OPLS blog

I often turn to Stephen Heppell when considering next steps and looking for help in making sense of this new world we’re living in. Recently I came across this. I shan’t try and paraphrase this time, but let his own words speak to you.

“Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to “deliver” the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses, they produce architectural fly-throughs of incredible buildings without any drafting or 2D skills, they make stop frame animations with their plasticine models, they edit and finesse their poetry, they explore surfaces on their visual calculators, swap ideas with scientists on-line about volcanic activity, follow webcam images of Ospreys hatching, track weather by live satellite images, control the robots they have built and generally push rapidly at the boundaries of what might be possible, indeed what was formerly possible, at any age.

Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago although the many projects emanating from Ultralab over that decade offered clear enough indicators of what might be possible. The challenge here is to criterion referencing. So often the cry of the teacher “that work is better than my degree exhibition piece!” reflects a substantial step change in both the age at which a creative act can be enjoyed and the quality of the tools supporting that creativity.”

So, if you want some guidance on what we might do as educators to evaluate some of this, have a look at what he has to say here.

At a recent dinner with a number of workshop leaders for IB psychology, we discussed the issue of mobile technologies in the classroom and the decision being taken by many schools and districts around the world to ban them. It was quite a vigorous debate (as you can imagine in such company), but a real eye-opener for me was the genuine concern around the table for things like mobile phones, iPods, PDAs etc, being used covertly and overtly in the classroom.

I’ve been reflecting since on what might be driving that concern and suggest the following:

• There is a concern that, if the student is listening to his iPod then he’s not necessarily listening to the teacher or his classmates
• There is a real or perceived threat to academic honesty
• The teacher is apprehensive at best, frightened at worst, by the fact that his students know more about mobile technologies than he does.

Josh Allen, writing in ISTE’s most recent Learning and Leading with Technology, even goes so far as to say, “Nothing that you can do on a cell phone will inspire students as they make their way in the world.” He suggests that investment in laptops would be a far better use of our very limited resources, arguing that, “any monies a school spent on phones and [their accompanying] plans would be much better served with any number of other technologies.”

I do not agree. Although there is a very real concern among teachers that they are being overtaken, perhaps overwhelmed, by these emerging technologies, I do not believe the right course of action is to ban them from the classroom. Equally, I do not agree with the sentiment that phone technologies have no educational use or application. You only need to look on Flickr - of students taking photos with their phones during a field trip, sending them to a class Flickr account and then creating and editing a digital slideshow later - for a myriad of examples.

Liz Kolb, writing in the same Learning and Leading with Technology article, states that “a basic cell phone has the ability to be the students’ Swiss Army knife of technology.” And I think she’s right. They can record audio and video, be digital cameras (with increasingly very high levels of resolution), act as video conferencing devices and blog editing tools, used as assistive technologies in special needs education, and can even been employed for formal assessment purposes (see the Ultralab example summarised by Stephen Heppell).

So, is it not a question of temperance and balance, rather than banning? And furthermore, are we not, as educators, compelled to embrace these technologies rather than ignore them and hope they’ll go away? Because, as we embark upon another year, I wonder if the real issue, and therefore concern for educators, is the fact that these technologies are changing the very nature of teaching and learning, and that we’re just not ready.

I’m currently reading Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. It’s an historical narrative on the emergence of existing notions of childhood - rooted in the development of movable type and the printing press - and its demise (according to Postman) - rooted in the development of mass communication media, specifically television. What I’m enjoying most is its ability to make me stop and think.

No more so than Postman’s reference to the teachings and work of Harold Innis. Innis stressed that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of effects: they alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with) and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop). In other words, new communications technologies not only change our habits, but also our habits of mind.

I’ve been struggling with what this means for us today (Innis was writing in the 1930s and Postman’s book was published in 1982). For me, social media has certainly changed what I think about. I now spend more time considering the possibilities of teachers and students connecting with one another across the world and the development of substantive relationships between them. I spend more time thinking about how learning can more easily be shared, communicated and even delivered online. Increasingly, I think about these things in public places, such as this blog, on collaborative wikis, and commenting on other blogs. And I think about the fact that I can now do all of this on online social networks that have sprung up around these areas of interest.

So, just as Galileo’s telescope changed our whole understanding of scope and scale, as well as the Aristotelian geocentric view of the world that the earth was the centre of the universe, so too has social media begun to make us change the way we think about a whole raft of issues related to teaching and learning.

One such example is assessment. There is a growing school of thought, led by Stephen Heppell and others, which proposes that we need to think more creatively about how we assess students, because existing assessment design has become far too notational and linear. They suggest alternatives to the 1500-word essay, such as a 10-minute video uploaded to YouTube, managing an online forum for a week, or two 10-minute podcasts.

Equally, the ability to capture evidence of learning much more easily, through mobile digital technologies, is having a profound impact on the nature of assessment. Just one example is the ability to video a student’s musical performance (using a mobile phone or digital camera), upload it to something like Viddler, and tag the timeline with examples of where the student shows good technique, interpretation etc. What’s great is that the student can self-assess first, then invite comments from peers (two stars and a wish?) and finally submit it for more formal assessment.

So we’re thinking about different things, with different tools and in different places. As educators, we going to need to respond.

“Technology is not about productivity”

“Technology is about motivation”

“Don’t consider your own curriculum without first looking at what others are doing around the world”

Three messages from Stephen Heppell to help us frame our understanding of educational technology and curriculum design.

Here he talks to Connected Magazine’s Nicola More about bringing his unique vision of learning to Scotland: