Apportioning blame

Currently, the British Lions are on a rugby tour of South Africa. On Saturday, they lost rather controversially in the dying moments of the match. Of course, I am pleased with my team's win. I would have thought that was a given. I completely understand that Lions fans are not happy about the loss. To my surprise, however, some of that anger has been directed at me. Now I quite obviously had nothing to do with any aspect of the game. I didn't even get to watch the live broadcast, but had to rely on a recording dropped off by a friend. Nevertheless, it seems I am called upon to shoulder some of the responsibility for what is seen as an injustice, simply by virtue of my nationality.

This got me to thinking about the things for which we are called upon to carry the blame and the extent to which this is reasonable.

For example, for close on a decade, it has been possible to send the parents of a truant UK school child to prison.

I have always found it inconsistent that this is the case in a country which makes provision for a girl to undergo an abortion without her parents' knowledge.

How is it that we are called upon to know whether or not our children are at school, but be ignorant of whether or not they are sexually active, pregant and taking this enormous step? I would imagine that an abortion is traumatic enough, without having to go through it without (at least) your Mom's moral support.

Now it seems we can be fined or even be sent to prison if our children become unruly at school. Not only must we see to it that they go to school. We must see to it that they behave when they get there.

Note: On a personal level, my husband and I have worked and continue to work very hard at teaching our sons to be productive, considerate members of society. We have even (thus far, anyway) had some measure of success. But it's the principle that bothers me.

In the light of the extent to which an increasing number of parents feel that they are 'not allowed to' do this or that in respect of their children, this seems to me to be another imbalance.

I can't help feeling that there needs to be a bit more joined up thinking, here. Either parents are to be expected to shoulder responsibility in respect of their children - in which case, they should be empowered to do so - or, if the state wishes to dictate to parents how to discipline, feed and even set their children down to sleep, then it can't hold them responsible when the wheels come off.

Telling a story

Thanks to Cheryl Cooper for posting this on Facebook and drawing it to my attention. This was taken from the Ukraine's version of the 'Got Talent' TV show. UK entrants are never given that long, but this story is quite rivetingly told. Watch the beautiful young woman who tells the story, too - she's dancing. Performing. Her face and body show the passion of the story she tells with hands in the sand. Quite extraordinary!



Later edit:
Wes Fryer shares the interpretation of this story by a friend who is fluent in Russian.

The video is from the Ukrainian TV Show – Ukraine has Talent. It is called a Requiem in the Sand by Ksenia Simonova. The girl starts by drawing a village and two people on a bench. Then the announcer uses the actual radio announcement of the German attack on the USSR on 22 Jun 41. It is followed by a Russian song about a quiet night during the war. It is followed by an instrumental score and then another Soviet song about soldiers that died for the Motherland. The final instrumental score shows a girl looking through the window and seeing a shadow of her sailor husband. The child puts his hand on the window and she writes "you are always close by."

So much sadder than I had realised. I thought the husband had unexpectedly returned home at the end of the war. Now I realise the wife sees the husband in the child's face every day.

Welcome to the blogosphere

I recently wrote an article on blogging for Training Zone magazine. In it, I promised readers who were started blogging that I would give their blogs a mention here. So I am making good on that promise.

Isobel Tynan blogs over at Lifetravelling, where she looks at "creativity, innovation and learning and development". Please swing by and encourage her with a response to one of her posts or a link to a blog covering a similar issue.

pic of the day - the icing on the cake

Tonight our ladies' group was shown how to some clever things with icing. This is my effort. I was rather pleased with it, actually. I had expected to be about as good at it as I was at arranging flowers! It's quite fun doing these really girlie things from time to time.

pic of the day - GO!!!

Until very recently, our younger son showed no interest in athletics. Our older son has always been a keen competitor, and has done pretty well for himself. Recently, during some school trials, our younger son turned in a surprisingly good performance in the sprints (no-one was more surprised than he was, in fact!) and was entered into the 100m for the school sports day. Since he has never donned a pair of spikes in his life, he thought it best to have a practice session beforehand. So he came along to the track tonight and trained with his brother. As you can see, only one of them is wearing spikes. This is because they have to share a pair for now. I'm not in a position to lash out on a pair of spike for what might prove to be a passing phase. Once he has stuck at it for a while, we can talk spikes. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and his big brother was very gracious with him.

