Here are a couple representative links (and quotes) covering the growing numbers of education related posts related to the future of learning. They all spend a lot of time looking tactically at the various technologies classroom teachers will (possibly) need to develop, and some pretty vague conceptual structures to validate this move to a different method of education.
I rarely if ever see anything about what these sorts of posts are based upon. It feels like this is all being considered in a rather backwards manner.
I could see that several reasonable (debatable) premises could be addressed to clarify most of these things.
For instance, an argument could be presented that the current educational methods we are using are already outdated. If you were to consider graduation rates and the growing lack of rigor in many areas of education (colleges too…), this may be an easy argument to prevail upon.
Our society is in flux, and many things are changing. Some (but certainly not all) of it is based upon more and more technology taking a larger role in all of our lives. For good or ill, many of our social structures are also in flux. What does this do to our ability to foresee what future graduates will need to be prepared for? What kinds of jobs will they be striving for?
Is there a need to completely transform some of the late 19th century (implicit) underpinnings in our current system, such as:
- Keeping students aligned in age cohort groups
- Is it important to be habituated and ‘trained’ to sit quietly?
- Should we move more towards learning, instead of teaching?
There are plenty of other questions which need to be addressed, questions such as:
- What is important to know?
- What are the best ways to learn (versus classical lectures and ‘desk work’)
- How important is collaboration?
- How much should we be focusing upon an ‘entrepreneur’ paradigm (instead of a factory worker model of years past…)?
- Who should have control over these potential changes?
· Is there a real need to add more diversity to the pool of teachers we have (with due respect to the hard work many to most of them perform). Generally speaking, I’ve found teachers to be much more cloistered and risk averse than the rest of the population (and no, this is not related to a supposed high intelligence…).
Does this have an impact upon the outcomes of students, when they are presented with role models who are a bit outside the broader hurly burly of our society?
I think that all of these questions will be answered (one way or another), and they are all more important than whether we adopt digital text formats…
The future of learning
http://bigthink.com/ideas/31773
We can’t state explicitly or emphatically what the future of learning will look like because things are moving so fast. But we can extrapolate some general characteristics from current trends. For example, in the future our learning will be even more …
- digital rather than analog / ink on paper
- informal
- online and less dependent on local humans
- mobile
- networked / interconnected
- multimedia
- self-directed / inquiry-based
- individualized / personalized
- computer-based and software-mediated and less dependent on live humans
- open / accessible (in the sense of OER)
- project-based
- simulation– or game-based
… than it is now. We’re not going to retrench or go backward on any of these. As educators, parents, and citizens, we need to begin envisioning the implications of these characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling.
How do we design and operationalize our learning environments to reflect these characteristics? And if we don’t, can we have any hope of staying relevant to the needs of students, families, and society?
What 21st century teaching, learning really means
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/what-21st-century-teaching-learning-really-means/2011/06/26/AGDSU1lH_blog.html
Q) Help us understand the shift you say must take place in teaching.
A) Well, we live in a connected world, with the Internet and powerful digital technologies literally at our fingertips, so it would be foolish not to integrate those things into the learning experience. But when I talk about the shift to 21st-century teaching and learning, I am not talking primarily about changing the tools we use. I’m talking about transforming the way most teachers teach today—either because they were taught to teach that way or because the accountability system makes them believe they have to teach that way.
Instead of thinking that I am “The Teacher”—the knowledge-giver who stands up front in total control—instead of that traditional pedagogy, we need a 21st-century vision of teaching, where there is less teacher talk and more student talk, where what I’m doing is thinking about how I am going to pull the most out of these kids; how I’m going to enable these students to be empowered; how I can make sure that I create a classroom that’s free from threat and stress, where they’ll be willing to take risks.
Instead of me having all these preconceived ideas of what they should doing, saying, and producing, I have to be open to what I find in each student. I have to discover—and help each student discover—their talents and interests and create a learning environment where they can use those gifts and passions to learn from a position of strength.
21st Century Education Requires Lifewide Learning
http://blogs.hbr.org/innovations-in-education/2011/03/21st-century-education-require.html
I have decided to spend the remainder of my career helping to replace industrial era schooling with educational structures better suited to our 21st century, global, innovation-based economy. This sweeping goal of total educational transformation may seem overly ambitious for someone whose work centers in learning technologies. However, in my research I consistently find that new media are at the heart of innovative models for education: contributing to the obsolescence of traditional schools/universities as educational vehicles, while simultaneously empowering new forms of learning and teaching.
Why do I believe, after facing decades of resistance to changes in schooling, that shifting our current model of education might now be possible? Educational transformation is coming not because of the increasing ineffectiveness of schools in meeting society’s needs — though that is certainly a good reason — but due to their growing unaffordability. Events of the last few years, and projections of our nation’s economic future, paint a bleak picture of the financial viability of schools as we know them; we can no longer support an educational system based on inefficient use of expensive human labor. These inefficiencies are not simply within the walls of the school, but reflect our lost opportunities to help students learn in all the hours and all the places they spend time outside of classrooms.
A century ago, a dedicated group of innovators was able to replace the one-room rural schoolhouse, emblematic of agricultural America, with the industrial-era schools we still have today. But that was a simpler time, both in terms of public beliefs about the goals of education and of the available organizational mechanisms, which are resistant to change. The core questions now are: How can we redesign education in order to prepare students for the 21st century? And how can we transform teaching in light of our current knowledge about the mind and new research on what works when, and how? What types of learning environments might modern technologies enable us to create?
The 2010 US National Educational Technology Plan provides some important ideas, sketching both opportunities and challenges. For instance, many talented people not in the teaching profession would be happy to serve as tutors, mentors, and coaches for students, if our formal educational system provided training, certification, resources and formal recognition of those roles. Modern technologies provide ways of coordinating such a distributed system of learning/teaching, so that teachers can both benefit from and guide the efforts of others who help students learn outside of the school’s location and hours.
In framing such alternative models, however, I find myself wrestling with the unpleasant truth that the primary barriers to altering curricular, pedagogical, and assessment practices towards any transformative vision of education are not conceptual, technical or economic, but instead psychological, political, and cultural. The largest challenges in moving beyond historic models of schooling are people’s emotions and their typically unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and values. To be achieved, a transformative model must generate professional commitment, political will, and cultural enthusiasm — not an easy task.
That said, with so much at stake in the lives of children, the economic competitiveness of our country, and the effectiveness of our democracy, I believe the time is ripe for advocating, designing, and fostering such a transformation. In the past five years, social media, immersive interfaces from the entertainment industry, and ubiquitous mobile broadband devices have coalesced to offer powerful ways to empower and integrate learning in and out of school. Too often, I have seen educational technologies used to put "old wine in new bottles." Now, if we seize the moment, we not only can have new wine — such as peer mentoring anytime, anyplace — but also can move beyond the "bottle" of the stand-alone school to Lifewide learning.
