Learning conversation at Bathurst
Learning all the time
Do schools prevent children from learning vital 21st Century skills?
Schools are inhibiting the process of developing children’s skills in digital technologies and new media literacy.
Of the 319,223 K12 students surveyed by the Speak Up project in America conducted in 2007, 43% of students expressed a frustration with the schools policy on Internet filtering and agreed that it inhibited their learning. Over 40% of students sited their teachers also as a major obstacle to using technology. (Speak Up 2007).
Children’s media experience in school is poor, filtering of the most popular and useful sites on the world wide web, restricting access to computers, restricting the use of personal digital devices, the lack of any substantial teaching or guidance on the use and development of digital literacy and technology skills, all lead to a ‘disconnect’ and frustration of the diet provided at schools.
The culture out of school for the children’s media consumption is entirely different, rich and varied, exciting, stimulating and compelling. The edges between reality and virtual reality, place and virtual place are not analysed they are just accepted and used, with enthusiasm and creativity.
However not all children are having an exciting, diverse and creative time using the new media. Some are disenfranchised from the digital mainstream; they do not have the cultural capital to take advantage of these new devices, despite the fact that they may own them. These significant minorities of students are in desperate need of education, perversely, they are unlikely to get this from school. These are the children that will fall victim to the electronic scams and will find it difficult to remove themselves from malicious online chat sites and they will be less discerning on their choice of Internet destinations.
The fast paced development of these new technologies and school’s inability to keep up and evaluate them is not the fault of the school or indeed the teachers. But it does have a profound impact on the development of learning relationships. Learning out of school is inherently fun using the new media, in school it is cosmetically fashioned into short burst lessons where information is provided still in many cases by word or worksheet, albeit electronically now.
When you code classroom practice for level of cognitive demand . . . 80% of the work is at the factual and procedural level. . . . [Teachers] will do low-level work and call it high-level work.
Richard Elmore, excerpt from Education Leadership as the Practice of Improvement (2006)
Also:
The average fifth grader received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning; this ratio was 10:1 in first and third grades.
– Robert C. Pianta, et al., Opportunities to Learn in America’s Elementary Classrooms (2007) [study of 2500+ classrooms in more than 1,000 elementary schools and 400 school districts]
This gap between school and out of school learning experiences can lead to a deep sense of frustration with school.
Classrooms in which there was evidence of higher-order thinking: 3 percent. Classrooms in which high-yield [instructional] strategies were being used: 0.2 percent. Classrooms in which fewer than one-half of students were paying attention: 85 percent.
– Mike Schmoker, Results Now (2006) [citing a study of 1,500+ classroom observations]
This frustration is already leading children to turn to peer experts (OFCOM 2006), (Group Interview), affinity sites, help blogs and Wikis (Wikipedia), for the answers they traditionally got in school from the experts. These experts are now out of school and the children are using them daily. Teachers have no control over the access or the destination of sites that children are discovering; they cannot check these sites for validity and would struggle to keep pace with the growth of new sites in relation to their area of expertise. Some teachers react in a traditional mindset and block these developments out calling for more control and are worried about plagiarism and the copy and pasting of large chunks of undiluted information into coursework. Other teachers however are embracing the new technologies and acknowledging that their roles will inevitably change.
‘Teachers would no longer be the providers of information but instead would be the explainers, the context providers, the meaning makers, and the evaluators of information that kids find on their own.’
Prensky (2008)
As Heppell (Heppell 2008 YouTube) in a learning to learn YouTube interview for the Learning and Teaching Scotland conference in April suggested that instead of locking everything down and powering down in school; why not ask students to critique an essay they have found on Google, instead of ignoring the fact that they will read it anyway?
Buckingham (2007: 98) suggests however that a celebration of the digital age and an eagerness to embrace the latest technological device will not lend itself to longer lasting solutions with regard to narrowing the gap between digitally rich out-of-school and digitally poor in-school environments. Therefore we need a rigorous and more critical approach to identifying the features that can be assimilated into schools.
