Technology, Education and Poverty

In Ontario, there's a plan to provide every kid from grade 4 to 12 with access to technology (iPad, tablet etc). There's this idea that with technology in the classroom, school is going to be the "great equalizer" at last.
We are not so naive as to believe that access to technology in education will level the playing field and poor kids will miraculously have the same opportunities their wealthier peers have.

But while handing out ipads will not overcome poverty, access to technology will empower poor students in learning. Access to technology via ipads will offer opportunities for children to work together, research, and collaborate in areas that interest them.

Take for example Sugata Mitra’s experiment in Indian villages. Mitra installed a computer in a wall and documented illiterate slum children figuring out how to use it, and then actually using it to learn and share knowledge.
Mitra has since designed ‘School in the Cloud,’ a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other —no teachers present—using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Mitra proposes Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), which he defines as “broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together.”

Fact is, school, as we know it is history. School is obsolete (especially relevant for poor kids). Done. Terminated.  Can I say it any more succinctly?
Today, students are called on to be the drivers of their own learning.

The internet offers an unprecedented opportunity to do so. We can find out what we want to know in seconds. We can connect in groups and across the world, with others who share similar interests and concerns.

Open Source Learning

Another way to understand where education is heading, what’s stirring in the Zeitgeist and taking hold of the imagination can be understood as ‘open-source learning.’
We have heard of the concept 'open-source' in internet circles; anything can be learned over the internet. There is a new openness to educational resources. Institutions of higher learning are offering free online course materials. MIT (Open CourseWare) has over 2000 gratuitous course materials, their motto being "Unlocking knowledge, empowering minds."
Open source learning is based on extending this idea to all learning, to everyone. It's a term that I believe was coined by none other than John Taylor Gatto.
Technology is lowering the costs of education: expensive textbooks will no longer be a barrier to education.

Joint Collective Agencies and Communities of Practice

It is happening everywhere; learning in communities, work groups and collaborations. ‘Communities of practice’—a term coined by John Seely Brown—is the new learning spaces and places representative of this new culture of learning.
Kids getting together and pursuing their passions in joint collective agency, is the revolutionary wave in education. Learning in community, engaging one another, practicing 'deep tinkering' 'marinating in the experience' are some of the ideas for a new culture of learning that Seely-Brown is popularizing.

My teen has been participating in virtual communities for years now, first following her interests in the arts and now focusing on anti-oppression, social justice activism. Exchanging conversation, picking up ideas, reciprocating with her fellow bloggers, the amount of learning she is doing through social media like tumblr is astounding.

Here’s where she goes to dialogue, critic, share, challenge and be challenged. Her virtual community supports the work she does and she in turn supports the work of its members. I never realized how powerful this tool for learning is until I saw the comments and feedback she gets from fellow ‘social justice warriors’—spurring her on to further work.
Online communities can provide the support that a kid might not otherwise be able to access (for example, children questioning gender). Shared experiences all factor into building the self-esteem that is critical in order to overcome abuse and injustices and yes, the trauma of poverty itself.

Not what you know but who you know.

Do you have a linkedin account? I do. We all know that developing personal networks is invaluable for professional growth. Who knows? We might get discovered or at least, land a job.
There’s the concept of personal learning network’ (PLN) to describe the cultivating of personal networks for learning opportunities. PLNs are those connections individual learners make to suit their specific learning needs.

Connections are being made on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blogs, Google Hangouts and more. Ahead of the adults, young people connect online in a social context as well as a more strategic, intentional way in order to share, grow opportunities and stay involved and connected

For younger children, it is important to have the guidance and support of caring, knowledgeable, and trusted adults.

To wrap this up, I’d like to offer a quote from Mitra who says, “we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. 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.”

Hand kids the technology, guide and counsel them, support their interests, facilitate their networking opportunities, and poverty will become less of a barrier to being educated.
Education is something that you have to want to pursue; no one can do it for you. But educators can pave the way.

All things Unschool

Web Video, Crowd Accelerated Innovation and Radical Openness?

Like most people who follow TED talks, I watch them to get inspired. A presentation with TED’s head curator, Chris Anderson was right on my ‘open source’ wavelength so that I had to write about it here.

Anderson opens his presentation by saying something awesome about what large human crowds can do.

Crowds can be overwhelming (I tend to avoid crowds like the plague). Our population explosion is terrifying. But sometimes, a large human crowd is a good thing.  Innovation emerges out of groups. As social beings, we spark off each other.  

In this ‘Age of Participation’ a fascinating example of 'open source' in action is taking place. It's a worldwide phenomenon that organizations and individual people can tap in to and Anderson calls it Crowd Accelerated Innovation (CAI).

 In brief, you’ve got these ‘cycles of improvement’ driven by people watching web videos.

Web taught? Absolutely!

Be it in the evolution of dance where you have dancers challenging one another to get better, TED speakers spending more time in preparation, or even scientists publishing peer-reviewed work on line,  poetry and spoken word and on and on, people can learn by watching the best and the brightest, and get inspired to step up their game.

Step your game up alright.

Anderson notes three areas that are needed to kick start CAI:

1.       A crowd of people who share a common interest. They are creating the eco system from which innovation emerges.

2.       Light. Clear open visibility. The best of what people are capable of- that's where you will learn, get inspired and participate.

3.       Desire. Without it innovation is impossible.

So on the web, all these three elements are connected! "The crowd shines a light on them and fuels the desire." Anderson describes this as a self-fueling cycle of learning. The internet makes it easy to find the best stuff.  You can watch repeatedly and gain knowledge and skill.

This possibility of a new type of global recognition is driving huge amounts of effort. Because you can see the best, everyone can learn.

Anderson points out that this is a model any organization could use to nurture its own cycle of crowd accelerated innovation: “Invite the crowd, let in the light, dial up the desire.”

 But there is a catch. To tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace what has come to be known as ‘radical openness.’

What does that mean?  It means you have to share. You have to give. You have to let people see your deepest self.

When TED started opening up their talks to the world, billions of people started spreading the word. The idea of radical openness works for TED. And it can work for you.

It works so well this web video learning because our brains are uniquely wired to decode meaning through face to face. As Anderson says, “It’s an ancient art form gone global."

What does that mean for global education you ask? Chris Anderson asks, “Is it possible to imagine a similar situation? Does it have to be this top down painful process?

Chris Anderson replies, “Why not a self fuelling cycle in which we all can participate? Schools can't be silos we can't stop learning at 21.” 

 “For the first time in human history, talented students don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. They can sit two feet in front of the world's finest.”

We know it. The world's universities are opening up their curricula. Self-directed and passion-lead learning has never been easier to do. People are finding new ways to learn and to share data and knowledge. Our future is "many to many not one to many."

There’s a whole lot more that Anderson says but for this post lets end with this:

What if the crowd could be net contributors as opposed to net plunderers. Who is the teacher? You're the teacher. You're part of the crowd that maybe about to launch the bigger learning cycle in human history – a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter, wiser more beautiful place. 

Yes!

Quebec Student Strike: It's a good thing.

If they can, so can you!

I can't be a blogger about education and not say anything about what is going on in Quebec!

Whichever way you look at it, those students have guts. Some people are saying they need to get real- the rest of the country is paying double what they pay in tuition.

They say, Stop whining and grow up." But I agree with the students. 

" It isn't fair. It isn't fair," they complain. That's right. A wise guy (my husband actually) said, "Innovation isn't fair."

What those kids are doing will result in fairness in the long run. The students in Quebec are pushing for more: more opportunities for education, more democracy for everyone.  

This is a good thing. So what's up with the rest of Canada? Why aren't more students out there- pushing for free or cheaper education?

Free education (funded through taxation rather than tuition) is no new thing. Many countries have free or at least super cheap, higher education that in some cases is even extended to foreigners! These countries include the Northern European nations- Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and Germany and Austria. 

