These random thoughts are here to support teachers from all sectors in the Asia Pacific Region. It is also a place to share thoughts and reflections on how learners can get the best from living and learning in "Asia's World City".
Hope you get something from my all too erratic posts.
Enjoy the read and please, leave a comment.
Paul
You have to love long-haul flights for catching up on reading. I am flying from Hong Kong to Perth, Western Australia and, en-route I have been reading a paper that I saw referred to on a list I monitor which had an interesting discussion recently about whether it was possible to predict a long future for the teaching of ICT as a discrete subject in schools. As one might imagine, the list that had a lot of experienced and reflective ICT and other teachers on it really grabbed this juicy bone hard and chewed it till it was devoid of all meat, marrow and even bone! Along the way there was some great discussion about why we should bother to teach anything (a topic I often start workshops with).
Along the way, this dissertation was referenced TRACING THE DYNABOOK:
A STUDY OF TECHNOCULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
by
John W. Maxwell
This is a bit of a lofty and academic sounding title but I really do recommend that readers who struggle with why the educators and institutions that you deal with sometimes seem reluctant to embrace the use of the technology that is reshaping the world as we know it, consider putting it on your reading list.
One of the great take-aways for me was thinking about the vision and the energy that must have been a part of the teams that Alan Kay worked with in the early days of shaping his Dynabook vision. In today’s world of amazing technology being thrown at us every “marketing quarter”, design for obsolescence in a few short years, pursuit of the latest gadget and amazing web tools seemingly landing each day, It is a very easy trap to fall into being blasé about a device that Kay would still like to see used as an “instrument whose music is ideas”.
The other amazing thing is just how far-sighted Kay is about the transformative power of the technology. Even though a lot of what Kay was thinking and writing about back in the 70s is now commonplace in terms of the availability of the hardware, it is clear from reading this that we have a long way to go to take onboard the way that Kay sees technology being used with children. I loved this quote:
Kay’s enthusiasm and unbridled romanticism is captured in his best-known quotation: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Kay’s future included children, personal computers, and a new kind of literacy.
Such a large, far reaching document is impossible to summarise here in a short blog post. I urge you to consider putting it on your holiday reading list.
Photo: Looks like an Ad, No? http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystalginn/115479869/
Over the past week I’ve been working on policies and documents relating to E-Learning and electronic resources at the Academy. The following are links to the Google Docs that were created with feedback from my Twitter network. They are very much still in draft form and I would therefore appreciate further feedback!
Some of the findings of positive psychology seem like common sense. Does this add anything to what we already know about the good life? It is easy to claim something is obvious after the evidence is in. It is the job of science to empirically prove or disprove what we consider as the common wisdom. Sometimes this common “wisdom” is true, sometimes it is not. One person’s wisdom can be another person’s folly. Positive psychology research is discovering some things that might not be considered wisdom to all.
In the lead up to the conference, I have been meeting with quite a few vendors. Some of these have been learning platform vendors. These guys have the unenviable task of trying to sell their product to schools who are not really clear on what they want to use it for. Some schools for example convey to the community that their programmes are inquiry based and student centered but then they say that the platform must hold lots of past papers and worksheets that to all intents and purposes look exactly what I used when was taught 40 years ago!
I am currently out of Hong Kong working in Australia but I know that the many of the schools in Hong Kong have closed down due to the Swine Flu Pandemic. There is a lot of talk about how the students can still do work online. I am wondering how effective it is and, if it still follows the inquiry model?
Given that many of the schools say that they have been prepared for this to happen for some time now, it should be easy to see how schools have used these tools effectively. I, for one, am curious to know if it is possible to see 21st Century Learning in evidence on a portal? It is easy to direct kids to a website to do activities and write reports or submit results but what would we see on the portal if the students are engaged in communication, collaboration and creative endeavors leading to innovation?
I would appreciate your thoughts.
Photo: If the leaders don’t get it.. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcleod/2919154475/in/pool-858082@N25
It seems like everywhere I look around me at the moment schools are evaluating some aspect of 1:1 computing. There are many reasons for this including the netbook revolution, Mr Rudd’s plan to put a computer on the desk of every Year 9-12 student in Australia and many more enlightened schools realising that standards for ICT are at least as important for any other core subject. As an educator that has followed and been deeply involved with 1:1 computing programmes in schools ever since David Loader kicked the whole idea off at MLC Kew in 1990. It was only 2 years after this that I found myself in an Aussie school that had followed the MLC model and Introduced a year level set of the same Toshiba 1100Plus Machines (I think it was this model but the image doesn’t look right). Yep, these “state of the art” machines had no hard drive, just a dual floppy drive arrangement which took the “newfangled 3.5″ disks” (there were a lot of 5.25″ disks around at the time).
Storage on the machine was not possible and things like networking or the internet were not even on the horizon. What was there, however, was an excitement about the possibilities and a hearty discussion about the possibilities partly fueled by Alan Kay’s Dynabook Vision which I think anyone interested in making education more relevant had read. As a result, there was not a single notebook programme that I was aware of that did not have tools for creativity on them, in spite of their clumsy interfaces and problems with loading the programme into the memory from floppies. The result was that companies like LCSI, JASC, Inspiration Inc., and Lego moved very quickly to modify pricing models and support their software on disks for student laptops.
What this naturally lead to was a lot of staffroom discussion about the use of these tools in core subject areas. Admittedly, it was a lot of hard work to get the very traditionally oriented chemistry/physics teacher or the senior literature teacher espousing the “smell and touch of books” to embrace the possibilites of making some interactive exercises to demonstrate understanding of a principle in Microworlds or to construct a mindmap prior to a book review focussing on characterisation but the conversations were taking place. Given that this was taking place in the early 90s, it is bringing a tear to my eye to read a lot of the discussion on how Australian schools should use the government money to put computers in front of students. This sort of post is typical of a focus on the machine and what IT can do. Note the absence of any comment about what students should or could be doing with it.
I was recently asked to join a meeting of School Leaders at a school that wanted to discuss the planning for a 1:1 programme at the school. Interestingly the primary (elementary) section of the school had employed a facilitator who was also an Apple Distingushed Educator. Regular readers will know that I am not a great fan of the “you promote us, we promote you” programmes of big corporates like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., but the teacher in question is a very professional, knowledgeable and caring educator and had clearly conveyed a well thought through argument to the leaders in the section of the school that they worked in. On the other hand the teachers in the secondary section clearly had not thought through what they saw the students doing with the tools. I could tell from the email exchange prior to the meeting that this was the case so I tried to set them up a little better in the meeting by making comments like these:
Given that the emails that I was being copied in on were continuing to be about the network, the infrastructure and the clients that might access all of this, I decided that the only thing I could do was try to leave them with something after the meeting to reflect on and, maybe, assist them at a later date. To try to achieve this I created the attached document to which I added the following comments:
Some comments about the attached checklists if I may.
1. This is the sort of list I put together when I was initiating
the discussion about what we needed on computers in every student’s hands
when I was responsible for the 1:1 program. I intentionally went as far to the
creative, collaborative open-ended side of the spectrum as I could. Some
of the teachers would have lists including such things as Math textbooks as
PDFs and extensive English literature extracts to be read verbatim on
the screen. I welcomed this as it lead to a very robust discussion which
really helped us clarify what we saw the students doing each day.
2. The support team who worked under me would add their list of
capabilities for the machine and the ensuing document would be turned
into a checklist which we used to evaluate whether a vendor could assist us in
helping us get to where we wanted to go. (In Australia, every notebook
vendor supplying to schools offered curriculum materials, professional
development and conference sponsorships. Very different to Asia.)
By the way, here are a couple of resources about schools that went with tablet PCs based on the analysis above. The first is from Paul White formally of NIST Thailand and now with the ESF in Hong Kong who talks about a tablet programme supported by wireless projectors in classrooms in this video. A more recent podcast from June 2009 has Bill Campbell, Associate Director of Technology at the Dwight Englewood School share his experiences at a Tablet PC School.
I would be very interested to get some comments from some of the educators whom I know read this blog and are in schools considering 1:1 programmes for the new school year. Are you having these sort of conversations about what learning on these machines looks like? Are you just looking at a machine that enables access and then seeing where it goes from there? Are you being seduced by the vendor that promotes the “creative notebook” and thus falling into the “iMovie project in every classroom” trap? (Had a great reference for this but can’t think how I tagged it!)
Comments, as always very welcome.
