Alan might be fighting a cause that can never be won but it is a battle worth fighting.
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.
Dr Ken Robinson is a leading force in the development of creativity and in this video he expounds on the issue of creativity and the education system and his view that the education system may well drive out the skills that we will come to depend on in the future. His wit and engaging approach is used with skill to draw you in while he weaves a compelling argument to challenge our current approach in formal education. He promotes his strongly held views that creativity needs to be nurtured and not undermined by the education system.
In a previous post on this blog I described the work of Daniel Pink and his arguments regarding the way our education system seems to give preference to developing left brain thinking! Dan Pink claimed that the more creative right sided thinking was being stifled in the traditional education system as it does not recognise, value or develop creativity. The argument is well known in education systems that seem to value measuring outcomes in terms of Maths and English SAT results or other forms of formal tests.
In the US, as in the UK, SATS scores and examination results are THE measure and all else seems to fade into insignificance. The name given to the US programme is 'No Child Left Behind', aiming to secure standards for all children by relentlessly focusing on standards of mathematics and literacy - many educators are concerned of what they claim is the bias toward SAT scores and not the equally important development of creativity. Maybe that is why some that I met in Boston in 2007 referred to this programme as 'No Child Left Alive'!
WebQuest UK was produced by the Worcestershire Learning Technologies team in 2001 following a visit to Quebec in 2000 with a group of secondary teachers looking at the way in which ICT was being used for learning.
Professors Graham Whitehead and Kevin Warwick came together to speak to around sixty teenagers at Worcester Rugby Club in the UK on various aspects of Information and Communications Technology.
Graham is a Futurologist who worked for British Telecom for over 34 years has extensive experience of digital and communication technology. He is a visiting professor to Salford University and a number of others and won the Queen's Award for Technology for the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific submarine
cable system.
It was launched in 2006 and now has around 140,000 documents in its database. A browse of the groups contained within Scribd shows the extent of the collections with some very interesting vintage print adverts, material on Wen 2.0 and even some open text books. Trouble is that, as you might guess the adult section contains the most resources , some 17,000 making it a difficult resource to see used in schools.
This would seem to undermine Dan Pink's analysis of the changing nature of the aptitudes we need to develop as an improvement or promotion of more right brain thinking. To be fair Dan Pink does make it clear that both hemispheres of the brain as still important and the aptitudes associated with the left hemisphere are still vitally important, just that we need to recognise the importance of those attributes that are often cited as right brain ones.
Alistair Smith does confirm that the left and right hemispheres contain areas which perform specific functions and they differ in the way they process information, For example, the right deals with more global 'big picture' interpretations while the left deals with more local (detailed) ones. Alistair uses this example to demonstrate that the two work in concert and produce an integrated information processing system with each half making its contribution to the overall interpretation of a particular experience.
Dan Pink's arguments can be presented without the left/ right brain issue getting in the way as what he is pointing out is a need for particular competencies requiring more attention. Certainly there is a shift toward curriculum models that provide for a wider range of assessment types than we have been used to through SAT's so the debate. Alistair points out that educators and scientists are asking different questions. Therefore it seems sensible to assume that any curriculum that is developed or teaching approach that is adopted can only really be informed by drawing on the analysis and research undertaken by both to inform future approaches.
Alan November captured discussions with Dan Pink were he expands on his thinking as it relates to schools, their design and the education system. Alan's discussions are part of the November Learning Podcast series and are available by subscribing through iTunes.
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.
The story of Mabry Middle school and Dr Tim Tyson is a fascinating one. He spoke at the recent PLC07 conference in Boston MA and showed some of the short films his students made.
Pupils were invited to make films when Dr Tyson saw just how powerful the use of new technology was in egaging young minds. He expected a few pupils to turn up to his first invitation but the room was filled by a much larger number of potential film makers.
The Maybry Film Festival is now an annual event and the films are quite amazing, limited to two minutes, the students have to focus on the message and the audience. They have to research and plan, master the digital media they are working with and work in teams. The results are truely amazing.
The idea is simple but the power of this as a learning experience is obvious.
The films for this year can be seen on the Mabry site here. Or click the picture to see the winning films.
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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