Monthly Archives: April 2009
Education 1.0, 2.0, 3.0- Where are we? Where do we need to be?
Most of us are aware how quickly digital information technology has been evolving. In personally adopting these technologies, there tends to be three broad entry points. Those of us that like to “geek out,” get our hands on and learn to use these new technologies as soon as possible. Others wait and see how the device or application becomes successful and useful among their network of friends and colleagues before jumping in to use it. The rest may never attempt to use a new technology, or they wait (or don’t even hear about it in some cases) until it’s fully in the mainstream. I think Twitter, as a fantastic Web 2.0 application, has been a great example of this generalized adoption process. It also happened very quickly. From a new application in 2006 to being a mainstream social networking tool in 2009 only took three short years.
Over the last 7 years or so, “version” labels have been added to help make sense of major changes and evolutions in society and technology. For example, in The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman laid out the differences between Globalization version 1.0, Globalization 2.0, and Globalization 3.0 (the third edition of his book is referred to as “Release 3.0“). Based off of this, some thinkers are even speculating Globalization 4.0. Maybe a little more popular in its “versions” is the Web. First, of course, was Web 1.0; we are now amid a dynamic Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 is hot on the heels of Web 2.0 and is already accessible some ways in its early stages.
Education is also going through an evolution process. The pace of change and adoption of new, transformational learning frameworks, however, is definitely not as fast as that with digital information technologies. Despite the slow pace of change, “version” labels are being tacked on in order to help understand the stages of evolution in education. Like the other version labels described above, the labels for education show where it’s been and where we need to be with it. Not surprisingly, two of the three versions actually still lay ahead of us! In some recent blog posts, the organization Education Futures gives some nice overviews on these versions of education, with a particular focus on Education 3.0. I’m not going to summarize them here. The posts aren’t long and are well written, so take a look:
- Leapfrogging to the New Basics
- Designing Education 3.0 (this post gives a nice overview of the differences between Education 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0)
- The Role of Schools in Education 3.0
- The Role of Technology in Education 3.0
After reading these posts, the issue in my mind is this: the process of moving from Education 1.0 to Education 2.0 has been very slow in many places. If there were a continuum between 1.0 and 2.0 written in increments of .1 (i.e. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and so on to 1.9, 2.0), my perception (and that is of all-in-one k-12 international schools since that is where my career has been for the last nine years) would be that most schools are between 1.3 – 1.6 in evolving toward the 2.0 model. Some people might consider this rating generous.
With the rate of change in all other aspects of society happening so quickly, it seems the adoption of and evolution toward the 2.0 model should be moving a lot faster. Since it’s not in most levels of education (at least at the high school level, which is where I teach), should we skip some aspects of Education 2.0 and start looking to create the environments for Education 3.0, doing the “leapfrogging” the first post describes above? If we were to wait for our school’s to go step by step toward Education 2.0 then toward Education 3.0, it might be too late. Considering the slow pace of change that has plagued education, that could take up to 20 years or more! In this case, I don’t think educators and schools can wait until the necessary educational framework is in the mainstream in order to adopt it. By then, the world and technology will have zoomed so far ahead that schools as we know it would likely be irrelevant.
I think we need to moving toward this 3.0 model sooner rather later. The question is, however: what do we need to do to release the ball and chain that unfortunately keeps education from moving forward more quickly?
A Sharing and Collaborative Culture
In order to effectively promote 21st century learning and technology integratration in our schools today, the culture within our schools needs to become an open culture of sharing best practice and collaboration.
It became clear in a recent “high level” high school meeting at my school (about the role of technology in learning) that one of the biggest barriers to effective and compelling technology integration seems to be the culture of isolation in which many colleagues work. Even though colleagues are talking to each other about various issues throughout the day, they aren’t often explicitly sharing best practices. This especially includes best practice with technology and creating 21st century learning environments. At the same time, colleagues don’t often seem to seek out this information either. For example, a few colleagues and I often offer various tech oriented workshops, but the attendance at these is often low and often have the same people in attendance. This problem of isolation isn’t only happening in my school. It’s been a problem in most schools for most of the history of education, I would say.
