THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION: THE BALANCING ACT

1. THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION:THE BALANCING ACT ISQ STATE CONFERENCE 2009 Steve Paul Contec Consulting

2. There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.” Claudia Wallis “Time” August 19, 2008

3. .... too many Australians are being condemned to less-than-satisfying lives by a less-than-satisfactory school system. ... As business leaders, we know how unprepared too many young people are for the working world." .... focused on our education and training system and how well it's performing for Australia and how it's performing for Australia against the rest of the world," Rupert Murdoch, 2009

4. Our Challenge “…if we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.” – John Dewey

5. We want to bring an education revolution to the quality of Australian schooling and as part of that we want to make sure that in schools right around the country we are getting the basics right. Because there is nothing more important than learning to read, learning to write, learning to do maths, these are the foundation skills for everything else in education. Julia Gillard radio interview at Gordon Primary School Canberra August 28, 2008

6. What I would say to our friends in the teacher unions across Australia, and many are of them are fantastic people, is that it is time to arrive in the 21st Century. And that is, let’s get past the name calling, let’s get past all this sort of pointless debate about blaming someone here or blaming someone there. Kevin Rudd radio interview at Gordon Primary School Canberra August 28, 2008

7. IT IS VERY STRAIGHTFORWARD “The goal of education is to raise standards of attainment... to better equip children to earn their way in the world and play a full part in society by improving teaching and learning within better organised schools, with improved facilities, better trained teachers and crucially, more effective leadership. A series of tests at key stages provided information for league tables of performance which pushed up performance..... The standards story has many merits; the goals are clear as are the means to achieve them. The field of play and the players are fairly contained; schools and teachers. If we get more children into better run schools for longer, then we should get better results.” Charles Leadbeater “What’s Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning” 2008

8. BUT THERE ARE PROBLEMS “Recent improvement strategies have inevitable limitations. Between 1997 and 2002, the literacy and numeracy strategies in primary schools were among the most impressive of the government’s achievements. But the rate of improvement has been levelling off. All strategies have their limits. Educational processes are complex, so the amount of improvement any single strategy can effect is small. To maintain the momentum new approaches are needed”. David Hopkins 2006 “Sharp increases in attainment between 1995 and 2000 in Key Stage tests in English and maths seem to have petered out.” Charles Leadbeater 2008

9. ` KERRY O’BRIEN: “Kevin Rudd’s promised education revolution was a key part of his election victory, an agenda that includes benchmarking schools and raising teacher standards. But a leading expert on education, creativity and innovation who advises governments and major global corporations says that most education systems around the world are still modelled on the needs of the industrial age, and if anything are getting even narrower”. SIR KEN ROBINSON: “You know, every education system in the world currently is being reformed....The thing is that most reform movements are looking backwards; they’re looking back to the old system that was the result of the industrial revolution”.

10. 7.30 REPORT contd. Sir Ken Robinson: “You know, I can’t think there’s a kid in Australia who gets out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise their province’s reading standards. You know, it’s about them and energising them. I think the problem is that politicians think it’s like bailing out the auto industry. It’s like refining a manufacturing process. And it’s not; it’s about cultivating individual passions and talents. And if we don’t get that right, nothing else will ever work” .

11. CLOSER TO HOME • “Full cohort standardised tests have profoundly negative effects on teaching and learning, and the data they provide are not capable of informing policy decisions in meaningful ways.” • “It is often assumed that increased test scores over time indicate that students’ learning has increased. However, it has been convincingly demonstrated that these increases are often due to a combination of teachers “teaching to the tests” and students becoming familiar with tests. • “Full cohort tests encourage methods of teaching that promote shallow and superficial learning rather than deep conceptual understanding and the kinds of complex knowledge and skills needed in modern, information- based societies”. “Student Assessment Regimes” QSA 2009

12. WHAT IS THE ANSWER? “We believe the core of an excellent education system is based on talented teachers, strong system leadership, solid curriculum, and accountability for outcomes. However, another key component is the integration of technologies that can fuel new forms of teaching and learning, nurture 21st century skills, and prepare learners for participation in the global economy of this century”. “In addition to ensuring student attainment of core STEM skills, we have found it increasingly important to nurture the development of 21st century skills such as innovation, collaboration, problem-solving, and self-direction to help ensure success in the workplace”. (CISCO -2008) IN OTHER WORDS – TECHNOLOGY IS A NECESSARY ENABLER IN PROVIDING A 21ST CENTURY EDUCATION

14. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? • “A lesson learned in recent years is that leaders need to be wary of designing a reform agenda that fails to account for the changes taking place outside the school gates. While education systems have been making incremental progress, learner’s experiences and attitudes have been changing radically and governments and employers have begun to seek out different skill sets”. • In both developed and developing nations, young people have become increasingly reliant on social networking technologies to connect, collaborate, learn, and create and employers have begun to seek out new skills to increase their global competitiveness. Education has changed much less. Most schools have yet to revise their pedagogy to reflect current trends and technologies.” CISCO 2008

15. “In the early years of this still new century, the role of education in the knowledge society has been re-affirmed.Educational facilities which provide innovative learning environments for tomorrow’s knowledge workers and the wider community, are more important than ever. The principles of lifelong learning, inclusion, integration, sustainability, connectivity and quality have become catchphrase of educational policy in all OECD countries, and those responsible for designing educational facilities are responding in new and exciting ways. In our post-modern era, new understandings of learning, influences of information and communication technology and the employment requirements of the knowledge society have placed pressures and questions on the traditional provisions of education. New purposes of schooling have evolved”. OECD Report on Schools of the Future 2006

16. Strategic Pillars for21st CenturyLearning Teaching & Learning Student Lifestyle Effective & Efficient Administration - Business of Schools

17. Today’s digital kids think of information and communications technology (ICT) as something akin to oxygen: They expect it, it’s what they breathe, and it’s how they live; They use ICT to meet, play, date, and learn; It’s an integral part of their social life; It’s how they acknowledge each other and form their personal identities(Seely-Brown, 2004) Learning in the Digital Age; http://www.johnseelybrown.com/speeches.html

18. WHAT IS WEB 2.0? Web 2.0 is a catch-all term to describe developments on and a shift in the way the web is used from passive consumption of content to a more active participation, creating and sharing. It is about using the internet as a platform for simple, lightweight services that leverage social interactions for communication, collaboration, and creating, remixing and sharing content. Typically, these services develop rapidly, often relying on a large community of users to create and add value to content or data. Becta 2008

19. Examples of Web2.0 services • Weblogging service providers • Peer to peer file-sharing services • Social networking services • Wikis and other collaborative-writing service providers • Collaborative, distributed-expertise encyclopaedia projects • Online auction and trading services • Customisable online radio • Maps and driving directions • Travel and accommodation • Customisable new and secondhand online shops • Online calendars • Photos and drawing • Blogger; LiveJournal; Edublogs • YouTube; Break.com; iStockphoto; Azaureus.com • Meetup; MySpace; Facebook; Twitter • Seed wiki; Fan Fiction.Net; Wikispaces • Wikipedia; Jotspot • eBay; Graysonline • Pandora • Google Maps; Mapquest • Expedia.com; Wotif • Amazon.com • CalenderHub;Google Calendar; Webcalendar • iPhoto; Google Sketchup

20. SOME WEB 2.0 FACTS • Facebook has 90,000 developers working for them • Australia has 680,000 Twitter users (including the PM) • Google has over 150,000 servers at 24 data centres • 900 million mobile phones are sold throughout the world every year • The number of OECD broadband subscribers increased 11 times between 2000 and 2006 • In 2006 there were 2.5 billion mobile phone subscribers (the number has increased 200 times in 16 years) • MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut grew by 72%, 270% and 78% (resp.) in 2006 with 190 million unique users worldwide • US teens spend 40% of their media time on cell phones, Internet and games (2007)

21. SOME MORE WEB 2.0 STATISTICS • 1,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO – approx number of unique URL’s in Google’s index • 2,000,000,000 – number of Google searches daily • 24,400 – number of people employed by Google • 2,695,205 – number of articles in English on Wikipedia • 684,000,000 – number of visitors to Wikipedia • 70,000,000 – number of videos on YouTube • 100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day • 112,486,327 – number of views of most popular video on YouTube • 1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date • 37,000,000 – number of visitors to Twitter per month • 1,554,583 – number of Barack Obama’s Twitter followers • 200,000,000 – number of active users of Facebook • 100,000,000 – number of users who log onto Facebook at least once per day

22. AND YES THERE’S MORE! COMBINED VALUE OF Google+ Yahoo!+eBay+ Yahoo! Japan+ Amazon.com • Pre-2000 .......$2.6 billion • 3/10/2000.......$178 billion • 10/9/2002.......$32billion* • 11/7/2006.......$259 billion * Dot com crash Morgan Stanley

23. “Teachers can’t sit on the sidelines. We have to recognise that students’ use of technology is stronger and work from our own strength which is pedagogy. This means that we harness the technology and use it to help students learn thinking and analytical skills. They may know the tools better but we have to help them use it wisely”. Solomon and Schrum “Web2.0; new tools, new schools” 2007

