My notes on two presentations from the Learning Without Frontiers Conference, London, 26th January 2012:

My notes for:
Sir Ken Robinson’s talk

Practice <–>Theory <–> Policy

  • People who practice don’t often have time to get the latest and greatest information re: theory
  • Theorists don’t have much time for practice
  • Policy makers don’t know much about either 🙂

Purposes of education:

  • Economic.  Not solely, but there are economic reasons for providing education. Academic vs vocation programs – Sir Ken doesn’t subscribe to this dichotomy in educational DNA. Need new sorts of education
  • Cultural. Aim to pass on cultural genes – values, beliefs
  • Personal. The most important! In the end, education is ultimately, personal. Too much impersonal testing that students aren’t engaged in.

Key point:

  • There is everything you can do – at all levels; many of us ARE the educational system – at least for the group(s) of students that we are working with. So we can make immediate changes; and collectively this can create a revolution.

Education not linear, not monolithic. Rather, it’s a complex, adaptive system – many moving parts, like a vortex…not like an undistributed canal; more like an ocean with different forces tugging this way and that. (From DSC: I agree with what Sir Ken is saying here, but I especially agree with this particular perspective — thus the name of this blog.)

Personalization is key! Education needs to be customized to the communities where it’s taking place.

Principles

  • Curriculum – towards disciplines (skills, processes, procedures) and away from subjects
  • Teaching & Learning – dynamic; flow of knowledge; not static; forms need to tap into streams; move towards collaborative activities; active learning trumps passive learning
  • Assessment – must move from judgment to description

 


My notes (part way) for:
Jim Knight – If Steve Jobs Designed Schools

What if Steve Jobs had re-invented the education system rather the computer and consumer electronics industry?

Steve Jobs was a contradictory character, combining control freak and Zen Buddhist, and technology with design. He had a revolutionary impact on computing, animation, the music industry, printing, and publishing. Last year he and Bill Gates together expressed surprise at how little impact technology had had on schools. Jobs’s wife is an educational reformer, he was a college dropout; but what would it have been like if Steve Jobs had focused on education? What would the Jobs School be like?

How do we make an insanely great school?

  • Must go really deep to create something that’s easy to use (from DSC — I call this “Easy is hard.”) Need to de-clutter the teaching & learning environment, the curriculum, the qualifications, and the people.
  • How does it make me feel when I walk through the doorway of your school?
  • Get to choose who you want to learn with and from
  • Simple, beautiful space; flexible; social; reflective, all year round
  • More seductive, intuitive, enthralling
  • Does it inspire curiosity?
  • “Don’t need instructions”
  • Not just a school – learning doesn’t stop when school bell rings
  • 24×7 thing
  • Curriculum
  • Is there a range of things to interest everyone?
  • Need more choice; selection; more control of their learning
  • All ages
  • Enterprising
  • Creative, technical, practical…but most of all, it would be fun!

More here…


 

Blackboard launches solution to improve developmental education
Fully online courses now include built-in assessment, analytics tools

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON – February 22, 2012 – Blackboard Inc. today announced the official launch of Blackboard Developmental Education™ (Blackboard DevEd), an innovative approach aimed at improving student outcomes and increasing completion rates in an area where many institutions have struggled. The solution, which was first piloted by several institutions in the fall, now includes built-in assessment and analytics tools that enable course instructors to further personalize their instruction.

.

Blackboard Developmental EducationTM (Blackboard DevEd) is a comprehensive program of blended instruction and online remedial courses designed to improve student achievement levels cost-effectively.

Early reflections from DSC:

  • First of all, my congratulations go out to Blackboard for innovating! Nice work.
  • This is another example of the innovation occurring in the online/digital learning world — yet more tools and diagnostic powers are being made available to online-based teaching and learning environments
  • This should be another shot across the bow of how institutions of higher education are training our future teachers — student teachers NEED to know how to teach online!!!
  • Too early to tell how such endeavors will affect career paths (for teachers, administrators, counselors, nurses, and such)

 

Also see:

Pearson and Knewton charge ahead with adaptive courses — from The Journal by Dian Schaffhauser

Excerpt:

“Personalized learning is a linchpin for the overall future of education,” said Greg Tobin of Pearson. “Incorporating Knewton’s technology into our MyLab/Mastering programs is leading the industry’s charge toward this new era of customized and personalized education.”

