2018 |

Summer Holiday Reading 2018/19

Posted on December 19, 2018 by Paula Eskett

We have made it to the end of another busy year! The Kiwi summer break provides an excellent opportunity to relax, refresh and prepare for the new year ahead. If you need something to read over the break, look no further!

CORE’s Knowledge Curator Paula Eskett has once again collected book reviews from across the CORE whānau, showcasing a number of new titles to inspire your thinking and teaching practice.

Thank you for being late, an optimistic guide to thriving in the age of accelerations.

Friedman, T. (2016). London, United Kingdom: Penguin Random House.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

Harari, Y. (2018). London, United Kingdom: Penguin Random House.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.

Reese, B. (2018). New York, United States of America: Simon and Schuster.

Reviewer: Derek Wenmoth

Rather than focus on a single book for this review I have chosen to provide a brief overview of three books; all focusing on the theme of the future, the impact of technology on society and what it means to be ‘human’ in the midst of this change.

The three authors, a journalist, an entrepreneur and an academic bring their own unique perspectives to this challenge.

Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who writes regular columns in the New York Times and is well known for his previous best seller “The Earth is Flat”. Friedman writes with vitality, wit, and optimism, and argues that we can overcome the multiple stresses of an age of accelerations—if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use the time to reimagine work, politics, and community.

Byron Reese is the CEO and publisher of the technology research company Gigaom, and the founder of several high-tech companies. His previous book as also a best seller, titled “Infinite Progress: How Technology and the Internet Will End Ignorance, Disease, Hunger, Poverty, and War.” Reese writes from the perspective of an entrepreneur, but does more than simply explain and describe the world of AI and robotics, he focuses on how to think about these technologies, and the ways in which they will change the world forever.

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli academic who rose to fame with the publication of his book Sapiens, originally written in Hebrew as a history of humanity, translated into English in 2014. He followed that with Homo Deus which is a gaze into the future. 21 Lessons provides a contemporary stocktake of where we are currently, and explores the issues facing us in the present time, challenging us with the decisions we will need to make as individuals and as society as we progress into this ever changing future.

My reason for providing this collective review is that when we read a single book on a topic like this it’s easy to become caught up in the particular set of arguments or thesis of that particular author, and lose sight of the bigger picture of the issue or issues at stake. The combination of these three books provides an eclectic mix of viewpoints which, while sharing a similar focus, differ in the perspectives provided, leaving the reader to synthesise for themselves the ideas to arrive at their own point of understanding.

My reason for choosing these three in particular is that they are each extremely well informed, well researched and profoundly challenging volumes. There is a plethora of books emerging at present on the similar theme, but many of these are purely descriptive or opinions of the authors, rather than providing the meaty, ‘metacognitive’ perspectives that these three do.

At the heart of what these authors provide are fascinating insights into Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics and Bio-technologies and their extraordinary implications for our species.

In The Fourth Age, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history:

100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language.
10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare.
5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state.

Reese then explains we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics.

Harari arrives at a similar place, claiming that as humans we are currently facing three big challenges that are shaping our ‘future agenda’:

How to prevent nuclear war
How to prevent climate change
How to learn to control new technology before it controls us

Friedman describes three key areas of non-linear acceleration that are shaping our future…

The Market (digital globalisation)
Mother nature (climate change, biodiversity loss)
Moore’s law (exponential technological development)

While it may appear from these summaries that each author has a different agenda, their perspectives merge around building a picture of the future that is significantly different to what has been experienced in the past, and one that will present us with an unprecedented level of challenge in terms of who we are as humans. The change ahead is simply not a case of finding ways to adapt, but of considering how that future is being shaped by our own behaviour and decisions now, and then facing the consequences of what may happen when we are no longer able to make those decisions or act on them because a ‘greater force’ is doing that for us.

The challenge I’ve taken from these books is to consider the question that has challenged philosophers and academics for centuries, “how should we then live?” It is patently clear, from the three perspectives here, that our current ways of thinking about how we organise our personal lives, our business models and our political systems must all be up for review if we are to adequately prepare for, and shape, this uncertain future.

