Thesis snapshots 1

There are 8 weeks left before I have to hand in my thesis (eek!). So despite having about twenty blog posts brewing, I just will not have much time to blog. Instead, I thought I would post sections of my thesis here for critique, review, feedback, etc. The more brutal the better! 

So here you go.... Thesis snapshot 1

Is formal education broken, expired and systemically flawed? Academic experts across the world have argued that our current education system is not fit for purpose. The public mirrors their arguments too, everyone from politicians, parents, teachers, students and the media can, and do find fault with the current system. Yet, despite so many finding fault with schools, a myriad of change in education, both in New Zealand and elsewhere, have somehow not succeeded in bringing about the necessary change. This begs the question, why not? 

In the chapter ahead, the history of education reform in New Zealand will be outlined. Following this, a brief evaluation of the New Zealand public education system, and its fitness for purpose, in light of the three philosophical purposes of education, socialisation, qualifications and subjectification. This establishes the argument that education in its current form is no longer fit for purpose. The chapter concludes with a review of how this has been addressed in the past, and establishes the limitations of past interventions. 

History of education reform

Despite the endless critique of education, its history is littered with varied attempts at change. (Berry, 2011; Brown, 1990; Thomas, 2013). These reforms in education reflect the historical and sociological context, including the rise of Marxism, Neo-Marxism and Capitalism (Brown, 1990; Gordon, 2016; Thomas, 2013). Specifically, in Western history, a number of global trends stand out in this timeline, including the rise of compulsory education and the secularisation of schooling. As well as the sociological context, education debate across Western nations have also been swayed throughout history between progressive (child centred, learning by doing) and formal ideas (teacher centred, back to basics, chalk and talk) (Thomas, 2013). 

Within New Zealand, a number of significant changes in education can also be noted. During the 1870s the development of state schooling, followed nearly a hundred years later with the Tomorrow’s Schools reform in 1989, are examples of the major educational reforms that have shaped the New Zealand education context (Gordon, 1992; Novlan, 1998).The Tomorrow’s Schools reform is perhaps the largest impacting factor on the current New Zealand education landscape, and has been credited as "one of the most notable episodes of liberalization that history has to offer” (Evans, Grimes, Wilkinson, & Teece, 1996). Largely, because it introduced free market ideals in the education sector (Philips, 2000). Gordon (2016) credits this reform with many of the structural aspects that we can see in New Zealand education today, including the governance by Boards of Trustees, competition between schools, fee-paying students within tertiary education, and the shift towards operational funding being managed by schools. The introduction of the Tomorrow’s Schools Act is largely credited with the autonomy with which New Zealand schools function today (Gordon, 2006). 

Following on from the Tomorrow’s Schools reform in 1989, other changes also took effect. A new qualification system (National Certificate of Educational Achievement - NCEA) was introduced from 2002 for students from year eleven to thirteen (New Zealand Qualifications Authority, n.d.). Additionally, New Zealand saw the introduction of a new curriculum from 2007 (Schagen, 2011). Although not credited with having as radical an impact as the Tomorrow’s School reform, the introduction of the latest New Zealand Curriculum document is of interest. This document, which is often touted as future focussed, saw a shift in the way education was approached in New Zealand, marking a movement from “setting out not what children are expected to know, but how they should be” (Priestley & Sinnema, 2014; Watson, 2010), for example the shift towards key competencies (thinking, relating to others, understanding language, symbols and text, managing self and participating and contributing), as opposed to large amounts of clearly defined content. Despite much protesting, National Standards introduced in 2010, required schools to report to Ministry of Education and to parents, on the literacy and numeracy levels of students from year 1 to 8 (Crooks et al., 2009; Ministry of Education, 2010). And most recently, New Zealand saw the introduction of the Investing in Educational Success (IES) policy in 2014. IES was deliberately designed to increase collaboration between schools and teachers (Ministry of Education, 2014). Under the Tomorrow’s Schools reform however, schools were set up to compete. Yet, none of the legislation from the Tomorrow’s Schools reform was amended, despite the conflicting purposes of IES and Tomorrow’s Schools policies. In conclusion then, New Zealand schools have seen a host of changes in the past thirty years, however only the Tomorrow’s Schools reform tackled systemic change rather than a tweaking of the system.  

Despite the many changes that have occurred at the policy level, there are many who argue that even more change is needed. This desire for change in public education is evident in schools and tertiary education, locally and globally (Berry, 2011; Bolstad et al., 2012; Claxton, 2013; K. Facer, 2011; Gilbert, 2005; Lichtman, 2014; Productivity Commission, 2016). There appears to be broad agreement from educators, academics, and the public, that education should be different. However, there is lack of agreement about what is actually needed, and no consensus about how a change might be achieved. For example, the PPTA (post primary teachers association) have argued against Innovative Learning Environments (Post Primary Teachers' Association, 2017) that is now mandated for all new built or refurbished schools in New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 2015). The lack of consensus is also apparent between schools and their communities, between various political parties and even between families.

Is education broken?

Purpose of education

To understand why public education, and in particular schools might need transformation, it is important to first examine its three philosophical purposes. Since inevitably, these act as the measure by which we establish whether public education is in fact, fit for purpose. However, these purposes for education are underpinned by conflicting ideologies that are “fundamentally irresolvable” (Biesta, 2009; Egan, 2001). As a result, these conflicting ideologies contribute tension to public private, political and academic debates where unknowingly, arguments are based on incompatible philosophies. This means that debates about the success of the education system are incapable of reaching a consensus, as different parties inevitably prioritise different purposes of education.  

Generally, we can agree on three common, albeit conflicting purposes for education; Plato’s academic idea, Rousseau’s developmental idea, and socialization (Egan, 2001). Similarly, these are identified by Biesta (2009) as, socialisation, subjectification (development of individual autonomy), and qualification, (acquisition of knowledge and skills). Despite these ideas underpinning most, if not all debates about educational success, they are rarely acknowledged, but instead are assumed. This problem stretches beyond our current dissatisfaction in education, even extending to Aristotle who captures these tensions when he wrote; 

“For in modern times there are opposing views about the tasks to be set, for there are no generally accepted assumptions about what the young should learn, either for virtue or for the best life; nor yet is it clear whether their education ought to be conducted with more concern for the intellect than for the character of the soul. - Aristotle (Thomas, 2013)

Although Biesta (2009) begins to stress the importance of examining the purpose of education within the current political landscape, his argument does not extend to a critique of these ideas, or the extent to which the current system actually meets these goals. Further, whilst the above three ideologies regarding the purpose of education are inherent within current and historical debates around education reform, an argument can be made that education within its current state does not serve any one of these particularly well. Additionally, this argument for potential system failure is amplified when considered in light of emerging global trends, and the Futures literature. In conclusion a case can be made for radical shift within public education, particularly in schools and universities.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel... or do we?

