Developing curriculum for deep thinking - book overview

In this 'age of AI ascendence'  more than anytime perhaps in human history, the importance of how we learn knowledge and what is required to learn it, is more important than ever.

This Open Access Springer brief - Developing curriculum for deep learning:The knowledge revival has chapters written by authors from Europe (T, Surma, C. Vanhees, M, Wils, J, Nijlunsing, N. Crato, D, Muijs, D. Wiliam, P. A. Kirschner) Australia (J. Hattie) and New Zealand. (E. Rata).

Although the chapters have the school context at the forefront, the many concepts introduced and discussed has relevance across the all educational sectors. The books main premise is that it is important to ensure curriculum is 'knowledge-rich'. In doing, the attainment of knowledge helps to drive the learning (acquisition and practice) of crucial cognitive or thinking skills. 

There are five chapters.

After a short introductory chapter the following chapters discuss:

- How knowledge matters

- knowledge and the curriulum

Then two chapter - concluding remarks and an executive summary close the book.

Therefore the book is a short treatise (less than 100 pages) presenting the argument for the importance of ensuring that knowledge is made visible across the curriculum, and the need for content richness, coherence across the curriculum, and clarity of purpose for learning knowledge. 

Future of work report 2025 - World Economic Forum

 This year's future of work report from the World Economic Forum, provides some good information as the world of work moves into the AI age. Summaries are provided for many countries by Aotearoa New Zealand is not included.

The forces contributing to the shifts are summarised as:

- increased digital access and advances across technologies (AI, information processing, robotics and automation, energy generation, storage and distribution), all influence the ways work is carried out and how work is structured.

- cost of living and other economic impacts of inflation, economic slowdown etc. will affect job creation.

- climate change mitigation leads to the need for new skills and generates new types of work and occupations.

- demographic shifts including worldwide aging of the workforce and increasing numbers of older people, living longer puts strain on economies.

-geoeconomics and geopolitical tensions make for an unpredictable future.

Jobs predicted to grow in volume include farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, sales people and food processing workers, Care economy jobs in nursing, social work, counselling etc. also to grow significantly. Technology related roles including one related to data management and green energy transition roles also set to grow.

In contrast, clerical and secretarial work is set to decline along with jobs in the postal service, banks and data entry roles.

There is a great need to ensure that analytical thinking as a core skill is attained. Other skills include workers being resilient, flexible and agile. Understanding AI and big data are also important to leverage off the potential of these technologies. 

All in, a good overview  and reference source on the current state of work and what may come in the near future.

Gen AI strategies for Australian higher education - emerging practice

 The Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TESQA) published a practice toolkit for Gen AI in November 2023. 

The guide covers three dimensions of tertiary education - Process, People and Practice. Each dimension is introduced and the implications of Gen AI are detailed, discussed and evaluated. Examples from Australian tertiary institutions are provided to provide case studies. These provide good templates from which individual institutional processes, policies and procedures can be contextualised and synthesised. 

All in a good resource to mine for relevant concepts as Gen AI takes hold across the tertiary landscape. 

Plans for 2025

 It looks like another busy year coming up.

Details of what post Te Pūkenga looks like will help clarify what is likely to occur at an organisational level and some of these may affect the composition of my current work team, our lines of management, and our objectives. Whatever happens, there is still a great deal of work to do!

Firstly, we have many programmes in review. In Aotearoa, all programmes of study are reviewed every five years. The responsibility for these, devolved to Te Pūkenga 2 years ago, but only a small number of programmes were 'unified'. Hence, we now have a substantial backlog of programmes, several over 3 years beyond their review timelines, to work on and have presented to NZQA by July. Therefore, my  educational development team (down to 5 from 8) are fully occupied with working through all the programme reviews.

Secondly, AI is not going away. Capability and professional development for our teaching colleagues, has been patchy, as lines of responsibility for who does what, have been unclear since Te Pūkenga disestablishment was announced late in 2023. Te Pūkenga was at the beginning of bringing together a consolidated approach to capability and development but this all came to a halt and individual institutions have been working on financial stability, maintaining quality etc. before looking at capability.

Thirdly, I am now about half way through scoping another group of scholarship of teaching and learning projects for this year. The focus will be on integrating AI into programmes with strong practice-based learning as currently, AI has text/writing focus. Multimodality of AI is not as common as integrating AI through text. Also, it is important to have AI available in practice-based learning environments - i.e. workshops, training kitchens / salons / studios etc. plus the need to have customised / bespoke or 'wall-garden' AI tools as the generalised AI (e.g. ChatGPT, CoPilot) often do not use specialised occupational vocabulary, with information drawn on being very North American-centric.

Therefore, it looks like there is quite a bit to do, making it difficult to even think about retiring for the moment!!