Opinion piece

Make the most of uLearn19

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Anne Kenneally

With two weeks to go, it is timely to look at how to get the most out of your uLearn experience.

Still looking for reasons to join us in Rotorua? uLearn is CORE Education’s annual professional learning conference.

Across three days of professional learning opportunities, you will connect and collaborate with others who have the interests of all learners at heart, and the drive to explore innovations and develop practical solutions to learning challenges.

But wait, there’s more! You can take part in uLearn even if you are not coming to the conference! The #notatulearn hashtag offers you the chance to follow along and experience uLearn virtually this year.

BEFORE

Plan

Read the uLearn updates you’ve been sent.
Familiarise yourself with the conference themes and focus questions.
Identify what you’d like to get out of the conference.
Take time to read the programme and pick a pathway through the breakout selection. Pre-book your breakouts to ensure a seat.
Make sure your device is fully operational outside your place of work.
Make sure you have all your charging cords with you, but travel as light as possible!

Connect

View the uLearn webinar recording to get the latest information.
Download the EventsAir conference app via the App Store or EventsAir conference app via the Google Play Store, and add your profile.
Use the app to make connections by marking delegates and presenters you’d like to meet with, and exhibitors you’d like to visit.
Sign up to updates from Connected Educator, and download the starter kete.
Get organised! Join Twitter and follow the hashtag #ulearn19 and #CENZ19
Join edspace uLearn group, introduce yourself and tell us what you’d like to get out of uLearn19.

Pack

Wear comfy shoes – you will do a lot of walking.
Bring your own drink bottle.
Wear a backpack so you’re hands free.
Make a uLearn dinner costume to fit the ‘Into the Jungle’ theme. Homemade costumes garner much admiration, and there are prizes to be won for your efforts.
If it’s too late to do this, make a note for next time!

DURING

The good news is you can still do many things from the BEFORE section, when you arrive.

Network

Visit the CORE Education stand and meet the Connected Educator Team.

Embrace social spaces at uLearn

Ten Trends conference showcase

WHEN: 5.00pm – 6.15pm Tuesday 8 October (optional, all welcome)
WHERE: Unison 3, Energy Events Centre
Want to connect before the conference gets underway? Register via the app, or just come along and join in on the day, after you’ve picked up your lanyard and name tag. The Ten Trends Conference Showcase, brought to you by a CORE Education team, includes audience participation. So grab a drink, and get social with us.

Welcome reception

WHEN: 5.00pm-6.00pm Wednesday 9 October
WHERE: Exhibition rooms – Bay Forum and Trust Sportsdrome, Energy Events Centre
The Welcome Reception is a chance to engage with exhibitors and other delegates in the exhibition spaces, and continue the first day of your conference experience, while enjoying fine wine and canapés. The interaction continues with the Town Square fun and games.

Town Square

WHEN: 5.30pm-6.30pm Wednesday 9 October (optional, bookable)
WHERE: Exhibition rooms – Forum and Trust Sportsdrome, Energy Events Centre
The Town Square is the heart of the community where people come to meet and socialise. As an extension of the welcome reception, Town Square is an opportunity to experience the vitality and heart of the uLearn community. Gather around the Digi Smackdown stage to hear impassioned speakers share their stories, tips and resources. Join the speed geeking conversations, play the giant games and begin the uLearn19 prize challenge. Try your hand at the Interactive Digital Mural in the Grand Hallway. Take the time to get connected in edSpace so that you can continue the conversations. Talk with the exhibitors and find out what’s on offer, and plan to come back to them during the conference. Meet up with your pals, meet new people, and flow on out to dinner at your leisure.

Eat Streat

Eat Streat is a vibrant, colourful must see as one of Rotorua’s coolest hot spots in the city. At the lake end of Tutanekai Street, you can enjoy quality restaurants, cafés and bars. The covered central walkway will keep you dry and the retractable roofing gives you all all-weather al fresco dining. Take a team there on any evening except on Thursday, if you’re going to the uLearn dinner.

