Teaching Assistants’ Changing Role July 10, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, edublog, politics , add a commentIn reponse to a request from Ian Terrel to comment on the changing role of Teaching Assistants I wrote the following:
I think all of this needs to be understood within the wider context of the role of education within society.
The 1880 Education Act made attendance at school compulsory for children up to the age of 10. This was increased to fourteen in the 1918 Education Act as part of the reconstruction legislation promised by David Lloyd George during the First World War.
So the leaders of advancing capitalist economies such as Britain had decided as a matter of policy that increasingly sophisticated industrialisation needed an educated working class, and after a few decades it started to happen.
Then in 1979 Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) came to power with an agenda to reverse a whole raft of social policy. Public spending cuts, attacks on trades unions and increasing unemployment levels all helped to reduced the value of educated workers. The idea of an educated overall population had, in the view of the ruling class, become a luxury which they no longer felt they could afford.
So finally, after a few years of testing the water and finding the teachers’ unions somewhat spineless, the 1988 Education Reform Act cynically planted the seeds of destruction. The reforms were aimed at creating an education ‘market’ so that schools were competing against each other for ‘customers’ (pupils), and that bad schools would lose pupils and close, leaving only the good schools open. This had a devastatingly demoralising effect on school staff, and the inspired vocational teachers left the profession in droves, to be replaced by itinerants, incompetents, clock watchers and petty social climbers.
Following the 1997 General Election, the Labour Party gained power in central government. But “New Labour”’s political ideology meant that most of the changes introduced by the Conservatives during their time in power stayed in place. Despite pledging to pour resources into “education, education and education” the imposition of innappropriate management techniques taken from manufacturing industry resulted in an overwhelming deluge of targets, planning, quotas and quality control measures burying teachers under a mountain of paperwork from which they can only emerge by writing downright lies.
So now we have a situation where our schools are being crushed by two opposing pressures. The superficial political drive to increase the appearance of meeting higher and wider education goals on the one hand, and an economic pressure to squeeze budgets (capping ) in a situation where there is no room to manoevre due to the high proportion of costs taken up by teaching staff’s wages.
This is the background situation into which the new styled Teaching Assistants are suddenly appearing centre stage, in front of the whiteboard - with no nationally negotiated wage scales, on short term contracts, pro rata, term time only. In other words for as little as one third of the cost of the legacy teaching professionals.
But even if the government wants to turn the majority of schools into child minding institutions, with a just a few good schools for the elite they still need people who are capable of keeping a classful of rowdy, bored kids - hyped up by TV, computer games and junk food - in some sort of semblance of order. That’s where the training and personal development skills are going to have to bear fruit soon, otherwise the plan to reduce the number of expensive teachers will keep getting put off. There is also a great irony in the plan, one which will dig its own grave - as the newly created army of Teacher replacements are drawn from the same estates as the communities in which the schools are situated. Without any of the terms, conditions and perks of the old middle class teachers, TA’s will start to build their own collective consciousness as a major force within the education system, overcoming the problems of regionalism and multiple unions to build a national solidarity. Increasingly, the conclusion will be drawn that they are being severely ripped off - action demanded. In the past, collective action was largely inhibited because the old teachers, who imagined that their interests aligned with the pillars of society, were easily confused by the illusion of conflicting loyalties.
“Isn’t it terrible, but i don’t agree with doing anything about it because going on strike only harms the children’s education”
will be replaced with:
“£8 an hour to stand in for teachers, with no job security, holiday pay or training - that’s just taking the piss that is”
and
“If the system can’t afford a decent education for everybody then we can’t afford to keep the system.”
WikidPad July 8, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning, tools, Wiki , comments closedVia Contentious Weblog I latched on to Wikidpad
It’s a personal Wiki for your own PC.
Q Huh?
Well you might use it to organise your own to do lists, jottings, embryonic articles, stuff like that.
Q But aren’t Wiki meant to be collaborative?
Well yes, that’s the BigIdea, but there are other aspects of Wiki as well, such as the ease of link making (WikiWords) and ultra simple markup language. WikidPad deploys these powerful features for personal collaboration.
Q Andy, you’ve lost me now. WTF is personal collaboration??
Ok, I made that up. But when you update a to do list, or start writing a report by sketching out headings which you might come back to later, it’s a bit like collaborating with your past and future self. get it?
Q I ask the qustions!
Sorry. I think you might have to have the ‘global learner’ style to appreciate the advantages. Or if you were once a computer programmer perhaps, using the top down modular method.
Q Right. So what are you going to do with this new personal collaboration tool then?
I’ll start off using it as an aide memoire, to paste in ideas and details I don’t want to lose. But then next year or maybe sooner, I’m going to use it for the authoring stage of writing my ultraversity assignments. I’m going to move away from the Patchwork Text method, and start from the top down instead. It makes more sense to me. I’ve already decided I need to do the literature review first instead of at the end. I’ll sit down with a blank Wikidpad instead of a blank Dreamweaver and grow the report wiki-style, with all the flexibility that entails - then export it as HTML and into Dreamweaver for further development and presentation.
Q Hmm, well good luck
That’s not a question.
Q Ooh. Um, so are there any snags so far with Wikipad?
Yeah, It doesn’t run on a Mac. There must be similar systems though - or soon.
shifting sands July 7, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : soundvideo, movie clips, Music , comments closed
I want to get this over and done with. It’s just a demo - ok, a way of getting the song down on tape somehow. Ideally there would be images from Whitsunday Island on the video, and some orchestration with perhaps my friend Alex helping out on the vocals but some vital components of the technical apparatus are still missing. Beggars can’t be choosers.
So here’s the photo I took of whitesands bay, and the cessner light aircraft. Whitsunday Island is an uninhabited nature reserve off the coast of Queensland, Au, near the Great Barrier Reef and I had the privilege to camp there for four nights.
Fantastic. Nothing to do with the song though, which is all about setting off to Bilbao, Spain on my own.
Dragonfly July 6, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : wildlife , comments closedMy 50th entry in this blog is a photograph of a dragonfly - species unknown - perched on a chimney pot. 
You might think it’s not the most stunning dragonfly you’ve ever seen - it isn’t flourescent blue or red. But click on the thumbnail and view the full size photo. Zoom in and examine the wings. See the rows of squares, pentagons and hexagons - just how symetrical are the opposites? Nothing’s perfect, but nature’s flight engineers have been working on this one for some time.
No Need to Click Here - I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster
The Danger of Metaphors July 2, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : learning , comments closedAn article by Danah Boyd about the shortcomings of analysing pieces of software as metaphors for more traditional things in
acrophenia rang bells with me.
Some of the features and processes of our online University are explained as metaphors for a ‘Real University’ but it also needs to be remembered that if Ultraversity is sucessful, it will not be as an online version of a traditional institution but something completely new and different which works in ways that were previously inconceivable.
Also relevant: “the thing, not the symbol”
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
