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10 Principles for the Future of Learning

July 5th, 2009

(This post, written by Jason Flom, is cross-posted on Ecology of Education.)

I daydream the future of schooling will include a teacher like this. (It’s too late for me, I know, but I cross my fingers for the sake of my daughter.)

Yoda aside, who better to daydream the future of learning with than the good folks at MIT? With minds on the front edge of theory, application, and innovation, they’ve shown prescient leadership in harnessing and shaping the emerging trends between technology, media, and learning.

Thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation, The MIT Press has published a series on digital media and learning (with open access electronic versions), which they describe this way:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

In their report, The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg investigate the internet’s transformation of shared and interactive learning. They suggest the following 10 principles as “fundamental to the future of learning institutions”.

(The principles in bold are unedited. The corresponding quotes were extracted from their explanation of the principles.)

1. Self Learning

Self-learning has bloomed; discovering online possibilities is a skill now developed from early childhood through advanced adult life.

2. Horizontal Structures

Given the range and volume of information available and the ubiquity of access to information sources and resources, learning strategy shifts from a focus on information as such to judgment concerning reliable information, from memorizing information to how to find reliable sources. In short, from learning that to learning how, from content to process.

3. From Presumed Authority to Collective Credibility

Learning is shifting from issues of authoritativeness to issues of credibility. A major part of the future of learning is in developing methods, often communal, for distinguishing good knowledge sources from those that are questionable . . . We find ourselves increasingly being moved to interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge-creating and learning environments in order to address objects of analysis and research problems that are multidimensional and complex, and the resolution of which cannot be fashioned by any single discipline.

4. A De-Centered Pedagogy

In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference.26 This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledge-making, global phenomenon of epic proportions. . .

Instead, leaders at learning institutions need to adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy that takes advantage of our era.

5. Networked Learning

The power of ten working interactively will almost invariably outstrip the power of one looking to beat out the other nine.

6. Open Source Education

Networked learning is predicated on and deeply interwoven into the fabric of open source culture.29 Open source culture seeks to share openly and freely in the creation of culture, in its production processes, and in its product, its content. It looks to have its processes and products improved through the contributions of others by being made freely available to all.

If individualized learning is largely tethered to a social regime of copyright-protected intellectual property and privatized ownership, networked learning is committed in the end to an open source and open content social regime. Individualized learning tends overwhelmingly to be hierarchical: one learns from the teacher or expert, on the basis overwhelmingly of copyright-protected publications bearing the current status of knowledge. Networked learning is at least peer-to-peer and more robustly many-to-many.

7. Learning as Connectivity and Interactivity

The connectivities and interactivities made possible by digitally enabled social networking in its best outcomes produce learning ensembles in which the members both support and sustain, elicit from and expand on each other’s learning inputs, contributions, and products. Challenges are not simply individually faced frustrations, Promethean mountains to climb alone, but mutually shared, to be redefined, solved, resolved, or worked around—together.

8. Lifelong Learning

It has become obvious that from the point of view of participatory learning there is no finality. Learning is lifelong.

9. Learning Institutions as Mobilizing Networks

Network culture and associated learning practices and arrangements suggest that we think of institutions, especially those promoting learning, as mobilizing networks. The networks enable a mobilizing that stresses flexibility, interactivity, and outcome.

10. Flexible Scalability and Simulation

Networked learning both facilitates and must remain open to various scales of learning possibility, from the small and local to the widest and most far-reaching constituencies capable of productively contributing to a domain, subject matter, knowledge formation and creation. New technologies allow for small groups whose members are at physical distance to each other to learn collaboratively together and from each other; but they also enable larger, more anonymous yet equally productive interactions.

Image: Wordle

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Posted in Cathy N. Davidson, David Theo Goldberg, Jason Flom, MacArthur Foundation, MIT, technology

Integrated Living. Separated Learning? (Part 2)

June 26th, 2009

This article, written by Jason Flom, is cross-posted on Ecology of Education
In such an integrated world, where the reverberations of problems and solutions ripple far beyond their localized sources, we must learn to think in terms of systems (called systems thinking), to see beyond compartmentalized events, and work with others from diverse backgrounds and cultures toward common goals.

