CORE Ten Trends 2013: User+Control

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Arduino
Arduino micro-computer. (CC-BY-SA Nicholas Zambetti)

Traditionally, many of us have been consumers of technology. The products are made and programmed by someone else and we buy them and consume them as they are. But, as our demands on technology increase, and as the power of that technology also increases, we are  more and more given the opportunity to customise those tools to meet our needs. An example might be a newspaper website. Traditionally, papers were printed with the same content on the same page for every reader. Right? It was too difficult to put people’s favourite kinds of stories on the front page of their newspaper. But a website’s different. Most newpaper websites will allow you to say, “I want world news at the top of the page, then entertainment, then sport”, and every time you go to that site, it remembers your preferences. That’s a very simple example of the user being in control.

Drivers for this trend:

  • Social: Demand for programming experience from business world; a desire to shape our tools rather than let them shape us.
  • Technology: ‘hacking’ and ‘modifying’ of existing programs and devices using user-friendly interfaces; increasing potential for personalisation and customisation.
  • Educational: Career options for students; motivation, engagement; co-construction

Programme or be programmed:

Douglas Rushkoff said "programme or be programmed." And technology is increasingly allowing us to programme the tools around us. You can go to websites like Codecademy or Codeyear and learn to program using self-paced activities. Even little toys like Little Bits allow kids to put colourful magnetic blocks together to make things. Each block contains some tiny electronics, and by snapping them together you can make fun things that do stuff. I’ve given a bunch of these to 3-year-olds and watch them put together a power source, a button, and a buzzer. Bingo, they’ve made a doorbell. Or, a light sensor and a little LED. As it gets darker, the LED gets brighter. These kids have built a nightlight. What’s happening is these kids are learning as they play, and they are creating solutions to problems that exist in their world.

Learning, self-esteem and satisfaction:

So, there’s no programming required with little bits, but there’s a real trend towards fun, hackable microcontrollers like the Arduino, and the Digispark, which are essentially small programmable computers. I’ve seen 12-year-olds put some of these together with parts from solar garden lights to create a mobile phone charger that rotates to follow the sun as it moves through the sky. Probably $30 worth of parts, and about 20 lines of programming code, and huge amounts of learning, self-esteem, and satisfaction. Or, build a smartphone app. Go to MIT’s App Inventer and make an app that uses GPS, the phone's camera and text messaging. It’s all drag and drop, and surprisingly easy.

Communities of practice:

Around this trend of user and control, communities are springing up, often around shared maker spaces. Places kitted out with a bunch of tools where people can come, learn, and make things. The logic is that if the tools are shared, none of us need own all of them, and more importantly, someone will be able to show you how to safely use them to complete a project. What’s happening is that communities of practice are springing up around these places, sharing knowledge, getting stuff done. And what’s a school if it’s not a well-equipped community of practice. There’s a great opportunity to be the centre of our community when it comes to brokering access to tools, opportunities to learn, and expertise. And, given what we know about the importance of active, real-world learning,  it is something we should be providing our students as often as we can.

Implications:

  • What are your beliefs about the importance of being digitally literate? How are these represented in your school  programmes?
  • What is happening in your school to cater for and encourage those students who have an interest in computer programming?
  • What opportunities do students have to create new knowledge (and things) as well as use the existing?

Not just passive consumers:

So user and control is about being more than a passive consumer of things in your world; it’s about customising the objects around you to make sure they solve your problems rather than just waiting for someone to bring out a perfect piece of consumer electronics that meets our need. It’s also about learning a whole lot along the way.

As Marshall McLuhan said ‘First we shape our tools, thereafter our tools shape us.’

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Modern Learning Environments: Three NZ Case Studies

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Let's have a look at how the research into flexible, open learning spaces translates into action. Below are three New Zealand schools that have been developed using the latest theories on modern learning and spaces. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that the building are a container for the learning we choose to place into them; and that curriculum, pedagogy, assessment practices, relationships and culture are just as important as the spaces, if not more important.

Case study: Stonefields School, Auckland

Part of a learning studio showing breakout spaces.

Stonefields is made up of a series of ‘Learning Hubs’ which are large shared classroom spaces surrounded by breakout spaces that offer students a range of different learning activities: digital making, quiet and reading space etc. Because up to three teachers share a hub, the collaboration that takes place in them mean students have access to a range of teacher strengths.

Case study: Albany Senior High School

Learning common with presentation space (rear), meeting rooms and activity space (right)
Albany’s large ‘learning commons’ host three-four concurrent classes at any one point in time. The classes are mixed in both areas of learning and year levels so there is a lot of cross-pollination. Each learning common is home to six teachers drawn from a range of different learning areas and these teachers work together as a team on each individual’s teaching as inquiry project, meaning the informal support and observations taking place every lesson are used to improve each teacher’s practice.

Case study: Hingaia Peninsula School

A learning studio showing breakout spaces (left) and shared teaching space (centre).
Hingaia’s studios are shared by up to three teachers and are composed of a central space which is surrounded by several breakout spaces which act as ‘caves’ and ‘campfires’. A student working centrally in the hub has access to private study space, digital production space (including greenscreen) and group collaboration space. Teachers are able to truly combine classes and arrange learning according to student needs and interest. They’re also able to facilitate the ‘flow’ of student learning through a range of different processes.

 

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Modern Learning Environments: Not ‘any colour as long as it’s black’

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Learning-common-hobsonville
Learning hub, Stonefields School
Learning hub, Stonefields School
Breakout spaces offer flexibility

When Henry Ford said of his Model T cars ‘You can have any colour you like… as long as it’s black’, he could just as easily have been talking about high school when I was young. Apart from a few amazing teachers who were as inspiring as they were enthusiastic, most lessons were pretty black and grim. For the most part we sat down, faced the front, and copied down notes from overhead transparencies. If we were lucky, once or twice a year we might do something interactive or practical.

Thankfully, Henry-Ford-style learning has disappeared from most classrooms, but there’s no escaping the fact that we ask many of our best teachers to inspire and engage young people in buildings designed around the time Henry Ford was making cars. Unless you’re lucky enough to teach in a classroom that’s less that 10 or 15 years old, it’s a fact that the design of your school was not informed by a good understanding of how the brain learns. We’ve made huge strides in cognitive science over the last 15 years, and this has resulted in pedagogies that embrace the nature of learning: they are personalised, socially constructed, differentiated, responsive (and often initiated by the students themselves), and connected to authentic contexts and the world outside.

Student learning

So if we were to design physical learning environments that matched and supported what we know about learning, what features would they have?

  • Flexibility: the ability to combine two classes into one and team-teach, split a class into small groups and spread them over a wider area or combine different classes studying complementary learning areas.
  • Openness: modern learning environments traditionally have fewer walls, more glass and often use the idea of a learning common (or hub) which is a central teaching and learning space which can be shared by several classes. The ability to observe and learn from the teaching of others, and be observed in return. Access to what other learning areas and level are learning so that teaching complements and builds on
  • Access to resources (including technology): typically a learning common is surrounded by breakout spaces allowing a range of different activities: for instance some students reading, some engaging in project space or using wet areas, reflecting, presenting and displaying or learning in a group. There is often a mixture of wireless and wired technology which means students have access to technology as and when they need it, within the flow of their learning.

Learning-common-hobsonville
Learning Common, Hobsonville Point Primary School

Teacher learning

So modern learning environments promote better student learning, but are there other advantages? Well the big one is teacher learning. More open and flexible spaces also create more collaborative communities of practice for teachers. Having access to the teaching practice of one’s colleagues; to model and to be modelled to, supports the development of effective teaching practice far more than teaching in an isolated, private space. This ‘de-privatisation of practice’ means that honest exploration of teacher strengths and weaknesses can take place in an open and supportive environment.

Beginning and provisionally-registered teachers have far more support around them in open learning spaces. Their progress can be monitored, supported and celebrated by their more experienced colleagues and ongoing low-level mentoring is easy to put in place because they have seasoned professionals to the left and the right of them.

Note: this blog post contains extracts from a CORE Education white paper on Modern Learning Environments.

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CORE Ten Trends 2013: Personalisation

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Education, at its heart, is about personalisation.

Schools provide a safe environment to nurture their students’ talents and make the most of who they are. We’ve moved a long way from the old approach of everyone facing the front and writing down the same thing at the same time. That model became popular, in part, out of necessity—we didn’t have the technology to set a class 15 different tasks at a range of levels of difficulty. Technology has meant that we can personalise learning and make a real difference for each child.

Drivers for this trend:

  • Social: rise of the free-agent learner; peer-to-peer learning
  • Technology: adaptive and assistive technologies
  • Educational: agency in learning, adaptive learning, individualised education plans (IEPs), tudent initiated learning and pathways

The personal process of learning

The more we learn about learning, the more we see that it’s a deeply personal process. If you and I are learning exactly the same content for the same course, we’ll bring very different sets of prior knowledge, experiences, attitudes, and contexts to our learning. Because of that, we’ll engage with the material in different ways: you might be faster than me, but I may be better at applying it to real-world situations. We are learning similar things, but in personalised ways. Technology is enabling us to cater for that difference in ways that makes learning more effective for individual students, as well as make life easier for teachers. For example, there are publishers now who are releasing textbooks that enable every person who uses them to progress through the material differently. Faster, slower, more difficult questions—all customised to the individual, based on their responses to previous activities.

There’s some interesting research out at the moment that shows that if children initiate a learning activity, they’re more likely to learn more from it. Of necessity this is very personal. We have to give students space to initiate their own personal learning.

Bring your own device

Increasingly, schools are offering students the ability to bring their own devices, and the ones making the most of this new opportunity are looking beyond what we’ve traditionally done (having most students do similar tasks most of the time). They realise that, if there are 10 or 15 devices in a classroom, then there can quite easily be 10 or 15 different activities taking place meeting different learning needs. And often it doesn’t require more work on the teacher’s part, it just requires them to be open to the opportunity, and comfortable with students being more active in guiding their own learning.

Adaptive learning

A really important trend in education at the moment is adaptive learning, or taking data about how students are progressing and using it to personalise learning. We have lots of data about student progress but what we’ve been lacking, and what’s emerging now, are the tools to use that data to personalise learning, adjusting for individual strengths.

E-portfolios

Tools like e-portfolios allow us to personalise learning with no greater work required by the teacher. A well-designed learning activity allows students to gather their own evidence for how they have met the requirements of the task—students can bring their talents from basketball, reading, the environment, the science lab, or computer gaming to their learning. The technology helps students to bring who they are to their learning.

Learning is a social process

Another thing we know about learning is that it’s really a social process. The act of sharing is at the heart of learning, and as technology increases our ability to communicate, it increases our ability to share. It’s this idea that has given rise to projects such as peeragogy: a massive facilitated connection of people who want to learn something with people who can teach them it. No longer are students dependent on the expertise in their classroom for their learning needs.

And so, at it’s heart, it’s about putting the ‘person’ back into personalised learning.

Implications:

  • To what extent does the use of digital technologies feature as a strategy for personalising the learning experience for students in your school?
  • When students use e-learning in your school, how often does every student do something different?
  • What use are we making of learning analytics to predict and advise on learning through the applications we use?
  • How might an adaptive web environment be beneficial to schools, for example for personalising learner spaces, interactions with parents and community etc?

These are great questions to be asking in your school. But we’d love to hear about your thoughts on this matter. Here’s another one: What technology have you used to personalise learning for your students?

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