21st Century Education
Thursday, April 3, 2008 — AlanHeyJude - Emerging technologies for learning
http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/emerging-technologies-for-learning/
在 Jude 那邊知道日前出了
Becta - Emerging technologies for learning
http://partners.becta.org.uk/index.php?section=rh&&catcode=&rid=13768
Becta - Emerging technologies for learning: volume 3 (200 
http://partners.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/emerging_technologies08-2.pdf
被收入的第 1 篇文章，作者恰巧是上次提過那本書 “Educating the Net Generation”
Alan Poon’s Blog - 網絡集錦
http://alanpoon.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/網絡集錦-99/
的共同作者之一，來自 EDUCAUSE 的 Diana G. Oblinger。這圈子真是小…
看過目錄後對上年的
Becta - Emerging technologies for learning: volume 2 (2007)
http://partners.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/emerging_technologies07.pdf
也很有興趣 (是因為前導師問過我的那條問題吧…)。
Alan Poon’s Blog - Semantic Cataloguing / “Teach” ICT to Net Generation
http://alanpoon.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/semantic-cataloguing-teach-ict-to-net-generation/
讀後特別喜歡 Marc Prensky 寫的一篇
Becta - Emerging technologies for learning: volume 2 (2007)How to teach with technology: keeping both teachers and students comfortable in an era of exponential change
http://partners.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/emerging_technologies07_chapter4.pdf
“There is so much difference between how teachers think and how students think,” explained a 16-year-old female high school student recently (2006). (p. 40)
“You really have to slow down when you talk to teachers” said a 14-year-old in Liverpool (2005). (p. 40)
“Don’t even try to keep up with technology – you can’t. You’ll only look stupid” (High school girl, 2006). (p. 41)
Lest you think I exaggerate, here’s an example. Many of our teachers think they have finally ‘mastered’ Microsoft’s PowerPoint. These teachers have worked hard, in many cases, to put their class notes and lectures into the new format, assuming that their students are sure to appreciate their effort to keep up with the technology. (p. 41)
But what do the students say? “Teachers make a PowerPoint and they think they’re so awesome,” says a high school girl (2006), typically. “Teachers make PowerPoints and think we’re so excited to see them,” says another in middle school (2006), “but it’s just like writing on the blackboard.” “And then they read them to us” says a third (2006). “Why should I have to go to hear it read?” (p. 41)
… teachers, being adults, still do have an edge. Our edge is that we understand what the students generally don’t – the learning objectives that determine why we are using whatever the technology happens to be. (p. 42)
what all teachers should learn to do comfortably, though, are those things we can do without ‘looking stupid’. This (we certainly hope!) is to evaluate their students’ uses of the new technologies, and teach our students the important lessons about those technologies. Teachers can and should be able to understand and teach where and how new technologies can add value in learning. To do this, teachers must learn what these technologies are and can do, and understand them, but without necessarily becoming proficient in their use. (And by ‘use’ I mean creating with the technologies, not just ‘accessing’ them.) (p. 42)
Teachers must do this because there are lessons about technology that even the most technologically proficient kids can’t learn well on their own. These include evaluating and comparing various uses of the new technologies, as well as specific lessons one doesn’t necessarily learn from ‘just doing’. So there needs to be a ‘useful division of labour’ around the emerging technologies. Teachers need to work with students to understand how the technologies work, what they offer, and to understand how to include them in assignments. Students need to do the work of actually producing things in these technologies and media. Then teachers and students need to work together to create evaluation criteria and rubrics, and to make and understand the distinctions that relate to quality. Teachers also need to help students apply technologies wisely to real problems, and to reflect and search for the deeper issues that the technologies raise, and to bring up and discuss these issues with the students. (p. 42)
For technology and our kids, it is absolutely a New World (“Brave” remains to be seen). And while it is a huge one-time leap from the analogue world of our past to the digital world of our hyper-changing future, because of the speed of continuous change, future teachers will always be behind the technological know-how of their students. And the gap will always be greatest in the lower grades. But whatever the technologies of the future turn out to be, creative, intelligent use of them, in service of real, important societal goals such as communication, education, and greater understanding, will still remain the thing that counts. And in those realms good teachers – whatever the technology – should be able to help and add value. (p. 46)
