2010 – Page 3 – Dave’s Educational Blog

ED366 – reflection on the first four days

I must say I’m feeling pretty good about the first four days of the course that I’m teaching at UPEI. It’s very refreshing to be teaching a small group of people (15) and getting a chance to get to know my students. They are quite an excellent group, with varied experiences, varied educational backgrounds and differing goals and objectives. With the exception of the student who bowed out after day 2 (I’ve never taught one of these crazy intensive, two week, 35 hour courses without losing at least one) we’ve had no MAJOR issues.

On tossing adult learners into the deep end
Common practice (and some might ad common sense) dictates that we are supposed to introduce topics and particularly technologies gradually to adult learners. After this course i am now convinced that at least in a f2f environment (where trust can be established without the technology blowing up or while it is) it’s much more effective to throw students straight into the deep end. I’ll leave it to my students to jump in and disagree… but while it creates a definite amount of confusion i think it creates the right amount of instability to support the learning process.

It also saves time. And gives people an early victory.

Technology, particularly in the first two days
The backbone of the communications in the course are being done on googledocs, twitter and wordpress.com. The students were quite willing to go out and start blogging, working on their googledoc assignments and tweeting to each other. That’s not to say that we didn’t have a big session on why twitter was such a waste of time, but allowing them to all follow each other and using it as a slackers blog reader (tweeting nightly reflections) has given them the control over their home bases that I was hoping for. If the balance of having to record their own learning in their network learning plan and communications records balance it out and the early results look like they might, then I’ll have to consider this syllabus a marked improvement over the one from two years ago.

On immigrant/native resident/visitor
Mucho thanks to @daveowhite for visiting our class near the end of day three. I started day three in an attempt to frame a day of talking about learning with tech through the lens of a debate between the two views of resistance. One age based and out of a person’s control, the other more nuanced and responsibility oriented. If you’ve not read of dave’s resident/visitor continuum, you might find it interesting. I think it was the critical moment for my student’s understanding why they themselves felt resistance to the process and the resistance they’ve seen in their own students.

Grading into week two
This otherwise very entertaining course has the terrible bad form to require me to give my students a percentage grade. The plan has been and remains to give students basically ‘participation’ grades for their work the first week, that is, grading on effort, and then creating a more specific rubric for week two. They’ve done nightly reflections, some class work, have been responsible to comment on other people’s blog posts and also keep track of their learning network plan. We’ll need to develop something with a gradation like “shows clear plans towards integrating concepts into own context” and “demonstrates next level thinking in application of technologies” into this plan for next week. I hate setting things up that way, but at the same time I can’t expect them to get a numbered grade without trying to describe what i’m thinking clearly

Advice much appreciated on this.

Syllabus – Educational Technology and the Adult Learner ed366

Introduction
The term ‘educational technology’ is a difficult one to pin down. There are some who would argue that every tool we use, from a ballpoint pen to an electronic whiteboard, is an educational technology. Others strive to pin down best practices with choice technologies and advocate for this or that brand of technology enhanced pedagogy as scientifically proven to better the learning process in some way. Some people think that social networking is faddish, or, worse, a sign of the decline of our civilization. Others will argue that if we do not bring it into our classrooms we are doing our students a disservice and becoming increasingly out of date.

As an educator working on such slippery foundations, I have taken the position that all these things are true. Social networking is both faddish and dangerous as well as critical to moving forward. Our tools are both simply a reflection of the same tools and methods of millennia and complex mechanisms fraught with implicit pedagogy. This course takes all opinions on education and technology as valid and mixes them together, to be interpreted by our own class as well as being validated by a wider network of educators.

This method, of taking all ideas and having them peer reviewed by a wide network of peers, is hardly revolutionary. The big difference in how it is approached in this course, is how quickly that reviewing is done, the degree to which certainty is required (or even desired) and the degree to which a given perspective can be personalized. The curriculum of this course will be made by, and I would say the curriculum of this course IS the people that will be engaged in it. That will include me as the facilitator, the learners who have chosen to take it, as well as a wider network of educators drawn from my own community and hopefully found and added by the students over the two weeks of the course.

Students taking this course come from a wide variety of contexts. Some will be classroom teachers from the k-12 system, some trainers in the corporate world or faculty members at a university. The needs and requirements of different participants will not be the same and learners in the course will not be required to come out of the course with the same thing.

Assessment
Student success in this course will be measured by how well a student has planned for their own context. Students will be assessed on three specific ‘projects’ (for lack of a better word), each reflecting the work that they have done in trying to take the concepts, the examples, the activities and the reflections of this course.

30% – Learning network plan
Throughout the course students will be expected to gather people, tools and approaches that will help support them in integrating educational technology into their own context. Students will be responsible for handing in a draft learning network plan by the halfway mark of the course and a final version on the last day. These should be between 500 and 1000 words and, ideally, be full of links, commentary and ideas for how they can continue to learn, network and use technologies after the course has ended.

30% – Classroom project
The majority of the second week of the course will be taken up by class projects developed and taught by the learners. These projects should involve the integration of a technology into their contexts that had not occurred to the students when the course began. The idea is to workshop an idea with the whole class while introducing an approach to using a technology. Students will be graded less on the ‘success’ of their classroom project, but to the degree in which it demonstrates an effort to integrate the models of the course into their own context.

40% Reflections and collaboration
Students will be expected to maintain a personal log of their reflections on each day of the course. Ten days. Ten reflections. They will also be responsible for engaging with other people’s reflections. Half of this grade will be the students ‘pitch’ for how they were effective members of the learning network that we tried to create in the class. The ‘pitch’ will be 300-500 words and should contain the same type of ‘links’ and ‘commentaries’ as the learning networks plan.

Notes (you should still probably read these)
No significant prior knowledge of technology is expected for this course. Students with broad technological backgrounds often find this type of course more challenging than students who come with less pre-described standpoints with regards to technology.

This course will also involve the use of a large number of technologies. We will try them out, do projects with them, hopefully have fun with some of them, and learn together. The course will happen (almost) entirely out in the ‘open’. While you may choose to use a pseudonym for the course, all students in the course will know the identity of other students, and work will be (almost always) done in the open. We will be using the googledoc suite for some of our work, which will allow for a backup communication system as well and semi-private space when necessary.

We’re going to be using twitter. Alot.

This course is based on my own research in the field of open education, the nature of knowledge and the intersection of education and technology. This research is ongoing, and critiques of the approach are not only welcome they are encouraged.

I can’t wait to get started.

ED366 – Conceptual discussions for my course that starts next week

ED366 is the second shot that I have at running a ‘community as curriculum’ style course face 2 face at UPEI. It has some lovely qualities about it (has no follow up course, had no set curriculum when i took it over) and the response from the last one was positive enough to give me the freedom to take another shot at it.

I’ve tried to ignore the old syllabus while i’ve been thinking my way through what i want to do this time. I’ve had a number of really interesting educational experiences, talked to some very smart and experienced people and had some time to think about stuff in the last two years. I’d like to make three broad comparitive reflections, try and blend that into some of the things i’ve done in the last couple years and hope for some feedback from folks.

It’s about the technology. No it isn’t.
I wrote a little blog post a couple of months ago having finally framed what i think the position of technology is in what, lets face it, is a course entitled “educational technology and the adult learner”.

We can look at the methods and methodologies (and epistemic foundation) implicit in the machine and recreate those in our classrooms without the purchasing the brand [or the technology for that matter]. A wireless keyboard available in a classroom can work just as well [as a smartboard], as can simply having people talk to each other and write down the upshot of their conversation. The thing that makes the smartboard a challenging (if not a bad purchase) is that it suggests that that collaborative spirit, that idea of sharing is ONLY available with a smartboard.

My last course was naively trying to address the technologies in the local surrounding and ignoring the core beliefs that underwrite the course. Yes, there are technologies that allow us to leverage connective possibilities that would be very difficult if not impossible f2f. There are other things (graphics, archiving) that are undeniable… but. And this is the but that doesn’t show up in the original syllabus, it’s not about any specific technology, but rather, understanding the pedagogies implicit in them, the things that can be leveraged from them, and the ways in which we can be successful in using them.