That’s a tall order for a human race often short on patience, tolerance, and understanding.

Additionally, thoroughly analyzing influencing factors beyond the immediate manifestation of a problem is often impossible alone, and cannot be attained by accident. Successful systems thinking requires both critical faculties and collaborative cooperation. Helping students navigate that balance is part of our responsibility as educators: it must be intentionally taught, cultivated, and prioritized.

Project Learning can provide much of the framework and substance for learning skills farther up Bloom’s taxonomy. However, simply providing students with projects and experiences is akin to drinking decaf coffee: its got the taste without the kick.

What’s the kick? Reflection and skill development.

Learning that prepares students for identifying, evaluating, and tackling problems that cross over systems and cultural boundaries must be diversified. No one style or approach can possibly cover the gazillions of options. Students need opportunities to immerse themselves in sweeping projects in which they apply a broad range of skills.

But they also need opportunities to learn, practice, and hone specific skill sets. Exploring and finding the balance between integrated projects and separate skill development should be a primary objective for both reflective practitioners and innovative administrators.

The problem we face today is the over-emphasis on what one of my students’ parents referred to as “the low hanging fruit” — basic skills. With almost exclusive focus on filling a student’s tool box with testable skills (without accompanying opportunities to employ those tools in novel and complex situations), we risk sacrificing holistic, integrated, and systems thinking in order to hold teachers and schools accountable. The sacrifice results in not just bland teaching and irrelevant schooling — the real consequence is that we inadvertently limit the potential of our students.

The compartmentalizing of all skills and learning makes for a cubicle education, while outside the schoolhouse doors students are living in an iPhone world.

Perhaps that is the perfect compliment — isolated schooling and integrated living? With today’s students forever connected to one another through sprawling digital networks, perhaps they are learning systems thinking themselves, and it is only the basic skills they need from schools.

I, myself, am not ready to gamble that. For now, I’ll continue to build curriculum around broad scope projects, breaking them down into bite size, skill development chunks, doing my best to take advantage of integrated living through an understanding the pieces.

Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

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Posted in Collaboration, Education, globalization, integration, Jason Flom, learning, Project Learning

Integrated Living. Separated Learning? Part 1

June 26th, 2009


(This article, written by Jason Flom, is crossposted on Ecology of Education)

I marvel at my phone. It surfs the internet, finds my e-mail, lets me twitter, takes calls, and gets along well with my computer. It’s a calendar, a stopwatch, a newspaper, and a means of distracting my daughter when she needs distracting. It’s the height of integration (for now). So many systems amalgamated. So many advances in technology blended together.

Yet it serves as only a sign and symptom of a much larger trend: increasing connections.

We live in integrated worlds. Myriad spheres overlap and influence other spheres. As the layers and connections increase, so does the complexity and the reverberations of actions, both positive and negative. While many of use get pretty excited by the integrated nature of our technology, it is the interrelated systems of nations and cultures that pose the largest long term impact.

A short list of challenges in today’s world:

  • Climate change
  • The Great Recession
  • Rising extinction rates
  • Famine
  • Poverty
  • Access to potable water
  • Basic rights
  • Education for all

This list is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive. Social and environmental issues run the gambit from site specific challenges to global ramifications. We have about as much hope of cataloging them all as of convincing a 2 year old that whining is an ineffective method for achieving one’s goals.

What’s more, this list isn’t new. Most of these issues have followed (perhaps even pushed) humanity from the savannas of Africa to all corners of terra firma.

So, what’s the point?

The point is this: The complexity of these issues escalates exponentially as the connections and interactions between people and nations increase. Actions by one party potentially impacts others on a much grander scale than ever before. And as the networks grow, so do the effects of our decisions and our patterns of living. (An example of this theory in action: Iranian elections.)

