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David Brooks wrote an excellent op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. He states that individuals cannot be successful in a globalized world without building advanced capabilities to transform information into meaningful knowledge:

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

This is one of the few articles in popular media that effectively ties globalization with the need for revolutionizing human capital development. And, it is one of the very few articles that contain the words “globalization” and “pedagogy” together in the same paragraph.

Read the entire article…

Buzz is starting to appear regarding the MediaWiki-powered free-reading.net. Free-Reading is…

an “open source” instructional program that helps teachers teach early reading. Because it’s open source, it represents the collective wisdom of a wide community of teachers and researchers. It’s designed to contain a scope and sequence of activities that can support and supplement a typical “core” or “basal” program.

Tom Hoffman notes that despite free-reading.net’s quiet launch,

this demonstrates that Wireless Generation is making a serious play. It also underscores a good reason why, as Doug Noon points out, the curriculum hews to the post-NCLB status quo on reading pedagogy.

I agree that the research base on the site is perhaps too centered on behaviorist and education psychology tradition. The curricula, however narrow, remains open –and could serve as another signal of a shift in curricula and textbooks toward open formats…

Today’s Inside Higher Ed reports on a Sloan Foundation report, “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning,” that found that although more U.S. students are learning online, the growth trend is tapering off. Nearly 20% of post-secondary students have taken at least one course online.

Four-year growth in students taking at least one online course:

Not surprisingly, the largest area of growth was among for-profit institutions, who are more pressured to innovate in education. The question is, is online learning really all that innovative? I think not.

Too often, we use new technologies without adopting new pedagogical models and new, contextually-relevant content. The result is that the new technologies are used to teach the same old garbage. And fail. Perhaps this explains why the penetration of online learning is beginning to taper off at 20%.

New models for learning are needed that properly utilize these technologies. Next week, I’ll present one such option, the “co-seminar” model, that begins to address the problem. Stay tuned!

Will Richardson asks, “is anyone else a bit interested in the fact that one 21,000 student district in the UK has decided to close all of its high schools and open learning centers instead:

In the words of rock legend Alice Cooper’s most famous song, “school’s out forever”. Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which - for years - has languished near or at the bottom of exam league tables, has abolished the use of the word to describe secondary education in the borough. It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft - which has already developed links with one school in the borough, Bowring.

The schools are moving from a deficit model of learning (”students can’t do…”) to a “can do” approach that the article claims will create creative students that will be valued by future employers. Operating 24 hours a day, the centers will allow students to explore problems that interest them at their own pace, rather than steering them through inflexible curricula.

This is an important change, as Knowsley Council seems to have figured out that students can get their information from anywhere (electronically, from social interactions, etc.). What’s important is the construction of information into knowledge and the creative use of new knowledge.

Microsoft has so far struck out in its attempts to reform education. Has it finally crafted a hit? This is worth watching…

(Thanks to Scott McLeod for the tip.)

A great blog, Paleo-Future, has emerged over the past couple months. The site provides “a look into the future that never was” –often for good reason. Here’s one: Bill Gates’ vision of the future classroom.

Matt writes:

The paleo-future of 1995 is filled with ethnically diverse students academically engaged by the high-tech presentations of their fellow classmates. The teacher brings the class to attention by telling them to “get off the net.” Every child has a diverse array of technology at their disposal. The keyboard Mr. Ballard uses is the most confusing of the supposed advances we see in the video.

Allow me to be more brutal to Mr. Gates’ vision: Why did his future of learning require kids to get off the net before they could start learning? And, why did he suggest that we use technologies to learn the same “download,” non-knowledge-producing garbage that schools have always taught. In a lesson or presentation on Mayan culture, why did he focus on displaying how technologies can be used to portray cultural essentialist “learning” as opposed to real cultural learning through intercultural interactions –perhaps, using cultural simulations?

Bah. Enough of my questions. Visit Matt’s blog. It’s good.

At yesterday’s Horizon Forum meeting, Chris Dede delivered a presentation via Skype on using multiple-user virtual environments in educational contexts. These environments, he argues, allows students to co-design and co-instruct their own educational experiences, allowing for guided social constructivism and learning that goes beyond what traditional schools try to accomplish through test-based assessments.

Scott McLeod continued with a discussion on preparing students for the new millennium rather than the industrial age. With the pace of change accelerating, schools, by design, are not able to keep up with society. Schools are in danger of becoming irrelevant unless if they do away with reactionary, compliance-based management and build future-oriented, proactive (and preactive!) leadership.

Finally, with Garth Willis’ help, we experimented with recording the session as a Macromedia Breeze meeting. The recording is available online at: https://breeze5.umn.edu/p44056320/ (sorry, the first twenty minutes of audio are missing).

The next Horizon Forum is scheduled for February 5, 2007, and will focus on advances in innovative learning in Latin America.

While the “dot edu” bubble has generated much interested in pedagogical technologies, issues of how the technologies are implemented and integrated into the curriculum typically do not enter the discussion. Poor implementation is perhaps a leading reason for why the dot edu boom has done little to actually improve student learning.

LiveScience.com reports on a new project sponsored by the National Science Foundation:

“Up until now, the personal computer’s potential to be a valuable teaching and learning tool has been stymied by its ’soulless’ nature,” says Baylor, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University’s Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning (RITL). “We’re using computers to simulate human beings in a controlled manner so we can investigate how they affect and persuade people.”

Using cognitive and emotional feedback, the researchers are investigating how to better implement technologies for improved student learning. There is hope.

Some U.S. students are taking note of a lesson learned by U.S. corporations and are outsourcing their homework. Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal writes:

Rent A Coder enables people — usually Americans — who need computer programs to put them out to bid — usually for cut-throat prices by Indians and Eastern Europeans.

…

Indeed, some programming students appear to be outsourcing their way through college. “Pascal Rookie,” from Colorado Springs, Colo., has put five school projects to bid. And while he may be a plagiarist, at least he treats his helpers well: Mr. Rookie has received the highest marks possible for a buyer in the eBay-like rating system used by Rent A Coder. “A pleasure to work with him,” said one.

Is the outsourcing of learning another sign that the U.S. is losing its innovation advantage?

More on the “innovation advantage” tomorrow morning…