The high street has been a casualty of both the recession, and shifts in the way that people spend their money. We lost Zavvi because more and more people are now buying their music and movies online. We lost Borders because Amazon undercut them on price and convenience. When ‘better and cheaper’ is available online, bricks and mortar stores feel the brunt of this. The ones that don’t adapt to this new landscape disappear. The ones that reconstruct themselves to amplify what the online stores can’t offer have a better chance of survival.
Skip forward a few years into the future. Students can construct their own curriculum online, from blocks of content – either user or professionally produced. They can make contact with, and gain skills informally from others, through sites like School of Everything. They have most of mankind’s knowledge in their pocket – along with any other new learning tools that might have emerged.
Are they still going to be coming into a Victorian building at 8am with their blazers on and top buttons done up?
Are they still going to be keeping their mobiles out of sight, and regurgitating information for high-stakes exams?
Are ‘Sir’ and ‘Miss’ still going to be in charge of what, how and when they learn?
Borders wasn’t books – it was a shop that distributed them, until a more effective method of distribution came along. Similarly, schools aren’t learning – they’re institutions that deliver it en-masse. What happens when more effective and student-centric ways of delivering learning come along? Unless they start to transform themselves now, they might well find themselves being made redundant.
A great post from marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog, that rings true more than ever in the run-up to the coursework/exam season…
“Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience and repeat.
Initiative is very difficult to teach to 28 students in a quiet classroom. It’s difficult to brag about in a school board meeting. And it’s a huge pain in the neck to do reliably.
Schools like teaching compliance. They’re pretty good at it.
To top it off, until recently the customers of a school or training program (the companies that hire workers) were buying compliance by the bushel. Initiative was a red flag, not an asset.
Of course, now that’s all changed. The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance.”
Hopefully this is more engaging for staff than a powerpoint presentation!
I’m hoping that ‘try, share, learn‘ is a good way of promoting informal learning and development amongst staff – trysomething new, sharewhat works, learnfrom each other.
I’m aiming to make this different from the ‘normal’ way of launching initiatives at school. I want this idea to be ’sticky’. Hopefully by emphasising autonomy, adaptation of ideas and exploration, e-learning will be more exciting for staff, and they’ll be more likely to give new ideas a try in the classroom.
Spent most of last weekend creating a school mobile web app that gives the latest news, school information and lets parents contact the school directly from their mobile.
Here’s the (ever so slightly cheesy) video that I’ve made to publicise it on the school site…
A study once found that students could accurately judge the effectiveness of a teacher from a two second, soundless video clip of them teaching. These judgements were significantly correlated with end of term evaluations from students from the teachers’ own classes, as well as comparing favourably with the judgement of the teacher’s school principal. We’re remarkably adept at making effective judgements, often subconsciously.
I would bet that it’s similarly possible to accurately predict a student’s future success from a few moments of observation. I would also bet that an instant judgement made from seeing a student interacting with friends whilst walking along a school corridor would be more effective in predicting their life chances than one based upon their GCSE results. Similarly, the intuitive feeling you get from walking into a great, buzzing school is probably a better indicator of a school’s effect on students’ life chances than an OFSTED report that is based upon reams of data, and a standardised inspection framework.
Education is obsessed with stuff that can be measured. Courses are designed around what can be assessed effectively – and things that can be easily assessed in a standardised way aren’t what our students need to be learning.
An exam can’t measure the quality of students’ interactions with others. Coursework can’t measure the extent to which students are able to creatively think ‘outside the box’ – in fact, doing so can result in failure. I often have to say to students “this is great, but it’s not going to hit the right bits of the exam board’s mark scheme”.
Rigid, standardised assessment is teaching our kids that conformity equals success, and risk taking leads to failure. This was fine when we needed compliant workers for factories – but now it’s not what our economy needs or rewards.
If you asked most people to name innovative institutions, British Gas and the Vatican probably wouldn’t be top of their lists. Yet British Gas has just released an iPhone app, allowing customers to submit meter readings, and the Vatican has a highly successful YouTube channel. These new ways of interacting with customers and the world are now becoming firmly mainstream. Having a YouTube channel or a mobile phone app isn’t ‘out there’ any more. It’s becoming the norm.
So, are schools also adapting to take advantage of these technologies?
No. Both YouTube and mobile phones are banned within the walls of most UK schools.
I visited BETT for the first time today – an interesting experience, and also an enlightening one. It made me realise just how huge a commercial industry education actually is.
Sure, the tools on offer were all impressive – 3D classroom displays and augmented reality software for instance. But these were being marketed to a sector where the effective use of technology isn’t yet anywhere near widespread. What’s technically possible is seriously disconnected from what’s actually happening in classrooms.
Huge sums of money are clearly being spent on the ‘hardware’ of schools (the tools and equipment) – but this is futile without investing in the ’software’ (the teachers and approaches to learning). Flashy bells and whistles alone can’t transform learning – but people, inspiration and contagious ideas can.
I visited BETT for the first time today – an interesting experience, and also an enlightening one. It made me realise just how huge a commercial industry education actually is.
Sure, the tools on offer were all impressive – 3D classroom displays and augmented reality software for instance. But these were being marketed to a sector where the effective use of technology isn’t yet anywhere near widespread. What’s technically possible is seriously disconnected from what’s actually happening in classrooms.
Huge sums of money are clearly being spent on the ‘hardware’ of schools (the tools and equipment) – but this is futile without investing in the ’software’ (the teachers and approaches to learning). Flashy bells and whistles alone can’t transform learning – but people, inspiration and contagious ideas can.
I’d be really interested to hear from others who went along – please do comment!
When it was first released, this scene from The Matrix was a ‘wow’ moment. Now, it doesn’t feel all that surprising or far fetched. We’re now more used to looking at learning from a different perspective than we were just a few years ago.
Bought a new piece of software? User-created videos on YouTube will show you how to use it. Want to learn a new piece on the piano? Somebody’s likely to have uploaded a ‘how-to’ video. Want to understand string and dimension theory? A quick video and you’ll get the idea. And if you don’t, there are hundreds more videos on the same topics, by different users. Somebody’s bound to have explained it in a way that ‘clicks’ with you. And this is without taking other tools, such as Wikipedia into consideration.
We can now learn pretty much anything, on-demand, wherever we are, in a way that suits our own learning style and ways of thinking. It won’t be long until there’s enough content out there to allow students to construct their own curriculum from ‘blocks’ of content. This feels far more ‘personalised’ than the approaches being taken in schools to ‘personalise’ learning. At the risk of overusing the ‘P’ word, there’s a limit on the extent to which monolithic, teacher-led classroom instruction can be personalised. As tools and networks of content grow, this is going to change things.
How will the school system adapt to these changes? Up to now, it’s been based upon an imbalance of knowledge between teacher and student. When all of these resources are sitting in a student’s pocket, this is challenged significantly. How will assessment change? Will learning still be so linear, with the bulk of it taking place during the first 16-21 years of a person’s life?
“When I can put on the kind of glasses that are being used for gaming technology and absolutely be anywhere in the world, learning absolutely anything, with absolutely anybody, why am I going to go and sit in a Victorian building?… The more we talk about schools, the more we miss the point. They’re not education, they’re not learning, they’re institutions.”
Zenna Atkins, Chair of OFSTED
“At some point, administrators, school committees, and teachers unions will recognize that even without explicit administrative decisions ever having been made, student-centric learning will have become mainstream.”
Traffic authorities across the world have started to install LED traffic lights, in order to take advantage of their efficiency – as well as lasting longer than traditional bulbs, they’re also much more efficient as they waste less energy through heat.
During the recent snow, it’s been discovered that this efficiency has a downside – whilst the ‘inefficient’ heat of the old bulbs melted the snow and kept the lights clear, the more efficient new bulbs don’t. This has resulted in a number of accidents.
Perhaps, as educators interested in change and innovation, we need to recognise that existing systems may have unexpected beneficial qualities that aren’t immediately apparent at first. This needn’t be a barrier to innovation; LED bulbs are clearly still superior to traditional ones. It’s a reminder that we sometimes need to recognise the positive nuances of existing systems and ideas, and use creative solutions to design them into new ones.
A representative of Edge has contacted me and requested that I take down the video of We Are The People We’ve Been Waiting For, which I’ve done. They are concerned that having it up online will reduce its chances of getting shown on television. For now, if you want to see it, you’ll need to email them and request a copy from the film’s website, ‘while stocks last’…
Comments