As teachers, we are sometimes a bit like magpies. You see something shiny, you pick it up and take it back to the nest. Or to be precise, you see a good resource, a teaching tool, a strategy, and you take it back to your classroom. Over the years, many of us have stockpiled many great resources. In fact, we are such magpies, that there are entire websites devoted to our magpie tendencies. Teachers Pay Teachers has seen numerous educators around the world make a pretty penny by sharing their resources for other teachers to buy. Sites like TES have banks of great resources, both free and paid for to also indulge our collection of shiny objects. Here in New Zealand, N4L’s Pond is attempting to do the same. This doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the copious resources that are being shared through social media.

With so many resources around, I have heard many educator say that there is “no need to reinvent the wheel”. I’ve heard this said across a number of contexts, and by numerous people. And perhaps because we are now well into term three, the coldest and darkest of the New Zealand school terms, I’m hearing this more. Perhaps term three is when we are most reminded that we have to manage our teaching workload more carefully, and hence, a good resource that saves some preparation time feels likes a win. By now we also know that there is plenty of research that shows that we need sleep for more effective problem solving and even creativity. So perhaps, our need not to reinvent the wheel, stems from the recognition that we are tired and don’t necessarily have the mental energy to do so. It is a fairly well researched fact that sleep deprivation affects our ability to solve problems.

Recently, I also blogged about how busy we are as teachers. Between reports, planning, meetings, parent demands, marking, professional learning and leadership responsibilities, there never seems to be enough time. It makes sense then, that we adopt some time saver tips such as our magpie approach. It’s a time saver when we do not reinvent the wheel!

source

While I hear this phrase more and more, I have all of a sudden become sceptical. (It might also be the “How might I be wrong?” postit stuck to my screen). You see, when this phrase is bandied around in a meeting, we often nod our heads in agreement. Or, we retweet it on Twitter, because yes, we agree that we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. But what if we are wrong? What if we SHOULD reinvent the wheel? In fact, you might find that the wheel has been reinvented many times over, and thank goodness for that! You wouldn’t want a wooden spoke wheel on your brand-new Tesla, would you? Whilst technology marches on, and has brought virtual reality, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, the blockchain and home genetics kits knocking on our doors, schools are still saying that there is “no need to reinvent the wheel”. Is it just me, or does that seem like a pretty fatal flow in our thinking?

“No need to reinvent the wheel” is making me increasingly and incredibly uncomfortable. If we do not reinvent the wheel, doesn’t that put us at risk of becoming obsolete as a profession? Or for privatisation to capitalise on our lack of reinvention in the public school system? But more importantly, does that mean we are frequently accepting the outdated, old fashioned, ineffective, unproductive wooden spoke wheels in education?

Watson the super computer is diagnosing lung cancer better than experienced doctors, Tesla can send push updates to your car to improve it remotely, my smartphone has technology that would have cost $5 trillion dollars in 1984, and an artificially intelligent teaching assistant helped students online for an entire semester and nobody noticed. I have thought about it a little more, I’ve actually decided that we do not need to reinvent the wheel. It’s time we start building the education equivalents of hovercrafts.

I’ve adopted a new lens to use in my leadership and my everyday practice. This means rather than assuming that I do not need to reinvent the wheel, I should instead evaluate whether a wheel is still appropriate. Perhaps I am in the territory of hovercrafts, self-driving cars and the hyperloop. I for one, will definitely no longer accept not reinventing the wheel.

How do you teach students to unlearn?

It was futurist and writer Alvin Toffler who wrote;

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

What I find particularly significant about this quote is the play on the word learn. My interpretation of what Mr Toffler is saying here is that to be literate in the 21st century, it is not sufficient to be able to learn a lot of stuff, or to put it another way, it is not sufficient to only teach kids a whole lot of content and skills.

To unlearn, we must first acknowledge that what we know is wrong. In some cases, this is pretty easy, we can simply change one fact for another. In other cases, where we have built a mental model, a way of making sense of the world around our knowledge, this is much, much harder. To put this into context, this is the difference between learning the names of the seasons (learning more stuff), learning that Greenland is disproportionately large on most world maps - it is not nearly the size of Africa (substituting an old fact for a new one), and learning that the earth rotates around the sun rather than the sun around the earth (changing a mental model about how the world works and how we make sense of the world). If you know even a little bit about the history of science, you will know that Galileo's heliocentric views of the solar system caused such a kerfuffle, that he was declared a heretic, condemned, and that he died under house arrest. These mental models, our way of making sense of our experience in the world, are often such deeply rooted beliefs, that we sometimes don't even know we have them, or why we have them. And what's more, when people begin to question these mental models, we often respond with aggression, discomfort, conflict or denial. Just think about how angry people get when you question them about their religion and politics!

How then do we teach students in such a way that they are able to truly unlearn? What does an education look like where students are expected to unlearn? In fact, how would parents react if you informed them the next week of school will be focussed on unlearning? When so much of school is focussed on learning, to read, to write, to discuss the evidence for atoms, or to speculate about the motivation of Shakespeare's Hamlet or Macbeth, what emphasis do we give to unlearning? How often do we teach how, or even give the opportunity for students (or teachers?) to unlearn at a deep level?

Over the past year, I have been working alongside Di Cavallo, Lea Vellenoweth Ros Britton and Jayne Dunbar to develop a curriculum for the Learning Hubs at our school. This has been a huge amount of thinking, refining and more, and we have been excited to kick off this seriously refined and increasingly rigorous curriculum this year. As part of this new curriculum however, we were grappling with how we might engage students with rethinking and reframing their visions of the possible futures that lie ahead for each learner. Not an easy ask! But together we settled on the idea of a Learning Hub Inquiry, where students might engage with all kinds of possible futures for themselves, and take action towards this.

As it happened, the Learning Hub Inquiry became one of my areas of responsibility to develop, with lots of feedback and input from the team (thanks lots in particular Di!). As I got really stuck into this project, I got more and more excited. Increasingly, this project morphed into something that felt really special, something that could potentially toe the line between doable and scalable in schools, yet truly future focussed, combining a mix of personalisation, learner agency, digital fluencies, learning to navigate complexity and the unknown, and of course, unlearning.

So what does this look like? You might recognise some of the ideas from the Spirals of Inquiry, with hints of Adult Cognitive Development, Kegan and Lahey's Immunity to Change, a dash of the Essential Fluencies, and a sprinkling of Keri Facer's Possibilities of the Present thrown in for good measure.

Each student will go through the process of gathering information about what is going on in their own lives, stretching across broad areas such as their digital footprint, their financial profile, their passions, interests,  wellbeing, grades, etc. From this, they will look for patterns, analysing the big picture to identify a focus area for a goal. In partnership with their learning coach, the student then constructs a goal. Each student's goal would be highly personalised, however with each student the intent being that the goal is an adaptive rather than technical goal (You know you have to exercise more and eat healthier, but you never do? That's an adaptive goal! The kind where you have to change the underlying beliefs, rather than the technical things on the surface if you wish to see long term change). Students will then devote time to research their goals, specifically seeking out new perspectives, ideas and expertise. From here, each student will create an action plan which they will carry out, reflecting, refining, and readjusting along the way. Finally, each student will then present this entire process to their family and whanāu, before beginning a new inquiry cycle. The students are of course supported every step of the way by their learning coach (kind of like a form teacher on steroids), this support looking very much like a coach and mentor rather than a teacher.

For me, this is the very picture of student agency and personalisation. Not only does each student have a personal goal that they come to based on making sense of their own personal data, but they also learn to navigate the true complexity and uncertainty of genuine self improvement. They learn to find new ways of looking at what is going on in their life, new ways of looking at their problems, and then to try out new models of doing things. This could look anything like students setting goals to learn to collaborate more effectively, manage work flow more effectively, lead their responsibilities in the school more effectively, or even make academic shifts. Anything!  Meanwhile, the teacher shifts from knower to coach, entering into a partnership of facilitation rather than director of learning.

Enabling our students to learn, unlearn, and relearn will hopefully develop the capacity of our students to take on any challenge they may face in the future, regardless of how complex it might be. I am also excited about this model because it incorporates opportunities for students to bring their own diversity to the table, rather than always relying on the teacher to bring the direction. It potentially also provides the space for students to mentor each other, as different students will inevitably have different strengths and expertise to offer.

Now... The big question as we launch into our first round of the new HPSS Learning Hub Student Inquiry is really just this: As teachers, are we willing and able to learn, unlearn and relearn enough to take this from possibility to reality?

All this reading is making me wonder...

source

Behind the scenes of all things #edchatNZ, my teaching, learning and leading within my school, and my masters, I have been reading like crazy, watching videos and curating content. The more I read, explore, make sense, listen, the more I wonder...

• How 'future ready' are New Zealand teachers really? In fact, are New Zealand teachers even coping with today? I just think about my unruly and out of control inbox, as well as the mental aerobics and resilience it has taken to reimagine learning at my school.
  
• What kind of future are we heading towards if we retain our current mindsets? What kind of a future might we head towards with a shift in mindset? I worry about the paradigm of growth that appears to dominate everything from economics to education in our society. 10% increase here, new target there...
  
• How do New Zealand teachers and schools cope with complexity, rapid change, radical change? What about our schools and their policies and procedures? I think about how challenging it is to navigate the space where my students' lives are overlaid by a digital parallel universe, where their alternate selves are roaming far beyond the walls of the school and classroom.
  
• How do we know if we are coping? How do we know if we are thriving in complexity? Just because it feels like we are thriving or doing well, doesn't mean we are. It is easy lulling myself into a false sense of security as I go about my comfortable daily life, forgetting the impact of the bottle of water I bought because I forgot my own, forgetting that the cheap T-shirt I got on special was probably made by an underpaid child in a developing country somewhere. Surely thriving doesn't mean that I am happy and comfortable at the expense of others? 

I am not alone in wondering about all these things. In fact, a research study from the Auckland University of Technology is doing exactly this - wondering about teachers and how 'future ready' they might be. 

"The last two decades have seen a paradigm shift in international thinking about education. Driven by an awareness of the massive social, economic, and technological changes taking place in the world outside education, there is now a questioning of the role and purpose of “traditional” forms of schooling. The literature in this area argues that today’s learners need knowledge and skills that are qualitatively different from those the current system was set up to provide. But more importantly, if they are to thrive in today’s world, learners need new ways of knowing. They need new and different “dispositions” towards knowledge, thinking, learning, and work. 

There is now a large literature on how we might go about developing these dispositions in students, but very little work on how these dispositions might best be fostered in teachers. While there is a great deal of New Zealand-based research on teacher professional learning, much of this is oriented towards “improvement” or “best practice”, not “transformation”. Research investigating the demands “future-oriented” education makes on teachers’ thinking, learning, and ways of knowing is, as yet, in its infancy."

The survey takes a while to complete. It's thorough, so rather than wondering about the future, future readiness, complexity, etc, I am now going to take the time to actually do the survey... I know that the team behind the survey would greatly appreciate if you could take the time to do the survey, but also to share it with your colleagues. The more people that do the survey, the better. Even better, the more diverse the groups of teachers who do the survey, the better.

You can access the survey here. 

PS: I completed the survey, it didn't take me nearly as long as they said. There were some pretty fascinating questions in there too! 

"...the only definite outcome is uncertainty"

The only thing we do know about the future is that is is uncertain. It surprises us. In our own lives and society, we know that unexpected challenges, problems and opportunities arrive. People and society is faced with everything from poverty and abuse to ISIS, climate change and natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornados. This doesn't even begin to talk about the uncertainty that we have about where technology will take us next. If for just one day, you were not allowed to use any technology that was invented in the last 15 years, what would your day look like? There would be no Facebook, no iPhone, so I would actually have to take a GPS with me. There would be no Netflix. Wait, there would be no YouTube. There would be no Wikipedia. Things are getting serious now. I would probably have to listen to a CD - oh the limitations to my playlist size! Scrutinise any part of your day, and you will notice the enormous influence that technology has had on our lives. Would we have been able to predict twenty years ago just how great the role of technology in our lives would be? You could try and argue with me, but if you just think about how many power outlet points there are in any given room in a house built this year compared to a house built twenty years ago...

"When contradictions, complexity and chaos
 combine with accelerating change the only
definite outcome is uncertainty"

Ziauddin Sardar sums up the ideas of uncertainty and complexity in today's day and age beautifully in his must read article, Welcome to the postnormal times; "When contradictions, complexity and chaos combine with accelerating change the only definite outcome is uncertainty"

It seems strange that the only thing we really do know about the future, is that it is riddled with uncertainty. Yet, in schools we seem to do little about preparing students for uncertainty. Instead, we give students timetables to tell them where to be every minute of their day. We tell them the learning objective at the start of the lesson so that they know what to expect and what to learn. We teach to a test or assessments, and we get upset if the questions surprise us. As teachers, we prepare our lessons, plan them out. In fact, how many schools and departments have the planning for the whole year ahead laid out, bit by bit? We are available to help students out when they get stuck. We tell student which strategies to use, what books to read and what thoughts to think. Before students learn to think about uncertain student finances, babies and children, political instability, we ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Then we ask them to make enormous investments in degrees that may or may not be useful as the market is too uncertain to know what will actually be useful. We help students believe that they just need to stick to the plan, and the all will be OK. There is no shortage of articles and research available about the disjoints between education and the workforce, both at a school and higher education level. Is it just me, or are the things that we teach, the ways we teach, actually doing the complete opposite of preparing students for coping with the unexpected and uncertain? And that's without getting me started on the helicopter parents!

I often hear teachers and parents talk about preparing students for the future. However I wonder if we have really thought about what this means. Does it mean teaching and learning of Shakespeare and Pythagoras as we have always done? But much like the economic ideas of continuous growth, that we perhaps try to do it better? Does it mean that we teach students coding and robotics? Perhaps it means that our schools should teach with devices, type those essays on Google Docs? Perhaps even collaborating on a Google Doc? Does it mean that we focus on things such as collaboration, problem solving, creativity, innovation?

