Listening to the radio this morning there was a very interesting story on the search for Steve Fosset that jives with some of the content of the 21st Century article.
In particular, it struck me how with a minimal expense (100k for the satellite images), online sharing community allowed thousands to participate in looking through thousands upon thousands of images to search for the missing plane.
I feel this story illustrated some of the potential for web 2.0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6987358.stm
More to come, I just wanted to mark this thought down before it went **poof**
Something bothers me about this story and its relationship to ways that web2.0 can be used in education: Are we training students to be the 'worker bees', who sift through photos to send questionable ones to the real experts, or are we preparing students to be the innovative thinkers who create the tools and methodology to efficiently parse data? In my experience technology education in High School is so piece meal and unfocused that it does very little to actually educate kids. Most teachers are not the technology leaders in the classroom, but are at an experience and skill level that puts them about at the middle ground. In this case, do we need to train teachers (who often are not interested in adopting new techniques and ideas) or perhaps have a whole new curriculum area that is focused on these 21st century skills?
From my personal experience I simply don't see public education embracing widespread paradigm shifts without a generational shift becoming more complete in who is doing the teaching. Particularly with NCLB making so many demands on teachers, this 21st century plan, no matter how laudable, is just another layer laid upon an over burdened system.
I think if NCLB could be drastically changed to minimize the high stakes testing (testing is important, but having it determine so much funding undermines the real world skills we need to teach), than Educators would embrace many of the points from this article. Until it is overhauled, the solutions to making our education fit the needs of the 21st century will be piecemeal and most students will only be getting the lower order skills for basic computer use.
2 comments:
I totally agree with you about minimizing high stake testings. I believe the quality of education decreases when schools are focused/pressured into getting passing scores for standardized tests. Students suffer from that in which learning becomes mundane and boring. To me, learning has to be fun so I can retain that knowledge, if it is not, I would definitely forget it after the test. Trust me, that happened many many times.
Indeed, you can only focus on so many things at a time. With all the pressure on test scores what else are we reinforcing?
Checking learning and scrutinizing that kids are learning is important, but standardized tests can't be the whole answer.
Post a Comment