Monday, April 1, 2013
The School in the Cloud
Go to SOLE Toolkit (Self Organized Learning Environments) and download a copy. View the latest video of the Grand Prize Winner of TED 2013, Sugata Mitra. Respond to the blog by reflecting upon the Toolkit as an educational strategy? Do you think it has merit or a place in the conversation we are having about education in the 21st Century?
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School in the cloud is relevant in a 21st Century view of schooling and education. I like that it's based on curiosity and collaboration. I like the kind of exploratory questioning that's introduced. In terms of creating life long learners, this is the right place to start. However I don't think I agree with Sugata Mitra when he says that "knowing" is not needed, that whenever you need to know something, you can just find it on the Internet. I find that suggestion a bit simplistic, a tad ludicrous. I do believe there is still a place for experts in the world--and other places to get information--and that it helps when the teacher is knowledgeable on the subject he/she is teaching. In other words I think it takes more than a grandmother to engage a group of kids.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say that I'm not for encouragement and celebration of student achievement in the classroom. In fact, I think more of this is needed and, in a lot of cases, teachers do need to take a step back and allow students to own their ideas and drive discussions. But I also think having a teacher as facilitator should not be under valued. For instance, some of the responses to problems in the toolkit (I.e., what to do when your helper is not engaged, what to do when one group member isn't contributing, etc.) seemed glib and I found myself wondering could it really be that simple?
I do love, love, love the setup of the computer stations, 3 or 4 to a computer, and the collaboration this inspires. The interaction amongst the children is clearly the best part of this whole project.
I do understand that part of the idea of School in the Cloud is to bring school to places where there is no teacher, but maybe I'm just not ready to let go of the teacher just yet. Also, I see this activity as just one part of a larger unit or study. Would it ever get tiresome or repetitive to repeat this exercise over and over again?
Again, I do love the complexity, the depth of the questions because I think these are the kinds of questions we should be asking as life long learners, but I think as a curriculum there has to be more to it.
Sugata Mitra is on to something when he talks about having the students answering the big questions not just being bored and losing interest with the little details. These are the questions that children ask when they are young and stop when they ‘grow-up’. What’s really cool is if you get the class comfortable with this approach they will take the lead. I often ask questions in my classes. Science begins with the questions we have and then we seek the answers. You have to wait and the students begin to ask some good ones.
ReplyDeleteI can see where Mitra is coming from when he claims that you could just look up the answers on you iPad but I’m not sure that’s the type of critical thinking we are all striving for. Facts alone are interesting; I think most people would agree. People enjoy playing a game show or a board game of trivia. But school is much more than that. It’s more a matter of the journey of discovery. It’s the trill of collecting data and sharing that joy with your lab group. It’s the skills of a scientist that matter most not just random information. In the 21st century I still think we need classrooms with a real awesome teachers that can not only generate excitement for the topic but passion, laughter, and sure grandmother like support.
What’s learning going to like in the future? Could it be we don’t need to go to school at all? Could it be that in the future when you need to know something you can find out in two minutes. I want to think that my students will be the ones making the facts not the ones looking them up on Google. Real Biology takes time. Important studies can last years, becoming a good doctor isn’t just learning physiology online.
With regards to the self organized learning environments. I agree education would benefit in moving more toward this constructivist platform but lets not go too far. There may be great strides that can occur with this in developing countries for sure. Not everyone can be lucky enough and could afford living in a college dorm and paying thousands of dollars per unit just to learn. The current system rules out millions. So I’m all for this new classroom in the cloud. It’s free and if it includes real collaboration it could be rather significant.
Yes, the SOLE Toolkit clearly has merit and a place within the conversation about 21st Century learning and education. In essence here, he is describing a new shoreline which he himself discovered, but which would have been inevitably reached without him. He navigated a side-channel that he noticed, but he himself is well within the flow of discovery being created as a cultural whole. If it had not been Columbus (or the Vikings, or inquisitive Irish monks, or the Templars...), Europeans would have reached “the New World” eventually. And so it is with creating a cloud environment for education in this, the new “New World” of being digital.
ReplyDeleteMy intention is not to diminish his achievements. In fact, I really admire what he is doing, and that he engaged with the world by noticing that there were street kids outside of his office window. Many people would notice the same street kids, and left their experience right there. But he navigated his own side-channel of discovery. Simple engagement, a curious nature, and an active interest: he himself functions as a rather concise description of a 21st Century learner.
Distributed and easy access to virtually unlimited online information can be (and should be) leveraged to maximize the learning environment, but I have reservations about the idealized vision of the improvements which will become manifest. Good points being mentioned which serve to reassure me about helping future learners are: to develop stronger memory skills; and, to strengthen interpersonal skills. It seems somewhat contradictory to indicate that KNOWING can go away, but that we also need stronger memory skills. More elaboration is needed about what those stronger memories are to be used for, I suppose. If increasing our memory is so that we can navigate increasingly involved maze-like drop-down menus to improve our job performances, well, then, I’m out. I’ll stick with pencils by the beach on a lovely day. Strengthening interpersonal skills is incredibly important, however, as we increasingly distance ourselves from direct social contact.
About jobs, a couple of points here. In his TED talk speech, the future of jobs in his graphic slideshow is apparently caucasian, and, blue is the color choice of the worker-of-the-future. Culturally, the past is all about faded sepia-toned photos, and the future is all James-Cameron-toned blues and cyans. Future tech is cool colored, apparently, and the worker’s wardrobe will always match his oh-so-pleasing! hand-held device.
