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Schools, colleges and university are just some of the places where learning takes place but school kids and students can spend a lot of their time in these spaces. There are other places where people learn, some through doing courses at work or online or even learning from others around them in all sorts of situations. The posts here are about learning spaces, writings about learning and technology and thoughts and ideas about all of these.

Transformation in a Fixed World

0 comments Posted by Dave Thomson at 08:39

There is much discussion about Transforming Education but what does this mean and how can you transform something that in many countries is driven by achieving specific outcomes. We all know that we need our schools to deliver citizens ready for work in the 21st Century but what does that actually mean when the measures we have for success are largely the ones that we have used for hundreds of years.


If you spend any time trying to find a definition of 'Transformation' as it applies to education then you won't find anything definitive. there are lots of people and organisations that state they are engaged in transformational change but very little to describe what that fundamentally means. Let us look at what we know:
  • Young people now engage in a wide range of activities some of which were not available only a few years ago. Much of this activity is connected with communication, either through their mobile phone or via the various communities they join online.
  • There are some young people who have no interest in technology and although most will have a mobile phone they may well not take part in any online collaboration.
  • The curriculum in many schools remains as it was ten or more years ago. In the UK we are exploring new structures for learning through such things as diplomas which will require collaboration between institutions but the bulk of the curriculum is still focused on traditional models
  • Quite a lot of the technology kids will use outside school will not be allowed in many schools
  • Kids like to collaborate and be creative.
  • Technology will continue to develop and will do so based on what the market requires - much of the market are young people
So what are the implications?
The outcome of the above is that we are creating two worlds; one which is the formal world of school and the other is the personal space surrounding the learner. Of course there is already overlap between these two but the impact of technology is pushing the world of the personal
space further away from the formal world of school.
In my view transformation, in part, must be greater inclusion of the informal personal space within the formal education space. How you do that and to what extent is the real challenge.

 

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