Shaping the future

Welcome to the future? Whenever we consider the future, it is always elusive, and always just around the corner. It is never quite here. We live in the present. All the time. All each of us have is our memories of the past, and a future that is imaginary. Until something happens, we really don't know what the future will bring, and anyone who says they know what the future holds is either a liar or deluded. Forget the soothsayers, the horoscope writers, the clairvoyants and the crystal ball gazers. Their prophecies of the future are nothing more than bland, generalised predictions which can be interpreted in many ways. If they get it wrong, it is difficult for anyone to prove anything. We just don't know what will happen next. That's probably a good thing.

William Gibson once famously remarked: 'The future is here - it's just not very evenly distributed.' This is a well used quote, but what did he mean by this? Some would suspect this is a reference to the digital divide, the haves and have nots in our society. For me it is more profound than that. It is that some see a different future to others, and there are many interpretations of exactly what the future holds. Some view it with trepidations, seeing only problems, while others see the future as a never ending set of opportunities to exploit.

How much can we shape our own futures? As a community, how much can we invest into our present to secure a better future for ourselves and our children? The answer is obvious - the more we invest in the present, the more we will reap in the future. But we cannot control everything. There are randomly variable events. George Orwell once said 'He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past'. This is why the media - television, newspapers, radio, internet, gaming - have so much influence over public perceptions. For slightly different reasons it is also why teachers can wield such power in the classroom. We know what technologies we can use to create excellent learning opportunities for the students in our care. We also know from research what the pitfalls and caveats are. We know for example, that technology used for technology's sake is usually a mistake. We also know that learners engage better when they have tools to use they feel comfortable with and enjoy using. The balance decision is ours to make. What we don't know much about (but we can guess) is what technologies are just around the corner, waiting to invade the classroom. What we certainly don't know is what effects new technology will have on learning, on our professional practice, on our daily lives. We can watch the trends, but who would have thought for example, that mobile phones, a tool developed for business and leisure, could be applied so effectively in teaching and learning? Conversely, who would have predicted the consternation and controversy mobile phones would cause in many, many school contexts? 

The subject of my closing keynote at this weekend's free to attend Reform Symposium online global conference will be 'The Future of Learning'. Here's the link to the Elluminate Room we will be using. I will draw on over 30 years of my own research and experience in the learning technology field to attempt to unravel this conundrum. I will discuss the trends in technology evolution and trace the social movements that have led us to this point in the history of education. I'm going to examine a number of ideas including personal learning environments, social media, open scholarship, resistance to change, content curation, augmented reality and the semantic web. In doing so, I hope to inspire and also challenge teachers to reflect on their practices, uses of technology, and instill hope for the future. The future is ours to own. 


The last word on this subject goes to President Barack Obama who declared: 'We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it'. 


Image source by 'Back of the Napkin'


Shaping the future by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Reusable cooking objects

Recently a lot of emphasis has been placed on sustainability. Sustainable this, sustainable that. Here at the University of Plymouth we had a CETL - a Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning - dedicated to Sustainable Futures. We have also seen a movement toward 'reusable learning objects' (For many teachers, sustainable education might simply be about actually keeping students interested for a full hour). I guess it's not simply about being 'green' or environmentally conscious. It's also about minimising effort of the creation of learning resources, and adapting existing content into new contexts or for new groups of learners. It's about sharing. It's about common sense. I just don't know why we had to invent a name for it.

I was fascinated last year, while walking around the huge sprawling open market of Serekunda in the Gambia, to see a huge 'cottage industry' dedicated to recycling old aluminium, tin and other metals into really useful objects. The picture above shows some of the products of this labour - salvaged aluminium from old cars, refrigerators, cola cans and other household goods that have lost their inherent value. We walked into one of the market stalls, and out through the back into a yard which resembled Dante's inferno. Everywhere we looked there were smelting furnaces, and all around in the smoke, people were melting down metal and remoulding it into useful cooking utensils. The picture below shows a guy fabricating a cooking pot. Got me thinking about education.

How much content do we actually waste, and how often do we 'reinvent the wheel'? I remember a few years ago having 14 cohorts of students, all studying the same content. I simply set up a wiki and populated it with a set of learning activities. I then replicated the wiki 13 times more and let it loose. The result was that the students were each contained in their own little groups, studying the same materials but enjoying small group conversations that were unique and relevant to their own cohort. It didn't take long to do once the first wiki had been established, and in a sense, I re-used the same content over a dozen times. It should only be a small step from there to reusing other people's content. But it's actually a huge step, because many teachers want to protect their own intellectual property and are not willing to share their ideas or content with others. The Creative Commons movement is going some way to challenging this mindset, and we are also seeing the rise of open scholarship, where teachers and academics are willing not only share their content, but also to open themselves up to constructive criticism from their peers on the web. I share all my slideshows and papers on Slideshare for free, and only ask for acknowledgement. (Go on, click on the link and help yourself. You know you want to).

