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StuCon2012- A Technology Conference BY Students FOR Students
On March 16-17, 2012, 13 students from my Semester 2 Grade 10 Technology Skills for the 21st Century Learner class attended the first ever StuCon 2012 technology conference at Hong Kong International School. This was a conference where all participating students helped design, organize, plan, and run the various workshops. In essence, it was a technology-based conference by students for students.
Photos and Collage by Thomas Galvez
Nine international schools from East and Southeast Asia attended the conference, including schools from Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Indonesia.
This event, organized as a non-stop 24-hour conference, was the first of its kind. Other student-centered technology conferences exist like Flat Classroom, which my school attended last year, but none have done the 24-hour model. The organizers qualified this non-stop 24-hour approach by saying, “…[The decision] was driven by awareness that productivity is often driven by pushing mental states out of their comfort zone…” They also stated that the 24-hour approach was one of the main themes of the event. The students weren’t expected to stay awake the whole time, however. The organizers created power nap times in the schedule and any student could grab a nap in a dedicated room whenever they felt the need.
The SIS Technology Skills students started preparing for the event as soon as they started the class after Chinese New Year in February. They divided themselves into three teams where they collaborated to design and deliver a four-hour workshop each that revolved around a technology skill, process, and/or idea. The students chose their workshop topic based off of pre-existing technology skills and interests or something on which they wanted to improve technology skill-wise.
One group, consisting of Andy K., Vaneson L, Lecy C., Luke W. and, Coco X., built their workshop around video making and editing. They titled their workshop “Movie Rookies.” Participants in their workshop recreated a scene from a movie, learning about the cinematographic and editing elements in the process. You can view the commercial they created for their workshop here.
Photos and Collage by Thomas Galvez
Another group, comprised of Joe R., Jason K., Jung Woo P., and Chris T., designed their workshop around photo editing on computer and mobile devices. Their workshop was called “Digital Plastic Surgery.” They helped students improve photo-editing skills while promoting the idea of a consistent and professional looking presence of one’s self across social media applications.
The final group, an all-girl cohort consisting of Helena K., Jamison F., Saige T-H, and Madyson H., created a workshop about making original music using an online music creation and editing tool. Based off of the name of the online tool (ROC by Aviary), they called their workshop “Be a ROCkstar.” Promoting the idea of creating original music for class projects instead of using a copyrighted song from a known artist (which is illegal in most instances), these girls showed their participants how to put together an original song depending on the mood of their video.
Along with facilitating their own workshops, the students attended other technology-based workshops developed by the other participating students. They also had opportunities to interact with “gurus” that were brought in by the organizers. Two gurus came from Warner Brothers Studio in Hollywood and CNN Hong Kong, respectively, while another two were a professional video game developer and a theme park engineer. The greatest amount of excitement came from those students who went on the CNN studio tour with the guru from CNN. Two of the students tweeted to their followers on Twitter upon their return that the CNN tour “was amazing!”
Overall, the students enjoyed their StuCon experience despite the inevitable exhaustion that came with such little sleep over the 24-hour time period. The students will have the opportunity to hone their new skills in future class projects. Hopefully StuCon will continue for many years to come and hopefully SIS will continue to participate in this wonderful student-centered technology event. Student reflections about the conference can be read here.
Thinking about Finland’s Approach to Education
In my post the other day, I listed my qualities of the ideal school. Today, an article from Time came to me through the related app I have on my iPhone with the headline “Finland’s Educational Approach? The Anti-Tiger Mother Approach.” In reading that article, a few sentences popped out at me that linked with my ideal qualities:
- “. . .a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back to back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can’t see them can say what they are.” This links to my ideal quality that a classroom shouldn’t have four walls. Almost everything that we do in life happens out in the world and we learn from the world around us. The subject areas we teach also happen out in the world. So, why have we spent so much time teaching and learning in a box? In thinking about it, the way most students are taught isn’t much different than a rat inside Skinner’s Box!
