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(1a) Learning will be significantly more global.
We already have schools running "windows on the world" Skype screens on classrooms walls, with Skype or FaceTime bars at the back of classrooms, we have an International Baccalaureate, universities and some schools have overseas campuses or allied institutions, workplace learning is already in multinational insitutions. Schools are Quadblogging with the other schools around the world for audience, and much more.
We are saying that working / learning with other children / students daily will seem as natural as wearing T shirts from China, or watching live sport from Sochi. So we would welcome thoughts and suggestions for moving more rapidly towards this increasingly global world of learning - whether they are simple pragmatic ideas like this primary school YouTube clip, to more national policies like exploring an education alliance with a mass of likeminded nations to build scale that could survive in this global learning economy.
please tweet using #etag1a, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 1a
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Learning will be significantly more global"
(1b) Servers and services will be cloud based...
...with, by today's standards, colossal amounts of data stored for each individual - lifelogging et al - identity, curation, community and ownership all become ever more important. That data will accompany them throughout their learning lives.
There is a lot to reflect on here: how networks need to evolve in learning organisations given the personal device ownership (2b, below), the role of multiple identities, maybe the greater role of unique student identifiers, the private / public mix of this given the rise-and-fall nature of huge on-line services and the poor record of public large scale computer systems. And then of course broader issues like whether a cloud based future leads us to a learner, rather than an institutional, centric future? And a balance between privacy and the entitlement to an enduring record, the potential for meta-institutions, the opportunities for tiny collaborating ones too. Obviously this also links into big data - see elsewhere here, but try to keep your contributions focussed if you can.
please tweet using #etag1b, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 1b
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Servers and services will be virtualised / cloud based"
(1c) On-line learning for all - as an entitlement
By 2025 our learners will do some, or even sometimes all, of their learning on-line. As we have already seen during various weather crises, working at a distance, from home, or connected to overseas branches, or simply seeking expert support, is already a reality for many employed and studying in Europe. As a nation we have an honourable track record of this - with for example the OU or Campus 2000 all predating the World Wide Web.
By 2025 or sooner, should this be considered an entitlement - as in some other parts of the world already? On-line in this context is not a sub-set of located learning, but is something different - a skill to be honed, social mores to be learned, esteem and confidence to be built. But the question is: what kind of on-line learning - the skills needed here include the ability to build mutuality and collegiality with distant collaborators and this will not happen if the on-line experience is simply individualised and solitary, however gamified and engaging it is.
"And what is the entitlement? Is it 10% or 20% or whatever percent? Is it a complete on-line course? Is it evidenced in outcomes rather than participation?" How should quality assurance at university level and inspection at school level value on-line engagement and collaboration? Can we radically approach workplaced learning?
please tweet using #etag1c, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 1c
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Some on-line learning for all - as an entitlement "
(2a) Students with sight & control of their own complex learning "big" data
Highly effective institutions already use data to understand progress, set goals and discuss learning. But often the data is owned by the institution and not shared with students immediately. As with patients in health, we think students will have sight and control of their own very complex learning data. And that data will be rich, multivariate and powerfully diagnostic. They will understand their own data, be able to act on it directly, have a sense of "where I am" relative to others now, to preceding learners, to international competitors, to the younger learners behind them, and so on.
Of course this is underpinned with a whole debate about what do we mean by learning - this Pisa graph suggests that our enjoyment of a subject may be as important as our tested success in it for an economy's, or a learner's, future. Knowing how you compare to others and what "better" actually looks like should be important. Maybe rather than a debate about "Whose data is it anyway?" we should explore "how do we create student demand for ownership of their learning data".
Lots to think about here...
please tweet using #etag2a, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 2a
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Students with sight & control of their own complex learning big data"
(2b) Technology will be even more personal.
It will be more portable, wearable, printed, embedded whatever - the key thing here is that it will belong to the learners. We will be firmly in the world of Bring a Browser and not "use our system", with a default of "always on everywhere" that is 24/7 (See strand 1b, above).
