21st Century Schizoid Learning

I first encountered the world of education (as a prospective teacher as opposed to a student) some 37 years ago, in 1975, which by chance marked the dawn of the final quarter of the 20th century. It was a time when design and processed-based education was being pioneered. The phrase ‘throw-away society’ had already be coined, and we all knew about the hidden persuasive power of the media and advertising. And because of the oil crisis in the early 1970s there was much talk of the need for conservation and alternative energy, and public collaboration and for greater participation in new design processes. Quite clearly the end was in sight for the then current approach to the industrial society, mass-production and established design-by-drawing methodologies. By the end of the 1970s the impending impact of the computer on our lives was becoming evident too.

So when I come across the phrases ‘21st Century Learning‘ and ‘21st Century Skills‘, I can’t help thinking that what is actually being discussed is ‘late 20th Century Learning and Skills‘. The need for critical evaluation and problem-solving, creativity and innovation, communication and collaboration was clearly identified way back in the last century, but it has taken 37 years for them to start to become more widely identified and accepted (except of course by the present UK government).

Let’s project forward another 37 years then, to 2049. What are the educational needs of someone actually born in the 21st Century? The oldest will be turning 12 this year, and by 2049 will be 49. But unlike the 1960s and 70s when the next 25 years seemed relatively easy to anticipate, there’s now little indication as to how things will be in the future. The only prediction we can perhaps make, based on the fact that technology has clearly entered a highly disruptive phase, is that the next quarter of a century is completely unpredictable.

Thus the so-called ’21st Century Learning and Skills’ might well be hopelessly out-dated and inadequate to deal with living and working in the later years of this century. I suspect (and hope) they will still have some value, but who knows what things will actually be like in the brave new world our current generation of school-children will find themselves?

Perhaps the most important thing we should be focusing on is to ensure the inhabitants of tomorrow’s world are as flexible as possible in their thoughts and actions, well prepared for and accepting of discontinuous change as something normal, and more than willing to take risks and deal with failure. But surely the most important thing of all is to ensure that 21st Century children gain a positive view of education, and the ability to be able to learn for themselves in whatever future they encounter? Sadly, at present, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Image credit: Photo-Extremist: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thevlue/4839060646

The art of anticipation

Today’s futures forecast – major disruption is expected…

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, things didn’t change very much. Tomorrow would be very much like today, which was much the same as yesterday and the day before was. But slowly, ever since around the 1960s, the rate of change has started to speed up a bit. The pace really began to pick up in the 1980s and 1990s, but even then many people believed things would stop changing after a while and go back to normal – and after all computers “are just another tool aren’t they“? But things just kept on changing, and increasingly we started to accept the fact that frequent change was inevitable, albeit in evolutionary, predictable ways that were perhaps not too difficult to cope with. Today, a few brave souls are finally beginning to realise that tomorrow’s changes are becoming increasingly unpredictable, discontinuous and disruptive, and that the reality is that tomorrow is unlikely to be like anything we’ve ever had to deal with before.

Predicting the future is, in itself, not that difficult – science fiction writers have being doing it for years. But what they consistently get wrong is how long it is going to be before their visions become a mainstream reality. 1984 is still on its way. The voyage to Jupiter due to depart in 2001 has been indefinitely postponed. And somehow I don’t think that by November 2019 Los Angeles if going to be full of flying cars, or off-world colony replicants for Harrison Ford to identify and terminate. But one day, I’m sure all these things will come to pass.

Meanwhile this video link appeared the other day. A group of schoolchildren had asked delegates at the LWF12 conference for their views on the future – what it will look like, and what are the skills that will be needed to be successful? Full credit to the school and children involved in making the video – however many of the responses were somewhat predictable – digital literacy, more engaging computer technology,  global communication through utopian technological fixes, or the more dystopian, ‘we’ll all have to save more to survive’. And it may be more honest, but is it acceptable anymore to admit you don’t really know what the future will bring?

