Serendipity35 - Learning

Bridging the High School to College Learning Gap

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 28 May 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Patrick McAndrew, Professor of Open Education at The Open University, has a guest post on the Next Generation Learning Challenges blog about the "Bridge to Success" program - one of the “Building Blocks for College Completion” from NGLC’s first wave of funding.

The grant portion of the project has wrapped up, but they are still finding new people adopting the content, watching access to the site continue to rise. They have launched revised versions and hope to continue without additional funding.

The program was a collaboration of The Open University, the University of Maryland University College, Anne Arundel Community College (MD), and the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their challenge was to to help people who, for whatever reason, find it hard to cope in the early stages of college study.

It is interesting that McAndrew says that "The MOOC phenomenon shows signs of missing such people as it offers engaging learning experiences for the committed rather than nurturing the skills of learning itself." He notes that even with the large number of learners that have engaged with MOOCs so far, "the majority of those, by their own analysis, have existing qualifications or are eager to advance to further study."

MOOCs attract self-directed, motivated individuals, many of whom are learning for the sake of learning. In their challenge grant, they were working with students who are struggling and often not motivated.

They found that usage of these open courses went beyond their college population. For example, "charities used the materials to enable some of the most disadvantaged in society to return to an education or workforce path."

New versions of the courses are now available with badges added and a structure to encourage self-study and to celebrate success. The new version takes some lessons from MOOCs to organize around a start date and to offer some extra support for a limited period. Timed to coincide with Adult Learning week in the United Kingdom, the supported period will run for a week, after which point the materials will continue to be available as open resources.

The new versions: Learning to Learn (L2L) is a course for anyone who needs help to get started in college-level study, and Succeed With Math (SWIM) is a confidence-building mathematics course. Both are designed for when learners are failing in trying to take college courses. These versions build on the versions piloted in Bridge to Success, with the intention of making the material easier to study independently by adding challenges that bring out the achievements for learners as they proceed. (The original versions are also available.)

For more about the project, including introductory videos, webinars, and guides for educators and learners on how to make use of the courses, go to http://bridge2success.aacc.edu/

Eastern And Western Cultures and the Struggle To Learn

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:22:00 -0500

Last fall, I heard a story on NPR about Jim Stigler, a professor of psychology at UCLA, who studies teaching and learning around the world. He has been looking at how people in the East and West approach learning.

If it has to come down to a word, the word is struggle.

He found that in Eastern cultures, it is assumed that struggle will be part of the learning process. It is expected that everyone will have to struggle to learn. That is part of the process of learning. And struggling gives you the opportunity to show that you have what it takes.

Of course, you can't paint half the globe as being all the same. There is cultural diversity East and West, but Stigler says that in American culture, struggle, in an intellectual sense, is seen as a weakness. In Eastern culture, it is seen as a way to measure emotional strength.

In Japanese classrooms where he has done his research, teachers intentionally design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach. They create experiences that will be a bit out of reach. And when a task is mastered, teachers make a point of letting students know that they succeeded and that their success required hard work and struggle.

Kids, Literacies and Lifelong Computer Skills

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:24:00 -0400

Jakob Nielsen wrote on his site that he believes that schools need to "teach deep, strategic computer insights that can't be learned from reading a manual." He gives this example:

I recently saw a textbook used to teach computers in the third grade. One of the chapters ("The Big Calculator") featured detailed instructions on how to format tables of numbers in Excel. All very good, except that the new Excel version features a complete user interface overhaul, in which the traditional command menus are replaced by a ribbon with a results-oriented UI.

Sadly, I had to tell the proud parents that their daughter's education would be obsolete before she graduated from the third grade.

The problem, of course, is in tying education too tightly to specific software applications. Even if Microsoft hadn't turned Excel inside out this year, they would surely have done so eventually. Updating instructional materials to teach Office 2007 isn't the answer, because there will surely be another UI change before today's third graders enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years -- and even more before they retire in 2065.

It is a tall order for educators. How do you make student truly literate in a skill and not just tech-savvy (a term I hate) in using a product? Teaching literacy is teaching deeper concepts that survive longer than specific applications. I hear parents say that their 6 year old can use their smartphone. Tech savvy kid. But with what real understanding?

