| CEQ•ALL Rationale & Lit ReviewWhat happens when students are left to their own devices? Many students, well-trained in “playing school” see free time a chance to good off, to escape the boredom or avoid the stress. CEQ•ALL provides a research-based, common sense approach to guiding personal learning to maximize intrinsic motivation, achievement and sophisticated thinking. In other words: to enjoy life. |
| CEQ•ALL Self-Assessment GuidePeople can use this to gain feedback on how they might support or work against developing their own joy of learning and achieving. |
|
HI Tom,
I enjoyed you presentation today however left with a number of questions and thoughts.
I understand and see where you are going with using social networking sites, web 2.0 and so forth as tools for student learning. In 1999, Ten Stages for Working the Web, you said that, “what makes the web so compelling is access to people”. The new tools for the web are just there to help this access to people and links to community stronger and easier.
Where I am not sure however is how these things can be implemented across a school and state curriculum. On an individual level making the changes is simple, but I think it is more important to consider application across a wider scale.
I am one of the converted and see the importance, however how do you get someone that doesn’t see that importance to change? How do you get a school system to change? How do you get that change to last once you have left? How do you get a state system to change?
In ‘Retooling Schooling’ you say, “Change isn’t change, unless it’s sustained”.
We have had the Internet for over a decade, webquests and other possibilities you were advocating a decade ago still are not happening in most of the schools I work in. When they are happening, then it is generally only on an individual level, it isn’t a school wide approach.
We spend millions and millions (1 billion in the next four years) on technology in schools yet large numbers of computers exist as pretty paper weights whose main purpose is to attract parents into enrolling their children. Has the money spent on technology actually made a meaningful difference to the way teachers teach?
In 2001, you were advocating a need to reflect on the education system in regards to Time, Place, Product, Process, Content and Personal Growth. Has this reflection occurred? Perhaps for you on a personal level it has but I am not sure if it has been looked at by the departments that run education.
We are planning to spend 1 billion on computers over the next four years, yet I am not sure if anyone has actually bothered to spend the time or money to see if it will be worthwhile and whether teachers and schools will use them effectively.
Using videos as a source for discussion is a fantastic thing that teachers should be doing. However when this requires spending hours looking for relevant material compared to 30 seconds to open to chapter 4 exercise 3, I wonder what option most teachers will choose.
When Arthur C Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable form magic” he might have been talking about the way that most teachers see technology. Much of what you where showing is simple to do, however I would contend that to most teachers it would appear like magic. For so many the challenge is to turn the computer on let alone have students create a vodcast and deliver it through an rss enclosure.
The use of technology in schools has been around for a long time. In ten years though I am not all that sure that anything has actually changed.
regards,
Daniel
Sorry, didn’t realise it was that long.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for this very thoughtful discussion. I completely concur with your observation that little has changed in the mainstream of schooling in this past decade of Web access. Given this basic agreement, I do see a couple issues that come into play. First, how many teachers / classrooms have true access even now? I work in a fair few schools that even if they have a reasonable number of computers, have pretty horrible bandwidth. And those that have computers and bandwidth, often have filters that make MacDonalds and a PSP a more hopeful learning scenario than many computers in school labs or libraries. What percentage of teachers / classrooms do you see that have a newer computer, big bandwidth and access to YouTube? I’d consider this level of connectivity as a base definition of “access” before looking for any impact along the lines of your comment:
We have had the Internet for over a decade, webquests and other possibilities you were advocating a decade ago still are not happening in most of the schools I work in.
As for the second – and critical part – your rightly ask the questions:
How do you get a school system to change? How do you get a state system to change?
I have been working on this angle for the past 5 years and I have sorted the answer into three categories:
1) Change will happen when almost all students walk into schools with a broadband-connected wireless device of their own and basically sidestep one-size-fits-all learning. The nearest best chance for this in Australia is this Friday when the iPhone 3G rolls-out. Realistically, given Apple’s quick iteration of better and better solutions and things like the ASUS EEEE and XO and the Rudd laptops for schools, I’m betting on 3 years for this iWag Revolution to take place.
2) If schools are already on a journey related to reinterpreting curriculum as a series of masterings (not seat time and year level) such as afforded by consensus Curriculum Maps, a Thinking Curriculum, Dimensions of Learning, etc., then smart technologies can easily integrate with the more personal learning approaches that better curriculum supports. If / when this happens at schools, we will see organic responses that solve the essential needs of that school’s learning community and students. I mention this because many large systems will miss the target by seeking one solution that can be mandated and objectively measured – still locked in the mass production model.
3) Many schools will blithely carry on as they have for the past decades, because fear of making mistakes and distrust of the mass of students and teachers will make safety and uniformity more coveted than learning and achieved potential. As a former public school teacher, I worry that these large systems, vulnerable as they are to the errors and crimes of the few, may get stuck in this time warp.
In the transition time we inhabit, I’m betting that doing “right by students” and going where organic experimentation is not only allowed, but encouraged, is the best contribution we can make. Otherwise, my time will be over before the new era dawns.
What do you think?
What do you do? Point me to some pages. And stay in touch!
Tom —