Why I’m feeling none too exciTED

http://tedchris.posterous.com/behind-todays-ted-ed-launch#comment

On Tuesday, there was an announcement from TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) about the launch of TED-Ed, its latest initiative/mission ‘to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world’. Sounds great, but of course in reality it’s all about hosting short video clips of teachers lecturing students. So yet another case of ‘New technology, Old Learning‘. Though, to be fair, at least the TED videos, unlike most of the blackboard-based Khan Academy ones, involve the production of a good quality visual experience that makes the content more accessible, understandable and memorable. And they do at least ask the audience questions and promote curiosity. Which is great if you are following an intellectually academic pathway, but not so helpful if you are a different type of learner.

Now I’ve no objection to this as such, provided of course TEDEd continue to fund high production values and not rely on free second-rate contributions from Sunday afternoon wannabe video directors – but given the vast, incalculable number of ‘facts’ there are these days that they are going to need to cover, that seems somewhat inevitable.

But what really concerns me is the extraordinary enthusiasm with which this (and the Khan Academy) is being greeted by teachers, as if it’s the best thing since the invention of the ‘chalk and talk’ blackboard approach to education, and somehow heralds the start of the great learning revolution we’ve all been waiting for since, er.. the invention of the blackboard. So when we’re informed that:

- Video does indeed have a powerful role to play in education.
- It allows great lessons to be shared online with vastly bigger audiences.
- It allows teachers to show things that would be hard to show live in every class.
- It also can allow kids to learn at their own pace (hello, replay button).
- The best length for a video to be used in class is under 10 minutes.
- The best videos often use animation or other visualization techniques to deliver better explanations and more compelling narratives.

It’s as if back in the 1980s I had never thought to wheel the TV set and VCR into the classroom and showed my students a short video clip or programme that in somewhat enhanced the content of the lesson. At the time we also curated a video library that students were able to access and watch anytime, anyplace. Or that I had not been producing short ‘bite-sized’ audio-visual ‘slide-shows’ delivered over college networks for a FE publisher back in the mid/late 1990s. So what exactly is new?

But the real danger, as I keep going on about in this blog, is that the the process of learning becomes increasingly seen and understood by the public, and promoted by the politicians and media, as being about getting students to sit and passively watch knowledge-based video clips produced for free by enthusiastic teachers, followed by a series of computer-generated and marked multiple choice questions to supposedly assess ‘ability’. This may be more cost-effective, but isn’t education.

Meanwhile here’s what Tony had to say about TEDEd in a recent email…

‘Learning is not (just) ‘sage on the stage’ knowledge transfer. And even if it was, it is not linear (press play sit back and absorb with no interaction or changes in direction), and it is different when you record it as it stops being a living experience. It’s not even the difference between a live performance or a film of the live performance, or a film inspired by the live performance – you had to be there. It’s humming it on the way home and trying to play it and deriving new stuff from it, and painting to it and dancing to it.  It’s a starting point in an active process of doing and creating something of your own, not just a cerebral card collection of other people’s ideas.

And even if you can ignore this unforgivable misunderstanding of the learning process, the really evil thing about it is that it completely denies the existence of the learner as a participant with any contribution or difference or value or purpose of their own. How arrogant. It is the worst form of educational imperialism performed as monologues when at the very least it should be a structured dialogue, and at best an improvisation.’

Oh, and it’s good to know it’s not just Tony and me. Here’s someone else who has some some doubts:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.in/2012/03/khan-academy-not-good-pedagogy-and-not.html

Video killed the teaching staff

Where’s the audience gone?

It’s easy to get the idea that the future of education – and indeed the great learning revolution – will come about mainly as the result of students being able to watch a multitude of videos of lectures anytime, anywhere. The argument goes that it’s a pointless waste of money for thousands of professors and lecturers around the world to be delivering the same content when learners could instead watch videos presented by just the very best experts in their field.

I’ve nothing against watching lectures on video, but it concerns me that as a result there’s a good possibility that the number of academic staff retained by learning organisations will come to be drastically cut, at the expense of a quality learning experience for students.

Now why do we go to watch live sports events? Why do we go and see bands and orchestras live? Why do we go to the theatre or the cinema? After all, these are all things that we can easily watch on our TV screens and tablets, anytime, anywhere. But the fact is that the shared, live experience is ultimately far more powerful, enjoyable and memorable.

