Aug 17 2008
One View – 2020
Hello readers, this page is a reflective work in progress. My intention is not a one idea, high GI post, but rather a slow burn to collate emerging ideas.
It will change, maybe frequently, I like that, it’s how my brain is wired. Read on, if you have the inclination. But the self censor has posted an advisory, be warned. It’s not a quick one idea post, its a repository of emerging thoughts, a page even, anyhoo, hope you enjoy.
Imagine the year 2020AD. Ok, you got the picture happening?
In April 2008 Australian PM Kevin Rudd and assembled fellow Aussies, debated where Australia could be in 12 years time. Their resulting visions released in May 08 are well worth a read, especially those pertaining to education and schools in chapter one. A sentence from page 14 resonates;
Our institutional arrangements need to be reformed. Policy and funding should be driven by the needs of the individual rather than the institution.
Ambitious? Certainly.
But unless the big picture goals co-exist with pragmatism you can never arrive at a destination of worth. Shoot for the stars and hit what? A black hole? I’d rather know my goal and then modify my way towards it.
Ok contextualising this nebulous but needed vision, I wondered what school “education” may look, feel and sound like in a little over a decade, a mere blip in systemic change chronology.
A decade into the 21st Century the vast majority still trumpet the 20th century factory model, itself a perfection of the original 19th century little boxes. Fill the empty vessal for 13 odd years then summative stamp the finished product on exit from the line.
A conspiracy of convenience, comfortable ignorance and “in my day, that’s how it was done.” It’s what we know as current education and we work to rules.
But is it really an effective learning model that will enable a 2009 kindergarten child to succeed in life post graduation in 2022? I don’t think so.
Should schools be fundamentally something different? Something that may in fact reflect the broader world and the times our student’s live in away from school?
Really education should not be tinkered with. It needs brave leaders who can fundamentally change the grass roots, the nuts and bolts, maybe “the system” whilst at the same time being pragmatic, concrete and tangible. A hard task, bet your sweet patooties it is, but are you getting where I’m heading?
19th Century Institutions called schools and centralised systemic education buerocracies need an urgent overhaul. Other economic and societal sectors did not enjoy their forced renaissance so why should we in education mirror past mistakes? If we can positively influence future directions shouldn’t we?
It’s not yet “get it now” or “wither and die” but changes elsewhere saw roles change substantially and relatively slowly. There is a rapidly emerging gap beteen the innovators, the current “good” learning operators and the gatekeeper laggards. Not only is change exponential now, the gap between these 3 broad groups also is and that is a key difference in the digital age. In the past you could play catch up, now I’m not so sure.
Ok enough, humour me whilst I peer deeply into my tea cup and have a little look at what the leaves reveal.
A few predictions on learning, change, the role of teachers and systemic bureaucracies. At least when I hang up the chalk, oh around 2028, I can come back here for a chuckle, if nothing else.
Innovators are moving far more rapidly than the following suggestions, laggards will still be using IWBs as overhead projectors and DETs may still be playing nanna to whoever is left.
One thing is absolutely guaranteed however, change is exponential from now on.
Are the now 5 year old ’semantic, read/write, web2.0 world’, virtual educational spaces and traditional online learning all overblown hype or will they fundamentally shift education into the 21st century?
Are monolithic walled garden systems, who ‘protect’ participants by cocooning them, simply adding solvent to their own internal structures when it will be community glue that is needed?
Are these ‘nannas’ or ‘Big Brothers’ hastening their own future irrelevancy by cloistering those inside from the new ‘flat world no gatekeeper’ learning realities?
It is a now a flat digital world and education is not immune to globalisation, or shouldn’t be.
Will large closed systems, unresponsive laggards and mega beurocracies remain educationally relevant and if so, for what? Probably as box ticking overseers of quality mandated standards and little else.
Will secondary students ultimately have the same choices now seen emerging in leading tertiary institutions?
The empowering of individual educational consumerism is already here. Tertiary students are already able to vote with their digital feet. They move on if satisfying, rigourous, engaging learning is not delivered on their terms.
Any government funding travels with the student, funding is no longer tied as a direct grant to the institution. The nexus has shifted and will filter to secondary learning sooner rather than later.
