What should we be doing in the classroom? I don’t think many teachers would suggest ’playing games’ without a lot of qualifications. There is a definite barrier between things that seem to belong inside the classroom and those that don’t.
These barriers are very permeable, though. During the recent World Cup there were a plethora of worksheets and activities generated to take account of kids enthusiasm for soccer. I’m not sure how effective a lot of these lessons were. Those I covered seemed to have sacrificed rigour in favour of engagement. It was so important that the kids enjoyed the lessons that quite what they were learning became a very secondary consideration.
This is one of the problems of bringing the outside world into the classroom. When it is done well it can be very effective indeed. When it involves cashing in on some current event the outcomes are much more variable. There is the problem of maintaining momentum when the national team loses. There is also the fact that some teachers (including me) and kids have less enthusiasm for soccer and become increasingly bored with Writing match reports, designing posters, logging and recording scores and all the other activities that someone - usually not a teacher - can dream up.
It may well be that, in the way that adults like to separate or compartmentalise home and work, kids like to draw a line between school and life outside. Effective education must be purposeful and feed into real life, but the learning in each place is different.
Or at least it was. For Marc Prensky, making this distinction between school and real life probably marks me out as what he calls a "digital immigrant".
"Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, ... Digital Immigrants."
This is opposed to "digital natives."
"What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
While I understand what he’s arguing, I come from a sort of half way house, being one of the people involved in the design and development of the video games that are central to his observations.
I understand what he’s arguing. Kids today already know how to blog in Bebo, to send emails, to estimate angles on a screen, to send text messages... They can use Information Technology very effectively in their social lives and for entertainment. They can be innovative and creative with no input from teachers.
The distinction between school and real life is quite stark for Prensky and it is about the distance, the ideological differences between ’digital immigrants’ and the ’natives’. It is interesting to consider that ICT teachers, in particular, may be the least prepared to cope with this.
In his book, "DON’T BOTHER ME, MOM -- I’M LEARNING", Prensky suggests that computers and videogames are the teachers of the twenty-first century. At a time when ICT teachers are struggling to find a role for the subject, kids are already learning effectively simply by using ICT in their leisure. I’m not convinced it is quite that simple, but more of that later.
The technologisation of classrooms is moving at a considerable pace. Just a few years ago it could be argued that a Victorian would recognise most of what happened in a classroom, even if the board is a different colour. Traditions are rapidly being trampled in the technological stampede.
It doesn’t matter that we are a long way from the ideal of one computer per child whenever necessary, although there is a lot of progress to that end in other European countries and a few UK schools. What matters is the head in the sand attitude to the realities with a myopic attitude that all will be well once we have an IWB in every classroom. The idea that we may not even be in the same learning space as the kids has yet to gain currency.
The range and complexity of technology available to kids is astounding and for them is a matter of fact. What it also threatens to do is to demolish the tradition classroom. Seymour Papert suggested this process was happening two decades ago, but how many teachers have even heard of this visionary teacher?
Prensky suggests that incorporating technology goes through four phases:
1. Playing with the idea
2. Doing old things in old ways
3. Doing old things in new ways
4. Doing new things in new ways
Looking at today’s classrooms, there has been much promise but precious little progress. Mostly, schools are playing with the idea, leaving anything more to enthusiasts. Progress has been hampered by lack of understanding of the scale of the technological changes by lack of appropriate hardware and particularly by below average software and very narrow teacher training programs. ICT is generally a lot of noise and the enthusiasm of a few nutcases.
This approach to technological change is classical. Medieval scholars developed writing to an art form then used it for copying. Printing saw Bibles and religious books being produced. The telephone, now a pocket accessory, was for years an alternative voice based message system and hardly used for long conversations.
We have a range of terms for the present capabilities, e-learning, ICT, educatainment, but it seems mostly to be more of the same. We’re distributing and creating documents of various sorts using computers, sometimes incorporating multimedia elements but generally it is quite insubstantial. Compare this to the sophistication available to kids in their real life and you begin to appreciate the scale of the problem.
There is nothing new under the sun, except of course the curriculum which changes on a whim of Government policy. The problem with this top down approach is obvious. The policy makers live in one golden age, the senior managers in another and the teacher in yet another. What is happening in the real world and the expertise that kids can bring from their own experience is very largely an unknown. For ICT this is disastrous. There is too much distance in the school and University between what happens there and ’real’ experience. So even with computers, old ways predominate.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of interesting tools. The functionality of a properly used IWB changes the ’feel’ of the classroom. (But please, can I have a little whiteboard too, to write things on? Just a little one.) Tools like PowerSchool, Student Information Systems, Student Management Solutions... were promising to bring about the e-revolution, at least according to the salesmen, but they only really add a veneer. They innovate delivery but have a lot less to offer in terms of motivation, relevance and context. Writing becomes digital overlaid with multimedia but its main advantage over handwriting is the speed that email can carry it to others. What is the future of handwriting? Are computers the alternative to pen and paper?
How many teachers are prepared to admit that we are no longer in control of our children’s future? When I was at school there were three distinct tiers which were built on the Platonic notion that there are men of gold, silver and bronze needing to be guided into the slots they were ideally suited for. This was reinforced by careers guidance that believed that you could psychologically profile people into the best job for them. I regard the fact that I, from a ’bronze’ education, have managed to out qualify most of the ’gold’ people of my generation as some small proof that the idea was not as clear-cut as it appeared.
If the previous conservatism was dubious, the present conservatism threatens to be even more damaging. Education must change to take account of technology and that change is not about additional hardware and software, but about a radical change in attitude. Teachers somehow have to become aware that the kids are often leading. They are not the followers of my golden (bronze) age.
There are lots of questions about disaffection in schools. I cannot offer any simple solutions, but I know that fun helps. Perhaps part of the problem is our failure to recognise just how much things have changed. The curriculum we offer is out of date. It doesn’t take account of the needs of the digital era. To reduce the boredom and the response to it we need to change and we need the children to be active participants in this.
Popular educational opinion favours incremental change, and this is mostly to enable the traditionalists to catch up (or retire), but we really don’t have the time. Change has to be radical and it has to be now. The computer, the network, the Web gives me instant access. The interactivity inherent in games and in game like virtual environments enables me to learn and teach in very different ways. This is why Marc Prensky, Henry Jenkins, Seymour Papert and others see an extreme urgency in the need to change the way children learn.
My feeling is that the people who are hostile to this message are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The kind headteacher who, after reading my blog, assured me that I don’t know anything about teaching or ICT is the sort of person my message is aimed at. The bathwater is the old way of teaching, the comfort of being in control, of ladling out the thin gruel of wisdom at a determined pace. That has to go. The wisdom remains to be shared and the digital era means that it no longer needs to be rationed. A teacher has access to wisdom that will grow exponentially. How do we share something this big? This, I think is what Prensky, Papert and the rest have recognised.
I’ve mentioned several times, W. W. Sawyer as one of my inspirations and I have one of his books beside me. The language is tight prose from the 1960s. There are tiny, badly drawn and labelled diagrams and in today’s world I doubt that it would inspire at all. But it did inspire because it contained that recognition that the learners have to lead the teachers and it is the duty of the teacher to meet the learners’ needs.
The digital era doesn’t need to rely on tiny tacky diagrams. It can model the world and allow, ’what if’ scenarios to be investigated. I can investigate biology, engineering, physics... I can explore art right down to the brushstrokes of the artists. Mathematics becomes clear are each step is worked through, explained and made into a fun activity with a game like feel. If I want to know something, I have access to some of the world’s experts.
The learning of children has changed and is changing. The idea that we, as adults, are immigrants in a world that they inhabit comfortably is one that can make us feel uncomfortable. Realistically, it requires us to change.
There are already several indications of how far and how radical the changes to the broader world of education are. Blogging, this media, already outstrips the ability of what someone has called ’the fossil media’ to comment and report. My twenty-minute stream of consciousness here will find an audience that would not be found by other means. There is also the Inkwell Project and wiki, wikpedia which is an organic encyclopaedia and more which is written by and grows with its readership. Simulations of so many functions are now available, from learning to fly to performing complex surgical procedures. You don’t have to perform real experiments whenever you need to explain and the child need not be limited by that single demonstration.
If you want to know where ICT teaching is going you need to look beyond your schemes of work.
These barriers are very permeable, though. During the recent World Cup there were a plethora of worksheets and activities generated to take account of kids enthusiasm for soccer. I’m not sure how effective a lot of these lessons were. Those I covered seemed to have sacrificed rigour in favour of engagement. It was so important that the kids enjoyed the lessons that quite what they were learning became a very secondary consideration.
This is one of the problems of bringing the outside world into the classroom. When it is done well it can be very effective indeed. When it involves cashing in on some current event the outcomes are much more variable. There is the problem of maintaining momentum when the national team loses. There is also the fact that some teachers (including me) and kids have less enthusiasm for soccer and become increasingly bored with Writing match reports, designing posters, logging and recording scores and all the other activities that someone - usually not a teacher - can dream up.
It may well be that, in the way that adults like to separate or compartmentalise home and work, kids like to draw a line between school and life outside. Effective education must be purposeful and feed into real life, but the learning in each place is different.
Or at least it was. For Marc Prensky, making this distinction between school and real life probably marks me out as what he calls a "digital immigrant".
"Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, ... Digital Immigrants."
This is opposed to "digital natives."
"What should we call these “new” students of today? Some refer to them as the N-[for Net]-gen or D-[for digital]-gen. But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
While I understand what he’s arguing, I come from a sort of half way house, being one of the people involved in the design and development of the video games that are central to his observations.
I understand what he’s arguing. Kids today already know how to blog in Bebo, to send emails, to estimate angles on a screen, to send text messages... They can use Information Technology very effectively in their social lives and for entertainment. They can be innovative and creative with no input from teachers.
The distinction between school and real life is quite stark for Prensky and it is about the distance, the ideological differences between ’digital immigrants’ and the ’natives’. It is interesting to consider that ICT teachers, in particular, may be the least prepared to cope with this.
In his book, "DON’T BOTHER ME, MOM -- I’M LEARNING", Prensky suggests that computers and videogames are the teachers of the twenty-first century. At a time when ICT teachers are struggling to find a role for the subject, kids are already learning effectively simply by using ICT in their leisure. I’m not convinced it is quite that simple, but more of that later.
The technologisation of classrooms is moving at a considerable pace. Just a few years ago it could be argued that a Victorian would recognise most of what happened in a classroom, even if the board is a different colour. Traditions are rapidly being trampled in the technological stampede.
It doesn’t matter that we are a long way from the ideal of one computer per child whenever necessary, although there is a lot of progress to that end in other European countries and a few UK schools. What matters is the head in the sand attitude to the realities with a myopic attitude that all will be well once we have an IWB in every classroom. The idea that we may not even be in the same learning space as the kids has yet to gain currency.
The range and complexity of technology available to kids is astounding and for them is a matter of fact. What it also threatens to do is to demolish the tradition classroom. Seymour Papert suggested this process was happening two decades ago, but how many teachers have even heard of this visionary teacher?
Prensky suggests that incorporating technology goes through four phases:
1. Playing with the idea
2. Doing old things in old ways
3. Doing old things in new ways
4. Doing new things in new ways
Looking at today’s classrooms, there has been much promise but precious little progress. Mostly, schools are playing with the idea, leaving anything more to enthusiasts. Progress has been hampered by lack of understanding of the scale of the technological changes by lack of appropriate hardware and particularly by below average software and very narrow teacher training programs. ICT is generally a lot of noise and the enthusiasm of a few nutcases.
This approach to technological change is classical. Medieval scholars developed writing to an art form then used it for copying. Printing saw Bibles and religious books being produced. The telephone, now a pocket accessory, was for years an alternative voice based message system and hardly used for long conversations.
We have a range of terms for the present capabilities, e-learning, ICT, educatainment, but it seems mostly to be more of the same. We’re distributing and creating documents of various sorts using computers, sometimes incorporating multimedia elements but generally it is quite insubstantial. Compare this to the sophistication available to kids in their real life and you begin to appreciate the scale of the problem.
