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5 key trends for the future of education In this, my last post here about the conference, I want to give a quick overview of five trends which jumped out at me. These were mentioned by several speakers during the conference: Openness - This has been going on for a while, but there's a real drive towards open access for academic research in particular.There is a feeling that education and public services should be open and transparent. Greater insight into the knowledge creation process - This is similar to openness but pertains to the creation of articles, books and other material. It's not just the output that should be shared, but the context of how it was put together. Mobile learning. - The big movement at the moment outside the conference is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) but the focus at Mobility Shifts was upon mobile for ubiquitous learning. It's not so much about the mobility of the device but the multiple ways in which the learner is mobile. Alternative forms of assessment - This is a big one with Mozilla's Open Badges leading the way. Because assessment often drives the structure of learning, this is key. Rethinking the classroom environment - This goes hand-in-hand with the curricula redesign necessitated by alternative forms of assessment. How should we build new (or reorganise existing) classrooms?

Secretary Duncan said, U.S. educational reform policy is motivated by a belief that the U.S. educational system is particularly failing disadvantaged children. Yet an analysis of international test score levels and trends shows that in important ways disadvantaged U.S. children perform better, relative to children in comparable nations, than do middle-class and advantaged children. More careful analysis of these levels and trends may lead policymakers to reconsider their assumption that almost all improvement efforts should be directed to the education of disadvantaged children and few such efforts to the education of middle-class and advantaged children

A re-estimated U.S. average PISA score that adjusted for a student population in the United States that is more disadvantaged than populations in otherwise similar post-industrial countries, and for the over-sampling of students from the most-disadvantaged schools in a recent U.S. international assessment sample, finds that the U.S. average score in both reading and mathematics would be higher than official reports indicate (in the case of mathematics, substantially higher).

Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.

But here are the solutions that this challenge brings to mind. Eliminate paper from the budget and remove all copiers and computer printers from schools and the central office (with exceptions of essential need). “On this date, everything goes digital.” Create a professional development plan where all faculty and staff learn to teach themselves within a networked, digital, and info-abundant environment — it’s about Learning-Literacy. Although workshops would not completely disappear, the goal would be a culture where casual, daily, and self-directed professional development is engaged, shared, and celebrated — everyday! Then extend the learning-literacy workshops to the greater adult community. Establish a group, representing teachers, staff, administration, students, and community. Invite a “guru” or two to speak to the group about the “Why” of transforming education.  Video or broadcast the speeches to the larger community via local access, etc. The group will then write a document that describes the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the person who graduates from their schools — a description of their goal graduate. The ongoing work of writing this document will be available to the larger community for comment and suggestion. The resulting piece will remain fluidly adaptable. Teachers, school administrators, and support staff will work in appropriately assembled into overlapping teams to retool their curricula toward assuring the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the district’s goal graduate. Classroom curricula will evolve based on changing conditions and resources. To help keep abreast of conditions, teachers and support staff will shadow someone in the community for one day at least once a year and debrief with their teams identifying the skills and knowledge they saw contributing to success, and adapt their curricula appropriately.

The district budget will be re-written to exclude all items that do not directly contribute to the goal graduate or to supporting the institution(s) that contribute to the goal graduate. Part of that budget will be the assurance that all faculty, staff, and students have convenient access to networked, digital, and abundant information and that access will be at least 1 to 1. A learning environment or platform will be selected such as Moodle, though I use that example only as a means of description. The platform will have elements of course management system, social network and distributive portfolio. The goal of the platform will be to empower learning, facilitate assessment, and exhibit earned knowledge and skills to the community via student (and teacher) published information products that are imaginative, participatory and reflect today’s prevailing information landscape. Expand the district’s and the community’s notions of assessment to include data mining, but also formal and informal teacher, peer, and community evaluation of student produced digital products. Encourage (or require) teachers to produce imaginative information products that share their learning either related or unrelated to what they teach.  Also establish learning events where teachers and staff perform TED, or TELL (Teachers Expressing Leadership in Learning) presentations about their passions in learning to community audiences. Recognize that change doesn’t end and facilitate continued adapting of all plans and documents. No more five-year plans. Everything is timelined to the goal graduate.

It's The Integration Economy, Stupid.

Tablet & Mobile Wars Create Ubiquitous Social Computing.

Facebook Interrupts Location-Based Networking.

What about Web 3.0? So, that’s a very brief description of the shift to Web 2.0, but what about Web 3.0? Does there have to be one? Is it already here? I’ve heard quite a few people speculating about Web 3.0. At one point, when virtual worlds such as Second Life were all the rage, it was being described as Web 3.D and many were predicting that the web would become a 3 dimensional space that we would fly around using our virtual avatars. Others have described Web 3.0 as the ‘semantic web’. The development of semantic web standards was designed to help computers ‘understand’ and read web pages and make connections between them. This would dramatically improve the effectiveness of search engines and help people to access web based information more effectively. One of the most recent predictions is that with the drastic growth of internet able hand-held devices such as phones, gaming consoles and tablet devices Web 3.0 will be all about ‘the mobile web’.

Augmented reality is a kind of fusion between our existing physical reality and the internet.

What it means in reality is that mobile devices, will help us to access information from the internet which is specific to our physical location and proximity to real world objects places and even people. Check out mobile apps from Gowalla and Foursquare for examples of this.

Almost half of all content consumers surveyed by Technorati trust traditional media sources less than they did five years ago

Equally interesting is the fact that almost 50% of content consumers surveyed by Technorati trust the content that they’re finding on blogs—a number that rivals the 60% of content consumers who trust the content they find in print newspapers, television broadcasts and radio programming.

60% of all bloggers surveyed spend between 1 and 3 hours per week working on their blogs—and the average blogger posts new content to their site 2-3 times per week.

As Linda Stone has written, we can't continue to function on what she calls "continuous partial attention," which she differentiates from multi-tasking. We aren't just shifting from one task to another, she has written, but we are hyper-alert, paying attention to input coming from every direction at the same time, including listening to conversations, responding to computers and smart phones

It starts with the fact that globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, 3G wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected. This is the single most important trend in the world today. And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles.