Data.
Boiling down children, human beings, to data.
Data on maths and literacy.
That’s what league tables do.
They don’t demotivate me because I know they paint a tiny, incomplete picture of a school, a smaller one of a class and a microscopic view of an individual child. https://twitter.com/mark_mclaughlin/status/1428405387355623425
Timely report... https://twitter.com/SchleicherOECD/status/1402204001358200836
Beyond my pocket & prolly my attention span, but as soon as I see mention of data in edu I reach for these questions and videos cc @IaninSheffield
Bribing children is so tempting. What they want, especially when they're young, is sometimes so cheap, so easy to acquire, that the temptati...
Found via @dgilmour.
50 years ago, Edward Deci gave different groups of students a Soma cube puzzle to solve. Some were paid to take part, others weren’t. When he announced that the time was up, the students that were paid to work on the task just put the cube down and walked away.
David’s tweet also lead to
Comments on ClassDojo controversy and Killer Apps for the Classroom? by Ben Williamson
I’ve never been a great one for points and the like in class, mostly due to my inability to be consistent enough in their use and unexamined distaste.
There are echos in the Doing Data Differently project. I’ve been listening to some of the colloquium videos and finding them though provoking.
Wednesday evening I hurried home after school to join the zoom meeting for the launch of the Virtual exhibition Doing Data Differently.
In the current climate, discussions about data in schools are usually linked to pupil attainment, data are represented using charts and graphs, and teachers rarely initiate data collection themselves or use it for their own purposes. The widespread use of attainment data in schools has been widely criticised for its impact on the curriculum, on teaching and learning, and on teacher and pupil wellbeing.
I’d heard of the project from Ian Guest, @IaninSheffield, an academic working on the project and an online pal. Ian did interesting work on teachers use of twitter. We talked to him about this and many other things on Radio EduTalk. Ian took a rather individual approach to gathering data during his phd.
The virtual launch was a great taster for the Doing Data Differently site or exhibition. If the idea of data in education is unattractive this will change your mind. The recording of data was done on postcards in very creative ways. A quick scroll down the Metaphors, for example, collection gives you different view of “data”.
I was particularly interested in was the amount of discussion and excitement generated by the postcards. One mention returning to change something in her class immediately. Perhaps I heard someone saying that the project vaccinated them against data. An interesting idea.
I felt that these postcards gathered more complex, subtle, less easily simplified data. This could be approached conversationally as opposed to mathematically.
The project is continued in a colloquium on vimeo. I’ve listened to the first, thanks huffduffer, Data harms and inequalities and queued up a couple more. The first was an interesting discussion of data misuse, bias, and bad algorithms. I am guessing that the videos are more academic than the postcards and should compliment thinking about data use in education in the round.
There is a lot more for me to read and think about on the site. It is facinating seeing an unusual view of other teachers practise.
DOING DATA DIFFERENTLY We're launching the virtual exhibition from this research project between 16:30 & 17:30 on Wed 11th Nov. online. Of interest to colleagues (esp. sr. leaders) interested in literacy in primary schools Registration (free) http://bit.ly/DDDExhibitionLaunch… - join us!
I’ve registered. Really interesting way of gathering information about primary teaching.
DOING DATA DIFFERENTLY
We're launching the virtual exhibition from this research project between 16:30 & 17:30 on Wed 11th Nov. online.
Of interest to colleagues (esp. sr. leaders) interested in literacy in primary schools
Registration (free) https://t.co/Gjj8keRrVj – join us! pic.twitter.com/Fsr15C2pP6— Ian Guest (@IaninSheffield) October 11, 2020
I realised that what I had been doing was adding to a dataset for training the machine-learning software that guides self-driving cars – probably those designed and operated by Waymo, the autonomous vehicle project owned by Alphabet Inc (which also happens to own Google).
