Questions, questions

All friend of mine recently told me that his child's school has complained to him about his son. It seems his son has been asking too many questions, and it's interfering with the running of the class. The young lad keeps asking why he has to do certain tasks in the lessons. Teacher is getting sick of having to justify everything she is doing. Oh dear. How disruptive. What an unruly child...

Actually, that teacher probably needs a kick up the backside. What was she thinking? Why would any teacher want to stop children questioning? Why would any school discourage children from asking 'why'? Surely, questioning is a fundamental part of learning at any age. Asking questions is always more effective than receiving answers, because it opens up all the possibilities and allows the questioner to frame the world in their own unique, individual way. From questions come other questions. From those come learning. Children need a psychologically safe environment within which they can question, explore and make mistakes, with no negative repercussions. The moment teachers stifle a child's curiosity is the moment school ceases to be relevant, to that child, to the community, to society at large. If ever there was an ideal place for children to be encouraged to ask 'why?' it has to be the school. The problem with the current school system is that far too many demands are placed on teachers, and there is little time left to spend on exploration and discovery.

More time and space needs to be allocated during the school day for thinking and questioning. Children need to ask questions, because it's a natural part of their cognitive development. But when the school systems as it stands, serves to knock their curiosity out of them, something has to change. It's interesting to read Sir Ken Robinson's take on this issue. He suggests that as children grow older, their curiosity and their creativity tend to decline. This is not because they are 'growing up' he says, but rather because they have been 'educated'. Schooling has knocked the curiosity out of them. Alvin Toffler once said 'We don't need to reform the system, we need to replace the system'. He could easily have been talking about schooling.

I had six faithful serving men, who taught me all I knew. Their names are what and why and when, and where and how and who.

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Questions, questions by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

In an Internet minute

The futurologist Ray Kurzweil once said that 'change is not linear, it is exponential.' Sociologist Alvin Toffler described three waves of evolution in our interaction with tools. The first two, the agricultural and industrial revolutions laid the foundations for the larger, Third Wave - the technology revolution. Prior to the technological wave,  life changed relatively slowly, and change was linear, but in the advent of new technologies, we are lurching from change to change without pause. The technological Wave has changed everything in life, including the way we work and trade, learn, provide healthcare, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships and interact. Arguably, old rubrics which described, but did not govern the pace of technological change (see for example Metcalfe's Law or Moore's Law) may already be outmoded.

The infographic on this page illustrates the sheer volume of  user generated content and user activity that occurs every 60 seconds somewhere on the Internet. In one minute there are over 2 million search queries on Google, 6 million Facebook views, over 200 million e-mails sent and 100,000 tweets. These staggering metrics are only the tip of the iceberg. We can expect to see exponential rises in all of these and the emergence of new and more dynamic social media and communication systems. One of the most marked changes are the upsurge in the use of mobile technology, with 1,300 new mobile users every minute. Mobile phones, tablets and laptops are portable gateways into the Internet, and it is predicted by 2015 that there will be twice as many mobile devices on the planet as there are humans. This means that access to the Web will increase, and there will be a steep rise in Internet activity, probably beyond what we can ever imagine. This assumes that the growth rate will continue at its current pace, which of course it won't. It also assumes that people will (and are) using more than one device to access the Internet. I currently have 3 devices with me, and I'm using two of them to write this blog post.

Whichever way we look at this, we know beyond reasonable doubt that demands on the Internet will continue to rise. Are we prepared for this exponential rise in use? The biggest challenge facing us now is not how to use the Internet, but being able to futureproof it so that we have enough bandwidth, capacity and storage space to hold all of the user generated content that is coming. Another challenge is to ensure that the Internet improves in terms of speed, security and usability.

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In an Internet minute by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Manufactured education

In 1980, sociologist Alvin Toffler described a third wave of civilisation, the first two 'waves' of the agricultural, and the industrial civilisations would be swept aside by a greater, technological wave. Describing the disruptive and transformational impact of this technological wave, Toffler wrote:


"The emergent civilisation writes a new code of behaviour for us and carries us beyond standardisation, synchronisation and centralisation, beyond the concentration of energy, money and power. The new civilisation, as it challenges the old, will topple bureaucracies, reduce the role of the nation state, and give rise to semi-autonomous economies in a post imperialist world" (Toffler, 1980, p 24). 


This prescient view of the future of society has largely been realised. Toffler envisioned a world in which centralised power was dissipated, and where control was firmly in the hands of each individual. It is clear that technological developments have radically transformed the structure of society over the last few decades. As it accelerates further, and pervades more deeply into our world, technology will continue to disrupt our way of life. The advent of the World Wide Web has changed forever the way we communicate, share ideas, buy and sell, are entertained, and conduct our relationships. But technology has reached farther into our society still. The use of mobile telephones and social media has also promulgated democratic change and political upheaval in recent years. Social media played a vital role in Barack Obama's election success, and was instrumental in overthrowing governments in a number of countries during the Arab Spring. Technology can liberate ideas, amplify content and reach far into previously information poor regions of the world. The issues of standardisation, synchronisation and centralisation Toffler identified - the bastions of previous industrial age processes - are indeed being challenged as individuals within society carve their own niches in business, entertainment, government, the media and personalised learning. Very early on in the short history of the Internet, sites such as Napster began to erode the power structures enjoyed by the elite music industry giants. Similar events occurred in the film and photography industries. Nic Negroponte's prediction that atoms would be transformed into bits was realised when music and book sales flipped from CDs and paper based to downloads and e-books. Even the long lived postal delivery service has seen declining popularity as a result of the increased accessibility of e-mail and social networking services. 