Red is always evil That’s why the HAL-9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey was a red-eyed cyclops (a cyclops with many different eye locations, however). As well, that’s why the “homage” (read that as stolen idea) for the evil computer named Auto in WALL-E is also a red-eyed cyclops. I can’t help but think about those humans adrift on the space ship in the second-half of WALL-E as being the ultimate outcome when giving students the choice to pursue only those topics which interest them. An extreme reaction? In some ways, yes, but not completely.
A previous Youtube video by Will Richardson contained these comments:
“In this moment, our kids can learn pretty much learn whatever they want, whenever they want”; and, “Mark and my daughter Tess are not waiting for a curriculum to deliver to them the things that they want to learn. They’re simply going out and learning those things when they want to”. Again the this theme is explicitly stated by Mitra in the TEDTalk video: “We don’t know what the jobs of the future will look like. We do know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever the want, in whatever way that they want.” That pretty much sums up what all of those people in WALL-E were doing.
Me? I’m taking my pencils to the beach (but I’ll still have my iPad there, too).
I do think that the SOLE Toolkit has merit or a place in the conversation we are having about education in the 21st Century, but I have some concerns.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate Mitra's efforts to "encourage kids to work as a community to answer their own vibrant questions by using the internet." I think it's clear that students will need these skills in order to succeed in the 21st Century workplace. And I agree with Kate and Ray that the depth of questions that Mitra poses to the students are a wonderful way to inspire curiosity and encourage self-directed learning.
I also share Kate and Ray's concerns that scrapping the structure of a school could be problematic. I am convinced of the benefits of self-paced learning and individualized instruction, but I’m not convinced that these can be accomplished by scrapping the structure of a school entirely. On the contrary, I think these approaches will require additional structure. In the SOLE Toolkit, Mitra states that, "the most effective educators are great witnesses, supporters, and structure-providers, but not answer-suppliers." But he doesn't address an important part of this equation, which is that teachers will need training on how to be effective structure-providers. How do we get kids to stay focused on answering the big questions and not get distracted on the internet? How do we help the students identify credible sources of information? And how do we facilitate the process of children self-organizing in an effective manner? The SOLE Toolkit doesn't have any tools to help students with these issues.
I agree with Mitra that the Internet might help children answer almost any question, but I'm skeptical of his claim in the TED video that doing multiplication in your head is archaic and no longer important. If students need to go online every time they need to do a multiplication problem, are they forming new schema? Are they developing new abilities to reason and solve problems, or are they taking shortcuts that inhibit their intellectual growth? I think these questions ought to be dealt with in proper studies before we accept that the role of the traditional school is obsolete.
So while I am in favor of many of Mitra's principles, I think his approach might raise more questions than it answers.
I also agree that the SOLE toolkit has merit/place in the conversation about education in the 21st century. However the traditional school system is not going anywhere soon. I think it’s a great compliment to the current system. SOLE provides children a place where they can raise questions and find answer on their own without fear of getting a low score on a test. Furthermore, teachers usually don’t have time to cover material in class or answering “difficult” questions. Children’s curiosity declines as they grow older because the adults ignore their questions. I do believe that once the SOLE toolkit and school in the cloud become more “mainstream”, we will see more creative and independent thinker type of children.
ReplyDeleteI share the same view with Katie about not taking teachers into account for children’s learning. However, I can see Sugata Mitra’s passion to create the school in the cloud. Privileged students from developed countries have everything when it comes to education such as devoted teachers, computers, ipads, etc. Children from the third world countries do not share the same fortune. Seeing children from the slum were able to learn by on their own from a computer on the wall was very fascinating. I wonder if all of the children the developing countries from around the world can learn without accessing to proper schools, what can they do with the new knowledge? Will it help them to get out of poverty? Maybe I am stretching myself out a bit here. I don’t think SOLE or school on cloud is the ultimate answer to all of our problems, but it’s definitely a great add-on to our 21st century education.
The SOLE Toolkit Gives a great structure for self paced learning. This is not a new idea. The idea has existed from the beginning of humanity. Humans have always taken the information they have around them,explored it and formed a hypothesis and conclusions. It is through this process that man has evolved intellectually. Sometimes getting back to the basics is best for the discovery of knowledge.
ReplyDeleteI know the inference is on the elimination of teachers, but they are still there. Teachers are required to ask the right questions and quietly guide the students in a direction that will provoke learning. When you have good instruction and guidance from teachers, the learning process happens faster. The student doesn’t have to start from scratch, but can learn from the thoughts and experiences of others; that's why today is a great day for education. There has never been a time in history when the thoughts and experiences of others have been so available to everyone. People are concerned because they are afraid of misinformation, but misinformation has always existed. When things are printed in books that information is only correct if the people printing the books were honest or did a good job researching the information. Books can be just as inaccurate as the web. People forget that before the web you still had to know how to check sources and filter the good information from the bad.
The SOLE Toolkit give great ideas on how to structure online learning. It breaks down the time that should be used for the learning process and so on. There is still learning when it takes place randomly, but learning increases when it is directed, giving the students a much more rich learning environment.
I feel that SOLE has room in the conversation for 21st century education. I am not sure how many people live in poverty I would have to venture to say 1 billion. It is wonderful to see youth in poverty sticken neighborhoods and villages able to answer a question in a language that is not their own by manipulating a computer. It is wonderful to see children working together to answer it seems any question that can be posed to them. What will it actually take to create a cloud school? I think it will take a lot of money and resources to create a cloud classroom. So when 4 children share their excitement over what they have learned or taught themselves, then other people are going to want to share in this new found knowledge or at least the accesability to it. I can see centers for cloud learning needing to be built but with no funds to make it happen. Where will the resources come from to build institutions with walls to access a school that has no walls. Seems like a strange paradox to me.
ReplyDelete