Imagine what a place like this is capable of unleashing in the mind of a child.
Imagine what places like this are capable of unleashing in the mind of every adult.
Tag: TED
Is this the future of learning?
Imagine students around the world being given daily opportunities to see the world through the eyes of another — or to travel back in time, or to fly to the moon.
Does the value of this tool outweigh any potential costs in the ways in which it further blurs the line separating mind from machine? Is it sharpening us in the right direction?
Hybrid thinking? That’s a thing?
Get ready, people . . . our brains are about to change in a major way.
This is the future of technology — how will it impact teaching & learning?
Educators and school reformers — ignore at (y)our peril.
(And crazy to think that this talk was from 2005!)
A Hole in the Wall, or Our Heads in the Cloud(s)?
(This article originally appeared in Education Week).
There are two recent cultural inflection points you’d be wise to check out if you care about the future of education: the first is Sugata Mitra’s acceptance speech for receiving the TED Prize, in which he outlines his plan to “build a school in the cloud;” and the second is ed/tech writer Audrey Watters’ article warning of the potential consequences that could follow an uncritical acceptance of Mitra’s vision.
Mitra, in case you missed it, is the Indian computer programmer who in 1999 placed a computer in the hole of a wall facing a community of uneducated children in a New Delhi slum. Within weeks, the children taught themselves how to use it and surf the Web, with nary an adult in sight.
Since then, Mitra’s work has involved other experiments in providing children with the space and a sufficient prompt to light their self-directed learning energy on fire. The culmination of this work (which he now has $1 million from TED to actualize) is the school in the cloud – a space where children can explore and learn on their own using resources from the worldwide web. “It’s not about making learning happen,” says Mitra, “it’s about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion, and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens.”
It’s a provocative idea – albeit one that could just as easily describe thousands of well-run classrooms across the country right now. That’s part of what worries Watters, a veteran reporter on the intersection between education and technology. “In the TED world of techno-humanitarianism,” she writes, “this computer-enabled learning certainly makes for an incredibly compelling story. But once something becomes a TED Talk, it becomes oddly unassailable. The video, the speech, the idea, the applause — there too often stops our critical faculties. We don’t interrupt. We don’t jeer. We don’t ask any follow-up questions.”
Watters then asks a slew of follow-up questions, but the gist of her argument is that ideas like Mitra’s aren’t “simply about the rise of the learner — we’d be so naive to believe that’s the case. It’s about the rise of the technology industry alongside the collapse of the education sector. Take away the public school, as Mitra suggests — it is a colonial legacy! — and replace it with computers. . . The School in the Cloud project posits that education is a corporate (financial) investment rather than a public good. Why fund public schools when we can put a kiosk in a tech company’s annex? Why fund public schools when you can learn anything online?” Indeed, she cautions, despite Mitra’s “claims to be liberatory — with the focus on ‘the learner’ and ‘the child’ — this hacking of education . . . is politically regressive. It is, however, likely to be good business for the legions of tech entrepreneurs in the audience.”
Who is right here? Are ideas like a school in the cloud indicative of the future of learning, the death of public education, both, or neither?
Since the article has come out, there’s an interesting conversation, with lots of civil friction, unfolding on Facebook. “I’ve spoken with Sugata Mitra multiple times,” said Nikhil Goyal, a 17-year-old critic of public education, “and he doesn’t have a vein of profit intention. He’s not advocating for the abolition of public schools. He’s not advocating for the abolition of teachers either. He’s providing a setting for young people to learn by means of networking and ‘big questions.'” And besides, Goyal concludes, “school as an institution is obsolete. That must be transformed. We know that very well. It should be turned into a public space and learning environment. Nobody is saying that we should demolish public schools.
Veteran educator (and fellow Ed Week blogger) Nancy Flanagan isn’t buying it. “I have a long-standing skepticism around The Magic of Technology, all the way back to the teaching machines that were introduced when I was in elementary school (back in the 1950s), up through Nicholas Negroponte and the one laptop/one child project. I’ve seen ‘miraculous transformations’ come and go, and still believe that Neil Postman is right: Americans love the idea of technology driving change, rather than change driving technology.”
Once again, who’s right?
