The Future of Education?

Education is the Future

In imagining the future of education, the truth of the global citizenry is either quite bleak or excitedly dynamic, dependent entirely on perspective.  With only half of college graduates holding full-time employment, questions about the importance of education versus the payoff to the individual abound. While Dr. Yong Zhao, in World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, frames education in terms of the word, entrepreneur, defined as someone who undertakes a significant project or activity (Zhao, p. 76), I like to think about the skills required not just to start a business or create something new but to live and be in a global world.  In other words, how can education open up to helping students be better humans in the current and forthcoming world?  It seems we are in a time and of a mindset, while much of what we are experiencing is “not working” in terms of the economy, peace, preservation of resources and, of course, education, where humans are primed for a thinking evolution.  How might we shift from “American” education or thinking and “Chinese” education towards Global Thinking and Education?  Would this not be a better fit for our digital native citizenry?  Who do I want to be community partners with, no matter where in the world I am?

Humans need time and space for thinking in all areas of functionality. Especially when coming of age, deciding who you are as a human being requires reflective thinking, plus time and space to do so.  However, this goes against the “billable” hours thinking of many organizations and the very regimented or structured school day of most educational institutions. This is evidenced by the “Post-it Note” anecdote Zhao referenced where 3M employees are encouraged to devote time in their workweek to personal ideas resulting in many innovations we use everyday.  (Zhao, p. 79)  The entrepreneurial spirit captures the common qualities shared by entrepreneurs: “inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude” (Martin & Osberg, 2007, pp. 32– 33; Zhao, p. 81). These are traits for functional humaning, as well.  I want our world to be filled with strong critical thinkers who can make examined decisions when choosing leadership, who can execute plans for how to care themselves and those around them, who feel connected to the world at large, who are driven by a desire to act in a manner that is productive, who are open to new ideas, curious about what hits their senses, authentic in their interactions, and who consider themselves capable, connected and full of passion and purpose.  As an educator, I care far less about a student’s ability to recall a name, date, passage or formula than I do about whether or not they know how to be a good human after spending time in my classroom.  The question is how do we shape education to fit an entrepreneurial driven world that helps students become skilled at being human?  

Perhaps the best idea for reshaping education is taken out of context and put this way, “Simply speaking, blow it up [the Chinese education system].” (Kang, 2010)  Apparently there is a mismatch of understanding of educational excellence.  Where opportunity exists for stable work, fewer feel compelled towards entrepreneurship of any kind. (Zhao, p. 89, pp. 102-103)  But what is entrepreneurial education and what kinds of learners does it produce?

It seems cliché to say, make it like it is in the real-world, like Google or other hip and successful companies.  But what if a classroom was like that?  From flexible schedules, flexible workspaces, collaboration with others near and across borders, to learning driven by student passion with authentic purpose, learning could exist this way. Tom Loveless spoke about “the happiness factor”— teachers paying attention to enjoyment of their class (Zhao, p. 136). As previously noted in Zhao’s work, happiness is part of the skillset needed for entrepreneurship.  We have to find ways to balance what we think is prerequisite knowledge needed and what are more practical skills for global citizenry while keeping in mind that happy students learn more.  Zhao framed the key factors as needed for an entrepreneurial classroom as:

1. Student voice and choice

2. Student support: mentoring and personalization

3. Authentic product

4. Process: drafts, discipline, review

5. Global orientation & competence

Without negating the need for basic skills, again, students learn more when engaged and passionate about their learning.  If writing well is required as a means to an end that is important to them, they will work hard at the best possible writing product and enlist support to improve their writing. Freedom to learn what you want is expressed through examples like the Summerhill School, which scared me when I first heard of it years ago.  If students didn’t have to come to class, then how would I have a chance to teach anything?  From an ego standpoint, that translated to how would I know if I’m a good teacher?  I see now, though, through my recent foray into allowing students time and space to learn or not on any given day, that given enough flexibility to not be required to learn when students’ heads are not in the game often results in tremendous productivity on the day’s when they are feeling ready to learn.  “Authenticity is defined by the degree to which the final product or service serves a genuine purpose, solves a real problem, meets a genuine need of others, or is personally meaningful.  If a product only ends as evidence for measuring a student’s mastery of certain content or skills, it is not authentic.”  (Zhao, p. 247) I want schools to be hubs of idea generation with the support and skill nourishing from teachers as needed for any given area of study, project or performance outcome.

