Technology in Education - Videos

TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION

Some Videos-

                                It is truly marked by Dr Marcus Specht, Professor of Advanced Learning Technologies, Open University of Netherlands that-

“The students of the future will demand the learning support that is appropriate for their situation or context. Nothing more, nothing less. And they want it at the moment the need arises. Not sooner, not later. Mobile devices will be a key technology for providing that learning support.” 

It is necessary to understand that education demands learning support that is appropriate according to the situation and context. And today, as the world is heading towards a new era of mastering technology and towards the progressive way of accepting AI, we need modifications in the education system also. This blog has some interesting talks about how technology can be helpful in education. 

Video - 1: Sir Ken Robinson: Changing Paradigm

                                Sir Ken Robinson gave some innovative ideas related to technology and education system under the title ‘The Changing Paradigm’. He was a British author, speaker and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education and arts bodies. Sir Ken Robinson defines creativity as 

"the process of having original ideas that have value". 

 It differs from imagination, which is the ability to bring to mind things that aren't present to your senses. 

"I think of creativity as putting your imagination to work. It’s like the executive wing of imagination. You can be imaginative all day long and never do anything. To be creative, you have to do something". 

-Sir Ken Robinson

                                Sir Ken Robinson studied education system in an innovative way in his talk entitled as The Changing Paradigm. In this video, his ideas on Divergent Thinking and Collaborative Learning are discussed as vital for changing paradigm. Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education. There are two reasons for it:

First, economic - how to train children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century?

People are trying to work out to educate children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century, given that we can’t anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week? As the recent turmoil is demonstrating.

The second, cultural. How do we educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity and we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalization?

                                The problem is in their attempt to meet the future by doing what they did in the past and on the way they’re alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school! 

“When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was if you worked hard and did well and got a college degree you would have a job. Our kids don’t believe that—and they’re right not to, by the way. You are better having a degree than not, but it’s not a guarantee any more.” 

Now kids don't like to do this. It's better having a degree, but it's not a sure assurance that the one will get a job. 

Hence, the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment. 

“Some people say we have to raise standards as if this is a breakthrough. Like really, yes, we should. Why would you lower them? I haven’t come to an argument which persuades me of lowering them. But raising them—of course, we should be raising them.”

“The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no systems of public education. Not really. You could get educated by Jesuits if you had the money. But public education, paid for out of taxation, compulsory to everyone and free at the point of delivery, that was a revolutionary idea. And many people objected to it: they said: “It’s not possible for many street kids, working-class kids to benefit from public education; they’re incapable of learning to read and write and why are we spending time on this?”

“But running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind. Which was essentially the enlightenment view of intelligence – that real intelligence consists in this capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning and knowledge of the classics, originally. What we come to think of as academic ability.” 

                                In the view of Sir Ken Robinson, the model pillared on ‘Economic’ and ‘Intellectual’ has caused chaos in many peoples lives. So educational reform is driven by an economic imperative which is like the modern epidemic - misplaced and fictitious where academic ability is no longer relevant. 

“This is the plague of ADHD. Now, this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America – or prescriptions for ADHD. Don’t mistake me. I don’t mean to say there is no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder. I am not qualified to say if there is such a thing – I know that the great majority of psychologists and paediatricians think there is such a thing. But it is still a matter of debate. What I do know for a fact is it is not an epidemic.  These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out. And on the same, whimsical basis and for the same reason: medical fashion.”  

“Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They’re being besieged by information and calls for their attention from every platform: computers, from i-phones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of television channels. And we’re penalizing them now for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff, at school, for the most part.”

                                The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you are present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive. And anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what’s happening. And a lot of these drugs are that.”

                                Sir Ken Robinson goes on explaining that we are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them. But it is necessary to do exactly the opposite! 

The present system of education is modelled on the interests of industrialization. And Sir Ken Robinson illustrates this statement -

“I’ll give you a couple of examples. Schools are still pretty much organized along factory lines. Ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches: we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture. Well, I know kids that are much better than other kids at different disciplines; or at different times of the day; or better in smaller groups than in large groups; or sometimes they want to be on their own. If you are interested in the model of learning, you don’t start from this production line mentality.”

                                The process of learning doesn’t require the “production line mentality”. It is essentially about conformity. Changing the paradigm means going opposite to the standardization. Robinson talks about DIVERGENT THINKING. Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. Sir Ken Robinson defines creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym but its an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question, to think what Edward de Bono would probably call “laterally”, to think not just in linear or convergent ways. To seek multiple answers, not one. The research says that education deteriorates divergent thinking which is essential among all but as we educate ourselves in this ‘corporate education which is industrial’, we tend to decrease these capacities. 

