Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Have been in Brussels for the last two days – speaking at 9th European Week of Regions and Cities organized by DG Regio and also taking the opportunity to join other sessions. My topic was Evaluation 2.0. Very encouraged by the positive feedback I’ve been getting all day both face-to-face and through twitter. I thought people would be generally resistant to the idea as it was fairly hard-hitting (and in fairness, some were horrified!) but far more have been interested and very positive, including quite a lot of Commission staff. However, the question now being asked by a number of them of them is “How do we progress this?” – meaning, specifically, in the context of the evaluation of Regional Policy and DG Regio intervention.

Evaluation 2.0 in Regional Policy evaluation
I don’t have any answers to this – in some ways, that’s not for me to decide! I have mostly used Evaluation 2.0 stuff in the evaluation of education projects not regional policy. And my recent experience of the Cohesion Fund, ERDF, IPA or any of the structural funds is minimal. However, the ideas are generic and if people think that there are some they could work with, that’s fine!

That said, here are some suggestions for moving things forward – some of them are mine, most have been mooted by various people who have come to talk to me today (and bought me lots of coffee!)

Suggestions for taking it forward

• Set up a twitter hashtag #evaluation2.0. Well that’s easy but I don’t know how much traffic there would be as yet!
• Set up a webpage providing information and discussion around Evaluation 2.0. More difficult – who does that and who keeps it updated? Maybe, instead, it is worth feeding in to the Evalsed site that DG Regio maintain, which currently provides information and support for their evaluators. I gather it is under the process of review – a good opportunity to make it more interactive, to make more use of multimedia and with space for users to create content as well as DG Regio!
• Form a small working group or interest group – this could be formal or informal, stand alone or tied to their existing evaluation network. Either way, it needs to be open and accessible to people who are interested in developing new ideas and trying some stuff out rather than a representative ‘committee’.
• Alternatively, set up an expert group to move some ideas forward.
• Or how about a Diigo group?
• Undertake some small-scale trials with specific tools – to see whether the ideas do cross over from the areas I work in to Regional Policy.
• Run a couple of one-day training events on Evaluation 2.0 focusing on some real hands-on workshops for evaluators and evaluation unit staff rather than just on information giving.
• Check out with people responsible for evaluation in other DGs whether there is an opportunity for some joint development (a novel idea!) Unlike other ‘perspectives’ it is not tied to content or any particular theoretical approach.
• Think about developing some mobile phone apps for evaluators and stakeholders around content specific issues – I can easily think of 5 or 6 possibilities to support both counterfactual, quantitative approaches and theory-based qualitative approaches. Although the ideas are generic, customizing the content means evaluators would have something concrete to work with rather than just ideas.
• Produce an easy-to-use handbook on evaluation 2.0 for evaluators / evaluation units who want practical information on how to do it.
• Ring fence a small amount of funding to support one-off explorations into innovative practice and new ideas around evaluation.
• Encourage the evaluation unit to demonstrate leadership in new approaches – for example, try streaming a live internet radio programme around the theme of evaluation (cheap and easy!); set up a multi-user blog for people to post work in progress and interesting observations of ongoing projects using a range of media as well as text-based major reports; make some podcasts of interviews with key players in the evaluation of Regional Policy; set up a wiki around evaluation rather than having to drill down through the various Commission websites; try locating projects using GPS data so that we can all see where the action is taking place! Keep a twitter stream going around questions and issues – make use of crowd sourcing!
• Advertise the next European Evaluation Society biennial conference, in Helsinki, October 1st – 5th 2012 “Evaluation in the networked society: New concepts, New challenges, New solutions” (There you go Bob, I just did!)
• Broaden the idea of Evaluation 2.0 and maybe get rid of the catchphrase! We are already using the power of the semantic web in evaluation to mash open and linked data, for example. Should we be now be talking about Evaluation 3.0?? Or should we find another name – Technology Enhanced Evaluation? We could have TEE parties instead of conferences – Europe’s answer to the American far right ; )

P.S. Message to the large numbers of English delegates at the conference

When you left Heathrow yesterday to come to Brussels, I do hope you waved to the English Rugby team arriving home from the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.

