Education in the Country - Some Early Experiences

After the war my father who had been an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force settled in Edinburgh, Scotland where I was born. He had a teaching job there but he and my mother favored the country life so after a few years he became the headmaster of a small country school in Morayshire where I attended myself when I became about five years old.

My first educational memories are of slates and slate pencils; can you imagine learning to write on a heavy slate with a squeaky slate pencil? Every morning we had to write down the names of the continents and whatever arithmetic tables we were learning. I think we were supposed to recite the tables to ourselves while writing them down but they made very regular patterns that were easy to reproduce by writing the numbers vertically, diagonally or in whatever way was most amusing. I was never caught but I'd been told that God was everywhere and could see everything so I was a little uneasy.

Mrs K, our formidable teacher, took 3 classes in the same room (one of which I thought she called the 'Fire Infants', actually 'Higher Infants'!). She had a robust no-nonsense approach to education and a fierce tenacity in dealing with the less quick to learn. She would stand over a weeping child at a desk until a task was done and if it wasn't, the unfortunate would be kept in until it was. I am appalled to remember offering to stand over a small girl and stamp on her feet if she made a mistake. To her credit Mrs K did not take me up on this but what a testament to her standing as a role model! She was probably not unusual by the standards of the day though and took what she saw as her moral responsibilities seriously. When something went missing and everyone, with absolutely no evidence, accused the class scapegoat of stealing it, she chided us and explained patiently that the correct thing to do was to ask if he knew anything about it.

The school dinners we had in the same classroom could be fraught. War-time austerity dictated that food wasn't to be wasted and if you didn't like a dish you stood in line for a compulsory teaspoonful of whatever it was; the macaroni cheese lines were by far the longest! For some reason I was allowed off to take soup with my father's class but gave this up after being taunted by Mrs K. The meat we had was fatty to say the least and I had a great aversion to it. Everything had to be eaten up so I solved the problem by depositing the fat under my desk. Unfortunately, a rancid accumulation was found by the cleaner several weeks later and word got back to my father. (Hmm - maybe that's why I got into trouble for throwing a stone at the cleaner's car!) I never had my father as a regular teacher but as headmaster he presided over school events such as Empire Day (renamed Commonwealth Day in 1958) where we all had to line up and Salute the Flag.

There was no electrical supply in the district although at some stage the school, but not the schoolhouse, was equipped with its own generator. The local village hall also had a generator and once when it failed, during a whist drive I think, several cars outside had to shine their headlights through the windows to keep the games going. At home, we listened to Tommy Handley and Charlie Chester on a large radio with a gigantic battery. The redundant 3 bar electric fire that had been banished upstairs was to me an exotic symbol of modern technology whose time was yet to come. A large Rayburn stove in the schoolhouse kitchen kept us warm. I think we used a Calor Gas cooker for most meals but sometimes my mother would do baking in the Rayburn oven. This demanded a fairly stable temperature for reasonable results and involved much stoking and poking of the fire on the part of my father.

My education outside the classroom was probably more valuable than inside. I learned to cycle on my mother's old bicycle. I got bitten in the Post Office learning that dogs are not always up for enthusiastic patting. I roamed for miles by myself exploring the woods and countryside; children could in those days. I almost learned to pronounce "agriculture" when my father became active in the local Young Farmers group. I tried (unsuccessfully) to poison the family dog with the engine oil left out from servicing our Austin 8. I listened to baffling arguments about people with curious names like "Attlee" and "Churchhill" and clearly remember my Grandfather pontificating on Prisoners of War: "We can't just tell them they've been naughty boys and send them home!" he would say.

It's easy to look back askance at some of the educational practices of those days but children are robust and my own memories of that time are almost all happy ones. But I had advantages where others did not and the full weight of classroom repression that descended on some must have been hard to bear.

Hopping out of the Walled Garden

When I started 'Not a Blog' on iBerry about two years ago I was very diffident about blogging and I warbled, "I'm dubious about devoting time and energy to blogging as such. In setting up the News Aggregator I've looked at quite a few educational blogs. Some are fascinating and endless hours can be spent reading them but I've no particular wish, or more accurately the knowledge, to join the crowd and sound off on the educational topics of the day. So, not a blog, and I've no idea whether or not I will continue this exercise." But I did continue, though for the most part, just to provide a record of development for myself and others contributing to iBerry. But now I think my attitude then was a bit wrong-headed. For most bloggers, blogging is its own reward and it does force a better formulation of ideas than just keeping them in your head or even jotting them down in the excellent Google Notebook. The fact that few people read the average blog, let alone leave comments on it, is not quite the point. They just might and this usually imposes some discipline on the writer. Also, it's become increasingly obvious to me that a lack of knowledge of the educational topics of the day is no barrier to sounding off about them! This makes me less hesitant to pontificate and I've even considered changing the blog title but for reasons of continuity and probably a lack of imagination, 'Not a Blog' will remain for the time being.

