Two years ago, Professor
of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (@secls) at Newcastle University (@StudentsNCL) Sugata Mitra (@Sugatam) won the 2013 TED Prize. In the following @TEDxUFM
Talk (delivered at Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Guatemala), Mitra
speaks about the progress he has made over the past two years: "I made a
project for TED. ... I would build seven laboratories, seven learning
laboratories. Five of them would be in India, and two of them would be
in England." His insights remain provocative, and his passion for
self-directed learning proves as infectious as ever.Well, there are reports from all around the world that children are not asking questions to people. Or at least if they have to ask a question to a person, they do that after they have asked their phones. Children don't want to learn how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract because they say they already know how to do that. It's done with phones. Children don't want to particularly learn to read because they say there are things that can read out things to them even if they don't know how to read. At the moment, they don't like to write by hand because they want to know why they should learn to write by hand. Will ever do it in the rest of their lives? So what happens in a world where reading, writing, and arithmetic are treated in such a cavalier manner?...In Killingworth, this is a room: it just looks like a nice lounge with computers and an XBox (@XBox) And the teachers, when I built it, they said, 'Sugata, this is a bit too much. Do you have any idea of what they will do with that XBox? They will do nothing else except play with the XBox.' So I said, 'Well, that's our challenge, isn't it?' If you've gone in there to teach Geography and the students are playing with the XBox, it means that Geography is more boring than the XBox. Then we should re-look at Geography, chuck it from the curriculum, or put it into the XBox. Somehow.
Ever
the savvy technology expert, Tim continues to research drones and
game design. He has begun to complement these explorations, too, by
considering the ethics of technology. This discipline concerns itself
with the ethical (or moral) considerations of implementing technology in
our modern age.
CEO and one of the founders of Epic Group PLC, Donald Clark (@DonaldClarke63) is committed to the idea that #technology does - and must - play a role in education (passages taken from Clark's bio).
Having spent "30 years experience in online learning, games,
simulations, social media and mobile learning projects," Clark had this
to say about technology in education during a 2012 @TEDxGlasgow event:The real scalability in education comes with the Internet because it gives us a world of digital replication for free. A world of digital abundance where some aspects of learning content are available for anyone, anywhere, at any time. It absolutely frees us from the tyranny of time and location. ... And that's the trick: freeing education from a place, from a specific time.What do you think? How can we use social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube educationally? Please post in the comments below.
Now if - as is clearly the case - the Internet and #socialmedia can lead young people to change the tyrannical and corrupt governments, can we really say that social media will have no role in education? How do you think those kids in Tahrir Square (@3alTahrir) learned to avoid tear gas by using Pepsi Cola (@pepsi)? How do you think those revolutions arose first through blogging, then through Facebook, then through Twitter, then through YouTube, and the ubiquity of mobile devices? We'd be fools to ignore the pedagogic lessons that are right in front of our eyes, politically and in terms of education.
We have to start thinking differently about what school is. There's a great quote that I read by a guy by the name of Justin Reich (the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, based in the Office of the President and Provost at Harvard University: @bjfr) who's a teacher at Harvard. And he said, 'You know, the problem right now is that we're paying so much attention to the measurable part of learning that we risk neglecting the immeasurable part of learning." And it's that immeasurable part that - right now, in a world where we have access to so much stuff - it's that immeasurable stuff, that hard-to-measure stuff that's much more important. It's that creativity, that gritty problem-solving, that persevering disposition that we have toward learning. All that stuff that's really hard to measure? That's the stuff that our children need right now.For a post discussing Richardson at TEDxNYED (2011), please click here.
So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is ... learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. I think that's what all this is pointing at.