A first step to this more balanced and pragmatic approach to adopting new technology into education is propounded in a thoughtful and comprehensive article by Bryant (2008). He has organized games into three categories based on the complexity of integrating them into a course. Category one games require very little change in the course and the games contain content or principles matching many commonly taught courses. One of the games in this category is ‘Oil God’ essentially a simulation game where you can control the price of oil and watch the consequences. Category three requiring major adjustments in curriculum design and the games played become a means of creating new media with the games platform. As Bryant suggests the games suggested do not lend themselves to an especially technology literate class. In this category he suggests using Civilization IV where students and teachers can create their own maps and scenarios. Bryant then directs the reader to Aldrich’s (2008) blog where he discusses a format for the evaluation of the games used in these redesigned courses.
Whilst these are first steps, they are useful paths for a teacher or school interested in narrowing the cultural gap between school and out-of-school. They will also provide useful evidence when enacted, evaluated and more importantly shared.
Heppell (2008 LTS YouTube) outlines an important tension that still exists in the majority of schools today that most children have a computer in their pocket that has the power to communicate across the globe. Yet even ten years ago when schools were embarking on the ambitious task of putting in huge great infrastructures for harnessing technology it would have been impossible to predict that we would have reached that goal so soon, but we end up confiscating the very device we have strived to put in place.
What is the solution?
The first part of the solution is already in place. The new ‘cloud computing technologies ’ as exemplified by Google Apps and Apple’s service MobileMe are already changing the way children can access, use, mash and store digital information. The OpenSource movement also provide a multitude of free software that rivals many commercial applications. OpenCourseware provided by MIT and the Open University publish some of their courses entirely for free. Google Apps for schools already offer, for free, an email service, website, blog and shared document space for individuals, all work can be done online and stored online in the servers that Google corporation run.
Traditionally a school would have to bear the very high cost of storage and application servers, networked systems, and site licenses for operating systems and applications.
Currently a school could make do with a robust and efficient, filtered connection to the Internet and a good wireless network to provide a future proof system for using technology.
As technology moves on a pace with the introduction of new mobile digital devices, the need for larger computers diminishes; even when looking at the memory intensive video editing programmes, some of which are now provided online for free: http://jumpcut.com/.
The second part of the solution is cultural and may take some time to change. Buckingham (2007: 173) hinted at it in his cautious conclusion, he suggests that the current specialist ICT subject should be substantially replaced and integrated into the English curriculum. This would make sense in an already crowded curriculum. He goes onto argue that we need a much broader definition of literacy to include the new media, an argument put forward by many other commentators, Gee (2007), Lankshear and Knobel, (2006) and Heppell (2008), to name just a few.
A new approach?
Keats and Schmidt (2008) in their article about Education 3.0, state that the new technologies are already beginning to shift the onus onto the individual to make choices about their learning. The artefacts for learning; people and processes, together with space and time all become blurred. The walls of a classroom and of course a school also become blurred.
As Brown and Alder (2008) propose the change from ‘supply-push’ to ‘demand-pull’ education systems will provide students with access to rich learning communities (sometimes virtual) built around a practice.
The ‘disconnect’ discussed earlier, between the culture of school and not-at-school will lead to a multiplicity of learning models and structures, some of these have started already. South East Asia and Singapore in particular have a huge national passion for education and learning and provide large-scale 2,000 population school communities with excellent results. The growth of Academies in England is a response to the failure of traditional educational systems to raise standards fast enough in some communities. Other projects within the state system are looking at integrating the curriculum along a project based or thematic stance to connect the learning processes. The government strategy for learning to learn and the use of metacognitive processes in learning is having some impact on the way children view learning.
However I would argue that there is something changing at a deeper level, expressed well in Shirky’s book: ‘Here comes everybody’ (Shirky 2008). Shirky explains the concept of ‘cognitive surplus’ where people have for a number of years, just been watching television.
Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Shirky (2008)
He argues that we are at the beginning of a new era where consumption is just not good enough; we also need to participate and produce. He cites an example of how Facebook was used as a tool to reverse a high street banks decision to withdraw a particular student scheme despite the fact that some students had signed up to it. One student posting his concern about the issue with the bank and asking if anyone else had experienced the same problem, many hundreds of students from across the country responded and the bank had to reverse its decision. He uses other examples of ‘organising without organisations’.