So what then does teaching for and with uncertainty look like? It seems fitting that I am uncertain! However, my current approach to uncertainty involves rapid iteration and deep reflection. Hence, here are some of the things that I have tested and tried with various levels of success over the past year:

• Design Thinking, the Scientific Method and PPDAC: You might wonder what these two have in common... As I see it, Design Thinking, the Scientific Method and PPDAC are problem solving approaches. Where Design Thinking uses empathy to solve problems, science and maths uses objectivity to solve problems. By teaching using these (and other) approaches side by side, I hope that my students begin to understand processes of problem solving, rather than simply looking for an answer. I hope that they learn to distinguish between the pros and cons of problem solving approaches, and learn to apply each approach accordingly. Or perhaps even to mix approaches when the moment is right.  In class, we explicitly discuss problems together and talk about what the best problem solving approach might be. 
• When teaching maths in particular, sometimes I give impossible problems. Problems that can not be solved because I did not give enough information. Or sometimes I give problems with too much information. Sometimes I give problems that I have not yet taught the skills for. These problems are usually followed by reflections where we discuss our responses to uncertainty. Some of us get defensive, some of us act like we know when in fact we don't (and then sound very ignorant!), some of us simply give up, get distracted or even get angry. We talk about what might have been a better approach. We talk about what we could have done, alternative approaches. 
• For some time now, I have also been an a fan of programmes such as Art Costa's Habits of Mind. This approach gives students strategies for 'knowing what to do when you don't know what to do'. It enables students to coach themselves through challenges by having strategies to draw on when they don't know what to do. 
• Simulations: This year I was fortunate enough to co-teach with Steve Mouldey. Together, we ran an alien planet invasion simulation in class where students had to make decisions for themselves in a highly complex environment. This meant that students had to deal with real uncertainty and complexity on the fly. Without a doubt, this was some of the most powerful learning I have ever seen for a group of students. You can read more about this simulation here. 

Of course, as most of my experiments in the classroom goes, they only raise more questions...

• If schools valued the ability to cope and thrive in uncertainty, would they want to measure it? How would it be measured?
• What other approaches could I try to help my students cope and thrive in uncertainty? What does best practice for teaching and learning with uncertainty look like? Can there even be best practice for uncertainty?
• How do my students feel about uncertainty? Do they feel as uncomfortable 'not knowing' as the adults?
• Are teachers able and willing to work in a space where they don't 'know', a space where they too are uncertain? Are teachers able to challenge and redefine their identity as the one who 'knows' the answer? 
• Why is uncertainty so uncomfortable? Why is uncertainty often associated with the negative rather than the positive? 
• Is it foolish to be/act certain about the future?

With so many more questions, it would appear the the only thing I am certain about is that uncertainty is a key to thinking about Education Futures. Perhaps you are more certain than I? How do you think we might prepare students for a society fundamentally different than ours, so different that we can not know what to prepare them for? How do you think we might prepare students for uncertainty? Or perhaps, you think we shouldn't? 

Are exams an anachronism?

As exam season for schools and universities around the country draws to a close, I find myself (again) reflecting on the purpose, point and goals of exams. Hence, I have a few questions for Mr Exam. I would appreciate if someone could pass the questions on. Or at least speculate on what his answers might be.

• Why should students attempt to 'prove' their understanding in an artificial context? What is the point of recalling facts and skills in an artificial environment? Would you go into a meeting or a presentation at work without your notes? You can take notes into a job interview. When solving complex problems at work you are certainly not expected to solve them from memory! We do careful research, we collaborate, we seek feedback, we refine. When I have struggled with particular aspects of a role, I often make notes for myself. I check over them to help me complete the task. I struggle to understand why students should be expected to recall without notes, without their peers, without context and without an authentic purpose? When you have to use recall for your drivers licence test, there is a purpose. What is the point of recall in exams?
  
  
• Do exams value recall or deep thinking? All of the most profound moments of realisation, understanding, application in my life, and I am betting yours, did not happen in exams. It involved deeply thinking in light of new experiences, information, discussion and so forth. Does this mean that exams are not about thinking? Perhaps they are about regurgitating and recalling your thinking? Although, I suspect it might also be about recalling someone else's thinking and not your own.
  
• Do exams value efficiency or efficacy, quality? When students are given contrived time limits to recall and apply facts, skills, etc. are we suggesting that it is how fast you are able to do things, not how well? Are we suggesting that learning, Knowledge, skills, capabilities can be packaged into two and three hour blocks?
  
• How can we possibly allow for diversity when we are expecting a whole country to sit the same exams? There are piles of research about the euro-centric approach in education, and piles about Maori and Pacifica frequently not 'achieving' at the same rate off pakeha (New Zealand European). This phenomenon is evident in other countries with indigenous peoples too. By making a whole country, district, class, year level sit the same exam, by standardising, are we ignoring cultural capital? Are we suggesting that cultural capital does not matter in academia? Why should all students know and think the same things? Does standardisation ignore and devalue diversity? 
  
  
  
•  Are exams about equity or equality? All students are expected to write the external 'English exam' or 'Maths exam' at the same time, regardless of what is going on for them in their life. +Ros MacEachern gives a great example from her last school where students were leaving exams early because they were hungry. How many other factors like this is going on? Is that fair?
  
• Are we assessing their writing or their understanding? All students, regardless of their strengths, preferences, cultural traditions, personal experiences, family situations and so forth at expected to 'write' exams. They have to give written explanations of their understanding. All teachers know students who can give incredible verbal explanations but struggle to do so in writing. We all learn differently, communicate differently yet exams seem to ignore this? Where do exams make space for different modes of thinking, learning and communicating?

• How do exams help to build a better future? The value that we attach to exams, explicitly, implicitly and tacitly, are they actually making the world a better place? What values are they instilling in students? What are they teaching students, the community and families to value? What are they teaching about how we assess and individual? What are they teaching about what matters about an individual? Or about a group?

As far as I can tell, exams are not about learning, not about thinking and not about Knowledge. So what is the point? Are they just an an anachronism? A tool from a past age where standardisation was more valued than diversity? Where Knowlege was confined to the pages of linear books rather than the multi-dimensional reality of the real world? If the purpose of exams were about learning and thinking, how would they be different? Are we still making kids and students write exams because coming up with something better has simply been lumped into the too hard basket? 

Why bother with change in education?

Enabling learners to create new futures from EDtalks on Vimeo.

My latest Core Education EDtalk. Thanks to all the great thinkers, academics, practitioners and more who have developed my thinking in this area. If you want to know more, I highly recommend you read some of the following:

• Too Big to Know - Weinberger, D. (2011). Too Big to Know. New York: Basic Books.
• Learning futures: Education, technology and social change - Facer, K. (2011). Learning futures: Education, technology and social change. Taylor & Francis.
• Catching the Knowledge Wave? The Knowledge Society and the future of education - Gilbert, J. (2005). Catching the Knowledge Wave? The Knowledge Society and the future of education. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
• Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a New Zealand Perspective - Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a New Zealand Perspective: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
• Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy - Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2012). Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Massachusetts: Digital Frontier Press.

My masters: Using MOOCs and complexity thinking to disrupt current debates on educational futures.

As many of you will know, for some time now I have been dabbling in post graduate studies. Although for some time I thought that I might examine some aspect of mathematics education, a chance meeting with the legendary Jane Gilbert in February this year saw me change my mind. I ditched my previous proposals (which fortunately was still very useful in learning how to use words like ontology and epistemology). Although I have met some fascinating and knowledgeable researchers and academics over the past few years, Jane was the first that genuinely listened with intent to the story of #edchatNZ and my passion for bringing about change in the education system. I talked about my hope to develop a MOOC (massive open online course) to deepen the many wonderful discussions I had seen on #edchatNZ. So, together we have embarked on a very exciting project - designing a MOOC examining Education Futures, and then studying what happens. It was an opportunity not to be missed, and one that even early on in this project, has turned my thinking inside out and on its head, inside out and back around. Like all things #edchatNZ, you can sign up to help build and design, or participate in the discussion. Even better, would be if you chose to participate, if you invited friends parents and colleagues. The larger the community that takes part in discussions about education futures, the more likely that we will see the changes that we so desperately know our students need. You can learn more about the MOOC on the #edchatNZ website, as well as sign up for more information or to participate in its design.

For those of you who are interested in the more academic side of things, below is part of the more formal research proposal for this project.

Major changes in the world beyond education have led to calls for a more “future-focused” education system: however, change has so far been slow or small in scale. This project plans to investigate one possible way to bring about the required change on a larger scale. It will explore the extent to which participants in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) talk to colleagues about ideas they are exposed to, and what these conversations are like. It will also explore the extent to which participants’ thinking (about education) changes as they experience the MOOC. 

Major world trends including the rise of technology, globalisation, networked knowledge and the increasing urgency of “wicked problems” such as climate change have led many to argue for change in education (e.g. Berry, 2011; Bolstad et al., 2012; Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2012; Claxton, 2013; Gilbert, 2005; Snyder, 2013). We also know that the way our young people interact with the world via technology is very different from any previous generation (Collins & Halverson, 2010; Gardner & Davis, 2014), and that the nature of knowledge, the traditional foundation of education, is also shifting (Biesta, 2007; Cope & Phillips, 2009; Gardner & Davis, 2014; Weinberger, 2011). However, despite this, change in education is slow, often non-existent. Many authors argue that our education system and its underpinning ideas have not co-evolved with the wider society, and, as a result, are no longer “fit for purpose” (e.g. Berry, 2011; Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2012; Collins & Halverson, 2010; Gilbert, 2005; Weinberger, 2011). Unless shift is generated across the network, our education system’s capacity to meet the needs of today’s students will continue to decline. 

While there have been many attempts at reform in education, most of these attempts have been “top down” approaches, involving new “inputs” into the system (new policies, structures, technologies, curriculum, pedagogical approaches, and/or assessment systems). While these approaches may result in superficially new forms of organisation and/or new ways of talking about what happens in the system, they have not produced the kind of system-wide change that is needed (Snyder, 2013). New approaches are needed. 

According to Forte, Humphreys, and Park (2012), educators who belong to, and regularly participate in, professional sharing and discussion in social networks are more likely to participate in reform efforts. Daly (2010) shows that specific subgroups within a network such as education can inhibit or lend support for overall strategies as they are made up of more densely connected networks. This project’s aim is to explore the possible influence of these networks and subgroups on the system as a whole. While some work has been done in this area, it has (so far) been small in scale (and therefore unlikely to affect system wide change), or unable to foster the kind of in-depth interaction and thinking required (for example, the various Twitter-based professional networks available to educators).

This project’s starting point is the idea that change will not come from adding more “inputs” - more administration, more policy, more ideas, and more processes - into the existing system. Rather, change has to come from within the system. Hence, the focus of this project is a within-system initiative designed to produce more – and deeper - interactions between the system’s elements. The idea is that this increased interaction will produce a shift in the way teachers think about education, across the system, and, following from this, new ways of working with past “inputs”. This within-system initiative is the proposed MOOC.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) became popular in 2012 (Daniel, 2013). These free or low cost university courses allow open access to knowledge traditionally only available in formal university degree programmes. MOOCs potentially allow large numbers of people, irrespective of location and/or circumstances, to participate in discussion and engagement with complex ideas.

This project involves developing a MOOC that is designed to make available some “big ideas” about education’s future, and to encourage participants to discuss these ideas with others. The research part of the project is designed to investigate the extent to which exposure to, and debate about, the ideas affects participants’ thinking about education. 

Research Questions

1. Do participants who have voluntarily enrolled in a MOOC discuss the ideas they are exposed to in the MOOC with colleagues and/or family and friends?
2. If they do, how in-depth/ extensive are these conversations?
3. Do these experiences change the way they think about education?

The broader context is to investigate the potential of MOOCs for facilitating within-system change. 

References

• Berry, B. (2011). Teaching 2030: What we must do for our students and our public schools: Now and in the future. New York: Teachers College Press.
• Biesta, G. (2007). Towards the knowledge democracy? Knowledge production and the civic role of the university. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26(5), 467-479. doi: 10.1007/s11217-007-9056-0
• Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a New Zealand Perspective: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
• Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2012). Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Massachusetts: Digital Frontier Press.
• Claxton, G. (2013). What's the point of school?: Rediscovering the heart of education. London: Oneworld Publications.
• Collins, A., & Halverson, R. (2010). The second educational revolution: rethinking education in the age of technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(1), 18-27. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00339.x
• Cope, B., & Phillips, A. (2009). Signs of epistemic disruption: transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal The Future of the Academic Journal: Elsevier Science.
• Daly, A. J. (2010). Social Network Theory and Educational Change: Harvard Education Press.
• Daniel, J. (2013). Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility. Open Education Research, 3(006). 
• de Waard, I., Abajian, S., Gallagher, M. S., Hogue, R., Keskin, N., Koutropoulos, A., & Rodriguez, O. C. (2011). Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(7). 
• Forte, A., Humphreys, M., & Park, T. (2012). Grassroots Professional Development: How Teachers Use Twitter Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
• Gardner, H., & Davis, K. (2014). The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Gilbert, J. (2005). Catching the Knowledge Wave? The Knowledge Society and the future of education. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
• Snyder, S. (2013). The simple, the complicated, and the complex: educational reform through the lens of complexity theory. OECD Publishing, 96. 
• Weinberger, D. (2011). Too Big to Know. New York: Basic Books.

Buzzwords are not enough

Visitors to Hobsonville Point Secondary School's beautiful, new modern learning environment are often distracted by the broad open spaces, the bright furniture. However, visiting the school with students in action leaves one with a completely different experience of a modern learning environment. Here are just two examples from my teaching for term three that illustrates this point.

What's a Squircle?

This module combined visual arts and mathematics. Students were exploring geometric properties of shapes, and using these to create screen prints. Using translation, rotation, reflection and in some cases, enlargement, students have created their own tessellations. Students then took a step further and completed a detailed write up, explaining the mathematical principals behind their work of art. 

Student work from 'What's a Squircle?'

 Age of Ultron

This module combined social sciences and science. Together, we have been looking at some of the ideas that sit behind artificial intelligence. In science, we unpacked some of the ideas around circuits including components of circuits, insulators, conductors, types of circuits etc. In other words, the very basic physical aspects of how machines, including smart machines are constructed. Steve Mouldey, my social science co-teacher for this module looked at the sustainability aspects of the rise of the machine, including automation and smart machines. He touched on ideas around economic, social and environmental sustainability. Student learning experiences in this module included modelling of Moore's law and the related chess board problem (see video and images below). We had the team from Thought-Wired in to talk to our students about machine learning. as well as playing with some breadboards, Arduino and also making some wobblebots (checkout the Mindkits website for gear). We deconstructed old computers and servers. Students have even had a go at constructing various parts of a policy statement for New Zealand regarding Artificial Intelligence. 

Student work from 'Age of Ultron'

So what?

I know that the students in 'Age of Ultron' were not just engaged in deep thinking about current, topical ideas, they were engaging with evolving ideas (we have a timeline constructed in class where we track artificial intelligence news as it is released throughout this module). The students were constructing ideas and questions together in spaces and ways where there is no textbook telling them about a single answer, or how to think. These students were dealing with the true complexity of the real world, not some contrived, oversimplified, fake version, and this includes everything from policy statements, killer robots, and even the ethical and social implications of sex robots. In contrast, the students in 'What's a Squircle?' were using existing knowledge of geometry, translation, rotation, properties of shapes etc. to create new meaning, new ideas, new interpretations. Students were not just replicating a method, they explored a method and applied it to create something completely new. Throughout the process, students were able to experience the real problems that occur when physically applying rational mathematical concepts. Students could recognise how two disciplines could find a way to work together.

Intended as a brief snap shot of my practice from last term, I realise that I could easily have turned this post into a buzzword bingo experience. Maker Ed? Check! Authentic and relevant context? Check! Learning from experts (other than teachers)? Check! Project based learning? Check! Elements of design thinking? Check! Blended learning? Check! Robotics and coding? Check! Assessment for learning? Check. Again, much like only looking at the beautiful modern learning environment spaces of schools like Stonefields, Hobsonville Point or Albany Senior, none of these genuinely capture the true complexity of what is going on. Too often in education, we grab the buzzword by the handle, and we leave the very important thinking, the bulk of the suitcase behind (thanks to Creativity Inc. for this metaphor). We look for answers, for recipes, for programmes, rather than actually engaging with the deeper thinking about what is going on, for our students, in the world, in the future. What would our practice look like if rather than talking trends, rolling out literacy programmes and preparing students for the working world (one that is changing so rapidly that this almost seems meaningless)?

The two modules above certainly tick many of the boxes around modern learning practice. I also know that the students were for the most part, highly engaged, they were learning and enjoying it. But is this enough? I hope that the learning experiences that I design changes the way the students think. I hope that the learning experiences I design enables students to collaborate, not just cooperate. I hope that students can recognise diversity (in people, in information, in knowledge, disciplines, experiences, etc.), learn from, and draw on the strengths and weaknesses. I hope to help students discover their passions, so that they may turn them into purpose. I hope to help students tackle challenges, to create brighter futures for themselves, for each other, and the world. I hope that I awake intellectual curiosity and determination. 

Given these hopes, there is no literacy programme roll out that will cover it, and no buzzword without the bulk of its meaning and context that will allow me success. There is no recipe that will allow me to meet these goals. There is however Dr Seuss; "Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!". Here's to term four being about taking the thinking about my practice to a whole new level. Join me?

Failing outside the car park

Failure is just a first attempt in learning. If you've never failed, you've never lived. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be” – John Wooden “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” - Ken Robinson “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” - Gena Showalter.

There is not shortage of inspirational quotes about failure. There is also no shortage of videos, books, blog posts or magazine articles about it either. Yet, failure still has a punch in the stomach feel to it. We still avoid failure. We minimise failure. We use failsafes so that we are less likely to fail. We help, guide, rescue others so that they do not have to deal with failure. Even as we spout inspirational quotes about failure, we try our best to avoid it.

Recently, I had to venture out of my comfort zone to experience some rather public failure. As a 28 year old, I had to learn to drive a manual car from scratch. Being a fairly competent learner of new things in many other areas, I started with my growth mindset switch engaged, as usual. I even got myself a new set of learner plates for the car, proudly sporting the fact that I was learning something new. My attitude paid off relatively well whilst driving around in my local shopping mall car park. But then, the real world. Stalling whilst trying to pull away at the traffic lights that resulted in many loud honks. Or, not stalling, taking my time to pull away calmly, and still being honked at for taking too long. Having to ask for help from others because I can't take myself for a driving lesson or learn how to drive from Khan Academy (yet). Scratching my new car on my own mailbox in the first week of driving it by myself. All of these events make you feel a bit embarrassed (because I still can't get it right), defensive (because I thought I did the whole sequence of handbrake-clutch-petrol right), argumentative (it's not my fault), angry (I'm just learning here, stop honking at me you stupid people, at least I'm trying) and just a general sense of frustration.

Something as simple (and yes, despite the above I am calling this simple) as learning to drive can be so uncomfortable that we sometimes avoid it (I don't feel like a driving lesson now...). We feel angry and upset about it (especially when I scratched the car). If this is how one might feel about driving, how earth can we take risks in schools when learning to drive is this emotional?! How can we innovate if the second we step out of the car park, we let the cars honking from behind put us off? We often feel safe test driving new ideas and innovations in the safety of a car park, but we get flustered, defensive, aggressive and a range of other feelings when we are honked at outside the car park.

But... Would you have told me to quit learning to drive manual because people were honking at me whilst I was learning? Yet we often seem to quit when cars honk in education.

So what do we do about those honking cars?

I am about mid way through a great book called Simple Habits for Complex Times by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston (PS: I am considering buying this book for every leader I know for Christmas, i.e. I think you should read it). One of the ideas from this book that has really struck a chord with me is the idea of safe-to-fail experiments, (as opposed to a failsafe). Where adding in failsafes to a process, we make back up plans and safety nets so that the experiment can not fail us, safe-to-fails do not. Failsafes stop the failure from happening, and in the process, limits the learning. In contrast, a safe-to-fail experiment has no failsafe. In other words, if the experiment fails, we don't 'fix' it, we don't have a back up plan, we literally try something that might fail, and let it fail. It means we learn what happens when it fails. Is that a terrifying idea or what?! Not as terrifying as you might think...

A safe-to-fail experiment is instead, an experiment where if it fails, it is OK, because the purpose of the experiment is to learn. The purpose is not for the experiment to succeed, the purpose is to learn. Again, a scary thought... Shouldn't we be aiming to succeed? Yes! But sometimes, learning is more important. For example, lets say that I would like there to be more diverse perspectives in a particular meeting. A failsafe experiment might see me invite outsiders who I know represent diverse perspectives. Of course, the experiment has a failsafe, I don't want it to go wrong, so I am going to remind them of the events, drop hints, maybe even coach the 'diverse perspectives' a little. I need buy in from some senior managers, it's about being accountable after all. I have also organised some 'back up' people incase my diverse opinions can't make the date. In contrast, safe-to-fail might have me ask questions in the meeting such as 'what other perspectives have we not yet considered?' and 'who has a contrasting opinion about this?'. Then, I would simply sit back and listen to what happens. My little experiment might have worked, it might not have. It doesn't matter, because either way, I will learn more about how the group responds to different perspectives.