As a bonus, this sign rests above the basin in the ladies' loo. I guess if you use a cup, it's okay!

Overstepping the mark

I have always been aware that the balance of power between employer and employee in the US is far more weighted in favour of the employer than is the case in the UK, but this just takes the cake!

According to Toni Bowers, it seems that, in Bozeman, Montana, all job applicants are urged to divulge their usernames and passwords for all social media spaces, so that a complete background check can be carried out.

1) How dare they?
2) How ever will they find the time?

pic of the day - capsicum

There's nothing quite like locally grown produce, is there? Look at the wonderful colours of these capsicum (bell peppers). Bottom right are some nice sized cucumbers and towards the top left are some almost snow white closed cup mushrooms.

A new humility

I have been rereading some papers on connectivism today, since this forms the theoretical framework for my dissertation.

In George Siemens's 2004 paper, there is a reference to an article in ScienceWeek during the same year, which quotes Nigel Calder as defining chaos as “a cryptic form of order”. Siemens says "chaos states that the meaning exists – the learner's challenge is to recognize the patterns which appear to be hidden."

There a few other references sprinkled here and there that imply the same thing. That perhaps chaos is not chaotic. Perhaps it contains an order that we do not yet have the capacity to detect.

One of my frustrations is our collective tendency to assume that we've got things figured. Let's get real here. The universe, as far as we know, is infinite. Perhaps it isn't really, perhaps nothing is really infinite, perhaps some things are just so big or vast that our minds can't conceive of their size, so we just opt for infinite. The milky way is just a small part of the universe. Our solar system is just one teeny tiny part of the milky way. Our planet is just one of (we think) eight revolving around an average (we think) sized star. As a race, we have managed to make a minuscule hop off the planet as far as the moon and back again. How on earth can any one of us, or even all of us collectively, possibly have things sussed on any significant scale?

Perhaps, if they think at all, ants consider our lives to be chaotic. Perhaps it's all just a matter of scale. Perhaps it's time we recognised that some things, many things (most things?), may just be beyond our means to understand. Perhaps there are patterns in the chaos, and we just can't see them, because we are too restricted.

Perhaps it is because I'm a deist that I have no problem recognising my own limitations beside a mind which does have the capacity to understand all the things we consider infinite.

But it does look as if there may be others out there prepared to say, this is probably not chaotic, it is quite possibly a pattern we do not (yet) have the capacity to understand.

After all, just look at fractals. Was there ever anything less chaotic looking, once you move to the right perspective?



Image by Cuddlepigs34 on PhotoBucket

These four stage models

Yesterday I was holed up in one of the university libraries reading dissertations and theses and such. One of the most useful ones I found includes a beautiful, three-layered model of development which owes much to the Kolb four stage learning diagram thingy. I can't reproduce it here without the author's permission, but...

In the centre are four stages: information, analysis, preparation and implementation. In the next concentric ring we have 'describe focus' attached to information; 'explain', 'evaluate' and 'explore' attached to analysis; all the 'w' questions attached to preparation; and 'execute' attached to implementation. The third consecutive circle is slightly more difficult to describe, so I will omit it here. In any case, it has no real bearing on what it is I want to draw out of this.

I have often said that I have a tendency to leap about those Kolb diagrams. I don't enter neatly and obediently in one quadrant and then follow the stages compliantly. When we discussed the Kolb diagram during a lecture a couple of years back, I raised a few eyebrows with this claim. It wasn't the first time I had encountered the model or felt this disconnect, so I had had a few years to think about why there was a disconnect. To be fair, it wasn't the first time any of the others had encountered the model, either. It would have formed part of what they learnt at university the first time around.

The thing is, most of the people present were school teachers who had gone to university straight from school and then started teaching. They would have learned the theories before going out to practise as teachers. I practised as a teacher (of adults in the workplace) before I learned the theory. I wondered to what extent this impacted the way we viewed things.