Scotland has free tuition and many EU kids flock over there. Argentina, Brazil, Sri Lanka, Cuba are some more examples of countries that make it possible for everyone to access higher ed if they want it. 

Then there's the fact that 'open source' has become a reality. If you still haven't heard about the 'open source movement,' now is a good a time to do so.

'Open source' means that more and more, education is going to be cheaper-not more expensive.This extends to higher ed. Easily, readily accessible, colleges and universities are starting to offer their course materials for free; to whomever wants it. 

That is the way the world wants it to be. Collaboration, contribution, innovation.

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

People are writing about the student strike (one of the biggest in Canadian history by the way) as being more that a student strike- but an actual social movement.

Naturally, the government has tried to squash their efforts by quickly passing Law 78, a radical legislation making all protests inside or near a college or university campus illegal! 

Additionally the law makes any spontaneous demonstration across Quebec illegal, forcing all to seek discretionary police permission to protest. Huge penalties apply for those who do not conform.  Some Quebec groups are arguing for the adoption of a bank tax, starting at 0.14 per cent and increasing to 0.7 over five years, as a way to raise public funds for post-secondary educational institutions. Here's what one writer reports:  

At a time of financial crisis, banks in Canada and Quebec are securing record profits, over $22.4bn in 2011, a 15 per cent increase from the previous year. Given record bank profits in 2012 and recent reports outlining a secret $114-billion bailout at the height of the financial crisis, the Quebec student proposal to create a relatively tiny tax on financial institutions to benefit education is gaining public traction.

Seems like a good idea to me.

Learning, learning everywhere! (Open source learning)

 Free online courses on computer science are being offered at Stanford. This, people is what I am talking about. The idea that education-higher education can be free is a reality. The face of education is changing and nothing, but nothing can stop the tide.
Here, I thought I'd include excerpts from a piece I wrote for this blog in 2009:

We have heard of the concept 'open source' in internet circles; anything can be learned over the internet. There is a new openness to educational resources; for example MIT (Open CourseWare) is now offering up to 1800 on line course materials for free - their motto being "unlocking knowledge, empowering minds."

Open source learning as coined by John Taylor Gatto is based on extending this idea to all learning, to everyone. The underlying premises of open source learning is that learning is available everywhere in life and not restricted to 'places of learning'-namely schools. Open source is happening everywhere. How can it not, with the internet as accessible as it is!

Resources of all kinds are every where to be found in the day to day world; people, art galleries and science centres, businesses, professional schools, museums, community centres, libraries.

Of course, much learning happens incidentally and by doing; through games, work, and living. You learn fractions by cooking, history by watching movies, writing by reading books.

Think of it as the newest, most cutting edge vision of the pursuit of knowledge and education. Much deeper than simply another novel way of doing business, it is a different business all together. Open source learning is a shift in consciousness- a fresh wind that is sweeping out the old ideas of what, how and when one should learn.

Questions arise that challenge the entire concept of education at it's roots; whose education anyway? Do we even have the right to impose on another human being our own ideas (the State's ideas, the religious establishments ideas...) of what another person should learn? Crazy? Going too far? Still it goes to the roots of freedom. And it's happening the world over.

As Gatto says, "Nobody can give you and education. You have to take an education." And that means taking here, there everywhere from the world around us, according to what we are interested in, passionate about and not what some one prescribes for us.

"We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."Gatto

Collaboration in learning

Much good can be achieved of peers learning together; bouncing ideas off each other. Healthy competition and collaboration is stimulating.

One kid sees what the other kid is doing and wants to do the same.
Another kid wants to be a part of what is going on.

The key to success is that the kids all be interested in the same topic and they have arrived at the group without coercion but with willingness and eagerness to be there.

Now in the case of Sugata Mitra's experiments, he reiterates that once he has introduced the computer to the village kids,he then leaves the kids alone. He goes away for months at a time.
http://radiofreeschool.blogspot.com/2011/01/where-teachers-wont-go.html
There is a challenge set; sometimes there is no challenge at all but the challenge of discovery that the kids set themselves.