“Students generate a tremendous amount of high-stakes data that Knewton can analyze to ensure they learn in the most effective and efficient way for each. It is a new frontier in education,” added Jose Ferreira, founder and CEO of Knewton.

This time its personal — from The Journal by Jennifer Demski

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Leading Through Technology
Thomas Greaves, CEO of The Greaves Group, an educational consulting firm, takes Cator’s point one step further and says that it’s doubtful personalized learning could happen–or at least, happen well–without the right technological tools in place.

“The student, using technology, is better able to personalize their learning than a teacher is,” he says. “Teachers don’t have time to sit down and study each student, each day, in each course to figure out what they’re going to do differently with them. Teacher-driven personalization ends up being very weak, with very few factors, whereas if the students are leading their personalization via technology, then their instruction can be personalized based on a hundred variables instead of one or two.”

Greaves also seems to suggest that tech-driven personalized learning will, by its very nature, enable individualized learning and that holy grail of teaching, differentiated instruction, in which a teacher adapts classroom instruction to the various needs and skill levels of each student. Historically, differentiated instruction, as a practice, has been incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to implement in a teacher-centered learning environment that is driven by a print-based curriculum. Personalized learning may finally allow individualization and differentiation to actually happen in the classroom.

Ideally, tech-driven personalization combines the best of individualized learning–self-paced, diagnostic-driven–with the ability to adapt to a student’s specific learning styles, interests, and backgrounds. Personalization could be as simple as students compensating for any gaps in their pre-existing knowledge by allowing them to unobtrusively Google unknown terms during group instruction rather than raising their hand, or as sophisticated as students entering information about themselves into a piece of software that selects digital content based on the their interests and skill levels.

From DSC:
And with shrinking budgets, class sizes could easily be rising — making it even more difficult for teachers to try and implement customized/personalized learning without some type of assistance.

We may not be there yet…but we’ll get there.  Using a historical analogy:

  • Let’s go back to the early 80’s when the personal computer was just starting to be used much and the DEC’s of the world didn’t think much of them.  But over time, as Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn pointed out in Disrupting Class, these new inventions picked up features and power, and eventually, they crushed DEC. (Seems to me I heard Kodak was going bankrupt too…)

 

 


 

 

The Promise and Potential of Personalized Digital Learning -- from Tom Vander Ark on November 4, 2011

Also see:


.

A comprehensive look at the promise and potential of online learning
In our digital age, students have dramatically new learning needs and must be prepared for the idea economy of the future. In Getting Smart, well-known global education expert Tom Vander Ark examines the facets of educational innovation in the United States and abroad. Vander Ark makes a convincing case for a blend of online and onsite learning, shares inspiring stories of schools and programs that effectively offer “personal digital learning” opportunities, and discusses what we need to do to remake our schools into “smart schools.”

— Examines the innovation-driven world, discusses how to combine online and onsite learning, and reviews “smart tools” for learning
— Investigates the lives of learning professionals, outlines the new employment bargain, examines online universities and “smart schools”
— Makes the case for smart capital, advocates for policies that create better learning, studies smart cultures

Addendum on 11/29/11:

Studying teacher moves — educationnext.org by Michael Goldstein
A practitioner’s take on what is blocking the research teachers need

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

But there is almost nothing examining the thousands of moves teachers must decide on and execute every school day. Should I ask for raised hands, or cold-call? Should I give a warning or a detention? Do I require this student to attend my afterschool help session, or make it optional? Should I spend 10 minutes grading each five-paragraph essay, 20 minutes, or just not pay attention to time and work on each until it “feels” done?

My point is simply that relative to education policy research, there is very, very little rigorous research on teacher moves. Why? Gates knows it’s more than a lack of raw cash; it’s also about someone taking responsibility for this work. “Who thinks of it [empirical research on teachers] as their business?”  he asked. “The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about [this type of] research.”

I agree, but I contend there are a number of other barriers. The first is a lack of demand.