Participate

Your colleagues are your best collaborators, so don’t be shy to ask about successes and failures, share your learning, and offer strategies that may apply to them.
Take time to visit the Exhibition Hall and ask exhibitors about their wares. They are there to assist you to do your job.
Branch out and broaden your horizons, or stay focused on your identified goals – there’s no right way to do it.
Be brave – ask questions, offer thoughts.
Be thoughtful and invite others to join you if they are looking lost or alone.
Contribute your questions to back channel conversations and share ideas and provocations to social media.
Contribute feedback to the presenters by completing the breakout evaluations as you go. Read the live keynote blogs and consider your own thoughts.
Keep an eye on Strea.ma on the conference screens, as an easy way to track social media
Visit the CORE Education stand just inside the door in the Forum Room. Meet the team, explore our 2019/20 professional learning offerings, and peruse resources.
Complete the challenge and enter for your chance to win the ultimate uLearn prize – a complimentary uLearn20 ticket plus flights (within NZ) and accommodation.

Record

Find out about our keynote presenters: Shay Wright, Dominic Liechti @domiliechti, and Sally-Ann Wiliams @sallyannw
What do you know about them already? What do you wonder? Have you followed them on Twitter?
Keep notes. Set up a collaborative doc for your group and add the link to the uLearn19 collaborative keynote docs. Shay Wright, Dominic Liechti and Sally-Ann Williams
Share in notes and join in uLearn discussions in edSpace.
Tweet as a way to include your #notatulearn friends. Share your favourite quotes and resource links.
Remember to use the conference hashtags to be part of the hashtag story. #ulearn19, #CENZ19, #notatulearn
Meet up with colleagues to discuss and reflect on what you’ve learnt.

Plan

Consolidate your learning, prioritise, and decide what you will action back in your learning community.

AFTER

Collate and share resources

Think about ways to share what you have learned in your workplace, and how you can positively influence other staff.
Presenters are asked to share their presentation slides and resources. Access the urls from the breakout sessions that you attended.
Watch out for the keynote resources that are added to the uLearn website and to edSpace. Watch the keynote videos to revisit key messages.

Continue conversations

Write your own blog to share your reflections.
Join a discussion in the edSpace uLearn discussion group or start your own conversation.

Take action

Award yourself the appropriate digital badge and identify the level you achieved on the uLearn19 digital badge rubric.
Gather evidence of the impact of your conference experience and attach evidence to your badge as part of your digital portfolio.
Bring others into your action plans and find ways to implement them.

And above all, plan to have some fun while you learn!
Now that you’ve read this, come along to meet the Connected Educator team at the CORE Education stand at uLearn, and share the ‘secret message’ and you will receive a treat:

Ehara mā te takitahi, engari mā te takitini, ka angitu koe!
Not as an individual, but as a collective, you will succeed!

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Ripples in the pond

Posted on August 22, 2019 by Philippa Nicoll Antipas

Throw a stone into a pond, and you will create ripples. The ripples will undulate outwards from the source of the disturbance towards the edges of the pond. There is a cause and effect relationship. These particular ripples will not happen without the stimulus of your stone-throwing action. You can choose the size of the stone, the force of the throw, the direction of the throw. These choices will have a flow-on effect to the size, magnitude and force of the ripples. But there will be other forces at play too. Sometimes the size of the ripples may appear to be disproportionate to the size of the stone, or the strength with which it was thrown. While we do know that there will be ripples when we throw the stone, we cannot completely accurately predict exactly how those ripples will evolve.

So it is in education.

We plan learning experiences – they will have some impact, but not the same impact on every learner, and we can’t be certain about what kind of impact they will have. Further, we can’t know of the unintended, but still potentially beneficial, learning that may occur for some learners.

