WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

Yep, it’s that time again. The end of the week, albeit with a bit of a longer weekend (at least in England!) with tomorrow being a bank holiday. There’s been quite a bit that’s caught my eye this week on a range of subjects, so you’ll have to excuse me if this week’s roundup is a bit less coherent than usual! Here goes…

Here’s a list of the blog posts and articles I’ll be mentioning this week:

• Autono Blogger - [3] How the Internet affects learning
• Borderland - [4] Who Knows Yet?
• EduBlog Insights - [5] Reflection Articles
• elearnspace - [6] Milken Institute
• Every One Learns - [7] The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content (Part 3)
• Mark’s edtechblog - [8] Speaking with authority and credibility
• Slow Leadership - [9] Slow Management
• Susan Greenfield - [10] We are at risk of losing our imagination
• Moving at the Speed of Creativity - [11] Messy assessment instead of flogging with the standards

I’ll begin with the most-quoted blog post of the week of the ones above which is George Siemens’ [6] Milken Institute post in which he says:

Learning, as probably the most critical human activity for the development of better (defined as low crime, available health care, standard of living) societies is the structures of learning. The challenge we face is that our approaches to learning (as I’ve often said) is that our structures don’t meet our needs, our society, or our global world. Learning, perceived as an activity outside of the structure of daily living, is simply not working. Learning happens continually (as natural as breathing, as constant as a beating heart). We need a new vision for learning. I’ve tackled it from the end of connectivism, but it is depressing to see that so many organizations continue to see learning as an add-on, not an enabler to better functioning on every level of life and business. One message that is coming through, in health care (and I would posit in education), is that the technology is at a sufficient level to make huge changes and transformations. Potential and capacity are not the missing elements - vision and will are the bottlenecks.

So to summarize for those of you who are in a Bank Holiday Weekend daze: we have the capability in Western societies to change education but not necessarily the collective desire to do so, even though the (indirect) potential benefits are extremely enticing. We need a new way of understanding the learning process, not as an ‘add-on’, but as something which occurs naturally but needs direction - much as a climbing plant needs direction to grow up a trellis. Once it’s been ‘trained’ it’ll grow in the right direction by itself (albeit with a little bit of necessary pruning now and again!)

To continue the metphor I’ve started, the way to be a good gardener isn’t to try and make every plant into a geranium. Different plants need different soil, different amounts of light and shade, and have different watering needs. So too with teaching: we shouldn’t be running an education factory, attempting to produce the same type of student by the time each reaches the end of their compulsory education. This is something picked up by Susan Greenfield in her article [10] We are at risk of losing our imagination for the Guardian. She talks of the danger of labelling children with ‘disorders’ and then prescribing drugs to either ‘cure’ them or control their ’symptoms’:

We must choose to adopt appropriate technologies that will ensure the classroom will fit the child, and buck the growing trend for technologies - including drugs - to be used to make the 21st-century child fit the classroom. The educational needs of the individual are changing, and the very nature of the classroom needs to change, too.

Going on to discuss the changing nature of the classroom, she talks about the danger of disconnected learning experiences, of students not having a conceptual framework or scaffold on which to hang their educational experiences and learning:

When you read a book, the author usually takes you by the hand and you travel from the beginning to the middle to the end in a continuous narrative of interconnected steps. It may not be a journey with which you agree, or one that you enjoy, but none the less, as you turn the pages, one train of thought succeeds the last in a logical fashion. We can then compare one narrative with another and, in so doing, start to build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys, which, in turn, will influence our individualised framework. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it a significance. So traditional education has enabled us to turn information into knowledge.

Now imagine there is no robust conceptual framework. You are sitting in front of a multimedia presentation where you are unable, because you have not had the experience of many different intellectual journeys, to evaluate what is flashing up on the screen. The most immediate reaction would be to place a premium on the most obvious feature, the immediate sensory content, the “yuk” and “wow” factor.

