Corinne Carriero on 2009-06-01
The printing press was a major factor in secularizing education. If we look at web 2.0 tools as equally transformative, what will be there effect on education - democratizing it? - individualizing it? - what else??
This link has been bookmarked by 43 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Mar 2009, by Will Richardson.
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Corinne Carrieroarticle on teaching and learning - how it evolved and what the authors believe will happen in the future
Authors:
Margaret Weigel
Carrie James
Howard Gardner-
targeted feedback
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first schools existed for three primary purposes: to enable young persons to become literate and numerate; to inculcate in them the discipline of hard work, often carried out in settings remote from daily life; and to make sure that the principal religious and moral knowledge and values of the culture were transmitted to the elite who would, in the fullness of time, pass this lore on to succeeding generations
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Teachers ruled the roost. Students copied, memorized, and drilled
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the invention of printing, a slow but seemingly inexorable trend began toward the secularization and the universalization of education, at least for young people in the years before adolescence.
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n most parts of the world, even today, the broad outlines of teaching and learning are strikingly similar to one another
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22 May 09
Stephen SpaethIn this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person's own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
The ideas in this paper are similar and even derived from people who are renowned in other circles, e. g. J.S. Brown. Unfortunately, these sources don't have the name recognition among teachers. Gardner has the recognition and trust of educators that help to advance these ideas.
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As shown in table 1, we will be cognizant throughout of who the learners are, where they learn, how they learn, what are the principal curricula, and how competences are purveyed via the media of the time. The grid itself contains generalizations about the past and present, and speculation about the future, thus providing a broad portrait of changes over time. While we do not discuss each entry in the grid, we hope that it aids in thinking about learning in formal and informal settings.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
Table 1 contains material that I'd like to highlight and add notes but the popup medium makes it difficult to use this Diigo tool.
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Uniform schooling reflects both fairness and efficiency. It appears fair to treat all children in the same way; and it is also efficient, given classes of 20, 30, or even 60 charges in one room, sometimes arrayed by age, sometimes decidedly heterogeneous in composition.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
This emphasis on fairness challenges us because our efforts to discover alternatives in some cases seems to be unfairly distributed.
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It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world. Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
This is the "Knowing-Doing Gap" (Pfieffer and Sutton) in our context.
http://books.google.com/books?id=MeY5hdgj1bAC
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Yet, nowhere are these ideas dominant. Indeed, until today, one might say that the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
With these precedents, it should not surprise us that changing the culture is so difficult even among professionals who should know better, e.g. university psychologists who won't take the pledge to stop using multiple choice assessments.
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One strategy might involve formal education playing a role in informal learning spaces (perhaps on the analogy of teaching hospitals), and learners' out-of-school passions finding a validating place in formal educational arenas.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
ITeams are supporting this strategy:
Adam's and Emily's portfolios.
Lobster research projects.
Capstone projects. While I grant the possibility that students might object, I don't see it yet. I find more hesitance from teachers wondering whether it is worth the effort.
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NDM's vast resources, including the provision of many activities in which the user assumes a formative role, can complement constructivist approaches to education. As noted above, a motivated learner can investigate a wide variety of personal interests on his or her own.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
Brandon says that he uses how-to pages and YouTube extensively to learn what he wants to know. Those experiences and resources motivated his interest in being able to develop his capacity to screencast from his Touch.
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At this point in time, deeply constructivist classrooms remain few and far between despite evidence that hands-on, problem-solving approaches in the classroom result in higher levels of student engagement, conceptual thinking, knowledge transfer, and retention (Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Lamon 1994; Bransford et al. 1999; Hmelo-Silver 2004; Meier 1995; Project Zero and Reggio Children 2001; Sizer 1984). But in an environment of “No Child Left Behind” and standardized tests linked to federal funding, the implementation of constructivist principles in the classroom can be considered a risky enterprise for public schools.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
MSAD 75 ITeams provide the venue for us to explore this frontier and mitigate risk.
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A web-based project at MIT, for instance, paired French language students with peers in France learning to speak English, and provided students an authentic opportunity to practice their language skills, learn online communication skills, and negotiate the implicit guidelines of a different culture (Cultura 2007).
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
This approach can help us address NCATE standards for diversity even in relatively homogeneous contexts like rural Maine.
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07 May 09
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01 May 09
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Until the time of the Renaissance in the West (starting around 1400), most educational institutions around the world had a heavily religious patina. The leaders, the funding, and the curricula were dominated by the regnant theology, be it Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, or polytheistic.
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most importantly, the invention of printing, a slow but seemingly inexorable trend began toward the secularization and the universalization of education, at least for young people in the years before adolescence.
