As I began to look at the SWOT ( Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) data that was shared from my district I realised how difficult it would be to summarise the information into some kind of cohesive picture. As there was no data from one of the three middle schools this added another element to the enormity of the complete picture.
I chose to explore a spreadsheet database to highlight answers given from each page of information- two being summaries from the elementary level and secondary level, two separate middle schools, the on line school and alternative school. As the day progressed I thought it might be interesting to reorganise the data as a set questions with checkboxes for each of the six pages for each area under SWOT. These results gave me the opportunity to see percentages and bar graph trends. The more I thought the more I realized that this could not take into account student population within each level or the amount of teachers. It was an interesting process, but I feel that it can only be used to see trends.
I wanted to reflect on the presentation piece and looked at ideas that I had floating around and how pull them together into some kind of format. I want to celebrate the successes that the district has made on a district level, consider pedagogy surrounding ICT in education. ministry direction, inquiry based learning, and suggest ways to move forward. Within this process there needs to be a format for discussion and collaboration. I began to formulate some ideas in a presentation mode within Google Drive that would allow the possibility of live input during a presentation.
Now for some sleep.
Thinking back to Jenny’s today lesson plan for Thursday she mentioned that she was going to propose an alternative to SWAT. The “threats” part of this survey approach seems very negative, is there not some other way to frame the question? Or is that too Pollyanna of me? I think it is wise to outline the positive changes and headway that has occurred in the District regarding ICT. This outlining of positives is inline with the idea of harnessing Linguistic Cognitive Domains to create change in the directions that we desire. You are in a difficult place with this project, what you present may be well received or it could be dismissed as involving too much change. What will your administrators argue as potential reasons for not making changes? What exactly are the changes you would propose?
I think it is very useful that you are able to identify voids or gaps in the data – areas that are not represented but would be impacted by any decisions arising from analyzing the data. You know, this makes me think about the use of scientific methods in education and how flawed they can be, when implemented by research designs that were never meant to measure such complex human enterprises as educational systems. When we accept that educational systems are living systems of human relationships, we must then accept that we are dealing with complex phenomena. We can study complex phenomena, but we need to design our research to reflect the qualities of our area of study. Gaps and voids indicate a lack of scientific structure to ensure a full representation of all stakeholder interests. It is very easy to design research to collect data about things we want to know, it is much more difficult to design research research to collect data about things we might be blind to.