Students and parents will easily find the best to suit their specific learning needs via peer reviews, deep tagging, semantic searching, online free sharing of quality intellectual property and sites like Rate My Lecture/Teacher/Professor/School. Bored of Studies, an Australian site, could easily develop into such a venture where communities critque contributors for the benefit of all.
Quality content will be ubiquitious, consumers can choose from a plethora of contracted learning mentors, whose intellectual property will have been openly judged with the best sticking in rating lists and searches. Educational reputations will be based on sharing not ownership.
Individual reputations will also be global and viral much the way institutional reputations do the rounds and are rated today. The “good” schools and universities are known today.
By 2020 the best mentors will be the tradable in demand commodity. Physical institutions will exist as a space for F2F activities when needed, only for a few morning hours, once per week or certainly in far more flexible time chunks than now. Other learning hours will be virtual, online, building social cohesion or recreation. Learning will be an open all hours 24/7 choice to suit consumers, not deliverers.
Students will use real, virtual and online learning communities based on connectivism, authentic collaborative projects and relevancy to their individual needs. The best independent contracted mentors will be hired and remunerated appropriately for their guidance at face to face campuses and in online and virtual learning spaces.
Learning concierges offering known deep quality will teach many well, other mentors, formally known as generalist teachers, will retrain and move on. The death of rote repetitive production line factory jobs has already seen upskilling, retraining and retrenchment in all other economic sectors, education is not immune. Expert mentors will come from all industry sectors.
Hands on, technical and practical resource centres will exist as specialist centres, co-operatively used by many consumers in a district or region. State of the art equipment, machinery and expensive capital items can be leased and kept at the cutting edge. Learners will attend these specialist centres for the new blocks of time they need to, maybe an internship for a month at a time for isolated students or one day a week for those with the physical access. Theory components of these courses will be delivered online.
High quality, flexible face to face learning using these new dynamics is becoming more critical, now, not in 2020. Savvy individuals who position themselves to harness emerging opportunities, possess the requisite deep understanding of connectivism and are masters of their own free intellectual property will find themselves in greater global demand. Teachers will tender out their services.
Freely available online learning resources contributed by the best open learning systems and individuals are rapidly compiling now. Content is king, but we need humans to deliver the deeper context.
Emerging deep tagging will search repositories of freely available digital resources for specific applications. A quality learning sherpa or concierge will be the critical difference to contextualise the resulting and reshaped free content.
Providng a sense of community and belonging, leaving a legacy and connectivism will be vital human requirements brought to this new learning by the qualities of the concierge. These will be the skills future teachers will need.
A far fetched and fanciful propostion? Maybe.
See what you take out of Margaret Meijers Hefalumps New Literacies story. I hope it makes you think.
The convergence of a number of new literacy issues is happening around us daily. Look at what leading media and universities are doing.
Consumers (students) demand change, they enrol in courses because it suits their learning needs. Business, in return for their sponsorships, will benefit by accessing the best and brightest ideas that result from aunthentic projects. If Governments can optimise their always limited budgets further then these changes will definately happen.
The research is in, governments are addressing these issues, slowly, now and lagging school systems are scrambling to remain relevant as the age of the hyper empowered connected individual dawns by 2020.
The slideshow below introduces very basic ‘now’ features of web2.0. If you don’t understand its content, maybe it is time to learn before the digital divide becomes a chasm and you won’t be able to play catch up.
In his video below Prof Heppell says no two schools will be the same. Schools will be communities far stronger than their collective parts.
Heppell says no two schools will be the same. Schools will be communities far stronger than their collective parts.They will be uniquely and easily identified by the relationships, passions, attitudes and core values of all participatory learners, be they the student, teacher, parent or school sponsors.
Real project based learning and formative assessment will be the absolute focus. Not taught from discreet syllabi boxes with pointless hoop jumping end summative assessments as seen in a single test or series of competitive individual tasks.
The 21st century real world does not work in this way and leading schools are already discovering the power of the requisite skills learners will need to contribute effectively for life. It sure ‘aint a single dumb 3 hour test.
Faculty empires and discreet subjects will merge into authentic cross curricula deeply engaging tasks taught collaboratively in and by teams.
Outcomes of these learner projects will be prized by the relevant school sponsoring industries as innovative real world solutions. School sponsers will apply these project results and financially contribute to do so.
