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
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.
Professor Sugata Mitra is an advocate of allowing children to use their innate abilities to learn through the use of technology and learning in groups. He is currently Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK.
His now famous Hole in the Wall experiment was the inspiration for the Indian author Vikas Swarup to write his first novel which was then to become the movie Slumdog Millionaire!
The hole in the wall experiment involved placing a computer kiosk in the wall of an Indian slum in Dehli to observe how children would use it. The experiment was established to prove that children could learn how to use computers without any formal training. The experiment has since been repeated at many places in India, Cambodia, Africa and within the UK with amazing results.
The HIWEL (Hole In the Wall Education Ltd) team have undertaken both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the various experiments covering a range of measures such as Academic performance and Peer to Peer Learning Patterns.
What this might say about the education of children in developed countries is both interesting and challenging as Professor Mitra says that his findings are not restricted poor families in other countries but for any child which could be said to be 'remote'. He suggests that the word 'remote' could apply to children in rural locations or in cities anywhere in the world.
If children can work collaboratively to solve shared problems using technology to support their learning and they appear to do this more effectively than would otherwise be the case then why do we need teachers?
What Professor Mitra is saying does not actually remove teachers but it does change their role and it raises important questions about our approach to teaching and learning, particularly for very young children and opportunities they have for working with technology in groups.
Interesting to consider whether the collaboration always needs to be working together on the same machine rather than working in online communities.
I have long thought that we need to develop a carefully crafted model for the learning environments of the future, particularly for students in the state school system attend compulsory education.
Research into the views of young people about their school experience reveal that many feel that it is not meeting all of their needs. If we are intent on delivering personalised learning then we need to listen to young people and build environments. Both physical and virtual, within which they can flourish.
Students also say that they want to be able to engage with other young people and in many cases the opportunities to do this are either difficult to arrange or are not sustained over long periods and are limited to specific projects.
The safe space of a learning platform or VLE, where learners are supported in their formal learning, combined with the more open global tools, where greater opportunities for social interaction become possible, must be our ultimate goal as educators. Our aim should be to ensure that we support learners effectively in their formal learning while allowing them to explore ideas and interests with each other. We also need to reach out to other learners world wide rather than requiring them to enter our closed managed online worlds which may well restrict the nature and extent of the discussion that can take place.
The diagram here shows how we could create much more stimulating online worlds. The use of RSS feeds are probably one of the most powerful ways of linking these external systems into the safer spaces without the need for complex API interfaces and authentication. Educators can ensure that their learners are aware of the risks associated with online system while harnessing them to serve the education process. A larger image is available here.
I would be interested to here how educators and/or learners use these different spaces and just what the impact of this approach might be.
In the local research, which was focused on the 14 to 19 age group in a number of UK schools, it was found that the opportunities provided by online collaborative spaces is actually having an impact on these ‘quiet’ learners. The report stated that;
"There appears to be a particular emphasis of certain impacts on ‘quiet’ boys (even though there were fewer of these that self-reported as being ‘quiet’), but the impacts on both groups were potentially important. It should also be noted that ‘quiet’ is likely to encompass at least three different groups of learners: those who are naturally reticent in terms of offering their ideas in classrooms; those who find difficulty for emotional or social reasons with engaging in a classroom learning environment; and those who do not want to be seen by others as being engaged or interested in the topic or lesson."
Many learning environments that are solely concerned with course delivery or assessment may well be missing a trick as the true potential appears to come from extending the routes by which learners can engage with the learning process even where the actual engagement is more about meeting their personal needs or providing an outlet for social interaction.
If we are determined to provide learner access to online learning then it must go well beyond access to content, their coursework or communication between teachers and their class group. The greater the opportunity to collaborate and communicate the greater the opportunity for quiet learners to find their voice.
The development of tools for social interaction and which foster collaboration and membership of online communities has exploded in recent years. Myspace, Flickr, Bebo etc are all sites which draw people in, share their identities and interests and then share in all sorts of ways (some not quite legal).
There are tensions in the educational world regarding such technologies. Leading advocates like Steven Downes would claim that Web 2.0 will provide massive opportunities for learning but absolutely not in the traditional school or even a school at all. Others say it is the way forward and it has a significant contribution to make to, what you might call, more formal education.
