Born Digital: Meet the college class of 2017 — from Yahoo! News by Liz Goodwin
Excerpt:
Here are some of the emerging trends that may come to define the class of 2017.
Also see:
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About the program (emphasis DSC):
Thanks to digital media, the Internet and new advances in understanding how students learn, educators are beginning to appreciate the importance of breaking out of the classroom and into the wider world. There’s a growing understanding that learning should not just be preparation for life, but is actually “life itself.”
Is School Enough? documents vivid examples of where new modes of learning and engagement are taking hold and flourishing. Featuring nationally recognized educators and researchers, Stephen Brown’s powerful stories show that when students have the opportunity to explore real interests and problems, they step up and perform at the highest level. This new approach reaches motivated students as well as kids that educators call “the bright and bored,” helping these learners tune in rather than drop out.
Is School Enough? introduces parents, educators, and everyone passionate about learning to:
• Students in Maine who work with veterinary experts and digital apps to prepare a new home for a retired circus elephant.
• Young people worldwide who use the online Harry Potter Alliance to launch meaningful social justice initiatives.
• A curious and creative teen who crafts her own educational experience based on her passion for natural healing and yoga.
• A young man in Oakland who produces state-of-the-art music videos to engage his community—and himself.
Through the voices of these inspired students and America’s foremost education thought leaders, Is School Enough? provides insight into an essential new understanding of what education can be in the 21st century. Is School Enough? is the second in a series of programs about kids, digital media and education. The first program, Digital Media: New Learners of the 21st Century explores students claiming digital media as a means of connecting, communicating, creating, and learning, while interpreting its importance and providing a window into 21st-century education.
OPINION: How to make college better & more affordable — from edsurge.com by Paul Freedman
One powerful answer: Reform the accreditation process
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
How can our diverse, 4,300 two- and four-year schools collectively be failing to produce the outcomes we need, at the scale we need them, all at the same time?
How can this be?
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…why have these solutions not yet driven the fundamental change the system needs? Innovators that could bring costs down and help our system stay on the leading-edge are being stifled by little-known organizations that possess tremendous unregulated power in higher education: accreditors. As a result, our system is sick–plagued by an institutionalized lack of adaptation.
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If they are indeed stewards of the public trust responsible for ensuring the quality of our higher education system, then they are also responsible for its outcomes and therefore share a large portion of the blame for the failures in higher education that we see today. Accreditation is the one constant across all US higher education institutions.
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The problem? Ivy Bridge wanted to change the status quo.
Also see:
A relevant side note from DSC:
The following statement in Downgrading Elite Colleges (InsideHigherEd.com) shows the impact of this straitjacketing, status quo situation (emphasis mine):
“We do see pressure on small private colleges as a group and that’s primarily because they don’t have a lot of different things they can do, so they are primarily dependent on tuition revenue,” said a Moody’s analyst, Edie Behr.
Moody’s advises institutions to try to diversify their revenue streams.
That is not an easy task, said Oberlin’s vice president for finance, Ronald Watts.
From DSC:
If the entire boat is sinking, does it matter what your peers are doing?!? Isn’t it time for bigger thinking? Bolder thinking? More (and careful/well-thought-through) experimentation?
Paul Freedman states this as well in his article:
I have heard people in the industry compare the current state of higher education to a sinking ship. If that is accurate, then accreditors should be viewed as the ones who are literally nailing down the deck chairs to the Titanic. We need to keep the students we are all dedicated to serving from going down with the ship. We, as the education industry and as US citizens, need to fight for accreditation reform.
I ask these questions and pose the above picture not to promote panic — but rather to strongly encourage change. Institutions of higher education need to adapt in order to stay relevant, survive, and to properly equip future generations for the world they will be entering.
If not, students will find other ways to be successful — and so will corporations.
Addendum on 9/3/13:
Changing education from the ground up — published on Jul 18, 2013; with thanks to Mr. Michael Haan, from Calvin College’s IT Department, for the resource
Sir Ken Robinson addresses the fundamental economic, cultural, social and personal purposes of education. He argues that education should be personalised to every student’s talent, passion, and learning styles, and that creativity should be embedded in the culture of every single school.