We conduct inquiries into our teaching. After careful thought and deliberation, we select a particular strategy or concept to experiment with, and gently lob it into the pond of our learning environment. We notice and observe the ripples the stone creates. We reflect on whether these ripples are desirable, as well as noting the unintended ripples. We might then wait for another opportune moment to select another strategy, another stone, and to toss that into the pond.

The analogy works in other ways too.

The pond, like a learning environment, is a complex ecosystem. It is made up of many different parts: the water, the flora and fauna, bacteria, microbes, etc. Every part has its own role to play, and interacts and intersects with some or all of the other parts in both predictable and unpredictable ways. This ecosystem appears generally stable, but can easily be affected by other influences: the weather, a person throwing a rock into it, the introduction or decline of a constituent part: the dynamics of the ecosystem shift in response to changes.

Our classrooms are the same. They are made up of many different parts, not the least of which is a range of individual and distinct personalities and their learning interests, preferences and needs. Most days the learning environment ecosystem appears generally stable, but can be easily affected by other influences: the weather, the actions of an individual, a new person coming into the environment, or a familiar person leaving. The dynamics of the environment shift in response.

So how is thinking about education in this way helpful?

It supports us to consider the idea that everything we do as educators creates ripples – both intended and unintended. Being mindful of the stones we choose, and paying careful attention to the ripples that result, is part of being an effective educator. Additionally, the analogy honours the agency we have as educators: we are inherently part of our learning environment, our learning ecosystem. What we do creates ripples. The stone can be a pebble or a mighty rock: everything we do nudges the ecosystem, which dynamically shifts in response. The system is not external to ourselves. What we do matters.

Like to think about this some more?

Garvey Berger, J. and Johnston, K. (2015). Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gilbert, J. (2015). Leading in collaborative, complex education systems (Commissioned paper for the NZ Education Council).
Johnston, K. (2018). Jamming on complexity (YouTube video, 5:39 minutes).
Johnston, K. (2017). Seeing systems (YouTube video, 4:24 minutes).
Omari, T. (2016). How to practice systems thinking in the classroom (blog post).

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Inside-out learning

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Anne Robertson

Looking Inside Out by Anne Robertson via Flickr CC-BY 2.0

I spent the last week on the road in our campervan with my husband, visiting a part of the country we didn’t know, and tramping up some mountains. We escaped, went off the grid…. no, actually we didn’t! We are social media and news junkies so being disconnected from family, friends and what’s happening in the world is not really an option. We had our mobile phones with us at all times, even on the tops of misty, windswept mountains. Why? We were making the most of the technology we had to keep ourselves safe and informed.

Before leaving we researched on the internet to plan a rough route and activities to do on the way. We connected with people online who had experience in the mountains to seek advice on the best routes to undertake. This gave us a variety of options to choose from. We checked the weather forecast daily, made observations on the ground and used our prior knowledge and understanding of how weather conditions in the mountains can change to decide our option for the day.

The TOPO maps we had downloaded onto our phones didn’t get soggy or blow away in the wind. We could zoom in to see the features and contour lines more clearly and cater for our ageing, myopic eyes! The compass, altimeter and GPS functions on our smartwatches let us know how far we have travelled, how high we are and helped us navigate.

But what has my holiday got to do with education and learning?

Children learn best when they interact with their environment, when they are able to link present content to previous experiences and knowledge and when they take an active part in their own learning.
John Dewey

In the past, we may have carried multiple field guides for flora and fauna but now we have all that information available through phones. Back at our van we would check into the online guides and identify plants from the photos. With the images in our heads and the photos we had taken we could explore the history and geography of the land and the stories behind the names of places we visited. Our learning was instant, connected and contextual.

Outside-in learning

I have long been an advocate for Education Outside the Classroom (EOTC) and the positive impacts it has on teachers, learners and their joint engagement with learning. School camps are traditionally the time when formal learning is put to one side, pens, paper and digital devices are left at home and kids get a chance to reconnect with the environment. Ākonga challenge themselves physically and emotionally, push themselves outside their comfort zones and have fun. They are active, outdoors, developing their hauora, working collaboratively with each other and learning together.

EOTC is not just about camps. EOTC activities can be planned to take place in the school grounds, down the road at the local park, in the art gallery or museum, at the marae, at places of worship, in the old people’s home or the library. EOTC and informal learning are examples of learner-centred learning. Dewey described a philosophy of learner-centred pedagogy which is outlined in this article by Steve Wheeler. The digital environment in which we live makes it much easier to provide opportunities for learners to make connections between their environment and learning across the curriculum and to ‘rewind’ what they experienced in an EOTC context.
One of the arguments for getting kids ‘off-grid’ for a few days is the concern about well-being and overexposure to digital devices. But this piece of research argues that well-planned use of digital devices increases the emotional connection that ākonga have to learning and ongoing engagement.

“Students without mobile devices were not as emotionally connected to the environment, nor were they as empowered in learning the content as the group that was given technology and a field guide.”

My belief is that school camps and EOTC activities provide essential non-formal learning which should be celebrated. But we need to go further and leverage the power they have to connect learning across the curriculum and explicitly plan to ensure that they do.

Coherence

Embedded in our New Zealand Curriculum is the idea of coherence across a curriculum in which “all learning should make use of the natural connections that exist between learning areas and that link learning areas to the key competencies.” (p.16 NZC)

EOTC presents opportunities to make connections across the curriculum and learning in a local context. It also offers us opportunities to use and create with digital technologies to enhance the learning before, during and after the EOTC activity.

In a previous role, I had the opportunity to reframe the concept of the ‘end of year’ camp so that there was coherence in terms of context and experience as ākonga progressed through the school. In CORE’s Ten Trends 2019 it is recognised that;

“Cultural narratives are increasingly recognised as powerful enablers in connecting our past to the present and acts to build a platform to a sustainable future. They enable schools to situate themselves in the context of the places they co-inhabit, and recognise the influences of people, places, time and events in shaping who we are. When learners are enabled to make connections to where they live, when they create links to significant events, people and the land, they develop a sense that they are part of a larger story. As such, cultural narratives are as much for non-Māori as they are Māori. They help learners examine knowledge, issues and events from where their feet stand first, in their local environment.”

I wanted to develop a holistic vision for camps with a theme of sustainability and a sense of knowing where we are and how we fit into the environment and the culture in which we live. We start close to home and gradually move further away building on our learning and making connections through stories and activities that develop key competencies and an understanding of place and identity.

Starting locally and then moving further afield fits with Wally Penetito’s idea of us starting where our feet are, building on prior knowledge and moving from the known to the unknown.

“Start where your feet are but never let it stay there; it’s the beginning point only, everything else moves out from that.” Wally Penetito

My vision was for these camps to be further developed through strong collaboration between learning areas and integrated and planned use of digital technologies. The flow or progression from one to the other provided rigorous learning opportunities that increased in depth, complexity and richness on camp but the opportunity to make explicit the pathway for learning for ākonga and their whanau in school was still not there. Points to consider;

How might we have re-designed the curriculum so that these camps provided rich opportunities for learning that ākonga, teachers and whānau could clearly understand?
How could we have worked together to connect the learning experiences on camp with deep learning in school across learning areas before and after camp?
How could we have built stronger, sustainable connections with whānau, iwi and other organisations so that there was a strong sense of ownership of the learning experience?
How could digital technologies have been used to plan for learning on camp, enrich learning on camp, rewind it back at school and produce digital outcomes to share learning?

Come and join the discussion in edSpace on how to frame your thinking around the EOTC activities you currently do and how you could develop them so that they are rich opportunities for learning, connected across the curriculum and based on ākonga strengths, needs, identities and aspirations.

References

Featured image by Alex Siale on Unsplash

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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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