                                But Sir Ken Robinson points out that we have to think differently about human capacity by eliminating certain distinctions of academic, non-academic, abstract, theoretical, vocational to meet the requirement of the real and future world. 

                                The most important lesson is to work in groups, in collaboration which the traditional system denies by accusing it with “COPYING” which is called “CHEATING”. But collaboration is the essential stuff of growth which is often neglected in the gene pool of growth. 

“If we atomize people and separate them and judge them separately, we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment. And thirdly, it is crucially about the culture of our institutions: the habits of institutions and the habitats that they occupy.”

                                Hence, Sir Ken Robinson chiefly talks about the “raising standards” of the education system in order to change the structure of education. 

Video 2: Sugata Mitra: School in the cloud- SOLE

                                Sugata Mitra in this video talks about the future of Learning. He observes the kind of learning in schools and informs us about how and why school learning is dangerous along with its history. The present-day schooling system came from about 300 years ago from the last and the biggest of empires on this planet.  The whole administration in that era was run without computers, without telephones with data handwritten on pieces of paper and travelling by ship. But the Victorians managed this amazingly. They created a global computer made up of "people". 

'The bureaucratic administrative machine'

They made another machine to produce those people which, according to Sugata Mitra, is school. 

"The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. They must be identical to each other. They must know three things. They must have good handwriting because the data is handwritten, they must be able to read and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head."

They must be so identical that they can instantly function. Sugata Mitra continues-

"The Victorians were great engineers, they engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists."

                                They are outdated, there is now, not any need to continue this kind of schools which prepares students for mere clerical work which today a machine can perform fluently. The clerks are computers. The people guide computers to do a clerical job. the question is how present-day schooling is going to prepare them. He talks about his 'Hole in the Wall' an experiment and a documentary 1999 film. 

Click on the below-mentioned link to know more about-

The Hole in the Wall Project and the Power of Self-Organized Learning

What are jobs going to be like, in future? What's learning going to be like? What will be tomorrow? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? Could it be that at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? Could it be a devastating question that we are heading towards, or maybe in, a future where knowing is obsolete? Encouragement seems to be the key.

"Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, perform. Why did they create a system like that? Because it was needed. There was an age, in the Age of Empires, when you needed those people who can survive under threat. When you're standing in a trench, all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. If you didn't, you failed. But the Age of Empires is gone. 

What happens to creativity in our age?

We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human-computer, do we? So we need to design a future for learning."

                                Learning is a product of educational self-organization. Sugata Mitra says that it is not making learning happen but it is about letting it happen. The teachers set the process in motion and watch the learning happen. 

"My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. Help me build this school. It'll be called the School in the Cloud. It'll be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures, driven by the big questions which their mediators put in." 

- Sugata Mitra

Video 3: Sugata Mitra: Future of Learning

Sugata Mitra often likes when he is described as Tarzan of education. In this, a bit long video objective-driven education and Schools in the Cloud. He describes his journey from a doctorate degree holder of physics and pursuing a career in the education field in teaching other people how to write computer programs. He highlights the digital divide of India where there was a contradictory view his plush office in Delhi and just outside was a slum, the thing which troubled him was that he was making rich people's children into good-quality programmers but he was missing a good one from the slums. It is increasingly a global problem. Some might have changed the world if they knew how to do with technology. 

He also discussed the history of Classroom teaching and exam patterns. Earlier what teachers used to maintain discipline in class was by instructing students in the situation of oral transmission-

-SIT

-DO NOT TALK

-PAY ATTENTION 

-LISTEN CAREFULLY AND REMEMBER WHAT YOU HEAR

These are the instructions even today. We don't need this kind of advice now. Sujata Mitra says that 

"You do need someone to tell you which books to read so teachers suggest which books to read because books don't tell you what's in them until you read them."

Today, if we observe, books are no longer physical objects, they do say what's inside them. The past 5000 years of history of education guides us today what we shall be doing in education, what's the efficient way to do it. 

Introduction of technology in education change things. 

Why can't we bring the internet in the examination hall? Sujata Mitra emphasized on bringing assistive tools in classrooms. If the internet is brought into the examination hall then students will be exposed to innovative and critical thinking because the questions will no more have a factual quality which Bing or Google can easily answer. He also highlighted that it is difficult to get good teachers in remote areas. Geographic remoteness and teacher migration play a vital role. 

He discussed the experiment which he has done in the last few years and observed that a group of children left with the computer unsupervised came with astonishing results of self-learning. Groups of children can learn most things on their own. He also discussed the method of self-learning like the grandmother pedagogical method which is very significantly different from the parent or the teacher, it uses admiration to produce a spiral of learning inside children and to observe improvement in their performance. He also talked about hole-in-the-wall experiment in the self-organized learning environment. Teachers can be 'beamed' to other places using the internet. Children can also learn to read by themselves was made clear by Sugata Mitra when he emphasized the collaboration, and the work is done in a group. One more interesting thing is that when children work in a group and are allowed to interact with each other and talk freely if the adult is not there, they can detect doctrine from actual serious material. 