The $4 million teacher — from online.wsj.com by Amanda Ripley
South Korea’s students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
Excerpt:
![[image]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AL211_TEACHE_DV_20130802162509.jpg)
SeongJoon Cho for The Wall Street Journal
Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy,
earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online.
‘The harder I work, the more I make,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
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Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.
The future is now: 15 innovations to watch for — from chronicle.com by By Steven Mintz
Excerpt:
But the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students consume higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including from early-college/dual-degree programs, community colleges, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are voting with their feet, embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language.
As a result, colleges must become more nimble, entrepreneurial, student-focused, and accountable for what students learn. I am a historian and far better at interpreting the past than forecasting the future. Nevertheless, I will go out on a limb and predict 15 innovations that will alter the face of higher education over the next 36 months…
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Technology in the Future — from strategy-keys.com by David Willden
What will be the technology in the future? According to the Global Trends 2030 report, the areas below should continue to be key technology drivers through 2030.
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A glimpse into the future of learning: An infographic — from knowledgeworks.org
Excerpt:
This infographic tells the big story of KnowledgeWorks’ third forecast on the future of learning, Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Future of Learning. Comprised of twelve key insights with accompanying graphics, it points the way toward a diverse learning ecosystem in which learning adapts to each child instead of each child trying to adapt to school.
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Quantum boost for artificial intelligence — from nature.com by Devin Powell
Quantum computers able to learn could attack larger sets of data than classical computers.
Excerpt:
Quantum computers of the future will have the potential to give artificial intelligence a major boost, a series of studies suggests.
Futuring in the year 2100 by Glen Hiemstra, Futurist.com — by Futurist Glen Hiemstra
Glen Hiemstra, Founder of Futurist.com, presents a program on Futuring in the year 2100. The presentation was a part of a series taking an early look at the 22nd Century, as a feature of the annual meeting of the World Future Society, Chicago, July 2013. As part of the program Glen solicited input from other professional futurists, a sample of which are presented in the slide deck. [note: slide 34 was a video of Elon Musk receiving the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award]
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What is the future of technology in education? — from guardian.co.uk by Matt Britland
Forget devices, the future of education technology is all about the cloud and anywhere access. In the future, teaching and learning is going to be social, says Matt Britland
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Alive in the Swamp — from nesta.org.uk by Michael Fullan and Katelyn Donnelly
Excerpt (emphasis and link below from DSC):
The authors argue that we should seek digital innovations that produce at least twice the learning outcome for half the cost of our current tools. To achieve this, three forces need to come together. One is technology, the other pedagogy, and the third is change knowledge, or how to secure transformation across an entire school system.
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The breakthrough in Alive in the Swamp is the development of an Index that will be of practical assistance to those charged with making these kinds of decisions at school, local and system level. Building on Fullan’s previous work, Stratosphere, the Index sets out the questions policymakers need to ask themselves not just about the technology at any given moment but crucially also about how it can be combined with pedagogy and knowledge about system change. Similarly, the Index should help entrepreneurs and education technology developers to consider particular features to build into their products to drive increased learning and achieve systemic impact.
The future will belong not to those who focus on the technology alone but to those who place it in this wider context and see it as one element of a wider system transformation. Fullan and Donnelly show how this can be done in a practical way.
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Also see:
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In the future, the whole world will be a classroom — from fastcoexist.com by Marina Gorbis
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From DSC:
What Marina is asserting is what I’m seeing as well. That is, we are between two massive but different means of obtaining an education/learning (throughout our lifetimes I might add). What she’s saying is also captured in the following graphic:
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Also see:
Example slides from
Will Richardson’s solid presentation at ISTE 2013, entitled ” Abundant Learning: Four newish ideas for powerful classrooms”
From DSC:
This idea of self-directed/owned learning is spot on — and not just for those in K-12, but also for those in higher education and for those in the corporate world as well! It unleashes an enormous amount of intrinsic energy, motivation, drive, grit.
Each person needs to own and build their learning ecosystem — identifying one’s gifts, talents, passions, interests and then going out and developing those things. If we each do what we do best, the whole world benefits. As we will need others along the way — a team-based approach, communities of practice, and several of the other things/skills Will alluded to will be very important as well.