So. Focus on the things that are important… let the technologies come naturally when they’re needed.

The network vs. the community
I am very sad to report that I now believe the community approach is a bit of windmill tilting. While the last course was very successful in creating community like feelings among the students (combination of good students, some lucky events and many of them knowing each other already) but that sort of thing is not likely to last. There are exceptions of course… but for a regular course it’s just not likely.

My focus this time, rather, is going to be about connecting students with their own possible networks. Rather than thinking about the course as an attempt to create a community, I’m thinking rather about giving people some experience with working in online networks, creating a simulated community, and to connect people with some possible actual peers that they may have out there who do what they do.

So. Networks good… communities still good, just illusory as an intercontextual goal.

The archival space
I still keep beating myself over how to balance respecting the work students do enough not to create a system where their work just gets thrown in the bin (digital or tin) and not wanting the be the ‘owner’ of the repository as I was on the last version of the course. I want students to be able to control their own work… and yet i want them to be able to work together.

This time, we’re going to live in the cloud. I want to open the whole process up and not have a centralized location for the course itself. I mean… i need a place to put a syllabus. I need a place to blog (oh wait… that’s here). But i want to give the students a network presence that they can continue to work with as they leave the course. I want to try and negotiate the course curriculum out in the open. We’ll see 🙂 I’ve got googledocs accounts setup for all my students as a backup (in case they don’t want to live in the open) but i really want to see how far i can push this idea of jointly creating a curriculum but still leaving the content in the hands of the students.

On Bonnie’s advice, I’m going to rely on twitter. I think its a good idea, and i’ll take a run at it. It’ll have to be the glue that holds the ship together.

Community as Curriculum and Open Learning

wow… sometimes the different threads of work that you are doing converge into the same place… it does make me wonder if they aren’t all just reflections of the same thing. anyways

Over the last few months i’ve been focusing much more on the idea of open learning and finding a practical foundation for my rhizomatic education and community as curriculum models. I’ve been lucky enough to work with George Siemens on a couple of projects, including the Edfutures course. When this is combined with my realization at Northern Voice that the entirety of my critique of knowledge and learning hinged on the tyranny of the moment… well… I decided to start writing a book. Which I’m doing.

As part of that process, I’m going to try and clean out the different ideas that I have, to explore them deeper and try to make them more transparent. The following video is my first attempt at drawing the threads together between open learning and community as curriculum… the method of learning with the way that we decide on what we learn. In it… you’ll see some books turn into people… this is related to the tyranny of the moment.

I know this is all jumbled up. But this is how it is in my head right now.

Community as curriculum – We are the learning. We learn from each other, through each other, from each other’s learning, from our ideas, our shared and unshared contexts and, maybe more importantly, we learn to continue to do this… because that open collaborative spirit is going to be the curriculum of success as we move forward.

Open Learning – We’ve got a paper coming out soon that explains this better, but openness in the sense of transparency of practice, of opening the doors and giving access of allowing people into our work. Of sharing.

The tyranny of the moment – Print is responsible for our retaining a massive number of things. It underwrites many of the advances we’ve made, it’s dreadfully important. But the technology that makes print forces us to think in terms of final drafts, of ended thoughts of things that are defined and finished. This is holding us back…

I don’t actually mention the latter in the video… but you can see it in there…

Edfutures – How to collaborate and not lead.

I’ve written about 20 short pieces over on the http://edfutures.com site, and figured i would carry one over here… crosspost alert.

* note: i just noticed after posting that the title is not quite what i meant. I mean that collaboration does not always require a FULL investment… one can, i guess, peripherally participate :p hey. that sounds good, peripheral participation.

Not everyone is going to be a leader in every situation. There are four scenarios currently posted and, I expect, we might get a few more before we get to the end of this very interesting experiment. But, lets say, you don’t feel like you’ve been engaged enough to really start your own. You don’t, maybe, have the kind of time to put in to do the reading and work out what exactly it is you’re supposed to do.

But you still want to do something.

