The Future of Education

[Mark Treadwell]

Can education respond to the dramatically changing world we now inhabit? More importantly can we change fast enough so that school does not become irrelevant; assuming that is not too late? This is the challenge before all educators and administrators as we all grapple with what the purpose of what school is in a 21st century world.

The multimedia world of the Internet initially augmented and now is beginning to overwhelm the dominant role of written language in learning and in the process it has rearranged the very foundation on which have built "education" for the last millennia. With information and communication tools able to span the globe at almost no cost, we can now create and interpret sound, text, animations, movies and integrated multimedia simply and easily. Increasingly the major technology platform for doing this is the cellphone, something that is banned in most schools! Are we really preparing learners for the 21st century? What would take to the change the curriculum, change our teaching and learning pedagogy/andragogy and the very notion of what school is? What is the purpose of school in the 21st century? This is the primary notion which I hope to explore over the next few days with you in Hong Kong. This paradigm shift is not something to the feared but something to get excited about as for the first time ever we can teach for understanding; and in the process teach/coach learners to be creative and innovative and still sleep at night and have a social life!

Mark Treadwell www.schoolv2.net www.i-learnt.com www.teachers-work.com

[Jason de Nys]

I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks to progress in education, and this applies to improving learning experiences with and without ICTs, is the top-down model of curriculum development.

Most teachers in secondary schools would probably agree that everything is content driven due to the requirement of having to prepare students for exams. Exams which are required by Universities looking for an easy way to sort out who they want. It makes it very difficult for a teacher to take risks when it comes down to "If I miss a lesson I will be behind in the program". Even when those risks could perhaps pay back with increased understanding on the part of the students.

At least that seems to be the Australian model.

How do we tackle this problem?

[Mark Treadwell]

The New Zealand curriculum was partially created via thousands of teachers having their say via online opportunities to post comments and ideas via a number of web sites. The buy-in was considerable, not 100% but considerable and the end result is a very different curriculum focussing on developing core competencies and values in tandem with disciplines. http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/ Each school then develops their unique "brand" of curriculum by developing their own contexts and content . . . . however and here is the stumbling bock even in NZ.

The tertiary system owns the gateway to their system and their simplistic measure of success courtesy of remembering content and applying it to very limited contexts reduces all the previous good learning to a small pile of non-phoenix ashes. The top down result is that our final 3 years of high school is not "governed" by our curriculum but rather the imposed curriculum provided defacto by the tertiary sector.

My solution to this is to politically develop a mandate for the secondary school principals to take control of the exit exam process. This will take some time but many are keen for this to far more within their control.

[Mark Treadwell]

In the New Zealand experience educators were asked to contribute commentaries on the development of curriculum and has had a significant impact on the type of curriculum that we ended up developing as a country. Views of Web 1.0 & 2.0 tools allowed thousands of teachers to contribute to the grit and development process, enriching significantly and increasing ownership dramatically.

The issue of universities setting "default curriculum" is an issue here New Zealand is much as anywhere in the world. The only way I see of overcoming this is to increase the voice that principals have by claiming back their right to dictate their own curriculum. The ability of universities to be able to overwrite prescribed curriculum is verging on the immoral.

[Fiona Collins]

I am particularly interested in your views on how libraries play a part in preparing students for the challenges of finding and critically evaluating information from a variety of sources.

[Mark Treadwell]

Okay so now resume reading keeping Ms Dewey in mind. The role of the school library in the School v2.0 model for schools is at a crossroads. Whether libraries will increase in significance or decrease into obscurity is a source of concern and debate amongst librarians, library organisations, schools and Ministries/Departments of Education, all of whom are struggling to identify the role of the library in this radically and exponentially changing information and communication landscape. One of the central issues here is that school libraries have traditionally been structured around a scarce information landscape which needed to be managed so it could be accessed equitably.

The librarian and the services of the library are now facing up to a raft of new challenges and librarians have a distinctively different role where they are now opening the information valve and increasing the information flow rate while at the same time there is an immeasurably greater demand for them to manage the information conduit so that it is safe, academically appropriate, media appropriate and more easily searched to find appropriate information.

We have already discussed the new definition of the term "being literate" in the 21st century. The critical literacy’s of the 21st century are ever evolving and will in time include skills such as:
• Basic Literacy: Language proficiencies using conventional literacy
• Information Literacy: The ability to search for and access appropriate information across a range of genre, formats and systems. The ability to sift, scan and sort information.
• Technological Literacy: The innate ability to discover how a new or evolved technology operates; recognising its limitations and benefits. The ability to choose the most appropriate tool to access and process information, and present new knowledge & understanding.
• Media Literacy: The ability to synthesise a wide range of viewpoints/interpretations from a variety of media, and build a concise model of understanding of those ideas.
• Cultural Literacy & Global Awareness: The ability to manage information in the “global village”.
• Critical Literacy: The ability to identify key aspects of information validity such as accuracy, objectivity, authority, currency and coverage.
• Scientific Literacy: Knowledge of scientific concepts and processes.
• Cognitive Literacy: The capacity to build cognitive models/frameworks of understanding
If we are going to have schools without walls, extending the concept of school beyond the physical buildings, then we will require libraries without walls, where learners, educators and “distance” learners can access information simply and easily from any location.

These are challenging times for educators and librarians as we shift from a poorly resourced but well managed information environment to a poorly managed but overwhelming information landscape. The management of this environment will need to be electronic, making use of intelligent search engines that are tuned to finding resources that are content/reading age/media appropriate. Quite a challenge but one we cannot avoid.

Mark Treadwell

[PRO KGV STUDENT IT HELPERS]

I as a student frequently go onto different websites such as Wikipedia to enhance my knowledge. For 65% of my time at school I have learned nothing since I already learnt it all on the internet. I also understood Quantum Theory and the Theory of Relativity at the age of 10. The school will never teach such things at that age and I must say that traditional schooling is unchallenging. Frankly speaking, the internet is more of a teacher to me than my teachers irl.

[Dana Dukic]

Mark, 2 brief questions. What do you use for your Web-Folios. I can see it’s powered by knowledge[net]works but I can’t find anything like that on the Internet. The other question is about new electronic book format you mentioned at your presentation about libraries. Where can I find more information about it? Thanks.

[Mark Treadwell]

Web Folios need to operate from within an online learning environment where access permissions are set and administered by the school. The environment we have created to allow this is called the KnowledgeNET. Schools purchase this for about $HK20-30k and pay a monthly fee to have it hosted and managed. You can check out our two versions of this at www.knowledge.net.nz and www.smartask.net.nz

Libraries: I posted up the resource for this earlier today but now cannot find it so here it is again! The reading outlines the future of libraries and how they will need to adapt to the changes in information access as we move from a time when we had meagre information landscapes but they were well managed to one where we have overwhelming information landscapes which are poorly managed.

[Mark Treadwell]

Kia ora (greetings) Dana

The web folios are embedded within the KnowledgeNET environment which schools purchase (www.knowledge.net.nz) We hope to appoint someone to deal with the Honk Kong/China region within the next 6 months.

The information on the plastic book can be found at http://www.plasticlogic.com

[Peter Woodhead]

Stephen Heppell described this as .. learning is leaking from our schools!. Students no longer have to go to school to learn ( as the KGV student said!) and we can no longer assume schools are synonymous with education. Having said that I reckon schools and education system are remarkably tenacious but learners wil quietly subvert the system. Imagine this scenario . it's options evening at Doothby Academy. year 10 student find he can't do all the subject he wants at the Academy. Parents say that is OK because they will support their child's application to take the courses on line.

[Paul McMahon]

This is an excellent discussion and exactly the thing that we were hoping to have come out of the 21st Century Learning @ HK Conference.
One thing that worries me though, is that now we are back to our schools and the day to day teaching, assessment, reporting etc., how do we keep address the need to do all of this and move the agenda forward. I have to say, I have been trying to do this in my own way now for 3.5 years and I still have schools who say to me that they have no budget for ICT training in the school. One school (who will remain nameless) refused to pay HK$800 to send staff to the conference in spite of having made a huge investment in IWBs in the school. Some commentators advocate 30-50% of the funding for ICT in the school should be set aside for PD. This particular school has a long way to go to bring it close to 5%!!
Some thoughts that I have:
Most teachers are passionate about ensuring that their students learn certain things in their classroom. I have heard things like students must learn:
a. to cherish reading good books
b. to be able to pick out the points of a sound scientific article
c. to have a sense of their rights and responsibilities in a democracy
d. etc.

What I want to advocate here is some 21st Century Learning that students need to have but may not be getting in some schools. I know for a fact that they are not getting this learning in many of the schools I have visited in Hong Kong.

1. A clear understanding that anything that is posted online today will stay online forever and may affect University places, job offers, relationships and most other aspects of life in the future. (See today's Standard page 4 to see how Tibetan protester Christina Chan is unlikely to be remembered for her political views)
2. The skills to be able to secure their Facebook/Xanga/Other Social Network profile so that it is impossible to search any of their online information and link it back to the school that they attend, the block that they live in, the cafe's that they frequent, their other family members, etc.
3. A clear understanding of media sharing rights such as Creative Commons so that they are able to see why some people like musicians are very happy to assign "share alike" licensing to their work, hopefully leading to respect for material that is not shared freely.
4. Techniques for password management in a world where many online tools are being accessed by kids who may well use these for years to come and have little idea of identity theft and its consequences.
5. The importance of having balance in life. Especially with respect to time online, time with paper based resources, time for exercise, sleep etc.

I could go on but I am sure that many of you could suggest more. I am sure that many of you do ensure that such things are well understood by your students.

According to the article in the Standard, it is clear that one HKU straight-A student who believes that she can legal action against those who took photos from her Facebook account, has very little understanding of the open communicative power of the internet. I know that she is not the only one.

[Jay Parker]

I've been grappling with a problem which seems to be related to this discussion. My responsibility in my department is to facilitate and develop use of ICT in teaching, but as I have been working on this, it has struck me that the key issue is the one of change which Mark mentions here. I'm concerned that there is always a huge focus on current technology when we talk about 21st Century learning, when the really challenging issue is how to deal with future technology and the world it will create.

Given that we cannot predict, what can we teach students that will enable them to deal with a landscape that we cannot envisage accurately? The 21st century literacy that Mark mentions is helpful to me for beginning to deal with this because it seems to be about developing a skills set which can be applied in a range of contexts in addition to the particular place and time we now inhabit. One part, however, strikes me as particularly pertinent to my difficulty:

Technological literacy: The innate ability to discover how a new or evolved technology operates;

I emphasise innate, because it seems to me that this is at the core. If the ability is innate, how can it be taught? I think that it isn't innate, but that so much of this ability (and I think the essence of many of these other aspects of 21st C literacy) seem innate because the skills haven't been taught explicitly to us.

I've come across many systems which begin to try to unpick thinking skills etc, but it seems to me to be a vastly complex and extensive skillset (take this list of thinking skills, for example: http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/sem/typeiips.html). How do we begin to enable teachers who have never been trained to teach this, especially when we are also encouraging them to develop new skills of their own in current technology, such as teaching with one-to-one laptops, IWBs or web2.0?