This post is prompted by The engagement era - and the artist’s place within it, written by Courtney Johnston (director of the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt).  She has been pondering the shifting fashions for ‘collection’ vs ’education’ vs ’engagement’ in museums and galleries, trying to make sense of the swirl of ambitions and activities around those words and shifting focus and behaviours in GLAM institutions.  She’s an incredible thinker and a brilliant leader.  Subscribe to her blog.

“Digital citizenship” is a phrase I encounter often in my educational travels. Rather than merely teach how to use software and hardware, we should realize that students are citizens in an online world and teach them how to live in such a place. It sounds good on the surface, but there’s a whole contested idea of what “citizenship” is that I hadn’t begun to think about until I read the paper What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy by Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne. Here are my notes on that paper.

(this post is about the New Zealand education system. I wanted to say more than Twitter made easy)

NZ has an amazing education system. We went through the “Tomorrow’s Schools” revolution in the 1990s, which devolved governance of schools to the communities in which those schools sit. A Remuera school will teach and value different things than an Otara school, despite being only a few km away from each other, and that’s okay. But in a world of devolution, how does the state ensure that schools don’t suck?

Most of us have a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know”: we don’t know the range of what’s possible, so we continue doing things as we’ve seen them done before but with slight improvements. I think of it as being in a dark room: by looking at other schools, talking to other teachers, and meeting other school boards, we can shine a torch into the darkness to see where there are walls and where there’s unexplored territory.

I’ve been in the position of being a geek talking with teachers for a while, and I’ve found it best to approach the whole area of education with humility. In education, as in business, you can’t just thrust technology into a situation and magically get the best possible result. So the answer to “how to do I use technology to help kids achieve?” is not a laundry list of technologies that the successful schools are using.