Lots has been going on during my (brief) blogging break so it’s time to catch up! The break has refreshed me, allowed me to take stock, and hopefully the ideas I have for the blog will meet with the approval of you, my readership! Anyway, on with the show… :D

In a never-ending attempt for improvement, I’ve decided that the articles/news about which I talk in my Weekly Roundups should come at bullet points at the beginning (for those not particularly interested in my inane ramblings!) So here goes:

• Dave Warlick – 2 Cents Worth blog – Flat Classrooms; Flat Classrooms, Curious Students
• George Siemens – elearnspace – Are 21st Century Skills Right Brain Skills?
• George Siemens – Connectivism Blog – Ill-structured process, clear outcome
• Guardian: Mortar Board – Should We Teach Skills or Knowledge?
• Rob Reynolds – XPlanaZine – A New Series on Educational Gaming
• Wes Fryer – Moving At The Speed of Creativity – Joel Barker on Future Technology; It’s All About the Curriculum; Avoiding risk and discouraging creativity

There are two main themes that come out the above posts:
1. The future of educational technology
2. The ’shape’ of education and the curriculum (and the power structures and pedagogy behind it)

The Future of Educational Technology

Mike Muir (via Wes Fryer) makes a great point about educational technology. No-one asks whether pencils improve achievement, “stethoscopes improve health, or hammers improve buildings.” The wrong questions are being asked and wrong emphases being placed. We as teachers can play a role in the success of educational technology, but only a role:

But teachers alone don’t carry the weight of the success of laptops. They haven’t grown up with technology. Understandably, many teachers don’t know how to use more than routine uses, let alone how to teach with them. But even when teachers are expert at teaching with technology, they don’t have the positional authority to set direction for the school, nor the expertise to keep equipment running or to do networking. Yet these are all factors that will impact if student achievement is impacted by the introduction of laptops into learning environments.

The success or failure of a educational technology – either in toto or in particular – depends upon the sentiment of a large number of stakeholders. Parents, leadership teams, teachers, technicians, and students themselves all have a part to play. Mike (Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Maine at Farmington) outlines six elements which he believes affect the success of educational technology inititiatives/projects, as part of a wider framework of implementation:

He goes into more detail about this here and here…

One thing which I’ve been meaning to post on for a while but thus far haven’t summed up the energy to tackle is educational gaming. This is based on the idea that high-quality immersive gameplay can, amongst other things, build skills of leadership and collaboration. Rob Reynolds has started a new series of posts about educational gaming over at XplanaZine. This, along with Mark Wagner’s excellent category on Games and Education looks like it will add impetus to the movement to integrate games that promote higher-order thinking skills into the curriculum:

Online gaming in education implies experiential, discovery-driven learning through play. Whether we are talking about game-based reading intervention programs or role-playing multi-player Business games, my definition of educational gaming insists that several components be present:

* play/fun
* a personal experiential framework
* an impetus for discovery
* a core learning purpose with some stated outcomes

Note that this definition is more abstract and philosophical. For further clarification, this definition assumes the requisite five essential elements of online games in general (not necessarily related to education):

* collections
* scores and ranking
* feedback
* social exchange and collaboration
* personalization

Games that have value within an educational context are experiential that is to say that instead of being simulations, they involve a sense of becoming. The whole problem so far has been one of cost: to create a world where the player can become fully immersed in the story and/or the environment calls for game creation skills and resources of a different league to those possessed by most educational game-creation companies. What has been suggested has been adapting the games engine of titles such as Halo or World of Warcraft for educational ends. More on this as Rob’s series develops and when I’ve done more reading… :s (oh, and you can always search ‘games’ at feeds.mrbelshaw.co.uk!)

The ’shape’ of education and the curriculum
Dave Warlick, has begun a new thought stream (which will no doubt become a bit of a meme within the education blogging community) on Flat Classrooms. Using a wonderful metaphor, he sees the educational landscape becoming ‘flatter’ and moving away from the previous ‘hilly’ pedagogical model. In the latter model knowledge and skills flow down from teachers to learners through the curriculum, from higher to lower places. However, now the hills are fast disappearing:

But as much as we might like to pretend, we (teachers) are no longer on top of the hill. The hill is practically gone…

In many cases, students communicate more, construct original content more, and more often collaborate virtually with other people, than do their teachers. Those teachers who pretend to stand on higher ground, appear, to many of their students, to be standing on quicksand.