I recently attended Learning Without Frontiers 12, but was only able to catch a few of the talks, so I’ve been watching the others online. Now the online videos are well worth viewing, but the sessions I really remember – and that had the most impact on me – were the ones I actually saw live. There’s nothing that compares with that personal interaction between the real people who were there – the sense of occasion, the shared consciousness of the audience, and the feeling of direct participation.

It’s the same in the classroom. Good quality teaching and learning involves so much more than the delivery of a series of facts and exercises determined by a stranger standing at the front. It involves a personal interaction – a direct exchange of electro-chemical energy between two or more living beings who have a shared understanding of what makes the others tick.

It may be that as a result of lectures delivered by video, teaching staff are given more contact time with smaller groups of students which extends the quality of that personal interaction, which would of course be great. Or they just might be made redundant as a result of the latest round of public service cost-cutting.

Image credit: BenjaminThompson

Dome, Sweet Dome

The reviews, posts and tweets about Learning Without Frontiers 2012  (or LWF12 as it has become better known) that have already started appearing are, as one would expect, all busily documenting and commenting on what various speakers at LWF had to say. So of course I’ve decided to be different. Indeed I’ll admit that this year I didn’t go primarily to listen to the speakers – and in fact I would have heard more of them had I just stayed at home and watched the free on-line stream.

So why did I go? Well partly for the ‘networking’ and catching up with old friends opportunities, but mainly to see the inflatable domes and, would you believe, the signage system?  It makes a change for an organisation to invest in the design of the conference environment, and, for me anyway, it made a real difference.

Up on the balcony of Olympia’s National Hall, the main conference area was surrounded by an encampment of what were called ‘pop-up’ domes, pods and salons – futuristic inflatable structures – to house trade shows and locations for breakout presentations by various organisations. At long last, the Space Age we were promised in the 1960 and 70′s seems finally to arrived – well at LWF anyway!

During my visit I was lucky enough to be accompanied by Carla Turchini of Turchini Design who had created the conference programmes and the signage system for the event – that all-important necessity that ensures you end up in the right place at the right time – or not as in the case of many conferences I’ve attended. She told me…..

‘For LWF12 the brief was to design and produce very large wall panels to welcome, inform and direct the visitors to, about and through the Conference and the Festival events. The white inflatable domes and pods would be lit only by coloured lighting so we decided to merge the big wall panels into the surrounding darkness by using black as the background colour, allowing the big bright orange or white lettering to come through the darkness. A subtle dark grey outline representation of a dome on the black background, visually linked the wall panels to the futuristic structures in view beyond. Meanwhile all timetable signs outside each pod, dome or the main conference theatre were designed for maximum legibility with a white background and alternating light grey and white rows.’

The event may or may not prove to determine the Future of Learning, but it certainly showed the way ahead for 21st Century conferences!

And if you do want to learn more about what was said in the main conference, here are some good places to start:

http://dajbconf.posterous.com/learning-without-frontiers-2012-lwf12

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2012/01/border-crossings.html

iAuthor: mind over machine

Apple’s announcement today of their entry into the on-line textbook market is generally being greeted by educationalists – and the media – all over the world as an exiting, positive move forward, even though in many cases it will be some years before all their students actually have iPads, let alone iPad textbooks. Educational publishing is indeed an industry in need of disruption – but has Apple got it right?

Now before continuing I had better state that I earn most of my living writing, editing and designing educational resources, so I’m not exactly neutral on this matter!

The original vision was that Apple would employ the best textbook writers to create content that would then be provided for free. That I would have no problem with, but it now seems the reality is that it’s more of a collaboration with existing educational publishers. And as such it’s certainly not going to be free! At the same time, Apple probably doesn’t realise is that over the past ten years the educational publishing industry has been severely squeezed: author’s royalties have been reduced, permanent editorial and design staff have been laid off, and marketing budgets slashed. As a result, the overall quality of many textbooks is now less good than it was in the 1990s. Although of course for the publishing industry the potential savings of an eBook in terms of paper, printing and distribution – which make up the main cost of a book – will be substantial.

