PROCESS POST: Exploring Metaphors – Schools as iPhones or iPads

For those of you who are iPhone or iPad users, consider this -

Would you like your iPhone or iPad to be fully app-scripted for you? In other words, would you like it if someone determined all the apps you should have and pre-loaded all of these apps for you? Your level of personal choice and engagement is considerably constrained because all of the application content has been decided for you, by someone else.

Or is much of the fun and excitement of the iProduct residing in getting to load the apps that you find empowering, fun, and useful? In that well-designed, operating-system-enabled shell, you can personalize and individualize your experience in the ways that make the device most intriguing and captivating for you. That’s part of the magic, isn’t it?

From a student’s perspective, is school – in the traditional sense – more like the app-scripted, pre-loaded iProduct, or is school considerably more like the iPhone or iPad experience that allows for individualization and personalization – the “make-it-your-own-best-tool” that Apple devotees have come to love?

How might we make school more like a user-determined, full-of-choice, I-can-choose-my-own-apps system? There would still be considerable structure – the device shell, the internal electronics, and the operating system. But there would also be more flexibility and adaptability for what fills the structural shell.

PROCESS POST: Exploring Metaphors – Schools as Natural Habitats

Author’s note: I’ve thought on this blog post for about a month, but I have nervously avoided writing or publishing it. I think it runs a risk of really offending people. Of course, I do not mean to offend anyone. Rather, I find that exploring metaphors about school and education helps to stretch and enhance my knowledge and understanding of school and education. Comparisons reveal. Yet no metaphor is perfect – some traits translate, and others don’t. But many people seem to get hung up on an idea that a metaphor must translate each and every element of the comparison. In my opinion, to try to make a perfect 1:1 comparison is misusing a metaphor. If two things were perfectly alike, there would be no need for a metaphor or comparison. It is because two things are not perfectly alike that a metaphor and comparison proves interesting and helpful – to explore the similarities and differences. I’m sorry if this exploration offends. But… here it goes.

In 1907, the German entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck founded the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Stellingen, now a quarter of Hamburg. It is known for being the first zoo to use open enclosures surrounded by moats, rather than barred cages, to better approximate animals’ natural environments.^[14]

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo

How might schools be like zoos? In particular, how might schools be like zoos transforming from cage-based systems to more natural-habitat systems? In other words, how might schools provide more natural habitats for learners?

For some time between seven and ten years, I have been researching a primary question: “If schools are to prepare students for real life, then why don’t schools look more like real life?” As a corollary to the question, I like to consider how we might make schools more like real life. For students and teachers, in fact, school IS real life.

Lately, I am getting more challenges from people about what I mean by real life. That’s a fair and good question, and I am learning so much from these challenges – from these requests to define what I mean by “real life.”

Most recently, I’ve begun my responses something like this -

Well, in watching my own children grow and learn, I am struck by what searchers, explorers, and discoverers they are. So are other people’s children. Children seem to learn best through experimentation, immersion, and play. I don’t see many pre-school (not preschool) kids choosing to sit in desks most of the day to be taught to.

As I think about my life since formal schooling, I am also struck by how much my own learning – after school – involves messy searching, exploring, and discovering. Most of our lives as learners seems to be more constructivist, more integrated, more project-based, more inquiry-driven, more self-initiated. As an adult, I rarely sit for 180 days studying silo-ed subject matter (and I know that is a gross generalization).

Structurally, though, in many ways, formal schooling – in its traditional form – seems to be an interruption from our more natural, human ways of learning. The habitat of “school” doesn’t seem terribly natural.

So, for me, making school more life like means making school learning environments more like our natural habitats as human learners. In many ways, the PBL (project-based learning, passion-based learning, problem-based learning, place-based learning, etc.) movement is working to make school more like our real lives. In our real lives … We mostly work in projects. We pursue our passions. We find and attempt to solve problems. So, making school more like real life has involved more PBL. When student choice and curation of projects is baked into the work, I believe the work is even more natural habitat-ish. When students have authentic audiences – community members beyond the teachers – I believe the work is even more natural habitat-ish. When failure is a more process-embedded waypoint on the path to success, instead of a product-defining finality that marks a cell in a grade book, I believe the work is even more natural habitat-ish.

The technology integration movement seems another attempt at natural-habitat learning. Instead of understanding that kids live tech-filled lives outside of school and expecting them to check their digital devices at the door, many schools have worked to make technology part of the schooling experience in the most recent years. In the real world, kids can be producers in a Web 2.0 environment, not just consumers. So, adaptations to school have followed suit – students have more opportunities it seems to be producers of content, not just consumers of content.

MOOCs, badge-ification, maker spaces, and DIYs also seem related to the transformation of schools to more natural-habitat-oriented environments. Service learning, STEM, STEAM, STREAM, independent study, apprenticeships and internships, research partnerships – these all seem great examples of efforts to make school more like our natural habitats for human learning.

But what “cages” remain? A few possibilities come to mind:

• traditional grading systems, especially those that utilize mean averaging, zeros, and non-narrative feedback
• standardized testing, as it is used in the systems-measurement sense
• silo-ed, non-integrated subject areas and departments
• homework in its typical, traditional uses
• organization of classes by strict age-grouping
• single, isolated teachers instead of co-teachers and partnered facilitators
• 45-55 minutes as the typical blocks of time for math, English, history, etc.
• rows and columns of desks that preserve order over involvement

With the zoo comparison, I do NOT mean to imply that students are animals or wild creatures being held against their will. And I do not view teachers as zoo keepers. I am simply questioning if the traditional structure of school approximates our natural habitats as human learners. When we filter school transformation through a lens of “Does this change make school more like the natural habitats of human learning?” then I think we stand a better chance of making school naturally motivating, relevant, exciting, and intriguing. Additionally, when school is modeled on natural habitats, the environments and experiences come closer to preparing learners for the ongoing, lifelong learning that they will encounter for the majority of their lives after formal schooling.

Does any of this make sense?

Postscript: Despite thinking about this idea for weeks, I decided to write the piece as a process post. So, I gave myself 15 minutes to capture a rough draft of my thinking. For me, the thoughts are significantly incomplete, and I have much more to explore and discover about this metaphor – in both its strengths and weaknesses. But, as writing is thinking, I decided it was time for me to get more serious about my thinking on this metaphor.

How will I know what I think until I see what I have written?

E.M. Forster (roughly quoted)

Future of learning: obsolescence of knowledge, return to real teaching

Reblogged from GigaOM:

The future of learning is far more than new devices, digital content and online classrooms. It means potentially rewritten relationships between students and information, teachers and instruction, and schools and society.

In a short documentary released Tuesday, telecom giant Ericsson (s ERIC) pulls together observations from leading voices in education technology and entrepreneurship to give a high-level snapshot of what the future of education could look like and how technology is leading it there.

Read more… 332 more words

From a number of educational power-thinkers and get-it-doners, assembled by Ericsson's Future of Learning project, we can continue to imagine and prototype super learning solutions. (This is the first time I've tried re-blogging. Just to make sure - please know that I am reblogging Ki Mae Heussner's 10.23.12 GigaOM piece.)

Monday morning ideation – imagining the future of schools and schools of the future #WhatIfWeekly

Three idea seeds from my weekend “studying”…

1. What if we developed “nutrition info” for our school courses? Looking at an egg crate this weekend, I wondered why we don’t have something like this for our courses in schools? How might we develop guides for the 7Cs that could accompany a course description and indicate to folks what’s actually in the content-and-skills meal that one’s about to partake in?

2. What if we understood capital-P PBL as futebol de salão? Reading Farnam Street, I learned about a game credited with developing the soft skills of young Brazilian soccer players.

This insanely fast, tightly compressed five-on-five version of the game— played on a field the size of a basketball court— creates 600 percent more touches, demands instant pattern recognition and, in the words of Emilio Miranda, a professor of soccer at the University of São Paulo, serves as Brazil’s “laboratory of improvisation.”

For students working on real-life problems in a curriculum more balanced toward challenges and contexts, instead of so content-centric, they could be developing such soft skills for problem finding and problem solving in comparable improvisation labs for applying their interrelated subjects of math, science, English, history, etc.

3. What if we devised ways for personal learning, like Susan Solomon describes medicine is developing personal drug treatments? Listening to the TED talk “Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells.” I was struck by this part of the transcript:

But it isn’t really enough just to look atthe cells from a few people or a small group of people,because we have to step back.We’ve got to look at the big picture.Look around this room. We are all different,and a disease that I might have,if I had Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease,it probably would affect me differently than ifone of you had that disease,and if we both had Parkinson’s disease,and we took the same medication,but we had different genetic makeup,we probably would have a different result,and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfullyfor me was actually ineffective for you,and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for youis safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious,but unfortunately it is not the waythat the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugsbecause, until now, it hasn’t had the tools.

And so we need to move awayfrom this one-size-fits-all model.The way we’ve been developing drugs is essentiallylike going into a shoe store,no one asks you what size you are, orif you’re going dancing or hiking.They just say, “Well, you have feet, here are your shoes.”It doesn’t work with shoes, and our bodies aremany times more complicated than just our feet.So we really have to change this.

Too much of formalized education in schools seems targeted to the mean…or overly generalized, so that many experience something comparable to the shoe store that says, “Well, you have feet, here are your shoes.” With the advances in technology and brain research, how might we design personal learning, like Solomon describes designing personal drug treatment?

Education and the Presidential Debate 10.3.12 – my overly simplistic (and predictable) view

Last night, I tuned into the first hour of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Debate with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In the first few minutes, I heard education mentioned several times, but I never heard many specifics or actual plans of a concrete nature. (Perhaps I am naive and overly optimistic that I would hear such… one can dream… one should dream.)

This morning, I read a recap of the education-mentions in the debate – from EdWeek.
[After initial publish, I read this other EdWeek article - excellent!]

So, we want to enhance education so that, among other reasons, we can improve the economy. Maybe we should work to align education and the economy more purposefully. Perhaps business and education and non-profit could be considered three strands of the same chord. Perhaps they could play for the same team. Perhaps students and faculty should be considered the incredible resources they are for transforming school into more “real life.” Or for transforming more “real life” into school.

If you want to get better at the guitar, what do you do? Do you mostly sit and listen to others play the guitar? No. You PLAY THE GUITAR!

If you want to get better at soccer, what do you do? Do you mostly sit in desks and watch someone lecture on how to play soccer? No. You PLAY MORE SOCCER!

If you want to get better as an artist, what do you do? Do you mostly use your senses only to collect information in your head like a vessel to be filled? No. You MAKE ART! 

Maybe if we want learners to know how to create and contribute to the economy and the national citizenship as producers of value, we should work on an educational system that more systemically facilitates students PRACTICING such now!

[For the record - I think aspiring guitarists should listen to other musicians. I think soccer players should watch film and other games and listen to their coaches. I think artists should observe other art and visit museums. But, I think these aspiring creators should spend a huge balance of their time... creating. Creating things that matter for real audiences and learning by doing. Seems simple to me. School should be more like what we know works for the rest of our learning lives. Teachers and students are fully capable of this. I do realize the transformation is not "simple," but we could do this together. I have no doubts.]