What knowledge is of most worth?
I've sometimes felt that as rapidly as time goes by, I keep asking myself is what happens in my classroom keeping up with all of the developments that I want students to be involved with. So, this is the general theme of this post. Just what is important today and how might I adjust to deliver this?
The above quote comes from the title of a report from a group from Michigan State University a few years ago, and that I read a few years ago and just happened to recall. The full 2013 report from Kereluik, Mishra, Fahnoe and Terry is here. In their report they looked at all of the major "21st century learning" frameworks to look for any consistent themes that might help teachers in their quest to redesign learning. The model they came up with is pictured below.
I was also reminded of the work here in NZ by those looking into "future focussed learning" and, as you'd expect, most of the analysis from this group echoes that by Kereluik et al - likely because they use the same research base.
So, since 2013 has anything changed? This year the World Economic Forum have published their "New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology" report. From their report we see the following summary
So, do they have anything new to contribute (No) - or are they saying the same (Yes) ...Well, thanks to my good friends at the SingularityHub I haven't needed to plow through the the WEF paper fully (yet). The graphic below comes from the report, but it tells the story nicely I think.
Like other reports, there is a set of foundational literacies, and they go wider, and deeper, than our traditionally narrow focus on literacy and numeracy. They now encompass scientific, ICT, financial and cultural literacy. (And don't we need the ICT and cultural literacies to better understand the recent events in Europe. ). Like NZ has it's key competencies, the WEF have their competencies and character qualities. As a model, I can identify with this better than I can with other models I've seen - it's not overly different, just gives me a framework that works for me.
So, one of my goals for next year is going to be to develop learning activities for students that allow them to explore according to this "map". And in case you would like an overview of another person's view of some of the WEF information, along with some other stuff, spend a few minutes watching this video by Dr Nicole Wilson form Singularity. It's only about 10 minutes, and parts of it are better than others, but it's worth the watch.
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One of the sites I go to often for inspiration and wonder is TED. So - just having posted the note about drones I headed to TED and found this little gem. Enjoy.
The decision to invest in a new technology ...In reality it's all about the potential of the device to deliver rich new data sets for students to explore that holds the potential. fOne of the problems faced by classroom teachers these days is whether or not to invest time and energy into newly developing technology. The decision to engage or not is usually made around the usual issues ...
OK - rhetorical question. Right? In NZ we have the "Practising Teacher Criteria" from the Education Council that requires us to ...(at least) 4. demonstrate commitment to ongoing professional learning and development of personal professional practice 5. show leadership that contributes to effective teaching and learning 6. conceptualise, plan and implement an appropriate learning programme So - it's basically a requirement of our contract with the country that we "implement" an appropriate learning programme. The emphasis is important - "learning" - not "teaching". So, we owe it to the country to explore and develop and conceptualise and implement. But - this is easier said than done in reality. Let's take a current case in point. Drones. For one reason or another drones are in the news. Not just the ones that the US deploys in the Middle East, but from ones that deliver pizza to those that have and are revolutionising sports photography, through to the opening clip showing search and rescue drones in NZ. It might be argued that drones have a wide application in many areas - and so if we can afford the cost of entry to purchase a controllable drone with appropriate cameras then we should. There is no shortage of options available. But I do wonder about a better reason to try and introduce something like a drone into any course - stuff like this of course is great fun to try, but we miss that authentic application. Two possibilities have crossed my mind of late. One is pretty simple - use a drone with downward facing camera to capture sport (or any outdoor activity). Analysis of the resulting video can provide insights to the activity that were not otherwise possible. Example - analysis of positions on hockey/netball/football fields/courts during games. We've seen plenty of examples on TV of elite sports - now we can bring the technology to everyone. Aligned to this would be the analysis of geo spatial imagery taken for a certain area - maybe geography or science related to a local area. The second application that took my eye came to me from the Singularity hub (one of my favourite thought provoking sites). The article that I read talked loosely about industries prime for disruption with the exponential growth of "big data" and they mentioned drones, car parks and the finance industry in the same sentence.The claim is that there are drones targeted to image carparks of the likes of large store chains in the US (think Walmart and Toys R Us) and with real time analysis of the data collected, the imagery is being used to predict the financial success of the store chains long before any financial data is published by traditional analysts or the stores themselves. So - you can determine which shares to buy and sell by how full their carparks are at any given time compared to last week/last month/last quarter ... even last hour! What will that sort of information do to the stock market? That's a major disrupter. I'd argue that some kind of "big data analysis" from a local area imaged regularly by a drone could see students come up with traffic plans, parking plans or any other type of GIS related issue - maybe even updating local council GIS data or cross checking it, or working with council on joint developments. I'm sure that more creative people than me can think of any number of applications. Of course there are well documented issues of drones in close contact with other aircraft- control of the device, privacy, air hazards ... but these are all surmountable with little effort. In reality it's all about the potential of the device to deliver rich new data sets for students to explore that holds the potential. I have been taking a few minutes to reflect on some presentations I saw last year - and they fit perfectly into my current thinking space - so I've copied the blog post from my old site over to here. Living on the Future Edge I've borrowed the title for this post from Ian Jukes of whom many of you will have heard. Ian's been around for a while now and delivers some pretty energetic keynotes. I watched him deliver the final keynote at EduTECH 2014 in Brisbane yesterday. In this he gave a fast paced, emotive plea to Australian education to make the rapid change required to deliver the kind of education that will be relevant for learners of today an into the future. In his presentation he pulled no punches. He based much of his presentation on the work of Richard Florida and his Creative Class project, ( http://www.creativeclass.com/ ) and that of .... Clayton Christensen and his Disruptive Innovation projects. http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/ Now, I'll have to admit that I have heard Ian before and while I have not read Florida or Christiansen I am aware of their work. So, it was good to hear and see what some of their research is showing, and I'll try and capture the essence of it as Ian shared it. 1. Many of us know the 'industrial' model that Sir Ken Robinson and others have described in some detail over recent years. We all nod in agreement that the Industrial Age has long gone and we are in the Knowledge Age. But as I sat and watched comments such as ... '90% of routine cognitive tasks will be taken by either software or outsourced' 'By 2025 the average number of careers (note : not jobs, but careers) that school leavers can expect to have by the time they are 38 is 10 - 17’ 'Part time is the new full time. The corporation of the future is the corporation of size 1. You will have multiple part time jobs with multiple organisations at the same time, all on contract.' [Ian gave an example of his own company hiring via oDesk. They posted a job on oDesk and within 20 minutes had 238 applicants. They hired a developer in India. oDesk does all the rest - keeping track of the work the developer does and sending this to Ian's company.] 2. The rate of change is/continues to be exponential. Moore's Law still applies to the computing part. Doubling of the number of transistors every 18 months and halving the cost. Fibre optic cable can transmit vast quantities of data at the speed of light. And I mean VAST ... And the speed of light is pretty quick from memory, too. As Sugata Mitra observes, 'there is no need to know. There is the need to know how to know and when to know.' We have incredible amounts of data available. And the tools we have for manipulating that data and transferring it are incredibly powerful and cheap today on comparison to just a few years ago. All of this leads to a crucial, and I would say tipping, point... In the now, and in the future, there is a new learning disability. This is those who are digitally illiterate. Today and in the future, it is as important to be digitally literate as it is to read and write and do basic arithmetic. This is big. How many of us believe that today's students, the so-called digital natives, are digitally literate? They may be tech savvy, but are they digitally literate? From my own experience I would say no. Many don't know file types, they don't know how to protect their systems from corruption, and if corrupt how to restore. They don't know the language of the network they depend on. How many of our teachers and administrators are digitally literate? How many of our colleagues can use multiple devices, operating systems, applications and create their own content for the network in any form other than via a word processor and email? As Steven Johnson said, 'chance favours the connected mind' and if we really believe this, or of we even suspect this is true, then why is it that we have extensive discussions in schools about just how to block students from social media sites. Business and individuals are communicating via these means for real work and real learning and we want to ban them because we don't understand how to make our students aware that they are really useful tools. They are using them outside of our school networks anyway! 