Now, given that I’ve had more time than the delegates did to think of clever answers, what struck me was that they were generally speaking providing essentially wild, uninformed guesses, aspirations and fears. Which is worrying really, because, assuming things continue to change discontinuously at an increasingly fast pace, my prediction is that one of the most essential successful survival skills of the 21st century will be the ability to anticipate and predict what’s going to happen next, and even more importantly, when. And that’s something that’s yet to make it onto the curriculum.

Futures forecasting is, of course, by no means new, and there are plenty of well established techniques and methodologies. Essentially there are two main approaches. The first is ‘predictive’, where subjective guesses are made about expected desirable and undesirable outcomes, supported by likely evolutionary time-scales, projections and statements made about the social, economic, technical and political circumstances that will need to be in place for that particular future to occur. The second type is a ‘predictive’ forecast based on detailed and sophisticated data analysis and extrapolation of current market and social, cultural, and economic trends and cycles – and ‘web analytics metrics‘ derived from computer-generated user behaviours is an approach that’s already very big business. A third approach is called ‘scenario writing’, which usually involves a mixture of normative and predictive forecasts.

In our future world the holy grail for our global corporations is to be able to predict what you are going to do or want before you even know it yourself, and then push it at you. And as a result we are going to need to be a lot clearer about what sort of a future we really desire for ourselves and others. More than ever before we are going to need a rich mixture of creative and logical thought and action to be able to survive by knowing how to learn from the past to understand the present and anticipate the future. And a new hybrid approach to the recently denationalised subjects of Design and Technology and Information Technology would be an excellent place to start.

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

Now where did I leave my Google?

Is this the fatally-flawed new iPad 3 tablet?

‘Too much internet use can damage teenagers’ brains‘ screams a headline in the Daily Mail.
‘How Googling can harm your memory’ announces the Daily Telegraph above a further, and entirely un-related, article headlined: ‘Fatal tablet dispensed in error‘, which as it happens, was nothing to do with accidently issuing a schoolchild with a faulty iPad, but just for a moment it made me wonder.

The Telegraph report is on some rather limited research data that suggests that the way we remember things may be starting to change. It’s interesting that they interpret ‘change’ as ‘damage’ and ‘harm’. What the researchers actually discovered was that people are making less effort to remember facts and more to recall where they will be able to find particular items of information when they actually need  them. We are thus apparently developing our ‘transactive’ brain abilities. And the researchers go on to suggest that as a result educators need to become increasingly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorisation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8640393/Search-engines-rewire-our-memory.html

Meanwhile the ever-dependable Mail goes a step further and provides a test to discover if you are already addicted to the web, with the sub-head ‘A terrible shame – It’s a wake-up call’. Apparently excessive internet use may be causing parts of teenagers’  brains to waste away, based on a study of 19 year-old students who spend between 8 to 13 hours a day, six days a week playing games online.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2015196/Too-internet-use-damage-teenagers-brains.html

There’s no question that we do need to do more research to discover the ways in which the internet is disrupting the way we think and behave, and as a consequence changing the way we learn. There are some facts we do need to memorise, and it would be crazy to spend all day, every day living in a virtual world, but we have yet to work out which are the essential facts to remember, and when it’s best to be online or in the real world.

But to promote the idea that using computers is damaging our brains  makes it more difficult for teachers and parents to swallow the pill and accept that IT and learning are a positive development. Until then, we are just going to need to keep taking the tablets ourselves.

Who? What? When? Where? And, most importantly, why not?

Now here’s a quite interesting site:

http://openstudy.com/

“Get live help from other students. Be a hero to your peers.” it claims.

Obviously in its infancy, the site’s proposition is simple – a student asks a question, and someone else helps answer it. Perhaps oddly, I suspect the greatest value is probably not to the student who asks the question, but the one who answers it: learning is, after all, a two-way process, and there’s nothing like trying to explain something to someone else to sharpen one’s understanding.

But what is sad to note is that the introductory video perpetuates the myth that wisdom (the adult wise spec-wearing owl) is gained simply through the speedy acquisition of knowledge. As a result, most students’ questions seem to be looking for short factual answers – simple facts, that could have fairly easily been discovered elsewhere. Don’t schools teach kids how to use search engines and find out things for themselves anymore? Oh – no, of course they never did, did they?!