- “He (the teacher) can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum. . .” This aligns with my ideal qualities that standards and benchmarks shouldn’t be forced and that teachers should be encouraged to innovate. I think the Finland case study shows that standards and benchmarks aren’t fully necessary to the extent in which they are used now in many places. They can be very general and hopefully malleable. If they are too specific or narrow, they can stultify the innovation process (for both teacher and student) and even get in the way of investigating more relevant ideas or situations occurring in today’s world.
- “It (their high levels of achievement) surprises them (the Finns) because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don’t believe it does much good.” This aligns with my ideal quality that grades are an after-thought (or not used at all). The article doesn’t give much specifics about how they assess, but I think we get the picture that grades and exam scores don’t always “prove” one’s intellectual and/or practical abilities in real-world contexts.
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“In Finland, the school day is shorter than it is in the U.S.“ This is partially related to my ideal quality that “school” or learning doesn’t and shouldn’t occur between 8am and 3pm. The timing of school days is based on the now irrelevant industrial model of working 9 – 5 (except schools were timed to start before the parent had to be at work and finishing before the parent got home from work). Learning doesn’t happen in a certain amount of time nor at a certain time day. It can happen any time, any where. Even though this is known, schools still refuse to change. Yes, a central learning center (aka a school) is still needed for the necessary face-to-face interactions, collaboration, social development skills, etc., but learning on a fixed schedule doesn’t match how our brain works and the globalized 24/7 world that we now all live in. Furthermore, technological innovations allow for a lot of these processes to happen without having to be in the same room.
The article does leave out reference to technology integration, specific approaches in other subject areas, how teachers work together (or not), and some other issues. I think I’ll start taking a deeper look into Finland’s model to see how they round-out their approach. I wonder how many Finnish national schools do the IB program?
The other thing I started thinking about was what is the correct answer to all of this? Some people who subscribe to the idea of Cultural Relativism might say that each society has their own history, culture, belief systems, and traditional practices of education, and because of these factors, certain approaches may not work and/or not align with the belief system of the society. The article did briefly hit on this at the end. It mentioned that Finland is a society based on equity, so their system may not work where some form of deep-rooted competition exists. It said that Thailand was trying to revamp its system after Finland’s, but it wasn’t working. Also, it gave a link to the article about Chinese students getting higher standard exam scores than Finland in recent global assessment of exam data. So, which approach is best?
If we think about Blooms revised Taxonomy, knowledge, or the remembering of facts, is at the bottom. “Understanding” is second from the bottom. Most of these exams that are used really only assess these bottom two elements. When it comes to memorizing, I don’t think anyone will beat the Chinese! Memorizing the work of the masters has been the educational tradition in China for centuries. If we were to assess the top of Bloom’s revised Taxonomy (Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing), however, I don’t think Chinese students would be at the top any more.
So can we say that despite the long hours and fantastic exam scores, the Chinese (and general East Asian) approach is wrong? Do we have to take the Cultural Relativist perspective in this instance? Are my Western and individual progressive values causing me to side with the Finnish approach because it’s more Western and progressive? My contention is no- cultural relativism doesn’t fully apply in this situation. A human brain is a human brain. Yes, our neural networks make certain connections based on our experiences in the world (thus, culture can shape the brain and cognitive processes in some ways), but brain research also shows that we learn better in context of real-world situations. I think the Finnish educational model or adaptations of it that doesn’t emphasize rote memorization and the subsequent exams that assess it can and will work in other cultures for the better. Just more time is needed. I would say it’s like trying to put a square into a round hole- at first, it doesn’t fit. But, if you actually take some time to round the edges of the square, however, it will fit into the hole eventually. The rounding of the edges process is what would take into account the cultural components of learning in a place while maintaining the circular nature of the middle that will allow it to eventually fit the hole (the brain and how we learn best).
All-in-all, in order to have agile and creative minds working together to innovate and solve today’s and tomorrow’s issues, we have to round the square edges in all cultures.
