thinking 2.0 » Reform

It’s an E(ngelbart) world

msbarnsley — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:45:18 +0000

Sharing knowledge has fundamentally changed our world. That was the message from futurist Mark Pesce, who delivered the keynote address at the 2008 Innovative Technology in Schools (ITSC) Conference in Sydney.
Part of the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney, Pesce discussed the Ruby Anniversary of the most important day in the annals of computer science, the demo of the Online system or NLS and its implications for the world we live in.
Led by Dr Douglas Engelbart, the wunderkind of a Stanford Uni thinktank, the day marked the most famous computer demo ever, now known as the Mother of All Demos. This day in 1968 changed the entire future of computing and was a response to Engelbart’s belief that human civilisation would collapse under the weight of its own complexity.
Engelbart’s solution was to develop tools that could “augment human intelligence”. The NLS was his answer to the question of: “How could you make human beings smarter?” The answer: connect human beings to other human beings and allow people to collaboratively share and build on ideas. This was, in essence, the very first wiki in 1968, 20 years before the web came into being.
“The Mother of all demos” set the stage for the world we are living in now and foreshadowed projects like Wikipedia that allow us to build a massive repository of human knowledge. In January, 2002, Wikipedia had 14,000 articles – it now has 2,650,726 articles in English.

Pesce challenged people to use opportunities like ITSC, to “realise your intelligence and effectiveness through sharing.”
“The more something is shared the more valuable it becomes”.
He said while sharing “is not a panacea, it is simply the best approach now to the problems that are facing us.”

MANY HANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK nka Crowdsourcing
Links: blog.futurestreetconsulting.com

Image: ‘invest in sharing’
www.flickr.com/photos/48889113547@N01/2667847439

Who’s afraid of technology? Murdoch and the Boyer lectures

msbarnsley — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:12:00 +0000

As debate continues over a national curriculum, the ABC has an interesting forum on 21st learning. The forum is in response to Rupert Murdoch assertions in the Boyer lectures that “Australia has a 21st century economy with a 19th century education system”.

In the first of a series of six lectures, Murdoch argued that: we need to reform our education system … the bottom line is this: it is an absolute scandal that we are spending more and more and getting less and less in return. For those still in school or just entering the workforce, the opportunities a global economy offers are greater than at any time in our history—provided you have the right skills.”

The forum, recorded at the National Curriculum Corporation Conference, examines what a 21st century education might look like.

Guests Professor Barry McGaw (Head of the National Curriculum Board and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute), Valerie Hannon (Director of Strategy for the UK Innovation Unit), Chris Wardlaw (Former Deputy Secretary of Education in Hong Kong) and Michael Stevenson (Vice President of Global Education at Cisco Systems) “discuss the current major reform of curriculum in Australia, skills and knowledge needed in the 21st century, how Hong Kong transformed its education system and the role of technology and innovation.” Download audio file here.

The Future is NOW

msbarnsley — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:44:40 +0000

PLC Sydney’s move to trial the use of the internet and ipods in exams has sparked lots of discussion.

Chris Betcher, who works at PLC, presents the reasoning behind the move in his post, The Truth is Out There. He argues that schools need to prepare students to solve problems, not “know answers”.

“It ought to be obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that the model of school we all know so well – the model in which students come to school as essentially empty vessels waiting to be filled by the teacher – is hopelessly flawed and outdated in this day and age.

John Connell is strident in his support for PLC, and writes that:

“If you want to understand the effects of the ludicrous examination systems we have been smothered by for so long, just read the comments here from all of those who believe that education should be about filling young people’s heads with ‘knowledge’ and that examinations are therefore surely about testing how much of that ‘knowledge’ a child can retain in his or her head and then vomit onto a piece of paper on command – with a pencil (a pencil !) – all within a very short space of time – and with no recourse at all to the wonderful and abundant sources of information available to us all today.”

Related post: Aaarrgghh- it’s the test

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahmedrabea/246570462/

Students speak out

msbarnsley — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:32:35 +0000

There has been lots of discussion about realising student participation in the edublogosphere in the past year. Driven be a belief that students “should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners”, Clay Burrell and others have helped students set up Student 2.0, a blog that is “administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view, Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.”