What I am concerned with are life-long technology skills. That is more than just "computer skills" because our definition of what a computer is and will be is being changed as you read this post. Is my iPhone the only computer I will need one day? If you say that you will cling to your desktop or laptop computer, you have to consider that companies (including Apple) are already considering dropping those products from their product lines.

Nielsen offers these as general skills that he believes should be taught in elementary schools:

Search Strategies
Information Credibility
Information Overload
Writing for Online Readers
Computerized Presentation Skills
Workspace Ergonomics
Debugging
User Testing and other Basic Usability Guidelines

If those sound outrageous for elementary school students, read Nielsen's post for more details. For example, when he says "Workspace Ergonomics" he means that kids need to be aware of the RSIs (repetitive
strain injuries, such as carpal tunnel syndrome and "text-message thumb") that are hurting adults now, and teach young people about proper usage (frequent breaks, monitor placement, lighting etc.) and head off the headaches, backaches and RSI that will come from an entire life of tech use. Those kids will be the user interface designers of the future anyway, so start early!

But seriously, he is also suggesting that living in an interactive environment means that usability heuristics like "recognition vs. recall" or "consistency" will be concepts that an educated person will need.

Finally, Nielsen referenced a book that I checked out. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane. The book looks at how people at work use tech and also at how researchers in cognitive science, computer science, and economics study how computers are enhancing productivity (as they also eliminate jobs).

The authors see a growing division between those who can and cannot earn a good living in the computerized economy, and see the challenge for educators to teach the new skills that will survive a changing technologized workplace. Three of those skills are ones that no educator should have a problem with including in a curriculum. The three are problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication.

Training and Learning

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:57:00 -0400

I recently got back into doing some instructional design and teaching that is more closely related to workforce training than to traditional college coursework. Sometimes the line is very clear between the two - credits, degrees, prerequisites on the course side and certificates, promotions, and licensing being on the training side. Many colleges deliberately blur the line. They develop certificate programs with perhaps 15 credits of coursework and then offer students the opportunity to move that into a degree program.

Jane Hart has done three posts recently about training the "smart worker." She talks about these workers needing job aids rather than courses, continuous learning using social media and how these workers need immediate access to solutions.

Is this also useful to more traditional courses?

Are schools moving from their traditional role of creating, delivering and managing formal learning to another model?

Hart proposes "liberating courses from the LMS and making them available on the intranet where they were more likely to be accessed and used." Will we see courses moving out of the LMS to an intranet or the Internet (as in open courseware)?

But I also mentioned that the materials would need to be provided in a format that was easily searchable so that relevant content was immediately accessible without having to work through the whole course.

She references a piece by Marc Rosenberg that is also concerned with situations when training is not the answer.

“Too often, there’s more talk about performance than action. Too often, we offer training solutions (including eLearning) for problems that we know are not training related. We know better, but for reasons that are often, but not always, out of our control, we revert to what’s comfortable and what’s expected.“

How often in your classroom is a student having a performance problem rather than a learning problem?

Hart offers several suggestions for developing content in those situations.

Consider how people are going to use that content - dipping in and out of the materials to get what they need or taking a linear path through them. I like Jane's thought that, "People no longer want just-in-case learning, but just-in-time learning; when they need it. They don’t want or need to have to memorize information just in case they need it; they only need to know where to find it, when they need it.

Focus on performance outcomes rather than learning outcomes that measure what they “know”

Keep the materials short and as simple

Ensure resources are readable in mobile devices

In modeling "job aids", Hart gives examples of several Google pages on using their tools. She also gives links to other examples of job aids in this format can be found at jobaids.info/index.shtm. Producing effective job aids requires good information design skills. Here’s a meta-job aid (PDF) on creating Job aids.

A well-designed and simple cheat sheet/quickstart/job aid/web page of textual instructions or a short visual video is certainly something we sometimes use in courses and should probably be using more frequently, especially with adult learners and for performance support.

Academically Adrift

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:19:00 -0500

One component of the Writing Initiative that I work in at PCCC is to include more critical thinking in the redesigned writing-intensive course sections. So, I read with interest about Professor Richard Arum, New York University, who has done a major longitudinal study of student learning in higher education.

His research follows approximately 2,400 students at 24 diverse U.S. colleges and universities over a two year period to examine how institutional settings, student backgrounds, and individual academic programs influence how much students learn on campus.

His study uses a recently developed, unique learning assessment tool, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which measures the "higher order thinking skills" that colleges and universities aim to teach: problem-solving, critical thinking, analytical reasoning and communication skills. (The CLA is a tool developed by the Council for Aid to Education, a national nonprofit based in New York.)

Are you surprised? Research has shown for a long time that students spend more time on social pursuits than the average 13 hours per week spent studying.

Arum also points out that faculty incentives within higher education (such as promotion & tenure) are generally aligned with research pursuits, rather than the quality of undergraduate instruction. This is less true at community colleges, but there are still many non-teaching requirements and distractions.

According to Arum, this misalignment of goals results in far less attention to teaching and learning than is necessary to cultivate higher order skills in students.

&ASIN=0226028569&tag=poetsonline" alt="Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" />Richard Arum is professor of sociology and education at New York University and the program director for educational research at the Social Science Research Council. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

He is the author of several books and articles about student achievement, social stratification, and the organization of schooling, including, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

Test-Taking Enhances Learning

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:30:00 -0500

Test-taking enhances learning.

I didn't say it. It comes from a recent Alertbox post from Jakob Nielsen. He is a big name in the web usability world, and not an educator. But I thought his ideas were interesting and I wonder if we might see similarities with our own students - particularly those learning either fully or partially online for courses.

One of his ideas is that people remember much more after reading if they are asked to retrieve information about the text from memory using a test. Nielsen cautions that he has long thought that the Web may be "unsuited for real learning" mostly because of the superficial way that users "surf" (the "scan" of the digital age) information instead of close reading.

His own usability studies on teens leads him to conclude that "When using websites, teenagers have a lower success rate than adults and they're also easily bored. To work for teens, websites must be simple -- but not childish -- and supply plenty of interactive features."

College students don't rate much better because they are "multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They're enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines."

Again, Nielsen is looking most of the time at non-educational (commercial) uses of the Web.

Most of his post is about "writing-for-the-Web" guidelines, and it would seem that the thrust is at "making it simple." (Examples: "Craft the first 2 words of headlines and other microcontent for the scanning eye; Use numerals instead of words; Use bulleted lists") That's probably not an approach that appeals to educators.

Nielsen recognizes that, and sees the overlap here of educational sites where users need to learn something beyond the highlights, and commercial sites that need to "educate" users. (For example, a pharmaceutical site for patients about a drug.)

He cites a recent research study by Karpicke and Blunt from Purdue University published in the January Science that measured the amount of information people could remember a week after reading a scientific text. The students who took an "elaborate" test after reading the text remembered 145% more content after a week compared to the untested students who simply read the text.

I found it interesting that people who simply read the text 4 times also remembered more (64%) a week later.

Nielsen is concerned with the implications for web designers and I think this is probably an area that must also concern instructional designers working on web content for courses.

Is quizzing and testing (high and low stakes) the way to get better retention?

Unfortunately, for commercial web designers, they can't usually "require" users to take tests. But teachers often can and do require objective and subjective tests.

Perhaps, Nielsen's final thought is more important to our course design thinking - "get users to exercise their memory after reading your content, and then offer them a chance to revisit the material after they've seen how little they remember."

The Medium Is Still The Medium

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Last week there was an interesting Op Ed in the NY Times by David Brooks titled "The Medium is the Medium" that seems to give hope for the good old books.

It points to several studies about the presence of books in a student's home and the impact it has on their performance in school. In one study, disadvantaged students were given 12 books to keep and read over the summer break. In that study, they performed better in the fall than students who did not get the books. The study also points out that those students also had less of a "summer slide" - their term for the decline that seems to especially hit lower-income students during the vacation months. Just having those books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school. Brooks also points other research that shows that children who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better.

I am a book fan, but all this seems too easy.

Can just the mere presence of a home library make a difference? (Some of these studies are not looking at whether or not students actually read the books or even the types of books in the home. The new study gave $50 worth of paperbacks from Scholastic, so they were probably "age-appropriate.")

The new study (led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee) suggests that it's not just the presence of the books, but there's a change in the self-perception of the students who see themselves as readers.