Expanding his thoughts in a subsequent post, Dave puts an idea in bold in his text that I’ve been meditating upon for a while since delving into Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan’s Understanding Media, that:

The learning engine… must feed on the energy of curiosity in order to move, and we should come to agreement that in a flat world where the answers are changing, it’s the process of the question that is becoming more important. It’s more important how we learn than what we learn.

The nature of the activities in which students are invited to take part (note: not forced to do), the ways teachers interact with students, the (holistic) expectations of each student are more important than the knowledge and facts that the student retains. Learning how to learn is more important than the specific thing being learned at any given time. Students are always learning to as well as learning that.

George Siemens mentions something to do with this over at elearnspace where he references Doug Johnson’s article on Are 21st Century Skills Right Brain Skills?. Doug cites Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age in which the latter expounds his belief that we are moving into the ‘Conceptual Age’ where right-brain senses or skills to complement our left-brain, analytic skills:

We need to realize the value of:

* not just function, but also design.
* not just argument, but also story.
* not just focus, but also symphony.
* not just logic, but also empathy.
* not just seriousness, but also play.
* not just accumulation, but also meaning.

And I would add a final conceptual age skill to Pink’s list:

* not just knowledge, but also learning.

…

Our society and educational system sadly sees many of these opportunities that develop conceptual-age skills as extras — frills that often are the first to be cut in times of tight budgets. It’s tragic that by doing so, we are doing a disservice to our students as future workers and citizens.

In other words, it’s all very well developing higher-order thinking skills but students have to be able to make sense of the world around them, to be able to build up and dismantle structures around which they can scaffold knowledge, skills and understanding. A curriculum that has one ‘accepted’ way of doing this in the ‘Conceptual Age’ is not a good curriculum. As George Siemens notes on his Connectivism Blog, perhaps we should be talking about ‘learning ecologies’ rather than curricula – environments in which students can work towards desired outcomes rather than giving them a fixed path along which to travel.

I wonder if we couldn’t extend that value of learning slightly if we didn’t equate it so strongly with structure. I think we can achieve intended outcomes, even if the learning isn’t structured or sequenced in a particular manner. While I lack a particular research example, I have life experiences that support the value of chaotic learning approaches…that still produced specific skills. Learning how to play basketball (or any sport), use a computer, play a video game, drive a car, build relationships, think critically…these are all skills that I acquired in ill-structured ways.

Clear learning outcomes (i.e. driving a car) are essentially goals that individuals can achieve in what ever manner is most in keeping with a) how they learn, b) what they already know, c) the immediacy of use, d) motivation, e) success as a learner (confidence), and f) the “state of life” (stress, relationships…and all that other personal stuff that influences learning). In a similar manner, we solve most of our work problems in an ill-structured way – we often only have a goal (i.e. “business presence in India”), and we then take numerous approaches (trial and error, expert guidance) in attempting to achieve the goal.

Thinking about how I learn best and then thinking back to when I was at school and the two are like chalk and cheese. Although everyone has constraints placed upon them – time, the limits of technology, peer pressure, etc. – in today’s society there’s no reason why we can’t have a more flexible approach to the process of learning. Let’s say I was going to start teaching a new module in History about which I knew very little. Knowing what I do about how I learn best, I’d search for a timeline of the period on the Internet, then perhaps go to Wikipedia and read up about the main events/people/places involved. I’d then find a reputable book on the subject from Amazon or similar and (most probably) a novel set in the period. This would give me a ‘thick’ understanding which would make me confident in teaching it. How would I have been taught this when I was at school? Mini-lecture format. How did I fare in the examinations? Averagely… :(

The inimitable Wes Fryer (who must read a whole lot of stuff) shares the following downward-spiralling vicious circle which occurs through a focus on the ‘bottom line’:

(from Carmine Coyote’s Slow Leadership blog)

This is a cycle which strikes a chord in many educational institutions which I’ve seen. The opposite, of course, is true in successful institutions. So when reports come along which purport to show that pupils do better in schools which have specialist status, one realises that this is probably less to do with the status per se and more to do with the innovation and good leadership within the school. As this vicious circle shows, once an individual/department/institution has fallen behind they are likely to find it difficult to catch up. What is needed, therefore – and this is something I’ve mentioned before – is not one-off INSETs, but long-term interventions by effective change agents. :p