EdTech Mindset your must-have educational guide to the future June 2015 | MindCet.org
SPECIAL EDITION
SHAPING THE FUTURE |||
EdTech beyond the screen from virtual to tangible reality
The Editorial EdTech Mindset 2015 Special Edition offers a taste of a very special EdTech event: Shaping the Future lll – EdTech beyond the screen, from virtual to tangible reality that took place on June 1-4, 2015, in Israel. A four-day powerful event that merged generations and cultures, bringing together artists, students, scholars, programmers, educators, politicians - different people interested in offering new insights to the education world. The almost 1,000 participants moved around dynamic settings, especially designed for truly interactive and collaborative activities kicking off with a Hackathon, followed by a showcase of ventures, lectures and workshops led by thought leaders and representatives of all stakeholders currently interested in the future of technology & learning. Dr. L. Cecilia Waismann, Editor
Editor Cecilia Waismann ceciliaw@cet.ac.il Art Director Danny Zavaro Digital Editing Ran Magen, Gilad Nass Graphic Design Sarit Youker Photographers Sefi Shlevin, Gadi Ohad Video p.19 Nir Weiss Image Rights Dvora Gruda, Laliv Gal English Editing Nechama Unterman Translation Hebrew-English Perry Zamek Images Popperfoto/Getty images/Image Bank Israel: p. 6; UniversalImagesGroup/Getty images/Image Bank Israel: p. 4, p. 8-9 shutterstock.com: 5, 29, backgrounds of pages: 22-23, 24, 26-27, 28, 31; istockphoto.com/Martin Wimmer: p. 17 (background); istockphoto.com/Plus: p. 32-33; istockphoto.com/ rbirch1: p. 35 (background) Picture on the cover Š Leslie F. Miller General Enquiries mindcet@cet.ac.il Content Contributors: Akin Ajayi, writer British Broadcasting; Dr. Ilan Ben Yaakov, Pedagogical Director MindCET; Prof. Walter Bender, founder Sugar labs- MIT Lab; Dale Dougherty, founder Maker Media; Robert Gehorsam, CEO Institute of Play; Prof. Renee Hobbs, Head Media Edu Lab Rhodes Island Univ.; Steven Hodas, Edu Entrepreneur - NY iZone; Ido Keinan, Journalist; Dr. Orna Lavie, Math Teacher and researcher; Guy Levi, Innovation C.E.T.; Gilad Nass, Marketing MindCET; Prof. Miriam Reiner, Technion Neuroscience Lab; Dr. Jeremy Roschelle, Director Tech Learning at SRI International; Dr. Cecilia Waismann, Head R&D MindCET; Avi Warshavsky, CEO MindCET; Dr. Peggy Weil, Digital Media Artist; Dr. David Weinberger, Harvard Innovation Library Lab
content 04 10 12 13
Spatial Turning Point Avi Warshavsky
Meet the participants Bringing the Maker Mindset to transform education Q&A with Dale Dougherty
A new generation of true makers Cecilia Waismann
14 Virtual Reality, a personal experience beyond technology
(extracts from Prof. Miriam Reiner’s talk)
16 Teachers need to expose students to powerful ideas
Q&A with Walter Bender
17 Coding: Making better learners
Ilan Ben Yaakov
18 Allowing a Hackathon to provide Megalomanic Answers to Childlike Questions
Cecilia Waismann
20 IoT: Interaction between human and machines
Gilad Nass
22 Creating an Educational Innovation Zone
Guy Levi
24 Constructing one’s own learning experience
Q&A with Robert Gehorsan
25 Gaming, a global grammar of youth
(extracts from Robert Gehorsan’s talk)
26 The world beyond the screen - The educational perspective
Ido Keinan
28 Girls & STEM: A collective concern
Orna Lavie
29 Teachers as Makers: Content Creation as a Pedagogy of Learning
Akin Ajayi
30 A learning space that goes beyond…and meets the learner
Q&A with Jeremy Roschelle
31 Thickening the spread of Education
David Weinberger
32 3D Printing – if not already, soon in a school near you
Gilad Nass
34 Sharing real stories through virtual environments
Q&A with Peggy Weil
35 Thoughts on Shaping the Future III
Peggy Weil
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L A I T A SP G N I N G
N R I N U TTURNING RNING POINT Avi Warshavsky
Technology and knowledge have always gone hand in hand. It is hard for us to describe our knowledge world without the technologies that surround it. The history of human knowledge runs through major technological revolutions: the transition from an oral to a written culture, the shift from scrolls to paged books (codices), and the move from manuscript to the printed word. Each of these revolutions not only constituted a new medium but, largely also served to shape knowledge itself - the system of values that it carries and the manner in which we remember, express ourselves and learn. The technologies used at our daily practices have become almost transparent. For example – the action of writing cursively is not perceived as a use of technology. Pen and paper are almost like a part of the human body, while the act of writing is almost automatic. We are so well adjusted to writing that we are not even aware that, when we write the letter “T”, we are initiating the action of writing a vertical line, lifting the pen, placing it on the paper again, and then writing a horizontal line. We are also unaware of the fact that the ballpoint tip of the pen puts out an exact amount of ink in response to the pressure we put on it. We write just like we ride a bicycle – the technological instrument becomes almost like an extension to our bodies, and its use like a basic bodily function, such as breathing or walking. One of the most fascinating dynamics is that of the replacement of one knowledge technology with another. Amazingly, not too much time is required before we readjust to the transparency of the new technology. It only required a few decades for many of us to treat the keyboard with the same automaticity as we treated the ballpoint pen. Sometimes, when looking from the
outside, the new technology that we have adopted is less effective at being transparent: for example, the transition from writing with pen and paper to writing on the computer is a transition from objects that are inexpensive, easy to carry, and uncomplicated in operation, to heavy, expensive objects with significant potential for going wrong. However, the evolution of the technological device, along with our human capacity to adapt, makes even the most complicated technology, automatic and transparent. The amazing human capacity to adapt to a new technology and make it transparent, also conceals within it a major shortcoming – we tend to be blind to the limitations that the knowledge technology imposes on us. The more successful the technology is at being transparent and invisible, the more blind we are to the price that we pay for its use. The ability to perceive these limitations is generally found within two fundamentally different populations – the conservative Luddites, who oppose the adoption of technologies, and who are thus able to look at them from the outside; and the futurists, who look forward to the paradigm that is yet to come, and so are able to adopt a perspective of foreignness toward that which we see as obvious.
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Looking at knowledge technologies like a science fiction writer
If we wish to look critically at the transparent technologies around us and at the directions in which they are developing, we may adopt an enjoyable exercise that science fiction writers sometimes perform – a supposedly retrospective examination by people of the future on the civilization of our own day. This perspective puts things that appear to us to be natural or logical into a different light. For example, today’s learning appears slow and clumsy when compared with the possibility of loading our brains with a large amount of knowledge within a few seconds, as in the world conceived by the creators of “The Matrix”. How would our descendants in another 400 years look at today’s educational technology? Let us imagine, for example, a student at the Education Dept. of an University on Planet Kepler 452B (a planet similar to Earth, discovered in mid-2015) looking at images from the 21st century that depict “educational technology.” If that student would have to describe educational technology in the 21st century based on pictures, she would note – with a measure of surprise combined with the patronizing smile reserved for those who look at the past – that most of the pictures include one image that repeats itself over and over. It is that of a student sitting in front of a computer screen, alone or with friends, smiling and showing interest. Towards the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, thousands of such images were created intended mainly for marketing purposes.
