August 2004 Newsletter

Volume 8 Issue 5  August 2004

The Perfect [Education] Storm

The “perfect storm” that caused such devastation in 1991 off the east coast of the US did not arrive fully formed as a single storm but rather it was built over a week, from three weather systems.

The first storm began as a small low pressure system in north western Canada. Along the way this storm collided with a second storm; a very cold front moving south. The two systems combined to form a significant storm in the North Atlantic: but there was more to come.

A third storm that would contribute to the "perfect" storm was hurricane Grace off the cost of Florida, which was inexorably sucking the other two storm systems south. Horrified meteorologists watched, unable to stop the inevitable. These three systems merged to form a storm that covered tens of thousands of square kilometres with waves over 30m high and winds of over 100km/hour. To put the energy that this storm contained into perspective "The combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don't contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day."[1]

Right now three huge storms are forming in the ‘education world.’ Just as in the perfect storm described above these three storms are inexorably merging to create the perfect [education] storm.  The three contributing storms are:

     1. High-speed data networks: not so long ago we measured data speeds in kbps: more recently we acquired broadband which measures data speeds in Mbps and now Internet 2 is providing Gbps to many tertiary institutions and some schools, and this will eventually be delivered to the home. Access to Internet 2 would enable you to download the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a matter of minutes.

2. The overloaded and ill-defined curriculum: Schools to-day are under enormous pressures. The expectation is that they have the resources to teach students to drive, feed those who do not get fed properly at home, act as social welfare agencies, train students to use new information and communication technologies, provide them with workplace skills, manage the increasing complexity of decision-making with which they are confronted, extrinsically teach them thinking processes, teach them values, ethics and morality, teach them business skills, better interpersonal communication, critical literacy skills . . . . .  All this as well as teach all the historical information that has always been taught within schools.  And of course everything has to be assessed in case it may not have been taught!  It is no wonder that teaching has come to be considered an unsustainable occupation.

      3. The transition, from an information poor landscape into an information rich landscape (see the article "The Weariness of the Flesh: Reflections on the Life of the Mind in an Era of Abundance“ http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0423.asp for a wonderful description of this transition) : the Internet now contains vast resources that can:

§         Assist teachers in creating for students "rich" tasks that encourage understanding as well as building knowledge foundations. 

§         Allow for the better targeting of teaching materials to the specific needs of individual learners.

§         Eliminate the ‘reinvention of the wheel’ syndrome by creating global (Federated) libraries of Digital Learning Objects that can be re-used and edited.

§         Facilitate a new balance between Just In Case (JIC) content that forms the foundation required for lifelong learning, and Just In Time (JIT) skills and processes that allow students to build their own understanding of concepts as needed.

This storm will cause three major educational transitions: 

• Transition 1: The move away from a focus on knowing information to one of identifying foundational knowledge coupled with the provision of a set of skills and processes that will provide students with the capacity for lifelong learning.

• Transition 2: The Internet will become the primary medium which will allow Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime (A³), access to resources, assessment and reporting software, e-portfolios, assignments, and electronic libraries of digital learning objects, providing all stakeholders 24/7 access.

• Transition 3: Knowledge NET’s (http://www.knowledge-networks.co.nz) will become the dominant teaching, learning and reporting environment within which teachers, students and parents/caregivers will work and communicate with each other.

Storms, by their very nature are change agents, but on a huge scale. The "perfect [education] storm" is still forming but once fully formed it will wreak havoc, unless we prepare for it by being receptive to the huge amounts of energy that this storm will create, as well as being ready and willing to use it constructively. If we anticipate and plan for the storm’s arrival, we can harness its energy to create and foster the second education paradigm in the modern age. Those countries that do this will dominate the 21^st century, producing “Knowledge Workers” who have the skills and tools to be innovative and ride the extreme “knowledge waves” that the perfect [education] storm will whip up through the years ahead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

These transitions will define the transformation process within those education systems that are adept and willing to make wholesale changes, as they realize that their present system has reached it’s upper limits of efficiency despite the reductions in class sizes, increased  resourcing, new curricula and new ICT purchases, none of which has had the desired impact on student performance in the areas commonly agreed on to be critical for success in the 21^st century.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What are those skills?