Schools could tender, auction, sell or trade this intellectual property to the highest bidder as the next Pulitzer, Nobel, Booker, Archibald, Logie or Walkley is uncovered in future schools.
Mentors, coaches, sage on the side, learning concierges, all formally known as the teacher, will be in greater demand for face to face guidance. Dr Google has long been far smarter than any single ‘font of all’ type teacher anyway.
Hierachial or lineal control by overseers will be redundant, instead learners will embrace the strength and opportunities of random access circular networks that build communities of “likemindedness”.
These will be the contexts where the deeper quality teaching and learning will take place for the life of the project. Its happening now with many wikis, projects, authentic action research. Its just that by 2020, that will be how progressive schools will do all their learning, easily tick the governments mandated quality outcome benchmarks and give students choice.
The greatest transformations and place for the largest gains are in those places who are the most disadvantaged or lagging. The incremental top of the exponential scale is the hardest improvement to achieve.
Less developed education systems rapidly progressing along the x axis of improvement will fast close the performance differential, due largly to ubiquitous technology.
Research I enjoyed
Bill Farren at Education for Well Being articulates his thoughts far better than I with fantsatic diagrams that explain many of the changes facing Insulat ed education systems.
I really hope those with responsibility for our DETs future direction have a read of Bill’s and Clay Shirky’s work. Thought provoking and hard to put down.
Bobby Elliot of the Scottish Qualifications Authorty (SQA)
Frank Feather on Today’s Education Systems an extract below, read the full entry by Stephen Dill on Public Education Start Again.
Mass education was the best we could do in the Industrial Era, and so we educated people on the basis of the factory model. This is the mass education we have today. It served us well. We could educate masses of people with few teachers, in production-line fashion, in batches. And the subject matter was also taught in batch mode. And that model may still be appropriate for some types of skills training in some environments in some countries. But it is being made obsolete by the Internet Revolution.
2020 Vision Report of the Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review Group
Schools also need to ensure that young people develop the skills and attitudes that employers value, many of which are becoming even greater priorities in knowledge-based economies. These are sometimes misleadingly called ‘soft skills’ and include …
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• being resilient in the face of difficulties
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• being confident and able to investigate problems
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• being creative, inventive, enterprising and entrepreneurial.
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• knowing how to work independently without close supervision
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• taking responsibility for, and being able to manage, one’s own learning and developing the habits of effective learning
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• knowing how to evaluate information critically
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• knowing how to work with others in a team
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• Reliability, punctuality and perseverance
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• being able to communicate orally at a high level
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Thanks for this post. Lots of interesting ideas here. I’m betting that the forecasts you make here will come true sooner than later. (I’ll be attempting to set up a virtual class for next year and will no longer be working in a school. Hopefully, I can get enough students to sign up for my course and make it work.)
The idea of students being able to take their money where they want is an important one. I think we need to be working toward legislation that allows students to use “their educational $$” from the gov. as they please (for education, of course). The definition of “education” will probably need to change, however. Once students have choice in how they spend their ed$$, then I think it will open up all kinds of new offerings from a more eclectic group of ed providers.
Interesting idea about less developed ed systems catching up with the more developed. It reminds me of poorer countries skipping the infrastructural costs of land line phone systems and going right to cellular. I agree this could help level the field considerably.
Bill, thanks for joining the conversation.
Agreed, much of this will happen well before 2020. I chose that date back in August when I was just diving into this web2.0 world.
6 short months later I can see the pace of reform and development is way faster. Real innovators such as yourself will see to that.
The eclectic learning on offer by education service providers will see deep QTL as a given on all levels.
Students will carefully invest their government funding and choose very unique paths that suit their individual learning styles, their passions and goals for their futures.
The student will be the administration. The pyramid of control in current DETs will cease to be relevant.
I’m also predicting 2020 as to when these practices are global and common in what are now known as departments of education which will cease to exist by then, or be very different places at the very least.
Those systems and individuals that innovate will be allowed to because they are not restricted, filtered, mandated, controlled or cloistered.
Current misguided policy that wants to protect and cocoon for either control, privacy, fear of semantic web or litigious reasons will change, but too slowly as others close the achievemnet gap and others such as yourself, race ahead and set the deep learning pace.
Well done Bill, I will be following your posts more closely now.