The old way and the new

Back in the bad old days, with limited transportation and communication, it was difficult to learn something if you were not physically near someone who could teach you. If I was a farmer, and I wanted to learn more about bookkeeping, but there wasn’t a bookkeeper in my village, I was plum out of luck. In order to counter this, the design of schools was centred on physical proximity. What we did was put a bunch of people who knew about stuff into one building, and we sent the children to that building in the hope that they would learn from those clever people. This design served us really well for a long time, but, as technology has improved, we now find ourselves in quite a different world. It’s a world of ubiquitous learning, where learning is available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, almost anywhere in the world.

Knowledge has become more available

As Tony Wagner says, ‘Knowledge is now a commodity; it’s free, like water or air.’ So, the system we built, that centred around efficiently moving information from one person’s head to another, where one person stood at the front of a room talking, and 50 people sat facing them, listening, writing it down, and trying to memorise that knowledge, needs to change. But, let’s be clear, knowing things will always be important. There will never be a time when ignorance will be an asset. Increasingly, the world values not simply the knowing of things, but what you can do with the things you know.

So, things like relatively low-cost computing devices, wireless internet, and 3 and 4G networks mean that we can overcome the tyranny of time and place. We no longer need to be in the same room as an expert, at a time convenient to both of us, for me to be able to learn from that expert. Think of something like the thousands of guitar tutorials on YouTube. If I want to learn from the best, I don’t need to travel to wherever they live, I just need a guitar and an internet connection. Even better, I can rewind that learning as many times as I need in order to go at my own pace, not the pace of most people in my class.

The challenge to schools

Open the doors to this new way of learning

The challenge to schools is two-fold: open up our doors to bring the ubiquitous learning that exists out there inside our schools, and arrange what we do in our schools so students have access to what’s out there. One of the most exciting things about ubiquitous learning is the fact that we can now put learning back where it belongs: out in the community, next to the people who want it.

Let me give you an example. If I were walking to school and I notice that the river beside me is flooded and a different colour, in the bad old days I would have to find an expert and ask her what was going on. In a world of ubiquitous learning, if I’ve got a device and a 3G connection: I can pull up a Google Earth view of the landscape, see that the river actually drains from the foothills of the local mountain range, overlay that with data from the Metservice to find that there has been a weather system carrying a lot of rain from the west over the last few days, then search for a YouTube video to learn more about erosion and sedimentation in rivers. All this in the landscape while following an authentic question of my own asking.

How will we spend our time in the classroom?

The other part of ubiquitous learning that is a challenge for schools is this: If we have traditionally spent a lot of time lining students up in rows and having them face the front, but now no longer need to do that in order to get knowledge out to them, what do we do with that time? Does ubiquitous learning mean that we can offer an increasingly personalised pathway through learning for each individual? Does it mean that the teacher’s role becomes more of an activator than a facilitator, that we need to be building the dispositions of lifelong learning rather than ensuring the learning takes place? If the answer to these questions is yes, then we need to radically re-think how we arrange learning in schools.

And if we don’t, we run the risk of holding on to a lot of practices from the bad old days.

Drivers for this trend

Social:

• Social media
• always on, always connected

Technology

• mobile technologies
• cloud computing
• online services
• UFB access
• wireless

Educational

• Learning works best in the right context and the right time. Ubiquity helps learning be right there.

Implications

• Is your school network prepared to accommodate the influx of student-owned mobile devices being connected?
• How would you describe the concept of “the cloud” to your staff or board of trustees?
• How could your school make effective use of ‘cloud-based’ applications and services for students and staff?
• Are your ‘home learning’ and ‘school learning’ experiences as rich and as deep as each other?

Examples and Links:

Cloud computing:

• What is cloud computing?

