Hello friends,
The role of technology, in a traditional school setting, is to facilitate, through increased efficiency and effectiveness, the education of knowledge and skills. In order to fully examine this thesis, we must first define several terms. Efficiency will be defined as the quickness by which we obtain knowledge, while the term effectiveness is associated with the amount of imparted knowledge that is operationally mastered. When technology is directly applied to an educational setting, such as a school, both the students and teachers can be viewed as learners. Thus, we can operate under the assumption that any increase in teacher knowledge and utilization has the impact of increased learning in students. Ultimately, technology should serve to increase student achievement in schools.
Technology can aid in educational achievement through two primary methods: the removal of physical barriers to learning and the transition of focus from the retention of
knowledge to its utilization. Each of these methods must be examined in the context of their relation to both the student and the instructor in order to see their value and effect in educational settings.
Summarizing the videos
Video - 1: Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Paradigm
In this TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson argues that our current educational systems are still based on a industrial paradigm of education – education is increasingly standardised and about conformity, and kids, who are living in the most stimulating age in history, fail to see the point of going to school, which is about ‘finding the right answers to pass the tests’ rather than about stimulating divergent thinking.
One of our major solutions to the plague of distracted kids (alienated by a system the don’t identify with) is to medicate them to get them through school, whereas what really needs to change is the system itself – we need a paradigm shift, rather than mere reform.
The education system kills creativity
There was a great study done recently on divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creative thinking – it is the ability to see lots of possible ways of interpreting and answering a question; to think laterally and to see many possible answers, not just one.
An example of this simply to give someone a paper clip and to get them to think of as many different uses for the paper clip as possible – someone whose good at this will be able to think of hundreds of uses for the paper clip by imagining that it can be all sorts of sizes and made out of all sorts of different materials.
Cites a Longitudinal study (taken from a book called ‘Break Point and Beyond) in which Kindergarten children were tested on their ability to think divergently, and 98% of them scored at ‘genius level’; the same children were retested at ages 8-10, but only 50% of them scored at genius level, and again at 13-15, where hardly any of them scored at genius level.
This study shows two things: firstly, we all have the inherent capacity for divergent thinking and secondly it deteriorates as children get older.
Now lots of things happen to these kids as they grow up, but the most important thing is that they have become educated – they’ve spent 10 years being told ‘that there’s one answer and it’s at the back, and don’t look and don’t copy’.
The problem we have is that the industrial-capitalist mode of education is deep in the gene-pool of the education system, it is an educational paradigm which will be hard to shift.
Shifting the Education Paradigm
We need to do the following to shift the industrial-capitalist education paradigm:
Firstly, destroy the myth that there is a divide between academic and non-academic subjects, and between the abstract and the theoretical.
Secondly, recognize that most great learning takes place in groups – collaboration is the stuff of growth, rather than individualizing people which separates them from their natural learning environment.
Finally, we need to change the habitual ways of thinking of those within the education system and the habitats which they occupy.
2nd and 3rd both the videos are of Sugata Mitra, pondering upon cloud school and future of learning.
Video 2: Sugata Mitra: School in the cloud- SOLE
“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.”
Sugata Mitra
Modern schooling looks much like it did 300 years ago. The teacher in front of a class, the students in orderly desks — this system developed under the British Empire. But with the rise of the Internet, memorization of facts just isn't as important. For the jobs of the future, students need to learn how to think critically. This is the paradigm shift Sugata Mitra hopes to usher in with the School in the Cloud. In addition to opening physical learning labs of varying sizes, he's creating the "Granny Cloud," a global network of retired teachers who support kids through an online School in the Cloud platform. His goal: to share the Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) method with parents, teachers, after-school programs and communities worldwide, and transform the way kids learn.
Mitra has also launched the School in the Cloud platform which ensures that anyone, anywhere, can experiment with self-organized learning. As of 2016, more than 16,000 SOLE sessions have taken place globally, with partner learning labs and programs scatted across the world — including in Pakistan, Colombia and Greece. The platform debuted at TED2014, with Microsoft and their Skype Social Good team stepping in to provide core technology and connect a global community. Made By Many, the product design partners, and IDEO, the research design partners, co-created the experience. Newcastle University opened SOLE Central in 2014, as a global hub for research on self-organized learning. The platform is managed at the university's Culture Lab.
Video 3: Sugata Mitra: Future of Learning
Mitra’s alternative to the current system is one that creates “happy, healthy and productive people”. However he states that we should also remember that the term “productive” has changed in meaning – being a productive member of society no longer means have a skill such “as a farmer or blacksmith who made horseshoes” – this is all changing due to our increasing reliance on machines.
As a result of the rapidly changing world around us, Mitra says it’s important to ask questions about the big changes that are yet to come and that we do not know of yet. It’s very easy to focus on things that are familiar, serving only the imaginary packing of the suitcase.
On the future of education and whether our current system will change, Mitra has an optimistic outlook, stating that he does see a will to change, with almost everyone aware that a certain change in the current system is necessary. However if this need is not realised, Mitra suggests that information technology could be the catalyst that forces this change.
Sugata Mitra maintains that the internet, used by putting children in small groups, can be a quicker and more efficient way of learning, with teachers becoming less and less important. He argues for moving away from memorising facts and moving towards answering big, serious questions.
Finally, on whether there will be a need for schools in the future, Mitra says: “Certainly, because one of the main functions of the school is bringing together the children who communicate with each other in a safe environment… almost nobody remembers the teachings themselves from school. But they often recall their classmates and what they did in their free time, whether good or bad. And that’s simply what we enjoyed when attending school – our classmates, not learning. So something like a school, whatever that may be called in the future, will still have to exist so that children can safely meet and be together.”
Video 4: Salman Khan: Let's use video to re-invent education
Salman Khan’s TEDT chronicles his amazing and unexpected Khan Academy journey to date.
In its earliest form, the Khan Academy was a series of tutoring videos that hedge fund analyst Sal Khan casually posted on YouTube. He’d created them for his cousins, who enjoyed the option to pause and repeat his lessons, thereby self-pacing their learning. Soon other learners discovered the videos online, followed by educators. The videos popped up in schools as part of a groundbreaking teaching method: “flip the classroom.” Rather than lecturing in class and assigning practice exercises as homework, teachers were doing the reverse.
Video 5: Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants
“Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”
Mark Prensky
It‟s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.
Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today‟s learners are different. “Www.hungry.com” said a kindergarten student recently at lunchtime. “Every time I go to school I have to power down,” complains a high-school student. Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to? Often from the Natives‟ point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience – and then they blame them for not paying attention!
So what should happen? Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? Unfortunately, no matter how much the Immigrants may wish it, it is highly unlikely the Digital Natives will go backwards. In the first place, it may be impossible – their brains may already be different. It also flies in the face of everything we know about cultural migration. Kids born into any new culture learn the new language easily, and forcefully resist using the old. Smart adult immigrants accept that they don‟t know about their new world and take advantage of their kids to help them learn and integrate. Not-so-smart (or not-so-flexible) immigrants spend most of their time grousing about how good things were in the “old country.” So unless we want to just forget about educating Digital Natives until they grow up and do it themselves, we had better confront this issue. And in so doing we need to reconsider both our methodology and our content.
Click here to read my summaries on David Crystal's Videos.
Thank you.
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