Schools fading as the cyber blends into the real world

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Posted on 31st August 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Obamaschool | Schools we now have

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Schooling has held cyberspace off at arms length for years, cringing at the dangers educators saw out there and touting a need they saw for education experts to guide and limit what students do out in the scary virtual world. The education establishment put walls around its stuff in the digital “out there” and walled it out of or filtered it into schools.

Meanwhile, we have come a very long way folks from the time when cyberspace was a separate world where geeks isolated themselves from the “real world.” In his new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Clay Shirky explains, on page 37:

The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the real world, was an accident of history. Back when the online population was tiny, most of the people you knew in your daily life weren’t part of that population. Now that computers and increasingly computerlike phones have been broadly adopted, the whole notion of cyberspace is fading. Our social media tools aren’t an alternative to real life, they are part of it. . . .

As they put it in Star Trek, someone needs to order schooling to head into the internet in a big ways: “Helm, Warp One — Engage.”

More than 3 clicks builds competence

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Posted on 25th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Schools we now have | Testing and assessment

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Peter Cochrane makes some very interesting points in a blog post about possible paradoxes that are keeping kids from achieving in school. He makes a point I have never heard before, which he couches in terms of the persistence required in pursuing the complexity in playing video games as compared to the 1, 2, 3 sorts of steps it takes to score well on standard tests students are drilled for in today’s education. As I read what is quoted below from Cochrane, it seemed to me that his observation applies to the richer experience of following your curiosity through a knowledge-filled website compared to just learning a few steps to prove you have understood a page or two in a textbook, which characteristically requires nor offers many if any links to related knowledge or context .

You can check my theory by seeing if you can resist making more than 10 clicks into this section of the CERN site about their Large Hadron Collider. Naw, you don’t need to know what the Super Proton Synchrotron is. [Hint: CERN calls it "The first lord of the rings."] But when our kids get a chance to do more of this sort of complex curiosity satisfying as routine in their schooling, it seems likely they will develop more competence as well as master more knowledge and ideas.

You may be thinking: And why would kids persist in clicking around in a website to learn more if there is no incentive like a good text score or winning video game? Well, to engage knowledge is exciting. Ask any six-year-old whose response to every answer is “why?”. What happens in school in our times seems to be not exciting. Interacting with online knowledge like the CERN site is a way to bring some intellectual juice and fun into learning.

From Cochrane’s observation

In my dealings with youngsters I find them as bright as ever but often without any predisposition for a life of discovery, creativity and problem solving. Why?

There are many factors of course, but here, I think, is a major one: in the old education system it was not unusual for problems to require five, 10, 15, 20, or more steps to get to the solution.

Successive watering down of the curriculum for political purposes has produced tick-box formats with a solution in one, two or three steps. Should a problem involve five steps, the reaction is that it is too difficult or too much like hard work.

Now here is the paradox. Those same minds play computer games where tenacity is essential and the steps to achieve success might number 30 or more. But the players trained themselves, were unfettered, and free to develop their own strategy.

In contrast, the education system put them into a straitjacket and told them what and how to do everything.

Now here is another paradox. In the computer world the players expect tough competition and failure. To succeed they assume that they will have to work hard and persist, which appears not to be the case in education.

Schooling the gaming generation

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Posted on 20th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Next

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The major role of video games in teaching and training young U.S. military recruits is described in a featured article in Live Science. The picture the reader gets is of an effective new methodology for engaging adolescents and training them in battlefield skills. New games are being developed that aim to prepare the mind for war by simulating distressing battlefield situations and walking players through handling these crises.

Once established education shakes itself loose from its analog preconceptions — and someday it will — digital gaming will play a big role in future teaching and training. For now, the military, not the educators, are inventing this new venue for learning.

Why not the massively multiplayer mathematical game, where players are armed with calculus and trig? Or the Medieval Wars of Europe game in which player avatars are historical characters like Charlemagne or Macbeth — constrained in the playing by the facts of history and their own personalities? One supposes an adolescent playing a game like these would learn a lot more about the subjects involved than by for cramming for a high school standards test in math or history.