I would like to extend this and suggest that children and parents may well be at the beginning of an era where their cognitive surplus and hunger demonstrated by children’s consumption and production of media, (Flickr, 6037 items loaded in the last minute, YouTube 10 hours of videos a minute uploaded) may well want organise without schools.
We may well see the development of hybrid schools in an assortment of varieties ranging from Heppell’s model of ‘notschool.net’ to the huge battleship style academy. The project that I am working on at the moment is another example of a different model that fits around the child, the family and the context they find themselves in. (www.st-judes-school.org.uk). The model acknowledges that for a variety of reasons children cannot or will not be in school to learn all the time. With a laptop and broadband access at home these children can follow an individual learning path in the context of their situation; early indications are promising and this is another area ready for research.
Having undertaken the research to prove a profoundly held view that schools do inhibit the development of digital competency and digital literacy skills, I find it difficult to be truly objective about the outcome. After all I set the structure of the research and phrased the questions therefore I greatly affected the results of the inquiry.
The purpose of the research was to determine whether schools inhibit the development of digital skills and the following set of objectives and tasks were planned at the beginning to measure validity.
1. The extent and level of usage of digital devices amongst the school population will have to be measured. This was achieved and reported on.
2. The use both students and staff make of the digital devices they have. This was achieved and reported on.
3. The student’s level of expertise in the use of digital skills must also be measured and whether this expertise was developed either in or out of school. This was achieved in part, the evidence suggested that much of the use of digital devices were outside school and that schools actively inhibited the use of devices and access to a number of important and useful web 2.0 applications. Assessing the level of expertise was achieved in part with a very useful set of questions developed by the DCA group, but further research would be needed to establish a wider set of criteria to assess ‘higher order’ digital competence, to prove a conclusive link between exposure and consumption and digital competency.
4. The gathering of evidence in relation to the restrictions placed on access to computer and Internet resources in school. This was achieved and reported on.
This research must be seen in the context of one inner city secondary school with 900 on roll. Most of the data collected should be typical of the picture nationally in the UK, with most secondary schools; as identified by the recent OFCOM (2006) report.
Further research possibilities
1. Further research into the effects on children of being disenfranchised from the digital mainstream and how this imbalance can be addressed is an important first step.
2. We must also research the ‘disconnect’ issue further and determine how digital and new media literacy skills can be incorporated into schools.
3. Look at new delivery and assessment models that can incorporate digital skills and new media skills.
4. Look at how video games and virtual world games or scenarios can or should be deployed in the learning process.
5. Research the new hybrid school’s; for example the St Jude’s concept, and determine and how they will fashion future learning spaces.
6. Research the principal that education will become a supply-push model and how this could have implications for traditional institutions.
7. Investigate the use of a modern mobile devices in-school and how they could enhance the learning of students and connect to experts outside the school walls.
Concluding remarks
However the most important area of concern as expressed by Wesch (2008: 4) is trying to find the relevance in our learning processes and giving it value and meaning. Many children today have a voracious appetite to consume media; the children’s media market is now big business and children’s leisure time has become increasingly privatized. But with all of these devices children are still searching for an authentic meaning or purpose.
“Furthermore, the Internet radically redefines a person's psychological relationship to time and space. Attention is rivetted on what is tangible, useful, instantly available; the stimulus for deeper thought and reflection may be lacking. Yet human beings have a vital need for time and inner quiet to ponder and examine life and its mysteries, and to grow gradually into a mature dominion of themselves and of the world around them. Understanding and wisdom are the fruit of a contemplative eye upon the world, and do not come from a mere accumulation of facts, no matter how interesting. They are the result of an insight, which penetrates the deeper meaning of things in relation to one another and to the whole of reality. Moreover, as a forum in which practically everything is acceptable and almost nothing is lasting, the Internet favours a relativistic way of thinking and sometimes feeds the flight from personal responsibility and commitment.”
Pope John Paul II (2002: The internet: a new forum for proclaiming the gospel)
We must then be at the very centre of the Internet as teachers to ensure that we can act as guides and place things in context and add that insight.