Historically, people have built an understanding of their world from their physical observations, in tandem with the oral histories and discourses that they have shared with other people. In past centuries travellers such as Marco Polo returned from Cathay (China) and like places with remarkable stories that significantly enhanced people’s views of the world. Thanks to the evolution of the written word and the subsequent emergence of the printing press, documented information took it’s place with oral histories, discourses and observations as the prime access points to new ideas and new knowledge. Even at the end of the 20^th century, such was the perceived scarcity and cost of this written information that it was, and even to-day to a large extent is still housed in hallowed silent places of reverence called libraries, the managers of which allow only one or two of these treasured books to be borrowed at any given time and impose fines for their late return. Old habits die hard, and many still choose to ignore the impact and benefits of new technologies, not to mention its inevitability

Access to information resources has historically been a somewhat rare and prized commodity so it is not surprising that those who had knowledge (based on information), were set apart as professionals whose services were expensive and much sought after. This stranglehold on information preserved it’s rarity and conferred on those privileged enough to be able to avail themselves of the considerable requisite preliminary and advanced education processes, a degree of power that perpetuated the 2 class system.

Schools worked hard to increase the literacy of the general population but they too were caught up in the “information scarce/expensive” landscape. In the absence of adequate information resources which would have enabled them to ask the sort of clever questions that forced students to manipulate information and gain understanding along with knowledge, they were limited to generic low-level common thematic questions such as space, dinosaurs, the undersea world, the weather etc., the relevant resources being freely available in libraries.

Teachers who wished to ask clever questions that encouraged understanding were faced with spending many hours creating their own resources, duplicating rare resources and recruiting the support of experts either in or outside of the school environment.  This resulted in schools primarily teaching not for understanding, but rather so that students would remember specific information that would enable them to pass the appropriate test at the conclusion of any given unit of work or year of study.

Unfortunately this was the nature of teaching as dictated by an information scarce environment. 

Knowledge NETworks

A knowledge network is well described in one of the most talked about education articles of recent times entitled "A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing" http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0350.pdf .  The paper is written by Donald Norris, John Mason, Robbie Robson, Paul Lefrere and Geoff Collier and was published in EduCause Review (September/October 2003).  In this article the authors discuss what it means to know and to understand, in the context of lifelong learning. 

• Know who: networks, authorities, individuals, practitioners, collaboration

• Know how: networking, consulting, collaborating, sharing, researching, reflecting, developing, testing, maintaining, doing, learning, educating, training, innovating, managing, navigating

• Know why: the context, business planning, strategy, reasons to learn

• Know where: where to, where from, strategic positioning, planning, reflecting

• Know when: timing, pacing, planning, scheduling, context, just-in-time

• Know if: scenarios, scenario development, foresight, contingency, just in case

The article highlights the many key infrastructural requirements that are necessary if students are to be able to become knowledge networkers and innovators.  Building knowledge and understanding is a complex process

The arrival of the second modern education paradigm is imminent; it is up to us to prepare our schools for it and to learn how to surf the waves and harness the energy it will create. This means that all learners and educators will need to make use of these three storms in order to transition themselves from the previous paradigm to the new one.

Q. Why NOW? A. The Upper Limit Hypothesis:

In 1999 Robert Branson from Florida State University wrote a paper entitled “The Upper Limit Hypothesis" http://www.cpt.fsu.edu/pdf/teaching.pdf  . In this hypothesis Branson portrayed schools as a technology that consisted of a collection of products, systems and environments that met particular needs and opportunities of the community and over time schools increasingly became more efficient until they approached an upper limit of 100 percent.  Branson proposed that education had approached its upper limit of efficiency in the early 1960s! 

Historically as a technology approached its upper limit of efficiency a new technology emerged, just as flight transitioned from ballooning to gliding, to powered flight, to jet flight to scram jets as each previous technology approached its upper limit. Each of these new travel paradigms emerged due to the arrival of a new technological innovation (system, process and/or product).

So hypothetically, if the first modern education paradigm was approaching or had reached its upper limit so that we could no longer squeeze more efficiency from it what would the second modern education paradigm look like, what would be the principal innovation that would allow this new paradigm to emerge and what would be the major advantages/efficiencies of this new paradigm?

The innovation that would facilitate this transition would be the dramatic change from a world where information was rare and precious to a world where information becomes cheap, accessible and overwhelming in both quality and quantity. Suddenly knowledge is available to anyone who can spell the word Google.

The inevitability of the second Paradigm:

Irrespective of whether we automatically become part of that cadre of second paradigm teachers/learners or we choose to put it off for as long as possible, there is a certain inevitability about our long term inclusion within it.  In the second modern education paradigm information is available to anyone, anywhere, at any time (A³).  This is a mixed blessing as none of us has a personal virtual librarian who can check every information source that we use to make sure that it is appropriate for it’s intended application, or that the information is correct, that it is not biased or written from only one particular viewpoint, and that it is at a level that meets our learning needs. It is ironic that the very same teachers who struggled for so long with an information deficient landscape now find themselves struggling with the overwhelming nature of a rich information landscape.  Their information world has been turned upside down overnight and in its wake both educators and learners are struggling to come to terms with the new rules of play. .

