International Education News

I’ve been waiting to get my hands on David Weinberger’s latest book Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, but unfortunately it arrived from Amazon the afternoon I left for my four day trip to Illinois. (Btw, anyone see where I was yesterday???) Being the impatient type that I am, I picked up a copy in a bookstore yesterday, and while I haven’t gotten too far into it, I’m glad I did. (Plane ride home tonight…)

Anyway, I know it’s cheating, and on some level ironic, but the first thing I did was check out the decidedly un-miscellaneous index to see what he had written about education. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, the answer was not much. And I have no doubt that as I read through this, there will be all sorts of connections to our own issues and struggles with the changing structure of knowledge and information. But anyway, here’s a taste.

At one point, Weinberger discusses “Social Knowers,” and he describes the typical Massachusetts classroom at the end of the year where students are taking standardized tests.

The implicit lesson is unmistakable: Knowing is something done by individuals. It is something that happens inside of your brain. The mark of knowing is being able to fill in a paper with the right answers. Knowledge could not get any less social. In fact, in those circumstances when knowledge is social we call it cheating.

Nor could the disconnect get much wider between the official state view of education and how our children are learning. In most American households, the computer on which students do their homework is likely to be connected to the Net. Even if their teachers let them use only approved sources on the Web, chances are good that any particular student, including your son or daughter, has four or five instant messaging sessions open as he or she does homework. They have their friends with them as they learn…

One thing is for sure: When our kids become teachers, they’re not going to be administering tests to students sitting in a neat grid of separated desks with the shades down.

I hope he’s right…

One last observation. Yesterday in a workshop with some independent school teachers, we were talking about IM, and someone said that she had a student tell her that IM is where the drama in her life plays out. It struck me how powerful that tool can be and how different that is even for me.

Anyway, more on the book as I plow through it…

I had the pleasure of being invited to “lead” a conversation during a “Teacher’s Buzz” session at the New Media Consortium Campus in Second Life earlier today. I’m looking especially bizarre these days…white socks and black flip flops…how’s that for style? And I got some weird raccoony looking pony tail going on. Oy.

Anyway, it was a pretty interesting dialog (if you can follow it) that went a lot of different directions over the hour. We were trying to get some sense of the educational opportunities here, and to be honest, I’m not sure how much sense I made even to myself. There were about 25 people in the space which made it pretty chaotic at times, but I learned quite a bit from the experience. I’m starting to focus in on what for me, at least, are the salient questions about SL that I’ll save for later, but you can get a sense from the chat transcript if you like.

This is a story that I picked up on BBC News today.  On the outset, it looks like an especially interesting and bold program of a metropolitan city in the county of Merseyside, UK.

BBC NEWS | Education | Council calls time on classrooms:

Knowsley’s seven learning centres will remain open from 7am to 10pm and throughout the traditional holiday period.

And the teachers working in the schools will take on roles as “facilitators” and “coaches”, depending on negotiations with the unions.

The centres will also host courses for adults to upgrade their skills and improve their education alongside pupils.

The whole project will rely heavily on the latest computer technology likely to be provided by RM while Microsoft provides expert advice to the council.

In reading and clicking around, I’ve found a national program for improving teaching and learning, whose scale is boggling.  I’ve heard mention of this once before in a conversation, but it just didn’t scan.  But the UK is investing 45 billion pound to rebuild (literally) every school in the country by 2020.

According to the official government web site:

BSF aims to change the educational experience for pupils and teachers and to increase opportunities for life-long learning for the wider community. Virtually every family and community in England will be affected by BSF,

I especially like the closing sentence in the story, a quote from Knowsley’s director of transformation within children’s services, Nick Page.

nobody knew what the next generation of technological advances would bring, but Knowsley was trying to ensure it had the flexibility in its learning centres to use it.

Here are a couple of web sites on the project that I found:

• Welcome to Building Schools for the Future
• Welcome to Building Schools for the Future
• Wikipedia site on the program

One theme that I see emerging again and again in the new information landscape is customer marketing — that is customers marketing the product for you. My classic examples, which I’ve published before, are conferences that grow dramatically from one year to the next, as attendees started blogging about their experiences there.

I saw it again, as Brenda forwarded me an Associated Press piece (College Recruiters Use Student Bloggers) that was published on WRAL.com, a local TV station’s web news site.

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online.

The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

Further in the article…

Chris Smith, a sophomore at Ohio Dominican University, posts lively weekly descriptions of his life as a college baseball player. He gets $20 a posting and has been unafraid to hide his preference for playing ball over going to class or criticizing professors for assigning too much homework.

“Being in class is literally the last place you want to be at this time of the year,” he wrote on April 12.

How might this manifest itself in the pre-higher ed world.

Vinny Vrotny is a technology integrator at an independent school in Chicago, and he was asked to put together a succinct presentation for grandparents about the work his teachers and students are doing. He came up with the following five ways that teaching and learning have changed at his school due to Read/Write Web tools:

1. Allowing teachers and students to communicate and exchange information with others around the world. (Examples used are an 8th Grade Cultural Exchange that we have begun and a faculty meeting on global collaboration presented by Jennifer Lindsay in Bangladesh)
2. Allowing teachers and students to see the world in new ways. (Example used was the American Holocaust Museum’s GoogleEarth Darfur project, which is being used by our eighth grade Service Learning Project, our ninth grade Regional Geography and History course and our twelfth grade Holocaust elective)
3. Allowing teachers and students to reconstruct history. (Showed our fifth grade’s Mayan village recreation using Google Sketchup)
4. Allowing teachers and students to share new stories. (Played an excerpt of our third grade’s podcasting project to research and tell the stories behind the named spaces around campus)
5. Allowing students to change the world. (Told about our eleventh grade’s service learning project as inspired by reading Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea)

I just like the way that’s all framed. It’s not “we can blog” or “we can use Sketchup.” It’s what we can do with those tools. The presentation itself is included if you need some ideas for that group of grandparents (or others) that might be headed your way.