From DSC:
The article below made me wonder…
What would happen if the U.S. Federal Government got tired of waiting for institutions of traditional higher education to respond significantly enough to their satisfaction? Would they re-allocate/redirect their funding elsewhere?
(Please leave a comment if you know of cases where they are already doing this.
I have a lot to learn about this, I’m sure.)
No Love for Accreditation — from insidehighered.com by Libby A. Nelson
Excerpt:
But when lawmakers do sit down to rewrite the law governing financial aid programs, accreditation will be under a particularly harsh spotlight.
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Members of Congress of both parties seemed to agree more with the critics, saying they were skeptical that traditional accreditation was flexible enough to respond to new developments in higher education.
From DSC:
1) To start out this posting, I want to pose some questions about “The Common Core” — in the form of a short video. <— NOTE: Please be sure your speakers are on or you have some headphones with you — the signal is “hot” so you may need to turn down the volume a bit! 🙂
With a special thanks going out to
Mr. Bill Vriesema for sharing
some of his excellent gifts/work.
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Having asked those questions, I understand that there is great value in having students obtain a base level of knowledge — in reading, writing, and basic math. (Should we add keyboarding? Programming? Other? Perhaps my comments are therefore more appropriate for high school students…not sure.)
Anyway, I would be much more comfortable with moving forward with the Common Core IF:
* I walked into random schools and found out which teachers the students really enjoyed learning from and whom had a real impact on the learning of the students. Once I identified that group of teachers, if 7-8 out of 10 of them gave the Common Core a thumbs up, so would I.
* The Common Core covered more areas — such as fine arts, music, drama, woodworking, videography, photography, etc. (Just because STEM might drive the economic engines doesn’t mean everyone enjoys plugging into a STEM-related field — or is gifted in those areas.)
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2) Secondly, here are just a few recent items re: the Common Core:
Good Read: Who’s Minding the Schools? — from blogs.kqed.org by Tina Barseghian
Excerpt: (emphasis DSC)
For those uninitiated to the Common Core State Standards, this New York Times article raises some important questions:
“By definition, America has never had a national education policy; this has indeed contributed to our country’s ambivalence on the subject… The anxiety that drives this criticism comes from the fact that a radical curriculum — one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents — was introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about the Common Core.”
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Editorial: Make the Common Core standards work before making them count — from eschoolnews.com by Randi Weingarten
AFT President Randi Weingarten calls for a moratorium on the high-stakes implications of Common Core testing until the standards have been properly implemented.
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How to train students’ brains for the Common Core — from ecampusnews.com by Meris Stansbury
Excerpt:
According to Margaret Glick, a neuroscience expert and educational consultant at the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE), the Common Core State Standards and the accompanying assessments will cognitively require more than past standards. “They will require a deep understanding of content, complex performances, real-world application, habits of mind to persevere, higher levels of cognition and cognitive flexibility,” Glick said during “The Common Core State Standards and the Brain,” a webinar sponsored by the Learning Enhancement Corporation.
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Common Core testing will require digital literacy skills — from ecampusnews.com by Dennis Pierce
Excerpt:
It also will require students to demonstrate certain digital literacy skills that go beyond the core curriculum, observers say. These include technology operational skills such as keyboarding and spreadsheets, as well as higher-order skills such as finding and evaluating information online. And many observers have serious concerns about whether students will be ready to take the online exams by the 2014-15 school year.
Minn. moves ahead with some Common Core education standards — from minnesota.publicradio.org by Tim Post
Carry the Common Core in Your Pocket! — from appolearning.com by Monica Burns
Excerpt:
Whether you are a parent or educator, you have likely heard the buzz around the Common Core Learning Standards. Here’s the deal.
Across the United States schools are adopting these national standards to prepare students for college and careers by introducing rigorous content to children in all subject areas. The standards cover students in Kindergarten through Grade 12 in English Language Arts and Mathematics. The Common Core Standards app by MasteryConnect organizes the CCLS for students, parents and teachers with mobile devices.
Addendum on 6/19/13:
Addendum on 6/27/13:
