Some educators are probably either too reserved to create their PLN -Professional Learning Network- or they perhaps don’t know how to start and who they should connect with. Other teachers perhaps think that it is a waste of time to build their PLN and make global connections, certainly because they have never seen the benefits of it.
However, it has become extremely worthwhile and valuable to get and receive feedback, to understand different perspectives, to be exposed to a variety of experiences and to make your own thinking visible for others. This is certainly true with your peers, and even more with anyone who stands outside your "bubble".
If we really want to prepare our students for 2025/2030, then we must adopt new approaches such as global collaborations, MOOC, PLN, and technology plays and should continue to play a strategic role in the future development of Education. Cathy N. Davidson refers to the silo metaphor when she writes about the way of seeing:
“For more than a hundred years, we’ve been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.”
By focusing too much on one thing, we miss a lot. She argues that multitasking could be relevant in the digital age because “On the Internet, everything links to everything, and all of it is available all the time.” The iPod experiment in 2003 at Duke was probably one of the first attempt to flip classrooms, but what is even more impressive is that this initiative was de facto based on “crowdsourcing”, where a group is invited “to collaborate on a solution to a problem”.
Whenever you empower students, the results are far beyond your expectations:
“The real treasure trove was to be found in the students’ innovations. Working together, and often alongside their professors, they came up with far more learning apps for their iPods than anyone—even at Apple—had dreamed possible.”
The development of MOOCs, podcasts and many other initiatives to move the relation between the source of knowledge and the learner makes us reflect on our own practices and on how we could do things differently. In January, I was fortunate to attend a workshop run by Ewan Mc Intosh.
One of the tasks that we were asked to do was to identify a problem that we encounter when we integrate technology in our school. We had to generate as many ideas as we could. Then, he showed us a visual with about thirty famous brands on a screen and asked us: “What would X do with this idea ?” We then realised that although we were all teachers, we could find inspiration from anything around us, including companies like Spotify, Google, Formula one, Ikea, etc. So we though about Spotify as they would probably have teachers create playlists or F1 which could design a tech pit stop in the corridor for anyone who would need a precise and quick help. Suddenly, we had hundreds of new ideas. This is the power of having more than one way of seeing!
What Cathy Davidson says about wikipedia also rings a bell:
“Wikipedia is an educator’s fantasy, all the world’s knowledge shared voluntarily and free in a format theoretically available to all, and which anyone can edit. Instead of banning it, I challenged my students to use their knowledge to make Wikipedia better.”
This is it! Knowledge is everywhere and accessible in one click so the real value of Education lies in how we evaluate it and what we do with it. Students must be challenged to think, create and innovate. New approaches and tools help schools to define a better use of students and teachers time. In their own time and pace, students can learn by watching vodcasts, listening to podcasts, writing blogs, commenting on their peers blog, etc. Class time is then organised around inquiry, group discussions, thinking routines and projects. In our school, like in many others, Google apps have become the norm to work collaboratively and share documents, photos or videos between all the members of the school community. Some parents -and teachers- still believe that students should know how to write and read. Of course they should! They simply don’t do it in the same way and with the same purpose. When Heidi Hayes Jacob declares in the following video that the enemy is the Number two pencil, she meets Cathy Davidson’s point of view when she reflects on her students blog skills at Duke:
“Their writing online, at least in their blogs, was incomparably better than in the traditional papers. In fact, given all the tripe one hears from pundits about how the Internet dumbs our kids down, I was shocked that elegant bloggers often turned out to be the clunkiest and most pretentious of research-paper writers.”
In many schools, technology has grown a lot in the past five to ten years so that many students can access a connected device. But figures only do not make the success. It also takes dispositions. The approach of teaching and learning has also changed in many of my colleagues’ mind and this is an absolute prerequisite to any change. Like any school, we still have some skeptics which forces us to define well our arguments and make our thinking even more visible. Prakash Nair says “the Classroom Is Obsolete: It’s Time for Something New”.
The walls of the classroom have already been torn down and the windows are now a lot wider than even.
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