Reform Symposium 2010

Reform Symposium 2010- Steve Hargadon - reflections on the Keynote address

[PART 1]
[PART 2 next week 1st October]

Recently, I had the opportunity to take in part of the very successful two-day Reform Symposium 2010.

However, like many, life got in the way and conspired with global time zones to make it impossible to take part in more sessions than I would have liked. It was a great professional development experience though, which I look forward to taking part in again in 2011.

The organisers have provided the sessions as downloadable links, which was especially convenient for me since my wife and I spend much of our "downtime" in areas of the world with very limited (dial-up) or non-existent internet connectivity for long periods of time.

As a result, I was able to download some of the sessions I had wanted to attend but couldn't and watched the presentations as we travelled (yay Nokia E72!).

In this post, I am going to summarise and reflect on the issues of particular interest to me, given my context, in Steve Hargadon's keynote address which he presented at the Reform Symposium 2010 on 30th July which he called "School 2.0: How the world is changing dramatically and how that will impact education." Steve is an excellent presenter so his was the first session I downloaded.

Steve began the presentation by discussing John Taylor Gatto, the New York State Teacher of the Year from 1989 to 1991, and author of the book "Dumbing Us Down." Steve read a short snippet from Gatto's retirement announcement and went on to highlight the fact that Gatto's message, that the factory model of education is not working, is now considered pretty much mainstream in the Ed Tech world.

Steve couched much of his discussion in terms of "stories" and that although the factory model "story" is understood by many to not work any longer, there is some question as to what the new story should be. Steve argued, quite correctly, that the new story of education needs to be an all encompasing one with, in fact, many different stories connected together. I would suggest calling it an "anthology of education stories."

The presenter then raised the point that the internet is now a very powerful tool which allows a multitude of participation types like never before, while being essentially beyond bricks and mortar school rooms. Steve presented two views of the revolution which is occuring.

The first of the two viewpoints was called the "Orderly View" and the second was the "Realistic View". The "Orderly View" shows "The Three Eras of Education" as being 3 distinct stages: "Apprenticeship", "Universal Schooling" and "Lifelong Learning". In the final era, students and parents take responsibility for learning and the content

What is is that makes people do this stuff (Free & Open Source) for free?

Steve went on to consider the idea of open source software and briefly discussed Linux and Apache programs which are very popular open source programs created as a result of volunteer effort. This led him into discussion of the topic of Volunteerism 2.0.

While he was discussing the MIT open educational resources service he suggested that one of the reasons institutions like MIT would provide educational resources for free is that the value is no longer in the knowledge per se. I think I would have to disagree with that. I believe the value is still in the knowledge, the difference I feel, is no longer in the need to have an "all knowing" expert who appears to own the knowledge be an the sole distributor of it. I would like to believe also, that it is an increasing sense of community responsibility on the part of large institutions who are making an attempt to be seen to be working towards the reduction of the digital divide in such places as Africa. It is easy for us sometimes to forget that by far the majority of the population of the planet do not enjoy persistent, reliable, ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet to the extent that we do in Western Europe and North America and parts of Asia and that much of the world's population relies heavily on mobile phones for their connectivity.

In keeping with the topic of Volunteerism 2.0 Steve also discussed the situation where Clay Shirky was being interviewed by a member of the television media who asked where people get all this time to volunteer for in such things as open source programs. Shirky's response, according to Steve, was that the time spent watching television is declining simply because television does not engage us enough. As a result, there is an increasing amount of "cognitive surplus" which people use on things that do engage them.

Photo Credit: burakg via Stockvault

[Part 2 next week]

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Reform Symposium 2010 [Part 2]

Steve Hargadon [Part 2 - Reform Symposium]

This has meant then that with the increase in participation, large numbers of people now take part in the online world who would not be participating before because of the barriers which were in place.
Steve then referred back to the concept of the need for a new story and that the "high stakes testing" as he called it, of the factory model, is no longer viable. Thus, as a result of all this,people are looking for a new story of education where different pedagogical beliefs have a role to play.

Steven then went on to consider the concept behind Creative Commons where he pointed out that we want to share and contribute and how this form of "copyright" is relatively new but shows the willingness of people to participate and contribute, which is related to what he called Volunteerism 2.0.