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Accordingly, in most parts of the world, even today, the broad outlines of teaching and learning are strikingly similar to one another. Formal schooling begins at age five to seven; the preceding years include, at most, introduction to the forms of literacy, experience of working and playing with peers, and an inculcation of routine in a setting apart from the more familiar terrain of home, the streets, the playground, the open fields, or the forest/mountain/coast line. Formal pre-schools are a quite recent phenomenon, though they are becoming standard practice in several European countries.
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teachers—largely women—introduce students to reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. This introduction is done in part by modeling and in part by imitation, with some oral recitation, and some exercises in workbooks or worksheets.
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But by and large, the model followed is that of “uniform schooling.” That is, there is a single way of teaching, a single way of studying and learning (chiefly copying and giving content back to the teacher), and a single way of assessing learning (through some kind of oral and/or written examination).
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In much of the world, schooling still ends with the mastery of the literacies.
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the curriculum features mathematics (algebra, geometry, and perhaps calculus or pre-calculus); science (with physics, chemistry, and biology the chief sciences); history or social studies (typically a focus on the history of the country or region, with a smattering of world history and culture and, possibly, some attention to current events); and in diminishing order of popularity, other sciences (e.g., geology, astronomy, social sciences like economics or psychology), geography, civics, physical education, and one or more art forms.
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he United States, with its focus on sports, arts, publications, student government is an outlier here
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It would be an exaggeration to claim that formal education takes place without attention to what has been learned about the processes of successful learning, such as insights into student motivation, study habits, strategies, metacognition, and other approaches obtained from experience, or, more recently and systematically, from the psychological and cognitive sciences. But it would probably be accurate to say that such accumulated knowledge is used only spottily and sporadically in most parts of the world.
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The texts, the teacher-dominated lectures, the stylized interaction between students and teachers, the examinations, the graduation requirements, are not that different from those that could have been observed a century ago.
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changes in communication media—telegraph, telephone, radio, television, film, film strips—it is notable how little they have infiltrated into the core of the educational process.
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Education is increasingly universal. Except in the undeveloped world, almost all boys and most girls get an education at least to the secondary level. The diversity of the student body is devious
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The hegemony once occupied by humanities and language is increasingly replaced by subjects related to STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
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In addition to the increasing nationalization of curricula (almost everywhere except the United States), there is growing focus on performance in the so-called international comparisons, especially the TIMMS and the PISA tests.
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While the broad changes in education noted above are not insignificant, they have not dramatically impacted the nature of learning in many schools; the content, functioning, and organization of the typical European classroom model remains relatively unaffected despite major transformations in the world just beyond its walls, and the implementation of more meaningful changes remains stalled.
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sharp contrast to the stasis of the classroom model, important changes proliferate in the world. To name a few, our global civilization must address climate change, the revolution in the understanding and use of genetic information, other biomedical breakthroughs, the power and ubiquity of financial markets, the exploration of space, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, massive immigration, and the emergence of powerful new communication media.
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Digital media allow for nearly ubiquitous access to people and to virtually infinite amounts of information, as well as affording new forms of sociality, play, creativity, social activism, networking, and collaboration.
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Despite significant progress in bridging the “digital divide” over the last decade, most of the world's populations are offline; only 5.3% of Africa's population can use the Internet, compared to North America's population, of which 73% are Internet users.
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It is the younger generation who are often accorded such labels as “digital youth,” “digital natives” (Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Prensky 2001), “neomillenials” (Dede 2005), and “net generation” or “net gen” students (Oblinger and Oblinger 2005). These labels have been contested by scholars who point to the variation in access and digital skills among youth on the one hand, and the age variation among the digitally savvy on the other (Jenkins 2007; Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Vaidhyanathan 2008).
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That said, we must also acknowledge that many American youth are introduced to digital media at relatively young ages and spend more time engaging with digital media at critical developmental stages than their older counterparts did. While adults as well as youth use NDM to build upon existing social links (Kennedy et al. 2008), the average teen spends approximately 11.5 hours a week of his or her free time creating, exploring, playing games, and communicating online (ConsumerLab 2008); over half of teens age 12–17 use a social networking site; approximately three out of five teens upload some type of creative content online (Lenhart et al. 2007); and virtually all teens engage in some type of video gameplay (Lenhart et al. 2008). The online practices of teens vary dramatically; they may be avid texters and emailers, social networkers, casual surfers, and news browsers, or deeply invested MMORP gamers and social activists.