Here’s your invitation to join in. The first and most simple rule is

“Add don’t take away” –
Feel free to jump into a scenario and add a few points at a given line, add a sentence on the end (or in the middle) or a paragraph, create a new section or fill out one of the blank ones. Do not feel free to delete the work done by someone else. If you think something is out of place, or should be deleted, leave a note explaining your reasons. You can add to a scenario, but don’t take away from it.

“contribute what isn’t there” –
One of the great things about working with other people who care about the same things as you do is that you get things that aren’t expected. I’ve seen many people look at work and think “oh, they are doing something else” and not contribute to a certain place because they feel like their idea is too different or doesn’t fit it. Please. This is EXACTLY the kind of contribution that is the most valuable. Surprise is a very important part of learning. Also… it is a great testimony to people’s work that their contribution made you think of something else and caused you to go off in another direction.

“Do the grunt work” –
If you’re not feeling up to engaging at a high creative level, jump in and do some of the grunt work. Any piece of work is going to be well served by cleaner sentences, more organized bullets, good spacing… that kind of thing. I can tell you from experience that it is a very happy feeling to come back to your work and find things more tidy than when you left them.

“Leave feedback” –
not sure where your idea fits in? Create a new section, call it ‘feedback’ or something and just write out what it made you think. That kind of feedback is very helpful for others trying to think through the work that they are doing. It might also get you to the point where you’re going to be doing more work later.

“wear the skin of the idea” –
maybe the most important part of collaboration. Lord Russell has a great quote (which i can’t seem to get my hands on) that says that any time you approach new thinking its important to first get an idea what it would be like to walk a day wearing the idea as a skin. What would it be like to think this way? What kinds of things come out of it. Simply reading a scenario should be an learning experience… try to follow it’s thinking before criticising it. This is the hardest thing for me to remember… but i keep trying.

“cheer” –
if all else fails… just tell people about what you liked. Critical feedback is better than Ra! Ra! Ra! feedback… but often people read things and think “wow… that was really interesting” and never leave that because they feel they have nothing to add. Just add that. Just say “you know, i really enjoyed reading that”.

Scenarios I know about

http://nafutures.wikispaces.com/Some+numbers+and+general+scenarios

http://edfuturescenario.wikispaces.com/Creating+Unity+in+Diversity

http://edfuturescenario.wikispaces.com/Business+and+Higher+Education

http://nafutures.wikispaces.com/The+Blended+Mash-Up+Model

Smartboards: It’s about the technology and it isn’t

I’ve been watching a discussion (partially in jest i believe) between four of my favourite UK people @daveowhite @josiefraser @mweller @hallymk1 about doing a debate at a conference about whether ‘it’s about the technology’. This idea of finding a technological solution for the various crises, real or imagined, in our educational system is one that has been ongoing as long as i’ve been in the business and, really long before. I’ve been in any number of debates where one side says “it’s not about the technology” and the other side says “it is”… and while mulling over the mootness of it all today I turned to thinking about smartboards and why they are loved/derided by people and how they can be a nice tool for looking at this question.

Smartboards: what is the technology?
First ‘smartboard’ is a genericised trademark (and an eponym, thanks @angelynnodom). ‘SMART Technologies’ is a company that makes ‘smartboards’ and there are other competitors that make touch sensitive white boards meant for instructional use. And that’s just what they are, there are many different variations, but essentially you’re taking what is on a computer screen, projecting it to a special white board that is sensitive to being touched by hand and ‘written’ on by special markers. There is often software that comes with it that allows you to save work that you’ve done on the smartboard, bring in saved work, play video etc… the software doesn’t particularly provide functionality that isn’t available elsewhere, but it does provide it in one, integrated package. so. that’s a smartboard