These pictures are so common that they could be defined as a genre of images in its own right, similar to those works that depict the “Madonna and Child,” or portraits of the families of nobility in the 17th century. As with the 17th century family portraits, these pictures
may be read both naively and critically. When we look at these portraits naively, what we see is a family of noble lineage, perhaps with a hunting dog or servants, grouped in front of the painter. When we look at them critically, we see that the painter is trying to make a particular claim, or tell a particular story. A critical reading, may reveal that this is actually a bourgeois, middle-class family, and it is the painting that allows them to represent themselves as something they could never be – a family of noblemen. The visual image has the ability to tell an alternative story to a less sparkling reality. If so, what is the story told by those common images of educational technology? In most instances, we see a gender and racially balanced group of students, smiling and engaged in front of the screen. If our student from Kepler 452B looks at pictures of the “joy of educational technology” genre through those same critical lenses, she would conclude that the picture is gender balanced because in reality this is a field dominated by boys, that it is racially balanced because it is mainly accessible to higher socioeconomic classes, and that the kids are all smiling because the outside viewer may suspect that computer assisted learning is actually quite boring. As with many pictures, the most problematic aspect is that it expresses something that was obvious to the contemporary viewer, but only with the perspective of time that it is revealed as problematic. In the case of our picture, the problem lies in the situation itself – a kid sitting in a room, concentrating on an isolated object in which only his intellect is involved. To emphasize how grating this image is as a learning method, we should recall what Jean Jacques Rousseau, a leading thinkers of the Enlightenment, wrote about optimal learning as a combination of three elements: nature, other people, and the interaction of our own bodies with environmental objects. To create proper learning, according to Rousseau, there has to be the right combination of these three elements – the body, the space and the society around us. Educational technology, in its initial stages, did not meet any of these conditions: in the early days other people were not involved in the learning process – the “learning machine” would not require interaction with a human teacher; it was designed as a technique that only involved our mental presence: disembodied awareness viewing a screen, based on a technique that takes place not in a closed room and in a single position.
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Makers Two turning points
We have put on the glasses of a science fiction writer so as to look beyond the surface and identify the limitations of the transparent knowledge technologies that surround us. Now we can take another look at those limitations, this time from the perspective of some of the trends developing in the tech culture around us, pointing at two turning points: the first took place at the beginning of the 21st century, and the other may take place in the coming years. The first could be called “the human turning point.” For the last decade, we have witnessed the entry of interaction with people into the learning processes. With the widespread penetration of the internet and of social networks, educational technology has ceased to be a technology that merely provides interactive eduware, and is instead establishing itself more as a communications technology. From learning management systems, through forums, to social networks, communication between teachers and students, among teachers themselves, and among students, has become an important component of the value offered by educational technology. From a paradigm that views technology mainly as a “teacherproof” interaction, we have shifted to a vision that views technology as a communications tool, one that produces learning communications that are far more powerful than those made possible by simple human learning communications. The second may be called the “spatial turning point” – it hasn’t yet taken place, but certain of the developments of recent years hint at its imminent arrival. The first and most significant is the massive deployment of smartphones, creating a situation in which computers have come off the desks, shrunk, and moved into the pockets of each of us. The computer goes everywhere we do. It now also has capabilities that can give expression to that movement, such as GPS, gyroscope, and so on.
The Makers Movement blurs the distinction between “lo-tech” and “hi-tech,” between professional and amateur, and lessens the distance from planning to production. The Maker culture matured about a decade ago, and has flourished in large part because of tech developments such as 3D printing and laser cutters. These technologies reduce time and space allowing for a complete production process. Using traditional means, these processes had required, until recently, industrial tools, specialist expertise, and a division between design and production, with industrial implementation being feasible only at the mass production level. In the Maker space, the whole of the process shrinks to one relatively small space, to short periods, as well as simultaneously plan and design using relevant software, and physical outputs. The Maker space brings together an infrastructure that is ideal for learning- the process is focused on a product, creating a direction for a project that demands learning while doing similar to that taking place in projectbased learning. The connection between the planning, preparation and implementation stages creates an interface
The next stage in the lead up to the turning point includes a number of developments that substantially change the three-fold relationship: man-spacetech tool. Among them, we should include the Makers Movement, the maturation of Virtual Reality technologies, and what is commonly referred to as the Internet of Things. At first glance, these developments do not connect with one another, and do not appear to belong to the field of educational technology. However, all of them are trends that blur dichotomies that block the connection between technology, body and space. London, England, 2nd June 1970, Cartoonist and zany inventor Rowland Emett demonstrate his latest invention the 'lunascycle'
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between the virtual and the real – and an unmediated understanding of the physical sides of what is learned – for example, a different understanding of spatial engineering. If the maker culture were a religion, then its religious ceremonies would be the hackathons – intensive development marathons operating at a fast pace, on the basis of teams working together toward completion of a shared task.
Samsung, and others. It appears that we are only a few years away from the point where VR glasses will be an inexpensive, accessible product, which will provide a variety of human techniques for communication, information and leisure. VR platforms allow us to overcome limitations of space, and to put ourselves in places that we would have no opportunity to reach, either because of their physical or historical distance This activity develops tools for working in a group, from us, or because they are not accessible to human as well as the opportunity to empower and offer beings. These platforms allow us to deceive our expression to participants with a broad spectrum senses in such a way that we can, in a very concrete of skills and abilities. An instructive example of an industry that has developed based on the fundamental way, move between galaxies, travel through the assumptions of the Maker culture is the drone industry, bloodstream, or walk through Louis XVI’s palace. which has “taken off” in recent years. This industry owes a great deal to a community of amateurs who, The Internet of Things programming in open code, provide the means to If the Maker culture makes space available to us control and operate drones from the ground, while through physical contact, and VR platforms make in parallel creating and improving the physical space available to us by means of virtual illusion, the components for these drones. The community of drone Internet of Things offers us that which is in the interval enthusiasts is, in effect, duplicating the model known between the physical and the virtual. to us from the open code programming tradition, into a world with physical outputs. The educational context The term “Internet of Things” is, in effect, a metaphor of this development falls naturally into place within that describes an almost evolutionary development it. Chris Anderson, who to a large extent, has been in the realm of communications. This evolution may identified with drones over the past decade, began be described in three stages. In the first, there was his involvement in the field when he was looking for a interaction between man and computer. Man was suitably challenging activity for his children. assisted by the computer, programmed in advance by other people to fulfil tasks and solve various problems. In the second, with the penetration of Virtual reality the internet, networks were created that connected Apparently, the field of Virtual Reality contradicts people by means of a connected computers. The everything offered by the Maker culture. If the latter first generation of the IoT is the generation in which requires us to interface with the physical world, VR computers communicate with one another without technologies seek to eliminate this connection, while people participating in this communication. If this offering us a strong enough illusion that masks the mythic formulation sounds abstract, we may make it lack of connection with the real world. However, it clearer by referring to some expressions that already would be more accurate to say that the field of VR exist around us. For example, smart houses, in which also expands our contact with space, only from a very the thermostat can tell the air conditioner to turn itself different angle. VR and the technologies connected on, are an example of this communication between with it have been around for about three decades, but computers with does not pass through specific human until recently they have been so heavy and clumsy that mediation. This vision is still in its inception, and it they could not be implemented outside professional has already become an important element in turning research laboratories. A sequence of events has all of space into a technologically sensitive place. A led to them becoming applicable, accessible, more place which has a kind of ability to sense, to express compact, and, most importantly, of interest to the itself and to interact. In the world of the IoT, even the software giants who are leading the industry. What supposedly inanimate objects around us, become got the ball rolling may have been a crowdfunding animated. In such a world, the concept of research project led by a startup that offered goggles with a based learning takes on a totally new meaning very concrete illusionary experience - Oculus Rift, students, parents and teachers can obtain information bought by Facebook in 2014 for the immense sum of in real time, not only about school work, but also about 2 billion dollars. This acquisition marked the beginning levels of students’ physical activity, blood pressure, or of an “arms race” joined by Microsoft, Google, Intel, a host of other data (which may or may not interest us).
