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Sugata Mitra’s new TED talk – creating environments for emergent learning

Be sure to watch this TED talk by Sugata Mitra, who has done pioneering research with computers, learning and children, especially about learning in parts of the world where, as he says, “good teachers don’t want to go.”

He talks about some of his old concepts, such as the Hole in the Wall project, where computers were placed in walls in the slums of India, and what happened as the children taught themselves and others how to use them. His concept of “Minimally Invasive Education” is based on these experiments, basically giving children fully functional computers and time to explore questions of interest. The results were amazingly consistent — children can achieve basic competency on computers completely on their own, even when the interfaces were in languages they didn’t understand. It calls into question the whole definition of technology literacy and how we traditionally teach it.

There is more about his projects here in my blog post from 2007 which has videos and links from those earlier experiments, and some thoughts on what this means about the role of the teacher.

Now for an update. Mitra has been busy, designing all kinds of environments to explore the range and limits of what children can do with computers. This new TED talk shows these experiments, future plans and how he sees education as a self-organizing system with learning as emergent behavior.

In it, he talks about his current experiments using a “granny cloud” and Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs). Both of these are experiments where students had access to grannies, teachers, and other experts over broadband connections. For example, a “granny” might read aloud to the class, or to an individual student. What might this mean to a classroom where students have no regular teacher, an overburdened teacher, or an undertrained teacher? What might this mean to children who have no classroom at all? Could kiosks be placed in remote village centers?

These experiments, like the One Laptop Per Child project, seek to address the learning needs of the developing world. And we need to meet those needs, to bring education and hope to all people around the world. It is incredibly short-sighted to view education as a competition, where American children “win” only if children in other countries lose. We need people like Sugata Mitra to explore new ways of teaching and learning that can reach everyone on earth, not just those with access to traditional classrooms and good teachers. And as a bonus, in doing so, it provides new insight and raises questions about what conditions and environments really support good learning.

Some might see this research as an attack on teachers, questioning the need for any teacher in any classroom. I do not think this is the case, as I explained in my blog post from 2007 about this concept.

But what do you think?

Sylvia

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Prairie Elementary Filmmakers Save a Regional Nature Program

From Gail Desler (aka Blogwalker) in a school district near Sacramento, CA.

Prairie Elementary Filmmakers Save a Regional Nature Program | BlogWalker.

“I was there – at the Sacramento Board of Directors – on Wednesday, joining other concerned educators and citizens in a last minute effort to save one of Sacramento’s primo science programs: Spash.

Thanks to Splash, thousands of elementary, middle, and high school students have explored life in Sacramento’s streams and, in the process, have come to understand why taking care of our water supply is so vital to the community. However, the Board was ready to eliminate the program as part of their latest round of budget cuts.

We had our chance to speak out, each person being allotted 3 minutes to justify continued funding for the program. With Splash director Eva Butler leading the charge, I think the 12 of us who took our turns at the podium helped provide the Board members with an understanding and appreciation that for most kids, “Splash is their first experience with relevant science and things that live beyond the pavement in Sacramento’s streams and vernal pools.”

But it was clearly a team of 5th grade filmmakers from Prairie Elementary School (Lesley McKillop’s former 4th graders) who saved the program. In less than 2 minutes, their Saving Splash video (see snippets in the above TV coverage) provided a compelling argument that led to a unanimous vote to save the program.

A huge victory for students all over the Sacramento region – and a powerful lesson to our young filmmakers on the importance of taking a stand and the power of media to sway an audience.”

If you don’t know, California schools are going through some incredibly tough fiscal times. Yes, I know that’s true all across the US, but California school’s are especially dependent on property taxes, and California real estate was subject to some of the biggest bubble bursting in the country. So the fact that these young filmakers changed a decision in these times especially affirms the power of student voice.

Here’s another reason – the subject of water and the science behind it. The city of Sacramento is at the heart of the California Central Valley Delta. This inland water system is the ecological lifeblood of the state and nourishes one the richest agricultural areas in the U.S. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value, most of it fed by human engineered water systems (source). Understanding water ecology is vital to Sacramento citizens. So this testimonial about elementary school students saving a science program with their media skills is no joke. This is not just media literacy, it’s science, politics, and ecology! This is certainly the “real world” that we want students to experience.

Thanks, Gail, for sharing Prairie Elementary Filmmakers Save a Regional Nature Program

Sylvia

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The feeling of twitter as a metaphor for education

Repost from July 2008. Still relevant today!

OK, my turn. Obsession over Twitter, a microblogging tool that’s a favorite of millions thousands hundreds of edu-tech-bloggers, is running rampant over at Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed – What I Hate About Twitter.