Perhaps the rest of the class could see how practice included all the elements of the theoretical model and this confirmed to them that it was valid. While I came in with a head full of recollections drawn from practice, and could just see all the ways in which the model didn't fit. Or perhaps I am just more perverse.

Yesterday, as I was working through the material, especially the neat little flow diagram of development which followed, it dawned on me why it is that I don't think this model works.

Collaborative learning. Network learning. Social learning.

In this space, I pick up an analysis from one person on a piece of information I didn't previously have. I look briefly at the information to gain an overview. I read up on how someone else has done the preparation bit, and the implementation bit. Person A describes their focus. I read it and think, "Yup. That works for me." (or not, as the case may be). Someone explains, evaluates and explores their view of things. Someone else chimes in and tells them it's bunkum and this is why. I read all of this. I think "Hmmm. I wonder how...?" I share that question somewhere. Person B points me at Person C's shared perspective. Person C and I have a conflab. Several other people chime in. Person D explains how his implementation failed because of such and such a point. We all take that on board. I go back to the information and have another look at it.

So why am I not an obedient little follower of the Kolb learning cycle? Well, because of you, really. Because I like to discuss things with people. Because learning is and always has been a conversation for me. Before social media blipped on my radar, the conversations were face to face.

I regularly visit a nursery school classroom which has a poster listing the rules and habits of a good listener. It seems you need to sit quietly in your desk, look at the speaker and keep your mouth shut. I hate that poster. I also hated school! I was always in trouble for not abiding by those good listener rules. I wanted to look at a diagram or an article in front of me, and listen to what the teacher was saying, but then I might notice something amiss. I wanted to say "But, but, but...." Or maybe a penny dropped and I wanted to say, "Hang on a sec, so..."

In this space, I can do all those things! I can look at your diagram, read your blog post, follow your tweets, and say "But, but, but...." or "So what you're saying is..." I can say "No wait, that doesn't make sense..." And - hopefully - someone will answer me.

Isn't it cool?

pic of the day - train up a child

This statue stands outside one of the libraries on campus. This is the campus which houses the school of education. The plaque references Proverbs 22:6

"Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it."

Around this time of the year (just after Fathers' day) my thoughts turn to parenting and the duty of care towards children. Perhaps it's inevitable that I would contrast my own father with the one my children have. (Almost) any male creature on the planet can become a father. That bit's easy. It's hard work to be a Dad... if you do it right.

lpod - what we don't know about childbirth

I know it's been a while since I did one of these, but this was my learning point for today.

Because I'm a sad person (or so my family tells me), I listen to talk radio when I have the car to myself. Today was one such day and I listened to a programme about premature babies (the link will be available for 7 days - apologies if the BBC link doesn't work outside the UK). Comparatively little research is done in this field and there are still huge areas of blankness.

Unless a woman has already miscarried or given birth to one premature baby, there is still no way of knowing whether she is at risk of doing so. So a couple will have to have dealt with all the associated difficulties at least once before they are referred to a unit which will monitor subsequent pregnancies. The interviewer asked the expert what starts a woman off in early labour and (and this is where the learning point comes in) it transpires that we still don't know what starts labour at any point, early or otherwise. No-one knows yet what the catalyst(s) is/are that start the process.

The immediate instinct when a woman goes into early labour is to try to stop it. Very few effective means exist to achieve this. Quite often, it transpires that the uterus has become a hostile and/or toxic environment for the child and the risks of early birth may be less than the risks of a prolonged stay in that environment. So it's a trade-off and we don't know enough to be able to make that decision quickly and reliably.

Rather tellingly, it has only been in the last few years that UK birth records have begun to record gestation instead of just birth weight, so there is precious little recorded data to go on prior to that. As a result, it isn't possible to compare the statistics around premature births with other countries.

Interesting, huh?

Okay, so it's just me. Sorry.

The programme kicked off and ended with an interview with a woman called Sarah and her daughter Isobel who had been born at gestation 27 weeks (so 3 months early) in 2001. I was stunned when Sarah shared how people immediately assume that the early birth of her daughter was somehow her fault: as if she hadn't looked after herself properly, or had engaged in substance abuse of some sort. I have known many people with preemie babies and have never heard anyone respond to them with such an assumption.