When thinking about my role in global education and making such education happen, I circle back to the work I focused on for my graduate program studies: individualized learning that focuses on critical thinking.  Knowledge is so readily accessible; my role is to help students decipher the vast information, consider it with critical thinking skills and mold learning to couple personal passions and effective productivity.  Helping to ask the right questions with students is a means to guide them to take ownership of learning and teaching them how to address hurdles with problem solving skills fosters ownership of learning and the global human skills I’d like to see in the world.  If I am merely a project manager guiding and supporting my students, and one that they enjoy “working for”, then I’m already en route to tremendous success in education.  It requires a bit of revolutionary philosophy to ignore the rigors of testing and core standards, but I feel confident that more time spent thinking and less on regurgitating will result in a better world.  We can have the exciting and dynamic future filled with creativity and peaceful connectedness everyone craves; we just have to believe it is possible and trust our students to lead us there.  

Reference

(2012) Zhao, Yong. World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Corwin/SAGE Company. Thousand Oaks, CA. Kindle Edition.

Mobile and Online Learning Technologies

     Words come fairly easily to me.  I know that's a gift and I recognize that this is not the case for many of my students.  I believe one of the strongest tools I have in trying to lift students to their full potential lies in mobile technologies.  I see how the dynamic nature, the connectivity and accessibility create a learning environment conducive for all learning styles.  My only concern rests in the challenges I'm having making it happen.
     Web design requires instinctive flow in order to work.  Trying to wrestle technology feels beyond my intuitive grasp, though.  Finding the most efficient methods may come with practice and time, certainly plenty of time.  My hunch is to keep tapping into the talents of the digital natives I work with in the classroom so they can guide me with feedback.  As it stands now, my prototype is flat, lacking the interactivity to grab interest.  As I spend some quality time with Google sites, I'll keep looking forward to feedback and incorporating it as it comes.  Connectivity is the mindset.
   

Formative Assessment and Personal Learning Networks

In consideration of what it means to be connected, one has to reflect on one’s own connections and mobile learning as educational methodology.  As part of my own growth, and especially in pursuit of graduate work, becoming more of a part of the learning community fueled my thinking and played a significant role as I determined the future of me as an educator.  After connecting to Alt Schools in California, following Sugatra Mitra on TED and Twitter and finding the awesome Critical Thinking “core standards” of New Zealand and Austrailia, I began to see the benefit of learning anytime, anywhere, in real, global time with the support of peers, tools and mentors connected as needed.  I realize how important it is to move towards mobile learning and “connectivism,” but as I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is the action is harder than the words.  

The Informal Learning Activities Figure (Ally, p. 104 [Patten, 2006]) paints a clear picture of the categories, making it easy to consider the relevance of mobile learning as I observe it in the classroom or in relation to my classes.  Although I’ve tried using “interactive” options, such as electronic flashcards, most students who use it are already inclined to use flashcards.  I encourage “administrative” e-planning tools for executive function support,especially for students with dysgraphia, dyslexia or other challenges with tracking.  I’m so happy when mobile devices become “referential” tools, and I believe the golden ticket is when the devices become “collaborative” for students to work with and learn from each other.
Working through my outline reminds me that I have a long way to go to get students and myself into a fully realized connected learning practice.  I have no doubt they will be able to enlist it as they embrace it, if I can make everything as intuitive as a video game.  Whether going mobile will create the individualized, globalized passionate learning is another story.  I can’t wait to get it together and get moving with the necessary feedback in order to fully realize this goal.  

Mobile Interactivity and Instructional Design Strategies

It strikes me as apropos that one of the cited studies in our consideration of the applications of mobile learning is one that looked at the practical uses of such learning online. (Ally, p.139)  As I write this, I’m online,if you are reading this it’s online, and my reading of the related material  is happening electronically from open source material found- yes, online.  This scenario leads me  to say, “We are officially in the matrix.”  I’ve been working with my philosophy students online for a few years to manage a more individualized learning environment while personally, I am increasingly managing my own life mobilly (and yet the dictionary does not recognize this experience as an adverb to help me with spelling).  In order to move at a productive pace with many facets to my highly curated life, I need the mobility, even as I often resent the theory of constant availability.  Does it, though, have bearing on my teaching practice, and if so, how?

