Technology alone cannot deliver outstanding schools, people do that. However, if you put technology in the hands of creative risk takers, whether they are teachers or the school leadership team then it can have a major impact on the delivery of the curriculum, the engagement of learners and parents and the effectiveness of a school.In the years I have been supporting schools, too long to admit to, I have seen huge impact in situations where the teacher has limited resources but a creative spark that converts the mundane into a vibrant classroom. I have also seen thousands of UK pounds spent on a product or service that someone deems to be the ‘must have’ service or application only to find that after a while its use and impact withers and eventually is forgotten.
Firstly a leadership team and headteacher who encourage innovation. This does not mean that they take their eye of the issue of standards but does mean that any idea must prove itself if is is to be sustained - the space for the teacher to generate the proof is what the school leadership can encourage and support.
Second, the teacher needs to be supported in their endeavour and the measures of impact need to be a wider than simply acquisition of knowledge. In many instances the impact is actually more about how learners are encouraged to learn than the learning itself - clarity around what outcomes could be expected from any particular innovation or idea needs to come from the teacher. Doing something because ‘it might be interesting’ is not really good enough in the modern target driven school.
The impact could be felt as you went around the school. Teachers felt that they could contribute to the development of their school and their ideas would be given due consideration. Very few schools I know have adopted anything like this as an approach to staff development is such a systematic way as we always seem to want very short term returns.
Jim Rohn
Alan might be fighting a cause that can never be won but it is a battle worth fighting.
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.
Alan November is well known in countries around the world for his work on Information Literacy. His book 'Empowering Students with Technology' is an essential read for anyone trying to harness the use of the net to support learning.
Alan has also been in a position to visit a number of the most innovative schools in the US and elsewhere and in his usual candid way is well able to set out his opinions about everything from e-safety to school and curriculum design.
After the BLCO7 conference in Boston this year I asked Alan to take part in a discussion about the future of learning via Skype.
We discussed a number of issues as always Alan brings his experience to bear on the issues and provides insightful comments on the challenges that are ahead.
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.
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.
What constitutes a community? Are online communities real communities? Are online communities important for education?
Users of YouTube think they are a community........
Research about communities is extensive - do a search on Google Scholar and you get 9 million hits, try Learning Community and you get 1.8 million with the top hits leading to some of the leading thinkers in this area. From my reading around this I was attracted to the definitions of 'community' presented by Kowch and Schwier (1997) where they describe four different types of community, each with distinguishing features and which meet the needs of different groups of participant. Reil and Polin (2004) explore the notion of online communities and identify three different types. Task based communities tend to be where groups of people are working on a common task or problem. Practice based communities often share goals or expertise and knowledge based communities are often people who come together with diverse expertise and can establish new areas of knowledge.
This all sounds grand but I wonder just how the notion of community sits within our education system. We don't assess group contribution or how well students share expertise or work together to create new knowledge - at least that is the case in many school I visit. We only seem interested in assessing the individual or what contribution they make to the 'community' (usually through social good works). Seems to me that we have much to do to explore online educational communities and harness them for learning.
The question remains - is the YouTube Community a real community?
confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives
responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.
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