Designing the future…

msbarnsley — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:10:15 +0000

A great quote by Barry Vercoe, one of the six founding professors of the MIT MediaLab from Ewan McIntosh

How does innovation occur?

The future is not to predict but to design… Innovation comes from:

a clash of cultures
clash of disciplines
clash of ways of doing things
high tolerance of failure

In the words of Woody Allen: “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”
Photo: DanCoyote’s New Art Sim

Is that a light on the hill?

msbarnsley — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:48:09 +0000

An election has just been held in Australia and will bring a Labor government into power after 11 years of Liberal (Conservative) Party rule. The first priority of the new government, according to Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd, is an “education revolution”. The key planks of this policy include promises to link every school to a proposed national high-speed broadband network and to give every student in years 9 to 12 access to their own computer through tax rebates worth $2.3 billion to low- and middle-income parents.

While this is potentially exciting, it will take more than computer hardware to help students develop innovative and adaptive thinking and interpersonal skills. Hopefully, this may also encourage a rethink in education to allow for genuinely collaborative, deep, creative, critical, interdisciplinary and process-based learning rather than content-based and test dominated curricula that predominate in most areas.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this may lead…

Photo: flickr: Quick Step by Kiri

Re/thinking information

msbarnsley — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 21:19:16 +0000

Another instalment from Digital Ethnography. According to the creators: “This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

Digital enthnography v2

msbarnsley — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 22:20:05 +0000

From the creators of the Machine is Us/ing Us. There are some interesting ideas in this despite the whiney affluenza overtones.

Flexibility is the key to success

msbarnsley — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 14:04:40 +0000

Flexible curriculum, top quality teachers, high-level investment – are these the keys to building the best education system in the world?

Christopher D. Sessums has written an interesting post on factors that contribute to educational success, part of which is how schools attract and retain excellent teaching staff. He explores What do all great school systems have in common? and examines a number of comparisons between the US, UK and Finnish educational systems.

He writes that:

According to Sir Michael Barber, an advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair:

“They all select their teachers from the top third of their college graduates, whereas the U.S. selects its teachers from the bottom third of graduates. This is one of the big challenges for the U.S. education system: What are you going to do over the next 15 to 20 years to recruit ever better people into teaching?”

Sessums also looks at “a recent New York Times article, [in which] Sir Michael elaborates on the theme of improving schools and teacher quality. He notes that South Korea pays its teachers more than England and America and, as a trade-off, accepts larger class sizes. On the other hand, Finland draws top-tier college graduates to the profession by “fostering exceptionally high public respect for teachers.”

While attracting and keeping teaching staff is an important factor in creating an educational system that fosters excellence, I couldn’t but wonder what it was about Finland’s educational system that places it at the top of OECD surveys. Australia also fares very well in these surveys but some shallow research pointed to to some unique aspects of the Finnish system and its excellence may have a lot to do with the combination of stability in early childhood and flexibility in later teens that is offered to students.

Some of these aspects can be found in this BBC article on Finnish education and, in particular, the Makelanrinne upper secondary school in Helsinki.

Children stay at the same school between the ages of seven and 16, rather than having primary and secondary schools.
Pupils begin at upper secondary schools after their comprehensive schools, at the age of 16.
Opportunities for students to learn at their own pace, rather than within a year group.
Very flexible and individualised curriculum – with each student creating their own timetable.
Core subjects are also very broad, including elements of languages, sciences, maths, humanities, psychology, religion and philosophy with dozens of extra subject units
The upper secondary school system is intended for more academically-able students – and runs parallel to a network of vocational schools, which focus on workplace skills.
Almost all pupils stay in education and training beyond 16 and 17, almost two thirds continue into higher education.

In another BBC article, which places the system of education in an economic context, Education Minister, Tuula Haatainen, attributes the Finn’s educational success to the “unified” school system, in which children staying at the same school between the ages of seven and 16, rather than having primary and secondary schools.

The education system is geared towards maintaining a “high-wage, high-skill” economy and an annual report from the World Economic Forum, has identified Finland as the world’s most competitive economy, citing its “culture of innovation” as a key determinant.