Of the 319,223 K12 students surveyed by the Speak Up project in America conducted in 2007, 43% of students expressed a frustration with the schools policy on Internet filtering and agreed that it inhibited their learning. Over 40% of students sited their teachers also as a major obstacle to using technology. (Speak Up 2007).
Children’s media experience in school is poor, filtering of the most popular and useful sites on the world wide web, restricting access to computers, restricting the use of personal digital devices, the lack of any substantial teaching or guidance on the use and development of digital literacy and technology skills, all lead to a ‘disconnect’ and frustration of the diet provided at schools.
The culture out of school for the children’s media consumption is entirely different, rich and varied, exciting, stimulating and compelling. The edges between reality and virtual reality, place and virtual place are not analysed they are just accepted and used, with enthusiasm and creativity.
However not all children are having an exciting, diverse and creative time using the new media. Some are disenfranchised from the digital mainstream; they do not have the cultural capital to take advantage of these new devices, despite the fact that they may own them. These significant minorities of students are in desperate need of education, perversely, they are unlikely to get this from school. These are the children that will fall victim to the electronic scams and will find it difficult to remove themselves from malicious online chat sites and they will be less discerning on their choice of Internet destinations.
The fast paced development of these new technologies and school’s inability to keep up and evaluate them is not the fault of the school or indeed the teachers. But it does have a profound impact on the development of learning relationships. Learning out of school is inherently fun using the new media, in school it is cosmetically fashioned into short burst lessons where information is provided still in many cases by word or worksheet, albeit electronically now.
When you code classroom practice for level of cognitive demand . . . 80% of the work is at the factual and procedural level. . . . [Teachers] will do low-level work and call it high-level work.
Richard Elmore, excerpt from Education Leadership as the Practice of Improvement (2006)
Also:
The average fifth grader received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning; this ratio was 10:1 in first and third grades.
– Robert C. Pianta, et al., Opportunities to Learn in America’s Elementary Classrooms (2007) [study of 2500+ classrooms in more than 1,000 elementary schools and 400 school districts]
This gap between school and out of school learning experiences can lead to a deep sense of frustration with school.
Classrooms in which there was evidence of higher-order thinking: 3 percent. Classrooms in which high-yield [instructional] strategies were being used: 0.2 percent. Classrooms in which fewer than one-half of students were paying attention: 85 percent.
– Mike Schmoker, Results Now (2006) [citing a study of 1,500+ classroom observations]
This frustration is already leading children to turn to peer experts (OFCOM 2006), (Group Interview), affinity sites, help blogs and Wikis (Wikipedia), for the answers they traditionally got in school from the experts. These experts are now out of school and the children are using them daily. Teachers have no control over the access or the destination of sites that children are discovering; they cannot check these sites for validity and would struggle to keep pace with the growth of new sites in relation to their area of expertise. Some teachers react in a traditional mindset and block these developments out calling for more control and are worried about plagiarism and the copy and pasting of large chunks of undiluted information into coursework. Other teachers however are embracing the new technologies and acknowledging that their roles will inevitably change.
‘Teachers would no longer be the providers of information but instead would be the explainers, the context providers, the meaning makers, and the evaluators of information that kids find on their own.’
Prensky (2008)
As Heppell (Heppell 2008 YouTube) in a learning to learn YouTube interview for the Learning and Teaching Scotland conference in April suggested that instead of locking everything down and powering down in school; why not ask students to critique an essay they have found on Google, instead of ignoring the fact that they will read it anyway?
Buckingham (2007: 98) suggests however that a celebration of the digital age and an eagerness to embrace the latest technological device will not lend itself to longer lasting solutions with regard to narrowing the gap between digitally rich out-of-school and digitally poor in-school environments. Therefore we need a rigorous and more critical approach to identifying the features that can be assimilated into schools.