It is small, it is safe, and it is just as likely to go wrong as it is likely to go right. But, I will definitely learn from the results. And from there, I might upscale my experiment, because I learnt that the group were very receptive to alternate perspectives. Or, I might learn that the group struggled to generate alternate perspectives so my next experiment might be targeted there. Either way, I know more and so, can make a better decision about where to next, what to try next, what experiment next.

Some people talk about failing forward, I like to think about this as experimenting forward. But more importantly, it might be a means by which in education, a system in which we desperately need and want to see change but we are honked at by parents, politicians, communities who fear failure, we might experiment safely. Maybe, by using safe-to-fail experiments, we might learn to drive outside the car park without being honked at too loudly. And maybe this way, we might learn about the ideas and people that underpin our faculties, our schools and their communities, the relationships that shape and guide them, the tails that wag the dogs. We all know that you can't really solve a problem until you understand it. So, until we really learn about and understand our systems, our initiatives, our ideas, our failsafes will keep resulting in us finding mediocre solutions because we have not really learnt about the problems enough. Our innovations and experiments will be limited in reach, they will be bandaids, not arcs.

PS: I can drive a manual now... outside the car park. Join me?

Subject teacher identity crisis

I was super excited when just before the holidays, this topic won the poll for #edchatNZ night:

What's the point of subjects in an age of wicked problems where collaboration rather than isolation will help us solve them? 

The archive for the chat is here and the 10 minute debrief podcast will be here in a few weeks with our other podcasts.

So what is the point of subjects? Or learning areas? Except for at university, it's not like we ever experience situations that require our subject knowledge in isolation. And anyways, what percentage of the students that we teach in this way become academics? And on top of that, so much of what students have to learn at school is completely google-able. So what exactly is the point of memorising something that you will just google later anyway to check that you have remembered it correctly? And who decides what students need to learn anyways? There are entire fields of knowledge that are completely excluded from the school curriculum, despite their enormous relevance and importance. And then, most students still learn subjects in isolation, despite the academic world currently contending with the fact that the traditional disciplines are not sufficient for our current world. Things like climate change, sport psychology, biomedical engineering and more span many disciplines and can not be viewed under the umbrella of a single academic discipline. And on top of all of that, the sheer volume of human knowledge is expanding at an enormous rate, one that means we add more an more into textbooks but understand less and less in great depth. (For an extended argument of how knowledge has changed, with references, see the summary of my reading below).

The question then becomes, what exactly should we be teaching? And for me, in a school with more flexibility that anywhere else in the country, what should I be endeavouring to teach? How should I teach it given the shifts in knowledge and academics? What is best for my students? Will they be disadvantaged if I do not teach them to value knowledge and the disciplines in the way that society has thus far? Or, will they be disadvantaged if I do teach them in this way? What should be prioritised?

All of this is enough to give a subject teacher an identity crisis. And it appears that to some extent I am having one. For some time now, I have felt uncomfortable with calling myself just a maths or science teacher. I feel that what I do and what I teach, is so much broader that the narrow image that people often apply outside of education. At Hobsonville Point I have worked alongside social science teachers, physical education and health teachers, visual arts teachers, dance teachers and more. As a result, I often end up teaching about these things too, combing my subject knowledge in ways that give problems more meaning. More often than not though, I have no idea about many of the things that our students have questions about, even in my subject areas. Considering that our students have asked questions that stumped climatologists, have been the kind of questions you could do a doctorate about, it's hardly surprising that I often can not answer them. What I can do though, and I like to think I do this well, is teach them how to find out. Now lots of teachers teach research. But I would like to push things a little further...

I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that having done science is pretty useless on its own. So is having done maths or social science. A bold statement I know, but let me explain. You are presented with a problem. It might be a small problem, it might be a large problem, it might even be a wicked problem. I can then draw on 'the way we think or act in science' to help me solve the problem. For example, I might make a hypothesis, collect data, analyse the data and then draw a conclusion. This allows me to determine whether my hypothesis is true or false. However, we all know full well know that in an organisation, country or community where we have to make decisions on behalf of others, that an understanding of different perspectives becomes useful. Hence, I might draw on the way that social scientists use knowledge to add a different lens to my data that I collected. I might view the data from different perspectives. Either way, the problem did not require me to remember some facts, but rather, it required me to draw on different ways of thinking. In this way, the old subject hierarchy disappears too, because rather than thinking that English or Science is more important than Performing Arts, in this way, we recognise that each has a particular way of thinking that can be employed as needed.

To get back to the idea of 'helping students to find out'... More and more I have been thinking about how I might get my students to do something more meaningful that simply consume the knowledge of others. To move beyond shallow research projects. What would it look like if my students were producing knowledge, if what they were finding out was not google-able because that knowledge simply didn't yet exist? What if my students were able to draw on the different ways of thinking from the diverse disciplines to combine them in unique and novel ways, to generate new ways of knowing, new things to know, to solve complex problems, to answer beautiful questions, or one day, maybe solve a wicked problem?

Blue hexagons are science ideas whilst social science hexagons are ideas from social sciences. The yellow post it notes explain the links between the ideas on hexagons.

Summary of notes about the nature of knowledge:

Networked knowledge

One of the contributing factors to the need for a systemic change in our education system is the change that knowledge has undergone since the establishment of our education system. For much of the history of formal education, reproduction of existing knowledge has been one of its core goals (Bolstad et al., 2012). This is evident in the approach that schools and teachers brought to the implementation of the current New Zealand Curriculum.  The release of the current New Zealand Curriculum document saw the introduction of the ‘front end’, a range of future focussed outcomes. However, it was found that teachers were more likely to engage with the ‘back end’, the achievement objectives relating to content, rather than the future focused outcomes (Hipkins, 2009).   As mentioned previously, the educational ideas from Plato’s Republic underpin much of our education system today, and as such; Plato’s ideas of knowledge to some extent underpin our education systems. This is evident in the presence of the academic curriculum, which is often creditedto Plato, a curriculum based on the best of human knowledge (Gilbert, 2005). However, the arrival of the Knowledge Age has meant that the nature of knowledge has fundamentally changed (Gilbert, 2005; Weinberger, 2011) need more sources, hence, suggesting a need for a change in our approach to knowledge in schools. As Weinberger (2011) puts forward; “Our most important institutions are being shaken by questions about knowledge that we thought were as firmly settled as those institutions’ marble and concrete foundations” (Weinberger, 2011)

The Changing Nature of Knowledge 

Where knowledge has previously been described as limited, true, actionable, the new nature of knowledge can be considered to be networked, dynamic, exponential and diverse (Bolstad et al., 2012; Gilbert, 2007; Weinberger, 2011).