Image: http://static.parkingpanel.com/themes/books2/main.jpg

Creativity versus Curriculum

msbarnsley — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:34:10 +0000

Are these two concepts mutually exclusive? While we’d like to think they’re not, the tyranny of content often means that we do not undertake projects that involve “deep”, connected and creative learning because we have “too much stuff to get through.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I compare my two history classes and the different types of learning in each. One is very open ended, requiring that we study units on “Constructing History”, “Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Societies” and a “Thematic Study”. The Mandatory History curriculum is far more prescriptive and is very content driven. We are currently studying Australian Federation, a notoriously “boring” topic in the eyes of students. Australia’s Federation is a remarkable event historically because it is of the few instances when national independence from a colonial power was achieved without bloodshed. The reason this is often viewed as boring for students is because we whip through a whole raft of “old bearded guys”, dates and constitutional and legal concepts. There are fascinating personalities and cultural issues that would be terrific to explore but doing this in any depth is undermined by the time constraints of the syllabus, which dictates that we “get through” Federation, World War I, the Depression and World War II” in Year 9. The learning enabled in the more open-ended course is, in constrast, more authentic because it is driven by student interest and choice. As Einstein famously said: “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.” I have tried to create opportunities for students to be involved in the planning process and to choose areas that they want to research and learn about. Rather than having every student learn about Ancient Greece, students are able to choose an area that interests them and to take more ownership of their learning. This has also meant that I can focus more on helping students learn how the processes of research and communication skills to share their findings with their peers. It also means that students get to learn from each other as rather than all doing the same content, they are exploring different areas that broaden everyone’s understanding of a broad range of past societies, individuals, events and ideas. The engagement in this class is palpably higher than in the one where content is king and leads to a regurgitation of facts rather than the interpretation of facts for meaning and relevance.

I was reminded of this when I was reading Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s post on Creativity is a global crisis, in which she summarises a video, “Teaching HOW TO learn”, with mind-map creator Tony Buzan:

World is getting less and less creative on average. Education today is structured so that it destroys creativity and crushes dreams.
In China, Mexico, Japan and US it is normal for creativity scores to decline throughout a child’s education.
We teach kids what to learn.. not how to learn. We teach curriculum rather than how to learn.
Scientific Journal feels that brilliance can be unleashed through nurturing creative thinking in children.
Intellectual capital is fueled by creativity. There is a new creative age dawning and we must address it. 60% of all jobs and professions within the next 10 years will be based on creative thinking.
Child are born with intellectual potential- brain is soil with endless seeds. When child is stimulated creatively then brain cells engage and grow. When they are not stimulated cells disengage. Nurturing creativity allows synapse to form more connections. When we routinize, when we linearize, when we dull a child we actually physically disengage their brains.
It is not one or the other:curriculum or creativity. Creativity is the thread that should be woven in each area of the curriculum.

Sheryl argues that: “Back to basics is returning to way we all learn naturally through wonderment, questions, and explorations – not through memorization and regurgitation of facts.”

This “creativity crisis” is also explored by Ken Robinson in the TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity” [below], who explores how we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. “Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences.”

Another excellent post on this is, “How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci” at Wandering Ink, which details 10 aspects of creative thinking and then goes on to explain how our society quashes them. They include:

1. Intense and insatiable curiosity; constantly learning due to a desire to ask and answer questions

2. Constant testing of knowledge through experience and persistence; accepting of and learning from mistakes

3. Fully noticing and observing things with all senses, but especially sight (seeing things that others miss, seeing the details)

4. An acceptance of ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty out of a realization that life is not black and white (also an art technique using shadow famous for its use in da Vinci’s paintings)

5. Interest in both the arts and sciences and interdisciplinary work that combines them

6. Keeping one’s body in good shape; attending to nutrition, fitness, and general physical well-being

7. Acceptance and appreciation for the interconnectedness of everything in life; interdisciplinary approaches and thinking

8. Energy and desire to focus intensely on one’s work and interests (often the same thing); merging of work and play

9. Confidence, willingness to take risks, and tolerance of failure – Willing to continue on with creative work despite rejection; ability to sell oneself and one’s talents

10. Independence, introversion (from various studies on creative genius) – Willingness to spend lots of time alone working and honing skills; acceptance of possible isolation

Images: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/blog/2006/10/
http://bedfordcommunityorchestra.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/creativity1.jpg