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The meaning of this teen engagement with digital media is widely contested. Critics lament the decline of literacy, divided attention, and the decline of autonomy, among other concerns (Bauerlein 2008; Keen 2007; Turkle 2008; Wolf 2007), while enthusiasts laud the social and intellectual skills cultivated in games, virtual worlds, and online communities (boyd 2007; Gee 2003; Jenkins et al. 2006; Shaffer 2006). The net impact of youth digital engagement remains to be see
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In the traditional classroom, a teacher distributes text-based materials and augments them with oral information; lessons are reinforced through notetaking, homework, and textbook guides. Knowledge is possessed by the educator and imparted to his or her students in a top-down, unidirectional transfer, and a student's classroom success or failure is assessed by said educator (or by an externally mandated examination).
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the contours of learning—what is deemed important to learn, and where, when, and how—evolve over time, albeit at times very slowly.
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question of whether learning should take place in radically different ways—in terms of content, pedagogy, and assessment—is likely to become urgent in the very near future, in part because young learners themselves may be different from prior generations in their learning orientations; if so, these differences are arguably related to their increasingly digital lives.
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youth are engaging with digital media at ever-younger ages (Rideout et al. 2003). Students walk into classrooms (even toddle into preschools) armed with new competences, learning preferences, and expectations that call into question existing curricula. Indeed, there is mounting evidence that the learning preferences and styles of youth are affected by their digital engagement. Dede argues that “people's daily use of new devices is shifting their lifestyles toward frequent mediated immersion,
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23 Apr 09
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nalogy of
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06 Apr 09
Janet Cernilooks fascinating... on my list of TO READ ASAP!
Here's a teaser from WebLogEd guy:
"it’s one of those must reads that helps put in perspective the many changes that learning is going through right now and helps affirm a vision of learning that may come to pass." -
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Jeff UtechtA Must read from MIT Press on the future of reading....be ready...this one is heavy.
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Gene McCrackenLearning: Peering Backward and Looking Forward in the Digital Era
Weigel, James and Gardner -
19 Mar 09
koroghcm usScholarly article providing the general history of education and the context of education today. Argues for change in the education system and that the new technologies will force that change to occur. The problem is that education does not really want to change and is unwilling to do the things that would allow real change to occur. Education is willing to put up with teachers who don't want to learn, be controlled by IT people with issues about "control" over content/students/access, are afraid to fail (and thus learn) and content with the status quo while the world changes around them. Education talks about the "lag" time between them and society and figures that in 5-10 years they will be ready for the Web 2.0 stuff but by then the world will have marched further into the future and gotten there faster. How does this prepare the future citizens of our country for the world they will live in?
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with contemporary challenges
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Tania ShekoLearning: Peering Backward and Looking Forward in the
Digital Era
Margaret Weigel from the International Journal of Learning and Medialearning journals education mit digital web2.0 internationalplp21
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16 Mar 09
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after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person's own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.).
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Even so, it is undeniable that new opportunities for individuals to assert the truth, or their truths, are afforded today; educators will likely grapple with questions about what is true, and what is worth teaching and learning, more and more, both now and in the future.
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That said, we must also acknowledge that many American youth are introduced to digital media at relatively young ages and spend more time engaging with digital media at critical developmental stages than their older counterparts did. While adults as well as youth use NDM to build upon existing social links (Kennedy et al. 2008), the average teen spends approximately 11.5 hours a week of his or her free time creating, exploring, playing games, and communicating online (ConsumerLab 2008); over half of teens age 12–17 use a social networking site; approximately three out of five teens upload some type of creative content online (Lenhart et al. 2007); and virtually all teens engage in some type of video gameplay (Lenhart et al. 2008). The online practices of teens vary dramatically; they may be avid texters and emailers, social networkers, casual surfers, and news browsers, or deeply invested MMORP gamers and social activists.
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Mobile tools such as handheld computers or similar portable, sophisticated appliances have the potential to free students from the classroom context and immerse them in rich, meaningful learning experiences while maintaining access to text- and graphics-based learning supports. These types of mobile media, or “augmented reality,” provide unique educational affordances, including portability across multiple sites, social interactivity, context-specific engagements, connectivity that can capitalize upon the resources of a network, and a unique experience for each individual learner (Klopfer et al. 2002). The teams of students who play Environmental Detectives, for instance, investigate a virtual chemical spill in the real world by collecting data and interviewing experts, witnesses, and suspects via a handheld device. In Waag Society's Frequency 1550 game, students are transported back to a historical Amsterdam to search for a lost relic—all courtesy of their mobile phones (Frequency 1550 2005).
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And, finally, situated learning with NDM suffers from the same difficulties associated with formal assessments as do many NDM learning initiatives. In order for NDM to help students move out of the classrooms and into the world, educators need to carefully consider how to establish baselines for assessing progress in unorthodox settings with little or no precedents, and how to grade students on the basis of their activities in these types of settings.
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The new digital media provide new ways of engaging with each other, with information, and with the world; we have pointed to both promising and problematic implications of these affordances. Ultimately, we believe that digital media could be leveraged in ways that bring about a tipping point when learning becomes more decidedly individualized, constructivist, situated, and social. Again, the paradoxical confluence of opportunities for individualized and intensely social learning experiences is a noteworthy facet of digital media. It is far from clear who understands, takes seriously, and—importantly—is poised to act upon these potentials. While talk of reform is everywhere, far too much of the discussion centers on test scores in traditional subjects, secured in traditional ways.
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However, the trends being observed among some students are worth paying attention to, especially as larger efforts are undertaken to narrow the divides and gaps among youth. The world as a whole is increasingly wired, and we are charged with preparing our youth to face the challenges of the future. Success in that endeavor will remain elusive until we teach them to weather the challenges of the present.
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15 Mar 09
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Tero ToivanenLearning: Peering Backward and Looking Forward in the Digital Era
Margaret Weigel
Project Manager, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education margaret_weigel@pz.harvard.edu
Carrie James
Research Director, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education carrie_james@pz.harvard.edu
Howard Gardner
Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education hgasst@pz.harvard.edu -
14 Mar 09
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Randy ZiegenfussAt this point in their proliferation, much remains unknown concerning the educational and learning impacts of NDM: Will they be large or small, will the outcomes be positive, negative, mixed, or neutral? It is still too early to tell. That having been said, we believe that a "perfect storm" of NDM affordances, sociocultural changes associated with globalization, and the growing pace and interconnectedness of human life may potentially add up to a formidable tipping point. We operate on the assumption that NDM contain affordances that, if leveraged properly, could create future learning environments and cultures in which the promises of constructivist, social, situated, and informal learning are realized.
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those competencies that require some kind of formal instruction, tuition, or scaffolding on the part of the individuals, organizations, and/or media of the ambient society.
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Girls watched older women plant, gather, sew, swaddle, raise younger children,
and play roles in decisions visr-à-vis the household; as soon as possible, the
growing girls began to participate in these activities. Boys watched older men
hunt, fish, engage in combat, and play roles in decisions vis-à-vis marriage and
wider communal and extra-communal relations. More often in the case of boys, the
transition to adulthood was marked by initiation rites -
Probably for the first time in human (pre) history, the need for a more formal
educational institution emerged. Most young individuals cannot learn to read and
write on their own; nor can they handle more than the most elementary numerical
totals and operations without some formal instruction and ample opportunity to
practice, preferably with targeted feedback. With the rise of literate and
numerate civilizations, fresh needs emerged, for locations called schools, and
for adults—variously thought of as teachers, instructors, masters, models,
coaches, or even tyrants—charged with the responsibility of educating the young - 3 more annotations...
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Accordingly, in most parts of the world, even today, the broad outlines of
teaching and learning are strikingly similar to one another. Formal schooling
begins at age five to seven; the preceding years include, at most, introduction
to the forms of literacy, experience of working and playing with peers, and an
inculcation of routine in a setting apart from the more familiar terrain of
home, the streets, the playground, the open fields, or the forest/mountain/coast
line. -
Education—teaching and learning—changes very slowly. The texts, the
teacher-dominated lectures, the stylized interaction between students and
teachers, the examinations, the graduation requirements, are not that different
from those that could have been observed a century ago. And given the previous
changes in communication media—telegraph, telephone, radio, television, film,
film strips—it is notable how little they have infiltrated into the core of the
educational process -
In the developed world, the relatively privileged enjoy access to digital media
tools and resources. North America boasts the largest rates of Internet
penetration, but the statistics do not elaborate on the range of Internet
experience for those who have access, from the fully wired, robust, and easily
accessible home computer to the censored and shared access offered by the local
library or Internet café. Twenty-seven percent of North Americans remain offline
either by choice or by circumstance
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13 Mar 09
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12 Mar 09
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Jedd BartlettWhile the ubiquity of digital media resources allows for more customized learning within a formal learning context, its primary value lies in the acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of learning that take place beyond formal schooling.
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Part of the answer to change surely lies beyond the walls of schools themselves. Parents, government, the professions, even the marketplace, are all important stakeholders in the state of learning. Alignment among these diverse constituencies may be hard to achieve; here political leadership of the highest order is essential. In the last few decades, the phrases “learning communities,” “lifelong learning,” and “the learning society” have virtually become clichés. Yet like many clichés in education, and elsewhere, the terms themselves are more familiar than actual instances of the phenomena they describe. In our view, no society is likely to thrive in the future unless it actually is dedicated to lifelong learning; and this, in turn, will require both a society that values learning, and communities that continue to learn. As educators, we hope that this learning will continue to take place in educational institutions. But unless the schools are equal to the task of absorbing the new digital media, and making acute use of their potentials while guarding against their abuses, schools are likely to become as anachronistic as almshouses, teachers as anachronistic as barber-surgeons. Any culture that wishes to survive will ensure that learning takes place, but the forms and formats remain wide open.
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In this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person's own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning. Throughout this article we draw upon a variety of resources to inform our arguments, including scholarly research, general interest articles, blog posts, and research in progress by our team at Harvard Project Zero, including The Developing Minds and Digital Media Project and The GoodPlay Project.
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1. Education is increasingly universal. Except in the undeveloped world, almost all boys and most girls get an education at least to the secondary level. The diversity of the student body is devious.
2. The hegemony once occupied by humanities and language is increasingly replaced by subjects related to STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
3. In addition to the increasing nationalization of curricula (almost everywhere except the United States), there is growing focus on performance in the so-called international comparisons, especially the TIMMS and the PISA tests.
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While the broad changes in education noted above are not insignificant, they have not dramatically impacted the nature of learning in many schools; the content, functioning, and organization of the typical European classroom model remains relatively unaffected despite major transformations in the world just beyond its walls, and the implementation of more meaningful changes remains stalled. In sharp contrast to the stasis of the classroom model, important changes proliferate in the world. To name a few, our global civilization must address climate change, the revolution in the understanding and use of genetic information, other biomedical breakthroughs, the power and ubiquity of financial markets, the exploration of space, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, massive immigration, and the emergence of powerful new communication media. Both the demands of the workplace and the demands of education have changed profoundly and promise to do so for the foreseeable future.
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Of particular relevance for learning is increased skepticism and contestation of what constitutes “truth.” In the view of many commentators, the collapse of metanarratives (Lyotard 1984) and a heightened awareness of the limitations of language (Derrida 1998; Wittgenstein 2002) have rendered truth as a fluid entity validated primarily by consensus.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
This is such an amazing concept, isn't it?
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
YES! Now, if we could just get a substantial fraction of our colleagues to say and act as if they believed this.
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In the absence of recognized authorities and standards for determining what is considered true, learning is problematic. This postmodern perspective is not universally shared. Many continue to operate in a climate in which facts are fixed entities taken for granted, information is created and circulated relatively slowly, and authority figures are invested with the responsibility of determining and sharing what is considered true and good. Even so, it is undeniable that new opportunities for individuals to assert the truth, or their truths, are afforded today; educators will likely grapple with questions about what is true, and what is worth teaching and learning, more and more, both now and in the future.
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It seems improbable that the traditional educational model is capable of serving the needs of a transformed culture and a population that is growing up in radically changed milieus.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
And, so, what does the model look like?
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
We don't know yet but we are trying to follow Alan Kay's injuction: Invent it!
http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
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Most would agree that a well-educated individual should be able to successfully participate in a global economy where money, culture, ideas, and people circulate rapidly; to synthesize and utilize vast rivers of information obtained through a variety of channels (textual, visual, multimediated); to engage with this information across a variety of disciplines; to be comfortable negotiating a range of social connections, including interacting with diverse populations; and to serve as an engaged and responsible member of one's profession and one's communities.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
and to create their own learning opportunities and spaces in global classrooms.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
Is this a Turing Test for our contexts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
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Despite significant progress in bridging the “digital divide” over the last decade, most of the world's populations are offline; only 5.3% of Africa's population can use the Internet, compared to North America's population, of which 73% are Internet users.
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Twenty-seven percent of North Americans remain offline either by choice or by circumstance (all statistics from World Internet Uses and Population Stats 2008).
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In the subsequent section we describe the ways in which the growing prevalence of digital media in young people's lives—and the powers of these media in and of themselves—may hold the potential to occasion a decisive tipping point with respect to longstanding modes of K-12 learning and education, as well as lifelong education.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
"A decisive tipping point."
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That having been said, we believe that a “perfect storm” of NDM affordances, sociocultural changes associated with globalization, and the growing pace and interconnectedness of human life may potentially add up to a formidable tipping point. We operate on the assumption that NDM contain affordances that, if leveraged properly, could create future learning environments and cultures in which the promises of constructivist, social, situated, and informal learning are realized. We recognize that we could be wrong. We also recognize—and will elucidate at critical points—how the integration of NDM practices into a school setting can be challenging, such as the difficulties of implementing more social-based Internet practices in the classroom, or of incorporating youth's extra-curricular, digital pursuits into fruitful classroom instruction, for example.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
I love the "we could be wrong" part.
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
And I, the understatement "how the integration of NDM practices into a school setting can be challenging".
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While the ubiquity of digital media resources allows for more customized learning within a formal learning context, its primary value lies in the acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of learning that take place beyond formal schooling.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Love. That. Sentence.
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the difference between informal and formal learning as based on “the intentions and structure of the learning experience”
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One could argue that a strictly formal learning experience is characterized by classroom-based instruction featuring an explicit curriculum and traditional pedagogical goals, and scaffolding implemented by a single educator; a pure informal learning experience lacks all of these characteristics.
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While these extremes help to define the argument, multiple hybridic forms of pedagogical practice located on a continuum between formal and informal, which combine elements from both approaches, are more the norm.
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In a postmodern, globally interconnected, digital world, individuals will likely be required to master new technologies and related behaviors throughout a lifetime to successfully learn, synthesize, and adjust to rapidly shifting requirements of the workplace and the culture. “[A] capacity for independent learning,” suggests Brown, “is essential to [students'] future well-being, since they are likely to have multiple careers and will need to continually learn new skills they were not taught in college” (Brown 2006, p. 18). Others argue that informal learning can harness learners' passion related to the activities they voluntarily engage in, and capitalizes upon the collective power of group, rather than individual, endeavors (Ito 2008; Jenkins et al. 2006), with the Internet providing opportunities for self-study and self-directed learning for all, while schools increasingly do not—indeed cannot—handle the burgeoning educational requirements of a growing, ever more diverse population.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
This last part is particularly important. Speaks to what Sir Ken Robinson writes about in "The Element" in terms of personalizing learning and education. Key is we have to teach kids to direct their own learning. "Self-study. Self directed learning." Are we teaching kids to do that?
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Stephen Spaeth on 2009-05-23
Brandon's work hacking his Touch both outside of school and in ITeams shows me one approach we can take toward this goal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whxox00XfTE
He is producing outcomes that we, ITeam members, and his teachers value.
But we didn't "teach" him this, we are primarily encouraging and facilitating some activities.
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As evidence grows concerning the competences gained through these activities, traditional notions of school as the ideal locus of the full range of learning may be disrupted.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Already happening, and I wonder if the re-entrenchment is the first real signal that this disruption is upon us.
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A core pedagogical challenge for informal learning is the learner's ability to apply lessons learned in one context to related (and even unrelated) contexts; this is the classical educational issue of transfer. For informal learning to augment, or even in certain instances replace, formal learning, measures of its quality and its (real or potential) transference to other contexts will need to be more firmly established.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Crucial, crucial point. Context is everything, as Seimens says. ARe we teaching this to kids.
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Should strategies be crafted for assessing the quality of learning in informal environments, helpful criteria might be found among the features of constructivist learning.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Shifting the way we think about assessments are critical.
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Constructivist epistemologies redefine existing pedagogical roles, eliciting more engagement and investment on the part of the learner, and less overt control and knowledge dissemination on the part of the educator.
NDM's vast resources, including the provision of many activities in which the user assumes a formative role, can complement constructivist approaches to education. As noted above, a motivated learner can investigate a wide variety of personal interests on his or her own. Or potentially, he or she can learn sophisticated analytic and social skills by playing complex games or participating in a social network or online forum, entirely independent of formal educational experiences or designated instructors.
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However, there are serious challenges associated with implementing an NDM-based pedagogy. NDM may be seen as sources of entertainment and escape, not learning; additionally, the determination of the proper level of scaffolding can be difficult.
The Internet's potential for learning may be curtailed if youth lack key skills for navigating it, if they consistently engage with Internet resources in a shallow fashion, and/or if they limit their explorations to a narrow band of things they believe are worth knowing. Left to their own devices and without sufficient scaffolding, student investigations may turn out to be thoughtful and meaningful—or frustrating and fruitless. A successful informal learning practice depends upon an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Very powerfully expressed. This is information literacy.
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Identification
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Depth
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In an information-saturated environment, skimming is a critical skill; however, learners drawn to superficial content may be less able to sustain a directed focus, assess findings, and reflect upon the meaning and significance of rapidly encountered information.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Liking this reference to skimming, and to the complexity of reading in these times.