A second issue is that researchers don’t worry about teacher time. Education researchers often put forward strategies that make teachers’ lives harder, not easier. Have you ever tried to “differentiate instruction”? When policy experts give a lecture or speak publicly, do they create five different iterations for their varied audience? Probably not.

Pier Luigi Capucci -- The Internet of Things

Excerpt:

We were asked to consider the Internet of Things (IoT) from the user’s viewpoint. Well, my viewpoint is exactly this, since I’m neither a company director nor a software coder or a hardware creator. From an user’s viewpoint I think we are undergoing a big transformation. The Internet of Things comes out from an evolution process which involves calculation power, connections, networking, personal technologies, and that can be resumed in four phases.

 

Apple University will train executives to think like Steve Jobs — from good.is by Liz Dwyer

Excerpt:

If you want to honor Steve Jobs’ life by following in his entrepreneurial footsteps, forget heading to business school. The Los Angeles Times reports that an Apple team has been working on a top-secret project to create an executive training program called Apple University. The goal? To train people to think like Steve Jobs.

Apple refused to comment on the existence of Apple University, but the Times says that in 2008, Jobs “personally recruited” Joel Podolny, the dean of Yale Business School, to “help Apple internalize the thoughts of its visionary founder to prepare for the day when he’s not around anymore.” Apple analyst Tim Bajarin told the Times that, “it became pretty clear that Apple needed a set of educational materials so that Apple employees could learn to think and make decisions as if they were Steve Jobs.” Though the curriculum is still under wraps, Jobs himself oversaw the creation of the “university-caliber courses.” (emphasis DSC)

 Also see:

 

Steve Jobs&#8217; virtual DNA to be fostered in Apple University:  To survive its late founder, Apple and Steve Jobs planned a training program in which company executives will be taught to think like him, in &#8220;a forum to impart that DNA to future generations.&#8221; Key to this effort is Joel Podolny, former Yale Business School dean.
Photo: Steve Jobs helped plan Apple University &#8212; an executive training program to help Apple carry on without him. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times

Steve Jobs helped plan Apple University — an executive training program to help
Apple carry on without him. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times / October 6, 2011)

From DSC:
If Apple were to choose to disrupt higher education, several other pieces of the puzzle have already been built and/or continue to be enhanced:

  • Siri — a serious start towards the use of intelligent agents / intelligent tutoring
  • An infrastructure to support 24x7x365 access and synchronization of content/assignments/files to a student’s various devices — via iCloud (available today via iTunes 10.5)
  • iTunes U already has millions of downloads and contains content from some of the world’s top universities
  • The internal expertise and teams to create incredibly-rich, interactive, multimedia-based, personalized, customized educational content
  • Students — like employees in the workplace — are looking for information/training/learning on demand — when they need it and on whatever device they need it
  • Apple — or other 3rd parties — could assist publishers in creating cloud-based apps (formerly called textbooks) to download to students’/professors’ devices as well as to the Chalkboards of the Future
  • The iPad continues to be implemented in a variety of education settings, allowing for some seriously interactive, mobile-based learning

 

 

 

 

At the least, I might be losing a bit more sleep if I were heading up an MBA program or a business school…

 

5 ideas for responding to what kids want the nation to know about educationfrom The Innovative Educator by Lisa Nielsen

Excerpt:

In the session the focus was clear. Educators and the former principal (YAY for administrators) who attended wanted to know how we can hear the children and show them they matter, we love them, and we want to honor their unique passions, talents, interests, and abilities.  We discussed a lot of great ideas.  Here are five ways we discussed addressing what students want from education:

  1. Rather than bubbletests, measure student progress with personal success plans.
  2. Rather than report cards and transcripts allow students to showcase their learning with an authentic ePortfolio.
  3. Rather than work that only has the teacher as the audience, empower students to do real work that matters to them and has a real audience.
  4. Rather than telling students how to meet learning goals, empower them to drive their own learning as participant Deven Black explained he does (visit this link to see how).
  5. Have conversations with students about what their talents are.  You can use the videos in this article that feature students sharing stories about their talents.
© 2024 | Daniel Christian