DanG BloG: yet another DanG BloG

 

  I've read a number of posts lately that point in a similar direction, which is we our educating our students as if we are preparing them for a hundred years ago, not 20 or 30 years from now.   I also get the nagging feeling that there's a tide rising and most of us have a course set with no adjustment assuming the tide is at a constant level.  School is school, what worked 100 years ago to service an agrarian age should work just fine for the current age.  No Child Left Behind, although seeming to "teach to the test" at least... um... leaves no child behind... right?  With the proliferation of computer desktops, mobile phones and so forth, wouldn't you think that enrollment in computer science would be through the roof?  Well, it's at a 30 year low, actually..  Not to say that computers themselves are going away, quite the contrary.  But the computer science deparment, that particularly odd thing that needs to insert the word "science" into it's title so that it can continue to hang out near the mathematics department from which it sprang... that's the place where you grab a keyboard and spend a week typing in your "Hello, World" Java program and by Friday maybe you've gotten past syntax errors, compiler issues, and managed to see those special "Hello, World" characters appear on the screen... that place seems irrelevant these days.  Why in the world would you want to type in a bunch of cruft that displays "Hello, World" on a screen with no graphics?  "Dude, I can do that on my mobile phone faster than you can say it.  What's the point?  You got any classes on virtual reality I can take so I can own my own business in Second Life?"  Some things to think about below...

Exhibit A: Here's one of my favorite talks on, hmm, careful here... "Creativity as something to encourage in education" and not ruthlessly educate students out of it.  Excellent TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson entitled "Do Schools kill creativity?":

Please watch this talk, but I think one of his early points is worth pulling in here even if you don't click the play button.

• "It's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.  If you think of it, children starting school this year (given the talk was given in 2006...) will be retiring in 2065.  Nobody has a clue!  Despite all the expertise [...] nobody has a clue what the world will look like in 5 years time.  And yet we're meant to be educating them for it"

Exhibit B: The "Shift Happens" presentation, or variants thereof:

Some data points worth pulling inline in case you aren't watching that one, either:

• today's learners will have 10 to 14 jobs... by age 38
• the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004 (not to mention that the people holding those jobs in 2010 started school around 1970)
• Nintendo (as in video games) invested more than $140 million in research and development in 2002 alone - the US federal government spent less than half as much on research and innovation in education
• There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month - where did people ask the questions before?
• The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet
• It is estimated that a week's worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century
• It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10 18 ) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year - that's estimated to be more than in the previous 5000 years
• The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years - it is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010

Exhibit C: Robert Cringely's, installment the last couple of months, a series of three posts on education and technology:

1) War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore's Law - excerpts:

•  "... we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools...."
• "... Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. ..."
• "... Homeschooling, charter schools, these things didn't even exist when I was a kid, but they are everywhere now. ..."
• "... We are nearing the time when paying dues and embracing proxies for quality may give way to having the ability to know what kids really know, to verify what they can really do ..."

2) Amish Paradise: There is no one correct response to the generatonal change that's coming thanks to Moore's Law - excerpts:

•  "... the Amish have been on this same "new" educational path forever. Their ability to produce nearly 100 percent productive citizens (and very nice furniture) for about fifty bucks per student per year is especially galling to those government schools that spend $16K and turn out a lot of slackers...."
• "... because of cheap computers and the Internet, the ability to solve problems ad hoc has become more efficient than teaching kids about problems and issues that will never face them. As a result, the US has let itself become less competitive by putting so much money into a product (a kid) making both its cost and its ability globally uncompetitive. So, instead of putting more effort into making globally competitive products, we put more effort into blaming those who are smarter at using technology that was mostly invented here. ..."
• "... The next generations will use technology even more than we do and they'll use it differently. This difference will form a feedback loop that will in turn alter the very structure of our society and its institutions. ..."

3) Ozzy Knows Best: Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne are the unwitting inventors of  prototype for digital education - excerpts:

•  "... Our grandchildren will run a world very different from the one we ran and many institutions will simply have to adjust or die...."
• "... Parents who are today in their 20s grew up with personal computers, mobile phones and video games. More importantly, their parents did, too.  This new generation of parents lives in a digital world and has little patience with analog traditions. Where we think of bricks and books they think of electrons and photons. Where we remember what time the library opens, they wonder why it should ever close...."
• "... For education, the personal computer is probably a dead end. It's not that we won't continue to have and use PCs in schools, but the market and intellectual momentum clearly lie elsewhere. So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games...."

And on that last note, I have to pop in for a few moments of confirmation and mega-dittoes.  I've been using Scratch and Alice recently with students.  I can liken the responses to the usage of these tools in the following way:

Class Project for 4th graders:

• Create a document in Word
• Create an HTML page

Class Response from 4th graders: 

I might as well have said, "it's time to do 100 sit-ups, everybody on the floor, let's go..." - there are a few eager beavers but by and large, "why are we doing this again?"

Class Project for 4th graders:

• Create a video game using Scratch based on a homework assignment
• Create a movie using Alice based on a homework assignment
• Create a robot car project using Squeak that drives itself around a track

Class Response from 4th graders:

Roughly akin to what you'd get if you walked into the computer lab and said, "Who wants ice cream?" -  nearly unanimous "Boo-YEAH!!"