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Assessment
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
I wonder what the solution is to this? There has to be a starting point that we can offer to balance of ideas and let others build on them in personal ways.
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Defined by some as the problem of “balkanization” online, unscaffolded Internet engagement may allow users to self-select information that further refines, or shrinks, one's worldview.
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At this point in time, deeply constructivist classrooms remain few and far between despite evidence that hands-on, problem-solving approaches in the classroom result in higher levels of student engagement, conceptual thinking, knowledge transfer, and retention
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But in an environment of “No Child Left Behind” and standardized tests linked to federal funding, the implementation of constructivist principles in the classroom can be considered a risky enterprise for public schools.
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Recently, renewed attention has been paid to situated or contextualized learning—the contention that learning cannot and should not be separated from relevant physical and social contexts (Lave 1985; Lave and Wenger 1991). In contrast to mainstream classroom approaches, immersive technologies such as virtual worlds, augmented reality games, massive multiplayer games, social networking tools, and knowledge and fan communities offer highly active, situated, and social learning experiences. Engaging recreations of complex historical and present-day events may engender more enduring or nuanced understandings and, when framed as games, perhaps deeper investments in learning.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
NDM is highly contextualizable.
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And, finally, situated learning with NDM suffers from the same difficulties associated with formal assessments as do many NDM learning initiatives. In order for NDM to help students move out of the classrooms and into the world, educators need to carefully consider how to establish baselines for assessing progress in unorthodox settings with little or no precedents, and how to grade students on the basis of their activities in these types of settings.
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Digital technologies offer new ways for students to engage in social learning. Enthusiasts point to the virtues of fully wired learning spaces that enable ongoing dialogue (back-chat) during lectures, polling of students, instantaneous sharing of ideas and work in progress, and immediate access to the Internet's knowledge communities (Vogt and Mazur 2005). The potential also exists to extend this model through long-distance collaborations, distributed cognition projects, and collective intelligence work.
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As Shirky most recently notes, the new tools of “social media” create unprecedented opportunities “to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside of the framework of traditional institutions and organizations”
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These affordances also carry discernable risks. Voices of dissent may not be heard or, perhaps worse, shouted down by the majority.
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However, history teaches us that too often the majority opinion is driven by factors other than rational discourse and honest debate; we note that the concept of the mob is being reframed as a smart or wise agent of change (Rheingold 2003; Surowiecki 2004) in contrast to the traditional definition, “a riotous or disorderly crowd” (Oxford English Dictionary 2000). NDM social learning activities need to be actively monitored to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to participate, and that colleagues treat one another with mutual respect.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
We have to model this always. When does intellectual push back happen with teachers in the room (excluding students)? When do they see us engaging in pushing each other's thinking?
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The social dynamics of a group, and demographic characteristics of members, may affect its potential as a learning collective. Research suggests that students enjoy engaging in group tasks because it enables them to socialize more with their peers; it can be a challenge to keep adolescents in particular—developmentally highly social and self-conscious—focused on tasks when they would prefer to just hang out with friends. The gender of digital participants has also been found to affect collaborative learning practices: As they mature, girls may not want to publicly demonstrate technological fluency for fear of appearing “weird” or violating gender roles. Girls and boys employ different strategies as they pursue investigations, with boys more likely to assemble data and girls more likely to conduct interviews
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A student's persistent connection to others may undercut opportunities for reflection, synthesis, and integration of knowledge as we increasingly rely on each other for what we need to know. If not used judiciously, digital media may over time undermine personal autonomy rather than enhance it.
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We have highlighted the new digital media as a powerful facet of these changes; these media carry affordances that could foment further shifts (for both good and bad), particularly in relation to learning.
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Ultimately, we believe that digital media could be leveraged in ways that bring about a tipping point when learning becomes more decidedly individualized, constructivist, situated, and social.
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The question of whether learning should take place in radically different ways—in terms of content, pedagogy, and assessment—is likely to become urgent in the very near future, in part because young learners themselves may be different from prior generations in their learning orientations; if so, these differences are arguably related to their increasingly digital lives. The question of the role of schools and teachers vis-à-vis digital cultures is particularly urgent. Schools cannot afford to ignore, nor simply attempt to curtail, students' uses of digital media for several compelling reasons.
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First, youth are engaging with digital media at ever-younger ages (Rideout et al. 2003). Students walk into classrooms (even toddle into preschools) armed with new competences, learning preferences, and expectations that call into question existing curricula.
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These observations suggest that many students today are using digital media in ways that might lead them to question approaches that are more teacher-centric, uniform, and passive for students. Again, these labels ignore both the “digital divide” (unequal access to technologies among youth) and the “participation gap” (unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow [Jenkins et al. 2006]). Not all youth exhibit the “neomillienial” traits described above. However, the trends being observed among some students are worth paying attention to, especially as larger efforts are undertaken to narrow the divides and gaps among youth. The world as a whole is increasingly wired, and we are charged with preparing our youth to face the challenges of the future. Success in that endeavor will remain elusive until we teach them to weather the challenges of the present.
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Second, as exciting as these new facets of learning are for supporters of constructivist, situated, and group learning, the mixed potentials described in the “Looking Forward” section of this article must be acknowledged. Educational institutions are important stakeholders for cultivating the promises but also helping to counter the risks associated with these trends. For example, while young people may be comfortable with, and even enjoy, navigating the volume of information yielded from a typical Google search, their assessments of what is reliable and trustworthy may be weak (Guinee 2007; Palfrey and Gasser 2008). Formal schools have both a stake in—and are well poised to scaffold—good assessments and syntheses of information (Gardner 2007). Understanding informal learning should arguably be on the agenda for schools, too. Should informal learning spaces continue to grow in importance, it seems that a role for schools and teachers may be warranted—perhaps if only to provide their students with scaffolding so that they can properly acknowledge, assess, and (ideally) transfer learning to other contexts.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
This last part is huge. We need to understand and help students undertake informal learning in much wider contexts.
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The advent of digital media and their affordances—particularly those related to the emergence of potentially new learning styles and the explosion of informal learning communities online—constitutes clear pressures on educational institutions to acknowledge them in some fashion. If schools do not take seriously the positive and negative potentials of digital media for learning, they risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to the lives students lead outside of school and to the futures for which they are being prepared.
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In thinking about the future, Perkins (2008) argues that our attention should be directed to the growing “relevance gap” in education today—the failure to teach things that have a good chance of being relevant in the uncertain future. As we've noted, successful and fulfilled individuals, workers, and local and global citizens in the future will need new kinds of competences ranging from information synthesis to social skills to the cultivation of an ethical mind. Of special importance is the capacity to draw on various disciplinary skills in order to tackle problems that by their nature entail multiple disciplinary perspectives. Schools themselves have little experience in doing this, at least before the years of higher education; it is difficult to see how they can meet this challenge without judicious use of the new digital media (Gardner 2007).
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Again, this is such a huge challenge to schools. I wonder if informal learning can be taught formally.
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What might it take for slow-to-change schools to embrace the potentials, and deftly manage the risks, associated with digital media and cultivate broader competences for the future?
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Key question.
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This disruption is most likely to emerge in places where traditional ways of teaching are outright failing; over time, Christensen says, educators and the general public will come to see the potential of powerful, individualized, and connected forms of media. Other studies of school change suggest that for systemic change to be widely adopted and successfully implemented, innovations must be at least somewhat familiar to stakeholders, and presented as a coherent system (Ellsworth 2004). Informed and skilled leadership is obviously essential as well (Fullan 2007).
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
True, but I don't agree with Christensen's vision here.
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Part of the answer to change surely lies beyond the walls of schools themselves. Parents, government, the professions, even the marketplace, are all important stakeholders in the state of learning. Alignment among these diverse constituencies may be hard to achieve; here political leadership of the highest order is essential. In the last few decades, the phrases “learning communities,” “lifelong learning,” and “the learning society” have virtually become clichés. Yet like many clichés in education, and elsewhere, the terms themselves are more familiar than actual instances of the phenomena they describe. In our view, no society is likely to thrive in the future unless it actually is dedicated to lifelong learning; and this, in turn, will require both a society that values learning, and communities that continue to learn. As educators, we hope that this learning will continue to take place in educational institutions. But unless the schools are equal to the task of absorbing the new digital media, and making acute use of their potentials while guarding against their abuses, schools are likely to become as anachronistic as almshouses, teachers as anachronistic as barber-surgeons. Any culture that wishes to survive will ensure that learning takes place, but the forms and formats remain wide open.
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Will Richardson on 2009-03-12
Powerful conclusion, and accurate. Unfortunately, it seems leadership and vision around these ideas is still lacking.
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Public Stiky Notes
http://books.google.com/books?id=MeY5hdgj1bAC
Adam's and Emily's portfolios.
Lobster research projects.
Capstone projects. While I grant the possibility that students might object, I don't see it yet. I find more hesitance from teachers wondering whether it is worth the effort.
http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whxox00XfTE
He is producing outcomes that we, ITeam members, and his teachers value.
But we didn't "teach" him this, we are primarily encouraging and facilitating some activities.
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