Several days ago, Christian Long, President and CEO of DesignShare and think:lab blogger, sent a set of questions to a number of education thinkers, in preperation for a keynote address he will be delivering to school planners and architects. I got a copy of his questions too, and spent some time yesterday evening jotting down some answers. Actually, I took a good deal of time answering them, so I thought I’d post them here as well. I am whittling down his original questions to save space. I hope that it does not diminish to flow too much.
- Big Picture trends in the next 5-25 years that will have the biggest impact on what it means to be an engaged learner. This is the firecracker side of things…
It is impossible and I would be foolish to predict the future. Today, however, nearly half of the wage-earners in my immediate neighborhood are self-employed, most of us working out of our houses. We are consultants, freelance writers, and one plumber. The work experience is changing dramatically. For me, what I do on a daily basis to serve clients and others and to earn income has been almost constantly changing for the 10+ years since I left the state DoE. Only thirty years ago, when I first started teaching (before PCs), I had no reason to suspect that what I did on the job would change in any substantial way for the next 30 years.
In a time of rapid change, success does not come so much from what you have been taught. It comes from what you can learn, what you can do with what you have learned, and how compellingly you can express it. It will be based on how innovative and resourceful you can be, how well you can not only work in collaboration, but how well you can form collaborative networks, cultivate them, and manage them to accomplish goals. It will require a proficiency with technology but more importantly the ability to play technology like an evolving musical instrument, with which you must continually play new tunes for new audiences.
Success will come from smart and confident people who work like they play, and play like they work.
- YOUR definition of School 2.0 and/or Classroom 2.0…and how to help “school design” decision makers use it to inform their thinking, research, leadership, and solutions.
My vision of school/classroom 2.0 is, more than anything else, about conversations. Traditional schools involved teachers and textbooks delivering information to students, and students reflecting that information back. To better serve their future, today’s classrooms should facilitate teaching and learning as a conversation — two-way conversations between teachers and learners, conversations between learners and other learners, conversations among teachers, and new conversations between the classroom and the home and between the school and its community.
It is about textbooks (whatever they come to look like) that are channels for these conversations, walls that serve as mirrors as well as windows, and where the very air is a conductor of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, all constructed and communicated through unimpeded conversations.
- Best way to describe how ‘kids’ (all ages, really, but I’ll use the cute version since most still default to it) are transforming as collaborators, creators, project team members, publishers, etc. …
Today’s children, the Millennials, enjoy and flourish in an information landscape that would have been unimaginable when most of us were in school, and it dwarfs, by comparison. the experiences they have in their classrooms. Their information experience puts them in control, gives them information that becomes a raw material for new information experiences. It connects them to wings instead of anchors.
- A challenge or provocative statement that will spark conversation.
The education that we received was defined by limits. Its rules and roles were confined to what could happen inside the four walls of a classroom and the two covers of a text book.
The education that our children and our future deserve, must be defined by its lack of limits.
- Offer a set of requests you’d make TODAY that can have a positive impact for learners and teaching guides/mentors without spending a fortune, and set up a mind-shift for bigger school design’ investments in the future.
I want wheels for every piece of furniture. I want not one, but two ceiling mounted projectors with smartboards, one driven by a classroom computer, and one driven by my tablet PC, and all connections are wireless.
I do not want to ever worry about bandwidth, nor do I want to worry about filters (I control the filters).
The textbooks are outside the window of my classroom, in a pile, in the school yard, waiting to be picked up by city sanitation. The textbook I use is a dynamic digital collection of resources that may be a wiki or it may be a course management system. It is probably a combination of the two, and my students help to write and maintain it. Each student has a computer (laptop or tablet), with the ability to project their displays through one of the projectors.
There’s a water cooler, plants (in rolling planters), and an arbor outside the window, and in my mind and the minds of my students, my classroom is more like a global trolley car, in which we can visit places all over the world and visit any time that has been sufficiently documented.
Great luck to you, Christian!
David, I’m a bit concerned by your use of the word “discussion.” Educational research demonstrates that the vast majority of students learn by doing not by hearing or seeing or even saying.
I”m pretty sure this is a matter of semantics and not real difference. You’ve written some great posts on virtual simulations. Simulations allow students to do. If the only thing that modern technology does is expand the discussion it is not doing its job. I don’t want my students to only see the streets of Shaghai. I want them to interact with the people and policymakers of Shanghai, virtual or real, and make real decisions. Since I also want my students to fill the role of policymakers, there’s no reason that students can’t virtually simulate international interactions.
Andrew Pass
http://www.pass-ed.com/blogger.html
Andrew,
I mean conversations in many different ways. I didn’t mention conversations between students and curriculum, between curriculum and the world; conversations between learners and learning environments, in the broadest sense. These conversations are places where students find things to push off from, and things to hold on to. Sometimes its an interaction between people. Sometimes its interactions between people and information. Sometimes it interactions between people and computers and between people through computers.
I’m talking about all kinds of back and forth, not just one way!
Sorry, it was late in the day as it is right now (east coast time).
Later!
Oh wow! This post is the best! All your points are wonderful … and inspirational. I can’t wait to share them with the teachers I work with.
Dave, I think the line, “These conversations are places where students find things to push off from, and things to hold on to,” is just brilliant. That’s real world learning which comes from doing. Thanks for the clarification.
Andrew Pass
http://www.pass-ed.com/blogger.html
I recently presented to parents of students involved at in 1:1 pilot at our school. My first slide showed a picture of the kids and the school in 1924. The second slide showed a picture of the current school and kids. I asked “What’s the difference?” Except for new paint on the building and new style of clothes for the kids not much. Classroom instruction and how the curriculum is designed and delievered is very much the same. My vision for what could be was received with mixed emotions. I shared this article from TIME magazine to make my point: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1568480,00.html
The kids loved it, the parents were intrigued but skeptical, and the teachers still were still holding onto the textbooks and traditional teaching methods.
I plan on using this post to help facilitate the change at our school and further the discussion of what could be and what should be. Luckily we have a superintendent who has a vision and is supportive. Change is difficult but if we are going to provide our students with the tools and skills to be competetive in a global society we must start doing business differently.
Thanks for writing and for listening.
Skip
Dave, you really nailed it with your requests for a positive impact on learning. Rolling furniture could really open up my video classroom. Thanks for the idea!
I really appreciate the clarification on “conversation” as something that is more than just talking (or writing) between people. As a former math/science nerd, the possibilities for computer mediated “conversation” – simulations, programming, control systems used in education are endless. But these are often the last thing we think about when we talk about Web 2.0 or Classroom 2.0.
Like the story you told the other day about the boy lighting up when he discovered his own power to control his turtle by programming it, there is so much to be explored yet with computers and education. We’ve only scratched the surface.