The cathedral and the bazaar in Luxembourgish education

In his book "The Cathedral & The Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary" Eric Raymond writes about the rise of the Linux operating system and of open source software but his metaphor can easily be applied to education in general and also to ICT in education. What I observe in education in Luxembourg for example are several attempts to enforce or construct educational change following a centralized, more or less coordinated top down approach. Intended is the building of controlled innovative hot-spots (cathedrals) that could, if successful, serve as transferable models, lightning the path for the rest of the educational community.
Surprisingly - and maybe not surprisingly after all - the same stakeholders that argue in favour of fundamental educational change persistently ignoring emergent creative efforts in the bazaar and giving disproportionate weight to the innovation they think they are controlling.
To me there is a significant mismatch between what is said to be intended and what is happening real-time in school. I'll come back to this subject in short ...
If you have comments on this I would be glad to hear from you ...

LEGO 50th Anniversary

Playing with Lego promotes creativity, spacial knowledge and imagination and as other tools Lego helps developing emotional values and social intelligence through collective play, (socio)dramatic play and narrative play.
In general, playing contributes to the development of emotional values and a positive self-esteem through the mastery over the tools and the imaginary worlds the player creates.

All experiences during play educate the player by providing enjoyable and sometimes not so enjoyable experiences (frustration if the construction is not working as intended).

5.000.000.000.000 Lego elements have been produced until today.
15.000.000.000 Lego figurines populate the globe.
And - LEGO is the world leading tire manufacturer.

Free dictionaries

Some online educational portals try to convince teachers and students to subscribe because they offer "for free" commercial resources like online dictionaries and encyclopedias. For free - meaning that the state has spent enormous sums to pay licenses. I can't help but finding this strategy quite odd as there are lots of useful yet really free resources on the net that most Internet literate students know about and use on a daily basis during homework.

Here are some of my favourite online dictionaries which I use:
http://dict.leo.org
http://www.dict.cc/
http://www.lexilogos.com/
http://www.thefreedictionary.com


NetLingo.com - The Internet Dictionary with thousands of terms about the online world of business, technology, and communication, including acronyms, text messaging shorthand, smileys, and more :-)

Changing Education

After having worked as a primary school teacher, ICT trainer, research coordinator for 20 years I quit my (well paid) job as a state official to found the company EducDesign.

So far EducDesign has implemented some interesting long term ICT, teacher training and school development projects in public and private schools in Luxembourg and invested a lot of its resources in the development the portal solution OLEFA which offers some great open tools for creative learning (Storyboard, Tiparlo, Wiki, Webbook) and resources management (library, multimedia data, teaching materials, etc.).

From my experience at school as a teacher I knew already that change in education is very slow and that substantial change is hard to achieve.

I have also experienced that people who try to move the system from within are rarely granted for their efforts and sometimes leave school or if they stay, resign and isolate themselves in their classroom until retirement.

So what's the situation in Luxembourgish education today? Well, I must say that nobody really knows which way the country is going. On one hand, a lot of teachers started to develop their teaching practice (or at least to reflect on it) as there seemed to be a positive political climate for change (mostly due to the disastrous results of Luxembourgish students in the PISA survey conducted by the OECD).

This move began after the latest elections which lead to a change at the head of the Ministry of Education. On the other hand, I have the strong impression that again a certain mistrust against "the system" is arising. Teachers feel that there is to much focus on some pilot projects which have little to do with their own situation in their "ordinary" school and a lot of inconsistencies between political messages and political decisions.

Le's see where this will end up, as we will have elections again next year.

Into the Wild

On Friday night I went to see the movie "Into the Wild" directed by Sean Penn and based on the nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer. It's the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man who, after getting his college degree leaves everything behind, his parents and his sister, his room and his car, gives away his money and even burns part of it, and goes off for a two years trip ending up in Alaska's wild nature.

The movie tells me that getting an educational degree or a driving license isn't enough to serve as a rite of passage to real life where you feel being more than a product of your nearest environment, composed by your family and its history or your schooling and the relationships you experience within or around your school life.

Definitely Shawn Penn is a great director and Emile Hirsch who plays Chris McCandless is just captivating.

As an "avant goût" visit the movie's website at www.intothewild.com.