After witnessing the collective actions and sharing culture that exist among the poor people of the Gambia and realising that they are compelled to take this approach simply to survive, I am even more determined to share my own content and encourage others to do the same. Seeing how the people of Gambia use everything and throw nothing away makes me very conscious about our own wasteful consumer society and how selfish I can be with my own 'property'. Reusable learning objects....It makes a lot of sense to me now.


Click here for more pictures of Gambia.


Reusable cooking objects by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Around the world in three days

The Reform Club is the London gentleman's club to which Victorian adventurer Phileas Fogg returns after his fictional epic, and highly entertaining journey around the world in 80 days. Jules Verne's hero made it back in time and against all odds, to claim his reward of £20,000. The Reform Club is still there, and ironically, it hasn't changed all that much since the days of Jules Verne. But reform is here and there are some changes being made in the world of education.

This week, the Reform Symposium will take us around the world again, three times in three days as it launches its third global conference. The expected 8,000 participants will be located around the world across all 24 time zones, enabling the conference to be virtually non-stop between Friday 29 - Sunday 31 July. That in itself is quite an awesome concept. Billed as a worldwide e-conference, and boasting a schedule of more than 75 presentations, invited panels and 12 keynotes, the Reform Symposium promises to be an event of huge significance for the education world. One teacher on Twitter said today that they looked forward to learning some new things while still in their pyjamas (I won't mention their name...)

Lots of tweeps are sporting the REFORM logo around the edges of their profile pics and David Wees has created a Twitter list of all the organisers and presenters for the symposium, all adding to the building excitement. The great line up of keynote speakers for RSCON3 includes Alec Couros, Steve Hargadon, Paula White, George Couros, Chuck Sandy, Jo Hart, Pamela Burnard, Steven Anderson, John Davitt, Terry Freedman and Phil Hart. I am delighted to have been invited to give the closing keynote address on Sunday at 2200 hours (British Summer Time). You can work out your own timezone for any presentation throughout the three days simply by going to the Reform Symposium site and using the excellent timezone tool. Some of my audience may well be in a state of undress, but I will be wearing my best suit and tie (as the pigs land for refuelling) to present from the confines of my home office, using my faithful laptop Nigel, and my Elluminate headset.

Expect the Twitter stream to go crazy, as this week the Reform Symposium takes us around the world in 3 days. See you online!

Image by EraPhernalia


Around the world in three days by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Three things all teachers need

Recently I took part in a 3-way Skype podcast recording for TeacherCast.net, which was hosted by Jeff Bradbury, who is based in Philadelphia, USA. My co-panellist was Mark Greentree, who was speaking from Sydney, Australia. One of the scheduled questions which we never got around to addressing was: What should a parent expect from a teacher in the 21st Century? This is actually quite an interesting question and if we had been given enough time to answer it, I would have said something along these lines:

The question acknowledges the direct interest parents have over their children's education, and reminds teachers of the need to keep parents informed of their children's progress. As a parent of three children who have now all left school (where has the time gone?), I know that I was always interested in what my kids had been getting up to in school, and what they had learnt. But I was also interested in the methods the teachers had employed to help my kids learn. That may have been because I am a teacher educator myself, and I have a professional interest. How many other parents who are non-educators actually think about the methods and tools teachers are using? Also, beyond the fact that the teachers of their children are qualified educators and have been police-checked, how much do parents want to know about teachers or the methods they use? What should parents expect of teachers in the 21st Century?

Apart from the surge in technology use, and the new skills teachers need to adopt, implement and harness new digital media and tools (a subject for another blogpost), I would argue that little has changed in our expectations of good educators. In this post I'm not going to dwell on digital skills. Instead I'm going to focus on three essential things teachers need to practice, and without which children would be poorer.

The first thing parents should expect from teachers is their ability to inspire children to learn. This is vitally important. Yes, it helps that teachers are experts in their own subject areas, and it yes, it is important that teachers are organised and can maintain some kind of discipline in the classroom, but I would like to argue that the ability to inspire is more important that all of these. All teachers should aspire to be an inspirational catalyst for learning. Enthusiasm for learning, a passion for their subject and the ability to get kids excited about something new is vitally important in the shaping of young minds. You can't teach enthusiasm or passion, but it can certainly be infectious.

Another allied skill we should expect from teachers is an ability to understand the child's perspective. Good teachers have the ability to place themselves in the position of the child, and ask themselves, how would I have felt in that situation? This is the basis of good pedagogy, and was referred to by Jean Piaget as 'decentering'. Many of us, as we grow older, tend to forget the experiences we had when we were in school. Intuitive teachers understand what kids experience and know how to maximise those experiences. They know how to tap into the sense of wonder a child has when she sees something new for the first time. They recignise the importance of the need to touch or taste, to directly feel and relish a new experience and the desire to question, to experiment and to ask 'what if...?' These are manifestations of childhood all teachers should remember. Good teachers recognise that children need this kind of experimental space to learn.

Parents should also expect teachers to give creative freedom to children. Although teachers are hard pressed for time, the very best know the importance of play and can create playful learning spaces. Children have great imagination, but until it is given the opportunity to be expressed outwardly, it is difficult to share or celebrate. The best teachers do not always insist on the 'right answer' or the correct way to do something. They don't dismiss children who offer outlandish ideas or alternative suggestions. Sure, children needs some facts and rules, but they also need to be able to question those facts and find out what happens if someone does break those rules. Children should be free to make mistakes without fear of punishment, and should be able to express themselves creatively and explore their world in safety.

There are many other things we should expect from good teachers and I invite readers of this blog to post additional values and skills below in the comments box. And how can technology help teachers to create such environments? Well, that's the topic for a later blogpost...

Image by Yago Veith


Three things all teachers need by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The great collective

When there is live TV coverage of an event do you watch the entire broadcast or just the highlights? The answer of course will depend on a number of factors, including how interested you are in the event, and how much time you have available to you. It's exactly the same with content on the web. Earlier this month I wrote about the 'tsunami of content' online that threatens to swamp us all. Just about everyone using the web today is creating content on a daily basis. How do we find the gold dust content amidst all the dross and trivia that exists on the internet?

Search engines have their place, and of course, we tend to use them a lot. Some of the more intelligent search engines are morphing into answer engines, computing your question against highly structured data (see for example Wolfram Alpha), and providing focused information. Often, for busy professionals, even this is not enough. Then there is problem of how to organise your content when you actually find it. Many are using tools such as Delicious.com or Diigo.com to tag, store and share their favourite content. These tools are also excellent and well used, but are they enough to cope with the vast quantity of content we want to keep? Wouldn't it be nice to have up to date, regular content, all presented in one place?

Enter the digital curation tools. There is a very special breed of web users out there that we call 'the curators.' In a sense, curators are a little like their counterparts in museums, because they tend to trade in very specialised, focused content. Anyone can be a digital curator. As a part of the great collective, curators choose a topic they are interested in, and then search and display dynamic content related to this topic, using one or more digital curation tools. They are collectors of the virtual and ephemeral and they have some great tools. Scoop.it is a very useful and attractive curation tool, enabling summaries and snapshots of related content from blogs, media sharing sites and other social media to be displayed, usually in two columns. Check out my own Scoop.it site Future School. Storify is another style of curation tool, enabling the curator to search for specific content from social media sites that can be sequenced into a blog style story. The curator can add their own text, and embed the final product into their blog. This short video explains how it's done. A third curation tool is Pearltrees, which works as a kind of connective network of content, which can be shared, repurposed and linked in a number of ways across social media platforms. The Pearltrees Teams group function also enables users to collaborate to create shared curated collections of content. Here's the video demonstrating how Pearltrees works. All three tools allow conversations and further sharing, and all three are very attractive as a means of making sense of the vast amount of content there is on the web. There are of course many other tools being developed that can also perform similar tasks of consolidating and accumulating content, and offering it in a digest form to busy professionals. The great collective it seems, are becoming the great collectors.

Image by Dieter Drescher


The great collective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Breaking down fences

Seth Godin's blog is always good value, but his post today is quite profound. He writes about his avid reading of the entire collection of one library's science fiction stock during his high school days and concludes that "Expertise is a posture as much as it is a volume of knowledge". Expertise does not come easily. It takes hard work and a lot of tenacity to become expert at anything, whether it is sport, music, art or and other realm of knowledge or skill. Godin urges us to 'go deep' and to read everything we can on our chosen subject, and on the surface, this seems a no brainer. We read for a degree. Reading is what it takes to master a topic.

I tell all potential PhD candidates I meet the same thing. If they wish to complete a research degree, they must become an expert in a very narrow domain, and through their research they should contribute something unique to that field. In order to do that, they need to explore their field thoroughly. It means reading a lot. It means reflecting on your own practice, and thinking critically about your field. It means finding where the edge of that field is, and sometimes - if you're bold enough - even breaking a few fences down to venture beyond into uncharted territory.

It doesn't just apply to PhD candidates. Anyone who is a professional should try to be the best they can be. What about your own professional practice? How do you find the edge of your field of knowledge and expertise? What do you read and where do you find the edgy stuff?

Although journal articles and books are a great source of knowledge, many articles go quickly out of date, and were probably in most cases already out of date by the time they were published, due to ponderous editorial and review processes, and a general back-log of articles that wait in a queue to be published. It's the same for just about every closed pay-per-view journal. Open access journals are better - they are generally more up to date, and are of course free to read. Many can be found online and usually, as soon as an article is accepted, it is quickly published. Better still, if you wish to approach the very very edge of your field, search for blogs written by the leaders in the field. You can gain access to the latest thoughts and ideas posted onto the web direct from the mind of the author. You can't get much more immediate than that. You may receive more understanding and wisdom from a just-written-blog by a reputable researcher or leading thinker than you will ploughing through several dozen paper based journal articles. You need to find your own pathway. Any way you do it, go deep, search for the edge of your field and then break down a few fences.

Image by Lionel Grove


Breaking down fences by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Facing the front

A guest blogpost by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American earlier this month really made me think. Entitled 'The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience', her article deftly and firmly demolishes the premises and practices of current school practices, and hypothesises what would happen if children were given creative freedom to learn. Kuszewski's first hypothesis in particular, is a must for all teachers to consider:

Teaching and encouraging kids to learn by rote memorization and imitation shapes their brain and behavior, making them more inclined towards linear thinking, and less prone to original, creative thinking.

Kuszewski goes on to critique the school system as the main culprit behind restriction of creative thinking:

Let’s take a look at our typical education paradigm: From the earliest days of school, we hammer specific scholastic values into our students: pay attention, watch the teacher, imitate what the teacher does, stay in your seat, don’t question authority, and receive praise. But instead of teaching children to think, we are teaching them to memorize. Instead of encouraging them to innovate, we expect them to follow the outline and adhere to rules.

This resonated with me. I was always told to 'face the front', stay in my seat and pay attention to my teacher when I was in school. You see, the 'front' was where the teacher was, where the blackboard was located, and the front was ostensibly where all the action was. Learning whilst 'facing the front' was supposed to make me more attentive, focus my mind, enable me to grasp what the teacher was saying, and memorise the facts. It was all very much a 'mug and jug' education. I was the mug (in more ways than one) and the teacher was the jug - filled to brimming with knowledge which s/he imparted by pouring it into my empty mug. Yet in the words of the poet William Butler Yeats - "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." This is the essence of engagement. It's a shame I was forced by my schools to be a pail.

Later that academic year, I was expected to sit down, again facing the front, and regurgitate all I had learnt before I was allowed to progress to the next stage of my indoctrination - sorry, education. But facing the front didn't work for me. I was too easily distracted by the butterfly outside the classroom window, or the jet aircraft screaming by overhead. I was too interested in catching the eye of the pretty girl sitting across the room from me, or the card games that were going on under the tables next to me. Instead of taking notes, I was more intent on creating cartoon characters, writing stories and poems and drawing fantastic scenes in my exercise books.

I was also a fidget. I didn't want to stay sat still in my uncomfortable chair, facing constantly in one direction. I wanted to move around and face other directions, because in doing so, I was less bored, I could see the rest of my classmates, and it gave me much more freedom to explore what I was learning, to experiment, to ask the 'what if' questions, and to take risks. I liked walking around as I was learning. My teachers frowned on this, and insisted that if I couldn't sit still, stay in my seat and face the front, I would be punished. Punishment in those days was something to be feared - the cane (in my English school) or the strap (in my Scottish school). So I reluctantly sat and faced the front, and became more and more bored and frustrated with school and sadly, more disenchanted with learning. School was something to endure rather than enjoy.

It was only later, when I left school and began my career that I eventually became switched on to learning and began to enjoy formal study. It took me many years to shake out of the school induced learning lethargy. I was in my late 30s when I successfully completed my first degree with first class honours. I achieved this because I was interested, I had discovered my own creative and intellectual abilities and was able to think for myself. I could move around while I studied. I had found my own front to face. I wonder how many other people experienced (and continue to experience) this same situation?

As Richard Merrick recently suggested 'People need to change. Organisations don't'. And there's the rub - schools, colleges and universities are organisations that change very slowly if they change at all, but the people in them, the teachers, lecturers and professors, do need to change. Teachers need to find their own front to face. We need to realise that everything we do changes the structure of our brains - and that goes for our students too. We need to encourage our learners to do things and experience things that change the structures of their brains positively. We need to avoid imposing the 'face the front' syndrome which is largely responsible for conditioning learners to blindly obey the rules, submit to the status quo without question, and follow instructions rather than thinking for themselves. We should move away from the ludicrous idea that 'one size fits all' and the tyranny of homogeneity. We must provide creative freedom and room for individual expression in the classroom. Let's provide students the space to decide where their own front is.

Image by James Wilkinson


Facing the front by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.