The main thing is that the kids are left to explore. In this scenario, a kid who has a little more knowledge than another shares what they know. Together, the kids learn naturally by exploring, trying out, playing- no adults directing the process.

They've been given something intriguing. They can do it on their own.

In the John Seely Brown case studies, Maui kids got together with a common ambition; to become the world's best surfacers.
http://www.johnseelybrown.com/ncstate09.html

In Seely-Brown's Commencement Speech (given at North Carolina State University), he tells the story of Dusty Payne and his six or so kids "came together to fiercely compete but also to continuously learn from each other."
The story goes,

These kids would gather in Dusty’s living room and pour over YouTube videos and their own videos of themselves experimenting – trying impossible moves, failing, failing, failing but never getting discouraged. As a group they learned, they invented, they created new aerial moves that defy the imagination... And, as we would say in business lingo, they also studied adjacent domains such as skate boarding, snowboarding, motor cross and then built analogies from them, talked them over, analyzed them to death and then dashed down to the surf to try them out. 

Maui is now the center of this kind of extreme surfing. No, not the north shore of Oahu, but Maui – the island never known for producing a champion surfer. And all this because Dusty and his buddies decided they could do the impossible and they pushed each other and learned with and from each other to the extreme. These kids have mastered the art of innovation.

So the ideal learning situation for many is to find like minded people to share your interests. I don't think this means that participants have to all be the same age- although that is a good motivating factor.

Take a look around your community and see what's cooking and get involved.

Start your own group if there isn't one. ; put out a call in the local papers or community centre or library or --yes, school.

Don't forget the online community. This is a wonderful place to share and collaborate on projects.
I welcome your comments!

An open letter to educators

This is an entertaining watch (although a little obnoxious) and certainly telling of how things need to change in the way education is traditionally delivered.

Unschooling 101

My friend, Betsy Agar teaches a course at McMaster University and invited me to speak to her 'Engineering in Society' class of third year students. What a great bunch of kids! They were really interested in the topic-Unschooling/Open source learning and asked good questions, and gave thoughtful comments.
I introduced the idea of unschooling by reading a chapter from Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking. What a hoot! 'Pippi goes to school' was the chapter I read to the class. Why did I choose Pippi? Well, she is really the quintessential unschooler. Yes,she displays great ignorance and even rudeness.But she is also truthful; "Well now, really my dear little woman," said Pippi,"that is carrying things too far. You just said that seven and five are twelve. There should be some rhyme and reason to things even in school. Furthermore, if you are so childishly interested in that foolishness, why don't you sit down in a corner by yourself and do arithmetic and leave us alone so we can play tag?"
So the spirit behind what she says and does is what an honest experience of unschooling would entail.
She tries to create meaning in the questions the teacher asks the students, attempting to contextualize an otherwise vague inquiry;"If Lisa has seven apples and Axel has nine apples, how many apples do they have together?"
"Yes, you tell Tommy," Pippi interrupted."And tell me too, if Lisa gets a stomach ache and Axel gets more stomach ache, whose fault is it...?"
This is not a smart alec talking but someone who is actually reflecting on the question as well as the outcome!
When it comes to drawing the "snip of paper" that the teacher gives the kids is far too small for her and she has already filled it up and is moving onto the floor to complete her picture of a horse;"Just now I'm working on his front legs,but when I get to this tail I guess I'll have to go out in the hall."
The non confirming, exuberant, joyful child is open to the world and refuses a type of 'learning' that takes space in the confines of a school room; "There's altogether too many apples and ibexes and snakes and things like that. It makes me dizzy in the head. I hope that you, Teacher won't be sorry." And not too long after, she gaily leaves on her horse. With a 'ringing laugh Pippi rode out through the gate so wildly that the pebbles whirled around the horse's hoofs and the windowpanes rattled in the schoolhouse.' Awesome!