Our Students • Our Worlds

[David Warlick]

David Warlick • Monday, 6/30/2008 • 12:30pm–1:30pm • HGCC Lila Cockrell Theatre
Spotlight Presentation

Description: The world is flattening, and not just economically. Learn about three converging conditions that are redefining education—and providing windows to the future. In this presentation, I will seek to examine and factor together three foundational disruptive conditions that are converging on our schools, each serving to disrupt schooling as we know it, yet also providing direction as we work toward new models for teaching and learning -- Learning 2.0.

My Question: What do you believe are the fundamental disruptive conditions that are demanding a new kind of education institution?

[Jacques Cool]

All of the above + systemic constraints; from timetables, to bus routes, to class rotation, to prep time, to 60-minute periods, to grades, to photocopier paper allowance, to teachers' lounge, to firewalls, to diploma requirements, to brick-and-mortar class "cells", etc.

21st-century schools need to be thought from the inside out. I refer to it as a moving beacon... If too utopious to some, at least let's aim for it, one disruptor at a time.

[Jacques Cool]

Finally, I think that it all comes down to education and schools being a HUMAN experience before everything else. Wesley Fryer's excellent post (Our schools need passionate, caring, and visionary leaders - not JU...) hits it right on the spot:

"Yes, we need technology. But let’s be honest. Many (if not most) of our schools in the United States have a LOT of technology now (...). Where have these educational technology purchases made the greatest difference in the lives of students? There is one, unequivocal answer. In the schools blessed with administrative and teacher leaders who have the passion for differentiated instruction and helping each child learn (...), AND focused on the ways digital technologies can help make the learning process even better. THAT is what our schools need."

As he states afterwards, this cannot be "purchased" but it can be cultivated, inspired, modeled and shared.

[Lee Kolbert]

Dave,
This may be politically incorrect, but I believe the compulsion to be politically correct in every area, really shortchanges the kids. The desire to avoid conflict, and perhaps litigation, at all cost in our schools has caused us to do bizarre things in the name of “increasing graduation rates” or “protecting the feelings” of our children. For example, we’ve removed playground equipment and snuffed out recess from the elementary school day, banned awards ceremonies because not everyone gets an award, locked down Internet sites based on a single parent’s complaint, changed the content of history books and give extra credit for bringing in cans of food for food drives. The top-down pressure has caused our creative teachers to cower in the corners of their classrooms, waiting for the door to close so they can teach away from the worksheets and #2 bubble forms. I imagine an education institution where project-based learning and the whole student is allowed on the educational playground, even if he/she may get a bruised knee!

Thanks for the opportunity to voice my opinion. ~Lee

[Dottie]

Our culture in general. Over the past generation it seems that schools have had to take on more and more responsibility to teach students basic life lessons that used to fall on the family to teach. Politeness, Respecting one's self and others, right and wrong,civic duty,etc.
I was recently at a middle school where a mother came to the school to help her daughter fight another student. What happens to our society when any parent thinks that is acceptable behavior?

[Alan Kwan]

We could say that agriculture ended, among many things, our nomadic life style. We could say that the industrial revolution created, among many things, the possibility for individual to specialize due to increase output. Then it is not hard to go so far to say that the information age forced us to acknowledged, among many things, that information is no longer scarce.

Information scarcity created our current education system where portable materials (namely the printed type) and relatively few individuals (namely teachers) are the subject experts teaching facts. Along the same line, information abundance is the cause of the break down of our current education system where materials are not rare, teachers are not necessarily the only accessible subject matter experts, and facts are relatively easy to find.

When agriculture dominate our lives, we have ag schools. When industries dominate our lives, we have engineering schools. When information dominate our lives, we need schools that teach information processing. Where to find it, how to interpret it, how to critique it, and how to separate facts from opinions from lies. That need is what demand us to revamp our education system.

[Julie Lindsay]

David

After some reflection about your question I think the crucial disruptive condition in play now is the move towards collaborative learning and therefore the Web 2.0 and other tools that can be used to support this. Community, collaborative creation/output, global connections between teachers and students, mobile technology and enhanced Internet access to support learning needs are all combining to provide a veritable paradise for learners. Gone totally are the days of shutting the classroom door and teaching/learning in isolation. Every learning opportunity demands an international perspective and in some cases an international collaboration and/or interaction to promote better understanding socially, politically, economically, geographically, etc etc.