A first step to this more balanced and pragmatic approach to adopting new technology into education is propounded in a thoughtful and comprehensive article by Bryant (2008). He has organized games into three categories based on the complexity of integrating them into a course. Category one games require very little change in the course and the games contain content or principles matching many commonly taught courses. One of the games in this category is ‘Oil God’ essentially a simulation game where you can control the price of oil and watch the consequences. Category three requiring major adjustments in curriculum design and the games played become a means of creating new media with the games platform. As Bryant suggests the games suggested do not lend themselves to an especially technology literate class. In this category he suggests using Civilization IV where students and teachers can create their own maps and scenarios. Bryant then directs the reader to Aldrich’s (2008) blog where he discusses a format for the evaluation of the games used in these redesigned courses.
Whilst these are first steps, they are useful paths for a teacher or school interested in narrowing the cultural gap between school and out-of-school. They will also provide useful evidence when enacted, evaluated and more importantly shared.
Heppell (2008 LTS YouTube) outlines an important tension that still exists in the majority of schools today that most children have a computer in their pocket that has the power to communicate across the globe. Yet even ten years ago when schools were embarking on the ambitious task of putting in huge great infrastructures for harnessing technology it would have been impossible to predict that we would have reached that goal so soon, but we end up confiscating the very device we have strived to put in place.
What is the solution?
The first part of the solution is already in place. The new ‘cloud computing technologies ’ as exemplified by Google Apps and Apple’s service MobileMe are already changing the way children can access, use, mash and store digital information. The OpenSource movement also provide a multitude of free software that rivals many commercial applications. OpenCourseware provided by MIT and the Open University publish some of their courses entirely for free. Google Apps for schools already offer, for free, an email service, website, blog and shared document space for individuals, all work can be done online and stored online in the servers that Google corporation run.
Traditionally a school would have to bear the very high cost of storage and application servers, networked systems, and site licenses for operating systems and applications.
Currently a school could make do with a robust and efficient, filtered connection to the Internet and a good wireless network to provide a future proof system for using technology.
As technology moves on a pace with the introduction of new mobile digital devices, the need for larger computers diminishes; even when looking at the memory intensive video editing programmes, some of which are now provided online for free: http://jumpcut.com/.
The second part of the solution is cultural and may take some time to change. Buckingham (2007: 173) hinted at it in his cautious conclusion, he suggests that the current specialist ICT subject should be substantially replaced and integrated into the English curriculum. This would make sense in an already crowded curriculum. He goes onto argue that we need a much broader definition of literacy to include the new media, an argument put forward by many other commentators, Gee (2007), Lankshear and Knobel, (2006) and Heppell (2008), to name just a few.
A new approach?
Keats and Schmidt (2008) in their article about Education 3.0, state that the new technologies are already beginning to shift the onus onto the individual to make choices about their learning. The artefacts for learning; people and processes, together with space and time all become blurred. The walls of a classroom and of course a school also become blurred.
As Brown and Alder (2008) propose the change from ‘supply-push’ to ‘demand-pull’ education systems will provide students with access to rich learning communities (sometimes virtual) built around a practice.
The ‘disconnect’ discussed earlier, between the culture of school and not-at-school will lead to a multiplicity of learning models and structures, some of these have started already. South East Asia and Singapore in particular have a huge national passion for education and learning and provide large-scale 2,000 population school communities with excellent results. The growth of Academies in England is a response to the failure of traditional educational systems to raise standards fast enough in some communities. Other projects within the state system are looking at integrating the curriculum along a project based or thematic stance to connect the learning processes. The government strategy for learning to learn and the use of metacognitive processes in learning is having some impact on the way children view learning.
However I would argue that there is something changing at a deeper level, expressed well in Shirky’s book: ‘Here comes everybody’ (Shirky 2008). Shirky explains the concept of ‘cognitive surplus’ where people have for a number of years, just been watching television.
Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
Shirky (2008)
He argues that we are at the beginning of a new era where consumption is just not good enough; we also need to participate and produce. He cites an example of how Facebook was used as a tool to reverse a high street banks decision to withdraw a particular student scheme despite the fact that some students had signed up to it. One student posting his concern about the issue with the bank and asking if anyone else had experienced the same problem, many hundreds of students from across the country responded and the bank had to reverse its decision. He uses other examples of ‘organising without organisations’.
