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

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.

Animating the secret power of time

Beyond the general content of this extract from a recent interesting and thought-provoking talk given at the RCA, which includes a short section on the direction in which education needs to be going, is the delightful post-production animation. Maybe one day PowerPoint presentations will be like this, somehow automatically producing a visualisation of what is being said!

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/05/24/rsa-animate-secret-powers-time/

Polyunsaturated facts

Warning: this post may contain traces of disturbing words and sentences that are unsuitable for those who are allergic to change in education.

During the week I came across this blog post on Info-snacks, which made an interesting analogy between the intake of information and food. Essentially the author suggests that the increasing online availability of small chunks of easily digestible facts and figures is potentially at the expense of a series of ‘proper meals’ that form part of a ‘sensible diet’. Now I’m the first to admit that being able to rapidly search for and discover some fascinating fact can be surprisingly satisfying, possibly even more so than eating a Cadbury’s Chocolate Egg, and for substantially much less effort than having to sit down for months on end consuming a course in some rich, over-egged esoteric academic banquet and facing the prospect of an examination at the end in order to gain a certificate that will probably mark me as ‘over-weight’ to most prospective employers.

With the rapidly increasing range of easily available motivational Scoobie Snacks such as blogs, posts and a variety of Pick’n'Mix tweets it seems almost inevitable that the young will start to opt for info-bites rather than a desire to acquire an in-depth knowledge and understanding.

At the same time, in a related post, comes the suggestion of something called ‘Just In Time’ learning. In industry Just In Time (or JIT) is a management tool for cutting costs through setting up efficient work-flow processes, so that components for the assembly line through to deliveries to the consumer arrive exactly when needed. In a similar way, JIT learning would presumably deliver exactly the right information to you on your hand-held device at the right place at the right time. Knowledge becomes something that is provided on a strictly need-to-know basis.

What the anticipated growth in Info-snacks and JIT learning have in common is that they both question the established approach that knowledge and understanding of the world is something to be bulk force-fed and absorbed in one’s school and college days. Unless we change our approach to formal academic education courses, learners will increasingly turn to rejecting traditional forms of learning in favour of readily available, easily digestible, instantly forgettable fast-facts. And, as with the need for more healthy eating, it’s not a simple matter of ‘banning’ crisps and fizzy drinks, it’s about educating people how to develop good learning habits and to only consume high-fact information snacks in moderation. Remember everyone: ‘Information snacks between meals can spoil your appetite for real learning?’ There are times when a quick snack is appropriate to keep you going, and times when you need to sit down to a proper meal.

However, there’s one aspect of information snacking that has not so far been mentioned. Just as eating is essentially a social as well as nutritional occasion, so is learning. And it may just be that if these frequent information snacks are shared in some way across social networks that the collective and collaborative experience of the participants will ultimately provide a depth and breadth of learning that begins to transcend traditional methods of teaching and learning and produces a completely new approach to the whole process of education that is actually appropriate to the 21st Century.

Maybe then we’ll even start to read reports in the e-newspapers raising concerns about binge education?

Work less, think more…

Yet another quiet week in the world of education, unless of course you’re a middle-aged university lecturer hoping for early retirement, in which case, things are looking up.

I was about to give up on a post for this weekend when I came across this item:

Cut working week to 21 hours, urges think tank

Suddenly I was back in the early 1970s when Tomorrow’s World was confidently predicting that by the turn of the century we’d all be enjoying extensive leisure time. And here we are again – cut the working week to 21 hours and become better parents, children, citizens, carers and neighbours.

Now I fully agree of course – marvellous, can’t wait (though a bit galling for all those university lecturers who’ve just been given early retirement after a lifetime’s stress and anxiety). But as the foundation’s policy director admits: ‘A cultural shift will throw up real challenges’, and let’s face it that’s an understatement.

The trouble is that although we want massive cultural change in many things, including education, no-one knows how to even start the ball rolling, let alone achieve it.

Back in October’s inaugural post Going for Gold I made some suggestions as to the sorts of big issues we should be considering if we are really going to change anything. If we’re all going to work less and educate better, we are going to have think a lot more about how to actually get there.

No more Noughties anymore?

End of Term Report: December 2009

Pupil Name:  Third Millennium

“Third Millennium has found it difficult to settle in to his new age group. He seems more interested in playing computer games, watching Reality Show DVDs on his HDTV and catching up on the latest celebrity gossip than he does coming to terms with his social and economic studies. Lacking in suitable role-models he has been frequently noughtie and spends too much time getting involved with fighting pupils from other schools. Although Third is becoming increasingly aware of the need to make a more sustainable effort, he has yet to make the major commitment that will be needed if he is to seriously improve his results. There are testing times ahead if he is to start to make real progress in his teenage years…

So the time has come to look back and try to guess what history will make of the decade that is about to pass. How has life changed? Do we live in a better or a worse place?

There’s no question that the ‘Information Age’ has finally dawned, with extraordinary changes to the way we access our entertainment and connect and communicate across the World Wide Web. Instead of using new technologies to simply automate what we did before, we are slowly starting to realise that IT is a lot more than ‘Just Another Tool’, and something that represents an agent for substantial change in the way we live our lives.

Back in 1999 an increasing number of people had access to the internet, though not to a faster broadband connection, and e-mail was becoming a common form of communication, but the proliferation of social networking sites was still to emerge. The first iMac had appeared. A significant number of people had mobile phones – though the sort that just made and received phone calls. However, there were no iPods, no iTunes, no iPhones or Apps, no flatscreen TVs or monitors. And digital cameras were still expensive and only capable of taking small-size, poor quality images. We’d heard about something called Big Brother, but had no idea how much we all really, really wanted Reality TV. On-line shopping was in its infancy and wasn’t expected to catch on, and Sat-nav was still something you only saw in old 007 movies. Home-working was still something that school-children did. During the past decade, without doubt these have been the things that have changed, and generally improved, our lives the most.

But look around the house, down the high street and at the hundreds of other products and services we interact with on a daily basis. With just a few exceptions, things – what we eat, wear, how we travel, healthcare, etc., remain pretty much the same as they were back in 1999, accept often relatively cheaper. And in some respects they have become worse, particularly in terms of there now being such a wide range of choice it’s almost impossible to decide which the best option is, and in the quality of service. Whatever happened to ‘Customer Care’?

So what about education? Back in the late 1990s I was visiting a lot of different schools. The schools I go to today seem generally much the same. If anything there’s an even greater sense of a production line, manufacturing consistent batches of bland ‘Mother’s Pride’ soft sliced white qualifications, quicker, cheaper and more efficiently than ever before. Teachers seem even busier – they don’t even have time to answer emails, let alone have time to think about developing their subject knowledge or teaching skills – the main concern seems to be more to do with the latest administrative initiative and updating risk assessments. At least there finally seems to be some increasing doubts about the validity of traditional methods of assessment, but the majority still believe in romanticised view of academic education that continues to leave tens of thousands of teenagers disaffected with the idea of education as a whole. It seems unbelievable that we still have not yet found a way that successfully ensures every child who leaves school can read, write and do basic maths.

So in decades to come, who will we look back on as the great inventors, creators and heroes of the first ten years of the new millennium – the individuals, the movers and shakers who really made a difference? Let’s see now, there was Jamie Oliver, Russell Brand, Jade Goody, Simon Cowell..?

The 1970s currently has the reputation of being the most miserable decade in recent years. My prediction for the future is that as such it is about to be demoted into second place behind the Noughties. Let’s just hope the next ten years start to see some real changes for the better.