Learning still needs to come first even with mobile learning.  The goal of mobile learning is to make it more accessible.  What’s interesting is that as I’m working on developing an online learning module I’m working through it the same way as developing in class learning units.  When does the path deviate from instructional design to be instructional design online?  I know how to teach critical thinking in the classroom.  I’m working on developing equitable performance outcomes to better focus the learning.  My aim is to use mobile learning options to increase the level of individualization and thinking.  How can I best transition into mobile learning so that I maximize the potential and minimize the drawbacks?  How will I translate the moments of inquiry and connection, the malleability necessary for reaching students, and the immediate feedback that happens in order to be more effective than the teacher I already am?

I look forward to enlisting project tuning in this process.  It’s a regular part of my practice with colleagues and I’ve used variations of it with students.  Figuring out how to best approach this project will benefit from additional perspectives.  My only hope is that the metacognitive matrix of critical thinking is the hard part and going mobile won’t break me!

SJ IDA #3

Performance Objectives and Mobile Learning

The idea of “online “tribes” as a community of like-minded people without geographic constraints”^[1] immediately struck me and served as a catalyst for my learning goals this week.  I have a student who has more than one online tribe, and he interacts with his tribes in a manner that does pique his curiosity, engage his evaluative thinking and foster new stimuli regularly.  One tribe member in particular, whom he met on a Mongolian underwater basket-weaving site, is a constant frame of reference for this student as he navigates life and learning.  This shifts online perception away from deviance or sources to be skeptical of towards imagining the hopeful possibility that is connected learning.  The chats are more than fodder to distract, as so much online life is, and instead offer random touchstones of sects of the world that might never have been encountered in one’s “regular” life, even with travels.  This leads me to the essential question, “What is the purpose of an educator in connected learning?”

 

Two key “educational affordances” stood out to me in my goals with trying to find meaningful ways to incorporate mobile learning.  One is “ Context sensitivity, the ability to “gather data unique to the current location, environment, and time, including both real and simulated data,”^[2] as it puts learning in the now, though I am reluctant to jump into using the “just in time” mindset.  The second key point speaks directly to my current practice and focus for change in education which is,  “Individuality, a “unique scaffolding” that can be “customized to the individual’s path of investigation.”^[3]  There is a clear advantage to students learning at their own pace, in their own way and when it suits them.  Additionally, as summed up so well in Ms. Peters’ words,  “Managing m-learning as a part of a suite of services that offers greater choice to learners will have benefits for providers, because it can allow teachers to move from delivery to the management of learning, and will help learners to gain specific skills of immediate value in the knowledge-based economy.” 

Admittedly, this should be driving my work, and specifically in writing performance objectives for the mobile learning module I’m trying create.  How, though, do I take the educational principles of objectives and focus more on providing this “suite of services” for my students.  How can I focus on conditions, performance and criterion^[4] for an objective, assuming I am still managing the learning, while allowing my students to learn however, wherever, and whenever mobily? 

I disagree with Hall Davidson’s theory that we are returning to non-reading or that all learning will be inevitably e-learning.^[5]  As a question lover, with support from Make Just One Change^[6], which is the basis for the Question Generation practice I use regularly, I believe reading is one of many ways we learn to question ideas of others as a means to think critically.  I also believe that seeking ideas from words along with other modalities, allows for higher likelihood of imagination, personal connections and practice finding “voice” or other aspects of storytelling.  If I’m attempting to nurture a generation of thinkers, I want multiple means of information as part of the deal in order to maximize construction of learning networks.  E-learning, m-learning, face-to-face learning and reading are essential.

In the interest of brevity, writing performance objectives felt quite challenging in relation to my learning goal.  I’m trying to put the Critical Thinking skills into concrete actions, yet have no idea how to put thinking into words let alone a succinct one to two sentence objective.  My big picture plan includes students helping define what it will look like if they achieve mastery of the CT skills, so perhaps my next step is to have that conversation in order to find ways to build backwards from those goals. 

IDA #2 Writing Performance Objectives

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^[1] Peters, Kristine. "m-Learning: Positioning educators for a mobile, connected future." The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 8.2 (2007).

^[2] Peters, Kristine. "m-Learning: Positioning educators for a mobile, connected future." The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 8.2 (2007).

^[3] Peters, Kristine. "m-Learning: Positioning educators for a mobile, connected future." The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 8.2 (2007).