Throughout each of these books there are challenges that will resonate in the minds and hearts of educators. The future we imagine and are preparing our young people for demands action now. Our current ways of thinking and organising learning are being severely challenged and will require us to ‘let go’ of some of the things we feel precious about, and to act with greater determination to understand our role as ‘future makers’, rather than those who perpetuate the status quo. Essential to this is finding ways of working together, in collaborations, in networks, in communities – and not as isolated individuals with a ‘hero-mindset’.

The challenge is well summed up in the words of Harari…

“How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?”

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life.*

Manson, M. (2018). New York, United States of America: HarperCollins.

Reviewer: Alyssa McArthur

This review has been written from my own personal point of view and is my opinion on some of the key points made in the book.

What attracted me to the book was the slightly naughty title ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’. In this day and age I feel we are programmed to care about everything and anything. It affects everything we do from our mahi to our personal lives; when really we need to figure out what we truly care about and what matters to us. It’s not just handed to us, we learn through our own experiences in life. I thought that reading this book would be a step in the right direction to help me lighten up and care less about the pointless dramas life throws at us.

The world we live in today has lots of not so great factors e.g. unhappiness, unsolved problems, depression, anxiety etc.; but it also has the good factors including happiness, problem solvers, and people willing to help. We are usually quick to forget about all the good factors as we are constantly dealing with our next issue or problem. Many people just like to complain and they can’t complain about the good factors which is why we hear more about the not so great factors.

A number of not such great factors affect my life daily and I was curious. I wanted an insight into someone else’s way of thinking about life and its problems and that person ended up being author Mark Manson.

I found the book to be funny and relatable in the stories Mark Manson used as examples to explain his theory as to why the human population think and act in the way they do. I didn’t take into account every thing he said (sorry Mark!), but that’s the good thing about this book; you can take what you want from it and use the techniques which align with you. They make you think! Sometimes I found myself having to stop halfway through a chapter just to think about whether or not I agreed with what the author was saying. It was like a mini counselling session for myself.

I honestly enjoyed reading this book. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is looking into changing their mindset or re-considering their own personal values. Life can be full of surprises and this book provides some interesting insights into how we can handle them.

Why We Sleep : The New Science of Sleep and Dreams.

Walker, M. (2018). London, United Kingdom: Penguin.

Reviewer: Pete Sommerville

An extract: ‘Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory, makes you more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?’

The wonder drug can be hard to get your hands on. But it seems it’s worth the effort.

Everyone needs to know how our modern world has conspired against sleep. Matthew Walker clearly describes the damage we do by ignoring the importance and complexity of the role sleep plays in our lives.

For example, we can all be divided into two genetically determined groups: morning larks and night owls, each influenced by different circadian rhythms. There is nothing owls can do to become larks which is tough because work and school norms overwhelmingly favour early rising larks. Owls are forced to ‘burn the proverbial candle at both ends. Greater ill health caused by a lack of sleep therefore befalls owls, including higher rates of depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, heart attack and stroke.’ There is evidence for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia. Early school starting times are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers.

If you regularly clock in under seven hours a night, you’re doing yourself a disservice as grave as that of regularly smoking or drinking to excess.

Your Wellbeing Blueprint: Feeling good and doing well at work.

McQuaid, M., & Kern, P. (2017). Australia: Michelle McQuaid.

Reviewer: Ara Simmons

Who doesn’t want to feel good and function well? For many of us work will make up a good chunk of our lives so why wouldn’t we want to thrive.

By regularly engaging in wellbeing habits and activities we can build on our wellbeing. In this book, the authors distill research from the past three decades and serve them up as practical activities which we can try on for size in our everyday lives.

The wellbeing blueprint provides a “how to” guide from initially supporting us to measure our own wellbeing right through to supporting us to create our own wellbeing plan.

Personally, I think it’s a gem of a book and something which I come back to regularly to provide me with doses of inspiration. For those of us with an academic thirst the book comes filled with a bumper store of references for further exploration.

Contextual Wellbeing : Creating Positive Schools from the Inside Out.

Street, H. (2018). Australia, Wise Solutions.

Reviewer: Ara Simmons

So when we are creating positive schools what are some of the things we consider? Does context ever come into it?

Children not only need to learn, but they need to live well too but sometimes the decisions we make as schools can get in the way. In this book Helen Street asks us to be curious about what the social side of wellbeing looks like – considering community approaches instead of competition, looking at motivation as opposed to compliance and control as just a few teasers and then serves up a contextual model for wellbeing together with next steps on how to begin.