In a recent post on Academic Commons called “Opening Up Education- The Remix,” the authors stated:
“The failure is harder to put into words. It could be described as our lack of progress on sharing “pedagogical know-how” among educators. We have systems to run e-learning courses and content to view, but we have not captured the teaching processes that expert educators use to bring learning alive in their e-learning courses. If an educator creates a great sequence of learning activities that leads to a rich learning experience for students in an e-learning class, how does this educator share the activity sequence with colleagues so that they can automatically run the same activities or adapt them to suit local conditions? How does the educator share the thought processes that led to the design of the activity sequence?”. . . Put simply, what we lack is an agreed way to describe and share the teaching process, regardless of whether the activities are conducted online or face-to-face. As a result, individual educators spend heroic amounts of time on planning and preparation, but with enormous duplication of effort and no economies of scale. Apart from the lack of efficiency in preparation, educational quality also suffers: While some educators regularly create outstanding learning experiences for their students, some do not. How could the best teaching processes be shared among the widest number of educators?”
This culture of sharing best practice and collaboration can happen in many different ways. Professional development conferences, both regional and local, have always been a great place to learn what other educators are doing. For educational technology and 21st century learning, a couple of great regional examples here in east Asia are the Apple Leadership Conference in Hong Kong which occured this last weekend and the Learning 2.008 conference that happened in September 2008. An upcoming conference in September 2009, the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong, will surely be a great one, as well. These regional conferences only happen a couple of times a year, though, and not all faculty attend these. Furthermore, those conferences that have a educational technology focus (like the examples above) tend to be attended by ed tech leaders and teachers who have already shifted toward 21st century models of education. We obviously need to be sharing with more educators than those that have already shifted and are doing the sharing. “Regular” teachers need to be encouraged and given incentive to attend these conferences.
When time and money constrain people from attending distant regional conferences, local weekend workshops can provide wonderful opportunities for sharing best practice and building collaborative relationships. Of course, these types of workshops aren’t uncommon. They just need to be promoted more explicitly at times, I think. One that I know will be great for those in the Bangkok, Thailand area will be TechTrain 2010: Beginners Learning Technology Tools Together which will occur in January 2010. Events like this will surely achieve great in-roads to helping educate the faculty that need the most assistance. Presenters at these local workshops will be local themselves and possibly from the same school, so getting further face-to-face assistance beyond the workshops will be much easier.
The last way this culture of sharing best practice and collaboration can be promoted is by creating a viable and explicit intra-school model. For those teachers that don’t have the time or motivation to attend external workshops, having situations for learning how to effectively integrate technology and create relevant 21st century learning environments is essential to move the whole school forward. Examples can be collated and presented through online showcases; there could be face-to-face show-and-tell sessions, and there could be the usual in-house workshops that promote these instances. An example of the latter is the 7 Steps toward 21st Century Education that two colleagues and I created. Trying to make time for workshops like these during the school day is critical, however. Some people can’t stay after school or come to school early due to family or other commitments. So, it’s often these people that miss out and are getting left behind. At my school, we will tackle this time problem by having early release Wednesday’s starting next school year where we will have two hours every Wednesday afternoon for professional development.
Even if you can’t physically attend a face-to-face session in any of the contexts above, social media technologies make it easy to follow what’s happening. Most conferences and/or presenters will have a wiki or a Ning site that will delineate most of the information shared in person. At the same time, many attendees at a workshop will Twitter the backchannel. By following the hash-tag #hksummit, this is how I kept up with the recent Apple Leadership Conference in Hong Kong. Though not as much as those physically in attendance, I still learned a lot from the backchannel of this conference. Following the backchannel is so easy to do and doesn’t require much time and/or effort. We just need to teach people how to do it.
All of these are important ways to build understanding of best practice in technology integration and relevant learning in today’s ever changing world. All of these situations need to be promoted and encouraged in a school. Moreover, administrators need to be attending these situations along with strongly encouraging common faculty members to attend, not just the ed tech leaders in the school. When this happens, and everyone has opportunities to learn that fit their schedule and style of learning, I think isolation will lessen and a sharing and collaborative culture will be achieved.