Confronted by a variety of technologies, systems and new environments some of our braver teachers and students are wading into the precarious information ocean and sorting through the vast array of resources available, in a concerted effort to create schools where the emphasis is on understanding and thinking rather than on simply assimilating discrete information packages in order to achieve success in tests and examinations.  With the advent of rich information environments it is actually becoming possible for teachers to set clever questions which encourage students to manipulate information and create deeper understanding, building conceptual frameworks without the need for the teacher to personally design/invent all the resource.

But surely schools have been teaching students to understand for years? Well yes, and  . . .no . . . . In a common example of the difference between knowing and understanding; consider your knowledge of day and night.  If you were asked "Do you understand day and night?" you would assure the questioner that indeed you do as you have learnt about it and have experienced it (every day and every night).  But consider the map of the world below and draw in a simple line to divide the world into those places currently experiencing daylight and those experiencing darkness.  Many people (not you of course), would set apart the southern hemisphere as being in day light (if you lived there and it was daylight at that time) and the northern hemisphere as being in darkness. 

Some however would have constructed a demarcation line between night and day that was vertical (following degrees of longitude rather than latitude) and they would indeed be nearer the mark.  However, consider now what you presume to know about day and night in Antarctica in winter and let us see if this is consistent with our model.  Most of us would remember from our school days learning that in winter Antarctica experiences almost predominantly darkness. This hypothesis challenges the veracity of the vertical demarcation theory which tends to indicate that in Antarctica winter and summer have equal hours of daylight and darkness, and this is simply not true.  Hence even the better of the two models does not portray the actual reality, which in fact is quite complicated but the answer can be found below.

22 June 2004

22 December 2003

These images are courtesy of the Swiss web site Fourmilab that can be found at http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/vplanet.html and the results above can be found by clicking on the words "map of the earth". 

We are often convinced that we understand a particular concept when in truth we merely know a collection of facts about the concept, rather than having it fully sorted in our minds. The above example is particularly confusing, drawing as it does on many different concepts, so you can be easily forgiven for not necessarily fully understanding day and night.

So why is understanding important?  And what will be the Ministry/Department of Education and school’s response to this sudden transformation of the information landscape?  Given that we cannot know everything, what is it that is important to know?  Equally given that we can't understand everything, what is it that is important to understand?  What skills do students really need in the 21^st Century? What knowledge is fundamental to building understanding, and how do we teach learners to become lifelong learners?

Briefly:

·         Firstly, we have to decide what the purpose of our schools is!  This will require considerable public discussion.  At the moment we expect schools to take our children and turn them into some combination of Kiri te Kanawa (opera singer) and Albert Einstein, which fortunately/unfortunately is a somewhat unrealistic goal. Once the general public and the education system as a whole, are clear as to the purpose of schools then schools will be in a much better position to target their resources to meet their mission, as opposed to being the blame/solution to every social/academic/workplace ill.

·         Schools will need to be selective in the amount of traditional content that they teach because of the many new skills, processes and concepts that students will require in order to be successful lifelong learners. The requirement for students to be critical thinkers is now accepted as fundamental to their education.  A consensus will have to be agreed on as to how this will be achieved and if indeed it can be achieved through traditional subject areas, considering the breadth of knowledge and skills that need to be developed.

·         With the emphasis on teaching for understanding, topics such as "space" become redundant while questions such as "compare and contrast video footage from the earth and Mars and identify two significant similarities and differences.  Using one of the differences which you have identified hypothesise as to why life is so prevalent on earth but appears to be almost non-existent on Mars”, become viable. Both of these units of work will take approximately the same length of time and hence the amount of perceived content that will be delivered by schools will reduce even further.

·         Assessment systems developed over the past 10 years have increased the capacity for schools to assist students to develop the skills necessary to achieving curriculum objectives. It is vital however that we ensure that these objectives are consistent with what students need to know, learn and understand. The natural progression then is that students’ “records of learning” follow them on a web-based database electronically stored on the Internet on secure servers (similar to online banking).

·         Schooling will transition from a five hour a day/five days a week (5/5) model to a twenty-four hours a day/seven days a week (24/7) model.  Using online Knowledge Networks (http://www.knowledge-networks.co.nz) students will be able to access from home (via the Internet), all the resources that they can access at school. Using this intranet/extranet environment teachers and students will be able to add to and edit a wide range of electronic material without any knowledge of Web design or coding. This will allow teachers to better target school work and homework to individual learner’s needs, making full use of rich multimedia resources identified and made available by teachers to students.  Use of these environments will promote much better communication and interaction between learners, teachers and caregivers/parents. (for further reading on this check out the article “A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing”) http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0350.pdf)

There is a wide range of inherent changes in how schools will function and how teachers will teach and these can be summarised in the diagram below:

·         To ensure that all schools have the infrastructural requirements for delivery of the second education paradigm the Ministry/Department of Education will, in turn, need to target the cabling and network infrastructure within schools along with the cost of filtered broadband Internet as a priority for every school, for. The key word here is interoperability of all systems.