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Three men sit on couch wearing virtual reality goggles. Glastonbury 1993
In this world, technology will function as a tool that offers the optimal conditions for learning that Rousseau formulated – it will be a world in which the body will be active, in which we will experience space with an intensity that we have never before known, and in which we will have the conditions and opportunities for discourse with others. The learning environment in a world such as this will be the whole world, with the technology being transparent and invisible.
If we attempt to imagine a world in which these technologies are more mature, it will be a world in which there is no single “workstation” or anchor point for technology, no single object, large or small, into which everything flows. The whole environment will be full of sensors, expressive instruments, and the means to allow us to move in time and space comfortably. In this world there will be sufficient room for the body and for physicality, for creativity and activity. We will be able to turn our virtual creations into 3D products, the programming activity will be integrated with the research, design and production of physical objects.
Only a few years after the first Morse signals were transmitted, Henry David Thoreau noted that the fact that a person from Maine could communicate with someone from Texas did not yet mean that there would be something important for them to say to one another. This statement may be understood as a sarcastic comment that accentuates the cultural emptiness that technological capabilities bring to the fore. Neil Postman interpreted this statement differently. According to Postman, the medium has a great influence on the content and values of what we say. Entry into a new communications medium is not only the use of a new instrument to transmit all that had been transmitted previously; it is a profound change in the content and functionality of what is worth communicating. Those who have experienced the introduction and adoption of mobile phones, of instant messaging and of social networks will easily identify with Postman’s words. It is no less true when we come to decode the learning framework following the “spatial turning point.” Each of the trends that we described embodies within it a world of values whose implications are hard to discern without experiencing it. The world of makers offers a new hierarchy of trades, and repositions trades that are currently labeled as low-tech; this world also offers a new perspective on the concepts of purpose and need – much of what is being done in the makers movement is not intended to solve problems or to fulfill a particular purpose. The world of virtual reality once again raises questions of manipulation and illusion, and regarding the internet of things, one may ask – paraphrasing the words of Henry David Thoreau – if the fact that the refrigerator can converse with the washing machine means that they will have what to say to one another. At the Shaping the Future lll conference, we attempted to touch on some of the issues raised by the world that comes after the “spatial turning point” – the world beyond the computer screen.
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
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/2015
with
Dale Dougherty
Bringing the Maker Mindset to transform education
D. Dougherty with his Hackathon partners Y.Warshavsky, O.Stettiner, R.Knoll.
“Father” of the Maker Movement. Founder of Maker Media, Media Magazine and Maker’s Fair
How do you see the Maker Movement as part of education?
>> There are key concepts here. One is the creation of maker spaces – fab labs, kind of like libraries have been to schools, a place where you have machines, you have computers, learning new skills but also being able to apply them creatively, do work that is of interest to you – hands-on learning.
Schools should be more about a set of contexts for learning and the experiences one has in those contexts instead of content that we try to deliver to students. I want students to feel more like they are playing and enjoying something. If you have ever been around machinery you know there is risk involved, there is danger potentially, so it is also about being responsible for taking those risks. Another part is having their own ideas. You often learn from someone else and you imitate what they do but I hope it also begins to stimulate new ideas: “This is what I would like to do,” “This is what interests me.” I think we can get a more engaged student, motivated students who begin to figure things out for themselves. If there is one thing that schools should accomplish is creating good learners. Not what they learn but the ability to learn, to be self-directed learners. So they are ready when they get out in the world.
Technology is changing in the world very rapidly. The things that I went to college for – computers weren’t in college pretty much, so I had to learn those later, on my own. This happened a lot in that generation – we figured things out. For example, we didn’t take a class in cell phones. So a lot of what I’m interested in, you might call it informal learning, things that occur outside but we have the right motivation to learn them. You have the motivation to learn about your cell phone because it’s powerful and does things for you, and I think that getting that to other areas as well is important. The Maker Movement is gaining voice within the educational system, how do you see that?
>> I think the Maker Movement is changing education in a somewhat quite subversive way. First of all, it’s coming up from the bottom, not coming down from governments or bureaucrats. It is teachers, students, and parents saying, “We want our students to be engaged. We want them to be creative. We want them to learn new ways of doing things.” Instead of having only pencil and paper to work with, we have 3D printers and laser cutters and all kinds of technology like band saws,
that engage students. I think that the Maker Movement’s long-term impact is on transforming education from a classroom passive experience to standing on your feet, moving around, touching things, interacting with things, interacting with people, building things, creating things, sharing that with other people. To be a maker is to create projects and to share them with other people. They make connections because of that sharing, so it is inherently like the real world, it’s about doing things that you touch and interact with and part of that is with people. My hope is that we can turn education from this passive experience of sitting in chairs and listening to someone talking to being much more forward and engaging, driven by students towards goals that they and their teachers work on. To have a sense of progression that you are developing capabilities, that you are learning to do new things, and it is that confidence – what we call the “maker mindset” – that is ultimately even more important than what you are making.
bit.ly/Daled
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new generation true makers A
of
Hacking, Gaming and Entrepreneurship three powerful activities youngsters are turning to in order to actively engage in new market opportunities. Cecilia Waismann
Looking at the spectrum of learning spaces used by the youth today, a varied, complex, apparently endless and scarily unknown picture stands in front of us. The education system’s capacity to respond to their needs became scarce - kids are looking beyond the formal education screen offers and are actively and collaboratively seeking, finding and creating new learning spaces to meet their “real-time” needs. No delays, no waiting, no barriers – just be active and you will find an answer to any doubt within this immense and infinite digital space. It is interesting that this is not a “trivial” task, but youngsters are dedicating time and effort in developing expertise to make efficient and innovative use of digital information and possibilities. They are developing new spaces to prepare themselves for this new world, reshaping our culture and educational standards. “Hacking”, for example, once upon a time, an activity with negative connotations, is being turned into a highly valued skill, not only for developing witty and innovative programmers, but moreover, as an essential activity for any product development.
Hacking became almost like the immune system test – crucial to detect the weaknesses and develop the strengths of any product.
“Gaming”, another example, is the current generation’s main activity across devices, time and place. Undeniably, today gaming is a significant space for kids to develop digitalrelated skills, as well as internet culture, and, surprisingly enough, social interactions not only for pleasure but also as a valuable resource for training and information. “Entrepreneurship” is yet another example of a fast-growing culture, rooted in business but flowering at the heart of youth who wish to be relevant, independent, creative and autonomous. The startup boom has provided a professional alternative to a generation needing flexible learning systems that are adapted to the fast and constantly moving environment they inhabit. Moreover, it enables them to be active contributors to and not merely recipients of the dominant (mostly obsolete) status quo.
/2015
Virtual/Augmented Reality provides new exciting opportunities for designing experience, and tailoring the experience according to the user, context and goals.
(extracts from Prof. Miriam Reiner’s talk) Traditionally, Virtual/ Augmented Reality has been aiming at optimal resemblance to the physical reality, looking for technologies that enhance visual, haptic and auditory display, and adding new sensory channels such as Prof. Miriam Reiner smell and temperature. Yet, the potential of Virtual Reality goes beyond mirroring reality – sensory cues activate brain mechanisms to create the sense of ‘being there’, and the degree of immersiveness we feel in a virtual world. By orchestrating the sensory stimuli in VR/AR we turn the synthetic world into a powerful catalyst for activating brain areas that are correlated with learning and enhanced cognition. We know now how to fabricate core experiential interactions that lead to enhanced cognitive functions, such as faster brain processing time, improved accuracy, and enhanced memory consolidation. We (at the VR & NeuroCognition Lab, Israel Institute of Technology) tested combinations of sensory affordances, which provided a new ecology that ‘talked’ to the brain mechanisms.