Of course, in this case, the enabling keystone of expanded spheres of influence is technology, which has effectively flattened the world by decreasing the role of proximity as the necessary cornerstone for communication, collaboration, and conflict. (Technology has also exacerbated the divide between the haves and the have nots, but that is fodder for another post.)

The result is that our problems, as people of Earth, are now, more than ever, shared problems. Solutions to those problems cannot be found or enacted in isolation. Want to minimize global climate change? One must act locally and globally. Watching An Inconvenient Truth won’t be enough. Adjusting one’s consumer patterns can make a difference, but real change will happen when a mass of interconnected citizens who demand or create action. (Or a great calamity forces us to rethink.) Technology allows previously isolated groups to join together, for better or for worse, and drive change.

What does this have to do with education?

Everything.

Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

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Posted in Jason Flom, learning, Sphere of Influence, Systems thinking, technology, X Collaboration X Education X globalization X Integration

(Re) Emerging Trend: Disruptive Innovation

May 4th, 2009


By Jason Flom

(This article is cross-posted on Ecology of Education)

Let’s take an imaginary trip through some snapshots from our Educational Landscape Photo Album:

  • Here’s Achievement Gap on a culinary tour of Urban Areas, circa 2009. Bigger than ever and looking healthy.
  • Take a look at High Stakes Test — that trickster keeps giving our schools bunny ears.
  • How cute! In this one the Basil Readers team spelled out BLAND using only textbooks.
  • Oh, check out the Teachers’ faces when they realized Standardization got rid of all the food at the annual picnic except for potato salad. Good times.
  • Don’t show this one to too many people, but here is the Education Technology Crew, looking like CIA agents as they scheme of ways to get around blocked sites.
  • And finally, the memorable series of the Kids playing 21st century games on their cell phones:
    • Climatic Sorry!
    • Petro-opoloy
    • Financial Market Jenga
    • Hungry, Hungry Energy
    • International Squabble
    • Meal or No Meal
    • Who Wants to be an Immigrant?

Collectively, such snapshots (though fictional) illustrate current themes that point to the idea that education is undergoing a transformation: from the complacency of yesterday to the eventuality of tomorrow. As a result, we stand today in a period of disruption and change. Budgets are suffering, drop out rates are on the rise again, curriculum is being narrowed, and for every one writer who offers constructive ideas, there are three others doing their impressions of Chicken Little: “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

You can barely open the paper, surf the internet, or tweet merrily without bumping up against some big debate about the nature of learning, what our schools should and should not be doing, and/or reform for this century or some other.

This is very good news.

While evolutionary biologists can argue over the exact mechanisms that lead to specific mutations, an undisputed fact remains: disruption stimulates change.

And, when it comes to development, growth and innovation, change is not only good, it is necessary.

For example, the rapid demise of the dinosaurs left the landscape in comparative chaos. Mammals capitalized on the available resources, and over time, changed considerably (exhibit A). Had the reign of the dinosaurs not ended, the mammals might have had a much more difficult time thriving, because, let’s face it, mammals taste delicious. (Full disclosure: I do not eat mammals, but I hear many animals — people included — enjoy them often enough. exhibit B)

The colosal failure (fail whale?) of reptilian megafauna cased a disruption in the biosphere that effectively spurred rapid growth, cultivating previously unavailable niches that in turn, spurred more growth. (While anyone watching My Super Sweet Sixteen might wonder if that growth has, in fact, been good, when I see my daughter laugh, I’m inclined to believe that it has been.)

So?

So, the current turmoil in our nation’s school system amounts to a national disruption that is stimulating change.