Teacher/Blogger Brian Bachenheimer posted a good observation about the Brooks OpEd that focused on the idea that is pretty well accepted by many teachers that "literacy" now can take many forms including blogs, social literacy sites, wikis, and podcasts.

Sure, they are not books, but some educators feel they are better than books because they are participatory (read/write) and allow students (via links) to go beyond the document to images (photos, maps, art), audio (speakers, music), and related stories and research.

And anyone with a student at home or in their classroom knows that, for whatever reasons you want to list, the Internet is far more motivating than books.

Would a study that gave disadvantaged kids the Net and a computer over the summer show any improvement or any less summer slide? Would they see themselves differently - not as readers, but as connected?

Brooks' conclusion sound quite old-fashioned:

"But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher."

Although many teachers would still like to believe those sentiments, the reality of the classroom doesn't really support them.

(There area few hundred comments on the Brooks' piece online.)

Deep Reading

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:16:00 -0400

This a cross-posting from another blog of mine. It seemed to have some crossover to the learning and technology focus of Serendipity35.

As a kid, you learned to swim in the shallows and eventually took a dive into the deep end of the pool, lake or ocean. School and life taught you that some things are “deep” and that some people can be shallow.

This post isn’t about that. Or maybe it is.

Nicholas Carr wrote a piece in the Atlantic Monthly called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that caused a lot of discussion, especially with educators and technology types.

Now he has a book out called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains that looks at some neurological science in an attempt to see the impact of computers and the Net.

I love to read about the brain and this book has stories about experiments that I find interesting (though not always convincing). Can we really see a difference between those neural pathways that form when we are reading books versus those created when we read online? Is Net reading with its surfing and skimming that lead you from a story to an image to a video to something else and distracting you with popups, messages, alerts, and feeds.

I have heard all my life that interruptions and distractions kills my comprehension and retention. My parents told me. My teachers told me. My wife still tells me to put down the iPad while I’m watching TV and flipping through a magazine.

“Deep reading” is the good thing for your brain. Right?

“Habits of mind” is another term that came into my teaching life. If you look at that list, you can see that technology and especially the Net is probably changing some of these habits – or creating new ones.

Some of the habits of mind are: persisting, managing impulsivity, and striving for accuracy and precision. Not at the top of the Internet learning program.

Then again, habits like being open to continuous learning, thinking flexibly, thinking interdependently (learning with others) and applying past knowledge to new situations might be encouraged by Net use.

I wonder what the difference is when you read Carr’s books on a Kindle versus on paper?

Education really loves the ability to concentrate. I think Carr is more concerned with our everyday habits than with the classroom. And we all have seen those statistics about the amount of time we spend in classrooms versus the time we spend online, watching TV, sleeping and at other activities. Classrooms always lose.

Yet, Carr likes technology. He liked those first Apple home computers and social networking, blogging, YouTube and toys that allow you to people to stream music, movies throughout your house and DVRs that let you program your own TV network.

But he does want to warn us of what is being lost.

His argument includes the brain research and Plato and Marshall McLuhan as evidence. The controversial part ids the idea that the Internet literally and physically rewires our brain. That brain becomes more computer-like and is better at consuming data. We’re better at swimming in the shallow water.

A surprisingly large section of the book is devoted to the history of the written word and all that it has done to “mold the human mind.”

The past week I have been doing more “deep reading.” That is “sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object.” I have been reading (like much of the world) the Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. (Just finishing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoothis weekend, and yes, I do like it.) You might argue that those books are not “deep” but that’s not the point. The deep comes from the way you read.

And I do tend to read print books differently. I have been sitting outside in my Adirondack chair with a cup of tea and focusing on the book. I even moved the chair off the deck yesterday because I was picking up the sounds of the TV from inside the house.

Carr’s argument is that the Internet works against that kind of focus.

“Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, educators and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” Sure, deep reading is possible, but that’s not the kind of reading “the technology encourages and ewards.”

Is the book pulling me away from my laptop, phone, and iPad? Not really. I need them for work and to survive the day it seems. But I am being more mindful of occasions for deeper reading.

I am also thinking about how a deeper “reading” of other things – relationships, for example – might be something I need to consider too.

It’s wisdom over knowledge. It’s using the technology, but more intelligently.

Originally posted on Weekends in Paradelle

It's Tee-Ball Season Again

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 24 May 2010 00:24:00 -0400

My Drew dreaming in the tee-ball outfield.