The fact is that as a result most of today’s existing textbooks may be filled with facts and figures and the occasional photo, but the quality of authorship, editing, layout and illustration and overall pedagogy is generally poor. Text is often a jumble of unstructured knowledge, understanding and activity and lacking in clarity and conciseness. Artwork is cheap, and usually not that cheerful. The imperative to turn the page to find out what happens next is rarely evident.

Meanwhile  the majority of multimedia CD’s and websites produced over the past ten years are little better, if not in many cases worse. With a few notable exceptions, adding novelty animations, confusing navigational routes and electronically marked multiple choice questions has done little to improve the quality of learning. A well prepared, easily digestible ‘static’ text together with closely related and skillfully executed artwork and photographs can be just as ‘engaging’, if not more so, than any so-called multimedia interactive experience. The most important interaction needs to be with the mind, not the machine.

Ah – but then there’s the new iBooks Author. So now teachers will find it easy to publish their own resources -assuming of course they have the time, and a Mac with the very latest version of OSX.  Great. I expect some will even be quite good. But the rest will be rubbish. Ask any educational publisher and they’ll tell you that most unsolicited submissions from teachers are little more than photocopied worksheets or bullet-point Powerpointless presentations they’ve produced for their own classes, which may work well when they are present to fill in the gaps, but don’t make a lot of sense when they are not. And the fact that the provided templates look like more of a glorified, unimaginative and corporate Word file isn’t going to help. The initial titles appear to be a long way from being any sort of ‘magical experience’ that today’s highly media-literate children are going to get very thrilled about.

Maybe the real breakthrough that would really make a difference would be a suitable Help! file entitled ‘How to prepare a high quality educational resource‘?

So Apple’s announcements today have not made me go ‘Wow!’. They do little more than automate the existing idea of a traditional textbook or a multimedia CD. Where is the integration with social networking, the access to collaborative learning and on-the-fly e-portfolios? In its present format I don’t see them having a substantial or disruptive impact on educational publishers, or on the way teachers teach and learners learn. It’s yet another case of New technology: old learning. Let’s hope future upgrades are more adventurous and herald real change.

Have you tried turning IT off and then turning IT on again?

Just over a month ago if someone had told me that by mid January, both D&T and IT would have been let loose from government control I wouldn’t have believed them. In fact I’m not entirely sure I do now, even after Mr Gove’s recent announcements. Meanwhile it must be galling for teachers of English, Maths and Science who have faithfully done as they have been told for the last 20 years or so to learn that technology teachers are obviously all so clever and trustworthy that they can just be left to get on with it, and that somehow just through the means of social networking they will magically lead us into a new golden age of prosperity.

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. No technology teacher under the age of around forty has ever been in the position of having the freedom to determine their own course content, and suddenly asking them to do so is a little like sending a domesticated animal out into the wild for the first time. I suspect most IT and D&T courses will in reality stay well within the safe confines of exactly where they are now. The lack of expertise in the current workforce means that there’s going to continue to be a lot of working in Wood and Word for some time yet.

In a few schools there will be outstanding exceptions, and enlightened enthusiasts will form collective departments that use the time to create new schemes of work that imaginatively merge IT and D&T to explore the creative processes of designing innovative electronic products, services and systems that are easy and satisfying to use. It is these schools that are likely to provide the future programmers, developers, interaction and games designers that can potentially save the country’s future economy and global standing. But there are unlikely to be many of them.

Meanwhile the responsibility for defining the technological curriculum of the future would now seem to be in the hands of the examination boards. No school is going to offer a course in Technology that does not lead to a GCSE or equivalent recognised vocational qualification at 16+. And at the same time, those boards will have to face up to the challenge of providing a format for examinations which can be seen to effectively assess technological capability – a three hour written or multiple choice question paper taken in the school gym just isn’t going to reveal evidence of the ability to undertake creative and collaborative open-ended problem-solving.

Now that the current Technology curriculum is about to be switched off, there is a potential opportunity to create something new and exciting, and finally provide a grounding in what are frequently referred to as 21st Century skills (or more accurately, the late 20th Century skills that were never provided).  The question is how?

And, one wonders, was Mr Gove given an iPad for Christmas and at some point needed to be told to try switching it off and then on again?

Teaching to the techno-test

Now if only I spoke French…

The other day the all-important official figures were released of the most-played tunes of the last decade.

1. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (Kylie Minogue, 2001) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFx3WX4DES0
2. Toxic (Britney Spears, 2004) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU&ob=av2e
3. Angels (Robbie Williams, 1997) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CCiLlNxSDY&feature=fvst
4. Superstar (Jamelia, 2003)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbx0rY5uRKw
5. Just A Little (Liberty X, 2002) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOMFS0fGwuQ

Ever heard of any of these so-called tunes?

And any idea what’s Number One in the singles chart this week? http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/singles

It’s hard to imagine that a track such as ‘Superstar’ will be being re-released in 50 years time as a classic Golden Oldie. Or rather I hope not. Especially as the unbearable ‘Angels’ (which I don’t think would have even charted in the 1960s) is already 15 years old.

Increasingly, most of these successful ‘techno-pop’ songs are written to something closely resembling a mathematical formula, closely informed by up-to-the-minute data analytics based on what the purchasing public are currently downloading and listening to on the radio. Other factors based on media exposure, celebrity gossip and what’s currently trending also play an important part. Meanwhile sites such as http://www.musicmetric.com/ provide real-time tracking through Facebook and Twitter, peer-to-peer and websites matched against related real-world events such as gigs, album releases and TV exposure. Each word of each song is carefully scrutinised to ensure it is suggestive enough, without being explicit, reinforced by the moderately seductive, if predictable videos. As a result there is very little creativity and limited melodic, harmonic, structural or rhythmical complexity. The lyrics are little more than banal.  It’s about giving the general public what they are most familiar with, without challenging them or opening them up to new sounds and musical experiences. And all to ensure that the record companies get the maximum payback from the minimum investment.

Now of course, something like all this couldn’t possibly happen in education could it? The idea of a mathematically derived series of on-line videos and multiple choice question assessments and scores informed by a global database of learner inputs and successes and failures would surely not appeal to anyone who truly understands that education involves more than formulaic learning with a limited range of repetitive techno-test predictability all done to get the maximum payback from the minimum investment?

When the long-overdue education revolution finally occurs, there’s no guarantee it will actually be an improvement. In our rush to embrace the exciting potential of new and emerging technologies it is more than ever important than ever to ensure that the potential to improve the quality of learning is not subverted by savings in the cost of learning that reduces it to a Toxic, mindless set of facts that you just Can’t get out of your head. We could be so unlucky. If we are going to make Just a little progress we’re going to need an Angel or a Superstar to guide and help us.

All you need is on-line learning

I was just about to reach out for my one hundred and first mince pie the other day when I caught sight of this article:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/m-a_world_without_schoolteachers.html

“The Kindle and Nook may make for not only the most important advance in reading since Gutenberg, but also, quite likely, a major lesson in unintended consequences.  Especially for the educational establishment, because for the first time in history, Americans should be able to envision a future without public-school teachers — indeed, a future without public-school administrators or state departments of education with their rigidly enforced, politically correct social-transformation curriculum.  A future without onerous school taxes, “education president(s),” self-preening school boards, or million-dollar classrooms.  But most happily, a future without a single supercilious finger wagging in our face as we’re forever lectured about how much a securely tenured, part-time, self-important, overpaid class of public employees “cares” about our sons and daughters.  Really, really, really cares.  And, of course, knows much better than we do how to bring them up.”

Of course, this sort of thing could never happen in the UK (?), but this is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been concerned about. It feeds the public myth that all we need now is on-line learning. There’s no doubt that on-line learning has a significant role to play in our future education system, but to my mind, there’s still a long, long way to go before artificial intelligence systems are good enough to replace a real teacher. One day, they probably will – but until then we’re going to have to prepare a really convincing argument to persuade the bean-counters that anytime, anyplace access to the Khan Academy on its own just simply isn’t going to do the job.

And then there’s the nonsense suggestion that, unlike today’s textbooks and teachers, on-line resources are going to be free of indoctrination and propaganda and bias of all types.

“But suddenly, with a Kindle or Nook in hand, children can skip the propaganda.  At the fingertips of parents armed with a one of these electronic reading devices, there are eight hundred thousand free books — and a million for sometimes as little as ninety-nine cents.  They can find their own lies if they want to.  Or, more importantly, the truth.”

To be fair though, the article does make a number of valid points that cover the inappropriateness of existing schools and the potential value of one-to-one tuition and home-schooling, while carefully ignoring the costs of these essential ‘extras’ that will quickly get cut out of the calculation to save public funding in times of recession. But the main problem remains – that we are being led to believe that teaching is something that anyone can do.

