Learning environments of the future are in incubation. And therein lies the challenge: Learning environments that don't exist can't be analyzed. Moving into the unknown requires a pioneering spirit. Helen Keller reminds us that is the truth of not only our age, but of all ages: "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
The point of this story is change. It illustrates how the teaching profession you are entering today will be a different ‘place’ in ten, fifteen, twenty years time. The relationship between a profession and its client group – and in our case that’s children and parents – is constantly transforming. That is something we all have to accommodate. The landscape within which we operate changes too – sometimes quite dramatically.
While it's no secret that there seems to be more use and reliance on digital and blended learning with each passing semester, a transition may be happening faster than you think writes Tom Vander Ark. At a conference he talked about a dozen of the factors accelerating the shift to digital learning:
''Fixing the technology's important, but so is changing the pedagogy,'' Mr Tanner said. ''While we've made great progress in e-learning, there's been an awful lot about 'e' and not much about 'learning'.''
UNIVERSITIES that fail to embrace new technology will lose students and die, former federal finance minister Lindsay Tanner has warned. Mr Tanner, now a vice-chancellor's fellow at Victoria University, told a Melbourne audience last night that while Australian universities were using the internet to deliver study materials, they were not yet fully exploiting the potential technology offered for new ways of learning.
"While attending this particular workshop I was, at first, contemplating how I could utilize this tool as an administrator. As those thoughts wandered, the instructor repeatedly said the words "expand the walls of the classroom". That caught my attention and then I had no problem envisioning how the teachers I worked with could utilize a wiki to do just that."
"In conjuction with our partners in the Rethink Learning Now campaign, we have produced an ESEA Toolkit for you to use in making your voice heard around ESEA reauthorization."
IMAGINE AN assessment system in which teachers had a wide repertoire of classroom-based, culturally sensitive assessment
practices and tools to use in helping each and every child learn to high standards; in which educators collaboratively used
assessment information to continuously improve schools; in which important decisions about a student, such as readiness to
graduate from high school, were based on the work done over the years by the student; in which schools in networks held one
another accountable for student learning; and in which public evidence of student achievement consisted primarily of samples
from students' actual schoolwork rather than just reports of results from one-shot examinations.
The teachers understood that learning doesn’t have to be measured in order to be
assessed.
It focused on teachers’ personal “connection[s] with our subject area” as the
basis for helping students to think “like mathematicians or historians or
writers or scientists, instead of drilling them in the vocabulary of those
subject areas or breaking down the skills.” In a word, the teachers put
kids before data.
All that does is corrupt the measure (unless it’s a test score, in which case
it’s already misleading), undermine collaboration among teachers, and make
teaching less joyful and therefore less effective by meaningful criteria.
"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring,
others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be
remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought
to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a
consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the
business world or involves digital technology.
Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity,
and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless
officials to raise test scores at any cost).
With a good dose of critical
thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't
have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin
to take back our schools."
As these systems evolve, the number of inputs and outputs generally increases.
Each time a new node is added to the network, the number of potential
connections required scales exponentially
Furthermore, because there is only one standard, there is no incentive for
innovation, which means that the system cannot evolve.
Single standards are notoriously difficult to overcome or dislodge, even when
they become ludicrously inefficient, as is the case with the Western “QWERTY”
keyboard layout.
the system has great difficulty overcoming its own internal structure and
adapting to the change.
Complex systems of this type, that are too loosely structurally coupled,
maximize their openness to innovation but do so entirely at the cost of being
able to exploit those innovations when they are useful
a panarchy
The bow-tie structure manages these tensions by occupying an “edge of chaos”
zone in between too much rigidity and too much flexibility, between too little
diversity, and too much.
There is a need to capitalize on potential efficiencies in one’s current
environment while at the same time remaining flexible enough to adapt if the
environment changes
confusing the necessary cluster of evolving core elements with a “standard
Future networks operate on multiple standards in the core — optimal levels of
infrastructure arrived at by open innovation in the periphery that makes its way
into the core as adoption and usage increase.
widely agreed upon cultural understandings and practices.
When we are trying to convey ideas, get buy-in, share values or challenge
someone we need to pick a richer medium. Sometimes only face-to-face will do -
hence the outrage when employees are notified of their redundancy via SMS
message from a gutless manager
Sobel-Lojeski's work and her conception of Virtual Distance shows us that there
are lessons to be learned from the way technology is making the workforce in
some businesses less productive
Sobel-Lojeski has called this phenomenon "Virtual Distance" because the death of (physical) distance due to the use of communications technologies just heralded a new kind of interpersonal detachment.
This article responds to a generation of techno-criticism in education. It contains a review of the key themes of that criticism. The context of previous efforts to reform education reframes that criticism. Within that context, the question is raised about what schools need to look and be like in order to take advantage of laptop computers and other technology. In doing so, the article presents a vision for self-organizing schools.
Anna Patty can you please link to your sources so SMH readers can read full transcripts of ideas you selectively quote? Poor journalism in a hyper-linked age. These ideas are NOT new, so why do they gain prominance once one GPC Pricipal obviously published their thoughts somewhere?