The term Learning 2.0 was coined (I guess) by those advocates of Web 2 technologies to claim the educational ground and to promote their vision of the way the future of learning should go. Learning 2.0 is really what Wikipedia would refer to as e-learning 2.0 i.e. the second generation of e-learning tools based around collaborative tools such as wikis and blogs etc.
Most innovations in learning and which have an ICT component have come and gone - remember the CD ROM? We have been through a whole raft of software and hardware systems which we have put into schools. In most cases the ones that stick are those that seem best to fit the traditional mode of teaching and learning e.g. Learning Platforms as course delivery systems or whiteboards which look a lot more interesting that black ones but still hang on a wall at one end of a room and have everyone looking at it!
The same fate may lie in wait for Web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 if we try to fit it into the standard school setting other than to be used by a few interested people with a passion for exploring at the edges of what we still refer to as schooling.
Alan November was asked a question about the relationship between web 2 and learning 2 at a recent conference - although the audio is poor his comments are pretty realistic.
Tony Buzan is probably one of the best known proponents of Mind mapping as a means to aid thinking by using a diagram to represent words and ideas.
The development of computers allowed the Mind mapping idea to become extremely flexible and Tony Buzan developed his own software to allow maps to be created and stored.
Now the web host a number of mapping tools that not only allow you to create and even illustrate mind maps but to share them with a wider community of users . Most of the online mind mapping tools are free to use but additional features can be accessed at an additional cost.
Probably one of the best around is MindMeister which is simple to use and has a large number of maps created by other users to browse. Another is Mindomo, which also has a library of maps to access but is a little more powerful. Yet another is Bubble.us with similar features but has a relatively limited tool set.
If thinking is a human trait, and we often think through things with other people, then using this sort of online tool provides new opportunities.
They work in teams, sometimes from across the world and collaborate to create these sites drawing on any expertise they can locate. The sites are totally student created with an adult to act as mentor or guide.
I promoted ThinkQuest to an online community within an e-learning project known as the Virtual Workspace not knowing how students would react. Two teams appeared out of the ether with students drawing in potential team members from within the 18 thousand or so learners within the community. Lee's team had a number of challenges to overcome in the six month journey for the project. They completed the work and ended up publishing a site on Nanotechnology which is now in the competition library. The team that put the project together were from totally different schools. They never met until they went on a trip to London paid for by Oracle, sponsors of the ThinkQuest competition.
On the coach journey back they began planning their 2007 entry which won the 14 to 19 category in the UK version of the ThinkQuest competition having chosen the topic - Water.
The potential of online communities and that of project based learning really came home to me as a result of this work but don't listen to me listen to Lee on the ThinkQuest Podcast.
I attended a workshop run by Bob Pearlman at the BLC07 Conference in Boston during July and what he had to say still resonates with me weeks later as I write this entry.
Bob posed two questions for the session:
What kind of learning and teaching is appropriate for students of the 21st Century?
What kind of learning environments and facilities will support and enhance the education of today’s and tomorrow’s students?Bob is clear on the key requirements of a 21st Century curriclum and describes the characteristics of such a curriculum in numerous publications - the most useful for me was the one entitled 'Educational Leadership' on the ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) website. ASCD is a community from across the world exploring all aspects of the education process. Bob's article can be found here.
Much of what he says is familiar to educators in the UK as we attempt to define personalised learning but in Bob's case he has practical experience of schools where this has been done. His presentation from the BLC07 conference can be found here.
Bob emailed me on 13th August 07 to discuss some aspects of design and provided an additional useful input to the discussion which is an interview he did and which is posted on the DesignShare web site. It provides a very useful context for discussions with designers and others on thinking through what school design needs to achieve.
You can create animated sequences and then post them to the Scratch online community to be dowloaded, modified and republished. I managed to produce a rather feeble attempt can be found here.
Since the launch of the Scratch online community in May 07 over 18000 animations have been posted to the scratch web site.
It is free and can be downloaded here.
The online application is free to use for a limited number of diagrams but for most casual users this would be ok.
There are a number of different shape libraries including flowchart sybmols, room layouts and computer interface design. Users can make their own as well.
Once created the drawing can be shared with other collaborators or published to a Blog or Web site using a simple script. Fles can also be saved for off line use as jpg, svg or png files.
Access Gliffy at http://www.gliffy.com/
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