An interesting article (2000, using data from 1998) that argues teachers with a more constructivist outlook are better at integrating technology in their classes (via A Teacher's Life). It uses results from the Teaching, Learning, and Computing Survey.

 

Over at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk I posted this which may be of use to my Ed.D. research. It takes a current QCA initiative and tries to trace back to the origins of the ideas therein.

The results surprised me, if only for the lack of coherence it demonstrated... 

I'm reading David Carr's Making Sense of Education this morning, who on page 14 quotes P.H. Hirst, The curriculum: educational implications of social and economic change (London, 1974). The latter states that education should be,

...based on the nature and significance of knowledge itself, and not on the predilections of pupils, the demands of society, or the whims of politicians.

I don't think I could disagree more with that, really! Knowledge is not an objective thing that is out there for us to grasp, it is formed by precisely the things that he wants to remove from the educational process - the interests and desires of pupils, the current societal demands, and the need for politicians to implement reforms to ensure relevance. Instead, education should be based on the changing nature of conceptions of knowledge and how they are formed through interactions between the various agencies and people involved in the educational process - government, schools, other bodies, teachers and learners.

I sent the following email to Gareth Mills (Head of Programme, Futures, Innovation, and E-Learning at QCA) today:

 

 

Gareth,

Please excuse me contacting you directly in this manner (I obtained your email address from Terry Freedman), but I feel it is important that my school is clear on what is meant by the QCA 'big picture' and the Futures in Action initiative. I am a teacher of History and ICT at a successful school in Doncaster - as well as being an blogger about education - and feel that the sentiments behind what the QCA is proposing and what is going on in my school seem to be in tension. What seems to underpin the QCA big picture is a move to a more competency-based curriculum, personalised to the learners in each institution, with the somewhat artificial barriers between the different forms of human knowledge being broken down.

What's happening in my school, on the other hand, is that departments are merely highlighting on their schemes of work where the elements from the big picture are or could be located. Whilst this could be a first step, it would seem that this is all initiative-weary teachers are likely to want to do, for fear of doing lots of work only for everything to change again. What I think is needed is some clearer guidance on what exactly should be taking place in schools. I agree that, to a great extent, each institution needs to figure out how the result of the Futures in Action initiative will look in practice, but at the moment what is likely to happen is mere tokenism.

I don't know how much time you will have to read things like blog articles, but perhaps you may be interested in a couple which have been the result of my Ed.D. research (Durham University):

• Where do educational ideas originate? A digital paper trail...
• The QCA 'big picture' and curriculum coherence

I'd certainly be interested in any comments you may have, guidance you'd be able to give, or suggestions you're able to make! :-)

Regards,

Doug Belshaw

 

I've just come across a blog by Liz Lian, KM in Education, the tagline of which is:

A blog to explore where and how knowledge management principles apply to education.

Could be useful for looking how and why forms of knowledge appropriate to business have been or are being applied to education... 

 

Comparing groups with networks may be a good idea to get across why education needs to change to meet the needs of 21st-century knowledge. Stephen Downes posted this image to Flickr (there's a video of him explaining it as well):

There's also a presentation here. It might be an idea to discuss the 'wisdom of crowds' in my thesis and how and why this could be applied to classrooms. 

In the 21st century it is almost impossible to be an expert on anything. There is so much information - and indeed knowledge - out there that we could only ever become experts in ever-diminishing content areas. Instead, we need to ourselves become, and train our students to likewise become, experts in connecting knowledge. This is where connectivism comes in:

 

 

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

The theory is advocated most passionately by George Siemens via his connectivism.ca blog, in his article on connectivism at elearnspace, on the Learning Circuits blog, an article for the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning and his excellent book (available via PDF or on his wiki), Knowing Knowledge.

Some notes:

• Bill Kerr is a critic of connectivism who has a wiki
  
• Wes Fryer has a post with some good links surrounding a presentation made by George Siemens
• The Experience Designer Network has a decent summary of connectivism
  

(There is a connectvism online conference running in February 2007 that should be worth checking out...) 

I have a feeling that the reason that what I would term '21st-century forms of knowledge' are not filtering into schools is because at their core they are fundamentally anti-capitalist. Traditionally, knowledge has meant power with access to the upper echelons being available only to the privileged and/or wealthy. The Internet (along with concomitant social trends) has changed that, leading to some talking about the world being 'flat'.

It's also tied into the idea of experts. Wikipedia has been shown to be just as reliable as the Encyclopedia Britannica, yet the former is edited by thousands of 'amateurs' whilst the latter is put together by a team of 'professionals'. It's certainly larger and a more valuable research for me, being always up-to-date and covering non-traditional information.

(photo by antmoose @ Flickr) 

Proudhon is famous for his slogan 'Property is theft!' in his book What is Property? Whilst I'm no anarchist, I do believe that we have the wrong way of looking at questions surrounding the 'ownership' of various things. Take digital downloads of music, for example. The talk here is of 'intellectual property' and 'copyright'. Nevertheless, the music industry is being forced to change the way they deal with customers and, indeed, their whole idea of the inherent 'value' of singles and albums due to changes in way the younger generations look at and value music themselves. 

It's the same with knowledge. As Woodrow Wilson famously said:

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.

If knowledge can reside in networks as well as groups, we need to be not just 'standing on the shoulders of giants', but interacting with one another and collaboratively building knowledge. Many blogs and various sources of information and knowledge on the Internet (including photos posted to Flickr) are released into the wild with a Creative Commons license. Instead of focusing on the things that you can't do with the information/knowledge/photograph/whatever, it focuses on what you can do. The license for my teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk blog, for example, states that my work can be shared or remixed in any way you like, provided that attribution is given, it is not used for commercial (i.e. for-proft) ends, and that any resultant remixing is also released under a Creative Commons license. Compare that to the restrictive practices of the RIAA... 

What does plagiarism look like in the 21st century? Can a line be drawn between that and being 'inspired' by another's blog post? Where does the collaborative knowledge which comes as a result of wiki creation fit? Are examinations outdated?  

I am of the opinion that there are various pressures, not all currently identified (at least by me), on our conception of knowledge to change. Here are some obvious ones:

 

• The demands of business and the need for new skills in the workplace (but what is driving organizational change?)
• The pressure on teachers and schools by learners who have different skillsets, interests and motivations than previous generations (but where do these come from - the media?)
• The 'flattening world' due to new technologies 

Many educators who I talk to seem to be of the opinion that the only way the world is changing is that more 'technology' is being used. And that is usually conceived of as a passing fad, a bad thing, or something which will be forced upon them.

 

However, I believe that the use of ICTs is actually just a subset of a wider change that is happening at the beginning of the 21st century. Knowledge, or at least our conception of it, or at least the conception of it by people that have influence, is changing. It is no longer something that resides in the heads of the great and the good, but something that is distributive. Knowledge, to use a metaphor, is not the nodes on the network, but the connections between those nodes. Wisdom comes through having a meta-view of the network and understanding how the nodes can and do interact.

A podcast to follow up on: Podcast 39 - The Vocabulary of 21st Century Learning by Wes Fryer 

The skills and literacies 21st-century learners need to understand, interpret and function in the world they will inherit are very different from those that most of their teachers are imparting.

 

 

1. Futurelab - The New Basics: changing curriculum for 21st century skills
   
2. John Seely Brown - New Learning Environments for the 21st Century (via elearnspace - PDF & audio)
3. Techlearning - The New Literacy (Sara Armstrong & Dave Warlick )
   
4. enGauge - Literacy in the Digital Age
5. David Jakes - jakesonline.org
   

A few months ago when I had to submit an outline for my thesis proposal essay, I indicated that I wanted to look at 'changing conceptions of, and reactions to, the nature of knowledge by educational institutions.' My feeling was (and still is) that, as George Siemens so aptly put it in Knowing Knowledge, 

Knowledge has broken free from its moorings, its shackles.

The five questions I framed initially I know think are a little broad: instead I intend to focus on where stimulii for change originate, examples of how changes have taken place in schools, and then what changes can be expected in the future (short to medium-term). This would allow me to discuss ideas surrounding the changing nature of knowledge, the role of educational technology and the structure of a 21st-century curriculum. 

The work that I have done since September, both on my blog and the reading I have done specifically for my Ed.D., has shown me that there is a fundamental difference between 'education' and 'schooling'. The former is an ideal, something almost Platonic in form, whereas the latter is the practical implementation of more abstract ideas, subject to multitude pressures from varying angles. It is important not to confuse these two notions, especially when talking about the 'purpose' of each.

A lot of what happens in education depends on how conceptions of society, knowledge, human nature and varying degrees of optimism as to what extent the existing (fairly delicate) status quo can be maintained. For it is this stability that educational institutions strive for, over and above creativity, inspirational teaching and motivating students to become lifelong learners. Upon reflection, this has to be the case given that schooling is compulsory and schools do not, in reality, face the same market pressures as commercial entities.

 The work I've done in trying to synthesize (some of) my research so far is here.

(I've been using the Open Source program FreeMind to do my mindmapping - I'm still getting to grips with it...) 

 

 

I've used Google Docs to write my expanded Ed.D. Thesis Proposal Outline. I've now emailed it off to my supervisor, and it's available for the world to see here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajdmqgcb7rbb_4cnp547

Comments, suggestions and ideas are very welcome! :-)