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 This website is no longer actively maintained.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]

First of all, apologies for the reduced frequency of posts this week: I’ve been extremely tired - possibly in sympathy to my increasingly-pregnant wife! I have, nonetheless, (and needless to say) been reading other people’s blogs. Most of what I’m going to be looking at in this week’s roundup centres around how technology is and should be affecting the curriculum on offer to 21st-century students. This is something I’ll be discussing as part of my [3] Ed.D. thesis…

The posts I’ll be discussing in this week’s roundup are:

• Will Richardson - [4] What’s in Your Curriculum
• Robert Paterson - [5] Why I hate school!
• Kathy Sierra - [6] Motivating others: why “it’s good for you” doesn’t work
• Will Richardson (edutopia) - [7] The New Face of Learning
• Judy Breck - [8] Why is education not in the ubiquitous web world picture?
• Jeff Utecht - [9] Teaching 21st Century Skills and [10] Technology: it’s what we do, not one more thing to do

If you’re reading this then there’s a fair chance that you’re already the type of educator who is keen to implement new things within the classroom, develop curricula which are relevant to learners in the 21st century, and change the way professional development is done. Perhaps I’m making too many assumptions, but that’s where I believe my readers are at; we may not all be implementing ideas (sometimes it’s not our fault…) but we can still discuss and plan the way forward. Will Richardson, in his short post [4] What’s in Your Curriculum gets a number of A-grade edubloggers thinking about how and why they teach 21st-century skills alongside more traditional classroom content. Will wondered whether anyone had all of the following intergrated into their curricula:

1. Wikipedia–as in teaching kids about the collaborative construction of knowledge.
2. Cell phones–as in teaching how to use them effectively as tools for “just in time learning.�
3. MySpace–as in teaching the safe and effective use of the Internet to build networks and publish content.
4. Martinlutherking.org–as in teaching the skills necessary for navigating a world where editing occurs post publication.
5. Google–as in teaching the skills to find the information we want.

I wasn’t surprised when I read the first comment from [12] Clarence Fisher, who responded that he honestly believes he is close to this - in spirit if not in the actual tools listed by Will. Anyone who’s read his [13] Remote Access blog (I’ve been a subscriber for a while) will be aware of the amazing work that Clarence is doing with his class. Blogs, wikis and podcasts are used on a daily basis: his is pretty much Classroom 2.0! [14] Vicki Davis is another who responded with an honest assessment of what she’s up to in her classroom. She discusses the tools she uses, and there’s a lot of great ideas packed into her comment. I like this paragraph especially:

These are great questions, however, those who read your blog and take the time to introspect into their own classroom behaviors are going to be the types that incorporate these into their classrooms, or at least are beginning. The struggle is to realize the mountains of classroom behaviors that have evolved little from the one room school house on the frontier.

This idea of a ‘one room school house on the frontier’ is a great image. It’s what I’m going to keep in mind as I’m trying to change my teaching and learning practices to reflect the changing educational landscape. I’ll try to transform my classroom and then help everyone else as they catch up! (and yes, I know Vicki was using it in a negative sense, but equally we can be seen as setting out the new frontier with our own little one classrooms within wider school contexts!)

The problem is that a lot of the time teachers want to be in complete control. They want to know how something works inside out before they use it. However, that’s not always necessary - you just need to know that it has the potential to transform your learners’ educational experience in a positive way and learn as you go along. Take last week, for example - I signed my students up to [15] Imbee.com (replacing their [16] Think.com accounts) the night before using it. I explored it a bit, read some of the ways that others have been using it, and then unleashed my students on it. I and they are learning about it as we go along. Some teachers, as Jeff Utecht says in [10] Technology: it’s what we do, not one more thing to do, will always find an excuse not to implement potentially liberating and transformative technologies:

It’s so hard for teachers to take a leap from something that works, to try something new. I’ve been hitting a lot of dead ends lately with teachers which is frustrating and deflating. Just when I think I’m starting to make some headway, something happens and we take two steps back. It comes down to priority. You do not just get on a bike and start riding right away. It takes practice, patience and the ability to get up, dust yourself off, and try again. But what is it about technology that the first time something doesn’t work or a teacher gets frustrated that they throw their hands in the air and say things like:

“I’m too old to learn this.�
“I’ll never get this.�
“Why won’t this just work?�
“It never works.�
“I’ve tried using it…it’s just a waste of time.�

I keep trying to get through to teachers that the don’t need to know how to do it, they just need to know how it works. The students will figure out the ‘how to’ part.