R “The level of the experience in V/A ology. is not determined only by the techn It is the brain that determines our experience.” Our results showed EEG-based mechanisms for measuring mental load during learning, conditions for activation of mechanisms related to mental rotation and spatial reasoning, the mirror neuron system for learning through mimicking, and human-human enhanced interactions via VR/AR environments.
Human-human interaction through VR
“Why when you learn, when you teach, is it important to interact face-to-face? The reason is because only 10% of the information is conveyed through words (there are people who say that it’s even less, 3%). So, how is everything else perceived? Some of the cues are perceived without awareness on our part and some are under the threshold of perception (what we call subliminal). Therefore, it is very hard to create this human-to-human interaction with an avatar or robot … but we can create a VR image of the real teacher (overcoming distances when is needed).” “I think VR can help us understand learning … and have the potential to enhance learning. There are obvious applications (for education), for example, you can navigate inside an electric magnetic field; you can look at interactive molecules and be part of them; you can interact with people who lived in Jerusalem 2000 years ago; you can discuss science with Einstein.”
VR BeAnotherLab project participating at the Hackathon
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MEMORY
EnhANCING
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VR
In lab conditions, you can orchestrate stimuli in order to activate the relevant brain mechanisms, and generate a situated environment for powerful emotional multi-sensory learning. "During your sleep, an interesting process of memory consolidation occurs. My question in this study was: Will I be able to create memory consolidation without sleep?... we can create a small app where people will be able to play a game and consolidate memory…memory is a major issue in learning". "We also know how to look at the errors. Do you know the feeling when you are talking and while you speak, you know you should not have said something, and you'd like to stop and not to say it, but it is too late? There is a distinct error potential (brain potential) that I can measure which happens even before you actually perform that mistake, that error. We can use that in education as well". “The advantage of VR is not only to create worlds that do not exist, it is much beyond. It is the first time that we have a way to orchestrate stimuli in order to enhance learning.” bit.ly/Miriamr
/2015
with
Walter Bender
Teachers need to expose students to powerful ideas Founder of Sugar Labs, One Laptop per Child, ex-Director of MIT Media Lab
How do you see the future of learning?
>> A natural evolution of the way we think about school and schooling, in fact, is actually a throwback to the olden days, ancient ways where the teacher is not pouring information into the students’ ears but the teacher is there to mentor and to expose students to powerful ideas that they might not stumble across on their own. Calculus, to my knowledge, has only been invented twice in the history of humankind – by Leibniz and Newton. They invented it, each of them, and nobody else has ever invented it that I know of. I don’t expect all these kids, however bright they are, to be reinventing calculus. Calculus is a powerful idea. We need to expose the kids to these powerful ideas. But that doesn’t mean that the way we expose it is by pouring differential equations into their ears. Rather, we can engage them so they begin to work with those principles that led to Newton and Leibniz to invent calculus. Therefore, the teachers have a very important role; but it is no longer a role of instruction, it’s a role to foster construction by the students and enhance that construction by introducing powerful ideas.
W. Bender working with his Hackathon partners A.Hershkovitz, R.Rauchwerger, S.Sagi
They’ve got to be very attuned to what is going on. They do not necessarily have to have deep knowledge in computation, deep knowledge in this or that, but they do have to have a sense of what are the powerful ideas that are important to expose. How will technology help teachers do that?
>> In the mid 1970s Alan Kay coined
the phrase “personal computer,” but he also said that computation is going to be good for five things: the first is “getting and holding our attention.” Computation, computing technology, is like candy to these kids. It’s really good at getting and holding their attention – that in itself
W.Bender, organizing a Turtle Workshop for kids with I.Ben Yaakov and R.Magen
I’d like to quip that the only time collaboration is called cheating is when you are at school, and in the rest of life it’s called being smart and getting the job done. That is something that technology is going to change. I guess that though now schools tell kids to turn their cellular phones off during class, that will change and they will realize that kids can use these devices to collaborate. They will use them to mess around too because they are kids, but they will also use them to be smart and get the job done. I think that the fundamental thing that technology brings to the table is this communication aspect, this expressive aspect. At the same time there is something special about computation.… Computation gives us a place to take risks – we can take big risks without worrying about breaking anything or hurting anyone. We can make things, we can break things, and all we have to do is to reboot the machine and we are back to where we were. So the idea that we can take big intellectual risks within a context of these new tools, I think is really important.
is important. The next few things are more mundane: word-processing, simulation, database. The fifth thing on his list – which is fundamental and grossly undervalued in today’s educational world – is interpersonal communication. bit.ly/Walterb
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There are lots of reasons why teaching coding to kids is crucially important today, but after this workshop I realized how it can make them better people, or, at least, better learners. Ilan Ben Yaakov
During the third day of the “Shaping the Future lll” conference, I had the privilege of moderating a Turtle Lab coding workshop for 5th-grade students from a local school, led by Walter Bender. These are some important things I learned: The only rule – “There’s only one rule,” Walter said at the beginning. “If you make
something cool – you must share it with everyone.” When you learn how to code you
make amazing things each second, but don’t forget who inspired you to make them and keep inspiring others. With creativity comes responsibility – One hour into the workshop, Walter showed the students how to make the drawing turtle follow the mouse movement. “You just created your own Photoshop! Now you’re responsible for making it cooler every moment.” Being creative and productive
is not just showing off your creation. It’s a commitment. Yes you can – In the middle of the workshop, Walter asked the students to fill two whiteboards: one with things they already know, and the other with things they want to learn. While most of the students focused on improving the basic skills they’d just acquired,
Walter encouraged them to think big and write down even “impossible” things on the board, because coding enables you to do anything you can dream of. Hard fun – For most of the kids, it was the very first time they were writing code, and while most of them enjoyed the exploration of this new world, some of them were struggling, asking us for help every moment, and always getting the same answer: “Coding is fun, but it’s hard fun.” It should be easy enough to engage you, but hard enough to challenge you.
So what did we have? Kids learning, working hard, believing in themselves, taking responsibility and sharing – everything we want education to be.
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
Creating the ideal space for innovation to occur is a challenge (as well as a hopeful wish) for most industries today. Where? How? Who? There is no shortage of “guidelines” and “experts” on the subject, but the spark that triggers the fire of innovation is not often found.
Allowing a to
Hackathon Provide e k i l d l i h C to Questions Cecilia Waismann
A daring experience was attempted on June 1-2, and the results blew the minds of all the participants – a Hackathon that allowed for megalomanic solutions to basic educational questions. The recipe, created by the vision of Avi Warshavsky, included very interesting ingredients.
The place chosen was an oasis at the heart of the Negev Desert (called Yeruham). The participants were a diverse group of people (120 educators, artists, programmers, students, scholars, politicians, philosophers, craftsmen…) from different countries, backgrounds and generations, meeting for the first time. The technological resources
included cutting-edge products like drones, VR goggles, brain sensors, 3D printers as well as low tech as Lego blocks or wood saws.
The task was to collaborate in order to create amazing EdTech products. The benchmarks were wisely defined by the choice of the judges – a panel of kids. The participants’ creativity and beliefs were given a green light, while their expertise was challenged by the power of the Hackathon method – 36 intensive hours of teamwork. During the process, the awkwardness of the scary unknown (where a mistake hurts, especially one’s pride) was slowly transformed into strength to dare towards the exciting unknown (where trying allows one to create).
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Walking around, one could enjoy the dynamic and optimistic atmosphere of voices articulating their visions, of hands drawing, building, of laughs, and of excited people trying out things: “People are very focused on what they are doing and yet there is a lightness about the possibilities” (Peggy Weil, interactive designer); “…you are kicking the tires, you have this critical dialogue with the other people, and then you have this opportunity for reflection” (Walter Bender, programmer); “…very different backgrounds, experiences and points of views, and becomes very interesting when you merge these people” (Philippe Bertrand, artist). After a very intensive one and a half days, a panel of young students commented and chose their favorite project from: VR goggles to help students “walk in someone else’s shoes” and build empathy; AR glasses providing an experiential opportunity for students to interact with atoms and easily understand science; digital storytelling based on Google Street View to enable immersive journalism; makers’ platform specially designed for students; learning how to code using drones; collaborative learning of physics through a VR rollercoaster experience and biofeedback response; creating a community of students-coders who collect data through sensors and make sense of it; robot-car race to enable students to learn physical laws; building a flexible and relevant learning space; among others.
The most exciting result was the optimism generated that will hopefully turn into innovative EdTech practices.
bit.ly/http://bit.ly/Mindhack2015
/Special Edition/2015
The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to drastically change the way we live. In multiple markets – security, industrial, health, entertainment, communication – the fairly new-found ability of devices to communicate between themselves, to collect data via a single sensor or an array of sensors, and to crunch the enormous amount of data derived from these busy collecting and communicating bees – is considered by many to be the next industrial (and personal) revolution.
I oT
G.Vardi at the Hackathon, connecting a neuro-headband to a smartphone
Gilad Nass
Education is mostly regarded as a “content market,” in which learners go through various processes, resulting in their exposure to content which, it is anticipated, they will remember and use in the future.
Prof. N.Intrator with Hackathon partner O. Shapir, developing an educational app that detects attention response using a headband that measures brain function.
Therefore, you would assume that the concept of data collecting by sensors and machines “talking” amongst themselves would not find a suitable home is such an environment. There are, of course, the logistics involved in running an education facility, which can benefit from the IoT enhancements – from energy efficiency to better security – but that’s because these facilities are similar, in a way, to factories or public offices, so they can benefit from the same technology advancements. We are less excited by IoT being used so that school staff and students can avoid having to rely on badges to access specific areas, because their smartphone or a wearable device can be used to authenticate them and give them clearance to enter.
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What we want is n, an education-centered IoT innovatio teach and learn. which could really disrupt the way we Well, we’re not there yet, way. but the groundwork is already under We are not thrilled by the use of sensors in a classroom to automatically adjust the heating system instead of this being done manually by the teacher or students. These are nice, but they are used in the same way in other non-education environments. So, what can thrill us? First, IoT as a concept is being introduced to students as part of the “maker movement,” so kids using Arduino and Raspberry Pi to build their own electronic and computational devices can tailor them to do things in the IoT realm – such as collecting data which can then be integrated within school projects and analyzed as part of their software-based projects.
Prof. Rafaeli moderating a panel with leaders of Microsoft, Cisco, Intel and META who presented their latest developments for learning.
But let’s think about the learning process as a holistic process. A student’s learning ability is influenced by many factors, which, until now, we had almost no way of accurately measuring. We assume that lack of proper sleep harms the student, but can we test this in a cheaper way than sending him to a sleep lab or in a more accurate way than to ask him how many hours he slept and whether his sleep was peaceful or disturbed?
Well, with IoT we can do that – wearable devices such as Fitbit, Nike+ FuelBand, Jawbone UP, Misfit and more, are used today mostly by adults, and in most cases as a lifestyle/fitness tool. They count steps, measure exactly how many hours you sleep, and in general provide a lot of data points that help build the “quantified self” – the numbers which represent the way we are living our lives . Now imagine this: using these devices, and “hard numbers” gained by test scores, and “soft numbers” gained by the teachers’ assessments, we could find patterns that enable us to pinpoint problems, and maybe even predict them. For example, using data from the wearable device, along with said hard and soft numbers, we might notice that Jenny’s studies have been deteriorating in the last 2 months, and this can be attributed with high probability to the fact that she has had 15% less sleep in that period than in the time when there were no problems with her studies. We might figure out that Dan is probably about to have problems with his exams, as we know that in the last 3 times when he had such problems, the wearable device also showed a drop of 40% percent in his daily movement, which may indicate that the same situation is occurring again and should be examined.
Dr. G.Hoffman presenting his research on human-robot interaction.
Of course, as with any data-driven solution, questions of privacy and security will have to be dealt with, but the potential for the enhancement of the learning process via the use of IoT is there, and we should embrace it.
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
We all know that the “industrial model” of education, which characterized 20th-century education, is obsolete, is not relevant to our kids’ future, and has almost nothing in common with the way they live, interact, communicate, play and learn outside school. So, why are most of the education systems still adhering to it? There are two possible reasons. First, they probably don’t know anything else and second, if they aspire to something innovative, it cannot be implemented in the bureaucratic system in which they operate.
n a g n i Creat
Guy Levi
During “Shaping the Future lll” international conference, experts such as educators, policymakers and other stakeholders were brought together to explore the necessary conditions for creating an educational innovation zone. The case study under consideration was the establishment of New York City Department of Education (DoE) Innovation Zone (iZone), represented by Steven Hodas, an educational entrepreneur and former Executive Director of the NYC iZone. Steven shared with the audience some of the major decisions that characterized the iZone creation process and were crucial to its success.
“We brought two principles that guided our work, principles that came from outside education and that, as far as I know, had never before been consciously applied to the work of schools: user–centered design, and lean startup methodology.” Steven Hodas
Steven Hodas lecturing (right) and participating on a panel with F. Valenzuela, O. Brechard and D.Obodovski
First, the leaders of NYC DoE decided, in 2010, to establish the iZone outside the bureaucratic system to enable it to employ innovative methodologies, such as “Lean Startup,” bringing entrepreneurs with ideas and prototypes to collaborate with school teachers and students as part of the product-life cycle, something which is alien to the bureaucratic educational system.
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“In the iZone we had permission to try new things and we used that permission to put a Trojan horse inside a Trojan horse inside a Trojan horse, bringing in UCD and Lean Startup as a way to build into the system empathy and respect, which are inseparably connected to usefulness, meaning,and pleasure.” Steven Hodas
Second, the iZone team encouraged school leaders to replace the “industrial model” by structuring schools around the needs, interests and motivations of the students, which cannot develop within the scope of the traditional curriculum and the current organizational structure of schools. Third, to provide schools with the resources needed to make the change without intervening or controlling, but rather letting them fail and encouraging them to iterate. This is not the language of the bureaucratic system; it’s a new language which can flourish and prosper in an open and free environment.
“The success enabled us to bring this approach to other projects with other audiences. We taught teachers, principals, and students in dozens of schools to use UCD and Lean Startup methods. They then used those principles to define the challenges they wanted to tackle for their own communities and come up with very untraditional, unofficial solutions.” Steven Hodas
Shai-Lee Spigelman, VP Planning & External Relations at Digital Israel, described the ambitious project of the Israeli government which aims to drive economic growth, reduce social and economic gaps, enhance economic efficiency and improve government services. The driver for these changes is innovation. However, the iZone experience tells us that, at least in the education system, it will not materialize if conveyed via the bureaucratic channels of the system. Unfortunately the wagon is currently stuck in the mud and only if a model like the NYC iZone is implemented we will be able to witness the first signs of success. Fernando Valenzuela, President of Cengage Learning Latin America, and Olivier Bréchard, Cofounder and Associate Director of the Institute of Action Research for Education (IRAE), agreed that pedagogy must be above technology, meaning that new technology can promote innovative pedagogy…and we saw several examples in the Hackathon and the Mindblitz sessions during the “Shaping the Future III” week.
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015 bit.ly/Stevenh
with
Robert Gehorsam
Constructing one’s own learning experience
R.Gershon at CET with W.Bender and S.Hodas
Director of the Institute of Play, Expert on Digital Media and Interactive entertainment
What do you think about this Hackathon?
>> “I think Hackathons are really an important way to explore a number of technologies and combinations of technologies, partly because all is moving so quickly that if you just did it in the sort of standard, laboratory-like settings, nothing would change very quickly.
How do you see the new technologies influencing the future classroom?