Robert Bruner, Dean of Darden School of Business at University of Virginia, recently posted an article to his professional blog entitled, Innovation in Disruptive Environments. He opens by considering how “innovators respond to uncertainty.” He goes on to suggest the importance of collaboration and networks in surviving (and ultimately thriving) during periods of challenge and disruption. He writes:

Successful inventors in history, such as Thomas Edison, were champions at collaboration with people of diverse expertise. In his book How Breakthroughs Happen, Andrew Hargadon wrote, “What set Edison’s laboratory apart was not the ability to shut itself off from the rest of the world, to create something, to think outside of the box. Exactly the opposite: it was the ability to connect that made the lab so innovative. If Edison ignored anything, it was the belief that innovation was about the solitary pursuit of invention. Edison was able to continuously innovate because he knew how to exploit the networked landscape of his time.” What really mattered was Edison’s network of invention. Hargadon argues that the most successful inventors are very good at technology brokering: borrowing here and there to create something new. Furthermore, good inventors recombine what they gather; as Hargadon says, “All innovations represent some break from the past…By the same token, all innovations are built from pieces of the past”—very few are truly revolutionary, radical, or discontinuous. What matters is the inventor’s network of connectivity to the past, and to inventions in the present.

With this in mind, the educational uncertainty and disruption currently affecting us today might become our stepping stone by utilizing three behaviors:

  1. Reflection and Planning: Long term, sustainable growth should be intentional and well thought out. We need to reflect on what is known and contemplate what might be. What’s our blue sky? What is achievable today? Tomorrow? And how can we ensure that the next generation of educational innovators can stand on our shoulders with solid feet to envision their tomorrow?
  2. Partnership and Collaboration: An education system that leaves no child behind requires that diverse vested interests work together in teams and partnerships to identify patterns, trends, and emerging relationships, before setting a course. It behooves us to include diverse knowledge and wisdom and ideas.
  3. Action and Exploration: Like scientific research that can take years (even decades and centuries) to mature into customer ready products, we need additional environments (like charter schools) for innovators to explore and develop new methodologies for reaching the wide range of students, interests, and cognitive needs of our diverse population. With strategic efforts we can then determine which strategies work locally and which could be applied on a larger scale. Then, repeat process.

Education’s soil is being turned, and now is the time to plant seeds for tomorrow. Not for today’s gains, our own glory, or to get a politician re-elected, but to ensure that this disruption’s growth amounts to long term innovation for our children, their children, and the world they live in.

As the Chinese proverb states, “One generation plants the seed, the next enjoys the shade.

Graphic: jaylopez

Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen, page 17.
Hargadon, page 32.

Follow Jason Flom on twitter (@jasonflom)

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Emerging Trend: Giving Teaching the Ole Tire Kick-Test

April 19th, 2009

In his article, Creme de la Career (titled “With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King” on-line), Steve Lohr of the New York Times suggests that “the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years.”
This trend proved true during both the Depression and “cold war Communist challenge” when college students migrated toward fields where “jobs beckoned and pay was good.” The results — ranging from the interstate system to Hoover Dam to the foundations of our modern computing framework — continue to shape and inform the world we live. Their legacy lives on.
The basic idea is this: a period of instability triggers a change that is then followed by relative stability. In evolutionary biology, this theory is called punctuated equilibrium. Borrowing from biologists, social scientists apply this theory to explain rapid periods of change in policy, behavioral patterns, and organizations. Wikipedia states it as such:

The model states that policy generally changes only incrementally due to several restraints, namely the ‘stickiness’ of institutional cultures, vested interests, and the bounded rationality of individual decision-makers. Policy change will thus be punctuated by changes in these conditions, especially change in party control of government or changes in public opinion. Thus, policy is characterized by long periods of stability, punctuated by large, but less frequent changes due to large shifts in society or government.

