What we need now is a new mindset for education

October 21, 2008 on 1:35 am | In Continual Professional Development, DRM, Digital Divide, Digital Media, Educational Change, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, distributed networking |

Elephant in the room

Photo attribution BitBoy on Flickr CC licence

I have just been reading Josie Fraser’s amazing post called Notes Towards Digital Literacy over at SocialTech. As she so succinctly puts it:

“However, while it is a critical area of development and resourcing, e-safety alone is not enough. To regard it as anything except a critical element within a wider digital literacy framework, and to attempt to teach it alongside an antiquated, generally programme-specific ICT education is to short change our learners, and to fail to recognise the technological, social and economic shifts that have take place globally. To not integrate and model good practice in digital literacy has huge social consequences - from potentially disadvantaging individuals and communities in terms of social and economic opportunities, to the society-wide disadvantage we risk by not ensuring that everyone is in a position to make their voice and opinions heard within the law, and to engage technology as a way of bringing about community facilitation of all kinds, social organisation and change.“

I am beginning to hear this from more and more consultants, educators and academics. The evidence is beginning to stack up. Our education system is rapidly becoming outmoded. Yet the ways of binding in a new Digital Literacy agenda still seems light years away.

Josie continues:

“So what is digital literacy? Currently, it is a discussion that isn’t happening, but which needs to be taking place nationally and publicly amongst the major organisational stakeholders (across government, industry, and education), informed by the local conversations of learners, parents, education sector workers, and employers.”

It is indeed the elephant in the room. Now more than ever there needs to be a change that transforms the mindset of educators in this country. But the teaching sector, in particular, are virtually powerless to break out of the antiquated systems they find themselves trapped in. Even SMT are powerless to act because there is no structure to go by - there is no scaffolding and no exemplars.

No-one is providing the vision for an educational system that enables teaching and learning to be highly dynamic, to prepare our children for jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

In my opinion everyone is stuck in an inert comfort zone predicated by outmoded curricula, pedagogy and administrative systems bound in too tightly to the old ways of doing things when all around us the world is changing so fast and to be blunt, the school system is no longer fit for purpose. No-one is taking the initiative by addressing this in practical terms. My vision for the future is bleak if things continue down this path. We will end up as a country producing grunt workers for China.

Where is the vision - things just cannot go on this way? Where is the passion, the engagement?

Now this is not just going to be a mindless piece of polemic against any political party or institution - it is a cry from the heart. I want this country to be the most dynamic, imaginative,innovative and creatively adaptable entrepreneurial place in the world but we are definitely going about it in the wrong way at the moment and not fast enough; schools in their present form will be sidelined by social and epistemological change within the decade.

There needs to be a cultural shift in education that reflects the global and a flattening out of how people teach and learn using Digital Media. There needs to be a new mindset of how we do things and there needs to be a debate about how we are going to go about doing this. At this moment in time I don’t see it being addressed.

You just cannot shoehorn these new developments in Digital Learning into an outmoded system and expect educators to adapt on-the-fly without an infrastructure for change. It will get broken and fixing it will require a reconfiguration of how we go about doing business in schools. Schools themselves will have to have more than just small incremental changes tweaked here and there locally. There needs to be vision from the top and I don’t see it coming. We need to start talking about this - and now.

If you want an economy that is thriving and healthy you need to educate people to be able to cope with the changes reflected in how we are connected globally and how we can produce people with a creative, innovative, passionate mindset about a system that shows them how to forge new business and take risks. We are just not doing that at present. Sure there are some patchy bits of practice here and there but there is no policy to bind in how today’s learners use digital technology. We need educators and learners to be able to adapt to this new environment in new, exciting, engaging ways and we need a whole new infrastructure to do it.

So here are a few suggestions for starters.

1) A top down policy that has the vision to push through change in this area that enables bottom up localised transformation. How?

A qualification based on competency that is nationally recognised for educators in Digital Learning. Senior management will only buy into systemic and radical change in this area where there are enough exemplars of use and esteem for practitioners that can effect change. It’s no good sub-contracting out academic study for years on end without practical outcomes. What is needed is a national qualification that is bound into ITT and continues throughout a practitioner’s life - not necessarily within the bounds of the school. More importantly it needs a bedrock set in the world of informal learning that can be co-opted into and eventually transformational for our present learning institutions. It needs to be dynamic, engaging, passionate and reflect the world of work. It needs to reevaluate the roles of teachers and learners giving them a creative, flexible mindset ready for constant flux and change.

It is quite possible to create a living laboratory of doing things in new ways without disrupting learning. Theo Keuchel’s recent post on Twitter flagging up Jesse Dylan’s Science Commons film points to a wonderful exemplar in that field. Watch that film. Now why can’t we have that insight, energy and creativity in schools? We are talking about aggregation of knowledge here and how people can dynamically adapt that for the greater good.

There needs to be a qualification over and beyond initial teacher training that is workbased and rooted in practice and it needs to be a flatly distributed  i.e. not rubber stamped by any one university but generated from the workplace and moderated in all teacher training institutions. It needs to include audio, video and distributed technologies as well based on projects where appropriate that bind in and reflect the new plethora of technologies outside the school. It needs to have a mechanism to keep learners safe through acceptable use policies deeply rooted in local communities real and virtual and it needs to be transparent and carry high value to both educators, practitioners and learners and by learners I mean teachers as well! This needs to be archived and accessible as exemplars for future use and be contextually bound to local and global culture reflecting diversity and change. A dynamic chain of change throughout the land.

2) Release copyright for schools to be able to remix and open up new Digital Pathways. Media companies need to be co-opted and encouraged to sponsor in-service, on the job, projects that bind in and open out opportunities for Digital Learning. If it is not commercial then leave it alone from litigation for heaven’s sake through the process of creative commons - if it becomes monetizable then give “schools” the opportunity to exploit that in tandem with partnerships. If it isn’t generating income, exploiting or undermining commercial activity then let it be shared, modified and used for learning.

3) Make the changes top down but the practice local and global. Ensure that the sense of “community” is bound into each and every project. Design for transformation and change but make it matter to the people engaged in the learning, personalise it on an individual and community level to reflect each and every community and these communities can start out rooted in the geographical area but be prepared to engage and join with other, bigger distributed communities to aggregate and scale that  knowledge, competency and achievement.

Make all this easily and openly searchable and tagged so that learners and facilitators can augment and adapt to their local context. Make it highly personalised and fit for purpose and enable people to see that context changes over that process sometimes and have a mindset to deal with that change. Not a one stop shop for failure.

This is not about the tech - it’s about the people and how they can join together in new ways to do things more productively. I care about education in this country and I see a possible massive lacuna of missed opportunity. I’m passionate about our children and their futures. I want them to grow up safe, curious, innovative, creative and engaged in their learning for the span of their whole productive lives. I care about community, relationships, good self-esteem, citizenship and the power of learning to transform people. So what are you going to do about it?

Let the debate begin…

Powered by WordPress with Pool theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS. ^Top^

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner