EduCon 2.1 Proposal--What Will Classroom Learning Look Like?

Inspired by recent studies and reflections on the evolution of online social media and its uses by teens, we'll spend some time attempting to paint a picture (in some broad strokes) around what effective classroom learning might look like in schools that have chosen to evolve their models. We'll frame the conversation around the questions posed in the conclusion of the "Living and Learning with New Media" study released in November by the MacArthur Foundation. Those questions, as well as some other salient and relevant quotes are included on a Google Notebook page at http://tinyurl.com/educonlearning. Please let me know if you have other starting points you'd like to add. Reminder: this is a conversation, NOT a presentation. Together we'll make a stab at a vision of classroom learning moving forward and, if time, generate some ideas of how best to get there.

 

Guiding Questions:

What needs to stay?
What needs to go?
What will replace it?
How do we plan for that change?
How do we ensure rigor?
What must be in place for learning to happen?

Link
 

"Living and Learning with New Media"--MacArthur Foundation (.pdf)
http://www.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7BB0386CE3-8B29-4162-8098-E466FB856794%7D/DML_ETHNOG_WHITEPAPER.PDF

Rather than thinking of public education as a burden that schools must shoulder on their own, what would it mean to think of public education as a responsibility of a more distributed network of people and institutions? And rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, what would it mean to think of education as a process of guiding kids’ participation in public life more generally, a public life that includes social, recreational, and civic engagement? And finally, what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from an engaged and diverse set of publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions? In addition to publics that are dominated by adult interests, these publics should include those that are relevant and accessible to kids now, where they can find role models, recognition, friends, and collaborators who are co-participants in the journey of growing up in a digital age.

What’s most interesting about the computer is how it puts paid to all of our cherished fantasies of control. The computer – or, most specifically, the global Internet connected to it – is ultimately disruptive, not just to the classroom learning experience, but to the entire rationale of the classroom, the school, the institution of learning. And if you believe this to be hyperbolic, this story will help to convince you.

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance and aptitudes across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns.

We now have powerful and inexpensive computers we can sling over our shoulder or carry in our shirt pocket. (Yamamoto, 2006) These computers are connected wirelessly to the internet at bandwidths sufficient to allow instant multimedia communication anywhere on the planet. These computers will only improve in the years ahead, becoming faster, slimmer, and more affordable. And we are not at the point where we are seeing the possibility that education may be deeply personalized.

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Though networks have always existed, modern communications technologies highlight their existence and given them a new robustness. Networks are distinct from groups in that they preserve individual autonomy and promote diversity of belief, purpose and methodology. In a network, however, people do not act as disassociated individuals, but rather, cooperate in a series of exchanges that can produce, not merely individual goods, but also social goods.

Traditional learning composed of classes and cohorts operates more as a group than as a network. (Davis, 1993) Students pursue the same objectives employing the same methodologies. This is especially evident in corporate learning, where they are expected to share the same vision and to be pursuing the same outcomes. Learning in such classes is frequently collaborative, as students work in small groups to produce a common project or outcome. (Mohn & Nault, 2004) Interaction is structured and led by an instructor. Classes are closed; there is a clear barrier between members and non-members.

In the case of informal learning, however, the structure is much looser. People pursue their own objectives in their own way, while at the same time initiating and sustaining an ongoing dialogue with others pursuing similar objectives. Learning and discussion is not structured, but rather, is determined by the needs and interests of the participants. There is no leader; each person participates as they deem appropriate. There are no boundaries; people drift into and out of the conversation as their knowledge and interests change.

We've stopped dreaming - unless we are dreaming of the Eisenhower Administration and pretending it was all things I am quite certain it was not. And since we've stopped dreaming, we've stopped progressing. We're so afraid these days. I never understood how Europeans just 'gave up on progress' when the Roman Empire fell, but now I do. We have done the same. Retreated to our dark, isolated classrooms, hiding from the world, hoping it all goes away.

Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine—and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn....if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed.