>> In education, the way that technologies get adopted is very complex, particularly around schools. I think it is hard to say that any one will be dominant. I think what is most interesting is the set of technologies that are now becoming available that allow students, and also teachers, to actually construct their own learning experiences.
What is interesting is that lots of different technologies are brought together, not just one or two, and are combined in all kinds of different ways. Just as the types of people who participate come from different disciplines and are forced to interact and collaborate with each other – so new ideas get generated. This is a great Hackathon. It is bringing together people not just from different disciplines but from different countries, different perspectives on what should happen, and forcing us to all really respect and listen to each other’s views and ideas and come up with something in a short period of time that it is compelling.
Whether it’s Minecraft, Lego worlds, or all the maker technology that is happening,
Personally, I feel that AR might have more rapid adoption and more uses in education than just VR because of the way that it interacts with the world around kids and applies information from all sorts of sources into the moment that they see. Among the things that change very quickly are the relative roles of teachers and students. The traditional model, that is certainly not everywhere but is still dominant, is that the teacher imparts knowledge to kids through either textbooks or lectures. One of the things that these (new) technologies have allowed to happen is that kids can take control of their own learning, and the role of the teacher starts to shift. In some of the work we have done around maker technology, we ended up having kids work on projects for 6 or 8 weeks and then they taught the teachers about the technology and how they used it, and that is very gratifying for both the kids and the teachers themselves.
I think that it is one important strand that will continue; whether it is on a mobile, on laptops – that does not matter – it is the genre that is important. The second piece that is very intriguing, which has really emerged in the last year or so, is the combined field of VR and AR. bit.ly/Robertg
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For the first time in history, our educational systems have been challenged to prepare youth for a global future, where perhaps (extracts from Robert Gehorsan’s talk) the only certainty is that we don’t know what that future holds. simply making better games with Games are exciting because they engageBut and Education must therefore focus better learning objectives will not by itself empower students, provide personalized instruction, deliver the transformation we all seek. The on developing in youth powerful opportunity withhave games is actually greater deliver and embedded and modes continuous of engagement that foster assessment and more profound than that. With many of a desire for lifelong learning. the potential to teach both traditional academic skills these same principles learned from game design, we need to reshape the contexts and higher-order In thisthe regard, there are vitalcompetencies lessons to learn generally known of learning – including the institutions of from the emergenceskills. of digital games as as 21st-century education and the way teachers teach –
a global grammar of youth. The way that in order to fully prepare our kids to thrive young people interact with games and with in an unknown future. each other through games represent some of Over the past seven years, the Institute of https://www.youtube.com/ the most powerful and relevant phenomena Play (http://www.instituteofplay.org/) has to consider as we transform the way we watch?v=wXcdR7TqGgM&feature=youtu.be explored and experimented with educate students. redesigning those contexts. engage and y the e aus bec g itin exc are es Gam alized instruction, empower students, provide person ed assessment and have deliver continuous and embedd ditional academic skills the potential to teach both tra ies generally known and the higher-order competenc
as 21st-century skills.
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
“What technology we think is good for learning depends on what we think learning looks like”, declared J. Roschelle - a critical issue raised at the panel on the nature of education once we remove its identification elements such as teachers lecturing to a class, memorization of content, or examinations.
The
world screen e iv t c e p s r e p l a n io t educa the
Renee Hobbs, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Rhode Island, along with her colleague Julie Coiro, has developed a course in digital literacy for teachers from elementary school through college level, librarians and media specialists. She warned of simply throwing technological aids into the classroom, accompanied by a belief that the students already know how to use them: “The myth of the digital native harms students and teachers alike.
Ido Keinan
Roschelle, co-director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, in whose laboratories over 150 cyberlearning projects are operating, also warned against blind reliance on technology: “I am afraid that teachers will turn computer lessons into typing sessions, or making lessons into product production lessons…. We have to re-imagine education,” he said, and proposed that use be made of the technological capability to provide multiple representations of the material under study. He demonstrated this through the study of mathematical equations. An equation may be described narratively, algebraically, graphically or in tabular form. Use of all four descriptions helps students understand the equation better.
Panelists: Prof. R.Hobbs, Dr. J.Roschelle, Prof. W.Bender
Students come to the classroom with a sense of superiority, and teachers come to the classroom thinking that they don’t need to do a thing. It removes the responsibility from educators. There are teachers who have a Smart Board in their classrooms, and they have never turned it on.”
“Teachers and students can be the ones to shape the world, rather than accepting the world as it is shaped for them,” said Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs, which develops educational software used by more than three million children in more than forty countries, co-founder of the One Laptop per Child project, and formerly director of the MIT Media Laboratory. Bender sides with the use of block-based programming languages, because “they have a ‘low floor.’ That’s part of their attractiveness to beginning programmers. But they also have a low ceiling, and so we need to allow children to complete their block learning, and to move on.
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The motivation for learning programming – autonomy, the opportunity to develop expertise in something, and the sense of having a goal together –creates a strong motive to be involved in constructing knowledge.” What is the role of the teacher, when he is no longer the all-knowing, sole educational authority? “Access to digital media from anywhere makes the model of standing up and teaching outdated. There is an art to creating a digital literacy learning environment,” said Hobbs. However, she admits, “What is digital literacy? We don’t even have agreement over how to define it.” She called for an “expansion of the concept of literacy,” so as to include multitasking (being able to carry out multiple tasks concurrently), transmediation (translating work between different media), representation, curation, and more. In her view, the functions of the new teacher are “to shape the learning environments, identify the needs of the students, support the students’ growth in unexpected ways, and assessing the quality of the learning experience One of the tragedies in the American education system is that we have dispensed with responsibility in favor of external, commercial, knowledge-testing systems. I like it when my students exceed my expectations.” “Technology opens the eyes of teachers, and they can truly teach. Giving a speech is not the same as teaching,” says Roschelle. “In the past, the teacher would come into the classroom and ask: ‘Where did you have problems with yesterday’s homework?’ Today he can say, ‘I see that everyone had different answers in Question 4, let’s see what happened there,’ because he can see, in real time, what the students are answering. It is to move from what you once thought was learning, to really learning.” Bender recounts: “I have a friend who is a good teacher and instructor. A student came into the class with a gourd, and asked ‘What’s this?’ She threw out her lesson plan, and the students learned what ‘this’ was. The next day they learned how to grow it themselves, and the day after that, whether it would be worth growing. On the fourth day, they prepared presentations explaining whether it was worth growing it, and on the fifth day, they prepared a plan for growing gourds in their own communities.”
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
: Girls llSecTtivEe M c o n c e rn A
co
Seeing the number of people who attended the workshop (at Shaping the Future III), was not only validating, but confirmed my belief that girls and STEM isn’t a niche issue but a collective concern. Orna Lavie The workshop attendees represented a crosssection of the education ecosystem, including the Ministry of Education, several NGOs, academia and industry, organizations that represent the different stakeholders in the issue of girls and STEM. Why are so many interested in and worried about the situation? I believe there are several reasons. First, governments invest a lot of money in this sphere, since, not utilizing women’s economic potential could have a negative impact on a nation’s economic development. Second, many of the NGOs are concerned about issues of equality. It seems that women do not have the same opportunities to choose occupations as men, since so few of them choose STEM-related jobs. Moreover, the salary difference between genders in STEM is lower than in non-STEM occupations, so in order to increase women’s financial independence more women should turn to these professions. Finally, the commercial companies have dual concern: (1) In R&D projects, one needs the diversity of people in the team to better analyze and solve problems. Excluding women from these teams is excluding the representation of 50% of society; (2) There is a huge and growing shortage of engineers and computer scientists; therefore, the aim to increase the number of students in these subjects would gain significantly from having more women.