Will is ambivalent about his own reaction to Twitter, and the 103 (and counting) comments range from agreeing, explaining, dismissing, and accepting various theories about what Twitter is and should be.

In my experience, Twitter is a nice place to hang out with people. Sort of like Second Life without bumping into things. A lot like a lunch room. Twitter is simple to use and gives you 140 characters to say something, anything. You see everything your “friends” say, and you can choose your friends based on any criteria you like. So loose groups of people tend to form who have similar interests.

On Twitter, the flow of tidbits is fast and completely random. Depending on when you show up, you hear about mundane details of people’s lives, work highlights, baseball color commentary, requests for help, and more than a few musings on educational technology. Not surprisingly, when you get a bunch of people who live, work and sometimes breathe education and technology, the conversation trends that way.

On Will’s blog, the conversation about Twitter is fascinating. People love Twitter, hate Twitter, can’t stand the cacophony, want it to be neater and more organized, accept Twitter for what it is, and much much more.

But my thoughts are going elsewhere today. I’m thinking about Twitter as a human laboratory — as a metaphor for learning. Twitter is what it is. How people react to it is a mirror of how they manage their own experience and their own needs.

Imagine if we let children manage their own learning like this?

How many kids get the chance to express their needs in their learning process. Clay Burrell says, “I tend to jump in, swim around like a fish in a wine barrel, then flop out to dry up for a few days or weeks. Then jump back in again. I love the playfulness, the sharing, the relationships.”

Is there every a time we let students “swim around” in learning and then have a chance to reflect, to think, to catch their mental breath?

Nate Stearns says, “Twitter doesn’t work for me, but I know that’s more about me than anything else. I like longer bits to digest” Do we ever give children this choice?

Jarred says, “I often feel a need to “keep up” with the high-frequency tweeters out there…“ How many students are paralyzed by the competitive nature of many classroom activities?

From Christian Long, “The more we seek to create Twitterquette, the more the organic joy of it all becomes watered down so that only a small group of like-minded souls are willing to hang out.” From kindergarten on, school becomes increasingly structured and less joyful. In the end, only certain kinds of students thrive in this environment. We label these like-minded souls “successful” and denigrate the wandering souls with punishment, ever-more boring and structured courses with even less chance to find what might spark a love of learning.

You could read every single comment and create parallels about how most school experiences are so different than what we expect for our own learning.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by this time that I’m NOT advocating Twitter for the classroom, or even Twitter as a necessary part of an educator’s professional development. Far from it. Nor am I advocating that learning should all be freeform and lacking a guiding hand.

Some students can take the always-on, highly organized and structured nature of the classroom – but many can’t. What can we learn from Twitter to allow a more natural, unstructured mix of learning and socializing that might actually feel soothing to some students?

The “feeling” of Twitter may actually be what many educators hope to encourage in an inquiry-driven, project-based classroom. The thrill of getting an unexpected answer to your exact question. The ability to choose when to jump in and when to hang back.The excitement of an intellectual gauntlet thrown down and picked up. Watching experts do battle and learning that there are words to express your own inner thoughts in a more intellectual, accomplished way. Watching people verbally implode and thinking, “I won’t do that!” Socializing in a group and celebrating the common goofy humanness of all different kinds of people.

Educators who create climates of possibility in a classroom sometimes make it look easy, but it’s far more tricky than it looks to guide groups of students in goal-oriented, academic tasks while still allowing them to drive their own learning. I talk to teachers all the time who have been tweaking project assignments for years, subtly changing minor details of timing, instruction, environment and tools to increase the level of student agency while also increasing the quality of student work. It’s difficult, painstaking, rewarding work.

What might Twitter teach us about creating these learning environments?

  • The rewards of serendipity
  • Making it simple to participate, contribute, or watch
  • The importance of socializing
  • Choice
  • Freeing up time constraints
  • Questioning whether imposed rules increase or limit participation

Your thoughts?

Sylvia

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New podcast from Radio TICAL – bringing student voice into ed tech

Involving students as partners and co-learners in the educational process, rather than as consumers—or worse, as “objects”—is not a new concept but it is certainly gaining currency in the 21st century. With information exploding, teachers can no longer hope to know everything about their subject. With changes in student lifestyles, fewer and fewer of them are content to be passive participants in the classroom.

GenYES is remarkable in how it brings student voice into the learning conversation. In this episode, Sylvia Martinez, President of GenYES, describes the project’s original program for bringing students and teachers together to co-plan technology-infused lessons as well as a newer program, TechYES, which offers a unique project-based learning approach to certifying middle school students as technologically literate.

via Radio TICAL.

Yup, that’s me, in a podcast recorded with Michael Simkins of  the Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership (TICAL). It’s the “go to” place for California school administrators who want to understand how to integrate technology in their schools. TICAL offers resources and networking opportunities both online and in person.

Direct podcast link (MP3)

Sylvia

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Unpacking a survey – High School Survey of Student Engagement

This post is by Steven Hicks, who is our project specialist at Generation YES. He writes about a recently released 2009 survey – High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) out of Indiana University. This year, 42,754 high school students participated in the survey. These students where selected from 103 different schools in 27 different states and reflected a cross section of the US population. The study sought to solicit student opinions in three broad areas of engagement: intellectual/academic, social/behavioral, and emotional.

Be sure to watch the video at the end, I found it very interesting that they talked about engagement as a measure of the “relationship” a student has with school, teachers and peers.

Enjoy! – Sylvia

“When we are curious about a child’s words and our responses to those words, the child feels respected. The child IS respected.” – Vivian Gussin Paley

Many schools seek and collect data to help them construct and measure reform efforts in their districts. Typical tools used for education policy analysis are attendance, performance, and achievement data. Data on student perceptions of school — why they go, why they stay (or don’t), and what methods/policies they feel enhance their learning experience are far less common. Unfortunately, student voices are often inferred from quantitative data, which misses the nuances of student motivation and engagement; the omission of student opinion in policy-making results in inadequate, “wishful thinking” policies that inherently prevent students from taking ownership of their learning.

The results for “time on task” questions on the survey may cause concern to those who exclusively view this as a measure of student engagement – 77% of students reported spending five hours or fewer per week on homework. However, when asked about the importance of activities common to adolescents, students overwhelmingly (79%) felt that doing homework was paramount. Students clearly make a distinction between the amount of time spent doing an activity and the importance of the same activities. Combined with the 42% of students who “do not see the value in the work they were being asked to do” and the small percentage (23%) of students who believe that school helps them “solve[ing] real world problems”, it could be inferred that schools should be more concerned with the quality of assigned work and less with traditional “time on task” method of measuring student engagement with the material.

Students were also asked to rate the degree to which various instructional methods excite/engage them. Overwhelmingly, students chose collaborative activities where they are active participants in the learning process as being “some” or “very much” exciting/engaging: “Discussion and Debate” (61%), “Group Projects” (60%), “Presentations” (46%), “Role-Plays” (43%), “Art and Drama Activities” (49%), and “Projects and Lessons Involving Technology” (55%) were all rated very highly by students. Contrast these activities with more independent/passive ones such as “Teacher Lecture” (26%), “Individual Reading” (30%), and “Writing Projects” (30%); it can be noted that “Teacher Lecture” was the least engaging activity with 45% of students saying that it was not at all exciting/engaging to them.

The conclusion of the 2009 HSSSE Survey revealed the same gaps in engagement as previous years. These “engagement gaps” closely mirror the typical gaps in achievement shown by multiple other studies: girls are more engaged than boys, Caucasian and Asian students are more engaged than black or Latino students, wealthier students are more engaged than those on free lunch, etc. The relationship between the achievement and engagement gaps needs to be further studied, however, the results of this survey suggest that gaps in engagement are potentially more addressable than achievement gaps at the school level — simply modifying the quality of assignments and delivery of knowledge may go a long way to increasing performance.

There is plenty of room to debate about why students feel the way they do, or whether they “know what’s best” for themselves; some may even question to what degree schools should be concerned with making content “interesting”. However, we teach students to consider their audience when conveying information — why should they expect less from us?

The full report, this video and more information about the HSSSE can be found here.

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Creating a Generation of “Thinkerers”

Making provides opportunities for young people to use their hands and their minds together. Untold numbers of youth are messing around with all manner of tools to create, in tangible form, what’s on their minds. Equally important, the maker movement nurtures communities of practice that bring adults and young people together around common interests. Thus, to visit the Maker Faire or a community-based fab lab is to see an aspect of our young people that we seldom witness in schools.

via Elliot Washor: Making Their Way: Creating a Generation of “Thinkerers”.

Elliot Washor of the Big Picture Schools writes about a Maker’s Faire – a time and place outside of school dedicated to bringing together the factors that make learning really happen – time, materials, personal interest, a helpful community, and taking risks.

Be sure to read this article! Making Their Way: Creating a Generation of “Thinkerers”.

 

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Focus on results can make children do worse, study finds

Children do better in their exams when their teachers focus on learning, rather than on test results, a detailed research survey published by the Institute of Education, University of London, concludes.

“A focus on learning can enhance performance, whereas a focus on performance alone can depress performance”, writes Chris Watkins, Reader in Education in this summer’s edition of Research Matters. Children who develop a “performance orientation” rather than a “learning orientation” tend to show greater helplessness, use less strategic thinking and be more focused on grade feedback. They are more likely to persevere with strategies that are not working.

Watkins says schools have two challenges:

  1. To recognize that passing tests is not the goal of education, but a by-product of effective learning.
  2. To recognize that even when we want pupils to do their best in tests, pressure and performance orientation will not achieve it.

Read more about this study at: IOE – Focus on results can make children do worse, study finds. (The actual study does not appear to be online, but this description is well worth reading.)

This is a difficult distinction for educators – pushing students to do better on tests has the opposite effect. And yet, we continue to do just that in the face of research (this study and others). It just seems like it’s “obvious” that drilling kids for tests is the way to go, and counter-intuitive to ease up on the test prep in order to do better on tests.

The problem is that research and studies aren’t really convincing those who need to be convinced. Why is this?

Update – it is online in PDF form. Thanks for the find by commenter aschmitz!

Sylvia

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Online safety report discourages scare tactics

A new, really important report has just come out about children and online safety. It is sensible and research-based, with excellent recommendations. The strongest recommendation is that scare tactics DON’T WORK to keep children safe online. I hate to sound surprised, but it is really a breath of fresh air. Educators and parents should read it!

Although unwanted online solicitations can have an alarming impact, recent studies have shown that “the statistical probability of a young person being physically assaulted by an adult who they first met online is extremely low,” the working group noted.

And young people’s use of social networking sites does not increase their risk of victimization, according to a 2008 report that appeared in American Psychologists.

via Online safety report discourages scare tactics | Featured SAFE | eSchoolNews.com

And kudos to eSchoolNews for an excellent report on a complex and highly charged subject.

Sylvia

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Constructionism 2010

I’ll be in Paris, France for the next week to attend Constructionism 2010 at the University of Paris. Constructionism 2010 is a reincarnation of Eurologo, and the name change refelects the myriad of opportunities that exist today for using technology to express the educational philosophy of constructionism.

I’m looking forward to linking the learning from Constructing Modern Knowledge 2010 last month to Constructionism 2010. Seminal people in constructionism will be there, including Idit Harel, Cynthia Solomon, Gary Stager, Jose Valente, and Brian Harvey. Of course, this list is completely personal (and geographically biased!). But that’s how learning happens, you connect one idea to the next, one person to the next, building and constructing knowledge as you go. I look forward to adding more people and expanding my learning and my network.

I always think I’m going to blog while I’m on the road, but it rarely happens, so no promises. But I’ll have lots to share when I return.

Sylvia

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‘Research dispels common ed-tech myths’

Contrary to popular opinion, newer teachers aren’t any more likely to use technology in their lessons than veteran teachers, and a lack of access to technology does not appear to be the main reason why teachers do not use it: These are among the common perceptions about education technology that new research from Walden University’s Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership appears to dispel.

Research dispels common ed-tech myths – read it at eSchoolNews.com

I’ve found this to be true in the schools we work with. A teacher who has experience with a project-based classroom has a real edge in adapting and adopting technology. These teachers seem to have more of the “chops” necessary for a tech-infused classroom — juggling lots of things going on at once, managing the seeming chaos while still keeping things on track, and dealing with inevitable setbacks and distractions. And often, it’s the veteran teachers with these skills.

Another finding that could surprise some people is that a lack of access to technology doesn’t appear to be the main reason why teachers don’t use technology in their instruction. Only 29 percent of the teachers who said they used specific technology devices less than once a week in their classrooms cited lack of access as the primary reason, while 49 percent said the devices in question weren’t necessary for their lessons.

Again, this rings true to me. I’m not one to point fingers at teachers and say that just because they aren’t using technology, they are not doing their jobs. Sure I’ve met tech-resistant teachers. But I’ve also seen too many times where technology was purchased on a whim by someone enamored by some feature or marketing claim, without input from anyone. I’ve seen lots of closets full of “stuff” that can’t connect to the network, or other fatal flaws that weren’t noticed until too late. Teachers who resist such antics are being professional, not resistant.

As I’ve said before, “You can’t buy change. It’s a process, not a purchase. The right shopping list won’t change education.” (in Let me save you $6,162.48) “Stuff” doesn’t matter as much as if the technology is purchased with a coherent plan. And the plan has to have teacher input and ownership. It even works better when there is student input and ownership as well.

The comments on the article are insightful as well, including bringing up the question – what do you mean by “technology”? This is a subject I’ve addressed before as well, Educational Technology Doesn’t Work?

Does anyone expect that a new gradebook program will inspire a teacher to bring student-centered technology into the classroom? Even using their term “instructional tool” seems pretty loose. Is transferring overhead slides to PowerPoint using a technology as an instructional tool?

This study should be reviewed by all district and school tech committees to see if these “myths” and assumptions have fed into any part of the tech plan.

Sylvia