Predictably (for anyone who reads me regularly), I see truth in both assertions. Sugata Mitra is right – learning needs to become more personalized, and great teachers create a spirit of curiosity and inquiry through questions, not answers. And he’s right that the universal (and near-instantaneous) accessibility of information has irrevocably changed the way we think about knowledge, and learning, and school.
But Watters is equally right to remind us about the myriad forces at work that would love to see the complete dismantling of public education as we see it, that characterize education as a private commodity, not a public good, and that believe not just that technology is an elixir, but also that the nonlinear site-specific magic between adult and child (and child and child) is a fungible resource, easily outsourced and replaced by an army of Grannies in the Cloud.
For me, this debate surfaces a vital question: how do we maintain our commitment to education as the most invaluable of public goods, while also embracing the changing nature of the human relationship to information, accessibility, and self-direction? Goyal believes we should turn all public schools into public learning spaces, available to anyone and everyone. Mitra believes the very act of knowing, as we have previously understood it, is obsolete. And Watters and Flanagan see in ideas like Mitra’s a profit-minded wolf in sheep’s clothing.
What do you think? And where to from here?
This is what thinking big about school reform looks like
It’s Sugata Mitra’s acceptance speech for winning the 2013 TED Prize. What do you think of his idea? And what do you think about this criticism of his idea?
The Learning Revolution, Circa 2012
Six years ago, a funny Englishman gave a stirring speech about how schools were stifling the creativity of their students. Today, Sir Ken Robinson is a worldwide celebrity, and his TED talk has been seen by as many as 100 million people.
How did that happen, exactly? And what is the state of the learning revolution Robinson urged us to launch?
The first answer has a lot to do with TED, and the ways it has become an unparalleled global phenomenon and idea accelerator. But it has more to do with Robinson, and the ways he was able to – clearly and cleverly– articulate our education system as it is, and as it ought to be. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original,” he argued. “By the time we get to be adults, most of us have lost that capacity. We have become frightened of being wrong. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
The second answer has a lot to do with the impact of those words, and the ways in which our education systems have started to move – slowly but surely – in the direction of Robinson’s recommendations. In particular, I see three trends worth noting:
- Shifting Endgoals – In 2006, it would have been impossible to suggest that anything other than content knowledge was the desired endgoal of a quality education. The rest was fluff, and if you couldn’t measure it, it didn’t matter. Today, however, there is an increasing recognition that content knowledge is actually the means by which we acquire a quality education, while the endgoal is a set of life skills or habits we can rely on throughout our lives. This paradigm shift was foretold by Robinson, whose talk centered around one of those skills – creativity. It has since expanded to include a rotating cast of others, from critical thinking to collaboration. And it will continue to reshape how schools see their work, both strategically and morally, requiring a new wave of creative thinking about how we assess both student and teacher learning and growth.
- Growing Grassroots – Robinson was right to urge people to stop waiting for policies to change before they themselves change. The only way a learning revolution will begin is if we heed the advice of Myron Rogers, who advised us to “start anywhere, and follow it anywhere.” That means recognizing each individual school is, as Ken says, its own school system, and insisting that educators start being more proactive in how they reimagine the structure and purpose of school. Scores of networks and organizations are already doing just that – from Expeditionary Learning to the Institute for Democratic Education in America. More communities are joining every day. And eventually, the policies will have no choice but to catch up.
- Emerging Leaders – In schools and districts across the country, a new wave of leadership is emerging with the confidence to speak publicly against the dysfunctions of the current system and think strategically about how to transform education for the long haul. Montgomery County superintendent Josh Starr is one such example – the leader of a massive network of schools and educators, a passionate believer in working collaboratively with all stakeholders, and an astute communicator who relies on everything from podcasts to Twitter to community book clubs. “I see my work being as much about helping people understand how we learn as it is about balancing budgets or driving student growth. These are community-wide conversations we all need to be having, and my job is to help seed those – and to keep learning alongside everyone else.”
It’s instructive that the most watched TED talk in history is about public education – despite the mainstream media’s ongoing reluctance to provide anything more than cursory coverage. Sir Ken’s talk is a reminder that people everywhere recognize that there is no issue more important to our future than the education of our newest generations. And his message, fittingly, is that we are the people we’ve been waiting for all along.
(NOTE: This article also appeared on Huffington Post as part of its TED Weekend series.)
How to Balance the Art & Science of Teaching
Recently, I gave a TED talk outlining why I think we’re in the midst of the most exciting and difficult time to be a teacher in American history. These sorts of talks are always imperfect (and timed) efforts to inject new ideas into the stratosphere, but I received lots of nice comments and feedback, including some observations that only a mom – my mom, actually – would share (“Your posture was very relaxed, and you never even said ‘um’!”).
It was another thing my mother said that struck me, though. “Do you feel sure that your audience knows what to do with all you’ve said?” she wrote.
Great point, and I’m not sure. So here, as simply as I can say it, are three specific things – some big, some small – we need to do to help teachers get better at helping children learn and grow.
1. Follow the Med School Model – As any M.D. knows, different medical schools have different strengths and weaknesses. But one thing every medical school shares is the belief that a strong medical training is built on a dual foundation of two courses: anatomy and physiology.
In education, no similar consensus exists. Worse still, most programs – whether they’re traditional schools of education or alternative certification programs – give short shrift to one of the most important things a teacher needs to know: child and adolescent development.
Think about that for a second. Our country’s teacher training programs, by and large, pay little attention to how well prospective teachers understand the emotional and developmental needs of the children they propose to teach.
So let’s start there by urging all teacher-training programs to adapt the Med School model and establish a similar two-course foundation for all prospective educators: Learning Sciences and Developmental Sciences.
I realize that won’t happen anytime soon (if at all). But the good news is we don’t need to wait; we can just start establishing online and/or in-person courses anywhere and everywhere, for anyone that’s interested in acquiring a deeper understanding of this new knowledge base. These courses would provide recommended reading, a forum for people to communicate with some guided facilitation, and a space for learners to self-organize with each other based on their areas of interest. And while it would be great if some accrediting body offered participants credit toward a degree or certification, we don’t need to wait for that to happen, either. What matters is identifying what we need to learn to be more effective at what we do, and then learning it. Period.
2. Study the Brain – In the same way educators need a solid foundation in how people develop, we should be equally aware of how people learn. That’s why schools and districts should incentivize any efforts on the part of their teachers to better understand the brain – regardless of whether it’s a book club or an accredited course. And once again, we can start right away in any community, alone or in groups. There are scores of recently written books that translate the latest insights in neuroscience for a lay audience. So we don’t need to wait for the schools of education to catch up. But we do need to do our homework and make sure we’re creating classroom environments that are highly tuned to our students’ strengths and weaknesses and how they see the world.
3. Craft Evaluation Programs That Honor Art & Science – One thing all sides seem to agree on is that teacher evaluation systems are in need of an extreme makeover; for too long, they’ve been little more than pro forma stamps of approval, and they’ve done little to nothing to help teachers get better.
In too many places, however, efforts are already underway to craft systems that disregard the art of teaching in favor of the (misunderstood) science of measurement. These sorts of systems are more about pushing people out than lifting them up. That’s why we should blow them all up and start over.
A prerequisite of any new evaluation system should be its effort to help teachers improve the quality of their practice via shared inquiry into what is and isn’t working in their classrooms. These new systems shouldn’t be afraid of quantitative measures, just as they shouldn’t devalue qualitative measures. And we should be sure to pay attention to the illustrative efforts already underway. If you’re a policymaker, for example, take a close look at what they’re doing in Montgomery County. And if you’re a teacher, consider getting certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
It will always be true, in teaching and in the natural world, that not everything can be measured, just as it’s true that there are ways to measure aspects of teaching and learning that go a lot deeper than test scores. The challenge is to find the balance between the elusive but evergreen art of teaching, and the emerging but illustrative science of the brain.
We can do both. And we can start today.
The Art (& Science) of Great Teaching
Here’s my new TEDx talk, or, as I like to call it, the video that makes you wonder when Sam will take his hand out of his pants.
Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?
What makes for a transformational meeting?
I’m asking myself this question because I just attended the best conference of my life. I’m asking it because most conferences, well, suck. And I’m asking it because the people I just spent three days with were continually asking it of each other in order to identify the “special sauce” for themselves – and give us all a better chance of recreating it for more and more people.