In my view, the only way our schools will ever adopt and benefit from the new technologies that the students want and need is if everyone, students and teachers, remains comfortable (or at least reasonably comfortable) in the process. That can only happen when each group acknowledges the strengths of the other, requiring from them that they employ their strengths as fully as possible, while learning simultaneously and gradually about the areas where they are weaker. Our students’ strengths lie in their ability to quickly master, use and apply technology, and in their fearlessness to try new things. Our teachers’ strengths lie (or should lie) in their ability to distil and teach lessons about and with technology, and to engage their students in discussions that help them see and understand issues that they are likely to miss on their own. In order to figure out ways to use the technologies in service of learning, both groups must work together, because today the ‘right answers’ and ‘best practices’ exist only as ideas and experiments, or do not exist at all. To use the twenty-first century’s rapidly emerging technology effectively for education, we must invent best practices together. In an era whose often unbelievable technological changes we are all struggling with, the mantra – for both educators and students — must be this: We are all learners. We are all teachers. (p. 46)
說真的，我替老一輩的資深教師感到可悲，但可憐的應該是他們所教的學生吧。沉悶的課是聽了，卻吸收不良，就算裝備了也無助他們面對畢業後的生涯。真是白受苦了… (文章中有更多要點和建議，恕不盡錄。)
特意參觀他的個人網站
Marc Prensky.com
http://www.marcprensky.com/
發現很多精文
Marc Prensky.com - Writing
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp
以下是最新兩篇的部分精要
Backup Education? — Too many teachers see education as preparing kids for the past, not the future (in Educational Technology, Jan-Feb 200
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-Backup_Education-EdTech-1-08.pdf
A disturbing voice has emerged in the questions that teachers ask after my talks. Reacting to my discussing the need to delete things from the curriculum in order to make room for topics about the future, teachers almost invariably ask some version of the following: “But what if the technology breaks down? What will our kids do then?” For example: “The power went down in a store the other day and the workers couldn’t make change.” “Just the other day our bus broke down on the highway.” “Didn’t you read about the cyber-attack in Estonia?” (p. 1)
Teachers who ask these questions and voice these opinions often get applause from their colleagues in the audience, making them think they are right in holding these attitudes. But these questions make me (and the students on my panels) realize that we have a real problem. (p. 1)
Of course technology will break down. And of course some people may not know what to do until it’s fixed. (p. 1)
So why is the teachers’ attitude a problem? (p. 1)
It’s a problem because what the teachers are really saying is this: “We don’t trust the technology of today, or the future. We don’t trust the world in which you kids are going to live. We believe the way we did it in our time was the “real” way, the only reliable way, and that’s what we want to teach you kids – “the basics.” (That’s why they all applaud the idiotic video showing people on a stopped escalator just standing there calling for help.) (p. 1)
Unfortunately, thinking that many of the things we have students learn and memorize – from the multiplication tables, to the long division algorithm, to making change, to the state capitals – are “the basics” is confusing the “best method” of the moment with what is actually important to know. The reason we memorized so many of these things in the past was only because there was no handy/speedy way to look them up. But the “best methods” to the basics change over time. (p. 2)
What the teachers described earlier are advocating that we teach our kids is not “the basics,” at all, but rather a “backup” education of old methods – ones that are now useful only in unlikely emergencies. Those who continue to teach kids things they need to know only when stuff breaks down are doing those kids an enormous disservice. There is rarely a need to go back to the old ways, even when technology breaks down. Typically we are inconvenienced a bit, then we fix what is broken and move on. (p. 2)
The real issue lies in the fact that by continuing to teach the “backup” stuff, there is no room to teach for the future. Within the working lives of our students, technology will become a billion times more powerful, likely more powerful than the human brain. What will serve our kids better in 20 years – memorized multiplication tables or fundamental knowledge of programming concepts? Long division algorithms or the ability to think logically and to estimate? The ability to write cursive handwriting or the ability to create meaningfully in multimedia? (And that’s just for elementary school – the same applies to the higher grades as well.) (p. 2-3)
Those teachers who want to give their kids a backup education can’t understand or accept that the world of their students is diverging incredibly quickly from their own. They don’t understand that their well-intentioned instinct to “protect” their kids actually has the opposite effect – it prevents their kids from learning what they need to know to succeed in the twenty-first century (more on what this is in future columns.) (p. 3)
Turning On The Lights — Will we continue to trap our kids in the past? (in Educational Leadership, March 200
http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/template.MAXIMIZE…token
Powering Down in School
Given this new state of affairs, one might suppose that educators would acknowledge that today’s kids grow up differently and that kids are enlightened by all their various connections to the world. Educators would figure out ways to use, build on, and strengthen students’ reservoirs of knowledge. They would assume that kids will use their connections to the light to find information quickly, structure it in new ways, and communicate with peers around the world in a powerful, 21st-century learning process. Teachers would no longer be the providers of information but instead would be the explainers, the context providers, the meaning makers, and the evaluators of information that kids find on their own. Teaching would still be a noble calling, perhaps even more so than before.
