I am in Sweden at the moment at a conference on Thinking. not just in education but across sectors. I feel that thinking is the solution to the problem of where our education goes. It necessarily to me involves the whole area of digital collaboration and the developments in literacy around that.
There has been considerable discussion at the conference about what education needs to do to develop further around where we need to go on thinking and some of this (although not enough in my opinion) is about linking digitally.
But the slowness of pickup by educators is huge and this concerns me. There is so little change in what people are actually doing that I still see the issue is that education trails the 'real' world in how it operates.
The recent conference on 21st Century Learning Environements in New Zealand had only 3 out of 100 people who used RSS feeds, had their own blog and web page. That is quite scary when these people are supposed to be the leaders of where we are going.
At this conference the same ideas are dominant. We need to change to embrace new learning but how when the dominant paradigm of testing, assessing, and transmitting knowledge is so entrenched. Learning of thinking in a digital environment does seem the way forward. We need adaptable, creative, resourceful citizens of the 21st Century. This is what Richard Florida talks about in his creative class.
Highlights so far in the conference have been Guy Claxton again and David Perkins. As well there was a very interesting presentation on the thinking of being chess master by Jonathon Rowson.
More interesting stuff today.
About Me
- Brian OC
- I am a Physics teacher in Phnom Penh, Cambodia having previously worked in Uzbekistan, China, Bangladesh and Australia. Prior to that I had a career in New Zealand education and I was fortunate to establish an innovative secondary school in Auckland.
1 comment:
I envy you Sweden Brian, it seems when I move around schools this week that a fair number of educators from New Zealand are looking for more adventures in thinking with you.
I wonder if the lack of any genuine uptake in digital technologies simply reflects what Hodas identified in 1993
For nearly a century outsiders have been trying to introduce
technologies into high school classrooms, with remarkably
consistent results. After proclaiming the potential of the new tools to rescue the classroom from the dark ages and usher in an
age of efficiency and enlightenment, technologists find to their dismay that teachers can often be persuaded to use the new tools only slightly, if at all. They find further that, even when the tools are used, classroom practice--the look-and-feel of schools --remains fundamentally unchanged. Indeed, the last technologies to have had a lasting impact on the organization and practice of schooling were the textbook and the blackboard.
What is often overlooked, however, is that schools themselves are a technology, a way of knowing applied to a specific goal, albeit one so familiar that it has become
transparent. They are systems for preserving and transmitting
information and authority, for inculcating certain values and
practices while minimizing or eliminating others, and have
evolved over the past one hundred years or so to perform this
function more efficiently (Tyack, 1974).
Is a great read
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