Changing Aspects of Education
Changing practice and changing tools...
Recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have a profound effect on education. The world is also becoming increasingly interconnected and the connections are both officially established and spontaneously created. Most countries are rethinking their education systems with globalization in mind. Wikis are allowing for unprecedented informal collaboration between people. These new developments require a reevaluation of the goals and methods of education.
The changing roles of teacher and student
Students today have access to more information than ever. They do not have to rely on school to furnish them with information. In fact there seems to exist a disconnect between what they consider relevant and what the curriculum offers. Because of this the teacher is no longer viewed as the gatekeeper of information, the role of the teacher needs to change from a lecturer to a facilitator, students are no longer mere vessels that need to be filled, they can occupy a more central role and become co-creators. The following excerpt from the article "The Changing Role of the Teacher in the 21st Century" by Dr. Brad Johnson & Tammy Maxson McElroy highlights some of the capabilities that teachers need to have in order to be successful in the changing and challenging environment that is school.
"Effective teaching has to be fluid and adaptive to current culture. The effective teacher understands that there are core skills and knowledge that have to be learned, but must be presented in a manner that students find relevant, even if not in their immediate lives. This requires an art and a science to teaching that makes the teacher of the 21st Century effective.
The science of teaching requires content knowledge, organization, management skills, and detailed planning. The art of teaching is not about possessing an outgoing personality, but making connections to students, parents, as well as connecting the curriculum to the real world in a relevant manner. Thus the 21st Century teacher creates and maintains intentional relationships with her students, parents, and colleagues for the sake of tomorrow’s success."
The video featured below is an example of students taking an active role in their education. The Canadian teacher Shawn Corey describes the positive effect motivation and relevance had on his students, after a student was allowed to choose her own study material.
"Effective teaching has to be fluid and adaptive to current culture. The effective teacher understands that there are core skills and knowledge that have to be learned, but must be presented in a manner that students find relevant, even if not in their immediate lives. This requires an art and a science to teaching that makes the teacher of the 21st Century effective.
The science of teaching requires content knowledge, organization, management skills, and detailed planning. The art of teaching is not about possessing an outgoing personality, but making connections to students, parents, as well as connecting the curriculum to the real world in a relevant manner. Thus the 21st Century teacher creates and maintains intentional relationships with her students, parents, and colleagues for the sake of tomorrow’s success."
A divide exists today between what is taught in traditional schools and the skills that are required in the real world. The reasons for this disconnect are many and range from unwieldy policy decisions and lack of funds to deficiencies in teacher training and the authoritarian structure of schools. This widening gap needs to be bridged through innovation and creativity in order for schools to provide meaningful education to students.
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The location of education
Education is longer bound to a particular medium or location. Classroom set ups can vary from conventional to digital and any combination of the two in between. It is important to note that traditional education and e-learning are not mutually exclusive and can be combined to create an even more enriching environment for students. The discussion on the use of wikis in class and the demonstration of a personal learning environment below offer insights into meaningful extensions of the traditional classroom.
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Professor Manuel Castells discusses among other aspects of intersection of technology and learning the importance of developing a policy for e-learning in his Lecture on Higher Education, University of Western Cape, Aug. 7th 2009:
"Finally the notion of the technological transformation of the university – this is something that has to be tackled seriously. We are already in a system that is hybrid; we are not simply in only face-to-face or only in virtual universities. Even the face-to-face universities are virtual because we work on the internet, we work on e-mail with our students, we are constantly connected. But all this is happening without any real policy, any transformation of the pedagogic method of the university. To introduce the notion of e-learning - not just distance learning but e-learning – as a critical form of our university world in the face to face universities is essential in addition to the development of the virtual universities."
http://chet.org.za/webfm_send/552
"Finally the notion of the technological transformation of the university – this is something that has to be tackled seriously. We are already in a system that is hybrid; we are not simply in only face-to-face or only in virtual universities. Even the face-to-face universities are virtual because we work on the internet, we work on e-mail with our students, we are constantly connected. But all this is happening without any real policy, any transformation of the pedagogic method of the university. To introduce the notion of e-learning - not just distance learning but e-learning – as a critical form of our university world in the face to face universities is essential in addition to the development of the virtual universities."
http://chet.org.za/webfm_send/552
The advances in ICT are allowing distance education and lifelong education to flourish. Lifelong education is viewed as particularly important presently due to the fact that successful employment in the so called knowledge economy requires flexibility and continued willingness to learn from workers. The concept of lifewide education is gaining traction as well. It underscores the fact that education can be gleaned from sources outside of formal education and it is a process that is never finished. The following wiki can be used as platform for creating a strategy for continued learning: http://lifewidelearning.pbworks.com/w/page/17247638/FrontPage
Conventional classes or groups of peers
Whether the conventional school class which consists of students grouped by age is an effective way to group students is debatable. The insights gained from the way people collaborate and co-author material online can be applied to find better ways to cluster students - by interest or related fields of interests as well as by stage of development. It might be even a question of matching the right type of teacher with the right type of students. In the article "Effects of teaching and learning styles on students’ reflection levels for ubiquitous learning" Sheng-Wen Hsieha, Yu-Ruei Jangb, Gwo-Jen Hwangc, and Nian-Shing Chenb describe how matching the right student with the right teacher style can improve learning. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131511000121
The content
Of course one of the most important aspects of school is what we teach in school. Whose agenda is being followed? Who is responsible for producing the content? How expensive is it to gain access to the content and to school in general. Education is being commercialized at a worrying rate and this is why open source education is such an important counter force and gives hope that relevant content will be available for people who need it and they in turn will co-author this content making it relevant to them. This in itself is a revolutionary development in education.
An opportunity to make the curriculum more relevant to the students is to allow a certain measure of informal education to gain credibility in schools. Here is a link to an article by David Burley and Pauline Gertig dealing with the relationship between formal and informal education http://www.infed.org/archives/usinginformaleducation/burley.htm
The elusive goal of education
How do we make education meaningful and relevant? Are educators and policy makers clinging to a model that has been surpassed by the development of society? There have been suggestions from many theorists of education policy that the system is flawed and inadequate, Ian Stronach argues that the global discourse on education needs to be taken out of the context of the paracapitalist hypernarrative in his book Globalizing Education, Educating the Local: How Method Made Us Mad. Stronach points to the fact that, league tables, reforms and accountability rhetoric frame education as a type of cultural performance (2010, p. 10). He argues that education needs to be freed from the supposed mimetic relationship with the economy, that one needs not be blamed or seen as a fix for the problems of the other, the following quote is a very interesting interpretation of current U.S. education policy, especially in view of the "Win the Future" rhetoric used in the nations address from January 2011:
Education and the economy are in a kind of a failing marriage, with government as a rather fixated and dysfunctional counselor, forever on the lookout for magic remedies, mainly from the United States. Together, they construct a founding illusion of the postmodern spectacle - that there is the security and agency of an educational foundation as such in global discourses that guarantees the continuation or expansion of prosperity via 'world class' competitiveness. (Stronach, 2010, p.39)
In the video embedded below Sir Ken Robinson makes his own argument for the need to rethink the foundations of education. Of course it is easy to see that something is not working, the difficult part is to identify and implement the right changes. The question of the future, goals and direction of education is one that will always be open-ended: as society changes education needs to change as well. The rapid changes ushered in by new technologies, the globalizing forces of the market, the discourse on competition and success warranted by the neoliberal ideology that seems to prevail today, are all contributing for the fact that our current system seems to be outgrown.
Education and the economy are in a kind of a failing marriage, with government as a rather fixated and dysfunctional counselor, forever on the lookout for magic remedies, mainly from the United States. Together, they construct a founding illusion of the postmodern spectacle - that there is the security and agency of an educational foundation as such in global discourses that guarantees the continuation or expansion of prosperity via 'world class' competitiveness. (Stronach, 2010, p.39)
In the video embedded below Sir Ken Robinson makes his own argument for the need to rethink the foundations of education. Of course it is easy to see that something is not working, the difficult part is to identify and implement the right changes. The question of the future, goals and direction of education is one that will always be open-ended: as society changes education needs to change as well. The rapid changes ushered in by new technologies, the globalizing forces of the market, the discourse on competition and success warranted by the neoliberal ideology that seems to prevail today, are all contributing for the fact that our current system seems to be outgrown.
While no one can predict how exactly schools will change it seems that technology has given us the tools to implement the changes that need to come.
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