There is nothing new under the sun, except of course the curriculum which changes on a whim of Government policy. The problem with this top down approach is obvious. The policy makers live in one golden age, the senior managers in another and the teacher in yet another. What is happening in the real world and the expertise that kids can bring from their own experience is very largely an unknown. For ICT this is disastrous. There is too much distance in the school and University between what happens there and ’real’ experience. So even with computers, old ways predominate.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of interesting tools. The functionality of a properly used IWB changes the ’feel’ of the classroom. (But please, can I have a little whiteboard too, to write things on? Just a little one.) Tools like PowerSchool, Student Information Systems, Student Management Solutions... were promising to bring about the e-revolution, at least according to the salesmen, but they only really add a veneer. They innovate delivery but have a lot less to offer in terms of motivation, relevance and context. Writing becomes digital overlaid with multimedia but its main advantage over handwriting is the speed that email can carry it to others. What is the future of handwriting? Are computers the alternative to pen and paper?
How many teachers are prepared to admit that we are no longer in control of our children’s future? When I was at school there were three distinct tiers which were built on the Platonic notion that there are men of gold, silver and bronze needing to be guided into the slots they were ideally suited for. This was reinforced by careers guidance that believed that you could psychologically profile people into the best job for them. I regard the fact that I, from a ’bronze’ education, have managed to out qualify most of the ’gold’ people of my generation as some small proof that the idea was not as clear-cut as it appeared.
If the previous conservatism was dubious, the present conservatism threatens to be even more damaging. Education must change to take account of technology and that change is not about additional hardware and software, but about a radical change in attitude. Teachers somehow have to become aware that the kids are often leading. They are not the followers of my golden (bronze) age.
There are lots of questions about disaffection in schools. I cannot offer any simple solutions, but I know that fun helps. Perhaps part of the problem is our failure to recognise just how much things have changed. The curriculum we offer is out of date. It doesn’t take account of the needs of the digital era. To reduce the boredom and the response to it we need to change and we need the children to be active participants in this.
Popular educational opinion favours incremental change, and this is mostly to enable the traditionalists to catch up (or retire), but we really don’t have the time. Change has to be radical and it has to be now. The computer, the network, the Web gives me instant access. The interactivity inherent in games and in game like virtual environments enables me to learn and teach in very different ways. This is why Marc Prensky, Henry Jenkins, Seymour Papert and others see an extreme urgency in the need to change the way children learn.
My feeling is that the people who are hostile to this message are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The kind headteacher who, after reading my blog, assured me that I don’t know anything about teaching or ICT is the sort of person my message is aimed at. The bathwater is the old way of teaching, the comfort of being in control, of ladling out the thin gruel of wisdom at a determined pace. That has to go. The wisdom remains to be shared and the digital era means that it no longer needs to be rationed. A teacher has access to wisdom that will grow exponentially. How do we share something this big? This, I think is what Prensky, Papert and the rest have recognised.
I’ve mentioned several times, W. W. Sawyer as one of my inspirations and I have one of his books beside me. The language is tight prose from the 1960s. There are tiny, badly drawn and labelled diagrams and in today’s world I doubt that it would inspire at all. But it did inspire because it contained that recognition that the learners have to lead the teachers and it is the duty of the teacher to meet the learners’ needs.
The digital era doesn’t need to rely on tiny tacky diagrams. It can model the world and allow, ’what if’ scenarios to be investigated. I can investigate biology, engineering, physics... I can explore art right down to the brushstrokes of the artists. Mathematics becomes clear are each step is worked through, explained and made into a fun activity with a game like feel. If I want to know something, I have access to some of the world’s experts.
The learning of children has changed and is changing. The idea that we, as adults, are immigrants in a world that they inhabit comfortably is one that can make us feel uncomfortable. Realistically, it requires us to change.
There are already several indications of how far and how radical the changes to the broader world of education are. Blogging, this media, already outstrips the ability of what someone has called ’the fossil media’ to comment and report. My twenty-minute stream of consciousness here will find an audience that would not be found by other means. There is also the Inkwell Project and wiki, wikpedia which is an organic encyclopaedia and more which is written by and grows with its readership. Simulations of so many functions are now available, from learning to fly to performing complex surgical procedures. You don’t have to perform real experiments whenever you need to explain and the child need not be limited by that single demonstration.
If you want to know where ICT teaching is going you need to look beyond your schemes of work.
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