3. The world will only pay for what you can do with what you know. Given that if you can harness the power of the networks to know, then what you do with this is critical. I loved this comment - Neck down is minimum wage! Neck up is where the money is. And of course this is the non routine cognitive work that Florida talks about and that we hear so often is the domain of the 'creative class'. And the creative class jobs are increasing. Now - this is quite scary for a country like NZ. We have a huge agricultural dependency. The jobs are rapidly going in numbers as smarter ways of farming, more technology and bigger machines replace the people aspect. So what do the rural people do? Move to the city will be one corollary to this. But also, given that the requirement is now to continually recreate our own knowledge base and skills, and given that the power of the network let's us do this anywhere, we need to be opening pathways for students to explore their creativity and to explore what it means to be in the space where knowledge value and creativity happens. In reality, they can do this, from anywhere. They don't need to be in 'school' to,do this. Sure there is a social role that schools provide, even a custodial role while parents are 'at work' ... but parents aren't going to be at work in the future according to many of the futurists - they'll be at home ... so the kids can be too. Why will a parent in the future want to send their children to a school unless it serves some real vaue? Creativity is facilitated by technology. There was no 'app' industry 5 years ago. Last year it generated $10 billion in revenues. There are 800,000 jobs in app development currently, growing incredibly fast. This graph, again from Florida, shows that we are at around 25% of jobs in the creative class now. This will grow to around 50% in 2018. How many of our students are ready to move straight into this space as a result of what we are helping them with in our schools today? Of course, the rest of the jobs are being replaced by smart software or outsourced to lower cost of manufacture and delivery countries. As has been said many times before, we are in danger of becoming irrelevant to our students if we don't make the required changes in our classrooms to cope with this sea change going on around us. Our students will learn from where they see the value to them. Again, I'm reminded of Mitra's work ... kids are not stupid. They have, as Robinson says, tremendous capacity for creativity. Mitra has shown that kids can and will learn on their own via the web if they have the desire. A question is then how do we harness the best of the web and develop the digital literacy skills for them in a way which is beneficial for all learners. This will require some considerable thinking and lots of action, testing and trialing and it will threaten many individuals and schools and systems of education. It worries me that in education we still spend so much time on planning and consultation and inclusiveness and equity and replanning and reinventing what already exists .... We need to apply more of Fullan's 'ready fire aim' and hurry things along. A final reflection. There is a convergence here. Whether it is Robinson, Mitra or Jukes or Florida or ... the messages are powerful and we are seeing the evidence all around in business of massive change. The explosion in mobile has driven this much faster than we thought. We've only had tablets and 'smartphones' for a few years, yet these have rapidly changed everything. They have brought the power of the network to everyone. And as Carly Fiorina said to Tom Friedman all those years ago, 'Tom, what you have witnessed so far is only the forging and sharpening of the tools. The real revolution is yet to come.' Well it's come. We're in it. This is sea change stuff and we'd better respond fast. Or the next generation will not be so keen on sharing their children with a system which is a relic. 'There is a default future rushing towards us,' says Jukes. Sometimes you only get one last chance to catch the wave. Disruption is a term that is bandied about a lot these days. We have Clayton Christensen to thank for that. According to Christensen there are two types of technologies - sustaining and disruptive. Sustaining technologies are those which simply as they develop provide incremental improvements over what they replace - think of the regular cycle of OS and application upgrades in this category. New versions provide incremental improvements as they evolve. Disruptive technologies on the other hand may not have a clear position in the first instance. But what they definitely do is completely shatter the current thinking by providing a totally new way of doing existing stuff, or indeed provide a completely new business opportunity, one that did not exist before. Think 3D printing, think social networks, think iTunes and Spotify, think Uber.