Why people tell other people not to buy them (like i usually do)
cost
The smartboards i’ve been instrumental in buying have cost somewhere in the $1500-$10000 range, depending on the model and whether they include a projector. When you are trying to outfit a school with these you are both setting yourself up for a huge one time cost as well as the ongoing cost of replacing those bloody bulbs that cost 3-5 hundred bucks. That can be a huge investment for alot of learning institutions. You are also going to invest in a fair amount of aculturation. By this I mean to say that ‘training’ people to use a smartboard is not particularly useful, but making them feel comfortable with integrating them into a classroom is necessary… how does it change teaching models, where are you going to be able to scribble if you want more space… things like that. For those people who aren’t currently using a computer in their classroom it also forces that adjustment as well… so it’s a big investment. Then there’s teacher turn over… and the second and third run of ‘buy in’. (of course, you could look at it the other way and suggest that it could be used for recruitment… maybe)

use
Some people love these things and swear by them. There are many other smartboards that simply take up space, trip students or otherwise get in the way of people being able to do things. I’ve heard many teachers talking about them ‘keeping students engaged’ but if you are going to be using a ‘new thing’ to keep students engaged then I think you’re going to find that that isn’t going to keep doing that for long. If you’re a teacher whose teaching style is about engagement, this would fit into the toolchest, if it isn’t, this isn’t going to change that.

It’s not about the technology… it’s about the people

However, it is about the technology
However, there is something about the technology that embodies a certain epistemic principle, or at least a pedagogic one. The software that accompanies the smartboard suggests that sharing and recording your work is acceptable… simply by having that functionality built in… it give permission to share and work together. It also allows for more learner friendly methods of input, it suggests that allowing students to do stuff on the board is valuable… thereby giving permission to do this as well. As these are things that I personally think are good for the educational space, the technology then be seen as contributing to the classroom.

so…
But this is just it. We can look at the methods and methodologies (and epistemic foundation) implicit in the machine and recreate those in our classrooms without the purchasing the brand. A wireless keyboard available in a classroom can work just as well, as can simply having people talk to each other and write down the upshot of their conversation. The thing that makes the smartboard a challenging (if not a bad purchase) is that it suggests that that collaborative spirit, that idea of sharing is ONLY available with a smartboard.

So its about the technology, in the sense that it can embody an (in this case positive) principle and give people implicit permission to perform it, but it is decidedly not about it when that thing that were being given permission to do ‘working together’ is so fundamental to the human condition that it requires 12 years of concentrated schooling to beat it out of us.

Day 5 futures education – sealing the deal

The last day of a very interesting course. It can be a challenge to have a successful second to last day to any course. The results that we came to at the end of thursday’s class would have been more than acceptable for the event and I encouraged the team to commit to something further… we committed to creating a publishable document.

Wiki page http://nafutures.wikispaces.com

We started off the morning by doing a course review. I have had bad luck with leaving a course review until the last minute of the last day (or after the last day) so i took some time in the morning to check with the students as to how they felt about the course… I asked three questions and two of them produced results that will be a useful reflection on the course… the other was badly worded/explained by me and led to 5 identical statements from the students.

Points of clarity – things that worked or helped encourage moments of understanding

the methodology for the freamework was helpful, a comment, really on the course design actually working (thankfully)
collaboration. Students really enjoyed creating the curriculum together.
OECD document to provide a model for creating a scenarios. I waited ’till day three to show it, but it provided valuable structure given the short timeframe
Course gave them an idea of what pressures will hold us back for the future
distinction of prediction and futures thinking
what we did here was shared online and we got responses from other people doing the same kind of work
no homework 🙂
role playing exercises where we took scenarios and built skits
the blog updates day 1-5 offered a reminder of the day before and many students suggested reading the blog post was a very useful way to start the day
the positiveness in the chaos model. They felt comfortable with the iterative nature of the course
hurray for rhizomes. They really did like the community curriculum model. this makes me tres happy.

Room for Improvements

Trends from other countries would be useful to provide context for Singapore
Working through the iterative mapping exercise was confusing for some students while others suggested that it offered room for a different perspective
Course is very compressed in four days, something we all agreed on.
More links out to other places to jump off with futures thinking. Even though we didn’t have alot of time to cover those resources these would have provided an opportunity for independent study
More collaboration with other groups maybe a concurrent course
More look at the nature of trends. how they start, how they die.
more switching of groups? I decided to stay with the same groups throughout the course. A decision with benefits and drawbacks

Future of Education

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

We watched Martin for encouragement and inspiration and…

I then had the students create a series of stories related to their given scenario. It was only the second time where each student was responsible for their own work (something we didn’t have a terrible amount of time for) but a useful activity. They were to be stories from the years 2015/2020/2025/2030 giving some context to the way that learning would be conducted in that time period.

