Alan calls himself a Neanderthal academic (traditional, old school) who’s stepping out of his cave and observing what’s going on around him. Some great short stories to start out, then into these major points: (slide by slide)

SCHOOLS VS LEARNING
Uniform learning vs customization
Teacher control vs learner control
Teacher as expert vs diverse sources
Standardized assessment vs specialization
Knowledge in head vs reliance on resources
Coverage vs knowledge explosion
Learning by absorption vs learning by doing
Just-in-case learning vs just-in-time learning

RESULTS
Schools becoming less important
New system emerging
Industrial revolution to universal schooling
Digital learning = life long learning

SEEDS of a NEW SYSTEM
Home schooling
Workplace learning
distance education
Adult education
Learning centers
Educational tv and videos
Computer based learning environments
Web communities
Technical certifications
Internet cafes

(Parents are more likely to encourage kids to pursue their interests vs schools who encourage standards)

COMPARISON of the THREE ERAS
Responsibility: Parents to state to individual
Content: Practical skills / literacy >> basic skills\ disciplines >> learning to learn\ generic skills
Pedagogy: apprenticeship >> didacticism >> interaction
Assessment: observation >> testing>> embedded
Location: home >> school >> wherever you are
Culture: adult >> peer >> mixed
Relationships: personal bonds >> authority figures >> computer mediated interaction

WHAT IS LOST AND WHAT IS GAINED
Losses: equity, citizenship, social cohesion, diversity, commercialism, isolation, broader, horizons
Gains: more engagement, customization, more responsibility, less peer culture

( might have missed a slide or two…)

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
State of flux: time when visionaries can have impact
Imperatives of technology: customization, interaction, learner control, production
Specialized certificates
Rethinking high schools

RETHINKING LEARNING
Not just: how can we improve the schools?
New questions:
How can w develop games to teach mathematical reasoning?

RETHINKING MOTIVATION
Current system doesn’t foster intrinsic motivation
Fostering self-directed learning
Handhelds for every kid to teach reading and math
Tutoring programs on web for certifications (for all)
Computer based games that foster deep knowledge and entrepreneurial skills

RETHINKING WHATS IMPORTANT
Tech changes what’s needed
New literacies: web sites, multimedia, negotiation, cultural sensitivity
Mathematical reasoning vs computation
Less memorization, more finding needed information
New habits of mind: how reliable is this source? What is their viewpoint? Are there alternatives?

RETHINKING TRANSITIONS BETWEEN LEARNING AND WORK
Lifetime careers will be rare
People go back and forth between learning and work
Making career transitions is difficult
Need support for making choices in both directions
Counseling for people going from learning to work and work to learning

RETHINKING ED LEADERSHIP
Time for a new Horace or Letitia Mann
Need to integrate disparate elements to form a coherent system
Need to address inequities
….

ADVICE
More skeptical than Rich Halverson about life of schools, and their ability to adapt
Teaching as telling is too deeply embedded (David Cohen)
Gaming is unlikely to pervade schools
Control is a central issue
Gaming will flourish outside of schools
Likes Klopfer’s notion of filling the interstices of time with learning games

Sent from my iPad

Here I discuss a structured learning activity, in the broader curriculum of canoeing, that allows for a range of skill levels to engage in, and be challenged by.

Gunwale paddling

At Flying Moose Lodge, after campers have had some experience and instruction on how to do the basic C- and J- strokes, and have a few hours of practice (and maybe a trip, or even a previous summer of trips) they begin to have a surface understanding of what it means to canoe.

We still haven’t covered things like initial and secondary stability. I do this by taking campers out and having them lean without tipping. The goal is no longer to tip, but to come as close as possible to tipping without shipping water. It’s fairly easy to do on our camp-built cedar/canvas canoes that have an arched bottom (and thus good secondary stability), but quite difficult to do in the Old Town Trippers, which novice canoeists prefer because they’re so stable when lightly loaded (initial stability). Of course, there’s much flipping in this lesson, but because they already know how to flip and rescue, they can still have fun with it.

Of course, when they’re precariously leaning over in a canoe is an ideal time to also teach bracing, where they get introduced to the idea that control of a paddle-in-water can play a very big part in keeping them from tipping. (This idea —one’s connection to and reliance on one’s paddle — is a point that I think we need to emphasize/convey even more, and I’ll discuss it in a future article, “A Boy and his Paddle.”)

As I mentioned, some of the campers may have already had a summer of trips, or are already comfortable in a canoe. If campers get to the point where they’re stable on the gunwales, we challenge them to paddle in that position. If they can maneuver a canoe with one gunwale kissing the water, chances are they’ve got a deep understanding of the canoe, and probably have deeply-embodied skills as well. At this point, we’ve got better canoeists than 95% of camps with canoes.

The ability to skillfully and competently maneuver a canoe on its edge allows paddlers to make quick turns easily, and in addition to looking cool and being a great indicator of canoeing prowess, can be a great asset in playing Dead Fish Polo.