Curricula around the world need to be revised to include the Internet. Pupils should be taught to recognize that the past is represented and interpreted in different ways, and give reasons for it. Pedagogy needs to include the use of the internet, not just for searching but for talking to each other, for Facebook, Twitter and all of that needs to come into pedagogy. Their world to become into the classroom. 

Examinations need to focus on the internet and collaboration for problem-solving and decision making. Obsolocenses of ideas, skills, methods and knowledge needs to be factored into learning methods, curricula and examinations. 

A School in the Cloud

Video 4- Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

                            There are almost more than 2200 videos covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and a million students watching on the order of 100 to 200000 videos a day. This is how Salman Khan starts his TED talk where he introduces about how he started the Khan Academy and the next level in education. 

Salman Khan actually talks about Flipped Learning or Blended Learning. Earlier, in the traditional classroom, learning such as remembering and understanding used to happen in class. But now the reversed (flipped) learning classroom model has opened a new mode of studying. Teachers assign the lectures for homework and what used to be homework is to be done in the classroom. Teachers have used technology to humanise the classroom. 

In the traditional classroom, there's a concept of homework, lecture, and exam. 

"our model is learn math the way you’d learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery."

This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. Khan Academy wants to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom. It's not the complete education but it frees up time. 

"This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace — and this is actually a live dashboard" 

When teachers let every student work at their own pace — and they see it over and over again — they see students who took a little bit of extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that they thought were slow six weeks ago, teachers now would think are gifted. And we’re seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time.

"And we’re seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time."

"Our goal is to use technology to humanize on a global scale. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio." 

Salman Khan also talks about the notion of a global one-world classroom. 

Q&A Bill Gates: I’ve seen some things you’re doing in the system that have to do with motivation and feedback — energy points,   merit badges. Tell me what you’re thinking there. Salman Khan: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. And I have to make it clear, it’s not just me anymore. I’m still doing all the videos, but we have a rockstar team doing the software. Yeah, we’ve put a bunch of game mechanics in there where you get these badges, we’re going to start having leader boards by area, and you get points. It’s actually been pretty interesting. Just the wording of the badging or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth graders or sixth graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them. Bill Gates: And the collaboration you’re doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? Salman Khan:Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. Once again, I didn’t expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, “What would you do if you had carte blanche in a classroom?” And I said, “Well, I would just, every student work at their own pace on something like this and we’d give a dashboard.” And they said, “Oh, this is kind of radical. We have to think about it.” And me and the rest of the team were like, “They’re never going to want to do this.” But literally the next day they were like, “Can you start in two weeks?” Bill Gates: So fifth grade math is where that’s going on right now? Salman Khan:It’s two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes. And they’re doing it at the district level. I think what they’re excited about is they can now follow these kids. It’s not an only-in-school thing. We’ve even, on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. And we can track everything. So they can actually track them as they go through the entire district. Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level they can see. Bill Gates: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what’s going on with those kids. So you’re getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they mean? Salman Khan:Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. And they’re literally saying, “Hey, this is nice, but … ” Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, “I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic.” So we made that focus diagram. So it’s all been teacher-driven. It’s been pretty crazy. Bill Gates: Is this ready for prime time? Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out? Salman Khan:Yeah, it’s ready. We’ve got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more. (Laughter) No, no reason why it really can’t happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. Bill Gates: And the vision of the tutoring thing. The idea there is, if I’m confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface I’d find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? Salman Khan: Absolutely. And this is something that I recommend everyone in this audience to do. Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, or nephews, or cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. But yeah, it’s all there.

Video 5: Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

 "Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." 

Marc Prensky in his talk discusses the change which can be termed as “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Marc Prensky talks about how today's generation is the first generations to grow up with this new technology as they have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using technology.  Today‟s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. And Marc Prensky talks about the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants.  

"Those of us who were not born into the digital

world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to them, Digital

Immigrants."

The single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Multi-tasking, parallel thinking, multimedia, multi resources, etc are the characteristics of Digital natives. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work. 

Click here to know the views of David Crystal on The Effect of New Technologies on Engish, The Biggest Challange for English Language Teachers in the times of the Internet, Texting is 'Good' for the English Language. 

Thank you. 

References- 

Weston, C.

Weston, Crispin. "Sir Ken Robinson". Ed Tech Now, 2012, https://edtechnow.net/2012/01/20/sir-ken-robinson/. Accessed 11 Jan 2021.