[Barbara Jansen]

I believe a fundamental disruptive condition is the myriad of ways children learn versus the traditional way many teachers still approach instruction. Instead of thinking about student learning, many educators are still focused on their instruction and present content the way they learned it. We need to prepare our children for their futures without relying on the way we learned in the past. Example: I still see teachers demanding that high school students only take notes with only hand-written note cards because that was the way they conducted "research" in college. They will not allow the students to explore electronic note taking and the use of a variety of organizers. Another example is a teacher who lectures to ninth graders, then has them read from the book and take a paper/pencil test over, and over, and over. The mindset is "if I learned it that way successfully, then these kids can also." How can we convince those teachers to differentiate their instruction so that all students have the same opportunities? I know it is more difficult, but isn't that why are we here?

Another disruptive condition is the prevalence of technology in the workplace--not just using Microsoft Word, but using technology to solve problems and redefine the traditional ways of doing business, from conducting research to communicating with clients. Traditional administrators and teachers (those who still teach the way they learned in high school and college in the 1950s-mid 90s) sometimes have a difficult time seeing a need for, and identifying how 21st century skills fit into their curriculum so that we can prepare students for success in the workplace. State educational learning standards are far behind the real world. It can take ten or more years for a state to update standards, then many more for them to actually filter down into the curriculum that is actually taught. How can we expedite this process?

[John T. Spagnolo]

The conditions brought about by the cognitive dissonance that the students feel create a surrealistic, unproductive and disengaged daytime experience at school, divorced and fundamentally unrelated to the @home realities of their entertainment channels, culture and social networks. They know better ways to learn and communicate. They are skilled with the digital networking tools that can connect them to an emerging culture with world flattening literacy. I imagine that some of the best and brightest students feel sorry and unable to connect with the trapped and cynical late technology adopters in educational roles that get easily mired in the muck and backwater of an inherently unreliable, oppressive day old school infrastructure and technology. The subversion necessary to stay meaningful connected by day to a personal “digital softspace” in a public education institution, separates those “googling thumb drivers”, networked courageous apprentice educators and younger (in spirit) teachers from the administrators and those making us secure and walled off from all dangers in the emerging webagora. Knowing better while we muddle forward is making the old ways of teaching and learning uncomfortable and ineffective while subverting the new ways of connecting to knowledge and each other.

[Midge Frazel]

Elegantly said.

[Scott Merrick]

Dave,

I LOVE the 3D glasses graphic on this page. It speaks of children looking at the world in fundamentally different ways, mediated (in fact, enabled, made possible) by technologies. I think what our man Jukes calls "information overload" (I hope I'm quoting him correctly) is the condition to consider. It is not disruptive by its nature, only potentially rendered so by one's methods of dealing with it. Unfortunately, the default set of methods is not defined, and if anything seems to be the bureaucracies' (including government, media, and probably even religion) dictate, through their means of information distribution and manipulation.

The fundamental thing we need to be seeking, teaching, and modeling, is a basic love of balance. Children, and for that matter adults, can't begin to seek it until they are aware of commercial and societal manipulations fundamentally driven by profit. Then they can start to establish practices and fit out tools for themselves to aid in the attainment of balance in their own lives--balance intentionally defined for themselves. We need a curricula of Balance. My one-and-a-half cents' worth :)

I hope I get to see you over the coming week, and not just at your presentation. I cherish your presence in this gigantic fray we find ourselves in!

[Grace]

The biggest disruption is 1) old ways of thinking/teaching vs. 2) new ways of thinking/learning.

In category 1 are the educators who continue to teach as they were taught before multimedia, the web, web 2.0, etc. - primarily via textbooks via a distributed learning process in which teacher is all-knowing.

In category 2 are today's students who are simply not interested in pure textbook learning. Pure text no longer engages them unless it's in a text message, blog, wiki, or similar applications. Distributed information no longer interests these students. They want to create and share information, similar to the way work places operate where people collaborate, create, and produce.

[Zack Allen]

I believe that the majority of our students (past, present and future) have never been engaged by, or interested in, distributed information constructs or pure textbook learning. I believe that they have always wanted to create and share information. Great teachers have always and will continue to understand this and nurture their students' curiosity and enthusiasm to create, share and produce information.

What has changed, is the fact that the information that our students desire no longer requires a teacher to be the gate way to that information. New technologies have empowered them. They resent, more now than ever, being stuck in a system where they have to be spoon fed bland and non-nutritious information, when they can be feasting on the independent learning opportunities that new technologies present.

The fundamental disruptive conditions that demand a new kind of education institution are not new conditions brought about by technology. They have existed all along. The technology has given our students a taste of what they have begun to understand tacitly as being a better way to learn. Drop-out rates are rising. I do not believe that this is a coincidence.

The solutions have existed all along as well. Cooperative learning, constructivism, project-based learning, service learning to name a few. Think those are too recent? What about the Socratic method? None of these require technology, but some, maybe all, may be more easily accomplished with it.