Another camp is opening up the institution–from the inside out–allowing students and staff to access outside information and join outside networks as needed–and from the the outside in–allowing those outside of the institution to benefit from the institution’s offerings. MIT, Tufts and Stanford, among others, are starting to put their courseware online for anyone to use for free. Opening up the institution may seem like a counter-intuitive way of protecting it, but in an era where tremendous value is being created by informal and self-organized groups, sharing becomes the simplest and most powerful way of connecting with external learning opportunities. Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution? Why limit students to a truncated classroom conversation when a much larger one is taking place all over the world? Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources?  Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation. These institutions understand that larger and richer sources of knowledge and wisdom are to be found outside their walls. They understand that allowing students to access these sources, sharing their own, and helping students learn how to manage and understand all of it, will add value to what it is that they do as institutions. They appreciate that the costs of trying to match the quality and quantity of resources/expertise found on the network would be prohibitive. The most practial solution is to become a participatory member of the network. In the end, providing access to these resources and teaching students how to benefit from them not only serves the students, but also keeps the institution from becoming irrelevant, although admittedly, institutional influence will most likely be diminished as more learners self-organize.

All the *buzz* words become *authentic* when education is modeled on LEARNING rather than TEACHING. In the future, I see *student-centered* environments in which learners pursue their *passion-based* areas of interest by *constructing* knowledge needed to solve *relevant* problems. Learners will be nurtured locally and virtually by *teams* of technology proficient content experts. Learners will be *guided* in *collaborative* learning activities by information-savvy *facilitators* that coordinate with school, community and global experts to identify *social learning networks*, *authentic projects*, and *active learning* resources. *Mastery* learning will be demonstrated by the learners’s *performance* and measured by successful demonstration of the knowledge, skills and *expertise* needed to *create* and *innovate* in an academic discipline.

What does this mean for teaching? It means far fewer teachers. Those content experts who survive competitive performance-based internships will be highly compensated for strong interpersonal skills, content expertise, and ability to transfer their expertise to the practice of learning.

A classroom is clearly relevant if someone is learning engine repair, but perhaps not if learning calculus. The classroom in this fungible future of student administrators and evolved lecturers is any place where learning happens. If it can happen entirely online, that will be the classroom. If it requires substantial presence with the instructor, it will have a physical locale, which may or may not be a building dedicated to education. (It could, in many cases, simply be a field outdoors, again harkening back to 13th-century university practices.) At one end of the scale, students will be able work online with each other and with an lecturer to master material; at the other end, students will work closely with a mentor in a specialist classroom. This entire range of possibilities can be accommodated without much of the infrastructure we presently associate with educational institutions. The classroom will both implode, vanishing online, and explode: the world will become the classroom...

All of a sudden we’ve imploded the boundaries of the classroom. The lecture can come from the US, or the UK, or Canada, or New Zealand, or any other country. Location doesn’t matter – only its rating as ‘best’ matters. This means that every student, every time they sit down at a computer, already does or will soon have on available the absolute best lectures, globally. That’s just a mind-blowing fact. It grows very naturally out of our desire to share and our desire to share ratings about what we have shared. Nothing extraordinary needed to happen to produce this entirely extraordinary state of affairs.

I am a secondary student but the grade level I would most like to teach is grade eight.  My grade eight room would have computers for every student, all the same so they are working with the same thing. 

Our Middle School academic leadership has been discussing the concept of 21st century learning, as have our counterparts in the Upper School.  A cohort of their teachers has reviewed the aforementioned resources and tentatively organized/categorized them into seven "Literacies of a Lifelong Learner":

• Basic Literacy
• Habits of Mind Literacy
• Visual/Media Literacy
• Information Literacy
• Intercultural Literacy
• Citizenship and Ethical Literacy
• Network Literacy

Instead, we are suggesting that expertise and nuanced understanding of knowledge is distributed across a network of people. Each with a part, none with the whole.

What’s the impact?

By letting learning emerge from rich inquiry, collaboration and publication tools, learners are able to play active roles in the creation and sustenance of their own learning contexts. These skills, the contexts and the products of course do not end when the course LMS site is closed, but rather become life long learning attributes and capacity. Thus the creation of a rich learning environment that the student creates, owns and continuous to build with is the major learning outcome, the specific knowledge domain outcomes are useful but less important outcomes in a life long learning context.

It could be video games. Bioengineering. Or health care. All of these forces and more are explored on the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and Institute for the Future 2006-2016 Map of Future Forces Affecting Education.

Look around the map. Explore it. While we'd never suggest that this map contains all of the answers and perfectly predicts the future, it does offer a clear point of view based on countless hours of research, analysis and expert opinion. Think of the map as a provocative tool, as the beginning of a movement, or, at the very least, part of a good conversation. Join in. And help us shape the future.