A friend recommended that I read NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

She knows that my own sons are grown now, but she said that I would agree with the basic premise that many of our popular strategies for raising children are bad strategies.

Maybe she was getting me ready for some future grandchildren. And she was probably thinking about the implications for teachers and school programs.

The first "problem" I noted in a browse of the book is about the inverse power of praise. We give too much praise and let effort count more than actual results.

I wrote about that last summer here in a piece called "School As T-Ball." I was thinking that the effort-rewarding philosophy of tee-ball was working its way into schools.

It might seem to be a good philosophy for very young children. We want to foster the idea of trying. We encourage "low stakes testing" where failure is okay. I see a place for tee-ball on a field even in some classrooms. My sons both played tee-ball.

My Justin considers life after tee-ball.

My fear is that it is moving its way up the grade levels. It just doesn't go away. It might be why graduate students seem to assume that if they are just "there" it's at least an "B" grade. Of course, if there's some effort, that's an "A." A "C" grade is just unacceptable. They will drop the course if that seems to be where they are headed.

If we are playing in a game where everyone gets up to bat, no one gets out and both teams win, I don't know what the point of playing is after awhile.

And, yes, I know that even older ballplayers will hit off a tee. It can be a good "scaffolding" activity and a way to teach good habits. But that tee is taken away when the game begins.

That's just one part of the book. It also takes on topics like why insufficient sleep adversely affects kids' capacity to learn; why white parents don't talk about race; why kids lie; why evaluation methods for giftedness and the accompanying programs don't work; and why siblings really fight.

Reviewers seem to have been fairly kind to the book. But there were those who disagreed - like the New York Times Book Review that felt that every generation seems to have a "revolutionary" book of parental advice (see Dr. Spock) and that all that's new here is the "packaging."

I am giving it a read and I find myself agreeing more than disagreeing.

But I also know that I am still very likely to cheer on my grandchildren if they play tee-ball, no matter what the book says.

http://www.pobronson.com

Who Is Driving Your Classroom?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:15:00 -0500

I was reading about the pre-frontal cortex. Really. Last part of the brain to evolve, the last part of the brain to develop. And it's pretty fragile. An area that often gets hit, and the first part to go in the aging process.

Researchers like Adele Diamond studying developmental cognitive neuroscience are looking at that part of the brain are finding evidence that when children start school not ready to learn, it's not necessarily because they do not know their letters or numbers, but because they lack the critical ability to regulate their social, emotional, and cognitive behaviors. Even with older students, this self-regulation, also known as executive function, seems to have a stronger connection to academic achievement than IQ or entry-level reading or math skills. And, children learn to regulate their own behaviors at an early age in school as they enact increasingly more complex scenarios in their imaginary play in preschool and in learning activities in kindergarten.

Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control."

Executive function, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control are all concepts that certainly are involved in teaching at all levels. But when you are more concerned with teaching content and teaching skills, those might not be ideas that you are familiar with or that influence your approach to teaching.

This research also also leads us to consider whether or not you always need the content to learn a related skill. How much content about a car do I need to know to be able to drive it? How much do I need to know about Moby Dick to write about it? Do I need to read the entire book, learn about Herman Melville, read his other books, read related books?

I am not alone in believing that we learn by doing. It's not the only way we learn, but I think we learn best that way. Who learns more about driving a car - the driver or a passenger? Who learns more about the driving route - the driver or a passenger?

Who is driving your classroom? Are your students driving, or are they passengers along for the ride?

Secondary and higher education teachers are lovers of content. They might tune out when they hear educational theory - especially research on childhood pedagogy. That's a shame, because there is so much good information and so many classroom ideas to be found there. Maybe your library has a copy of Tools of the Mind (The Vygotskian Approach) or similar books on the shelves in that section. I think we need to bring more educational ideas (theories scares peopel too) to teachers to consider. If you want a nice, easy-to-take introduction to some of these concepts, listen to this podcast interview with Adele Diamond.

The Mind At Work

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:08:00 -0500

For an interesting look at how blue-collar vocations address the complexity of thinking, take a look at The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker written by Mike Rose.

The book looks at intelligence and the integrated skills of blue collar and service workers which are far too often marginalized by cultural stereotyping - and by people in education.