But we need to look carefully at what we do as a result of choosing to use the word in the context of education. By this I mean "What does disruption mean in the education space?" "What are some examples?" "What implications does this have for me in my classroom?" In many ways this is a natural follow on from my previous note called "What's Up Doc?" You see, my previous blog post talked about one of the issues in K-12 education being the outdated mode of assessment that we use at the sharp end of the schooling system. Almost every country has some form of high stakes testing that is used to determine student success. It was Seymour Papert who taught me years ago that the dominant technology of the day dictates the activities in the classroom. And to me it seems that despite claims to the contrary, look around most schools and you will see the dominant technology of today. From the photocopier, the printer and the textbook to the exercise books and the worksheets ... the dominant technology in our classrooms today is the same as it was 50 years ago. Paper. We restrict the majority of our learning opportunities for students to activities that can be done on paper. And by this very choice we severely restrict what goes on in our classrooms. Paper is the ultimate 1:1 technology - 1 person, 1 piece of paper. It's not easy to collaborate on a sheet of A4 paper. It's not easy to share a piece of paper across time and space. It's not as if technology hasn't been in and around education for a long time. I recall the days of the TRS-80, Franklin Ace, BBC Micro, Atari, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81, Apple II. NZ even toyed with its own Poly Computer back in the 80's. But the way that technology is largely deployed in schools follows at best the "sustainable" model. At best we make incremental changes to the existing way we do things. We use a word processor or presentation tool rather than handwrite an essay or make an A3 poster. We use a blog perhaps as a slight step up. We make a video to show something rather than write about it. But the root tasks sitting behind these are often the same root tasks that we have always done. We make a presentation about Ancient Egypt. We make a presentation about the civil rights movement. We use a graphing tool to draw the graph of a quadratic equation rather than plot points. The task is largely the same. If the purpose of education, the goals of education, are the same as they have always been, if the task doesn't need to change then no amount of technology will make any difference. So, technology breakthroughs have not led to education being disrupted. Not yet anyway. Sure, tablets like the iPad and Surface Pro make life a bit easier to do some stuff. But we are still doing the same old - just with new kit. What we need are, as the SAMR model puts it, the "redefinition" tasks. Those that promote the higher order thinking and collaboration that we say are of such value into the future. Not that I'm promoting the SAMR model - it has a growing number of detractors - but what it does do is give what I call "below the line" [the Substitution and Augmentation] and "above the line" [Modification and Redefinition] options - and having just two options makes it easier for us as teachers to work with. My view anyway. So we look for new things that we couldn't do before that will promote the student behaviours and outcomes we say we want. Being a maths teacher from way back, though haven't taught it for years (spend my time these days teaching digital technologies and computer science) I liked the post from Grant Wiggins back in 2014. In it he proposed a maths test that I've copied here for you ... "A test for conceptual understanding. Rather than explain my definition further here, I will operationalize it in a little test of 13 questions, to be given to 10th, 11th, and 12th graders who have passed all traditional math courses through algebra and geometry. (Middle school students can be given the first 7 questions.) Math teachers, give it to your students; tell us the results. I will make a friendly wager: I predict that no student will get all the questions correct. Prove me wrong and I’ll give the teacher and student(s) a big shout-out. 1) “You can’t divide by zero.” Explain why not, (even though, of course, you can multiply by zero.) 2) “Solving problems typically requires finding equivalent statements that simplify the problem” Explain – and in so doing, define the meaning of the = sign. 3) You are told to “invert and multiply” to solve division problems with fractions. But why does it work? Prove it. 4) Place these numbers in order of largest to smallest: .00156, 1/60, .0015, .001, .002 5) “Multiplication is just repeated addition.” Explain why this statement is false, giving examples. 6) A catering company rents out tables for big parties. 8 people can sit around a table. A school is giving a party for parents, siblings, students and teachers. The guest list totals 243. How many tables should the school rent? 7) Most teachers assign final grades by using the mathematical mean (the “average”) to determine them. Give at least 2 reasons why the mean may not be the best measure of achievement by explaining what the mean hides. 8) Construct a mathematical equation that describes the mathematical relationship between feet and yards. HINT: all you need as parts of the equation are F, Y, =, and 3. 9) As you know, PEMDAS is shorthand for the order of operations for evaluating complex expressions (Parentheses, then Exponents, etc.). The order of operations is a convention. X(A + B) = XA + XB is the distributive property. It is a law. What is the difference between a convention and a law, then? Give another example of each. 10) Why were imaginary numbers invented? [EXTRA CREDIT for 12thgraders: Why was the calculus invented?] 11) What’s the difference between an “accurate” answer and “an appropriately precise” answer? (HINT: when is the answer on your calculator inappropriate?) 12) “In geometry, we begin with undefined terms.” Here’s what’s odd, though: every Geometry textbook always draw points, lines, and planes in exactly the same familiar and obvious way – as if we CAN define them, at least visually. So: define “undefined term” and explain why it doesn’t mean that points and lines have to be drawn the way we draw them; nor does it mean, on the other hand, that math chaos will ensue if there are no definitions or familiar images for the basic elements. 13) “In geometry we assume many axioms.” What’s the difference between valid and goofy axioms – in other words, what gives us the right to assume the axioms we do in Euclidean geometry?" What would you expect to see in the way of student answers to something like this. Let them use whatever resources they want to help, let them collaborate and come up with some solutions. This is a redefinition of the task in my view. Technology can probably help significantly here. Maybe students could use tools like the Wolfram Alpha computational engine or any other tools they like. While changing the task doesn't necessarily disrupt the maths classroom, it certainly will make it a bit more interesting at some points in time. For more current examples of disruption - we all know the disruption to bookstores (and lots more) by the Amazon and the AliBaba online stores. We all know of the disruption to photography brought by the digital camera (and now phone). We all know of the disruption to music and software distribution by the likes of iTunes, Google Play and the various app stores. And of course music is undergoing yet another disruption with the likes of Spotify, iHeart Radio, BeatsOne. But these disruptions have been around for a while. Perhaps two of the best examples of disruption today are the taxi/transport industry and the hotel industry. Uber have totally disrupted the traditional notion of "calling a cab" and in a few short years have a market cap of over $50 billion. Sure there are issues as the traditional businesses convulse and try to "lawyer" their way out of oblivion, but Uber has set a strong precedent by removing the monopoly and "democratising" a service directly between individuals. [Doesn't this sound a lot like "swapping goods" back in the very old days?]. Airbnb has recently posted that they housed 17 million people in the last quarter. They are valued at around $24 billion (more than the Marriott chain - and they own >4000 hotels). They weren't around 7 years ago. They don't own hotels. Like Uber, they "own" a system that makes it easy for people who want a service and those who can provide that service to make contact and close a deal. Uber and Airbnb facilitate the advertising and payments. The cost to the participants - basically zero. A cell phone and a free app. I've maintained for many years that education is due for a major disruption. There are three things, in my view, that are holding this disruption back. But there are signs around that indicate some of these reasons may not be reasons for too many more years. Firstly - education is political and heavy investment is made by all western countries in it. There is substantial investment in real estate and bricks and mortar. Not only does education provide employment for large numbers of people, there are vast "industries" built around education - from traditional publishing houses that dominate that paper technology and that lock up through various copyright and DRM management regimes "educational content and distribution", through to those "institutions" that lay claim to be the physical and virtual buildings from where you should get your "degree" from. Secondly, education provides (and I don't mean this in a derogatory way) a strong social service by providing baby sitting services for millions while parents work. But work is changing and changing fast for many. Thirdly - some guidance and security for younger students is required. It would be hard to envisage 5 - 14 year olds (say) being able to self regulate and form their own communities of practice. There is plenty of research evidence which supports direct instruction for the new learner. It would be unrealistic to put learners in front of a "system" without expert teacher input and expect instant success. But - outside of these three (admittedly big) reasons - there are plenty of signs that at least a proportion of "learning" can be delivered via a similar Uber of Airbnb interface. It's just a matter of putting the right content into the right place. And this is being done to some degree right now - especially in certain areas of "knowledge". I think it is important to consider what is happening around us - and so much is happening that I feel I want to comment on that this post is in danger of becoming too long and disjoint at the moment - so I'll pause here and continue in another post in the next few days. If you've read this far - thanks for listening to me ... |
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