What is school really for…?
Archives For 21st century learning
The key concept in this talk needs repeating:
And this is what I’m trying to explain has happened to us in the 21st century. Somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works. When I’m joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight, you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago. Okay? You didn’t notice it? But basically, what they do is, they switched all the rules round, so that the way to successfully run a business, an organization, or even a country, has been deleted, flipped, and it’s a completely new — you think I’m joking, don’t you — there’s a completely new set of rules in operation. Did you notice that? I mean, you missed this one. You probably — No, you didn’t. Okay.
My simple idea is that what’s happened is, the real 21st century around us isn’t so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists.
The following video provides another perspective on the World After Midnight:
The world has radically changed and most people are still trying to make sense of it in from a perspective that no longer exists. Where you up at midnight 15 years ago? Did you notice the change? Some of us were…so why won’t you listen to us?
Daphne Koller argues:
maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students’ minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them.
Prior to the release of the iPad a mere twenty five months ago the claim that paper textbooks being on borrowed time would have been laughed at by many in academia. Considering the explosive growth of the iPad, Android and Kindle readers over the past two years this claim is not only reasonable it is achievable. Perhaps even more important is the realization that we are moving well beyond just digital text and are looking at
digital content that’s not necessarily restricted to pages.
These changes are happening right now. Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education states:
I believe in less than 36 months, the idea of having a print product will be far from the norm on most college campuses across the country.
The next few years are going to be very exciting and the closer we get to fully utilizing digital resources to enhance learning the better off we all are.
In a Campus Technology interview, Tim Flood the former Stanford Mobile Program Director and manager of iStanford responds to Mary Grush’s question about the key advantage institutions can get by offering mobile applications on campus with two words:
Being Relevant
Flood makes the argument that the world that students live in on a daily basis is a mobile world and higher education must at minimum use mobile technology to just stay relevant. I would take this a step further and suggest that relevance is only a starting point. If we (higher education) really want to be student centered and build effective learning environments we have to be respectful of who are students are and what they bring into the classroom. This is not a new idea and mobility is only the most recent cultural circumstance that brings the need to respect the learner to the forefront. Back in 1966 the learning theorist Jerome Bruner argued that a theory of instruction should address four major aspects:
1. predisposition towards learning,
2. the ways in which a body of knowledge can be structured so that it can be most readily grasped by the learner,
3. the most effective sequences in which to present material, and
4. the nature and pacing of rewards and punishments.
Recognizing where your learner is at or being aware of your learner’s predisposition toward learning is the first and perhaps most important step in building effective learning environments because until you do so you are NOT respecting who they are and what they bring into that environment. The use of mobile devices is so intrinsic in almost all aspects of culture that it not only should be considered in point one, a learner’s predisposition, but should also considered in point three, the most effective sequences to present material. Mobile devices enable learners to access content all the time and everywhere so when presenting or using content the instructor has to take mobility into account.
The challenge of accessing information which was intrinsic to the print culture of the 20th century is no longer the challenge of the digital culture of the 21st century. Our new challenge is assessing information because we can access so much on our mobile devices all the time and everywhere. Recognizing mobilities role in 21st century learning is not only a matter of relevance for higher education it is a matter of respect.