What was utterly heartwarming, though, was Sarah's evident pride in her daughter's ability to walk, something she was expected never to do. Issy has a catalogue of disabilities, but Sarah takes pride in the things she is able to do, instead of bewailing the things she cannot. As the programme ended with the joyous laughter of mother and daughter as Issy bounced on a trampette, I chastised myself for my disappointment when my boys don't live up to my expectations.

We also heard from a couple whose (as yet unnamed) son was born two-and-a-half weeks ago at gestation 25 weeks. Their whole world has reduced down to the size of the neonatal intensive care unit. They hover over his incubator and celebrate things like a 20g weight gain. As the mother tried to explain how she treasured things like being able to change his tiny nappies, and gave up as her voice failed her, I realised again how very, very fortunate I was to have given birth to three live, healthy, term babies.

Go give your kids a quick squeeze. I did as soon as I got home.

pic of the day - acer

I have a weakness for acers. The shape of their leaves, the shape of the trees themselves.

pic of the day - pampering

Today the ladies of our church had a pamper day. I was in charge of mini facials. This was my stall.

pic of the day - a prince?

This fellow swung by for a visit today. He looked hopeful, but I can't go around kissing enchanted princes - I'm a married woman!

Welcome to Holland

In response to my reflections (on Facebook) about the surprises and unmet expectations of emi/immigration, Irmeli Aro drew parallels with experience of being the parent of a child with special needs. To illustrate her point she sent me a link to a video. It wasn't this video, but the two have huge overlap. There are certainly parallels, but I think the perspective of a parent in this situation bears expressing for its own sake.

pic of the day - friendship

As I have already mentioned, today is the tenth anniversary of our wide-eyed, naive arrival in the UK. For those of you who are my Facebook friends, I have written a more personal account as a FB note.

One of the most difficult things to deal with was the loss of our close friends and extended family. Being such a cultural misfit made it extremely tough to form real friendships of the sort that we were accustomed to.

However, things on that front have begun to change. And when a friend remembers unprompted that today is The Day and arrives with a homemade carrot cake with cream cheese icing (my favourite) still warm from the oven, you know things are are looking up!

BTW it was whole when it arrived!

Elearning in Africa

"If you look at the one laptop per child programme, if I remember correctly, the Nigerian government cancelled their order because they couldn’t afford desks to put them on.”

John Traxler, LearningLab director at the University of Wolverhampton

This article in TrainingZone magazine (you will need to register to read it, but it is free) highlights some of the challenges facing those who look to deploy technology-supported or technology-based learning solutions in Africa. Presumably many of the challenges mirror those faced in other parts of the developing world.

Among these are

• lack of hardware - many students do not have a computer at home and have to attend a teaching institution
  
• lack of infrastructure - while there may (or may not) be computers at the aforementioned teaching institution, there is not always a teacher
• poor internet speed - Africa has the lowest average internet connection speeds in the world at an average of 1.1Mbps as compared with over 6Mbps in Europe
• and even lack of access to mains electricity (the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa estimates that only 20% of the total African population have access to electricity)
• poisonous drinking water
• high infant mortality rate
• HIV/AIDS which is killing people off faster than they can be trained
  

So, to use a South Africanism, you can throw them dead with elearning, but until some of these basic problems are resolved, it isn't going to make a heck of a lot of difference. There are some far more fundamental issues that need to be addressed.

However, on the plus side, according to John Gordon AIS President,

[In Europe] mobile learning is either an extension of elearning or a reaction to it. It’s seen as tethered or limited, indoor. So mobile learning to a large extent here in Europe is a reaction to that; we’d like to take learning al fresco, into real life.

In southern Africa, there isn’t that history – they don’t have any elearning to react against – so if anything, mobile learning grows out of the distance learning model, often as a response to infrastructure issues.