Educational Implications:

Broad-range activities, activities that can be approached at different levels of understanding and skill, have been around forever. Example are abundant in our lives, but schools largely try to segment their populations so that any group of learners are learning the same skill or concept. This is unrealistic, especially when considering the narrow constraint of age-segregation that the current system is based on. The exceptions in this system — those who are held back or who “skip” grade levels are often ostracized because they don’t fit the system. Rather than force them to fit the system, we should change the system to allow for more range in learning groups.

One of the underlying assumptions in the above canoeing activity is that the learners (“leaners” in this case) are at different skill levels and different ages (though all between 10-16 here). As it turns out, the mix of age and abilities results in a great deal of formal and informal modeling and mimicking between them, as well as considerable volunteered tutoring as the more adept try to explain to those who aren’t getting it what they’re doing (and in the process re-thinking and restructuring it into terms that they’ll understand — this alone is a significantly deep learning method for them!)

I’d love to see age and skill levels mixed up more in classrooms, allowing for multi-level learning and teaching of content by the students themselves. If we are to move from the teaching paradigm of “teacher as expert” to “teacher as guide,” we need to allow students themselves to develop their own islands of expertise (Crowley and Jacobs, 2002) by experiencing and understanding concepts and skills from more of an interdependent standpoint, where they can cooperate and help each other learn rather than only compete with each other (e.g. for the grading “curve”).

There’s a certain structure to learning any task. As educators, we are often cognizant of  ”inefficient” moves, or the “wrong way” to do things (that we may have gone through or done ourselves when learning), and we often try to squash guide learners around these moves. I argue that sometimes it’s better to allow the “errors” and let the learners (safely) figure it out for themselves when they’re ready — with the appropriate guidance, of course — allowing for and respecting (and even speeding the learner through) Vygotsty’s (1980) Zone of Proximal Development.

At Flying Moose Lodge, after campers learn to flip, we teach them to do the C-stroke and the J-stroke, and we emphasize how bad it is to “rudder” (dragging the paddle in the water to steer; often part of a beginning or lazy J-stroke) — this is, in my opinion, a wrong-headed strategy on our part.

First, let me explain why ruddering is considered bad (in canoeing on a lake). The longer the paddle is in the water, and not being “pushed” through it as propulsion, the more it contributes drag that slows down the canoe and counter the effort of paddling forward. But to turn a canoe with a J-stroke, the stern paddler has to put the paddle in the water and push it away from the canoe. Any lingering of the paddle in the water causes drag, even though it may still be turning the canoe. So a good J-stroke will involve a strong forward pull, and a strong, smooth push to the side.

The problem is that it’s awkward and difficult to do this efficiently —especially for new paddlers. So there tends to be a lot of excess ruddering, because the paddlers immediately recognize that ruddering is an effective way of turning the canoe. What it is not, is an effective way of maintaining forward momentum. I argue that the primary thing to learn here is how the paddle position affects the direction of the canoe. We should explicitly teach them to rudder because in ruddering one learns, in a very physically compelling way, how the paddle can affect the canoe.

Once the new paddler has a good understanding of how to turn the canoe effectively by ruddering, we can (and should) emphasize that ruddering slows down the canoe and is an inefficient way to maintain forward momentum while steering the canoe (on lakes, whereas in whitewater the current takes care of momentum and keeping the paddle in the water aids in balance; it’s a good thing). Eventually good paddlers will learn an efficient J-stroke. But to condemn it early on ignores a natural learning curve, and discourages campers from developing at their own pace the embodied understanding one gets from  ”simply messing around in boats” (says Water Rat from Wind in the Willows).

Broader Educational Take:

Kolb Experiential Learning Cycle (1975)

People learn at their own pace, depending on motivation and access to environments where they can learn. A good overview on motivation here: Huitt, W. (2001)). They are very adept at mimicking and adapting ideas and methods that they recognize as working well enough (peer pressure is one instantiation of this). When they try something that seems to work for others, if it promises to work for them, they adapt and adopt it for the specific strengths, weaknesses, and constraints that they face in their circumstances. Essentially people follow Kolb & Fry’s (1975) Experiential Learning Cycle for much of their learning.

What I argue is that, as educators, we need to respect their processing of this learning cycle, and not guide with too heavy of a hand. The trick is find the right balance of course — if they head down the “wrong” path for too long, we need to address their choice with respectful challenges. But if we direct on too soon or too heavily we risk crushing their:

• willingness to seek out their own answers
• develop their own hypotheses
• do the work of customizing according to their own circumstances/abilities/constraints.

To respect a learner’s natural tendencies and processes requires a lot of flexibility in teaching methods — especially in situations where learners are grouped more by age than by ability. The simple truth is that people catch on to different skills and concepts at different speeds and times. Structures for learning must then take into account and allow for these different paces.

At Flying Moose Lodge, we do this whenever we can. I’ll discuss a few examples in upcoming posts — “Playing on the Edge” and “Rapid Prototyping.”