Photo: Teaching is not Rocket Science http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/2942564830/in/pool-858082@N25
At a demonstration, I saw a number of features in iMovie 09 that I wished were in FCP and I wondered if there was a way to use iMovie 09 in conjunction with FCP, utilizing some of its features to supplement the FCP workflow, most importantly in the rough cut phase of editing, as ‘09′ has an amazing skimming/edit tool. iMovie also sports a new and modern tool for exact clip trimming, the Precision Editor and it’s stunning. And, iMovie provides full Real Time playback, no rendering required, ever.
My own books is a fantastic site for fostering reading skills and thus, English language acquisition. It was created by Anne Pemberton, a retired Special Ed. teacher and she has done a marvelous job.
Students simply chose a story they want to read. Then, they put in their own name and BINGO! The story is all about them! You can print or read on the screen with pictures to support comprehension. Really cool and I suggest students print these out and share their stories. A great way to create a classroom , personalized library!
NeoK12 is a great collection of educational videos for science, math, social studies, and language arts. Each category is subdivided by topic. For example under the social studies heading you will find sub-categories of geography, government, industry and several more topics. Most of the videos come from YouTube or Metacafe. You could find these videos yourself on YouTube, but NeoK12 saves you time through their categorization of videos.
I was behaved and kept my mouth shut (uncharacteristically) but I really wanted to scream out “Why are we hamstringing kids with such primitive tools in 2009?!” The argument of the presenters, who were from the US, was that every student would not be able to present with a computer so why not make the most of the computers in their pocket? I really want to take issue with the first part of that statement. Surely in an age where every professional in even the most basic of desk jobs uses a computer, why are we still wondering if they might be of use in schools?
Graham Wegner recently reflected on this failure to move ahead in schools in a recent post he called Immunity. Whilst governments make decisions to try to find funding to put computers in front of kids in poor and remote communities, it amazes me that schools who can afford the technology are still wondering if they should do anything with technology in classrooms. We know that getting students to create, the top level on the new Blooms Revised Taxonomy is what we should be aiming to do and yet, we still think that using mobile phones, essentially tools for delivery of content, might do the trick in schools.
Shouldn’t we at least be saying that there is a minimum spec tool that first world economies should be insisting on for students, especially if we want them to be used for creation of digital artifacts that demonstrate that our students are creators, collaborators and all round thinkers?
With Tinychat, you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. You can also embed your chatroom on your blog, myspace, personal site, and many other portals. You can even invite people through email and twitter. Try it, we’re sure you’ll like it!
The Mobile Learning Institute’s film series “A 21st Century Education” profiles individuals who embrace and defend fresh approaches to learning and who confront the urgent social challenges that are part of a 21st century experience. “A 21st Century Education” compiles, in short film format, the best ideas around school reform. The series is meant to start, extend, or nudge the conversation about how to make change in education happen.
One regularly overlooked aspect of implementing a school laptop initiative is student involvement. The education consultants at Generation YES recently outlined some ways to do just that. For the full report, go to http://www.genyes.org/freeresources/
Glogster is a powerful tool for students to use to create online collages that they can share with their friends and classmates. If you’re not familiar with Glogster, it can best be described as an online poster creation tool with music. Glogster for Education gives teachers the ability to create accounts for their classrooms. Using their Glogster for Education accounts, teachers can assign to and manage individual accounts for their students.
05 February 2007 at 09.15 Making the best use of the web in MFL lessons The BETT show was a huge source of classroom inspiration for language teachers. Here MFL teacher Joe Dale rounds up some of the best Having…
I have mentioned previously that sometimes an idea has its time and this seems to well and truly be the case for discussion on learning spaces. I was privilidged to be a part of the Apple Global Leadership Summit in Hong Kong last month where Stephen Heppell delivered a fabulous keynote during which he shared specific illustrated examples of schools coming to terms with changes in education and trying to plan spaces and environments conducive to the changes.
Stephen forced the audience to really think about how schools might provide spaces that are felxible, adaptable, engaging, inspiring and supportive of new modes of learning that we can only just dream about now. Notes for this aspect of his presentation are here. They are well worth a look for schools looking at building or redesign of spaces.
