The Reflective Educator

Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

Tag: innovation (page 1 of 1)

October 11, 2012 / 0 Comments

Disrupting education

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. Neil Postman
(Image credit: Steve Slater)

I’ve read a lot of articles over the past few years about education is being disrupted. Most of these disruptions are focused on schools as systems (think financial disruption, not pedagogical disruption), not schools as ecosystems. The distinction is important.

I’d like education to be disrupted as well, but I think in some ways that are much different than what many education reformers are pushing.

  • I’d like every student to have a teacher, a school, and to feel comfortable to be in that space. For my school’s partner school in Kenya, we’ve put up a wall to add a level of security to their school, but it would be nice if all of the students had access to latrines, clean water, and food. When we can fix this problem everywhere in the world, I’ll consider education disrupted. Note: I’m also in favour of ensuring that the education we provide everywhere is suited to the needs of the local communities the schools support.
     
  • I’d like every student to feel safe to speak their mind in front of their teacher, and to feel safe in their presence. In too many places around the world, corporal punishment is still acceptable, and students are taught obedience over independence. It is possible to know when to follow the rules, and not have to sacrifice the ability to reason independently.
     
  • I’d like Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s chapter 12 of this book (at least) to be required reading for every teacher. Teachers (and parents) need to at least be discussing their role in quelling the questions of students.
     
  • We need to recognize that Daniel Pink’s idea of "Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose" as drivers of human motivation, especially for highly demanding cognitive tasks, does not just apply to adults, it applies to students as well. Unfortunately most schools do not give students opportunities for any of these three guiding principles of human motivation. How often does your school let students completely master a skill before moving onto the next skill? How often do students have choice in when, how, and what they learn? How often is the purpose of school given so base that it does not actually invite students to participate?
January 24, 2011 / 0 Comments

Improvement, not Innovation, is the Key to Greater Equity

Here is an excellent presentation by Ben Levin.

Improvement, Not Innovation, is the Key to Greater Equity from CEA ACE on Vimeo.

Here’s a great quote from his presentation. "How many of you have been involved in a pilot project? Okay almost all of us… How many of those pilot projects are still in operation? Virtually none of them…" In other words, schools have been spending too much time on innovation and not enough time implementing strategies which are known to work.

His observation that we have cycled through many times in education in innovation. Here’s a picture of what I think he means.

According to Ben Levin, we should "take what we know to be effective practices and ensure that these practices are used in every classroom…We could go into school after school after school and look for the practices we know that work, and not see them being used." I’m not sure that I want every classroom be identical, but maybe he is right, there should be more similarity. If something is known to work, and it works in every context it is used, then it should be used in every context, in every classroom.

I like what he has to say, but I’m going to push back a little. Obviously not every single new school program has died, maybe only most of them. However some of them have thrived and expanded and turned into things schools just do. We need a balance between what we know works, and a small number of educators pushing at the boundaries of what we know.

To do this, we need to become better at sharing, and we need to break down the barriers we place between schools. We need to find ways to allow educators to move more freely between schools and thus share their expertise. You can talk all you want about a good practice in education, but these things are complicated, and unless I see it in action, I’m not likely to implement it. We need more sharing of what we already know.

 

January 30, 2010 / 0 Comments

What could 3D do for language learning?

So I’ve had a thought about the direction of language learning.  I’ve been experimenting with 3D interactive worlds (specifically OpenSim), which are programs which let people interact with each other real-time in 3D.  Pretty cool stuff.  This is already being used to help people learn languages as many of the 3D servers offer the ability to communicate with each other via voice and text.

There are a couple of problems I can see with doing this activity with students in a class.  The most important problem is that it is extremely difficult (or expensive) to find a real human being that speaks the language you want to know and who has the time to interact with your students.  It can be incredibly difficult to find an entire classroom’s worth of people willing to interact with your students one on one.  Certainly the online nature of the 3d world makes this easier to manage, but still it almost certainly does not happen in most classrooms (although some languages teachers are adopting Skype successfully).

The second problem is the lack of control you have over what happens during the conversation.  Unless your language learners are somewhat advanced, they will probably struggle to communicate effectively with a native speaker, especially early on in their learning.  You also don’t know if they will cover the content you want to cover, or if their conversation even becomes completely off topic or even inappropriate!

Technology has come a long way recently. There are already chat programs which do reasonably well in conversation, especially if they are limited to a specific known topic area.  3d animation is amazing with highly realistic facial animation and human-like gestures, just check out the movie Avatar.  Voice recognition is improving in leaps and bounds every month with some big players (like Google and Microsoft) putting a lot of money into development and again this technology works better when the bounds of the conversation are known.

Imagine we combined these three technologies together.  Students could then be lead through a carefully arranged conversation including, most importantly, the context of the conversation.  All of the subtle cues and body language we use to learn languages can be programmed into the simulations so that students get as close to a real life experience as possible.  Programs of study could be designed for all levels of language learners, allowing for extremely differentiated and customizable instruction for every student in your class.  Instead of having to carefully plan an online session, your students could interact any time from any computer with sufficient power to run the program.  It would also be a fair bit of a fun for the students and hopefully end up engaging them at a deeper level than revision exercises from a textbook.

What’s amazing is that the technologies to implement this are very close to becoming a reality.  Within 2 or 3 years, all of the component technologies to make this work will be mature enough to produce a software package which is stable enough to release into the classroom environment.  Hopefully with a little bit of work on the administrator’s interface, a typical non-techy language teacher could set up their own simulations for their students.

The future language learning looks very bright, although maybe in 10 years we won’t need to learn other languages because the technology will be so advanced that all of our phones will include universal translators.

 

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