Reviewing Mark Treadwell’s Seminars
Mark’s website contains a huge amount of information, and it is hard to accurately describe his content because he covered so much ground. For me, it was a ground-breaking experience. The whole business is summarised in a quote from Howard Gardner:
“I discern two legitimate reasons for undertaking new educational practices. The first reason is that our current practices are not actually working… The second reason is that conditions in the world have changed significantly.”
Mark’s intention is to show that technology, far from threatening education in particular and society in general, makes possible what should be the purposes of education.
“To facilitate the outworking of the inherent potential embodied within every child, such that their uniqueness can change the world for the better via their active involvement in their community and their ability to be lifelong learners that are self assured; balancing confidence with humility and having the capacity to apply their abilities with wisdom.”
I have read a significant amount of the book, but it will take ages to follow up the matter in the book. I hope to eventually create a linkroll with all of the urls from the book and elsewhere. Ultimately, I would love to use the book as a professional development tool (actually, I would love Mark to visit the College and help people to get on board). Here, for the moment, are the ideas that are making my mind steam at the moment:
- The implications of the ‘The Upper Limit Hypothesis‘:
The scary thing about this is that implicit in this is the speed of the implementation of the new paradigm will exceed the possible impact of traditional Professional Development:
- School v2.0
This provides such a scope for speculation that it is hard to acknowledge that part of it is already possible.
Mark’s diagramatical summary is:
I think I have just decided to redesign the school!
- The role of schools has changed: not irrelevant, but in fact more relevant. More on that next post, but it is a great time to be a teacher. If we can make the transition that they have, we have more to offer that ever before.
I saw his presentation in Canberra and frankly I thought it was disappointing, which was a pity as his main point (that schooling needs to change) is one I agree with.
His presentation was heavy on ‘snake oil’ particularly his discussion and analysis of the brain. Apparently you can remove one of the brain hemispheres with no intellectual or cognitive impairment at all. All those with minor brain injuries must just be faking it.
His presentation contained a number of factual assertions that were plain wrong or highly exaggerated. (He stated as a fact more than once that TED talks were 17 minutes in length. I have 10 TED talks on my iTouch ranging from 5 minutes for Johnny Lee to over 25 minutes for Bill Clinton). Also, apparently by the end of this year all High Schools in NZ will have 1 gigabyte internet connections. Please excuse my skepticism, even if we define his ‘all’ as 80%.
His main graph of the ‘Upper Limit Theorem’ is inconsistent with his source document by Bransen. Bransen show the greatest rate of school improvement took place around 1910. Treadwell indicates it was in the 1600th century, with practically no improvement in the last 200 years. However I will concede that a brief review of Bransen’s published papers in this area seems to lack rigor as well.
Maybe I was expecting too much from the day.
Probably the best summary of the day came towards the end when a person near me was reflecting on the amount of passive sitting involved in the day. “It’s like I am on an airplane ….. If this was a plane I would be in Singapore now”
I also recently saw parts of a similar presentation by Mark.
The significance of the material on split brains or similar; was not really made clear. It did seem like a strange tangent to make in the context of what we thought we were all there for.
The TED talks format is 18mins. That is the limit that conference speakers are given and most are around this length. There are other shorter 4 or 5 minute snips that aren’t really full TED talks. The TED prize talks also go longer as do partner ones.
However to criticise Mark for that seems a bit pedantic.
I believe there was valuable content provided but without an over arching structure that would help most people to decode it.
At the presentation I attended some of the assertions were “over egged” for the purposes of the story. To me that kind of hyperbole is a distraction.
Because then you get people arguing about the facts and Marks presentation again got a bit sidetracked on some of that.
I wish he had just said. “Here is the book I’ve written on the subject and presented some of his exec summary – although maybe thats what he did.
My short summary – worth further investigation although a quick survey of all his websites shows that an understanding of information architecture is not one of Mark’s strong points.
I’m going to take these points up directly with him because I think the underlying content is useful – however the presentation format does needs work.