Marc Prensky - Public lecture at Ara Institute of Technology as part of Tertiary ICT conference

Tertiary ICT conference – a 3 day conference attended mostly by ICT staff from across the tertiary sector is being held at Ara Institute of Canterbury this week.

Notes taken at the free public lecture this evening by Marc Prensky on ‘Civilisation-level change in education’. he is keynote at the conference.

Advocates for the merger of traditional ‘academic’ education with the older ‘accomplishment’ approach. Discusses why it is important and how we may get there.

Based on his new book – education to better their better world  Chapter 1 available

Began with brief introduction including having taught at primary to college levels.

Rationalised WHY education has to change. The importance of education but we need to think through what is education and what is the purpose of education.

The third millennium requires a shift, to empower our kids in an exponentially changing world.

Argues, change is on us now and not going to slow down. Technology is not proceeding linearly but information technology has enabled change to be complex. How can people keep up or cope? Maximise the use of technology to face challenges of the future.

Spend some time defining exponential and speed of change. Computational abundance is now here with incredible empowerment. Personal devices (more than number of people), human web (50% now) connectivity and connected things / sensors. Convergence occurring between hard and software, physical and biological, human machine symbiosis etc.

Argues that computational power enable huge empowerment of the individual. Help deal with VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex ambigious), climate change, etc.

What does this mean for the future of work and to be human in an age of intelligent machines.  

“We learn in order to accomplish useful things”. Accomplishment (for others) is not the same as achievement (for yourself). Argues that we have always had ‘the accomplishment tradition” for action, relationships and still practiced in workplaces. The ‘academic tradition’ as about thinking and learning and this occurred in schools.

So, supports the precepts of situated learning. Critical thinking alone is not enough unless combined with effective action, relationships and application.

Education moving from personal achievement – individuals/ grades / rankings and personal success to Accomplishment – real world results.

Current paradigm is kids have to be taught, goal to make them better individuals and best process is with content, tests, rankings and qualifications. Tinkering with educational reform is not effective. Need to change the way people see the world and adopt a new paradigm.

New civilization level paradigm of education is kids empowered to accomplish, with goal to better their world and includes world improvement projects etc.

Goes back to his original premise of kids now needing to be educated for a different world. Reading and writing, researching, translating, thinking (AI) are becoming machine skills. Anything that 2 people can do equally well, can be, and will be, automated (eventually).

Education has been ‘making people the same’ what the future needs is people who can be unique. Teachers need to help kids find, nurture and extend their strengths. Need to see learners as extended brains all networked together. Provided examples of empowered kids and schools around the world (design for change). Proposed a way forward with alternative education as an option as to replace educational systems will be too difficult. Curriculum based on real world learning based on real world projects - people who can get things done. broad lifelong skills the key - effective thinking, action and relationships. Teachers are coaches and enpowerers, not content deliverers. Technology should be used as enablers for improving the world and becoming good empowered people. 

Some of his ideas are congruent with neuroscience of learning – to teach is to learn - see this blogpost on book overview of the secret life of the mind. Get kids to lead, they will learn what is required to solve the problems important to them. Learning needs to be situated, problem / inquiry learning engages and motivates learners. These skills set learners up for the fast changing future.

mlearn2008 day one afternoon sessions

The after lunch keynote is from Marc Prensky of digital natives fame. Marc covered the topic ‘Quo Vadis, Mobile’ providing a quick look into possibilities that technology and changes in teaching and learning bring. Pace of change is very rapid & perhaps in 30 years devices will be nanoscale, implanted, multi-sensory, thought driven, personality driven & sentient! Teaching will become more a partnership to prepare young students for the knowledge based economy of the future.

The conference continued & I attended a couple sessions in the mobile learning landscape stream.

First off, Paul Doherty with Deb Polson & Colleen Morgan on students using mobile phones to transform city gardens into dynamic learning games. This was an application of MiLK where design paths lead people through places using mobile phones. Event paths are made up of checkpoints & were originally conceived to be teacher created. However in this project, student teams also created the questions and answers for the various checkpoints during a field trip to the Adelaide botanical gardens. User generated content is an underutilised concept for mlearning. MiLK is a finalist for the Innovation award at Handheld2008. Text votes need to be in by 9th Oct. so vote for this great mlearning tool.

Then ‘evolutionary snapshots of mobile learning landscape’ by Elizabeth Apsden from Sheffield Hallam University provided an interesting contrast to Marc Prensky’s presentation. The mobile landscape of a group of students was studied for two weeks. It looked at how students use technology combined together in to a one day profile. This provides examples of how students access the internet, multitask (laptop plus watch TV), transport their work from home to café to university, read or revise work on the train, surf the web on the train, work with others in café on group project, read in the pub (so not distracted by access to a computer!), have to cope with operating systems that are a barrier & at home where access to the library would be good but the internet also OK. Therefore, people make use of their time in ways which are not always digitally based. Some people need a break from computers & access to the internet in order to reflect, read & create. The presentation also featured future possibilities included audio ebooks, telepresence (video conferencing), solar powered / wireless recharging, flexible / foldable screens, free wireless broadband, access to experts via vidmail, touchwalls, phones / location based embedded in sunglasses & 3D virtual learning spaces.

After afternoon tea, moved back across to the ‘mobile learning, mobile knowledge & mobile societies’ strand to hear John Pettit & Agnes Kukulska-Hulme from The Open University Institute of Educational Technology present on the topic ‘do mobile devises make smart learners?’ The presentation focused on the formal evaluations of a project (also presented at mLearn2007) in which lecturers, administrative & support staff were presented with Qtek 9100 smart phones and provided with support & development to use the technology for their professional development and teaching practice. Results included participants making use of the smart phone for a range of activities. Support included formal qtek club meetings which were useful for most. Challenges included using the keyboard, using the phone & problems with Wifi.

The day ended with session from Cecile Tschirhart, Chris O’Reilly & Claire Bradley from RLO-CETL (Centre for excellence in teaching & learning – reusable learning objects), London Metropolitan University on ‘language learning on the go’. Presentation on two current of projects, RLO-CETL embedding m-learning in various higher ed. courses & MOBILA (mobile phone interactive languages) by providing LondonMet epacks. Flash was used to provide learning objects that would support language learning including audio content, revision activities, quizzes and video clips.