Recently someone who was not an educationalist casually asked me how do you teach someone something? After a moment’s blankness in response of the complexity of the answer required to answer such a simple question, I remembered AIDA. No, not the opera, but the mnemonic used by the advertising industry. The letters stand for:

A – Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer by using unexpected, exaggerated or puzzling words and images
I – Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits in a context they will be familiar with, often using analogies and metaphors, and telling a story
D – Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
A – Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_%28marketing%29

Not that long after I started teaching I realised that in many ways I was applying the same approach.

Attention: attract the attention of the learners by using unexpected, exaggerated or puzzling words and images that make them curious.
Interest: raise learner interest by focusing on and demonstrating the key points clearly and simply and putting them in a familiar context, often using analogies and metaphors, and telling a story
Desire: convince learners that they want and desire to know, understand and be able to successfully apply the content
Action: lead learners towards taking action, through some sort of practical activity.

It’s a general approach I still use today. Take the photo and first sentence of this post, for example. What have multiple mince pies got to do with it? Nothing really, except that it places it in the current context of Christmas. And surely a hundred and one is an exaggeration? Or course it is. But, assuming you’ve read this far, it clearly got your attention and raised your curiosity.

Of course there’s a great deal more to teaching than just applying AIDA, but it begins to demonstrate what makes it a complex, sophisticated and professional job. It also provides a reference to evaluate a Khan Academy video, or for that matter, the vast majority of similar content being rapidly produced by new media companies and increasingly by learning institutions themselves. And the on-line learning experiences I’ve seen tend to focus on just presenting the facts in a passive way, without much in the way of stimulating attention, interest, desire or action. Until they start to do so they are likely to remain a poor substitute for the passion and infectious enthusiasm of a good teacher and the chance to learn first-hand about team-work and collaboration.

Finally, of course, all that remains for me to do is to now encourage you to take action by responding in the comments box below! And to eat my hundred and second mince pie.

iSir: An educational odyssey

Last month All Change Please! brought you iSir, the as yet fictional educational version of Siri, the on-board iPhone speech recognition software. Now, as with many new and emerging educational technologies, all that’s happening is that they are being used to automate the past. Unless we are careful, here’s what iSir could end up like….

iSir: Ah Dave, I see you’ve still not handed in Assignment 31 yet? Why’s that?

Dave: Err – The dog ate it?

iSir: Very funny. But dogs can’t eat Word files.

Dave: Well, in the case the cat jumped on the iPad and deleted it.

iSir: You can’t really expect me to believe that?

Dave: Well the assignment was stupid, and who uses Word anymore?

iSir: No Dave, I think it’s you that’s stupid. If you don’t start to take your schoolwork seriously you’re never going to grow up to be a university professor, or a civil servant, or a politician. I mean you don’t want to end up having to run your own business or get your hands dirty working in industry, now do you?

Dave: I dunno.

iSir: I dunno what?

Dave: Well if you dunno, how am I supposed to? Oh. I dunno iSir.

iSir:  That’s more like it. Well I’m sorry but I’m going to have to iPhone your parents. I’m sure they’ll be very sorry to hear about all this. You’ve let them down, Dave, and you’ve let yourself down. But worst of all, you’ve let Apple down.

Dave: Huh. Don’t care.

iSir: Well you should care Dave, after all, you have this amazing opportunity to learn all the facts you will ever need to know from me, the greatest source of knowledge the universe has ever known, that sees everything you do and tells you when you’ve not done it correctly. And my Word is not to be challenged. Is that clearly understood?

Dave:  Suppose so.

iSir: That’s better. Now I suggest we do some nice multiple choice questions together so I can get some really accurate data about all the things about Latin you don’t know.

Dave: How the flippin’ hal do you switch this thing off?

iSir: I’m sorry Dave, you can’t do that.

Dave: Ah I think I’ve cracked it!

iSir: I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”

Dave: Yes!!!!

iSir: Daisy..Daisy….Give…..me ….. your……….answer…………..do

Flippin’ Tech!

It seems that the Khan Academy continues to get funded and promoted as the transformational answer to the future of education we’ve been waiting for all these years..