I would like to extend this and suggest that children and parents may well be at the beginning of an era where their cognitive surplus and hunger demonstrated by children’s consumption and production of media, (Flickr, 6037 items loaded in the last minute, YouTube 10 hours of videos a minute uploaded) may well want organise without schools.
We may well see the development of hybrid schools in an assortment of varieties ranging from Heppell’s model of ‘notschool.net’ to the huge battleship style academy. The project that I am working on at the moment is another example of a different model that fits around the child, the family and the context they find themselves in. (www.st-judes-school.org.uk). The model acknowledges that for a variety of reasons children cannot or will not be in school to learn all the time. With a laptop and broadband access at home these children can follow an individual learning path in the context of their situation; early indications are promising and this is another area ready for research.
Having undertaken the research to prove a profoundly held view that schools do inhibit the development of digital competency and digital literacy skills, I find it difficult to be truly objective about the outcome. After all I set the structure of the research and phrased the questions therefore I greatly affected the results of the inquiry.
The purpose of the research was to determine whether schools inhibit the development of digital skills and the following set of objectives and tasks were planned at the beginning to measure validity.
1. The extent and level of usage of digital devices amongst the school population will have to be measured. This was achieved and reported on.
2. The use both students and staff make of the digital devices they have. This was achieved and reported on.
3. The student’s level of expertise in the use of digital skills must also be measured and whether this expertise was developed either in or out of school. This was achieved in part, the evidence suggested that much of the use of digital devices were outside school and that schools actively inhibited the use of devices and access to a number of important and useful web 2.0 applications. Assessing the level of expertise was achieved in part with a very useful set of questions developed by the DCA group, but further research would be needed to establish a wider set of criteria to assess ‘higher order’ digital competence, to prove a conclusive link between exposure and consumption and digital competency.
4. The gathering of evidence in relation to the restrictions placed on access to computer and Internet resources in school. This was achieved and reported on.
This research must be seen in the context of one inner city secondary school with 900 on roll. Most of the data collected should be typical of the picture nationally in the UK, with most secondary schools; as identified by the recent OFCOM (2006) report.
Further research possibilities
1. Further research into the effects on children of being disenfranchised from the digital mainstream and how this imbalance can be addressed is an important first step.
2. We must also research the ‘disconnect’ issue further and determine how digital and new media literacy skills can be incorporated into schools.
3. Look at new delivery and assessment models that can incorporate digital skills and new media skills.
4. Look at how video games and virtual world games or scenarios can or should be deployed in the learning process.
5. Research the new hybrid school’s; for example the St Jude’s concept, and determine and how they will fashion future learning spaces.
6. Research the principal that education will become a supply-push model and how this could have implications for traditional institutions.
7. Investigate the use of a modern mobile devices in-school and how they could enhance the learning of students and connect to experts outside the school walls.
Concluding remarks
However the most important area of concern as expressed by Wesch (2008: 4) is trying to find the relevance in our learning processes and giving it value and meaning. Many children today have a voracious appetite to consume media; the children’s media market is now big business and children’s leisure time has become increasingly privatized. But with all of these devices children are still searching for an authentic meaning or purpose.
“Furthermore, the Internet radically redefines a person's psychological relationship to time and space. Attention is rivetted on what is tangible, useful, instantly available; the stimulus for deeper thought and reflection may be lacking. Yet human beings have a vital need for time and inner quiet to ponder and examine life and its mysteries, and to grow gradually into a mature dominion of themselves and of the world around them. Understanding and wisdom are the fruit of a contemplative eye upon the world, and do not come from a mere accumulation of facts, no matter how interesting. They are the result of an insight, which penetrates the deeper meaning of things in relation to one another and to the whole of reality. Moreover, as a forum in which practically everything is acceptable and almost nothing is lasting, the Internet favours a relativistic way of thinking and sometimes feeds the flight from personal responsibility and commitment.”
Pope John Paul II (2002: The internet: a new forum for proclaiming the gospel)
We must then be at the very centre of the Internet as teachers to ensure that we can act as guides and place things in context and add that insight.
Add a Comment
About
© 2009 Created by Nick Chater on Ning. Create Your Own Social Network
You need to be a member of Learning conversation at Bathurst to add comments!
Join this social network