Tet tree on a motorbike by C Campbell

It is New Year or TET here in Vietnam. A time characterised by panic buying, the burning of things, releasing fish into lakes and the precarious balancing of trees on motorbikes. (see left)

It is also a time to deal with, and reflect on, things from the year we are in the process of leaving and I am going to do just that with this series of blog posts. For the title and to some extent the structure I have borrowed from Erroll Morris’s documentary, ‘The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara’. If you haven’t seen this film then I would suggest rectifying that as soon as you can. My lessons are less confessional than McNamara’s and as far as I know I haven’t started any wars – but I hope, like he does, to tease some wisdom from what has been an eventful 12 months.

Lesson number one – “The hills have new places”

“Till day rose; then under an orange sky, The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.” from ‘Wind’ by Ted Hughes

I feel like we are in that place that Hughes describes – the storm after the storm. And as we look around the things we always thought couldn’t move have moved or might even have disappeared. An introduction to a collection of essays by David Graeber that was sent through to me by a friend explains this beautifully.

“At a moment when the old assumption about politics and power have been irrefutably broken the only real choice is to begin again: to create a new language, a new common sense, about what people basically are and what it is reasonable for them to expect from the world, and from each other.”

I am always wary of present time arrogance (see #6 on my notice board) or the dangers of misreading the significant movements of our times by forgetting the filters we use and the echo chamber of ideas we might be in. However, it is my experience that the landscape is changing in terms of what it is we are supposed to do and the opportunities to do it. Yes there are caveats to this and I will cover some of those in these lessons, but let me give a small but significant example of the shifts I am talking about from within my own field of education.

Below is an edited transcript of an exchange on the BBC Radio 4′s ‘Start the week’ programme between the presenter Andrew Marr and Neville Brody who had not long been appointed the Head of Visual Communications at London’s Royal College of Art, one of the UK’s most prodigious art schools.

Andrew Marr. A lot of trades that have become ingrained in our heads specific forms of trade have dissolved. So for somewhere like the Royal College where do the special new skills come in that you are going to transmit to the students? (Interesting use of the word transmit here…cc)

Neville Brody: In all honesty we don’t know. The old idea of teacher and pupil dissolves now and it’s much more a kind of collaborative research than anything else. We have to understand the world, what it needs and what the right tools are to deal with that.

AM: Well except that the students that are now paying lots of money to come to somewhere like the Royal College will want something special back. Well if it’s not pupil and teacher it’s possibly, I don’t know, master and atelier, or something like that. They’re going to want to come to someone like you for specific ideas and skills.

I re-listened to this interview several times – nodding along and heartened to hear that progressive ideas about learning and pedagogy were coming into the mainstream. That out of the economic turmoil and the failings of what Brody labels ‘success culture’ a new way to learn is emerging. At the core of his ideas was an embracing of what he perceives to be a new digital landscape, a notion I will return to in my second lesson from the Year of the Cat.

20 x 20 by C Campbell (cctinto on flickr)

1. The creativity of constriction.

'Serendipity' by alex drennan from flickr

2. Serendipity

It is easy to get a little tangled up in the webs and routines many of us find ourselves in, especially as our search engines and social networking software get better at telling us what they think we want to know. A PechaKucha night can provide a useful way to mix things up a little, to get a glimpse of what people in other fields are doing and the way they are going about it. On a good night you might just get an idea that helps you make a breakthrough with a project you are working on or happen across something that takes you down a new and productive path.

'House' by Hideyuki Nakayama from www.busyboo.com

3. Design literate

PechaKucha was started by designers for designers and while the concept has evolved into a much broader and diverse network, a level of design mindfulness remains at its core. Speakers, be they professional or amateur, are all trying to communicate a visually arresting narrative with their audience.

4. Open, community based and not-for-profit

Anyone can get up and talk about pretty much anything at a PechaKucha night. It is about sharing ideas. The organisers both globally and locally do not make money from the events and the only reason someone might not be granted permission to speak at a PK night is if the organisers feel the content may not be in keeping with the ethos of the event or may put the permission to run the event in jeopardy.

'beer' by aka_lusi from flickr

5. Conviviality

With all that this creative nourishment going on you will have more than earned the right to have a few beers in a setting where you can decide how you want to experience the event.

The Hanoi version at the homely Cinematheque on 22A Hai Ba Trung Street will have two spaces where you can follow the presentations. This means you can either sit down in the main room where the speakers will present or mingle at the bar where another screen will show the presentations, an ideal spot for a little gentle hob-nobbing.

If you are interested in presenting at a Hanoi PechaKucha night please contact us by email at hanoipechakucha@gmail.com. If you want more details about upcoming events go here or follow us on twitter.

There Will be Blood minimalist movie poster

Right, getting into the minimalist movie picture idea now for the digital storytelling course I am following. Here I take on Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic There Will Be Blood. I got the oil barrel from here and I used sketchbook pro to add the drinking straws that I took from another picture (lost source sorry) and just erased the edges. I lost photoshop a while back when my hard-drive crashed and I’d really recommend sketchbook pro for this type of task. More of a drawing programme but has layers and really smooth intuitive controls.

Thinking about identity led me to select Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Synecdoche New York’ as a film to create an alternate poster for. A movie obscure, inventive and original enough to perhaps have ended his Hollywood career but hopefully not his creative output. His previous films Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich had all focused on characters struggling with their place in the world. His protagonists can barely cope with themselves, never mind the single minded, self-assured women they all seem to fall for. For my poster I had a go at representing the central project that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre director Caden Cotard gets lost in as the film progresses.

Synechdoche NY film poster by Colin McCampbell

I wonder what Cotard might have done for his photo for the daily shoot on the topic of ‘deadlines’. Perhaps just himself alone on a huge empty stage. I captured where all good deadline days start and tend to return to fairly regularly.

'Deadline' by ColinMCampbell

If I could have taken a point of view shot of me making an uncessarily complicated sandwich that would have been even better but I think this makes the point.

Lizard by TuckerH586 from flickr

However, as Merlin Mann points out in one of his videos or blog posts (not this one but they are all good), it is not as simple as that. If we are in the knowledge game then we need to research, we need to read, we need to open ourselves up to the ideas that are out there. I couldn’t agree more, my google reader and twitter feeds have been invaluable in pushing my thinking to new places over these past couple of years. However what Mann says and I think I’m getting a bit better at is to be conscious in what you are spending your time on and why? His advice on email inbox checking is a must view for those who have not read or seen it. I also thoroughly recommend his interview with Seth Godin on the lizard brain where they discuss motivation, Bob Dylan and what stops us shipping.

So what distractions help us ship? Well for me MOOCs (massive open online courses) are an interesting case in point and after reading George Siemens blog post on the very subject I have decided to follow another one about digital storytelling. I follow with these questions in mind that I hope will come back to when I finish the course?

(a) Can participation in a mooc help you ship a project and if so how?

(b) Did participation in the Digital storytelling course change my approach to my digital identity?

Lets see.

Art play masterpiece in Hakone photo by C Campbell

Clearly I’m not alone in still loving playgrounds and was triggered to write about the one in the pictures after reading this post from a blog all about play spaces. We lived in Japan for a few years and discovered some beautifully designed spaces for both children and adults to play in. Indeed the whole notion of play as an activity that continues unapologetically through our lives is very much a feature of Japanese culture generally. Play-centres in Japan are often set up for adults to play with their children in rather than a place just for kids.

Inside the net maze Hakone art museum photo by C Campbell

This piece is in a large outdoor art museum in a place called Hakone about an hour from Tokyo near Mount Fuji. We visited it with our son and another family and completely lost track of time playing in it. Like the Schulberg playground in Germany this works for kids of multiple ages, my son was under three when he played on this. The clever use of knitted tunnels being both challenging and supportive at the same time. None of the kids could stay still long enough to get a photo with them in focus.

The top of the wonderous hammock thing by C Campbell

And when you clambered your way to the top there was, just like lying in a real hammock, a place of peace and tranquility. Until of course two children emerged from a tunnel to shout and giggle and then disappear down another one.

Hakone outdoor art museum hammock thing outside by C Campbell

And this is the outside, the supporting construction being assembled from wooden blocks that reminded me of the sort of constructions you can make with kapla wooden blocks. Thanks to the designers of this incredible object and to playscapes whose blog reminded me of our afternoon at the Hakone Outdoor Art museum.