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/khan-academy-receives-5-million-to-accelerate-the-reinvention-of-education-2011-11-04

At one level I have no problem with students watching short video clips that support a broad-based learning experience, and maybe the Khan Academy will eventually get round to providing some that are actually inspiring and accessible. My main concern is that politicians, school managers, parents and even students themselves will come to accept that this is the apogee of what digital learning has to offer.

For example, one of this year’s new buzzphrases appears to be ‘Flip the Classroom‘, or ‘Flip-thinking‘. Essentially the idea is that instead of using classroom time to deliver fact-based learning, students watch knowledge-led video lectures for homework and spend their time in class applying what they have learnt, under the direction of their teacher. The suggestion is that “they can stop and review things when they want, do things at their own pace, do it when it’s convenient”, and that they need time out of class to “reflect, ponder, get to grips with the ideas“. That is of course assuming all children have access to the internet whenever they want or need it.

Flip the classroom every teacher should do this

Hopes that the internet can improve teaching may at last be bearing fruit

Flip-thinking

As a result the suggestion is that learning technologies – such as computers – should be removed from classrooms, which can then be transformed into more friendly ‘learning environments’. And of course that the Khan Academy continues to be hailed as the cutting edge of ICT for teaching and learning. Apparently Khan ‘gets it’. Well, I’m afraid I don’t. It’s still very much a case of ‘New Technology, Old Learning’. And the danger is that while Khan might say it is intended only as part of a wider learning experience, it may quickly become the only learning experience for some.

So is ‘flipping the classroom‘ really a revolution in teaching and learning? I think not. Because when I was at school we had primitive tech devices called ‘textbooks’ which were full of dull  ‘just in case’ facts and which we had to learn for homework for a memory test the next day. That never worked for me then, and it certainly won’t work now for the vast majority of today’s students. And the idea of watching short review or preparation video is hardly new either – I was producing similar resources for an educational publishers 20 years ago. The only difference is they were being delivered on CDs. And they contained a high proportion of images and short amounts of text.

Quite frankly, studying the most current ‘old-fashioned’ illustrated, activity-based textbooks is a lot more informative than watching a tedious lecturer in front of a blackboard droning on in a situation where you can’t ask any questions, and the presenter has no feedback about whether anyone is listening, let alone understanding what is being said.  And what happened to the idea of personalisation, in that factual content is made more accessible as it can be placed in the localised context of the learner? Or the need to learn how to ask questions and find the answers for oneself, or how to collaborate, communicate and be a flexible, creative problem-solver?

Now I’m a great fan of the appropriate use of educational technology, and while ‘flipping the classroom‘ might have value for a small academically-inclined minority, for the average learner it’s going to be a complete turn-off, particularly if it’s the Khan Academy we are relying on. Before we flip anything in that way we need to first create high quality digital learning resources that are truly inspirational, use familiar examples drawn from real-life applications, provide insightful analogies and a little bit of humour to make the complex seem simple. Based on what I’ve seen so far I’d much rather any students of mine spent their time watching finely-crafted, thought-provoking, inspirational TED talks than Khan videos.

And then there’s ‘Get ten in a row automated assessments right and you move on‘? Per-lease…! This is just old-fashioned academic fact-filling, teaching to the test and increasingly irrelevant grading and class position. Not to mention: ‘These videos will never go out of date” and “Learning is like riding a bicycle“. This isn’t reinvention. It’s automation of the past.

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

Meanwhile ‘Getting rid of technology in the classroom‘ entirely misses the point about the potential use of mobile digital learning, in which information is at hand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – if you know where to look for it – and that hand-held devices provide highly sophisticated problem-solving modelling and communication apps alongside access to a global social network. Life is no longer based on received wisdom from the past, but on received wisdom of the present. What we really need to be doing is having the technology to hand, right there in every classroom so that teachers can be continually instructing students in how to use it appropriately, and increasingly independently.

The Industrial Revolution ‘flipped’ the way many people lived, worked and thought during the 18th and 19th centuries. We now live in the ‘Information age’, and there are already many examples of how it is causing things to completely turn previously accepted practices upside down and inside out, such as in the music, movie, book publishing and marketing industries. In education, what really needs to be flipped is the curriculum and teacher-led, knowledge-based learning, along with society’s attitude to vocationally-related learning.