This book is for anyone who is interested in the conversation of creating positive schools from the inside out where health, happiness and positive engagement are all considered as an integrated whole.

Remixing the Key Competencies: A curriculum design deck.

Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press.

Reviewer: Jacky Young

I have been working in a secondary school recently helping them to review their Year 12 NCEA L2 course, focussing on the key competencies to enhance student learning instead of focussing on the traditional ‘credit farming’ they had been doing previously.

NZCER have produced a deck of cards called Remixing the Key Competencies: A curriculum design deck, where each cards lists an example of a learning activity on the white side and the relevant key competency on the other coloured side. We used them in a variety of different ways:

Lay out all cards white side up. Teachers select 2-3 cards that relate best to something they were doing with a class in the last day or 2. Talk about what they were doing, hoping to achieve etc in that lesson. Turn cards over. Taadah – which KC were you embedding?
Lay out all cards white side up. Select activities that best match up to a unit of work. Turn over and look at the frequency of KCs being covered. Where are the gaps? Which ones currently dominate? What do you want to do about this?
Fan out all cards. Pick one from the deck (a bit like a magic trick!) Turn it over and talk about what it would look like in your classroom if you designed an activity like this.

Lots and lots of ideas. Also blank cards so you can write your own. The school liked them so much they are going to buy their own set. They think they will get lots of use out of them when they start to review other year levels to be more inclusive of the KCs. All staff were fully engaged in this ‘gamification’ of curriculum design.

We have a set in our CORE Education library, but I liked them so much I bought my own.

NZCER also do a deck on remixing NCEA across learning areas (NCEA L2) and the Science capabilities.

Meri Kirihimete me ngā mihi o te tau hou ki a koutou katoa!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the CORE Education whānau!

We trust you have a safe and happy holiday break, the CORE Blog will return in 2019.

Featured Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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The School that Story built

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Heemi McDonald

The stories that circulate in and around a school paint a picture of the school’s culture and values, heroes and enemies, good points and bad, animating the actions and intentions of leaders, teachers, students, whānau and community. By creating and sharing our stories, we define “who we are”. Our identity is intricately woven into the tapestry of the narrative.

Strong school leaders distinguish themselves by being good storytellers; voices that people listen to, are inspired by and respect. We need stories in order to understand ourselves and communicate who we are. We use stories to help us make sense of the world and the experiences of others. By sharing stories, we can better understand the conflicts of daily life and find explanations for how things fit together in the world.

“Paul Austeronce said that telling stories is the only way we can create meaning in our lives and make sense of the world.” (Fog, Budtz, Munch & Blanchette, 2010, p. 18)

My own learning journey has provided ample fodder through which one might understand how story can influence perceptions about learning, identity creation, and identity affirmation. One thing that has been evident to me is the huge gap in our understanding of the lived realities of the learners we teach. Narrative influences how students are perceived and how they perceive themselves.

As educators, we collect copious amounts of data. In many schools, data gathering and interpretation practices are Euro-centric and the information is rarely viewed from any other perspective. Data flows from every aspect of a child’s learning experience and plays an important role in the development of their learning story. Care should be taken to ensure that our data practices do not result in a depersonalisation of information. In many instances, the challenge is centred on the notion that data, especially without meaningful patterns, is cold and has a lack of intrinsic meaning.

The problem is not with the data itself. The challenge is with the stories we construct out of the data; the ones we tell ourselves and our students, and the stories our students figure out on their own.

As a concept, storytelling permeates all cultures and is hardwired into us. We can’t help but make sense of the world through story. In our schools, one challenge is to discover how the future might be shaped by story and how and why storytelling can make a difference.

What’s the point of telling stories anyway?
What makes a good story?
And how do you go about telling a story so that it supports student learning?

Making storytelling more tangible is a step toward helping students, teachers and whānau further engage in education. If stories are so fundamental to the human experience, we need to figure out how to better incorporate them into the educational landscape. The question I am left asking is how might schools turn abstract notions of storytelling into practical tools for the benefit of all? Perhaps the answer lies in the fabric of the story of each school, student, teacher and whānau. Perhaps story is the language through which learning may be explored and changed.

References:

Fog K, Budtz C & Yakaboylu B. (2010). Storytelling : branding in practice, Springer, 19.

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“If you don’t lead with small data, you’ll be led by Big Data”

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Derek Wenmoth

Derek Wenmoth reflects on Pasi Sahlberg’s uLearn18 keynote address.

The keynote address by renowned Finnish academic and author, Pasi Sahlberg on day two of the uLearn18 conference may best be summed up as providing a warning and a call to action. While many in the audience were expecting to hear stories of how progressive the Finnish education system is, Pasi took us in a different direction. In his casual, at times ‘under-stated’ manner, he made us reflect on the challenges facing our education system and education systems around the world. Pasi then explained how we mustn’t simply expect the ‘system’ to provide the solution – that it should be the work of the professionals in the system to step up and take responsibility by focusing on each child and each classroom to make the difference.

The underpinning message throughout the keynote was the need to focus on and respect the learner, with his or her particular needs, strengths, abilities and ambitions, and to understand this as the key to a truly learner-centred approach in education. With subtle wit and humour, Pasi shared his own experience as a maths teacher who once wanted to be a mathematician. Teasing this out, he described the stereotypical view of a maths teacher that has established itself in the minds of students, and the disservice we do to the field of mathematics – or any discipline for that matter – when we allow the focus on the content or the discipline to become more important than the learner. In the learners’ experience their interests will typically traverse multiple disciplines and be more holistic, integrated and ‘linked’. This focus on the learner and the learner’s perspective is pivotal in building a successful, future-focused approach to schooling.

The Warning

The warning Pasi gave us is simple, and is tied in made explicit in the title of the keynote: if we don’t lead with small data we’ll be led by big data.

The problem is that education policymakers around the world are now reforming their education systems through correlations based on Big Data from their own national student assessments systems and international education data bases without adequately understanding the details that make a difference in schools.

(https://pasisahlberg.com/next-big-thing-education-small-data/)

By ‘big data’ he is talking about all forms of assessment and achievement data that is currently being collected and collated at a national and international level, sifted, sorted and represented back in the form of statistics and trends upon which large scale decisions are made about curriculum, policy and resourcing. We know this well in New Zealand with the recent experience with National Standards and the pre-occupation with OECD data that appears to cause immediate swings in what is deemed to be important.

Pasi’s key warning here is “Don’t confuse correlation with causation”. Just because the data can be construed to reveal certain patterns or trends doesn’t make it true in the context of a specific student or school. To illustrate his point he used a combination of OECD data and national data on the amount of ice cream consumed to “prove” that ice cream consumption positively affects education scores!

The more concerning warning came when considering how technology may be viewed as providing a solution to meeting the demand for mass-personalisation. The argument presented is compelling – if 75% of education spending is on people, and we could reduce a third of the “people” by using artificial intelligence (AI) in education this would present an attractive proposition for budget-conscious politicians. But what will it mean for educating students as a whole person?

To illustrate that this is a very real and current concern, Pasi used the illustration of alt-school – a network of progressive schools in the USA. These schools advertise themselves as being completed learner-centred, providing learning that is self-driven, competency-based, personalised, socially embedded, and open-walled. It sounds like the ideal scenario – highly personalised pathways for individual students, powered by a sophisticated AI that is monitoring each student’s every move using a series of cameras throughout the environment, and monitoring their every keystroke and response to online content and instruction.

There’s no doubt this approach works, and produces students capable of passing exams and demonstrating their gains in learning – but what’s missing? Where are the relationships with others? Engagement in play? Interactions with people? Development of empathy and other effective qualities that may best serve the future of humanity?

A key question here is to ask, “if it is truly personalised learning by the AI, where is the child’s voice? How can it be personalised if the child does not have some form of input?”

So the challenge is around just how seriously we take this possible future – and not to simply cast it aside as a ‘pipe dream’ that is the work of science fiction, because after all, ‘technology will never replace a teacher!”

The call to action

The call for action directs attention directly on those of us working with learners in schools – the teachers. Pasi challenged us to trust our raw instincts, to be amongst what is happening, not just observing from a distance. This will require a greater degree of professional trust is the key to the small data conundrum.

In Finland, trust is for us the full trust and freedom for our schools and teachers, believing that they can develop goals, teaching standards and content appropriate for their children. The trust is instilled deeply in our culture; it is not a single behavior in a particular situation.

(https://pasisahlberg.com/interview-teachers-need-a-sense-of-mission-empathy-and-leadership/)

Small data is what we gather when noticing the small stuff that is occurring in the specific context of the classroom or individual student learning, and will make a difference to the big picture when we combine what we observe with our professional wisdom. Pasi’s point is that this ‘small data’ reveals patterns and insights that the ‘big data’ with its statistical trends and correlations can never do.

Pasi’s call for action is that we discover together, at the local level, the power of collective professional wisdom. It is the little things we do as teachers with our learners that makes the difference. This resonates well in the NZ context where we’ve valued Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJs) as a part of the assessment process – but if we’re to be serious about taking up Pasi’s challenge, we will need to become even more serious about ensuring we build our professional capacity even further – and deeper – so that we can be even more secure and confident about the ‘professional wisdom’ that we are able to bring to bear on the observations we make.

To achieve this Pasi recognised the need for educators and government agencies to work collectively to find ways to reduce teacher workload, support special education, fund public schools better and use student voice to design learning.

The three key take-aways that Pasi left us with were:

Build a trust-based professionalism – trust colleagues, bosses, children – and this will include building trust within the community too, with parents and future employers etc.
Build professional wisdom as evidence – we need to give greater priority again to our professional reading, participation in professional associations and in-school professional learning groups (PLGs) where our professional knowledge can be challenged and honed.
Lead with Small Data – if you don’t make this a priority, you WILL be led by big data!

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Preparing the next generation for the algorithmic age

Posted on November 28, 2018 by James Hopkins

James Hopkins summarises Mike Walsh’s uLearn18 keynote address and interviews Mike.

What does the future mean to the education industry? Futurists tend to get a bad wrap because they often make technological predictions. Mike Walsh argues that successfully predicting the future is more about paying attention to people, not the technology in their lives.

While in Japan, Walsh shared his thinking around Masayoshi Son’s ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by starting his thinking 15-20 yrs into the future, and simply working backwards to see what support and infrastructure would be needed to make that future a reality. He then goes to find those companies to invest in and if they don’t exist, he creates them! You see, what Masayoshi does differently is that he looks at the people needed to create a distant dream, not the technology. And so, Walsh surmises, we needn’t be looking at the current crop of Millennials to make predictions about education in the next 12-15 years, as by then, they will be “as old and as miserable as the rest of us!” The people we should be looking, Walsh describes as the most terrifying generation we’ve ever encountered, are eight year olds!

Why are eight year olds so different?

The way our current crop of primary aged students interact with technology is vastly different to the generation previous to them. Walsh points out that this digitally native group of users develops an almost intrinsic understanding of the algorithmic framework that drives interactions from an impossibly young age. It’s this genuine difference in the way they interact with technology that Walsh believes will lead to a very different way of thinking around the way we connect with and explore knowledge.

It’s not the screen that’s interesting, it’s the experiences and the way technology has interacted with it. YouTube has changed the way an entire generation watches TV. Every experience children have now has been customised and hyper-individualised by the data collected by social media. Children now are at the beginning of a true algorithmic society, a social credit score based society. Terrified yet? The currency and fabric of daily life is fast becoming driven by data, artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learning. Computers themselves are constantly adapting, writing their own code and programming, no longer reliant on the dinosaurs of the MS-DOS prompt generation.

“The minute you joined Facebook, your kids left!”

Adaptive Learning

The reason adaptive and machine learning has so much potential is because it allows us to truly take the world’s knowledge, understand an individual’s needs and to personalise and tailor it to algorithmic, logical perfection. Students of tomorrow have the opportunity to be taken along their own learning journey, at their own pace and scale, for vastly reduced sums of money. As Walsh points out, this is not to say human teachers are not important, just that we are entering an age whereby content and opportunity can be delivered in a scaled way, that has previously been inconceivable. And we’re going to need it! Walsh continues on to share that the skills, knowledge and understandings required to function successfully in an algorithmic age are not being taught in today’s schools. As we stand at a precipice, faced with the landscape of tomorrow’s society, how can teaching knowledge and skills of yesterday, prepare leaders and learners of tomorrow? We need to start by articulating what those skills might be…

Automation of Industry

When farm jobs started to decline during automation, the westernised education system began to evolve. Many smart and forward thinking people realised the need to invest in new forms of education in order to prepare people for the future. Technology doesn’t destroy jobs, it simply changes them. It’s not always a straightforward process and often the realisation takes a little time. Sometimes enabling technology, even though it can be hugely disruptive, can actually increase the number of people employed in an industry. Take ATMs for example. Some bank tellers lost their jobs, however because paying the number of people who worked as tellers reduced, it meant that more branches could be opened- thus increasing the number of people working for the banks!

It’s becoming a case of looking at the type of people that will thrive in an environment that focuses on both the world of people as well as having a strong understanding of how to leverage data and apply it. Computational thinking is not about teaching children to code, it’s about how to leverage technology to break a problem down and find a strategy to automate its solution. Thinking about the future, this gives students the ability to both understand the essence of a problem as well as a knowledge of the tools and processes to combat it.

Key skills for the next generation

As we see the rise of this hybrid approach, the understanding of the problem and the data to solve it using computer science and technology, we need to teach the next generation to be more comfortable with ambiguity. We are in danger of preparing students for a world that has become obsolete by the time they leave education. The CEO of Netflix looks for employees that can exercise “good judgement in ambiguous situations.” This is harder than it sounds. As we leave a structured education system that has exams and allocated time, hierarchy and structure, and they walk into a world that has huge unknown, how can we make sure they cope. How do we teach students to process unpredictability and handle ambiguity?

Another element we need to help learners become aware of is the power of machine thinking and artificial intelligence. Here Walsh sites Deep Blue (an AI) beating world Chess Master Gary Kasparov. Reflecting on this event, it became clear that the computer was not trying to beat the world’s greatest human chess player by a substantial margin, it was simply trying to do the very minimum to win by just one point. What this means is that we need to understand how a computer ‘sees’ the world and problem solving. A computer will conserve resources, not try to focus on the end goal and winning big. A computer will work out the simplest way to win and this way is often not an approach that a human will see, let alone take.

The final element we need to take into account is to teach students to centre themselves, find the right moral compass and make good ethical judgements. Here Walsh suggests that perhaps studying computing is not the best way forward, but the studying of philosophy in order to help build decision making capacity using a strong moral compass. This is not about following the laws of a land, it’s about following the laws of trust, set by humans. As the debates around privacy and our data continue to rage, we are entering a time where understanding the tech is important, but understanding underlying motivations and human behaviour is even more valuable.

“The algorithmic age is an opportunity to embrace new and exciting ways of thinking…”

Q&A with Mike

Are our experiences within the digital economy going to get wider and bigger?

It’s impossible to not participate in the future. It may become impossible to get a bank loan or go about daily efforts as you’ll have no transparency and digital value. With kids, we have about 9-10yrs where people shelter them from tech. If we don’t teach them how to function appropriately and effectively, then how can we expect them to function?

How can we avoid programmer bias being transferred to AI?

This is important. We need to interrogate the code that is produced. How was the data collected? Are they discriminatory? There’s a need to have well educated teachers and others so they can be part of the discussion.

Small data: The rights, the voice and the individual. How do we as teachers ensure that the rights of our children are at the forefront?

People assume it’s a binary thing. They think it’s either about human interest or corporation driven outcomes. I see it as a combination. As we scale up good education into remote communities or for larger class sizes, it should be a partnership. Everyone is at a different rate of learning and we can leverage small or big data to find what someone knows and unlock their potential.

Teachers in the future: They need to be informed, discerning, questioning and listening. So what might it actually look like?

Teachers need to be as good as the tech they use. I don’t believe classrooms will disappear. The power of humans together is incredible. People working from home is beginning to end because their best ideas come from the old school analogue way of being face to face. In 10-20 yrs we won’t have virtual classes. If anything the tech will be less visible. It’s the data that sits behind it that will really shape the system.

Are humans learning to think less for themselves therefore teaching ourselves to becoming less intelligent?

In many ways we don’t have the same memories because we have google! We live in times when we don’t even need to remember phone numbers. Tech has become an extension of our memory and perception. Does it makes us stupid? I think it’s changed us. It should allow us to extend ourselves.

As someone who travels world as a global nomad – where do you think the patterns around where people live lie? Will travel decrease because of tech?

It feels like we’re going backwards. How did we lose Concord? Even with tech, our ability to see more digitally makes us want to see it more physically. I hope it will make people want to see more. Autonomous cars, flying cars and drones, all will change how we interact and how we design where we learn. We need to remember not to forget what it means to keep in touch and be human.

Image Credits

Mike Walsh Keynote Photo by Becky Hare via Twitter

VR Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash

Chess Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

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Tō reo ki te raki, tō mana ki te whenua

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Hohepa Isaac-Sharland

Hohepa Isaac-Sharland reflects on Hana O’Regan’s uLearn18 keynote.

‘Tō reo ki te raki, tō mana ki te whenua’

Let your story be heard in the heavens, and your mana be restored to the land

(2018, O’Regan)

Kia piki taku rau huia ki ngā tihi tapu o taku pae a Tararua,

e rere whakarunga ki te ūpoko o taku ika tapu,

Kia whiti atu rā i Te Moana o Raukawa ki te tauihu o te waka a Māui, ki te tauranga o Uruao,

Kia hōkai ake rā i ngā tapuwae o Rākaihautū,

tau atu rā ki ngā pākihi whakatekateka o Waitaha,

Kia hiki aku mata ki tō wehi, ki tō tapu Aoraki e tū mai rā,

otirā ki tō mana e hora iho nā e Tahu e!

Ka mihi, ka tangi ki a koutou katoa rā kua riro rā ki ngā hawaiki. Ka tautoko ake i ngā kupu mōteatea mōu Matiaha Tiramōrehu, otirā ngā kupu mihi, ngā kupu tangi, e koro e, moe mai rā. Ko tō reo ki te rangi, ko tō mana ki te whenua! Kāti rā.

Ko Tahu, ko koe e Hana. Ka mahana te ngākau, ka pūhana mai te wairua! Ka hotuhotu te ngākau, ka maurirere te wairua! Nāu e Hana!

Ko te momo i a koe Tiramōrehu, tohunga whakairo i te kupu ki te arero, ki te pepa, pou ranga i ōna tira, pou whakatō kākano ki ōna uri whakaheke, heke, heke, heke ki ō mokopuna te hāpai ake nei i ō wawata! Erangi ka hotuhotu ki ō tini mokopuna e kōtiti nei, e kuare nei i ngā kōrero mōu, auē te mamae e! Ka huri rātou ki hea? Mā wai rātou e tauawhi? Mā te mōteatea ō kōrero e whakakanohi mai, e whakaringaringa mai i te Tahu o āpōpō! E kore tō reo e ngū, e kore hoki e ngaro!

He hae roa, he ngau kino i te korenga o ngā kōrero o ō tātou tīpuna i kōrero i ō tātou kura. Ko ngā pānga tōnui ka taka mai ki ngā whakatipuranga e kīa ana, he tangata hākinakina, he tangata māngere, he tangata katakata, he tangata kēnge, he tangata mauhere, aha atu, aha atu. Pēnā i tāu i mea mai, ‘they know they (stereotypes) exist when they are followed around a dairy……have to process verbal abuse for speaking Māori to each other’ (2018, O’Regan).

Heoi anō ko tāu pū, kia tika mai, kia pai mai te ao, he whakapapa, he pūmanawa, he pūkenga o tēnei iwi taketake mai i ngā kāwai rangatira. ‘We can be the generation that made the change. We can reclaim our story and help our people understand it’ (2018, O’Regan). I ēnei kupu āu, ka tū te ihi, ka tū te wana, ko wai rā te tamaiti kei mua i a koe, ko Tahu, ko Te Rautāwhiri.

Ko au, ka whakataukī ake i āu kupu akiaki, i āu kupu whakatūpato, i āu kupu whakaaraara ki te ao mātauranga, otirā ki te ao e noho nei tātou kia aro pū ki te tamaiti me ōna kōrero whakapapa, arā he tāonga, he kākano.

E Hana ko tō reo i rāngona ki te rangi, ko tō mana i horahia ki te whenua, e te tuahine – mauriora!

Ngā Tohutoro

O’Regan, H (2018, Oct) Te reo ki te raki, tō mana ki te whenua. Paper presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand CORE Education uLearn Conference, Auckland, New Zealand.

Ngā Whakaahua:

O’Regan, H (2018, Oct) Te reo ki te raki, tō mana ki te whenua. Paper presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand CORE Education uLearn Conference, Auckland, New Zealand. – Images 1-3
Tāwhiwhirangi, K (2018, Oct) ULearn18 Keynote Speaker – Image 4

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