Tech KnowledgeE-notes

WOW! Just spent a morning with Chris Dede, from the Harvard College of Ed–will try to add links later, but here are my notes…how exciting! 

We as teachers are not prepared for what we have to get our students ready for!

Panasonic challenge of teaching video

Levy & Murnane’s book–The new division of labor: How computers are creating the next job market

 What jobs will be done by people and what jobs can better be done by machine

 

**Expert decision making  (what to do when all standard methods of problem solving fail and we have to invent something new)

**Complex communications

 

Content is not as important (will be outdated by time they are adults) as these two qualities

 

Microsoft video—classroom of tomorrow  Production Future Vision

Auto translation of communication and lessons between kids, Teacher on airplane creating lessons

Way cool scientist working on desk

Augmented reality in airport, shows available services, guides him to meet (arrows on floor) WAAAAY cool!

Digital post-its on workspace to collaborate

Coffee cup with levels, temp—“awake but grumpy” label got lots of laughs

From idea to implementation—amazing concept, man sees request at home, goes out to create what’s needed

 Lifesize telepresence with translation

Complex visual interfaces

 

Web 2.0 is precursor to this—what is 2.0?  Creativity, collaboration, and sharing

Co-creation process

 

Most people begin by sharing in 2.0—bookmarks, photos, social networks, writers’ workshops

Thinking—blogs, podcasts, online discussions

Co-Creating—wikis & collaborative file creation, mashups & collective media creation, collaborative social change communities.

 

Henry Jenkins (MIT, now USC)—New literacies, intellectual and psychosocial

Good list!

 

(side note—lots of keys being tapped, people taking notes!)

 

Don Leu   New literacies’ characteristics

 

Distributed Education—the next model for schooling post-industrial era (it’s on its way out, not what our society needs)

Keep school as place to keep custodial function, place for kids to go and be safe, parents trained as tutors, informal coaches & mentors in community to help complement teachers

Colleges of ed still needed, but change, too:  to train teachers, tutors, coaches and mentors

 

Boston Tech Academy in Boston

Lottery based school, many kids below level, want all to go to college, laptop school

Model based on personal heroism, couldn’t do on a massive scale like we need 

We need a way to create this on large scale

www.microsoft.com/education/demos/scale/index.html

 

New National Ed Tech Plan—Chris helped with this

(he calls it the “Trojan Mouse” strategy—Education plan with technology as an engine—what is 21^st century learning?)

http://www.ed.gove/technology/netp-2010

 

What do adults do with “wicked” (complicated—multifaceted) problems—need a team to do together, no one person has all the expertise to do this

Define problem first to decide how to approach (ex: Human Genome Project)

 

Situated learning and transfer—the reality:  nothing looks like the education we’ve had (ex: new doctor tossed in, start with simple tasks so you can learn tacitly in a series of apprenticeships, from fringe to center of community as build skills)

 

Immersive Learning

Multi-user virtual environments—immersed in virtual contexts with digital artifacts

Virtual reality–full sensory immersion

 

EcoMUVE projct—Institute of Ed Sciences (US DofEd)

www.ecomuve.org

Middle school science—causal complexity focus, complex dynamics of a real eco problem

Ex: Computer model of Black’s Nook Pond in Cambridge, MA owned by Cambridge Public Schools, offsite science lab

Shows change over time, used modern gaming engine

Helps teach kids the front end of inquiry—what is the problem (not a set up lab with answers expected like we had)

Virtual tools—magic sub to dive into pond to view (Miss Frizzle LIVES!)

 

Follow a specific atom to explore the flow of matter throughout an ecosystem

 

Our current assessments can’t measure this type of learning, current tools are invalid

 

Use immersive interfaces to tackle the assessment part of the problem, too—orientation, problem identification, experimentation, competing explanations—complex quests, not multiple choice—have 90 minutes to do this, can do “what if”scenarios to see what happens

Not dependent upon reading abilities as much as our current testing system (ESL, LD…)

Cognitive auditing—cool concept  Can see the kids’ thinking processes, too much info, need to chunk this data so you can see what they understand, and what the gaps are

http://virtualassessment.org

 

Products of inquiry vs. processes of inquiry

 

Formative and diagnostic assessments—not Summative (too late to fix them!)

IF we did these well wouldn’t need summatives! (ex: barcodes eliminated stores being closed for inventory for days!)

 

Ubiquitous computing—gaming industry is helping education to create the engines for what we can do to help kids

Transition to mobile wireless devices which is where we are heading

 

Roku’s Reward  HP video

Augmented reality gaming (cute!)

 

Lots of laughs as he showed slide of Little Professor calculator, “biggest tragedy of (his) life is that he looks like the Little Prof!”

 

More mobile devices coming—smartbooks, scaled up cell phone, always on, long battery life, always connected, location aware

In four years, price point of $200 for SmartBooks, with $15 per month data services acc. to Qualcomm

Schools not buying, but families would be…

Migration to cloud computing, use of resources, allows devices to be less expensive

 

Inclusive Model of Pedagogy and Assessment—knowledge in context, distributed across a community

“Industrial era school is not a good container to put this into”

parallels shift from one-room school to larger buildings, grouping to ?????

 

Our leadership challenge, reinvent education

(showed slide on why successful companies go out of business—Christenson, Horn, & Johnson Disrupting Class)

Miss strategic opportunities, etc. 

 

Sea Change from Ariel’s song in The Tempest (Shakespeare!) “full fathom five…”

“suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange”

Let’s not use a century-old model and throw away half of our kids by losing them