Mike Rose is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He has several personal takes on this research. His mother was a waitress and, because of a error, he was placed in the "vocational track" for two years of high school before being switched to the college track.

He observed how his mother used timing, concentration, strategic efficiency and a high degree of social skills in her everyday work as a waitress. He looks at how vocational teachers use problem-solving skills and teach the persistence necessary to success in jobs like being an electrician.

The book presents an overview of the divide that exists between the "academic" and vocational (which, of course IS academic) worlds.

Rose also published last fall a book called Why School? so you might guess he is a critic of schools. Well, yes, he is - and no, he's not.

We hear so much about education these days – test scores, reform battles – but little that we hear gets to the heart of why education matters. That’s why I wrote Why School?, to get us to think about why we send kids to school and often return to school ourselves. Along the way, I hope readers reflect on what made a difference in their own education. Education turned my life around – saved it, really – and I’ve taught for close to forty years, so this issue of the purpose of education is close to me, both professionally and personally.

That book asks questions about pretty fundamental beliefs that we have about education - What does it mean to be educated? What is intelligence? How should we think about intelligence, education, and opportunity in an open society?

Has education policy lost its way? I think so. I think Mike Rose would agree. And both of us still believe in education.

A recent post on his blog is titled "21st Century Skills: Education’s New Cliché" and that fits nicely with my own feelings as seen in several of my own recent posts. I am fearful of where educational policy is headed and this conflict that I feel about what schools should be preparing students for and what they are preparing students for is key to the fear.

What is good teaching? Good teachers. What are the qualities of a good teacher? In an interview Rose did with Teacher Magazine he says:

The first is that these teachers were knowledgeable. They knew things, whether it was a particular subject matter, like literature or science or history, or child development, or the teaching of reading or the teaching of math.

They were also resourceful. Especially if they had been teachers for a while. They had piled up a lot of materials and they would draw from sources that they had at their disposal.

But there’s also a kind of performative resourcefulness. You’ve seen this when you watch good teachers—they just seem to know what metaphor or what analogy to use to illustrate something, or when a kid gets stuck, they have another way to come at a question. There’s a resourcefulness of technique and approach.

The third thing—and maybe this should be the first—is that they created a safe and respectful space. That is, regardless of the teaching style, you could tell that the students in that classroom felt free to venture an idea, or free to go down a road and see where a train of thought would take them. There’s a sense of physical, emotional, and intellectual safety and respect that emerged in these rooms.

Mike Rose's site

Learning Versus Schooling

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:07:00 -0500

After writing yesterday about schools addressing the 21st century skills for the jobs of the next decade, I came across a post by Will Richardson that seems related. (Interestingly, I read the post on Facebook, not on his blog.)

He is doing a presentation at Educon 2.2 called "The 'Decoupling' of Education and School: Where Do We Begin?" He is thinking about how schools will change as alternative learning platforms become available which challenge and threaten tradition schooling as the place to learn.

He quotes from the book Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America and the quotes resonated with me in relation to my earlier post which was focusing on where the jobs will be, and where students will learn what they need for the "real world."

"If educators cannot successfully integrate new technologies into what it means to be a school, then the long identification of schooling with education, developed over the past 150 years, will dissolve into a world where the students with the means and the ability will pursue their learning outside of public school.”

It's common to hear secondary and college students with entrepreneurial spirit point to people like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or any of the others who gave up on college to start an innovative business - and made a fortune.

We already see signs that students and businesses are willing to look beyond traditional schools, especially for learning in the widening world of technology and media.

If you want to make a prediction for an education trend for the new decade, this quote would be a good starting place.

“Schools were prevalent in the era of apprenticeship, and they will be prevalent in whatever new system of education comes into being. But the seeds of a new system are beginning to emerge, and they are already beginning to erode the identification of learning and schooling. As these new technologically driven seeds germinate, education will occur in many different, more adaptive venues, and schools will have a narrower role in learning.”

Part of the problem with schools and technology learning is that schools adapt very gradually and that is not a model that works for the radical pace of technological change.

"Schools have fiddled with learning technologies on the margins of the system, in boutique innovations that leave core practices untouched. The emergence of new forms of teaching and learning outside of school threaten the identification of learning with formal schooling forged in the 19th Century.”