Few questions seem to be open-ended, prompting any discussion that might lead to some ‘deep-thinking’, or even less so, ‘deep action’. Click on ‘View All Groups‘ and some of the more important subjects emerge, such as Art and Design and Communications and Media. And finally in Art and Design there are the start of some more interesting and engaging questions, such as ‘ Who is the best designer of our time?‘ and ‘Does every artist have the spirit of art?‘  It’s a shame sites like these often simply ignore the needs of creative students and subjects.

Meanwhile I’m reminded of a conversation I had way back in the late 1990s with someone who had foolishly offered to reply to children’s e-mails from around the country about their textiles projects. She said the main problem was that the students didn’t know how to ask the right sort of question to explain what their enquiry really was really about in the first place, and she had to send a series of questions  back to them first in order to be able to go on to subsequently make a worthwhile response .

More recently I was working with a group of Geography PGCE students, and I suggested that instead of giving them the questions about a site they were studying, they could perhaps work out for themselves what the questions were? They and their tutor looked at me in astonishment….

Back in the 1980s, my GCSE students were expected to start projects by generating their own list of ‘Starting Questions’. They found it difficult at first, but it didn’t take them long before they got the hang of it.

So ‘How to ask the right questions’ would be high on my priorities for a curriculum.  The question is…?

Little thinks or Big thinks?*

I’ve been doing some deep thinking recently, about…’the art of deep thought’. Not this time the computer in the HHGTTG, but the phrase being presently used by academics and politicians without, as usual, any clear explanation as to what they really mean. For example: (Nice Mr Gove) said he ” wanted to switch emphasis back to examinations taken at the end of two years of study in order to revive the art of deep thought.”

And this very morning on the Andrew Marr Show on TV he explained that if there was a return to a two year A level course it would enable students to spend more time on things like Art and Music to provide a balance to those subjects that required deep thought.

So what exactly is deep thought? And will I be able to buy some in the deep freeze aisle in M&S?

Well, some research (now there’s the first clue in itself) reveals a lengthy text (clue number two), full of obscure words (ah, have I cracked it already?). Well, no, not quite – it seems it’s a bit more complicated than that. Apparently deep thinking skills include:

• Asking different sorts of open-ended questions about things
• Thinking about your own thinking processes
• Putting things in your own words
• Applying principles to real situations
• Analysing information into component parts
• Connecting separate pieces of information to form larger patterns, guidelines or products
• Evaluating the validity, morality and aesthetic value of ideas, data or products
• Drawing logical conclusions
• Deriving principles
• Making a case for and against an argument
• Identifying cause-effect relationships
• Identifying ethical issues
• Generating creative and imaginative ideas and innovative strategies

And it also seems there is something called ‘deep reading’ which involves a mixture of horizontal reading (ie in bed?) and vertical reading (ie standing up?).To be effective, the information gathered by horizontal, broad reading needs to appropriately interact with narrow, vertical reading.

So what deep conclusions can we draw from all this? The first, and undoubtedly the most surprising, is that just for once All Change Please! finds itself in agreement with nice Mr Gove that more deep thinking would be a good thing. Except of course, in his desire to return to a romanticised, ivory-tower view of rigorous academic study, he has himself probably not thought through his sound-bite very deeply. If he had, he would have realised that many so-called ‘soft’ subjects, with their extended practical open-ended coursework requirements, provide an excellent opportunity for deep thought and action. And that deep thought is not necessarily verbal in nature, but can also be visual, symbolic, musical, etc. Meanwhile if he is really interested in promoting deep thinking, then what better place to start than by promoting and accrediting the QCA’s Personal Learning and Thinking Skills as part of his new English/French Baccalaureate GCSE proposal?

And has Mr Gove yet realised that what we need is not so much deep ways of thinking, but new ways of thinking, focused around things like complexity, community and communication, related to the new world we find ourselves living in, rather than past times.

As I’ve suggested before, we urgently need to understand a lot more about the way in which people start to think and learn deep and wide from an effective mixture of horizontal Pot Google ‘information snacks’ and vertical five-GCSE Baccalaureate course ‘main meals’ as they gather and process information about the real and virtual world they live in.

Hmm – I think I’ll avoid the deep thought counter at M&S for now. Anyone else for some shallow Pot Googles?

* Those of you with the doubted privilege of an academic literary education will of course immediately recognise the reference in the title of this post to HG Well’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. Or, like me, needed to look it up on Pot Google to discover:

‘that to babble about names that meant nothing was the proper use of speech. He called it “big thinks”, to distinguish it from “little thinks” — the sane everyday interests of life. If ever I made a remark he did not understand, he would praise it very much, ask me to say it again and again, learn it by heart, and go off repeating it.’

**Meanwhile those of you with an academic art history education will instead immediately recognise the photo at the top as an image of a human brain as portrayed by the 1960′s Pop artist Peter Max.

“I want to teach the world to learn…”

In my last post I innocently asked one of my famous awkward questions when I queried how we might actually start the learning revolution advocated by Sir Ken Robinson?

It’s true that education has got so far behind the times that a major change is needed, but unless we can imagine school-children, students and teachers rioting in the streets and sending all the Oxbridge-educated politicians and journalists to the guillotine in a bid to achieve a really effective sort of education cut, it’s hard to imagine what other event could possibly act as a catalyst for the revolution.

Instead, somehow we have to find ways to be more sophisticated and strategic, working from within, getting the politicians and the journalists to buy into a simple media message that sounds positive and attractive to Daily Mail readers, and that isn’t going to cost too much to implement.

Now I’ve always considered that learning is a basic survival skill, not that far behind breathing, eating and keeping warm and dry. Children have an instinctive desire to learn, but the problem is that what they are currently being taught is not what they know they need to be learning. There is no longer a fixed body of knowledge that will see them through their lives, and the former holy grail of an academic degree is no longer a guarantee of life-long employment and a good pension.

One of the main problems with education is that as a society we still think of school as being somewhere children go to learn about things, and that’s what is they are then examined on. Perhaps all that’s really needed to achieve something more appropriate is a shift of focus towards an emphasis not so much what you learn, but how you learn? The QCAs ‘Personal Learning and Thinking‘ skills have been around for a few years now, but I doubt whether many teachers are aware of it, and students are certainly not assessed and certificated in things such as being independent enquirers, self-managers and effective participators. Of course a reliable and valid means of ‘on the fly’ collaborative assessment would need to be found to enable students to measure their progress against the learning performance of others, but we all know something that will do just that, don’t we?

Wouldn’t it be great if teachers were encouraged to share and pass on their own expertise in how people learn, instead of keeping it to themselves?

And as an employer in the 21st Century I’d much rather my future workforce had certificates to show that they have the capacity to work collaboratively to acquire the unforeseeable knowledge, understanding and skills that will emerge over their future working lives, rather than having a list of academic qualifications rooted in the incomprehensible suburban sprawl of the ‘just in case’ subject knowledge defined the National Curriculum.

So as a more positive reason for going to school, maybe ‘Learning how to learn‘ is a catchy enough proposition to one day persuade some enlightened and ambitious education minister (sadly not the present incumbent) that here is the basis of a policy that might actually make a difference and also be a potential vote-winner?

Let’s provide some TLC in our schools! That’s: Thinking, Learning and Creativity.

‘What’s your best subject?’

That’s what we always ask children. But it’s the wrong question. One of the most important things that school-leavers need to have is a clear sense of where their particular strengths lie so that they can be as competitive as possible in the employment market and thereby make the maximum contribution to the economy, and/or to society. Now although I’m sure that some children leave with a sense of where they are going, I suspect most only have a vague idea – ‘I was always good at History’, ‘I got an A* in Science’ on their own are of limited value. What they really need to be aware of are things like ‘I have excellent communication skills’, ‘I’m good at team-work’, ‘My strength is in finding things out’, ‘I’m a patient and persistent sort of person’, etc.

In our university-entry, subject-led curriculum  our schools are being diverted from what’s really important.