Mobile devices:

• 21 Reasons To Use Tablets In The 21st Century Classroom

Cloud apps:

• Google Docs
• Microsoft Office 365
• Dropbox.com

For more about the Ten Trends:

• Ten Trends 2013 (CORE website)
• About the Ten Trends

Think for a moment about the kinds of success stories we read about in the press about how some young people use the web: sharing their music and scoring a recording contract, blogging from a fashion show and creating a TV channel on YouTube, and working with others to write software for smart phones. We also hear stories that are of more concern such as bullying on social networking sites, or the sharing of inappropriate photos. It has never been easier to connect, network, and collaborate as a result of the evolution of ‘the social web’. This trend reflects the ways that we can all now use the web to enable. amplify, and extend social connections.

Drivers for this trend

• The exponential growth of social web technologies, such as social networks and social media.
• The ease with which individuals can access and create meaning for themselves via increasingly ubiquitous connectivity, and the rise of the agentic learner.
• The shift from consumers to prosumers, and connectivism: it’s not what you know, it’s how you locate, use, process, and apply that information. Check out the Bundlr collection of resources for this trend – a neat example of shared curation of content.

The issue for teachers and schools is that it’s never been easier for learners to access and create information for themselves. If control over how we access information is shifting, what does this mean for the role of the teachers and for the way we design learning experiences and curriculum programmes?

Implications

Identity and connections — the ‘who and why’

Whenever we upload and share information we add to the identity we are creating for ourselves online. We share data, we upload photographs, and we can have multiple identities across different online spaces. That has implications for the kind of values and the kind of expectations that we have of ourselves and the people around us.

We are also connected to each other in networks, communities, and groups, which provides a huge opportunity for sharing knowledge and sharing information. The implication for schools is in how are they supporting students to develop clear values and integrity, and to take responsibility over the way that they share and interact as individuals online. Check our our Digital Citizenship trend and the work of NetSafe.

• The importance of values, key competencies, and of a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship with meaningful learning.

Filters, identities, and digital literacy — the ‘what’

There is an unprecedented amount of information to be shared and created. We can ask other people the answer at the click of a button, but what does this mean for the way our students come to understand Science or History? We have got to help young people learn how to filter information themselves, and help them to become discriminating, questioning readers of the information that they find online. The challenge for schools is to encourage students to develop questions of their own, to not accept easy answers, to look for arguments that go against their own point of view, and to question deeply by looking at information from all kinds of different perspectives. For example, watch the ICOT keynote from Ewan McIntosh as he talks about helping young people become ‘problem finders’.

• The importance of working with learners to generate questions that are meaningful, not easily answered, require testing, iteration, and application.

User-driven learning and inclusive — the ‘how’

Web-based technologies are now essentially social in design. Recent years have seen an explosion in social networking sites and social media platforms with news stories and all manner of content going viral in fast-response feedback loops. It is rare to visit a site that doesn’t support sharing, linking, and broadcasting to networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Increasingly, we are seeing schools harness the social web in order to connect with their communities, and we have also seen examples of resources that are co-constructed and shared globally. Check out these videos on Enabling e-Learning that explore this idea further: Sharing learning in the class blog, The Portal Unity Project, and Passion Projects.

Multimedia resources and technologies on the web now offer unprecedented ways for us to design learning that offers pathways into new collaborative modes of learning, and to sharing our learning with whānau and communities.

• Importance of sharing control with learners, allowing them to have agency over what they learn and how they learn it, designing inclusively.

What does this mean for schools?

As well as schools beginning to make the most of the social web for their students’ learning and for their own professional learning, there has been growth in the way they use social networks to draw their wider community together. There is growing enthusiasm for teachers to draw on professional networks to complement and sustain their own learning. Check out the collection of approaches that teachers shared when we called on our social networks for ideas in over 48 hours. The big shift now is towards thinking of ourselves as part of a network, and of each individual as having control and agency over how they chose to learn.

Three big questions that apply to both students and teachers

• Who: How do our schools support students to act with integrity, to be responsive and effective online? How is this meaningfully part of the curriculum or professional learning?
• What: Are we offering a curriculum that provokes deep questioning, allows students to construct the direction, weigh up information and build discrimination?
• How: How can we allow students to drive the learning, connect, collaborate, and harness the technology to show learning in multiple ways?

For more about the Ten Trends:

• Ten Trends 2013 (CORE website)
• About the Ten Trends