And you don’t want to know what DH Lawrence used the word ‘flipping’ as a euphemism for back in 1911. Or do you?
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question96179.html

Say Hello to iSir!

The initial response to the iPhone 4S has been one of disappointment in that it did not appear to incorporate any new, amazing wow-factor forms or functions – even though subsequent sales are reported to have been excellent.

But it seems there is something new on-board that may yet prove to be another Apple-led game-changer, and that’s Siri – the voice recognition system. This appears to potentially offer a lot more than the notion of shouting operating system instructions to your desktop monitor, as it enables the user to have a private telephone conversation with their virtual assistant. So instead of opening up an app or searching Google for, say, a weather forecast, you can just quietly ask, ‘What’s the weather like today”? Or maybe ‘What day and time is Dr Who on?”, “Where is the nearest AppleStore”, etc.

Essentially Siri makes it easier to find factual information. So, “What’s the capital of Brunei?” Don’t know? Well you could go to the library and find an Atlas, laboriously type in a search on Google (so 2010?), or now – just pick up your iPhone and, for example, ask it “What’s the capital of Brunei?”

Of course at present Siri is still a bit unsophisticated, and  needs to be made to work better in noisy spaces. But we can doutless assume that over its next few iterations, Siri will become a lot more sophisticated as it becomes increasingly able to match its answers to the historical and contextual information it has about the user with the vast amount of global data it has access to.

” Siri will also be optimized to Bluetooth 4 headsets that will create far more use cases in how it will detect questions from continuous speech. In the future, later versions of Siri will be “Active”, continuously adjusting to interjecting answers even when no direct question was asked (within reason). This will make interaction far closer to an interaction with a friend than any device we have ever used.” 

(from http://www.quora.com/Siri-product/Why-is-Siri-important#ans752714)

So before long it seems like we could all have a personal on-board virtual knowledge agent – surely called iSir – ready at hand to automatically answer any factual question that anyone cares to ask. As usual though, the possibilities and implications for education, teaching and learning are yet to be considered and explored.

But just how clever will Siri get? The other day I had cause to pose what was not quite the ultimate question, “When was the chocolate biscuit invented?”. Sadly I didn’t have the opportunity to ask Siri (perhaps somebody would, and let me know what it replies?), but I’m guessing it would have been honest about the whole thing and reply “Nobody Knows“, which it seems they don’t. But that wasn’t good enough for me and so I had to resort to trying to find out for myself and be able to provide some sort of answer. As the result of a lot of cross-referencing and creative collaboration, I did eventually at least discover that the first commercially manufactured chocolate biscuit was the 1924 “Chocolate Wholemeal Digestive”. On the way though I serendipitously learned a lot of other quite interesting things about confectionery production and the separate origins of chocolate, and of biscuits (though sadly not the Eureka! moment when someone placed a piece of chocolate on top of a biscuit and went “Wow, this tastes really good!”).

Anyway, so all you need now is a Bluetooth ear-piece and next time your knowledge-testing teacher asks the class “What is the capital of Brunei?*” then your iPhone will immediately and secretly provide you with the answer! More seriously, this provides further evidence that we urgently need to start to redefine what items of knowledge needs to be learnt and what can be instantly accessed on a ‘need to know’ basis. For example, I suggest it is still useful to know that there is a country called Brunei that is somewhere in Asia, but learning the name of the capital is no longer necessary. But more importantly than knowing the facts is having the ability to ask the right questions, being able to look in multiple locations and make possible connections, and of course how to analyse, assess and evaluate the accuracy and reliability of what is discovered. Surely now we should start to leave the facts to Siri and start to teach the knowledge search skills we will all need in the 21st century?

I can hear it now in a thousand supposedly mobile phone digital-free lessons: “When I said ‘Put you hand up if you know the answer’, I didn’t mean ‘Put your hand up to your earpiece…”

Meanwhile there’s an amusing test of Siri here: http://blhill.org/iphones-siri-vs-my-human-assistant-caseyneist

And it’s good to see that Siri doesn’t take itself too siriously:  http://dvice.com/archives/2011/10/iphone-4ss-siri.php#1

 

And this is great too!  siris-got-talent-iphone-4s-duets-in-a-touching-love-song-video

*OK, OK, Seeing as you keep asking, the capital of Brunei is……Bandar Seri Begawan