We spent the afternoon creating a solid model that each of the scenarios were to follow in order to make the wiki make sense, and going over bits and pieces of the scenarios in order to make them as coherent as possible.

I’m going to take the work that’s been done over the last five days and build it into one massive document that people can take a look at both the way that the course was constructed but also to hopefully take the work done by the students here to help them in their own thinking about the future of education.

A good day and a nice ending to what has been an excellent learning experience. Sometimes we get offered the privilege to be part of something very special… this is one of those time for me. Thanks muchly to each and everyone one of the 19 of you. You brought me into your work, introduced me to your lives and trusted me to help guide us through. 🙂 I think we did pretty well

Student Scenarios

And now… back to Canada.

Day 4 of futures of education – The scenarios

Holy wow. What a day. We started our day by watching the youtube response to our work by Nancy White (more reinforcement of our participation in a larger conversation… not that it was needed) all the while knowing we were going to have to move on to the dreaded discussion. We needed to refine our trends discussion to two continuums of trendishness… So i dodged and started working with the OECD document

The OECD document is a futures of education scenario planning explanatory document that is one of the four that i leaned on for the creation of this course. It’s a complete front to back look at scenario planning using futures… and while there are a few issues that i have with the document, it is a fabulous place to start to get people thinking about education futures. Thanks OECD.

We took the OECD suggested scenarios as a nice easy place to start. These offer a chance to see what completed scenarios might look like. We first took a look at scenario number one, walked through it together and, shame of shame, I asked them to read through it in class. We explored the five dimensions that OECD uses for each scenario. These scenarios are about education more broadly than we are looking at it, but they offered us an opportunity to explore the idea of scenario, the extreme way in which they reflect the world and how that can be helpful.

This has been mentioned before, but it is critical that we understand what a futures thinking scenario is not. They are ideal paths… they should not be expected to occur in pure form in the real world. They are not predictions seeking to forecast futures accurately. Prediction is doomed to failure. The value of futures thinking is in opening minds to consider new possibilities and to deal with change. They should not be seen as visions of where an organization might go. These particular OECD documents don’t spell out the steps of the process by which these possible futures were reached, but rather they give us a broad sense of what a scenario might look like.

I then gave the remaining samples to each group and gave them an hour or two to work through the process of building a skit to represent what that possible future would look like. I wanted them to FEEL the future from their scenario, desperately hoping that it would influence a positive discussion on the building of our own scenarios. It really couldn’t have worked any better. Following are three of the five skits from my students. We laughed ourselves silly.

By the end of this process, other than a sore belly… we also had a pretty good grasp of what we were looking for in a scenario. You want substance. You want something that is rich enough that you can feel what it would be like to live in a world where that scenario was true. The next step in the process was picking an axes of tension in order to find new scenarios. We used a 2×2 matrix.

So we ended up with five scenarios… the four described in the image and a fifth ‘wild card’ where UV rays can be converted into enough energy to provide unlimitted power. That is what we got accomplished in the 2 1/2 hours before lunch.

After lunch the work began in ernest. I had each group choose one of the scenarios and attempt to write it out in accord with the work done by the OECD. You can see the results of the early part of our work at our wiki http://nafutures.wikispaces.com. I took a look being the work being done and suggested to my students that we could try and publish this document in some format or other. The work was already that good.

If you persuse the wiki, you’ll get a sense of their early work. We took that and did a cross examination session near the end of the day and talked about keeping people firmly in their quadrant to allow the overall structure to hold firm. There were a couple of instances where people were backsliding into what ‘they believed’ rather than what the scenario was tellling them, but the group self corrected. Which is cool.

Day 3 Futures education course – decision making

This was a discussion of the first two of Gary Klein’s ten claims about improving performance from his quite excellent book “streetlights and shadows” (buy it. buy it) . It should create an interesting platform for discussion regarding the nature of biasing of decisions. I created a powerpoint presentation to go through that process.

Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully
Decision biases distort our thinking

I started the class by handing out a sheet of paper to each group with four questions on it. There were two different versions of the sheets.

One version had the question

Is Canada older or younger than 2000 years old?
How old is it?
Am I older or younger than 10 years old
How old am I?

The other had similar questions… but Canada was 15 years old and I was 62 years old

As expected the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic led to much higher guesses about the age of Canada in the group that got the 2000 years and lower in the group that got the question with 15 years. The about my age were far more accurate (makes sense) but still showed traces of anchoring and adjustment. We went over the implications of this, and talked about how 1) this happens for some very normal reasons and 2) there are simple strategies to avoid this kind of difficulty.

Collaborate
Develop expertise

The position i’m going to take for the duration of the course (unless the students manage to convince me otherwise) is that the decision bias tends to bias us towards stuffing people full of facts. One could argue that one of the responses to people making bad guesses is to fill them with the ‘actual’ answers. “inform” people of the age of Canada and then they wont guess wrong. Understanding that the guesses aren’t bad… that they are actually just the use of available evidence… is critical to thinking about what we want to learn. I may be leading the witness on this one… but I am not ‘unbiased’ either.

What could this mean for education?
If we believe the results of this heuristic a normal response is give students more ‘knowledge’.
How does this relate to some of the trends that we were seeing yesterday?
How do we create our schools so that students can be good ‘biasers’?

Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skillfully

Lets play “this can be taught by a process.” Team is challenged to come up with first a simple task that can be accomplished by the building and teaching of a process. We had things like “pick up a pen off the floor”, “make noodles”, and “back up your harddrive”. Even in this exercise we saw a mixture of tasks that could be given as a process and others that required skill… “how do i know if a noodle is ‘cooked'” “how do i know what files to backup to the hard drive?

Then the teams are challenged to think of a complex task and a process for it. I asked the students to teach one of the tasks that they try and teach to their students. We did some research processes for gravity, we tried to land a plane, we did the Heimlich maneuvre. Each time we tried to dig under the process to try and find the complexity… the decision making that the students were learning. Being rigourous during an experiment to ensure good results. When did the start to land the plane? How do you control a person who is choking?

What does THIS say about education?

With this idea of looking under the hood of our normal practice we went back and wrote comments on the day 2 responses that we got from our colleagues in North America. Excellent discussion really.

First after break with watched David Wiley, and talked about the implications of his ‘position’.

We started the afternoon with a round robin iterative mapping exercise. The students pulled from the trends from the day before… adding those that occured to them during their reflection on the blog comments, and tried to create patterns. After 15 minutes they passed their sheet to the next group without discussion or explanation and that group tried to make sense of those patterns. Here’s a 2 min video of my awesome students at work

We finished off the day trying to find two ‘axes of tension’ to start creating narratives for our scenario planning. There are still about 20 of them on the white board in the classroom as we had quite a bit of debate about the format… Hopefully we can get those whittled down this morning. See page 9/20 in this excellent pdf from GBN on how the axes of tension work out for scenario planning. Till tomorrow.

Here’s my morning video reflection before the class started 🙂

Day 2 futures education course – Trends

Would love your feedback on the list of trends created by my students. I have had a strictly advisory role in the creation of them… in the “i fight but don’t win” kinda way. A pretty solid first day from my perspective. We made a list of trends, we brainstormed, and rebrainstormed and stormed some more. This post describes the work done during the day and then lists the trends that the students came up with. Feel free to add more trends or just make comments.

I started the day by creating a powerpoint of their responses from day one showing them (if they didn’t know) that with all their ideas combined, we could teach a course. community. as. curriculum.

Trends
These trends are the meat of the whole exercise. We’ll be using them to talk about our decision making and then going over them to rate them, to cross-examine them, to think about how much control we might have over them and then, finally, what effect they may have on the future.

Intro to trends… what are we looking for in the first place?
We first need to create boundaries around what we mean by trends, by drivers and develop some language to talk about them.What does a trend look like? What would an example of a trend look like?