This kind of superficial reaction to technology use in lessons is exactly the type which I’ve seen from lower-ability students when I’ve taken them into the ICT suite for the first few times. They need to learn how to structure their learning with technology. Susan Greenfield quotes recent research which shows that 92% of 19-year olds have accessed the Internet from either home or school, yet 67% of these have never been taught to assess the reliability of information being presented to them. Something obviously needs to change.

What needs to change is our approach to learning. We need to blend new types of learning using new technology with older, more traditional methods. As quoted in [3] How the Internet affects learning on Autono Blogger:

All of the things we now take for granted such as telephones, TV, radio, cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and so on, we regard, not as technology but as commodities. For this reason we are almost lulled into thinking that e-learning is the first time that technology has influenced learning in any significant way. This is a mistake, as the Internet is merely the culmination of wave after wave of technological innovation in learning…

Writing can be considered as the first technological innovation, with phonetic alphabets, papyrus and paper. Printing was the second, with moveable type. The third was broadcast media such as film, radio and television. The fourth was a range of mass media storage devices including audio-cassette, videotape and CD. The fifth was the mass produced computer with CD-ROM. The sixth is the current networked, web-based e-learning revolution. With each of these innovations, new forms of blended learning arose.

Talking of a ‘paradigm shift’ in learning on this view, then, is a bit of a mistake. Yes, the educational landscape is changing beyond all recognition, but there are fundamental elements which remain static. We are simply building outwards - another shell around the already core aspects of learning: discussion, recording, sharing, and using different methods of communicating. 21st century technology in the classroom is an evolution of learning technologies, not a complete revolution!

What needs to change is the ways in which we conceive education in (post)modern society. With new technologies come new opportunities, but at the same time they make some elements of education more-or-less redundant. Even as a History teacher I don’t believe that in this day and age students should leave compulsory education crammed full of remembered dates and knowledge about the past. They should, of course, know about crucial events, practices and people which are culturally relevant to them, but the historical skills they learn (empathy, source analysis, etc.) and methods of finding information are much more important. This is why I believe we need to move [15] towards a skills-based curriculum.

Thankfully, I’m not the only person who thinks this. Mike Muir, for example, in [7] The Answer To Curriculum Might Not Be Content (Part 3) believes that a curriculum’s effectiveness ought to be judged on how well it reaches the difficult-to-teach students, rather than our using the easier-to-teach students as a benchmark. Mike believes there are [17] 9 essential elements to motivating hard-to-teach students, and therefore 9 elements to designing a suitable curriculum for them:

• student/teacher relationship
• helping students succeed, especially through frequent feedback
• hands-on, active work
• variety and attention to learning styles
• making learning interesting or tying into student interests
• giving students choices and involve them in planning
• avoiding “bribery” rewards
• making connections by working at the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy
• and putting learning into context and making real world connections to the curriculum.

I’d wager there’s not an educator in the world that would disagree with those nor one who thinks that building these 9 elements into a curriculum could be anything but positive for all learners…

Well I haven’t the energy to go on any further today - my eyes are tired, my belly’s full and I’m feeling a bit sleepy. So I’ll leave you with a quick summary of those posts I haven’t managed to cover:

• Borderland - [4] Who Knows Yet? - links to [19] Vick Davis’ post on classroom blogging and talks about blogs not as a replacement for established forms of writing, but as a whole new form of writing.
• EduBlog Insights - [5] Reflection Articles - Anne Davis wonders by what criteria schools should be evaluated, and proposes blogs as a good way of promoting self-reflective learning both on the part of teachers and students.
• Mark’s edtechblog - [8] Speaking with authority and credibility - Mark Ahlness has vented his frustration on those who spout on about educational technology yet haven’t been in a classroom in the last year. Things are changing so rapidly, he says, that those who aren’t practising teachers aren’t relevant!
• Slow Leadership - [9] Slow Management - Carmine Coyote discusses the uselessness of having a constant stream of statistics coming at you when you are trying to make real decisions. I wonder if any teachers find this at all relevant to the situation in their institution?
• Moving at the Speed of Creativity - [11] Messy assessment instead of flogging with the standards - Wes Fryer bemoans the lack of ‘authentic’ assessment in schools and attacks the Standards Movement as creating more problems than it solves…

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