Hopping over the iBerry wall to Blogger fits in well with current plans for iBerry itself. The walls, and they were never very high, are coming right down as we attempt to distribute our efforts by strengthening links with other parts of the Open Global Education Network. It's too early to be definitive about all this but one early initiative involves some experiments in network representation using mindmaps. Also, we are trying to identify a very small number of sites that can reliably deliver up-to-date educational resources with expert authority in specific academic subject areas. This will take time and any suggestions and help is greatly appreciated - please contact us or leave a comment.

Towards an Open Global Education Network

Although a truly Open Global Education Network (OGEN) is not yet a reality, it is useful in clarifying aims and objectives to consider what exists of its beginnings in the present and what the future could or should bring. At present, the 'Open Global Education' part of OGEN is mainly represented by Open Courseware (OCW) and, no doubt, this is a good foundation. Certainly, the popularity of today's OCW, in spite of its shortcomings, points to a huge global demand for inexpensive Higher Education by many people with different needs, expectations and backgrounds. Other desirable parts of the educational process such as expert tuition, interaction among students or learning assessment are not nearly so well supported by any sort of infrastructure that could be called open, or free of the usual geographical and political constraints imposed by current systems of Higher Education.

The 'Network' part seems the weakest bit of OGEN at the present time. Nodes, such as university OCW websites, often hyperlink from their courseware to other nodes (websites) but usually only to casually reference supporting material rather than to incorporate essential content from a different node as part of a main thread. Ideally, OGEN would draw the best content from whichever network node was appropriate, provide the best (human) expert tuition available whenever the user needed it and maintain connection with a manageable (by the user) group of fellow students for whatever level of interaction he or she was comfortable with. The user would be then be presented with a personalized and seamless educational experience with no awkward leaps back and forth from one walled-garden to another along with jarring changes of style and presentation. Of course the devil is in the detail but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility to customize such a service for a given user or even automate it using some sort of intelligent agent (an 'edubot'?). The network would require aggregation of open educational and other resources on a scale not yet approached and also a herculean effort to manage and maintain but, provided standards were open and adhered to, much of the the effort could be distributed over a large network of nodes, many of which would be specialist in nature according to the particular interests and expertise of those involved.

Can we move from the embryonic edu-nets of today to something far more open and universal like OGEN? The present chaotic state of flux, where different models for e-learning and other associated functions are proposed, tried, tested, abandoned if found wanting, is an exciting and productive evolutionary process but survival of the fittest can lead to a number of scenarios – including that of a single survivor in the shape of a corporate monster! Greater integration and co-operation between educational websites of all shapes, sizes and functions must surely offer the best chance of strengthening edu-net connections (beyond today's simple hyperlinking, RSS and the like) and fostering a richer multi-way exchange of information and resources between nodes and users. And maybe edu-walled-gardens with their passwords, closed content and privileged access might even fade and die as providers recognise the impossibility of achieving anything like OGEN that is not free and open.

Everyone Has the Right to Education.

I have always been interested in following OCW initiatives of one type or another (many can be found here). They range from small sites, like iBerry, to huge university repositories such as MIT OpenCourseWare or the UK's Open University. For the most part, these large sites make available courseware that was created for funded students by paid academics. Non-paying remote learners are inevitably left on their own as far as important parts of the educational process are concerned, such as expert tuition, assessment or interaction with fellow students. Sometimes an attempt is made to involve OCW users, by providing a discussion forum but in my experience these forums are frequently empty or peppered with plaintive but unanswered pleas for basic assistance.

Recently, some other education sites have gone one or two steps further. A very impressive example is Connexions, "an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone ....... organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license." (Further info available here) Much thought has obviously been given to setting up this scheme and bringing together users in their different roles as authors, instructors and learners.

It is early days of course and the current evolution in the use and dissemination of open educational resources is encouraging but I look forward to a greater coming together of the different parts of the open global educational network. At present, a learner may well find ideal courseware on one site but probably also an empty or non-existent forum there for discussing work with other students let alone experts. He or she might then exercise initiative and find a lively forum on another site but equally well could make a bad misjudgment about the scope or quality of the discussions. Some sort of overall mentoring process is needed, offering advice, guidance and encouragement to the learner at whatever level and without fear or favor in regard to the vested interests of existing institutions.

Perhaps some sites should specialize as repositories while others provide support for student interaction, social and academic. Yet others (existing institutions?) could take on the thorny question of assessment and maybe some nodes (portholes?) of this futuristic education net could address the mentoring function by co-ordinating and drawing together the facilities provided by the others in order in order to create and maintain a personalized learning environment for whoever, whenever and in whatever language. A pipe dream? Perhaps, but if "Everyone has the right to education" as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, the time of the Free and Open Global Education Network must surely come.