But we’ve chosen something else. Somehow, schools have decided that all the light that surrounds kids—that is, their electronic connections to the world—is somehow detrimental to their education. So systematically, as kids enter our school buildings, we make them shut off all their connections. No cell phones. No music players. No game machines. No open Internet. When kids come to school, they leave behind the intellectual light of their everyday lives and walk into the darkness of the old-fashioned classroom. What are they allowed to use? Basal readers. Cursive handwriting. Old textbooks. Outdated equipment.
“Whenever I go to school,” says one student I know, “I have to power down.” He’s not just talking about his devices—he’s talking about his brain. Schools, despite our best intentions, are leading kids away from the light.
Where Kids Learn
Less in School …
In the United States and other developed countries, education is quickly splitting into two separate—and unequal—parts. One part is “school,” the education that kids, for the most part, are obliged to experience by law. In exchange, school offers credentials—a diploma and a set of grades—that help determine students’ future education and employment.
But many students find that schooling is almost entirely irrelevant to their present and future lives. For one thing, school is usually about the past—what we’ve learned up until this point (or some point a while ago) about math, science, language, and social studies—with, occasionally, a bit of current events thrown in.
School is certainly not about the future, which kids tell us is their most pressing concern. If schools were future oriented, they would be full of classes in programming, multimedia literacy and creation, astronautics, bioethics, genomics, and nanotechnology. Science fiction and fantasy literature would be a part of the curriculum, as representative of alternative visions of the future. Students would be learning and practicing such future-oriented skills as collaborating around the world electronically and learning to work and create in distributed teams.
Some educators justify the focus on the past by saying, “We don’t even know what tomorrow’s jobs will be—they haven’t been invented yet.” Perhaps. Yet we do know many, if not all, of tomorrow’s needed skills—we’re just not focusing on teaching them in school. Instead, school “covers material.” It prepares kids for standardized exams. It continues to offer, for a ton of familiar reasons—such as No Child Left Behind, standards, and parent pressure—an outdated education that most students find irrelevant.
… Than After School
There is another dimension to our kids’ education that I call “after-school.” After-school education is whatever the kids learn when they’re not in class, doing their homework, or preparing for or taking tests. Some after-school learning—such as robotics clubs, competitions, and browsing in computer labs—takes place in our school buildings. But after-school learning goes much further. It encompasses all the time kids spend on the Internet at home. It includes all their blogging and social networking in MySpace or Facebook. After-school includes all the time kids spend sharing messages and pictures, talking on their cell phones, and creating many of the hundreds of thousands of videos posted on YouTube. It includes the time kids spend playing complex electronic games like Runescape and World of Warcraft and exploring online nongame worlds such as Whyville, Club Penguin, and Second Life, which are huge learning environments. After-school includes game and other computer programming classes that kids either sign up for or teach themselves. It includes an increasing number of noncurricular summer courses, learning camps, and other learning activities.
It’s their after-school education, not their school education, that’s preparing our kids for their 21st-century lives—and they know it. This after-school education doesn’t bore them because, among other things, they help design it. It’s different for every one of them. And there are no exams, only clear levels of competence that everyone knows and respects.