Three major themes appeared in the presentation:

First, "How we Find, Create and Consume Information"

Essentially this is the concept of "openness" and he used MIT as an example and explained that the value was not in the knowledge, athough I would argue perhaps, since MIT is considering a costing structure, that this could be a price tag for "shared" knowledge.

Second - "How we get things done"
It was argued that the internet was allowing for "participation reinvented" and was allowing for a "return to participation" of the era before television and the pre-consumer, pre-factory model. He argued that "participation environments allow conversations" around topics of shared interest and he used the examples of Flickr and YouTube and why they were so successful. The argument was that their success has come from their ability to respond to what their users need and asked for. Flickr started life differently from what it is now and the change was a result of grassroots pressure to provide other services. Another example he used Linux which is a "user generated operating system" which runs Google servers. This discussion led into the concept of Volunteerism 2.0. It is clear to me however, that while there clearly are pockets of volunteerism in non-western states, I feel the value of volunteering is cultural because there are many states around the world which do not place as high a value on volunteerism as in western states. For example, in Eastern Europe where the concept of "volunteer" organisations is, to many, an alien concept. Nevertheless, the internet facilitates new ways of participation.

This means that, the new story must be one which describes education and accommodates a wider range of pedagogical perspectives which demonstrates that the "High Stakes" testing story, as Steve called it, is no longer a valid one from this perspective. Hence, in his opinion the new sstory was the story of the tension between "Freedom" and "Structure" which he illustrated on a continuum.

He argued that the internet is releasing latent energy in the area of content and knowledge but that currently, we are very much at the "Structure" end of the continuum to the right. He believes that the education system needs to move more to the left to be more participative because in the current environment it does not release the human capacity which is needed. Hence, from this perspective the belief that education needs to be moving toward the left of the continuum, where students are expected to take responsibility for their learning.

Another way we get things done, is "organising without organisations". Steve used the example of the Tehran protests and that when the Iranian government wanted to stop the demonstrations they stopped the social media such as Twitter. But I would also add that, like any tool, it depends on how it is used, I would point to the problem of Flash Mobs where sms and social networking tools are used to "spontaneously" create a mob at any given time or place. On the other hand, Social Media is very important for linking support groups to individuals suffering disease and illness. This let Steve into a discussion of the long tail where things which have low demand below which it is profitable to supply in stores, etc. However, he pointed out that the long tail is where the most interesting things are happening, including in education.

Third, the Internet has also affected "how we connect with others". Steve pointed out that the fact of the matter is taht real-time collaboration is here now and that tools which facilitate that connectivity such as Skype are ubiquitous. Another tool which he discussed was Social Networking, specifically blogs which were first to allow someone to be involved in a conversation, but it has its problems in the sense of it being date ordered and can be negatively affected by comments. The next entry were Wikis which are not date ordered, and allowed for a more personal organisation. Steve pointed out that it took him a year before he felt comfortable using wikis, but from my perspective, resources such as Wikispaces, have made Wikis much easier to use and organise for your own needs so I don't really think the suggestion that they are difficult to understand can be applied much now. The next stage was with the entry of Social Networking which opened the door of participation easily because they collected together multiple web 2.0 tools in one location thus making much easier for the average person to take part in the conversation.

At the time of Steve's presentation, Facebook had 500,000,000 members which made it the 3rd largest country behind China and India respectively. Thus, Social Networking is applicable to professional development because it allows and facilitates peer to peer practice sharing.

Steve started his conclusion with these questions:

• How well are we preparing students for this world?
• How well prepared are we for these changes?
• Are we still in School 1.0?
• How do we get to school 2.0?

So, how do we move from School 1.0 to School 2.0? Here are Steve's suggestions:

1. Be a learner; Learn about web 2.0 & manage change
2. Keep your perspective
3. Join an educational Social Network
4. Take part in the conversation
5. Collaborate in the discussion in moving to school 2.0
6. Be brave - embrace the change

Next week, I'll be looking at Edmodo, Twiducate, Schoology and Edu2.0 comparing their relative pros and cons and discussing why, given our particular circumstances, I chose the one I did.

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