Themes - Immutable Trends

Technology’s appeal to youth is obvious.  So is its relentless race to make things smaller, faster, smarter and cooler.  This theme tracks advances that seem to turn technology into magic. Whether we like it or not, Tech’s Appeal and Advancement is a fact of life that education should accept and leverage to empower learning. Here’s the best of what we’ve spotted this month.

Phones are becoming the device set to crack the world’s money vaults.  GPS, mapping, digital profiles, low price points and the huge number of potential customers make us big mobile wallets ready for location-based impulse buying.  See how we’ve been targeted this month.

Wikipedia is a great example of how from nothing came over 2 million entries in a volunteer-created encyclopedia.  No matter what you think about Wikipedia, compare this productivity to the average teenager’s output of homework.  Furthermore, as information explodes around us, trying to “know-it-all” is a myth that’s best left forgotten.  More sensible is to tap into the Distributed Wisdom available through information and communications technologies.  Pursuing learning and building knowledge become group efforts where we can all contribute expertise and tap into the contributions of others.  How did the “crowd-sourced academy” express itself this month?

The more we live our lives online, the more digital breadcrumbs we leave behind.  Will they show us the way home or lead The best of the Web 2 companies make these crumbs their business.  Think of Google instead of YAHOO or the iPhone and Loopt instead of an iPod.  Some What is your digital trail saying about you this month?

Education’s Tasks

The mass production assembly line transformed manufacturing.  The model also allowed education to scale up to the massive influx of students who entered our schools during the last century.  How else could the one room schoolhouse adapt to the needs of a growing population seeking universal education?  Year levels, content areas, standards and extrinsic motivators help move children of the huddled masses from illiteracy to a graduation rate of 70%.  As this century frees learning from time and place, what rust-belt remnants still define our schools?  Better yet, what technologies undermine the old model and reveal that we’re sometimes just “assembly lyin” when we call crowd control “class work” and logistics “learning.”  “Assembly Lyin’” focuses on technology-supported developments that either personalize learning or allow students to sidestep the factory school. What disruptive technologies are throwing a spanner in the works this month?

With the marketers and crumbware sifting through our ones and zeros, what’s being done with this information? Orwell thought the government was Big Brother.  We’re still trying to figure out if Google will truly “do no evil”.  But what if all this snooping were honestly for our students own best interests?  What if data were compiled lovingly to nurture our students’ budding self-initiative rather than crack down on the slightest indiscretion?  What if education could become our loving Big Mother?  Any signs this month?

Carl Bereiter provides a lucid metaphor to illustrate how our thinking about assessing learning needs to shift.  Before the era of great Greek sculptors, the criteria for determining the artistic merit of a work was how “human” or “life-like” it looked.  Observing the primitive or stiff figures of earlier eras this approach was useful.  But for the Greek masters, such mimicry was easy, their challenge was to capture the essence of moments, emotions and an individual’s character.  Similarly, in a world of limited information, “knowing the facts” was a good criterion for learning.  But with our era’s easy access to an exponentially expanding body of knowledge, assessing student learning through products that can be copy and pasted from the Web makes little sense. How will education come to validate significant student learning?  Here are some recent examples.