講述到的事實句句到肉…
“Power down” 這一詞用得實在太妙。在學校工作，令我有種現代人進了古代時空的感覺︰用什麼都不順手，做什麼都不合自己的心意似的…
經典文章
Marc Prensky.com - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants — A New Way To Look At Ourselves and Our Kids
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Part1.pdf
Marc Prensky.com - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They REALLY Think Differently? — Neuroscience Says Yes
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky - Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - Part2.pdf
原本想摘點內容貼出來，沒料到愈摘愈多，只好作罷。不過這反映文章有太多重要，對這方面有興趣的還是自己去細閱好了。
p.s. Marc 有専業教學資格
Marc Prensky.com - Marc Prensky’s CV (Resume)
http://www.marcprensky.com/experience/Prensky-Resume.pdf
Master of Arts in Teaching (Yale, 1968)，亦在 40 年前在高中教過 3 年書。他雖離開教育界已久，但開發學習遊戲、軟件的經驗十足。或者就是因為他是半局外人，所以更能看清當今教育跟學生學習嚴重脱節的問題…
p.p.s 他的遊戲生意可能令他寫文時較傾向支持用遊戲學習，不過支持都有道理啦…
p.p.p.s. 不妨再用 Shift Happen 作結
Alan Poon’s Blog - 網絡集錦
http://alanpoon.wordpress.com/2007/07/07/網絡集錦-31/
(Credit: Jeff Brenman)
補充 (Apr 4, 200
Keynote presentation given by Marc Prensky @ Handheld Learning 2007
不是很 impressive 的 slide，但 Marc Prensky 想表達的基本已在其中 (雖不深入)，不想讀文的就看 slide 吧…
另想說這兩冊的 “Emerging technologies for learning” 是我讀過有關 ICT in Education 最好的，有講實際應用的，也有新產品前瞻性的 (如︰iPhone, Microsoft Surface, Livescribe digital pen, Kindle, Readius 等)，真的萬勿錯過…
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Scholastic - School Libraries Work!
http://www2.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/s/slw3_2008.pdf
事實盡顯學校圖書館的價值…
從圖可見，圖書館的功能除了閱讀和閱讀資源外，還有資訊和科技相關的項目。忽略了就麻煩了…
Model of the School Library as a Dynamic Agent of Learning (Todd, Kuhlthau, & OELMA, 2004, p. 22)
Image from
Todd, R. J., Kuhlthau, C. C., & OELMA. (2004). The Landmark Ohio Study: 13,000 Students Can’t Be Wrong. In School Libraries Work!. Retrieved April 3, 2008, from http://www2.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/s/slw3_2008.pdf.
via
Stephen’s Lighthouse - School Libraries Work!
http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/03/school_librarie_2.html
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always learning - Defining the Role of a 21st Century Literacy Specialist
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2008/04/02/defining-the-role-of-a-21st-century-literacy-specialist/
圖書館主任以外是否需要到 21st Century Literacy Specialist 協作教學？
配合不同學科做出 project 來…
always learning - Projects
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/projects/
p.s. 泰國的教育都行得前過香港了…
p.p.s. Taiwan 2.0 的蔡博士心得和技巧俱備，所以自己上馬製出所任教課程的教學網站
心理學的異想世界
http://hao.dlearn.kmu.edu.tw/blog/
學生的功課和討論均在網上，用到 blog, social bookmarking, wiki 等，是很好的 e-learning 2.0 例子…
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always learning - Essential Understandings for 21st Century Literacy
http://mscofino.edublogs.org/2007/10/04/essential-understandings-for-21st-century-literacy/
New Literacies 又是什麼？應怎樣教？針對這兩點的研究…
University of Connecticut - New Literacies Research Team
http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/
via
superkimbo’s bookmarks on del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/superkimbo
相關閱讀/參考
Alan Poon’s Blog - 資訊素養教育的必要
http://alanpoon.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/資訊素養教育的必要/
Alan Poon’s Bookmarks - Information Literacy
http://www.diigo.com/user/alanpoon/information-literacy
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Cataloging Futures - Testimony to the LC Working Group now available!