Networked 

The new nature of knowledge is that it has become increasingly networked, or as Gilbert and Bolstad (2008) puts it, knowledge is “a product of networks”. Consequently, as Weinberger (2011) argues, the non linear nature of knowledge means that it has become “too big to know”.  Layered on top of the network is what Weinberger (2011) calls filtering forward rather than out. He illustrates this with the following example; in the past, knowledge was carefully edited for publishing in a journal or a book. Hence the publishing industry acted to a large extent as a filter, filtering much out. Bookstores and libraries then also applied a further filter. We were limited by what ‘fit’. This is further evidence with findings from the Andres, Zenter, and Zenter (2014) from the World Bank who found that internet growth in a country led to reduced consumption of paper used for newspapers and printing. In contrast to the confinement of knowledge to printed mediums, Weinberger (2011) explains that today we are more likely to filter forward than out, what doesn’t make it through the filter is often just a few clicks away in the background. In other words, at no point is knowledge filtered out, but rather filters share a node in the network, each node still connected to the easily accessible vast network of knowledge. Add to this, that our knowledge is no longer limited to the final refined, edited, reworked professionally published versions (Weinberger, 2011), but that we share ideas in their infancy, we share drafts, alpha and beta versions. In fact, some go as far as advocating for sharing the draft versions, the process of their work (Kleon, 2014) whilst others suggest that the networked medium means that we can share explanations of knowledge, making it more accessible intellectually (Barker, 2000). Thus, the network allows us gain more complete knowledge, however, at all time confronting us with the idiom of pulling on a loose that results in more and more unravelling.

Dynamic and Exponential 

Of course, if we are no longer publishing only the final versions, and we are no longer limited to publishing through traditional publishers, the rate at which knowledge grows is bound to escalate. The Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC was believed to house the sum of human knowledge  (Cukier & Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013).  By comparison, YouTube suggest that 300 hours of video is upload to their site every minute (YouTube, 2015).  In schools, we can see this trend occur too. In 2012 there were only two schools with a creative commons policy, whilst in 2015 the number was nearing one hundred (McGregor, 2015). Even the volume of scholarly journals have seen an increase, the average length of articles increasing by 80% from 1975 to 2007 (Cope & Phillips, 2009). Of course the nature of how scholarly articles are being distributed and published is also changing. As Cope andPhillips (2009) indicate, and as is echoed by Weinberger (2011), reports, conference proceedings, drafts published to personal websites and blogs are becoming increasingly popular over journal articles due to their immediacy and more often than not, open access. Adding to the growth of scholarly knowledge, is the increasing contributions from corporations (Cope & Phillips, 2009). This is bound to increase again with the rise of big data, as corporations seek to make sense of the increasing amount of data they have collected. As Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger (2013) points out, big data allows us to “experiment faster and explore more leads.” Hence, the pace at which the sum of human knowledge is growing by leaps and bounds (Sardar, 2010a), but also the immediacy with which it is needed and used bears further clues to the changing nature of knowledge.

Diverse 

A further quality of knowledge is that it has become increasingly diverse. More diverse groups are generating knowledge and more diverse knowledge is produced. As pointed out above, knowledge is no longer produced largely by universities and research institutes. Instead, as well as schools, hospitals, corporations and government, social networks are now commonly being utilised for knowledge creation, as it facilitates collaboration between scholars and amateurs (Biesta, 2007; Cope & Phillips, 2009). As a result, the diversity of those creating knowledge has shifted. Cope and Phillips (2009) call this a democratisation of knowledge.  Of course, there is a second level of diversity that comes into play here, that of knowledge itself becoming increasingly diverse. Some argue that knowledge produced from universities still holds the epistemological monopoly (Biesta, 2007), additionally, academic journals are characterised by their discipline or sub-discipline (Cope & Phillips, 2009). However, despite these more formal knowledge institutions, Cope and Phillips (2009) draws our attention to the fact that rise of interdisciplinary fields and problems such as climate change has led to the breakdown of these epistemological and disciplinary barriers. Thus, not only have the types of knowledge increased in diversity, but also the cross over between disciplines. Outside of academia, there is also enormous diversity in knowledge, as Weinberger (2011) puts it, “we can see – or at least are led to suspect – that every idea is contradicted somewhere on the web”. Even in statistics, big data shows us those data points that sit outside what we think we know, as a result adopting correlation rather than cause (Cukier & Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013).  It is these ideas about the diversity of knowledge that might lead to experts such as Bolstad et al. (2012) to argue that “21st century citizens need to be educated for diversity – in both the people sense and the knowledge/idea sense.” Both the nature of knowledge and those participating in its creation is diversifying.

Refereces

• Andres, L., Zenter, A., & Zenter, J. (2014). Measuring the Effect of Internet Adoption on Paper Consumption World Bank Policy Research  
• Barker, S. (2000). The End of Argument: Knowledge and the Internet. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 33(2), 154-181.  
• Biesta, G. (2007). Towards the knowledge democracy? Knowledge production and the civic role of the university. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 26(5), 467-479. doi: 10.1007/s11217-007-9056-0 
• Bolstad, R., Gilbert, J., McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a New Zealand Perspective: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. 
• Cope, B., & Phillips, A. (2009). Signs of epistemic disruption: transfomrations in the knowledge system of the academic journal The Future of the Academic Journal: Elsevier Science. 
• Cukier, K., & Mayer-Schoenberger, V. (2013). The Rise of Big Data: How it's Changing the Way We Think about the World. In M. Pitici (Ed.), The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014 (Vol. 92, pp. 28): Princeton University Press. 
• Gilbert, J. (2005). Catching the Knowledge Wave? The Knowledge Soceity and the future of education.Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Gilbert, J. (2007). Knowledge, the disciplines, and learning in the Digital Age. Educational Research for Policy and Practice, 6(2), 115-122. doi: 10.1007/s10671-007-9022-1 
• Gilbert, J., & Bolstad, R. (2008). Disciplining and Drafting, or 21st Century Learning? Rethinking the New Zealand Senior Secondary Curriculum for the Future. Wellington: NZCER Press. 
• Gilbert, J., Bull, A., Stevens, L., & Giroux, M. (2015). On the Edge: Shifting Teachers' Paradigms for the Future. In TLRI (Ed.), (pp. 18): TLRI. Hine, D. (2014, 6 March). 
• What good is information?aeon.  Retrieved 15 July, 2015, from http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-problem-with-too-much-information/
• Hipkins, R. (2009). Reshaping the secondary school curriculum: Building the plane while flying it? National Survey of Secondary Schools 2009. Wellington. 
• Kleon, A. (2014). Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered: Workman Publishing Company. 
• McGregor, M. (2015, 14 July). [Creative Commons Data]. 
• Sardar, Z. (2010a). Welcome to postnormal times. Futures, 42(5), 435-444. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.028
• Sardar, Z. (2010b). Welcome to the postnormal times. Futures, 42, 435-444. doi: 10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.028 
• Weinberger, D. (2011). Too big to know. New York: Basic Books. YouTube. (2015). Statistics.   Retrieved 15 July, 2015, from https://http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html
• Zucker, J. (2014). World Views: Creating Significance of Learning in the Classroom. The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies, 71(1).