wire services to make up for a decline in the number of reporters.

To borrow an analogy from the music industry, universities have previously sold education in an “album” package—the four-year bachelor’s degree in a certain major, usually coupled with a core curriculum. The trend for the future will be more compact, targeted educational certificates and credits, which students will be able to pick and choose from to create their own academic portfolios.

The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate.

Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though “most popular” may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous).

Because much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again on video, demand for instructors will decline. 

Large numbers of very intelligent and well-trained people may be freed up from teaching to do more of their own research and writing. A lot of top-notch research scientists and mathematicians are terrible teachers anyway.

Big changes are coming, and old attitudes and business models are set to collapse as new ones rise.

if our goal is educating as many students as possible, as well as possible, as affordably as possible, then the end of the university as we know it is nothing to fear. Indeed, it’s something to celebrate. 

is links to the point made by Goodyear et al (2014) Unless learning is very closely supervised and directed (which it rarely is), there will usually be some slippage between task and activity, for good and bad reasons. This is important to acknowledge, when designing, because what people learn is a consequence of their actual activity, and therefore only indirectly a result of the task set for them. Tasks are designable, activities are not – they are emergent. (p. 1

Goodyear et al (2014) pick up on the term affordance as both important, but also as “a term that is also very widely critiqued and contested” (p. 137). The idea is that particular technologies afford different possibilities dependent on people’s perceptions of a technology. But an affordance isn’t a single set of possibilities seen by every person. Taking what Goodyear et al (2014) describe as a “relational-materialist” the idea of affordance becomes much more complex and emergent.

Web 2.0 design supports a heutagogical approach by allowing learners to direct and determine their learning path and by enabling them to take an active rather than passive role in their individual learning experiences. Key affordances of social media – connectivity with others, information discovery and sharing (individually and as a group), and personal collection and adaptation of information as required – are also affordances that support self-determined learning activities (McLoughlin & Lee, 2007, p. 667). In addition, Web 2.0 encourages interaction, reflection in dialogue, collaboration, and information sharing, as well as promotes autonomy and supports creation of learner-generated content (Lee & McLoughlin, 2007; McLoughlin & Lee, 2008, 2010).

A key attribute of andragogy is self-directed learning

Within transformational learning, learning occurs along a self-directed path; as the learner matures and reflects on life experiences in relation to his or her self-perception, beliefs, and lifestyle, the learner perspective is adjusted and transformative learning can occur

The role of the educator in an andragogical approach is that of tutor and mentor, with the instructor supporting the learner in developing the capacity to become more self-directed in his or her learning. The instructor shows learners how to find information, relates information to the learner experience, and places a focus on problem-solving within real-world situations (McAuliffe et al., 2008). Instructors establish objectives and curriculum based on learner input and guide students along the learner path, while the responsibility for learning lies with the learner.

Heutagogy applies a holistic approach to developing learner capabilities, with learning as an active and proactive process, and learners serving as “the major agent in their own learning, which occurs as a result of personal experiences”

As in an andragogical approach, in heutagogy the instructor also facilitates the learning process by providing guidance and resources, but fully relinquishes ownership of the learning path and process to the learner, who negotiates learning and determines what will be learned and how it will be learned (Hase & Kenyon, 2000; Eberle, 2009).

The heutagogical approach can be viewed as a progression from pedagogy to andragogy to heutagogy, with learners likewise progressing in maturity and autonomy (Canning, 2010, see Figure 2).

More mature learners require less instructor control and course structure and can be more self-directed in their learning, while less mature learners require more instructor guidance and course scaffolding (Canning & Callan, 2010; Kenyon & Hase, 2010).

In an andragogical approach to teaching and learning, learners are actively involved in identifying their needs and planning on how those needs will be met

learners are self-directed to continue to learn on their own and “can personalize their learning paths in the way they desire

Recent research also indicates that the use of social media can support self-determined learning.

Learner-generated content (active media use): Active use of social media in creating learner-generated content seems to contribute to development of skills of self-directedness. Initial research findings by Blaschke, Porto, and Kurtz (2010) indicate that active use of social media, for example, development of learner-generated content, supports cognitive and metacognitive skill development, whereas passive use (consumption) is less effective in supporting development of these skills.

Research on the use of social media and its role in supporting heutagogy is limited, however, indicating that this is an area for further investigation.

A heutagogical approach to learning and teaching is characterized first and foremost by learner-centeredness in terms of both learner-generated contexts and content.

Guiding learners to define self-directed questions is one of the biggest challenges facing developers of heutagogical courses, as designers must be “creative enough to have learners ask questions about the universe they inhabit”

Negotiated and learner-defined assessment has been shown to improve the motivation of learners and their involvement in the learning process, as well as make learners feel less threatened by instructor control of their learning process

Heutagogy’s holistic approach takes into account the learner’s prior learning experiences and the way in which these influence how she or he learns; by considering these past experiences and the learner’s current experience and reflecting upon these, the learner moves into a growth process that has the potential to lead to transformative learning

The literature review conducted here indicates that there is substantial work to be done in researching heutagogy within this research construct, for example examination of the means in which Web 2.0 and social media support a self-determined teaching and learning approach, and investigation of the effectiveness of the approach in higher education and in creating lifelong learners able to effectively and successfully translate competencies into capability in complex, real-world situations. Another area of research includes defining and testing criteria for heutagogy as a framework for teaching and learning.

By incorporating heutagogical practice, educators have the opportunity to better prepare students for the workplace and for becoming lifelong learners, as well as to foster student motivation by cultivating students who “are fully engaged in the topic they are studying because they are making choices that are most relevant or interesting to them” (Kenyon & Hase, 2010, p. 170).

ignore the new ‘cool stuff’ as somehow not ‘personal’ seems short-sighted

Promoting digital ownership is different than assigning work in publicly accessible spaces.

For instance, public assignments tap into fears of public embarrassment

ut the assignments must be framed by a conversation about audience and the way the ‘domain’ represents the author to that audience.

Approach writers you admire.

Make sure that your work is in a somewhat similar vein.

Comment in a friendly and funny way on their posts and blogs.

Re-post their important announcements.

Be an active participant in author groups. Like this one!

Leave only sincere, glowing reviews on Amazon/Goodreads etc.

Go to author readings.

Be yourself. It’s okay if you’re shy.

Do not send private email messages to writers asking questions you could have answered yourself using Google.

Do not complain publicly when people don’t respond to your unsolicited overtures.

Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”