Following on from this, ISB Bangkok apears to have recently flown out more US educators, one from a little closer to Thailand, to advise them on an upcoming renovation of their Main Library. On an aside, it makes me a little angry to hear some international schools say that they have no money for sending staff to a conference in their home city when others find the money to do things like this! Completely off the topic but sometimes it is great to get a rant off your chest :).
It seems from Kim’s post that, unsuprisingly, these powerful thinkers were able to make a great contribution to the learning space that ISB will create.
Hot on the heals of this comes a discussion on a list I belong to where an Australian teacher poses the question:
Our school (primary in SE Queensland) will have a new library built with money from Federal Govt as announced recently. Apparently while the govt build the shell of the building, we (the staff) were asked today how we would design the internal requirements for a library for the 21 century. As we were reminded, something that would be there long after (many of us) had long gone.
I would appreciate your thoughts about what you believe should be included/designed in a primary school library for the new century.
As you can imagine, a list with a lot of forward-thinking educators on it was set alight by this question. One of the best framed replies, however, came from W.A. Educator and friend, Brett Clarke.
I presume you have already googled “21st century school libraries” (without the quotes).
“So what purpose do school libraries (yours in particular) serve in the 21st century school / learning community?”
Until you have determined this, design decisions lack a solid foundation. Any architect / designer needs to know the specific purpose/s for which a space will be used and the desired “feel” (emotion to be engendered) in the space before they can begin serious design work.
Also google UNESCO and 21C school design - they have created some specific documents on design of educational spaces.
Prakash Nair is generally considered the world authority on 21C school design (see Fielding Nair International)
It will probably take 3 years to design and build and hopefully be relevant for 15.
Remember that someone designing a school library 15 years ago probably wouldn’t have considered the existence of the internet/WWW or wireless networks - so what do you think will be around in 10-15 years?
However, suggestions such as lots of powerpoints etc, represent today’s thinking not tomorrow’s - and implies a belief that there will be lots of computers that need to be plugged in.
After spending the last 6 years in a school with over 1200 laptops, nowhere in the school needed lots more power points, let alone the library, and in 3-4 years it is less likely to be so (with the emphasis moving to mobile, rather than just portable, computing power - devices will last a whole school day…).
The presentation does highlight the importance of flexibility (everything on wheels - which is a good point).
No internal load bearing walls is the other!
Is the library of the future quiet or collaborative - and how can you have a lot of different groups collaborating/presenting and the noise not disturb/interfere with the other groups?
Noise control/compartmentalisation is important.
Whilst students will continue to create dioramas as part of project work that would need to be displayed as they are today - perhaps in a place we currently refer to as a library, more of their work will be digital and needs a similarly comprehensive opportunity for being shared (and for interacting with) with a broad, casual audience. - ultimately large touch screens. Depending on the size of group imagined, the projectors suggested in the wiki above may be better replaced with touch screen LCD type panels (IWBs will be replaced by these once these panels get cheaper in a few years). If ultra short throw projectors (with IWB) are installed - be prepared for replacement - google “microsoft surface”.
When it comes to sharing digital work, our current model is often to connect a computer (via a tether/umbilical VGA/DVI/audio cable) to a video projector for others to view.
Expect a change in this model to one more like the AppleTV “entertainment hub” where the display device has (or is permanently connected to) its own intelligence - and artifacts are wirelessly (perhaps temporarily) transferred/connected to it, so it can be viewed (and even better, interacted with - see surface reference above). Gigabit wireless may well be here before your “library” is built (along with wireless USB etc).
(Anyone know of an ultra short throw video projector with 802.11n (fast wireless) connectivity and enough built in intelligence to host a VNC client?) Didn’t think so… but one would be really useful!)
Sony/Epson/Mitsubishi are you listening???
Anyway,
Delay the specification and procurement of the actual technology related aspects for as long as you can.
Get advice from someone experienced in the design of technology enhanced learning environments.
The BER is putting great demands on the architectual profession - many architects who are not experienced in this field are already being approached to undertake these works due to the volume of work and short timeframes. Find out what experience the practice assigned to your project has.
The other major question to ask is
“What advantage would students of the future get (or should get) going to your “library” that they couldn’t get in other learning spaces that will be dripping with wireless information access and probably have an IWB or similar?
Is it the library staff?
Is it the books?
Is it the flexibility of the learning space/s?
We have had computer labs, but they are becoming irrelevant now given that those functions can be in any classroom today with laptop technology.