And yet standardisation, synchonisation and centralisation stubbornly persist in a few notable enclaves. Perhaps the most notorious resistance to the technological wave comes from the state education systems. Synchronisation of behaviour was required in the industrial age. Industrial processes such as ship building, mining and manufacturing required workers to arrive at the gates together, work beside each other in teams and operate in specialised compartments to get the job done. It was little wonder that the schools tasked to train these workforces emulated these practices by requiring children to turn up to the gates at the same time, work together in rows, supervised by a teacher (representing the foreman), and be delivered curriculum subjects that were compartmentalised with little or no explicit linkage. Sound familiar? Well, this scenario will be as familiar to those who went to school in the 1950s and those who attend school today. Little has changed, even though, ironically, the world of production and manufacturing has gone through radical change and is now but a vestige of its former self. Technology may be in the schools, but little has changed in terms of the pedagogy practiced in many. The factory model of education persists, because in the mind of its proponents, it is still the most efficient, cost effective way to train the workforce of the future. And yet, according to critics such as Sir Ken Robinson, this is not the way forward. In e recent speech, Robinson intoned: 


"We still educate children by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there an assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is their date of manufacture?" The entire video can be viewed here.     


Michael Shaw, editor of TESPro, suggests that a new form of teaching - vertical teaching - can be an improvement on the failing state school factory model of batch processing by age. He does caution however, that extreme versions of the 'stage not age' education approach can result in "16 year olds being sent to university and infants sitting GCSEs." He doesn't elaborate on why he thinks that would be such a bad idea though. Shaw argues that schools continue to teach children in year groups simply because it is practical. Yet batch processing children by age leads to the inevitable issues of differentiation such as having to maintain ability sets within year groups. It also leads to demotivation, stress and a number of other negative outcomes. Whichever arguments we subscribe to, it is clear that children deserve to be educated according to their abilities, not according to their age. As it stands, the factory model of education little to provide for the needs of society, and it certainly fails to provide personalised learning for the children in our care.


Image by Freefoto


References


Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave. London: Pan Books. 


Manufactured education by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Stuck in the past?

What changes has technology made in schools? In 1970, sociologist Alvin Toffler predicted: 'Within thirty years, the educational systems of the United States, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines.' (Toffler, 1970, p 251) By new machines, Toffler was clearly referring to computers and their associated tool sets. By mass pedagogy, he referred to the factory production model of education that schools have been caught in for over a century. More than four decades after Toffler's book was published, there is conflicting evidence that technology has actually delivered any significant change to the pedagogy practiced in school classrooms. The answer to the question for many schools, is that technology brings very little change to the way teachers educate. The mass production pedagogy model stubbornly persists, and personalised learning seems far from the reach of many young people.

Technology (in the form of mobile telephones) has changed the way we communicate with each other, and social networking services such as Facebook have made similar advances in the way we relate to our friends and family. Broadcast media are ubiquitous, with television in every living room, on our hand held devices, even on large screens in the public areas of major cities around the world. Our leisure, economy and social lives have been transformed by the impact of the World Wide Web, and arguably, we are a lot better of because of it. In fact advances in interactive, personalised technologies are so prominent that hardly a day goes by without some new innovation being trumpeted by the media. So why has technology wrought so few changes in the school classroom? Why was Toffler's prediction so far off the mark, when many of his other, contemporary predictions were clearly realised?

One reason there has been little change in schools is that many continue to operate on a factory production system that belongs in last century's industrial age, and new technology is not permitted to disrupt it. Schools continue to jealously protect a conservatism that resides in few similarly large-scale institutions. Even when new technologies are introduced into classrooms, they are often used in a similar manner to the older technologies they replace. Disruption of old practices is unwelcome in school. A classic example of this is the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB). Over the last few years IWBs have been installed into many classrooms in the UK with little impact. Teachers continued to use IWBs as though they were standard dry-wipe or chalk boards - as presentational tools or slide projection screens. 

The pedagogical opportunities the new tools afforded (such as interactive touch surfaces on which children could experiment, create and manipulate images and text) were largely ignored because a) teachers were concerned about damage or b) disruption or c) lack of knowledge and fear of exposure to new ideas. Often the failure to adopt new practices arising from new technology provision can be blamed on a lack of good leadership. Sometimes it can be the result of lack of knowledge, but more often than not, teachers fail to develop new pedagogies due to a lack of time or resources to be able to do so. This is where good leadership intervention could benefit the entire school. One of the greatest barriers to innovative practice in schools arises from the ban many place on the use of mobile phones in their classrooms. Place this in the context of local education authorities concertedly blocking social media services due to 'safety' concerns, and there is little wonder that schools struggle to capitalise on the technological benefits being enjoyed by the rest of society. It is an abysmal situation.

And yet there are pockets of inspiration and innovation in the schools sectors. What kind of new pedagogies are emerging as a result of technology provision in classrooms? Firstly, we are seeing children being encouraged to improve their writing and reading through the use of social media such as blogs and wikis. They are being encouraged to communicate more effectively through podcasts, videos and on social networking sites. A great deal of creativity is being unleashed through the use of image sharing sites, touch screen tools and new dimensions to learning are being realised through game playing. Mobile learning takes the experience of discovery outside the classroom into the community the children will eventually work within. IWBs, when used effectively can enhance and enrich the entire learning encounter, with students as actively involved in knowledge production as their teachers. None of this has been achieved without some self-sacrifice by educators, some visionary leadership, and a large amount of disruption. If these three elements are present, innovative pedagogical practices will begin to spread, and we will see a realisation of Toffler's prediction. If not, we will be stuck with the mass production pedagogy of the past.

Reference
Toffler, A. (1970) Future Shock. London: Pan Books.

Image by David Wright

Stuck in the past? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.