Mr. Lohr goes on to report that with the diminished lure of Wall Street, indicators such as “graduate school applications this spring, enrollment in undergraduate courses, preliminary job-placement results at schools, and the anecdotal accounts of students and professors” are pointing towards the emergence of a “new pattern of occupational choice”. He goes on to say, “(p)ublic service, government, the sciences and even teaching look to be winners.”
Did I read that right? “Even teaching”?
“Even teaching” is among the winners?! Well, Shazam!
Someone gas up the barbi, put some micro brews on ice, and queue up Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” on the iPod. There’s gonna be a party going on right here, a celebration, to last throughout the year(s).
I guess before I get too excited and start popping champagne to welcome more top-shelf students to our profession, we need to get serious about giving this jalopy of ours a tune-up. If young adults are going to be giving this career the equivalent of a tire kick-test, we need to make sure the wheels are in good shape, the engine hums and it is going to get good gas mileage over the course of their lives.
Basically, if we wish to capitalize on this dynamic shift in demographics and attract sharp, critical, and talented students to the field of teaching, we need to get serious about wooing seekers with a gleaming coupe of a profession. We need to Pimp Our Ride. And, we need to be already working on strategies keep them in it. Starting yesterday.
We should start with a good hard look at some of the rust built up on the frame of our beloved little clunker of a career:
  • Do we really think we’ll keep ambitious, growth-minded professionals in a field that requires a 30 year veteran to do nearly the same job as a fresh-from-college graduate?
  • Are students who’ve been successful at carving out their own niche going to be satisfied being required to teach from a text book, and then being judged solely on the results of a high stakes test that someone else takes?
  • Will young educators with a history of leadership experiences survive and thrive in a system dominated by top down reform efforts?
  • Can we really expect young adults, even altruistically minded ones, to stick with a profession that still pays many of its professionals like day laborers?
  • Are we likely to capitalize on the potential of collaborative curves if we isolate these new teachers in classrooms with little or no time to work with colleagues in meaningful and innovative ways?
Yikes. Will a wax job be enough to buff these issues out? No. Perhaps our strategy should be to enlist the efforts of a new generation of teachers. We want them to feel that their potential, their ideas and ideals can have a transformative presence in the field of education.
They need to feel that their contributions will make a difference.
There are small things we can do. To start with:
Our education language needs a stimulus package.
“Standards” and “accountability” can no longer be both the cornerstone and keystone of our conversations about learning. We need to hear words like engaging, curiosity, creativity, multiple intellegences, equal access, differentiation, learning environments, relevance, collaboration, and media literacy (among many others) when people talk about quality education.
There should be some effort to present the utility and versatility of becoming an educator. With the changing paradigm of globalization and international interaction, teachers have become indispensable On-Star navigators, helping to steer students (in any subject and at any level) toward information, knowledge, and skills that lead to success.
With that in mind, compare the aesthetics and persuasive content of the following sites. Which inspires you to teach? Which makes you want to run away?
Additionally, We need to begin establishing more layers in the teaching profession. Current advancement is limited to becoming a principal or a professor. What if there were a middle ground between these career options?
Katherine Boles, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education, outlined in the book she co-authored with Vivian Troen,”Who’s Teaching Your Children: Why the Teaching Crisis Is Worse Than You Think and What Can Be Done About It“, ideas about how to achieve increased complexity and topography in the professional educator’s career. They suggest we construct “Millennium Schools” in which there are numerous layers to the teaching profession in order to provide opportunities for beginner and master teachers alike to develop.
Four main pillars of a Millennium School are:
  • Multi-tiered career paths for teachers
  • Teaching in teams instead of in isolation
  • Performance-based accountability
  • Ongoing professional development for all teachers and principals.
The authors write,
A Millennium School offers teachers a multilevel career path that rewards advanced training and experieince with higher levels of pay, responsibility, supervision, and team management. . . (It) calls for the establishment of six teaching positions:
  • Chief instructor
  • Professional teacher
  • Teacher
  • Associate teacher
  • Teaching intern
  • Instructional aide
As a potential career option, teaching becomes much more attractive (and interesting) when there are more layers and levels. As teachers become hungry for more responsibility, pay, or both, or just a slight change, they have possibilities.
Our 20th century Tin Lizzie of a profession needs some updating. New interior design with increased access to technology, collaborative opportunities, autonomy, and professional advancement. Aerodynamic classrooms tricked out with resources and outfitted with relevant curriculum. Advanced integrated features such as accountability measures that stimulate engaged students and inspire teachers to grow and develop.
The schools of the future begin with our efforts today, and we need to communicate the great value, purpose, and potential of teaching. We want these career seekers to give our profession the kick test and find that it is not only worthy of their attention, but well worth their investment. We only stand to gain — as a profession, as a society, and as a world.