Half Nelosn by p373 from flickr

5. Half Nelson (2006)

On a second viewing I started to see the joins in this film, but the characters still achieve a level of complexity and realism lacking in most representations of teachers onscreen. On paper there seems to be too much going on with Ryan Gosling’s history teacher Dan Dunne. A crack smoking, off the curriculum, wanabee writer striving to save one of his inner city charges from the clutches of the local drug dealer could easily have slipped into cliche and melodrama. However, a combination of Gosling’s edgy performance and Ryan Flecks’s inventive direction ensure that does not that happen. Half Nelson ebbs and flows with the moods of our protagonist much in the way of a school year.

Here our teacher strays close to a complete collapse and the tension comes from there as much as from the nicely underplayed relationship between Dunne and Drey (Shareeka Epps), the student who discovers him early in the film smoking a pipe in the school toilets. This is far from the teacher as saint, but captures much of what it is like to work with young people. There is a self-indulgence to Dunne’s character, yet he has a clear sense of vocation and affection for his students. No neat conclusions are reached, but we sense our educator may find the next term just a little bit easier to handle.

Greogory's Girl by Vintage Movie Posters

4. Gregory’s Girl(1981)

Here I unapologetically cheat slightly by sneaking in a film with a group of teachers in supporting roles rather than as the protagonist. Bill Forsyth’s 1982 Gregory’s Girl is a beautifully observed warm hearted comedy set around a large new town comprehensive school in Scotland. Jake D’Arcy’s feckless PE teacher Phil Menzies is a treat in this film, understanding as little about his adolescent footballers as they do about his frustration with their attempts to play football. Forsyth gets what is inherently funny, ridiculous and endearing about a typical secondary school with the students and teachers coexisting in a routine that seems to have very little to do with the content of the lessons.

la classe

3. La Classe/ The Class (2008)

A Parisienne inner city school teacher walks the line with his students in 2008’s excellent La Classe. Facing similar challenges to those of Gosling’s Dunne in Half Nelson here we see and feel the rush of decision making involved in managing a classroom filled with ethic tensions, boredom and insecurities including those of the teacher trying to hold it all together.

Mr Marin and his students played fictional versions of their real selves for this project, a set-up that could easily have resulted in a film that felt contrived and staged. However, the opposite is true as we are pulled inside the bright yet claustrophobic classroom. There is always a sense of unease, the laughter slightly nervous, the peace paper thin. Marin is in control but only just, he works with humour to diffuse confrontations but it is a dangerous game that may backfire at any point.

Happy Go Lucky by YES, we like the movies

2. Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

There is a very recognisable Mike Leighness to Mike Leigh films. His characters are painstakingly and intricately drawn over long periods of rehearsal by the actors before shooting and they that inhabit a world that feels very much lived in by the time we, the viewers, happen upon it. In Sally Hawkins’s primary school teacher Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky, we get a character whose relentless optimism and chirp pushes and pulls us with equal measure. She is happy on her own terms and defends her decisons when challenged by her upwardly mobile sister over a strained weekend visit to the suburban semi detached to which her sister has ascended. Poppy has chosen a different path and makes no apologies for it.

However, Poppy also infuriates in her inability to keep her little suggestive asides to herself, especially when nervous. A character trait that proves crucial to the central tension of the drama, pushing Eddie Marden’s driving instructor Scott into apoplexy as he tries to teach Poppy to drive. Scott is not sure what to do with Poppy and he starts to come apart at the seams as all his anger and unhappiness is exposed. Also falling apart but with an honesty that just endears her more to her students is Poppy’s flamenco instructor. In the two best scenes in this film Leigh shows us the great joy and empowerment that a good teacher can bring.

Leigh’s films often work in the contrasts he presents between an ensemble of characters but dominating this piece is the usually and unashamedly functional central character of Poppy. An individual who is good at a job that matters, cares deeply for her friends and students and is quite literally Happy-Go-lucky.

Etre et avoir by C Kites from flickr

1. Être et avoir / To Be and To Have (2002)

Être et avoir is a documentary that follows a year in the life of the teacher and students of a one room schoolhouse in rural France. This is an elegantly constructed film that guides us through the seasons and in an out of the homes and farms the students come from. In Mr Gonsales classroom we are a long way from the claustrophia and tension of La Classe as we see an educator completely at home in his environment, a place that is slowly and subtlely revealed to be the heart of the community it serves. For a film about a group of children between the ages of 4 and 11 there is a surprising quiet and calmness to this piece; it comes from the gentle assurance of the teacher and lingering shots of the trees and hills that surround this little school.  

This film shows the great skill, craft and patience involved in becoming an accomplished teacher. Mr Gonsales knows when to listen and knows when to intervene. He gently guides his younger students, helping them learn how to count and wash their hands. We see him then have to switch to the role of counsellor to the older students in his class, dealing with the tearful aftermath of a pre-adolescent playground squabble. The scene where he says goodbye to his students for the summer, some of whom he has taught for seven years and are moving on to the big school away from the village is a powerful a piece of filmmaking that stayed with me for long after I had watched this magnificent film.

Having spent the last few months developing a new project I set myself the task of identifying the most important questions we have been asking ourselves as we have refined our ideas. I am using the word project to encompass any useful significant endevour – be it educational, entrepreneurial, creative or better still all three.

"Disrupt the Pattern" by cszar from flickr

#1 Will the project disrupt and confuse?

Innovations, learning and creativity should involve a bit of disquiet along the way. I am not referring to a willful lack of direction or a conscious obscureness; I mean that a project should challenge, provoke and unsettle in some way. Then when the dust settles, we will all have learnt something.

#2 Is there potential for failure?

The entrepreneurial sector and that of education often feel like disconnected worlds, but there are certain attitudes that persist in both. One of the most corrosive I’ve found over these past few months was nicely summed up by the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce when he said,

“Plan to avoid failure and you don’t plan to succeed”.

Boyce in his talk on the ‘Joys of failure’ was expressing his concern over a growing achievement culture within education and society at large that is creating a fear of failure. His worry is that this is already leading us to mediocrity, to playing it safe, to not reinventing the wheel at a time when that is exactly what we need to be doing and encouraging our students to do. The further up the school students go the less their projects encourage them to experiment and the more they pull them into fail-safe strategies and middle of the road thinking. I agree with Boyce that we too easily accept misguided easily measurable notions of achievement with what we know to be real learning.

A welcome exception from this is the IBMYP’s personal project that pushes students towards ambitious complicated goals that may or not not be successful. The process, of course, is what matters. Experience of this type of thinking is crucial to showing students that ‘success’ is a multifaceted and complex business. Hearing comedian and first time film director Joe Cornish recently state that he consciously attempted an ambitious high-concept complex genre movie for his first project as he wanted to overstretch himself and succeed or fail gloriously encourages me that there are still people who see innovation as a necessity not a luxury.

#3 Does the project solve a real problem?

For a school project this means that it has to be relevant beyond the insulation of the classroom. The most powerful educational projects I have been involved with have all been carefully contextualised within a community so that the success of the project was measured primarily in those terms by the students. Were we able to change the behaviour of others? Are we now better equipped to deal with that situation? You know as a designer of school projects that when the assessed element of the project matches, in concrete terms, a skill or concept that is important beyond the classroom that it has worked.

As an educational entrepreneur my approach is that you need to take an equally broad view of the impact of your project. Will this service, this learning model, this application have a real benefit on the community it is intended for? Education is too important for projects that are not ambitious. From a business point of view this is not woolly thinking either. Getting people to see that your project solves a problem is not easy, but as long as it does, it has a chance of prospering.

"Share your ideas" by Britta Bohlinger from flickr

#4 Is the project about sharing?

This one sounds a little fuzzy I know but is perhaps the most important. I never thought I’d quote Ronald Reagan but he got to the heart of this point when he said,

“There is no end to what we can achieve if we are not bothered who takes the credit for it”.

Sure we need to give feedback to individuals sometimes, learners need help to uncover their strengths and weaknesses, but there is no reason that we cannot think more in terms of learning within groups; not just as part of but as the focus of the process.

When it comes to building learning spaces and services in Ha Noi and on the web, we are deliberately developing ideas that we know are different, but we would be delighted to see them spread or taken on by others. Also when we discover projects that are similar in outlook as I did last night when Ewan McIntosh’s link brought me to Brightworks, I take encouragement that our project might work and that I am part of a growing community of educators that want to build alternatives to mainstream schooling.

Here are six pieces of wisdom that fulfill that purpose for me. Having adorned the real walls of my thinking spaces in the past I thought it would be useful to put them on a virtual notice board to see if others might feel inclined to add to the list. I have also shared them on flickr here where you can download the images, all of which have a creative commons license.

My whole interest in notice boards comes from a friend and former colleague with whom I shared an office for two and half fun-filled years. Despite his many flaws I still miss him terribly. His digital version of his old noticeboard can be viewed here, his new one here, thanks mcgurgle.

#1 Robert Johnson from Facebook’s engineering team on responsibility and action

It is slightly amusing to me that I found wisdom about responsibility and control from a company that has taken a few liberties in those exact areas but they are clearly good at what they do and this is such a simple point that we so often get wrong in education.

Too often schools have people doing stuff they had no or very little input in designing. We talk a lot about responsibility in schools but are not so good at giving or sharing control. This could be students working on projects with too many guidelines and restrictions resulting in compliant, unimaginative, superficial responses. This could be teachers or heads of departments having to implement a new system or approach they had little or no input in designing.

We need adaptable and flexible organisational systems and modes of learning in schools. I see this happening more in elementary/ primary schools where grade level teams are given a lot of autonomy in designing projects for the students. The projects themselves are open and built around curiosity and inquiry with sophisticated resources supporting the development of literacies placed within the context of the larger unit.

#2 – Are they students or learners? David Warlick from his excellent 2 Cents worth blog.

David Warlick - students or learners? (Reformatted from the original)

In two well-crafted little lists David expresses what I was struggling to communicate in a long rambling blog post I eventually ditched on the difference between learning and education. Another of David’s creations I like is the table about the shifts in education he put at the end of this post. His work takes him to numerous conferences and he meets a lot of educators but unlike some speakers and consultants he is clearly doing as much listening as talking shown in his aptitude for summing up the shifts and patterns that are (or should be) happening in learning.

#3: Stephen Downes on Groups and Networks

'Groups and Networks' Stephen Downes (2007)

Like David Warlick’s lists above, this diagram is attempting to shape trends as well as observe them. Careful reading of this diagram and engagement with the work of Downes and Siemens has pulled me into a more open and networked approach to (online) learning. Especially now that I am working independently, this digital space is a way of communicating my ideas but it is never intended as a broadcast, rather a place to share patterns of thought in order to have them disrupted by others.

#4: Will Taylor. Consciously incompetent?

Will Taylor's cycle of learning

I’ve seen various forms of this model and found all sorts of uses for it. Initially it was to drag up the painful memory of crashing into conscious incompetence about what I really knew about philosophy while supping a few pints with a colleague who had just finished her masters in the subject. Perhaps the measure of a teacher is how well they can handle that moment when a learner reaches the realisation that there is so much still to learn, this can be a moment of great discouragement but with the influence of the right mentor it can be the start of the journey of ‘life long learning’ that is rightly mentioned but rarely adhered to by most school mission statements.

#5 Loris Malaguzzi on the psuedo-democracy of teachers

Illusion by KayVee.INC

Illusion by KayVee.INC

It is much more difficult to build educational models than attack them as Malaguzzi does here, but his criticisms carry much more weight for me as he did exactly that. The Reggio Emilia approach to early education is still thriving forty years after Malaguzzi started the first school in Italy after the end of the 2nd World War. I have yet to come across a better book about education than The Hundred Languages of Children that reflects on the on-going development of this pioneering approach to learning.

#6: George Siemens on Present time arrogance

Spacehopper by Osbourne's Life

Few educators have utilized technology better than George as participants in any of the open online courses he helps coordinate will testify, however he does help to keep our digital optimism in check. Not that the intention is to discourage the use of digital tools but this statement and his approach in general is to focus our attention on ideas and pedagogy and not get distracted by the bells and whistles. There is, at times, a touch of the Bill Hicks about both the stridency with which he expresses himself and the sharpness of his observations. We desperately need the sort of debate, disagreement and provocation that the work of people like Siemens bring to ensure we do not get too cosy and self-congratulatory as we form learning networks and collectively seek to push the boundaries of learning.