^[4] "Lesson 6 - Writing Objectives - ITMA." 2003. 1 Nov. 2015 <http://www.itma.vt.edu/modules/spring03/instrdes/lesson6.htm>

^[5] "TEDxManhattanBeach - Hall Davidson - The Teacher with a ..." 2011. 1 Nov. 2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdIhMV2DWLU>

^[6] "Make Just One Change - Right Question Institute." 2012. 1 Nov. 2015 <http://rightquestion.org/make-just-one-change/>

Instructional Design Models for Mobile Learning

In thinking through the various Instructional Design Models, my initial response is that many are similar to one another.  In terms of similarities, it seems that opportunities for differentiation exist throughout the models.  One key theme that resonates is the detailed mapping of a clear plan as part of the process.  Although this may be an intuitive expectation for educational models, it is not necessarily the truth in all classrooms.  It seems that being absolute in establishing purpose is essential especially when employing mobile learning as the risk of tangents could increase with the multitude of options online.  Staying true to a plan might ensure learning outcomes are met.
To me, the most user friendly models are the ones that are the most succinct.  As someone interested in the complexities of thought, in practice and with students in mind, less is more.  I think compact plans are also likely to resonates with students, as too many steps or options can become confusing.  More detailed design models, like the ADDIE Model, makes sense for a teaching brain that often does heavy thinking up front, yet may be over thinking or not allow for variation based on student voice, choice or need.  Additionally, the Dick and Carey Model says “five steps” then walks through nine very detailed design steps.  Finally, though I appreciate the Iterative Design in terms of rapid prototyping for engineering and maker project based instruction, I find that the idea of continuous improvement can be a challenge if a student’s passion for a project is not at the highest level.  Even students invested in getting “it” right or working on a highly valued project have trouble with “revisions” as it indicates that this version he or she put heart and soul into is not done, not awesome, or just not enough.  The project evolution brings up affective challenges and requires a high degree of resiliency on top of actual work.
Both the Backwards Design Model (Wiggins and McTighe) and the Criterion Referenced Instruction (Mager) include aspects that make the most sense to me as instructional design models.  First, both include experiential or authentic outcome expectations, which I believe improves student investment.  Second, both have ways to incorporate multiple means of instruction with student pace, choice and individualized needs in mind.  These fit my goals for instruction well, along with purpose being set forth at the beginning. Purpose driven design may also help keep mobile learning on task.
In considering Gagne’s Learning Outcomes to practice an Instructional Design Model for mobile learning, I appreciate the five categories of learning as part of the whole student and hopefully whole classroom experience.  However, I live in the land of intellectual skill and cognitive strategy and will always gravitate towards those skill areas.  What is most interesting, however is the interweaving of learning as stated in the reading, “Different internal and external conditions are necessary for each type of learning. For example, for cognitive strategies to be learned, there must be a chance to practice developing new solutions to problems; to learn attitudes, the learner must be exposed to a credible role model or persuasive arguments.” (Gagne)
To me, this is learning.  The details suit the complexity of the mind.
Putting it all into practice proved challenging, though.  While I have in mind the learning goals and outcomes, I am essentially trying to map out the thinking for how to think in my instructional design for Critical Thinking Skills.  I am up to my eyeballs in metacognition, and need to keep in mind simplicity in order to make learning accessible for my students.  

Mobile Learning Final Project Topic Idea

In considering the foundational understanding of the “Mobile Learning Process” as so clearly framed in the FRAME diagram put forth by Marguerite Koole on page 27 of our text, one aspect roused my thinking.  Although the FRAME model makes perfect sense with mobile learning at the center of learning, it goes against my instinct to have the learner at the center of any pedagogy or learning theory.  It led me to the question, how could mobile learning wrap around the learner instead?  

My work focuses on individualized learning for many reasons, and I see the future of education as needing it to remain so, between personalized learning “playlists” and “Mass Customized Learning” it seems that mobile learning is a tool for individualized learning.  In attempting to merge my Action Research work and my own big dreams for education that focus on direct instruction of Critical Thinking Skills via Individualized Learning, the module I have in mind needs to address the instructional problem of defining performance outcomes for critical thinking.  As my best filter and best option for change in the classroom, I’ll use to create this module using my Philosophical Literature class, which is made up of twice-exceptional learners quite comfortable with “Individualized Learning Plans” and chaos in the school day.  Therefore, my learning module topic is practical application of the six areas of Critical Thinking customized for individualization.

Through a previous course on “Learning Styles” I created a sample module on Google Classroom. What I need to figure out before employing it in the classroom is how to make it more student driven and designed.  In the classroom I practice question generation and link it to the Critical Thinking areas as a means to guide students’ researching of various ideas, but if I want them to arrive at specific knowledge or understanding, I formulate the prompts or questions.  My hope is that this project will help me take my dream idea to a classroom reality.