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Emerging Trend: Collaborative Curve

April 12th, 2009

Recently, on the Harvard Business Publishing website, The Big Shift team (John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison) posted an article titled, Introducing the Collaborative Curve.
They tell the story of how a fax machine, by itself, is pretty worthless. However it becomes increasingly more valuable as more fax machines are added to the network (Network Effect). They go on to suggest that if the fax machines “improved their performance” when new units were added to the network it would not only have “an amplifying effect on the first level of exponential performance,” but it would also bring about a second amplifying effect as the machines’ performance improves.
To illustrate their point they provide an example from the World of Warcraft:

What happens, for instance, as you add more participants to a carefully-designed environment? The online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) provides an intriguing example. More than 11.5 million people around the world now play World of Warcraft. Performance in the game is measured by experience points, which are awarded to players as they successfully address progressively more difficult challenges. It takes roughly 150 hours of accumulated game play to earn the first 2 million experience points but players on average are able to earn another 8 million experience points in the next 150 hours of accumulated game play. Even though, within the game, experience points become more difficult to acquire as you advance, World of Warcraft players are improving their performance four times faster as they continue to play the game.

They postulate that this is the result of the numerous interactions between practitioners of the game and each others’ knowledge base. Through blogs, wikis, forums, and databases, they learn from and with one another at an exponentially amplified rate.
Calling this emerging trend “Collaborative Curve,” they define it as, “the more participants–and interactions between those participants–you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up.”
While this is an introduction to the trend, the behavior itself is not news to anyone who’s ever lived off the land.
Take the nomadic hunters of the ice age for example. Surely they collaborated in order to capitalize on and innovate new technologies, such as the atlatl. I imagine them, cloaked in fur, sitting around their fire, perhaps even gnawing on a deer bone, discussing methods for more effectively bringing down a mastodon using the new tool. Comparing experiences and then applying each others’ lessons surely advanced mastery and utility beyond what one could achieve alone, and at a much faster rate.
However, the emerging nature of this trend relates to the utilization of a new technology — interactive media. By ‘meeting’ at digital gathering points, the expertise of like minded enthusiasts, even across vast distances, accelerates the growth of ideas, knowledge, and ultimately innovation far beyond what was feasible with traditional trade publications, snail mail, or conference calls.
In the past, proximity has played a key role in meaningful collaboration. With the advent of Web 2.0 that obstacle has been effectively flattened, or at least lessened.
What does this mean for education? Depends on what we make of it.
If the anecdotal evidence proves true, the ramifications might lead us to two conclusions:
  1. Through our use of networking as professionals in the field of education (such as through the emerging on-line communities on twitter, wikis, skype, podcasts, blogs, etc) as well as efforts in our schools (through intentional practices such as PLC), we stand to exponentially improve the art and science of our pedagogical practices.
  2. By learning to utilize collaborative communities to their fullest potential, we can better implement tools that enable students to take advantage of these opportunities for their own growth. The benefits of this are two-fold. One, they have access to a broad range of content, yet depth in whatever topic they focus on. Two, If we can provide more opportunities for students to learn strategies for utilizing collaborative communities, we equip them with skills that will help them not only learn and understand more, but to apply that content in new and innovative ways.
I look forward to the emergence of new research on collaborative curves, because this trend could be a game changer. If researchers find that collaborative networks do accelerate learning for both individuals and groups, we might all benefit — students, teachers, administrators.
What else might we garner from this trend as it relates to teaching, learning, and constructing classroom environments that lead to a relevant education?
Jason Flom spends 10 months of the year being schooled by 4th graders (leading him to wonder if he missed the “101 Clever Kid Tricks” lecture at the University of Florida, where he received his bachelor’s and master’s in education). He recently founded Ecology of Education, a multi-author blog committed to exploring ideas and issues in education and learning from various niches in related fields. He can be reached at on twitter (jasonflom) or by e-mail (jason.flom@ecologyofeducation.net) or out in the woods on a hike with his wife and daughter.
Image: spekulator

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