26 June 2007

What should we teach the children today, tomorrow let alone in the future?

For the last few years QCA has been leading a major project on developing a curriculum for the future under the banner ‘Futures in Action.’ The scale of it is daunting; curricula are no longer collections of subjects, they are bustling frameworks that bring together a whole range of opportunities, experiences and inter related activities and offer them as a personalised map. Everybody has their own pitch for what should be in there from knowledge to skills, values to behaviours. ‘Tell us in a thousand words what the future of education should be like,’ QCA said and the responses poured in. Earlier this year, QCA brought much of the thinking together into ‘A big picture of the curriculum.’ Full of colours and boxes and inter related lines, it is literally bursting with action. Somewhere in there, the aims of learning for the future generation are beginning to take shape.

One of the more difficult themes because it’s changing so fast is that of technology. Friend or foe? Three recent Reports may help us determine.

The most recent is a Report entitled ‘2020 and beyond: future scenarios for education in the age of new technologies’ from futurelab, an organisation dedicated, in its own words, ‘to developing new approaches to learning.’ The Report makes for fascinating reading in the same way that Tomorrow ‘s World used to in identifying new gadgets and inventions for the future. Apart from the fold up car that wouldn’t, the programme’s track record on predictions was pretty good: personal stereos, compact discs and barcode readers being among their more well known correct predictions. This Report may do the same

The Report takes five key areas where it believe there are likely to be digital developments of interest to educators and offers its own analysis. As it admits, “predicting the future is notoriously unreliable,” egg and face being never far apart but unless we try “we risk being the Cinderella sector of the technology world – constantly receiving the hand me downs from the business, defence and leisure industries and then trying to repurpose them for educational goals.”

The first area it considers is personal devices where it predicts that by 2020 instead of discrete devices such as a mobile phone or an MP3 player, digital technology will be fully integrated and embedded even into what we wear. Apparently “invisibly integrated into our clothes and accessories, our digital devices will work together to create an invisible set of connected tools and resources that allow us to interact with them in a range of different ways.” This vision raises enormous issues for learning. For a start what should be tested: the candidate or their use of devices?

The second is a more familiar one – the intelligent environment, one which reacts from the temperature you need when you’re working to the mood in which you grab the computer mouse in the morning. Draughty classrooms, knee knocking desks in rows, forget it, an interactive and sensory environment really is the learning lab of the future and the possibilities are enormous.

Third is the network which like personal devices will be fully connected with ‘blanket wireless connectivity’ and enormous processing potential. No longer associated with ‘nerds’ it will be highly sensitive to the needs and skills of the user with massive storage potential, in turn raising questions about how far exams that test knowledge recall rather than information manipulation and synthesising will be necessary. Fourth, interaction will be much more sophisticated, less with a screen and more with a complete digital environment thereby opening up massive new learning relationships. Fifth and finally, digital security will be stronger but more open, less big firewalls and separate passwords, more based on user recognition and biometrics.

The headline message in this Report is that for far too long digital developments have been led by adults for the world of business and adapted subsequently for schools and colleges. What is needed now is a clear review of what education in the future is for, hence the Futures Review, and then of how technology can help deliver that grand quest.

The second Report that many might find useful in considering the role of technology in learning is Becta’s follow up volume ‘Emerging technologies for learning.’ The issue is examined through a series of different articles. Number four, for instance, looks at ‘how to teach with technology.’ It’s message is that it requires new roles to be adopted, especially as often it’s the learners that have the proficiency and the teachers the knowledge. “So,” it argues, “there needs to be a useful division of labour around the emerging technologies. Teachers need to work with students to understand how technologies work, what they offer and how to include them in assignments. Students need to do the work of actually producing things in these technologies and media. Then teachers and students need to work together to create evaluation criteria.”

The third Report that might prove valuable in getting to grips with the role of technology in learning came out earlier this year and is the Demos Report entitled ‘Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation.’ This too argues that there is an enormous disconnect between the way young people view and use technology, generally no big deal, and the way older generations do, often a big deal. For example, “the press responds with incredulity when politicians demonstrate their grasp of Myspace or iPods, yet the idea that institutions such as schools should respond to these developments seems remote.”

The Report looks at a number of areas including common myths and misconceptions, learning from pioneers, and the importance of families of networks and concludes by setting out an agenda for change. This includes giving every young person the opportunity to build up ‘a creative portfolio alongside more traditional forms of assessment,’ shifting assessment away from testing the skills of memory and recall and towards evaluating and synthesising, building on the growing power of the student voice by encouraging them to become designers as well as users, and encouraging students to share knowledge in the classroom in the way that they seem to online at home

As long as it’s not the ‘knowledge’ they pick up through MSN that they share.

© Edexcel Policy Watch 2007. Steve Besley is General Manger of Education Policy at Edexcel. Policy watch is a service intended to help busy people understand developments in the world of education. Visit Edexcel at www.edexcel.org.uk