Anniversary

It is 10 years today since I arrived in the UK. It has been a bumpy ride. I arrived thinking I would just find my niche and fit in. It took me a long time to realise that I was always going to be slightly out of step. It was fully nine years before we felt we had developed relationships which qualified for the epithet friendship.

However, I have made my peace with most of it and realise that this is it. This is my life. This is where it is playing out, and this is how it's going to be.

To all you other displaced persons, expats, foreigners, outsiders and misfits: I salute you!

Image credit: Wibofoto on iStock

We're not allowed to!

I have several friends who have recently had babies. Some are their first, others have been down this road before. Even for the practised Moms, every child presents new challenges. Sleeping. Feeding. Weight gain (or lack thereof). These are the topics that come up time and again.

In the UK (perhaps because new mothers get ousted from hospital within hours of giving birth), there are health visitors. These are people (usually women - I have yet to meet a male health visitor) who visit people like new mothers in their homes to offer support.

I have been somewhat perplexed, lately, by the increasing authority being imputed to these people. One of the new babies has a reflux problem. This is very common in boys and tends to clear up once they learn to sit on their own. But, until then, there's an awful lot of urking that goes on. My elder son had this problem and I chose to set him down to sleep on his side as a baby, using a rolled up nappy (diaper) behind him to prevent him from rolling onto his back. I didn't want him to choke in his sleep. When I mentioned this to the mother in question, she told me "We're not allowed to do that. We're supposed to put them on their backs, because of cot death." In an effort to reduce the reflux problem during sleep, the baby's cot has been slightly elevated at one end. I was somewhat puzzled by this. When you consider how small a baby is, the angle would have to be significant in order to make any appreciable difference. I asked whether she had considered letting the baby sleep in his bouncer 'chair'. Apparently, because of the risk to the baby's back, she's been told she's not allowed to do this, either.

I've heard this "We're not allowed to..." quite often lately and it bothers me. I'm not bothered that my friend doesn't want to set her baby down to sleep the way I did. I'm bothered that my friend is effectively being dictated to by the State regarding her baby's sleeping position.

When I was a baby, the recommendation was to set babies down on their bellies, and this was how I slept. Then someone identified the risk of babies drowning in any vomitus produced in their sleep, and parents were advised to lay babies down on their sides as I have described. By the time my own kids came along, someone had identified that the best chance of avoiding cot death was to lay a baby down on its back.

The thing is, as adults we don't like to all sleep in the same position, so why should the same be true of babies? Surely a new parent should be free to experiment with sleeping positions until they find one that works for their baby? If you look hard enough, there are probably risks associated with every position.

This relates obliquely to my assertion in yesterday's post about who is accountable to whom in the state/parent equation when dealing with children.

I can't help feeling that the business of parenting is being increasingly micro-managed by the state, to nobody's benefit. And, when parents have been inculcated with the habit of bowing to authority on how and where their babies sleep, when and what they eat and so on, it seems to me they are far more likely to adopt a stance of unquestioning compliance on the matter of their children's education.

I'm not suggesting there's a conspiracy, here, just that passive parenting is being fostered. We already see the fruits of the abdication of parental duty in our society. Sadly, that same society seems to be trying to increase legislative controls and state intervention to combat this.

My view? It won't work.

Parents need to step up the oche and resume the mantle of parental responsibility. We are society. It's our problem. We need to fix it. The government doesn't rule us, it serves us, the people in government are drawn from among us. They are, in fact, part of us!

Home educators fight back

There's been a review of home education in the UK lately. I'm not a home educator, for reasons I've gone into before, but I know of a few people who choose this route for their children. Some of them are not happy about the review. One friend of mine has written a letter to Mr Ed Balls. She has kindly agreed to allow me to reproduce it verbatim here. The friend in question has recently been expressing her frustration that so few people appreciate the extent of the powers which the state has awarded itself. Some of the grounds for her alarm are to be found in her letter.

I would like to say that I wholeheartedly support the notion that the state is accountable to the parents in respect of education provision, not vice versa. I have put several teachers noses severely out of joint through the years by making it clear that I hold them accountable to me. In South Africa, this was more accepted, since parental involvement in state education was the norm. In the UK, where far more parents consider their contribution to extend no further than the delivery and collection of their children, this has gone down less well!