·         Interoperability is critical between all the elements that schools wish to use, not just within their own environment but also across the entire country. This is particularly important for database records so that for example; a student can leave one school and arrive at the next with a complete electronic record of learning. Students who have historically been able to “slip through the cracks” can no longer do so.

·         Teachers will require considerable and sustained upskilling and retraining, not only to manage the technical challenges but also to reshape the way that they teach, how they present work, how they assess, question, and grade work along with how students demonstrate proficiency in a wide range of evolving skill areas.

Not all students will have Internet access at home but increasingly within each community internet access will be available from the local library, resource centre, school or Internet cafe.  Equity is a considerable issue in the evolution of the new paradigm and needs to be addressed at the highest level.

So what is the advantage of understanding as well as knowing?

Personal Value: There is a deep personal satisfaction in discovering, inventing and creating understanding either independently or inter-dependently.  Although not quantifiable this is without doubt the greatest benefit of all possible benefits that education can offer the learner.

Economic value: As production efficiencies start to reach their upper limit, countries that have high labour rates must do one of two things in order to sell successfully into overseas markets, i.e.

1. Brand their country well (knowing that people will always pay more for a branded item). Take New Zealand with its “green/environmental” brand that enables marketers to sell more expensive butter to Europeans and thus recover higher wage costs. Germany: reliability; Italy: design flair; USA: the corporate brand; India: IT skills . . . . .

2. Be innovative, creating entirely new products and services that can be sold in small quantities for a short time with appropriate returns on investments. However knowing about, and/or experience in those goods/services is not sufficient, rather in order to be innovative and successful in any area it is necessary to understand the concepts that underpin the area of expertise: only then can far more people think laterally and aspire to becoming true innovators.

Those who maintain that ‘low-costs for cheap labour markets’ is a transient concept, can learn from the “China factor” (CF). The CF will result in the gradual attrition in China from 800million farmers to less than a quarter of that number over the next 40 years. The ex-farm workers will gradually retreat to the cities, maintaining low labour rates, (demand/supply), while at the same time producing quality products/services (they read Demming just as we did!). They will dominate global factory based manufacturing/production for most of that time. The only way to compete will be through the two avenues described above.

Learning Value: The responsibility for empowering our society to be one that has the broad capacity to develop broad-based lifelong learning skills (in the year 0-12/13 range) inevitably falls upon the school system, and in order to encourage lifelong learners, schools will need to empower students with a whole new collection of skills which will endow them with the capacity to teach themselves what they need to know  . . .ad infinitum . . . . In short we must extrinsically (knowingly) and intrinsically (unknowingly) incorporate themes such as lateral thinking, critical thinking, systems thinking, media literacy, self direction, adaptability, information synthesis, problem solving, creativity, communication skills . . .

Social Value: There are many issues that, for numerous reasons, society as a whole has not faced up to, debated or come to terms with. These include:

1. The complexity that makes those particular issues difficult to understand without considerable specialised knowledge. These include topics such as genetic engineering, long term nuclear power issues,

2. Issues of ethics and values such as abortion, stem cell research,

3. Stereotypical issues such as culture, gender, race and roles.

If in our society the greatest debates played out in our media are concerned with teams of men playing games with a leather ball, then we must be prepared for our children to inherit a toxic thinking spill of epic proportion.  This is not to demean the place of sports and games but there does need to be urgent and informed debate on many, many topics of local, national and international concern, otherwise those who benefit financially the most will invest the most and reap their just rewards in the form of a power that will defy and transcend any aspirations that we might entertain to living in a democratic society. Our only avenue to achieving active and informed debate is to ensure that sufficient people have the capacity, through education, to understand the issues and engage in critical discourse. This is possible only if people generally are empowered with the skills necessary to understand issues, rather than simply accepting facts which are spilled out with no critical review, by glamour queens and sports stars  . . . whew!  . . . (herein endeth the homily!). Onwards towards our future. . . .fortunately we do have a choice in which future we and our children will face so lets get on with it..

Question & Comments to

Mark Treadwell

mark@work.co.nz

home | newsletter & sites | top 1000 sites | surfing the web
online virtual library | internet policies | consultancy | lecture notes
teacher's toolkit | server hardware / software | connecting to the internet
publishing a web site | network architecture | international vacancies