(Just as well this conference was not a week later or I’d have leave a similar message for the French delegates…..)

More and more of our data is being incorporated within Cloud services. Universities and other educational institutions are increasingly outsourcing services to cloud providers. But can we trust the cloud?

I am not convinced. Pontydysgu uses a number of different could services, most notably Google, Dropbox and Apple and there is no doubt that these services allow us a high degree of organisational flexibility and functionality for work in a distributed community. We do not pay for the Google or Apple services (although it could be argued that Apple services are paid through hardware) although we do pay for extended storage on dropbox.

I actually have (or rather had) four google accounts. My main account was tied to my mac (.me) email address. I additionally have a gmail account which I use as a backup email service. Somewhere down the way I created a Pontydysgu organisation account. And some time in the apst for soem reeason I couldn’t access anything so I set up yet another googlemail account (that was a mistake) …..although I instantly forgot I had got it.

But it was that account which caused me problems. Somehow that appears to havegot corss linked to my .mac account. If someone sent me access to a document on the .mac address google wa sautomatically changing that to my now dormant and throw-away gmail account. My Youtube account was beinga utomattcially linked in against it. And so on.

So idecided to simlify thigs. i would just erase the unwanted and unused account. That was easy. But at the same time it deletedmy main .mac account. How I have no idea. But everything was gone. I tried tehGoogel account recovery process but with little hope. The questions were impossible. I did not know teh eyar I had set up diffferent Google services let alone the month or day. And so it turned out – I had an auto email saying they were nable to restore my account beacuse they could not validate that I was who I said I was ands was tyeh owner fo the account.

OK – I gave in and setup the account again. Forthunately my amails were on anotheraccount. I lostmy feed readerbut it needed pruneing anyway. I lost access to about 200 docuemnts although once more only about eight or ten were in current use and I had backups of teh rest. Oh – and I lost access to 500 or so followers on Google plus.

None of this too much of a tragedy. But it has made me think agin about the cloud. If Google can screw up accounts then so can anyone else. And so whilst Cloud services can be very useful, i think I want to keep backups of my data on my computer for the moment.

At a presentation at a recent conference in Budapest I indulged in a short rant about the tendency to put 2.0 after everything these days. the term – if it can be called that – has lost any meaning, I said. But I do like this doodle by Jenny Hughes that I just found on the floor of our office!

Have just posted the video on studio schools in the UK. These Studio Schools people are practicing what we have all been preaching for years, they really are walking the talk and making the rhetoric a reality.

So why am I cynical? Geoff Mulgan says, crucially, “within the public system and publicly funded but independently run”. This presses all my buttons.

Trust schools

The Studio Schools are trust schools. Trust schools are local authority maintained schools and draw down public money from the local authority according to the same formula as any other community school.

However, trust schools are independent – owned by a trust with charitable status, run by their own governing body, employing their own staff, setting their own admissions criteria and owning their own land and buildings but with no accountability to the tax payers who fund them. And the publicly owned assets that were transferred to them, they are now in a position to sell.

The trust schools are having the best of both worlds, by tapping into the Local Authority for advice and support for ongoing maintenance, yet being independent from them in terms of funding and ownership of the assets. This, in my book, is called having your cake and eating it!

Whether or not the Studio Schools are doing a good job, the fact remains that I am paying – and I have no democratic channels, through my elected representatives to have any say in how my money is spent.

Moreover, the teachers in those schools do not benefit from the collective bargaining power that their unions have with the local authority public employers, their support staff (notwithstanding TUPE regulations) do not have any nationally agreed pay rates or conditions of service.

…and who pays?

I would also like to see the costing model. Mulgan assures us that Studio Schools run at ‘no extra cost’ – but what exactly does that mean? No extra cost to whom? Are we saying that there is no increase in gross expenditure on the education system (possibly) or are we saying the unit costs per pupil are no higher (unlikely)?

I would not be working for Pontydysgu if I was not interested in pedagogy but in my previous life I was a government officer responsible for running the education system in a large local authority and, significantly, managing the budget – endlessly balancing the statutory responsibility for providing quality education for EVERY child whilst also making the sums add up..

Although both trust and community schools are treated the same in terms of distribution of the formula budget, there are significant savings to be made by sharing services and resources between schools, rationalizing provision in particular areas and co-ordinating activities. The Studio Schools have opted out of this but thanks to the voluntary co-operation that exists between the community schools and the savings effected by their efforts, they, like other trust schools, reap the benefits. If trust schools such as the Studio Schools spread, there will ultimately be even less of a pot from which the local authority is able to distribute resources.

Back door to privatisation

Finally, I will stick my neck out and say you cannot run a school for the 300 pupils that Mulgan quoted at the same unit cost you can run one for 1000 pupils. This is not to say that large schools are, in terms of quality of education, better or worse than smaller schools – but they are cheaper. So if we grow the Studio School model in the future, we have to run small, technology-intensive schools ‘at no extra cost’ – presumably at no extra cost to the public sector. So where the issue of trust schools becomes even more entangled and contentious is with the introduction of Private Finance Initiatives – but that is the basis for a whole new editorial rant. Watch this space!!

Pedagogy v democracy

For the moment I will just conclude by saying firstly, I don’t actually think that Geoff Mulgan’s ideas around Studio Schools are in any way new or different. Learning through doing, through real projects, in groups, using technologies and so on have been part of mainstream thinking for years. What Studio Schools have done is make it happen. Ten out of Ten. Secondly, I think every school can be as good as a Studio School – we have the teachers with the skills and the enthusiasm to do it. What we don’t have are the funds to do it with or the commitment to public sector capital investment in community schools. And the solution is not the creation of unaccountable trust schools as a back door route to privatisation

The ideas are great but I’m not convinced they are ‘new’. The remarkable thing is that unlike most of the academics who have been advocating similar ideas, they have actually delivered them – demonstrable proof that they work in practice.

Kid Cartoon by Andertoons

(Go see the free embed deal at http://www.andertoons.com/free-cartoons/ )

Inspired by Tom Barrett’s presentations based on one idea per slide, I just asked Graham how big a slide was. After a pitying look and a very sniffy technical response, he helpfully put up a powerpoint on his screen and we measured how wide it was with a wooden ruler. It was about 30cm. Then I went for full screen mode and stretched it to .67 metres, which is therefore the length of an idea.

Divide that into a kilometre and it comes to about 1500 (give or take a few slides that sneakily have two ideas and take away the title slides and allowing a factor for lap top size screens).  Then I counted the number of ideas already published on Chalkface, including Tom’s, and found 108. That’s 72 metres of idea already – not bad, and loads to come!

Now I want an electronic thermometer thingy – like they used to have to measure the donations towards replacing the lead on the church roof – to see whether we can get a kilometre of ideas in the next year.

I admit there are some conceptual problems here because everyone knows that ideas are traditionally are measured by weight (as in ‘I’ve got tons of ideas’) or volume (as in ‘Here’s a handful of ideas’ ).

Anyway – that’s the target. A kilometre of ideas for teachers.

Bored of Pontydysgu :  (

PS Graham has pointed out that tweeted ideas are smaller so if some maths teacher could work out how long 140 characters are….

Last year I posted 20 Things To Do With Mobile Phones (or something!) – here’s the next generation of ideas, started by Tom Barrett. Seems a fitting tribute to Steve Jobs

As promised – the first of the ‘mile of ideas’ topics

Great idea from Tom Barrett who started off the series of ‘How to…’ presentations. One idea per slide, add yours on the end and keep it rolling! And loads of thanks to all those who have already contributed.

If you want to join the party, look at the last slide of any one for information on how to do this. Meanwhile, twitter their existence and alert all those over-worked, short-on-ideas teachers you know. We are going to post the whole series here.

Tom has an excellent website This is a must-read for all classroom teachers. Please note – those of you who have accessed his site before – the url has changed. (For which he blames the bullying of Doug Belshaw!!) Whatever the address, you NEED this site!