Sure, developing such games would cost a lot of money. But the scale to student in the open internet makes them very cheap. If a game cost $10 million and were made available to every student in the public schools of New York City, the per-student cost would be one dollar. (There are about a million students in the NYC system.) If the game were openly online and went viral, the per-player cost would plummet to almost nothing.

And while we are musing about the potential of gaming as schooling: Games may diminish the appetite of the new global gaming generation for war if they are playing each other virtually. The Live Science article includes discussion of how military games encounter the stressful reality of actual war. Perhaps the world’s youngest generation will learn to settle its disagreements virtually and live in actual peace.

All optimists raise your hands and say: “Yes!”

What if technology enriches the teacher’s Socratic role?

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Posted on 19th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Next | Schools we now have

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Socrates

An article today in The Chronicle of Higher Education probes the usually-assumed, seldom-challenged point that classroom teachers have to compete with technology. What if that assumption is not true? What if technology can prepare students to benefit from their teacher’s time, knowledge, and insights? There are many points and comments to value in the Chronicle piece, but why is the headline so negative toward the role of technology in teaching?: College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back

Would not Socrates have loved it if he could have told students to take their laptops to wireless hotspots and there explore everything written in the world about a subject? Socrates would then tell these students to keep their laptops closed when they have returned to discourse that subject with him.

Socrates would likely view today’s assumed conflict between teaching and technology as a paradox.

Public (socialist) school shame is on front page, again

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Posted on 16th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Obamaschool | Schools we now have | Testing and assessment

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For six years now, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has thrown everything he can at New York’s public schools to try to equalize student achievement. In an front page New York Times article today, titled Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in New York City Schools, we learn that:

. . . When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped  by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians. . . .

One has to suppose that their low numbers underrepresent the lost black and Hispanic students who drop out of public schooling. Many of them are the brightest boys, bored at school and lured into the streets for the excitement and profit of crime.

The New York City public school system is the largest school system in the world. Mayor Bloomberg’s inability to improve how well this system works for its students is a dramatic demonstration of the systematic failure of public education. The numbers above show failure for students: 60% of the blacks (who make up a large majority of the system’s students), 54% of the Hispanics, 25% of the whites, and 18% of the Asians.

The socialist notion that public education is an entitlement is being pushed hard by the Obamaists. In the real world example of the New York City public schools, that entitlement leads most of the students to failure. Shame on us for putting up with what happens to kids in public schools. How can we possibly think Obama will make public education better when Bloomberg hit the wall? When will we look beyond the public school model to 21st century learning methods.

No wonder they are taking their education into their own hands.

Two-screen mobiles are arriving for virtual textbooks

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Posted on 9th August 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles

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Mobiles come in many sizes and with a wide variety of features, ranging from small smart phones to iPads, to laptops, and now two-screen devices. What defines a “mobile” for education is that it is an individual device which a student can keep with her as she moves from location to location. A Wired Campus article last week describes two new mobiles, the Know and the Edge, that are being introduced this fall to enhance mobile textbook use by having two screens.

While the Kindle has largely failed with students as a replacement for printed textbooks, some colleges plan to test new e-reader devices whose promoters argue that two screens are better than one. . . . Like the Kno, the Edge primarily serves as a textbook reader, although it also offers applications, because it relies on Google’s open-source Android platform. Both devices feature Web browsing, e-mail access, and audio recording.

Note in the excerpts above that both of the two-screen mobiles being introduced include Web browsing, which is the second of the two keys that allow a student to take schooling into his own hands. The first key is having his own mobile device which cuts his learning loose from computers that are wired down to a physical location. The second key is the ability to use that device to connect with the unlimited knowledge resources that lie within the open internet cloud beyond the downloaded learning applications and content on his mobile.

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