Dear Mr. Balls

I write with regard to the Review of Elective Home Education.

In the first instance, I wish to register the fact that I reject the legitimacy of the Review on various grounds:

1. Mr. Graham Badman is far from independent:
(a) He does not have personal experience of home educating, and is biased in favour of the school system
(b) As a form Education Welfare Officer, he was known for being openly hostile to home education, i.e. biased against home education
(c) His various affiliations and activities (i.e. Becta, IEE and others) represent a conflict of interests

2. Views of home educators, including those of home educated children themselves with regard to the need for registration and monitoring and to the suitability of their education and safeguarding appear to have been completely rejected out of hand, despite,

3. No evidence has been presented to indicate that there is any need whatsoever to monitor, register or regulate home educators. (The suggestion of a loophole is completely bogus, since all children (unless they have already committed a crime) are registered at birth, not to mention the Government's various databases.)

4. Evidence including academic research proving the efficacy of home education, and in particular autonomous methods, have been rejected on extremely flimsy and illegitimate grounds.

5. The Review panel was completely and unreasonably unbalanced and did not include any experts on home education whatsoever

6. The Questionnaire to LAs asked for evidence from ultra vires practices, showing a fundamental disrespect for the Law

7.The Consultation which opened the review did not conform to the standards of public consultations, and when this was challenged, it was claimed not to be a Consultation

8. The Consultation questions were phrased in such a manner that a number of them were ambiguous, which suggests they were deliberately designed to confuse and thus the responses may have been unreliable.

9. The remit of the Review was to consider the efficacy of the current provision for safeguarding home educated children from possible abuse. This has been conflated with the efficacy of educational provision, which was never previously in question.

Additionally, I wish to register the fact that I reject the vast majority of recommendations made by the Review, on the following grounds:

I. The recommendations severely challenge and threaten the presumption of innocence which has been a Common Law right for many centuries, hard fought for!

II. The recommendations challenge the Human Rights Act protocol 1 Article 2 which ensures that the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure education and teaching in conformity with their own religions and philosophical convictions.

III. The recommendations disregard the rights of privacy and a family life (HRA Article 8) where no evidence to suspect a crime is taking place or about to take place, and infer on LAs a power which is not even given to the police.

IV. The recommendations trample the right of a child to protection by its natural safeguarders - the parents by inferring on LAs the right to interview the child without the parents and against the parent's wishes where no evidence for child abuse exists. This is known to be harmful; indeed in itself consitutes child abuse, and is widely considered to be bad practice.

V. The recommendations ignore and challenge the relationship of citizen to State, and of parent and child to State. Where parents delegate responsibility for the education of their children to the State, the State becomes responsible to the parents for ensuring that education is acceptable to the parent. Where a parent fulfills that responsibility itself, he is responsible to himself, not to the State. To quote EU case law from the oppressive educational regime of Germany (which banned home education during the nazi era) to suggest the State becomes arbiter of the suitability of education is offensive in the extreme.

VI. From the outset, the Review was based on slanderous allegations which have never been justified because they cannot be, and instead the Review report is littered with opinion and prejudice, a patently obvious (if not even apparently willful) misunderstanding of home education, and in no way justifies the draconian measures recommended.


I reject the recommendation for Registration.

I reject the recommendation that the DCSF review the current statutory definition of what constitutes a "suitable" and "efficient" education, for the reasons stated above, i.e.that it is the parent who constitutionally determines what constitutes a suitable and efficient education, and the State has no busines intruding upon that right.

I reject the recommendation for monitoring, since the current powers for safeguarding children are more than sufficient, if properly applied, and the Law understood.

I reject the recommendation that that the parent should ‘provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child, since this implies that the parent is responsible to the State, and makes autonomous education (which is proven to be the most effective approach) almost impossible.

I welcome recommendation numbers 10 and 11 as a positive outcome, and number 9 with the caveat that I reject the recommendation implied therein for monitoring. I also reject all other recommendations not specifically mentioned.

Yours sincerely,

Ms. S. Tootill