24. Synergies between Web 2.0 and 21st century learning • Offer new opportunities for learners to take more control of their learning and access their own customised information, resources, tools and services • Encourage a wider range of expressive capability • Facilitate more collaborative ways of working, community creation, dialogue and knowledge sharing • Furnish a setting for learner achievements to attract an authentic audience Becta 2008

25. The sum of these assessments is that traditional instructional practices have changed little despite the introduction of computers and other modern technologies. A class does not look all that different from the way it did a couple of decades earlier, with the exception that banks of computers line the walls of many classrooms. Lecturing, group discussions, small-group assignments and projects and the occasional video or overhead are still the norms. Computers have not increased student-centred learning and project-based teaching practices. The implementation of computers has not caused any measurable improvements in achievement scores. And, most importantly for the purposes of this book, computers have made almost no dent in the most important challenge that they have the potential to crack: allowing students to learn in ways that correspond with how their brains are wired to learn, thereby migrating to a student-centred classroom. Understanding how schools have spent so much money on computers only to achieve so little gain isn’t so hard. Schools have crammed the computers into the existing teaching and classroom models. Teachers have implemented computers in the most common-sense way – to sustain their existing practices and pedagogies rather than displace them. Christensen et al “Disrupting Class” 2008

26. Dan Buckleywww.camb-ed.net • 75% of UK classrooms have an IWB • 78% of teachers in the UK never use ICT for collaborative tasks • 52% of children’s time is spent copying off PowerPoint • Only 11% of children’s time is spent in school • Only 38% of children enjoy learning • 98% of children want to do well at school “TEACHING IS DAMAGING EDUCATION”

27. 20th - 21st Learning Environments ISTE National Education Technology Standards for Teachers (USA).

28. 21st Century Skills(the 5 C’s replace the 3 R’s) • Critical thinking • Creative problem solving • Communication • Collaboration • Cross-cultural relationship building

29. Emphasize core subjects Emphasize learning skills Use 21st Century tools to develop learning skills Teach and learn in a 21st Century context Teach and learn 21st Century content Use 21st century assessments that measure 21st century skills 21st Century Skills Partnership for 21st Century Skills

30. 21st Century Education Model

31. 21st Century Knowledge & Skills • 21st Century Content • Global Awareness • Civic Engagement • Business, Financial Economic Literacy • 21st Century Learning Skills • Critical Thinking • Problem Solving • Communication • Collaboration • Creativity • Self-Directed Learning • Information & Media Literacy • Accountability & Adaptability • Social Responsibility

32. Creating the 21st Century Curriculum What curriculum will prepare students for the C21st? What skills & values will be required? • disciplined mind (expertise in a field) • synthesizing mind (scanning and weaving into coherence) • creating mind (discovery and innovation) • respectful mind (open mindedness and inclusiveness) • ethical mind (moral courage)

34. Standardised Student Assessments • Assessments are designed primarily to measure knowledge of school subjects and these are divided by disciplinary boundaries • Students are assessed on their ability to recall facts and apply simple procedures in response to well-defined, pre-structured problems Tasksin the Outside World • Subject knowledge is applied within and across disciplinary boundaries along with other skills to solve real world problems, create cultural artefacts and generate new knowledge • People respond to complex, ill-structured problems in the real world contexts

35. Students take the exam individually. • Students take a “closed-book” exam, without access to their notes or other sources of information, and use only paper and pencil during the assessment. • People work individually and in groups of others with complementary skills to accomplish a shared goal. • People use a wide range of technological tools and have access to a vast array of information resources and the challenge is to sort through all of it to find relevant information and use it to analyse problems, formulate solutions, and create products

36. Students respond to the needs and requirements of the teacher or school system. • People respond to official standards and requirements and to the needs and requirements of an audience, a customer, or a group of users or collaborators.

37. SIR KEN ROBINSON (again) “... there are several big bits to education. One of them is the curriculum, which is what we all want people to learn; then there’s teaching, which is how we help them to do it; and assessment, which is how we make some judgements about how they’re getting on. What policymakers tend to do is focus on the curriculum and then they focus on maths, science, and languages, and leave the rest. And then they go to assessment and they do standardised tests, as if the whole thing were like pumping out widgets. And the bit they leave out is the only bit that will ever make a difference which is the quality of teaching”.

40. THE BALANCING ACT • How do school heads and administrators design and administer schools that meet the requirements of NAPLAN and also deliver a 21st century education? • How do teachers facilitate learning that develops the fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy but also develops 21st century knowledge and skills? • How do we reconcile the fact that, at present, for most schools, teaching is standardised but learning is customised?