Brainstorm no. 1.
First list created by students in a brainstorm session. Two students at the board, me stomping around rallying the troops. We did the first list on the white board and then moved to the web. One student suggested that we start with etherpad… which worked very nicely. The students cowrote the early draft of the trends… i’d guess we had close to twenty of them after the first brainstorming session. In retrospect it might have been better if i’d been on the marker encouraging a bit more ‘statement’ and a little less ‘two words’. It might have saved in the editing process.

Insert-able exercise
Future of Singapore in 2015. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1OFZlE7CeU&feature=player_embedded We watched this video (with the sound off) and tracked the trends that were being described in it. We added the ones we didn’t have to our list…

What is actually different and what is superficially different?

Brainstorm no. 2
Is the list relevant? Is there something else out there? Lets take this list and compare it against the outcomes that are mentioned in the department of education’s future document. What are the trends that are driving us in this direction? Which are the critical trends, which are less involved? Create a new list of things missed in the first list.

Interlude and brainstorm 3. a walk on the wild side.
What potential wildcards are on the horizon?

We watched the apple video from 1987. Talked about some of the comparisons between this and the earlier video. What is knowledge in this world? What does it mean to ‘teach’.

Reviewed list with the group

We added numbers to the trends… a painful process that forced us to demarcate between explanations, thoughts, reasonings and trends.

Review and grades
We then went back into our groups, took 11 trends each and graded them for inevitability and for their impact on education. The groups were also responsible for making them tidy. As you can see from the trends below, i should have said more about format 🙂

Which seem inevitable or pre-determined?
Which forces are most likely to define or significantly change the nature or direction of education?

big list

The size of computers and other devices are becoming smaller and more portable
The power of computers and other devices are increasing
Capability has become portable.????
An increasing amount of computing tasks will be done on mobile devices, such as PDA, mobile phones, tablet PCs, etc., over desktop type computers
Real-world learning objects are increasingly tagged thus becoming available to the mobile learning community
Work and Play will become increasingly mobile (‘on-the-go’) through the use of multiple resources besides equipment and space
Tied with accessibility. Concerns are two ways, you have more access to the public and the public has more access to you due to portable devices.A, [E] C: open coursewares
Advantages: More work can be done on the go. A,C: efficiency, e.g.google docs can collaborate w others
Disadvantages: More work is expected to be done on the go (regardless of where you are, what you are doing).A
Portability will lead to learning outside of confined spaces and common schedules towards a more user-determined environment
People expect instantaneous response and feedback to work and assignments
Greater wireless connectivity.
Greater wireless power
More collaborative learning
Trends towards more affordable means of collaboration
Better language translation capabilities
Trends towards outsourcing
People increasing using multiple identities
Growth in Social Networks and use of social networks in professional life
Increased use of Virtual Reality technologies. More adoption in Education specifically healthcare simulation etc.
Trend is towards democratisation of information and human activities, including learning
Realtime time, multiuser communication across borders
Copyrights: Increase in the use of Creative Commons license and it becomes easier to remix content
The trend is towards less use of paper.
The trend is towards more comfortable reading experience off the screen.
The trend is towards more efficient and more secure transmission of data.
The trend is towards more accessible information online.
The trend is towards a more realistic and richer virtual reality experience.
The trend is towards a more pervasive availability of 3D experience, from entertainment to education.
The trend is to attempt to pack in more activities at the same time.
The trend is towards a better ability to scale information larger or smaller.
The trend is towards faster (real-time) online translation.
The trend is to make more location based services available.
The trend is towards easy access to online services e.g. e-doctor
The trend is towards lifestyle-based mobile phone rather than function-based.
The trend is towards technology-enhancing human abilities (eg, Spellchecker, Online Dictionary, Thesaurus.)
Convergence – More devices are moving towards being multifunctional (a mobile phone to call, email, IM, tweet, Google, etc)
Unstructured Learning Environments – People are learning out of the traditional structure by seeking out information on their own instead of having it delivered to them by conventional means (schools, teachers, etc.)
Collaborative Learning – Learning is becoming more collaborative (discussion boards, online forums, social bookmarking, etc.)
Companies like Google and Delicious are organizing data on the Internet for users to find more easily.
People are becoming more trusting of information found on the Internet
New laws and regulations are being drawn up by the Government with regards to the Internet and online communities.