One of the more interesting points of view raised in the discussion was the tension between the desire to increase the participation of women in STEM subjects and occupations, and the risk to perpetuate a “victim” mentality. Our research (Fast Forward) is seeking ways to overcome this dilemma by looking into the practices of teachers who are successful with female students and manage to maintain balanced classes over several years. Our findings show that there are common characteristics to these otherwise very different teachers, who in fact do not have a specific gender agenda. These teachers’ “strategy” stands on two legs. One is the relationship they build with their students, as individuals and as a group, and the one they create between the students and the subject matter. The other leg is the clearly defined setting (order and organization, content requirements, behavioral requirements). It is important to note that this definition relates to boundaries and rules and it still leaves room for creativity and imagination, “a well-defined mess,” as mentioned by Prof. Renne Hobbs.
The findings have made us all very optimistic towards overcoming the gender gap in STEM subjects - even without big budget or major changes, teachers can make a difference simply by being more aware of their actions and influence.
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TEACHERS as MAKERS:
CONTENT CREATION as a PEDAGOGY of LEARNING Akin Ajayi
“Digital” is the key prefix of the moment. We should all aspire to become digital citizens, one understands; children born into a world of touchscreen tablets and “always on” connectivity are growing up as digital Prof. Renee Hobbs natives. If follows that this catchphrase has found a place for itself in pedagogy: digital literacy, we are told, must be a crucial component of teaching practice in the 21st Century. But, as the phrase gradually insinuates itself into our educational language, fundamental questions arise. Is digital literacy really the panacea for the educational challenges of the moment, or an utopian ideal with its scope and boundaries still contested? Do administrators, parents and students all take the same meaning from the phrase, “digital literacy”? And, perhaps most importantly, what is the role of the teacher in this brave new (digital) world? “Teachers as Makers: Content Creation as a Pedagogy of Learning”, a presentation by Professor Renee Hobbs at Shaping The Future III, addressed these questions from a functional perspective: considering not so much what digital literacy is, but rather what digital literacy can do. Hobbs is a leading authority on the subject of digital and media literacy education, and a strong champion of the role of digital media as a tool to encourage critical thinking, and for connecting classroom and the wider world. Her basic contention was the need to acknowledge that digital literacy is not the re-invention of literacy, but rather the means by which pedagogic practice can be invigorated. Digital literacy, she contends, emerges from and is mediated by the technology that helps to expand the concept of literacy in the classroom – tools that facilitate easy access to educational materials, support opportunities for collaborative working, encourage the introduction of multiple perspectives to a single topic. What digital literacy brings to the classroom is the potential for new ways of learning, new ways of developing skills and abilities. Digital literacy expands the meaning of literacy; but it doesn’t, by itself, create literacy.
Part of the fallout from the misconception of digital literacy is an almost axiomatic belief in the divide between so-called digital natives, children who have grown up in a technologyunderpinned world, and their teachers – who haven’t. This is unhelpful, Hobbs argues, not least because it minimizes the role of teachers in the pedagogic process. Ubiquitous access to online media, she agrees, does make the old “stand and deliver” model of teaching obsolete. But this creates an opportunity, she argues, to re-imagine the learning environment.
The key lies in teachers seeing themselves as makers, using the range of digital media tools – anything from cloud-based collaborative tools to content-discovery interfaces – to shape an educational learning space that expands beyond the teacher-student classroom duopoly. Teachers are an integral part of the brave new digital world, Hobbs believes. What needs to be remembered is that digital tools help teachers to create, rather than dictate. The full slideshow of Hobb’s presentation is available at http:// www.slideshare.net/reneehobbs/teachers-as-makers-contentcreation-as-a-pedagogy-of-learning
bit.ly/Reneeho
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
with
Jeremy Roschelle
A learning space that goes beyond… and meets the learner Director of Center for Tech in Learning - SRI, Researcher of Learning Tech Sciences
How can the new technologies affect the nature of education in the years to come?
>> We have so much more
customizable spaces. Learners are moving within these spaces. Learners have so many resources available to them.
People had the idea, when mobile learning first started, that learners are going to learn anyplace, anywhere. But that was the wrong idea. Learning is not independent of place; you cannot learn the same thing any place – we have so many different spaces – so where is our learning?
How do we take advantage of that context? So to me this is the way we can most powerfully support every learner to learn to the maximum – learn with the tools and the resources and take advantage of that setting. The future learning space is a very highly designed space that is aware of the person. It is aware of the personality the person brings. It’s an ambient space that may have music or lightning, that customizes itself to how that learner likes to learn. It’s a flexible group space, a place where students come together, where they can teach each other, where their teacher can come. It is very different from the learning spaces we all experienced ourselves as children – very regimented, very the same.
The technologies that I am excited about are context-aware technologies that allow the learner and the context to respond to each other so they can better meet each other and support each other so the learning is better. There are so many possibilities now for how spaces can be made specific to learning, to be very flexible to the needs of the learners and allow learners to move among them. But how do we take advantage of all this context of these specific spaces to help learners do the best learning they can? To me it is a new and very exciting possibility and I am learning about it through all the people I’m collaborating with here (at the Hackathon).
J.Roschelle with his Hackathon partners Y.Kali, A.Warshavsky, H.Gelbendorf, D.Zamir, G.Weil
Now we have the possibility of not only going to one generic place called school to learn, but to take advantage of the unique things in the library, when we go out in nature, when we are in a park, and of the people around us. But we need support.
I think we really have the opportunity to make a space for learners that allows them to learn to their maximum ability.
bit.ly/Jeremyro
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Thickening thespread of education
By now, we’re accustomed to the idea that the Internet enables us to spread education out across large physical distances. But just as spreading Nutella means thinning it, so does spreading education seem to require making the connections less substantial and real. David Weinberger That’s one important reason that virtual reality and augmented reality appliances were so prevalent at Shaping the Future III. (The other reasons are that they’re very cool.) They promise to “thicken” the online experience. As Avi Warshavski pointed out in his presentation, this also helps to explain the recent increase in interest in the Maker movement and the Internet of Things: learners are not just brains in space, as he put it. Miriam Reiner presented some evidence from her research that suggests that multi-sensory VR or AR may enhance the brain’s ability to learn. Even if that turns out not to be the case, it was clear from her presentation, and many others, that both VR and AR provide more and richer information than simply staring at a rectangular surface as opposed to entering a virtual world in the case of VR, or looking at the real world without the extra layer that AR provides. Our communication tech often takes us back a few steps before it then moves us ahead. For example, early word processors were hooked up to terminalstyle displays and dot matrix printers so that what we read was of far worse typographic quality than even what we were getting from electric typewriters of that era. Likewise, our computer displays have been unmoving windows that require us to fix our gaze straight ahead. The new generation of virtual display devices -- the Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens, the SteamVR gaming device, Google Cardboard, etc. - is getting to move us ahead quite dramatically. The many examples at the conference made the case convincingly that VR and AR are going to be important educational tools.
They’re going to be even more important as we are able to inhabit these virtual spaces with other teachers and learners. That’s already happening, as we saw. If two people strap on a Meta AR device, they can pass virtual objects back and forth, and a trainer can draw instructions in space that a HoloLens wearer can see in her augmented world. (There are almost certainly lessons to be learned from Croquet, a project by Alan Kay and David Reed that allowed people to create and share interactive objects in virtual worlds.) We can’t be very far from the time when we can send a drone equipped with a 360-degree camera through an historic city and automatically generate a landscape that can be traversed virtually by anyone with a VR device. We can’t be very far from the time when a walk through an AR landscape can be annotated by local denizens,teachers, historians, sociologists, and snarky teenagers. All of this promises a thickening of digital, networked experience. It will of course be over-hyped and misused. What isn’t? It will also be used astoundingly well. But it’s also important to remember the low tech way we thicken experience: through social relations. After all, education isn’t really like Nutella, especially when it’s spread through human connection. When students are educating one another even through lowbandwidth technologies, their relationships thicken simply by getting to know one another. VR and AR can give us more bits per second, and that counts, but it is not the only type of enrichment. Human connection has always transcended the bandwidth that enables it. There is no reason to think that will change.
bit.ly/dwein
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
With printers’ prices dropping and specialized search engines making it easier to find designs, more and more teachers and students are discovering the value of learning by printing
if not already, soon in a school near you Gilad Nass
lution 3D printers are not just another evo The introduction of 3D printing to the school n in the way of the CNC cutters, but a revolutio environment is considered by some as the equivalent te and experiment, of introducing computing platforms to schools educators and students can crea a few decades ago. Computing was (and still is) currently within the classroom a tool which enabled children to get acquainted home. with a technology which would surely not only but within a few years even in the benefit their current learning methods, but also be implemented in daily use outside the school and in 3D printing enables a wide array of uses for future workplaces. The same can be said about 3D educational purposes, so it would be unjust to limit printing, as it introduces children to a new way of its potential to just a few examples. However, it is applying their learning material, a way which also worth noting a few interesting uses: In archeology allows them to be creative not only in the digital studies, a 3D-printed model of an ancient relic or realm (software) but also in the physical realm. fossil can enhance the students’ grasp of its unique
characteristics. In STEM, 3D printing can both promote a better engagement with the subjects
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being learned, and be used as a platform for testing theories and creating new devices – a process which fosters creativity and even provides new solutions to old problems that students encountered during their studies.
3D design search engines fill the void
It seems the leading country in embracing 3D printing as a learning tool on a national level, as part of a larger foray into the “maker movement,” is the U.K. Since September 2014 the national curriculum has officially included 3D printing. While the new curriculum is not compulsory,
However, reports from the U.K., based on several surveys conducted among teachers and schools, claim the latter are not yet prepared with enough resources to meet the proposed targets. Furthermore, public and government institutions create “content” for 3D printing, thus expanding both the use cases of this technology in learning and experimenting, and lowering costs for the creation of 3D-printed learning tools. One example of such a contributor is the U.S.’s National Institute of Health 3D Print Exchange website, in which hundreds of scientific models (such as bone structures, protein builds, etc.) can be downloaded, edited and printed. NGOs and not-for-profit organizations are also promoting the use of 3D printing in the classroom.
Specialized search engines have been developed which make it possible to find ready-made 3D designs – Yeggi, Yobi3d and 3Dshapes – to name a few. These search engines, aiming to fill a gap into which the likes of Google and Microsoft’s Bing have not yet ventured, aggregate results from some 3D model repositories such as Active3D.net, GradCad, TurboSquid and more. g, design tools becoming With prices of 3D printers droppin existing designs easier to use and the ability to find it expects students from the age of 5 to 14 to mechanism, offered in an “open source” usage be able, during their studies, to create simple into the education system – computer programs (by understanding the use of 3D printing is driving more deeply algorithms), and by the time they reach 14 they should have gained experience with robotics and 3D printing.
ment with or without the “official” endorse cation. of the respective ministries of edu
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
with
Peggy Weil
Sharing real stories through virtual environments Digital Media Artist, Researcher with outstanding innovation VR media projects
Which technologies are becoming dominant to the future of education?
>> I prefer not to highlight one particular technology because it is not really about technology; it’s about a way of looking at the world and using technology, whether it’s VR or AR or wooden blocks, to foster more collaboration, more enthusiasm, and really more critical thinking, and about taking the steps that lead to another step that leads to a branch – thinking about the process.
P.Weil with W.Bender (old-friend from MIT) at the Hackathon
Another important part we should not ignore is teaching media literacy – just because it’s in VR and we respond with incredible empathy doesn’t mean it’s a good situation that is being expressed. These are very manipulative new genres, and that is why we like them, that is why we are interested – we want to use them for empathy but anything being used for empathy can be used for propaganda. We need to teach, explore and acknowledge that it is very important to have media literacy for this new media. I think that it is very important.
Coding is very fundamental; people learning the language of coding but also learning the language of data and to be able to translate the invisible language that we have all around us into these different medium. I am part of a group of something called Immersive Journalism, which really looks at non-fictional storytelling in these AR-VR environments. These are environments that are really set up for gaming or entertainment. There are certainly a lot of games in education, but telling real stories, being able to share your nonfiction real environment, …would be incredibly valuable for empathy, for understanding and for exploring things that are hard to explore.
From what I can tell there are people here who are story tellers, technologists, educators, even people in public policy, academics, people in the community - all coming together to put their minds together and come up with new solutions. It forwards a possibility to collaborate and really come out with imaginative new solutions. I was dropped in the middle of the desert (Yeruham, where the Hackathon took place). There is a huge sense of excitement. There is a seriousness combined with a playfulness that I find really lovely. People are very focused on what they are doing and yet there is a lightness about the possibilities.
P.Weil presenting her group final project at the Hackathon
Nobody seems restricted. There is not a set path. The path is to work together, collaboratively, to come out with something. It is very optimistic.
What is the importance of events like this Hackathon?
>> Hackathons such as this one are very exciting and important for the future of education because it brings people together from various walks of life.
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Thought s on
Shaping the Future III
In June I had the opportunity of participating in Shaping the Future III, which began with an intensive 36-hour Hackathon held in the desert town of Yeruham and concluded with MINDBLITZ, a two-day conference in Tel Aviv – both focused on identifying and supporting upcoming trends in education. Peggy Weil The Hackathon model is interesting: professionals from different disciplines converge in small teams to act on their brainstorms and produce a prototype in a very short time frame. The time (short) and the setting (remote) create intensity and focus, resulting in an experience valuable as much for the camaraderie and collaborative experience as for the final projects. I arrived late and was not initially assigned to a particular group and thus was able to get a broad overview of many of the projects just as they had committed to a course of action. I was interested that the teams took two very different approaches to defining projects. One set began with the technology and hoped to find an educational application; the other set began with a learning objective and sought to find a solution by developing an appropriate technology. Beginning with the technology was the flashier route: “What cool things can we do with a drone?” But the latter seemed to me to be more thoughtful: technology not as a solution in search of a random problem, but as a particular solution to an existing issue. One of the groups described a situation in a community where there are older people who are skilled in handicrafts such as woodworking but not necessarily skilled in teaching – and yet there was a compelling interest to pass along this knowledge. How might technology serve the preservation of individual knowledge serving the community? Or, specifically: Can technology be utilized to support a mentoring relationship? Anchored by MAKE Magazine founder Dale Dougherty, the group created a demonstration website intended to match mentors to upcoming makers with step-bystep guidance for projects; a solid, yet reconfigurable framework for transmitting community knowledge.
Digital technology is especially suited to complex, layered topics that defy linear explanations. Computation allows for the application of a series of solutions; each matched to the particular conceptual step in the subject or allowing for different paths and different approaches through the material. Game mechanics ranging from 2D puzzles to role-playing to advanced simulations can, together, provide a meaningful path through a complex topic; for example, The Redistricting Game, a game I helped design and produce at USC, begins with a 2D puzzle-like mapmaking exercise, and proceeds, employing role-playing game mechanics, to model the process of the map gaining approval through the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. In the education space, it might be helpful to re-conceive of Virtual Reality (VR) as Virtual Environments (VE). As whole subjects become folded into online worlds to create immersive experiences, the Immersive Journalism projects pioneered by Nonny de la Peña and myself illustrate the potential to create compelling non-fiction narratives in these spaces. World Building, a budding design discipline, will contribute to the re-imagining of education and storytelling as students work through dilemmas and problems to create worlds.
Just as literature and art have embraced non-linear, aleatory and abstract avenues of expression in the previous century, education in this century will follow with new approaches to learning matched to our non-linear, aleatory and complex world.
////EdTech MindSet /Special Edition/2015
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