21st Century - Personalized Learning
Technology Learning Resources
The real problem is not adding technology to the current organization of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning.
p. 189, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World. Heidi Hayes Jacobs (Alan November), 2010
Cross curricular, K-12 North American educators are adapting to roles as learning facilitators as education structures focus on empowering students as life long learners who are competent at setting learning goals, active in the assessment of their learning, able to traverse the multitude of resources and information to make the learning process meaningful, and use a method of communication to share their learning.
In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, (2011) Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown speak of the Tale of Two Cultures. They relate the traditional educational structures to the mechanistic view where
...the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can. In this teaching-based approach, standardization is a reasonable way to do this, and testing is a reasonable way to measure the result. The processes that necessarily occur to reach the goal, therefore, are considered of little consequence in and of themselves. They are valued only for the results they provide.(p.35)
Instead, if learning is viewed as providing an environment rich with resources as the context in which the learning occurs and
...students, teachers, and information within it all coexist and shape each other in mutually reinforcing way. Here, boundaries serve not only as constraints but also, oftentimes, as catalysts for innovation....Environments with well-defined and carefully constructed boundaries are not usually thought of as standardized, nor are they tested and measured. Rather they can be described as a set of pressures that nudge and guide change. They are substrates for evolution and they move at varying rates of speed.(p35)
Seely and Thomas suggest that the..
...primary difference between the teaching-based approach to education and the learning-based approach is that in the first case the culture is the environment, while in the second case, the culture emerges from the environment - and grows along with it. In the new culture of learning, the classroom as a model is replaced by learning environments in which digital media provide access to a rich source of information and play, and the process that occur within those environments are integral to the results.(pp.37-8)
The British Columbia Ministry of Education published two documents in spring 2011 related to shifts in learning and educational structures. The first document, A Vision for 21st Century Education (2010), is the result of the ongoing work of the Premier's Technology Council. In June, this was followed with the interactive document, Personalized Learning in BC, in which the government is seeking feedback from all sectors involved in Public Education. A pdf version of the document can be downloaded here.
Key Questions to Focus Investigation of 21st Century Learning Resources...
- What does it mean to be a student in the 21st century?link
- How has the influx of new information technology affected the brains of our 'Digital Natives?'link
- What are the 'literacies' of the 21st Century?link
- What elements are important considerations in a school's site-specific Technology Plan?link
Changes to note in the last 5 years....
Social Media Revisited
Did You Know Version 4 (2009)
Did You Know Version 5 (2010)
