Derek's Blog

In thinking about what schools might be like in the future it's imperative that we ask our students! They are the ones whose freshness of vision, and currency of experience in the existing system we can learn a lot from.

It's been nearly 15 years now since the original New Zealand Curriculum Framework was released, providing the structure and guidelines for what is taught in NZ schools. A couple of years ago the NZ Ministry of Education embarked on a process of consultation with teachers, principals and other educators as part of the "NZ Curriculum Project", leading to the development of a revised and updated curriculum framework.

One of the lesser visited part of the website set up to support this project is a section that reports on feedback from students who were asked for their thoughts about the future of schooling, with questions including:

1. Thinking about the future and the things you would most like to do, imagine yourself as a successful person. What is a successful person?
   
2. What's your favourite subject and why?
   
3. What helps you learn? What advice would you give to teachers?

The students' responses have been summarised in sections linked from the headings listed below. Significantly, two groups out of the ten commented that this was the first chance they had ever had to comment on their learning, and welcomed the opportunity.

Their responses are insightful, for instance, on the topic of technology:

Technology featured significantly in students' views of the future. Many perceived the advancement of technology as negative, especially in terms of making people "lazier". One student commented: "With technology, it seems as if things are automatically done for you... you won't go the extra mile to do things for yourself." Another said: "...the Magic Pen ... will tend to switch people's brains off during class because it can download the information given during a lesson. Students and/or people won't have work they produced themselves."

School was generally seen as an important means of acquiring the skills and qualifications necessary for success. Some comments relating to this were:

• "To have a really good job you need to have a good education."
  
• "No school, no job."
  
• "I think to be happy you have to be successful. To be successful you have to go hard at school."
  
• "School goes past very quickly. You need to make the most of it, be motivated to set goals and achieve them; take opportunities ... it might be your only chance."

Aside from the written summaries available on the site, there are several video clips that capture many of the thoughts and opinions of the young people who were surveyed. I found the student comments about teachers particularly interesting :-)

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in 2004 I was a part of a series of workshops at the Commonwealth of Learning's Pan Pacific Forum in Dunedin where we focused our thoughts on the way education could contribute to achieving the UN's Millennium Development Goals. Saturday's auspcious date - 070707 - marked the halfway point to the 2015 deadline for achieving these goals, and a progress report by the United Nations to mark the occasion has found that while there has been clear progress, their overall success is still far from assured, and will depend in large part on whether developed countries make good on their aid commitments.

I was interested to read the summary of the report and thought of the dozens of teachers around the country who could be tapping into this very useful data as a part of their social sciences programmes. Of particular interest was the chart that summarises the state of play in each of the eight goals, and differentiated across the ten main regions of the world.

The Chart shows progress as of June 2007, based on data for selected indicators in each of the eight Goals. More detailed information relating to specific countries in each region can be found by visiting the UN's Millennium Development Goals Indicators website which presents the official data, definitions, methodologies and sources for the 48 indicators to measure progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.

I'm about to start teaching my Global Classroom course again from next week, and the availability of this level of data provides a really authentic reason for engaging in Global Classroom programmes on sites such as:

• The UN CyberSchoolBus
  
• I*EARN'
  
• SOF_web Global Classroom Projects
  
• Wide Angle Global Classroom Projects
  
• Global Classroom.net
  
• Global Classrooms.org
  
• TakingITglobal.org

To name just a few!
If you have a good global project going I'd love to hear of it to share it with the students on my course!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Sheryl Nassbaum-Beach has started a new discussion over on the TechLearn blog, titled Virtual Communities as a Canvas for Educational Reform. She poses the following questions at the start of her article:

How do we promote the knowledge, skills and sense of urgency for 21st Century teaching and learning among all teachers in our schools? How do we come to the place we are willing to change ??? to risk change ??? to meet the obvious need for better alignment between "school as we know it" and the needs of 21st Century learners?

Sheryl claims a burgeoning body of opinion suggests that virtual learning communities are becoming the venue through which agents for change operate. - which is a statement that rings true for me, although I see the evidence as being more circumstantial and anecdotal than empirical at this stage. That aside, I do agree with Sheryl that the online environment is creating an enormous potential for bringing about large-scale transformative change in our schools and educational institutions.

The traditional view of communities as groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly (loosely taken from Wenger) leads to a strengthening and affirmation of these ideas and practices, forging a community identity and sense of belonging and purpose etc. BUT, as Wenger also points out, after a while , such communities can become very intro-spective and protective of their identity, leading to a resistance to change. This is where I see the virtual world, in particular the web2.0 technologies, creating some great opportunities.

At the 2004 NECC conference Malcolm Gladwell spoke about the importance of the 'mavens' and 'connectors' in the emerging world - noting the importance of people with the ability to make links between ideas and people, and who are good at 'gathering' up important pieces of the puzzle and making sense of them. Wenger refers to the idea of "boundary workers" - those who work in the boundaries between established communities - asserting that these are the people who are essentially change agents, refreshing and introducing new ideas to the communities they move between.

In the Web2.0-enabled online environments we now inhabit, those who are the mavens and connectors, many of whom are also boundary workers, are provided with a range of tools and opportunities that make it easier and more effective to carry out these roles. An RSS aggregator, for instance, enables a single person to monitor and contribute to a wide range of communities in a fraction of the time it may have taken previously.

So - I see these two distinct advantages of virtual communities:

1. linking people with common purpose and practice in a way that they can support each other and grow in depth in their understandings and practice, and

2. enabling connections and sharing ideas across and between communities, leading to transformation of ideas and understandings, and eventually practice.

If you have a moment, visit Sheryl's post and see what other thoughts are being shared in response to what she has written.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A few years ago when I was worked as the eLearning manager at NZ's Correspondence School it became very clear to me that the offerings of the Correspondence School were relevant not just to those who were unable to attend a traditional school, but to anyone within our education system. It didn't require an Einstein intelligence to figure this out - around 50% of the school's 20,000 students were in fact already attending traditional secondary schools, using TCS courses to supplement the limited subject offerings of what was available to students in their own school. The transition into an eLearning environment, I thought, provided a wonderful opportunity to not simply supplement our existing school system, but to transform it!

Unfortunately, at a time of increasing scrutiny into costs etc., the opportunity for transformation was lost to those on the conservative side of the fence - and so we go on building new old schools, some with exciting new architectures, but more of the same happening on the inside - not because there isn't a will or desire to change that too, but because the time-pace constraints that are inherent in the physicality of schools dictate much of what follows - timetables, subject silos, attendance registers etc.

An article in the Independent over the weekend caught my eye - titled 'No more school as council opens 'learning centres', it describes a bold decision by the Knowsley Council in Merseyside to close all eleven of its existing secondary schools and replace them with learning centres.

The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.

Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects.

They will be given their day's assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out.

The 21,000 youngsters of secondary education age in Knowsley will also be able to access their learning programmes from home.

I can imagine the debates that this announcement will start - but I say "good on them"! At last, someone with the gumption to truly look outside the box and conceive of a way in which secondary education may be provided that takes advantage of the opportunities that new and emerging technologies provide, and is truly learner-centred in its approach.

Of course, the challenge now will be to find the innovative providers of learning that will be made available in this online environment, to ensure that what they end up with is more than simply a 'delivery channel' for lots of online content, reinforcing a transmission model of education similar to many classrooms, but now available within a different timeframe.

The one thing that does concern me about the Knowsley decision, however, is that it's become an 'all or nothing' approach, so this will become the only way for secondary students to complete their schooling. It will be interesting to see how well they can stave off the pressure, that I'm sure will come, which may led to their study centres simply becoming traditional schools again - with longer opening hours!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)