The conference in question was WorldBlu live, an annual gathering that is “designed for individuals, for-profit and non-profit organizations who recognize the power of freedom and democracy as a tool for building thriving businesses, promoting innovation, attracting top talent and inspiring full engagement.”
I’ve already written about some of the specific highlights of the conference. Now I want to share the foundations of the WorldBlu “special sauce” that made it such a success – and that any conference planner can replicate, no matter what industry you represent.
1. The People (aka, Widen the Gene Pool) – WorldBlu Live is as heterogeneous a gathering of people as you’re likely to find. It is, most broadly defined, a business conference, and, true to type, there were many CEOs in attendance, in industries ranging from telecommunications to healthcare to online retail. But there were also human resource professionals. And programmers. And higher education administrators. And musicians. And students. And the people themselves were coming from all across the United States. And Canada. And Denmark. And New Zealand.
This olio of professions, places and perspectives made for conference exchanges where no one could ever safely rely on their own linguistic industry shorthand, or even on an assumption about what one’s training did (or did not) include. As a result, the conversations formed a powerful double helix of ideas and questions – quite the contrast from the more typical industry-specific meeting, in which the capacity to exchange new ideas – the genetic building blocks that lead to new ways of seeing both the world and our work – is so inward-focused it produces the equivalent of an inbreeding reproductive loop. In short, WorldBlu starts with the assumption that our capacity for innovation grows exponentially when we inquire into core questions with people inside and outside of our chosen fields. And any other conference would be wise to do the same.
2. The Purpose (aka, Start with the “Why”) – As Simon Sinek makes clear in his must-watch TED talk, successful businesses and individuals don’t get better solely by perfecting what they do and how they do it; they get better by understanding why they do what they do, and where that source of intrinsic motivation originates.
The same is true of WorldBlu live. Despite being such an eclectic group, each of us was clearly and powerfully united by the most unlikely of common denominators – a shared commitment to organizational democracy, and, by extension, to create spaces where people could bring their full selves to life and work. It was, put another way, a conference that was designed to reconnect the Me (individual capacity) with the We (collective capacity). And as a result, it was infused with great personal and professional relevance for every attendee.
By contrast, most conferences myopically focus not just on the professional, but also the “what” of what we do. This is what leaves us feeling half-filled, as, indeed, we are. It also prevents us from inquiring deeper into our own sources of passion, strength, and joy – a feeling anyone who attended WorldBlu live will tell you was at the heart of the experience.
3. The Pace (aka, Balance Passive & Active Learning) – Unlike many conferences, in which the majority of people have but one role to play – passive consumer of someone else’s learning experience – WorldBlu Live was designed to strike a dynamic balance between absorbing and co-creating solutions and ideas. Each morning, different people gave short, TED-talk style speeches to the entire conference – and each in response to one of WorldBlu’s ten design principles of an organizational democracy. Afterwards, someone else, from an entirely different organization or industry, spoke briefly about a tool they had used to apply that principle in their work. Then the group transitioned into long unstructured coffee breaks, then box lunches, and then short 45-minute breakout sessions.
I have never seen a shorter time for breakout sessions at a conference, and initially I assumed they would be too brief to yield anything meaningful. What I experienced was the opposite – the brevity encouraged folks to jump right in, and the design assumption was that breakouts were merely a way to help people identify affinity groups, and enable a more useful sorting of the participants so people could have the conversations they were most eager to have with the other people most eager to have them. Consequently, I witnessed something I rarely see in a conference: the complete absence of “drive-by speakers” – the folks who simply show up to dispense their wisdom and then leave as soon as they’re done. As one person put it, “At WorldBlu Live, the speakers were the conference, and the conference was the speakers.”
Imagine if more of our professional conference experiences were characterized by these design principles of people, purpose and pace? Imagine if we started to expect actual learning and fulfillment from these sorts of exchanges, instead of the reluctant knowledge that we will miss yet another opportunity to learn something valuable? And imagine if in the course of our own professional advancement, we made new connections that were equally valuable to our ongoing journeys of personal fulfillment?
It’s possible. I’ve seen it. So let’s stop accepting – and expecting – anything less.
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