Is a single location in a school called a library going to be irrelevant in the near future?
What might “distributed libraries” look like?
Could every classroom be a “library”? What would it take?
I think that every submission for the “Building the Education Revolution”, should be subject to these kinds of 21C schooling questions relevant to the specific building submission before approval.
This initiative is a great opportunity to move forward, or waste a lot of money and opportunity and build for the present.
I hope every school has someone like you who is asking good questions in a useful forum like this.
Please contact me off-list if you would like to discuss any of the above in more detail…
Hope some of this helps…
Cheers,
Brett Clarke
Apple Distinguished Educator, 2002.
I would be very interested to know if your schools are engaging in this sort of discussion.
I have been doing a lot of thinking and discussing with people lately about how the students and the parents are starting to gain momentum for cutting schools out when they begin to lose relevance. Naturally we see more of this in the US and Europe with the growth in the home schooling movement but something similar is happening in Asian schools were kids rush out of the school and head to an after school class.
Whilst, in many cases these after school classes are “cram classes” which are based around rote learning and couldn’t be further from 21st C Learning, there are more and more offering “creative learning“. Parents are starting to pick up on the fact that their children need more than the basic skills to be effective.
In the lead up to the Hong Kong 21st C Conference, I have been having a lot of discussions with regional educators about whether their schools have any funds to send them to conferences. I am always surprised by many well-equipped schools that do not spend funds on PD. Here is a discussion I had with David Carpenter from Taiwan last week:
I think you have a great idea going straight to the parents and putting the students out as the “sales people” sharing sharing their desires to be in Learning 2.0 schools. We spoke a little about this on the last SOS podcast with Andy Torris. Though we were not as direct in pointing this idea out, we do find ourselves saying that the students at some point are going to bypass the regular school program and make their own. Part of going to the parents is having them describe the skills they look for in employees and in citizens. I think the list most parents would agree upon are the 21st century skills we are trying to incorporate into our schools.
When we explain that just doing well on standardized testing mainly incorporates low level Bloom’s Taxonomy thinking skills, parents will demand that the higher order skills be a larger part of the program. Then the students can educate the parents as to what shifted instructional and assessment strategies get them to analyze, synthesize and create.
Remembering back to the SOS podcast with you, I think we now have an answer for the schools that don’t have the administrative leadership to shift their schools. One works with shifted teachers and interested students to design parent meetings and coffees to discuss what the parents want for learning outcomes with students as they share their insights and examples of constructivist and collaborative learning projects. The newly educated parents are then empowered to demand changes in the school.
David is commenting about some comments I made about schools where the leadership is not really wanting to shift mainly due to the fact that they think that the parents are not supportive of teaching that is not traditional and specifically geared towards maximising points on a standardised test at all costs.
I aware that parent involvement is not all smooth sailing. There is an excellent series of 4 articles on this topic in Public School Insights. The whole 4 are worth reading for perspective but they are a little more focussed on a discussion of urban and rural US schools and under performance of groups than about 21st C learning.
Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement? This article in particular outlines a model for building relationships with parents and not just feeding them information in a one-way mode.
Education is Becoming More Consumer-Driven Which gives teachers the imperative in terms of the option of parents choosing other options if we decided not to engage them.
These articles do a great job of pointing out that, like everything, we cannot just “say we want parent involvement” and then run a few information evenings and check the box. We need to build in regular, ongoing opportunities for parents to learn about the new models of learning for a new century and ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to maximising authentic learning opportunities for students.
What about your school? Do you think that the parents might “get it” more than some of the management? Do you have opportunities for parents to come in and discuss the direction that learning is taking in the school?
You have to love long-haul flights for catching up on reading. I am flying from Hong Kong to Perth, Western Australia and, en-route I have been reading a paper that I saw referred to on a list I monitor which had an interesting discussion recently about whether it was possible to predict a long future for the teaching of ICT as a discrete subject in schools. As one might imagine, the list that had a lot of experienced and reflective ICT and other teachers on it really grabbed this juicy bone hard and chewed it till it was devoid of all meat, marrow and even bone! Along the way there was some great discussion about why we should bother to teach anything (a topic I often start workshops with).
In the lead up to the 
It seems like everywhere I look around me at the moment 
I have just returned from 