As Jeff [18] quotes himself as saying, when teachers respond to technologies which are potentially classroom-dynamic changing with “Yeah, but what if…” we need to respond with “That’s a teachable moment”. This will hopefully result in others realising that there’s no such thing as ‘maintaining the status quo’ in education; you innovate or you stagnate. Will Richardson takes up this very theme in his article for edutopia entitled [7] The New Face of Learning. Will poses some very interesting questions at the end of his article, in which he addresses the ease in which learners can now collaborate and connect across the world:

This is indeed, a changed world. From the realities of war to the fears of avian flu and the global-warming crisis, these first few years of the twenty-first century have already tested us in innumerable ways, and the tests show no sign of abating in either intensity or frequency. But I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won’t be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners?

Or did we cling to old ideas, old models, and old habits and drift more fully into irrelevance in our students’ eyes?

The fact is, the world has changed. So to go on pretending that it hasn’t and teaching what essentially are subjects and skill sets rooted in the Industrial era is rather anachronistic. To put it in Judy Breck’s words in [8] Why is education not in the ubiquitous web world picture?:

…education practice today does little more than toy with the emerging innovation of digital connectivityâ€â€?when, in fact, a new knowledge ecology it causes will have to become central to global learning for education as an institution to remain relevant into the future.

You may believe that education does not belong in the open chaos of the emerging Internet. But thinking that misses a wonderful new cognitive order of learning that emerges from the chaos of connected knowledge. Education should be right in there with the other major elements in the ubiquitous mix of the Web world. The openness of the content within the Internet is a change for learning that is as complete as the invention of phonetic symbols was for language.

Judy goes on to discuss how the Internet was intially used for distance learning - to expand the boundaries of the traditional classroom. It was then used in a way common to a lot of us; it’s how most educational institutions view the Internet today:

A second wave of educational response to the Internet was for publishers and campuses to import raw virtual knowledge for piecemeal packaging by the pedagogical experts into the usual education textbooks and curricula to be offered by their institutions (both on campus and by distant outreach to students). For example, many old time lesson plans would have a few suggested reference links to selected websites plugged in here and there.

The problem with these distance-learning and cherry-picking approaches is that they miss the aspect of online interconnectivity, she says. Judy then goes on to look at analogies of how dominant paradigms have fallen due to inertia and a lack of innovation. Although I haven’t got space to go into it and explain it here, her example of how the Egyptians lost dominance in the Middle East due to the complexity of their language when faced with Phoenician simplicity is inspired!

To be fair, education has changed since I was at school. I left compulsory education nine years ago this year and in that time tinkering has made school a different place. But it’s still recognisable. In fact, fundamentally, little has changed since the Victorian age. And we have to ask ourselves why this is the case. Robert Paterson’s blog has just made its way into my [21] Bloglines account due to his heavy quoting of Neil Postman’s excellent Teaching as a Subversive Activity - one of the best books on education I have ever read. In [5] Why I hate school! Robert reminds us of this gem:

“The institution we call ‘school’ is what it is because we made it that way. If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it educates for obsolescence, as John Gardner says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as John Holt says; if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings, as Carl Rogers says; if it induces alienation, as Paul Goodman says; if it punishes creativity & independence, as Edgar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.

It all comes down, at the end of the day, to motivating students to want to learn for its own sake. This is the subject of Kathy Sierra’s post [6] Motivating others: why “it’s good for you” doesn’t work. Although primarily she’s talking about the end users when designing websites, similar principles hold in education:

We all know we can’t simply slap motivation on another person. All we can do is design an experience to help them motivate themselves. If we get them to spend time on our web site, and they have a good experience, but then leave without doing anything–and never come back–does it really matter that they had a Good User Experience? Is a good experience an end in itself, or is it a means to something else?

I think it’s time to start motivating students through engaging, stimulating, real-world, creative learning. One of the best ways to do this in the 21st century is through tools that connect people such as those which go under the banner of ‘Web 2.0′. Don’t you agree?

 

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