With wearable and personal, "powering down" or "we don't use them here" will not be an option ("take off your smart glasses!?") so the challenge for education is to take best advantage of the opportunity. We can't "lock and block", we can't "ban and wait", we can't appropriate each technology with a "standard" acceptable version. Of course this means learning spills out significantly more into the "non institutional time" in family and community. But as it does so, the consequences of being "off line" at home, or having parents who were "off line" could be damaging. We use pupil premium to intervene for equity - should that include home connectivity? And how does "secure assessment" fit in a world of diverse personal ownership? What advantage can we take of the opportunity that personal ownership brings?
Well, lots to think about here too...
please tweet using #etag2b, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 2b
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Technology will be even more personal"
(3a) We will know a LOT more about how we learn.
Rapid technological advances imply that the impact of learning research will be potentially very considerable - children will be able to learn "better", faster, to learn and retain more, to collaborate and problem solve more effectively, to be better placed to support each other, to better evidence learning through doing (as with video analysis in sport), better exchange of effective practice globally. Cognitive science, biological research, nutrition, and more are shedding / will shed considerable light on the complexities of learning performance and open entirely new possibilities.
A lot of these "better learning" strategies have been enabled by technology: examples might include personalised revision strategies, the on-line support of social media communities, the diagnostic and comparative personal and shared big data we get back as we learn, doing real time analysis and varying the challenge / feedback through an algorithm built around current cognitive science understanding, targeted nutrition for learning...
Cue debate about what is Learning, of course, but the point we seem to agree on is that we can and will be better at it. At which point an allied debate surrounds what we do with that improvement: shorten the process (graduate at 19, 20?), fit more in (which is what has happened historically perhaps), substantial equity gains, value broader exemplifications of learning? Leaving more space for creativity and play? Or do we look to see, for the first time, just how good all learners could be given the applied focus of everything we know?.
please tweet using #etag3a, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 3a
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Will will know a LOT more about how we learn"
(3b) Better measures of performance
Well, of course, all these cluster items overlap. Big Data and student autonomy within it will be a component of performance measurement, on-line opens new possibilities, real time and diagnostic, wearable technology opens the door to tracking learning in unexpected ways.
But historically simplistic measures of performance will be changed and challenged by the other certainties about technologies' impact in the next few years. So questions here would include: whether we can accredit and progress collaborative endeavour better, how or if we should measure ingenuity and creativity, whether citation in a world of peer referencing can or should retain its credibility, how we archive performance for children who have not traditionally had an enduring record of their successes, how our measures of performance are (or even should be) congruent with other nations', and much more.
For many of us on the ETAG with long experience, the history of the impact of new technology on learning has been a progression from "can we use it to do something we need?" to "it can do anything, what would you LIKE to do?". And it seems appropriate to ask the question here around measures of performance: what would we LIKE to do, and how do we move to there?
please tweet using #etag3b, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 3b
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "Better measures of performance"
(3c) New emerging teaching and learning
As we learn more about learning, and get better space design with more appropriate FF&E, with richer data, and as our learners get a louder voice in shaping their teaching and learning, and we swap effective practice around the world, we are seeing real change in teaching and learning. Arguably the impact of this on equity worldwide, as emerging economies step forward without legacy systems, has been greater than the impact on social mobility back home.
Perhaps especially in technology rich learning we have seen everything from mixed age and stage not age learning, from superclasses and one to one on-line support, to the extension into 'non institutional" time by computing clubs. We are seeing a significant growth in work placed degrees, apprenticeships, and also in all-through schoools for example. As technology transforms our learning further a blurring of institutional boundaries seems a plausible result with some remarkable possibilities.
The powerful engine of teachers' collegiality and sharing through their TeachMeets and huge twitter communities seem to be leading innovation for many schools, colleges, and universities.
Perhaps in this item in particular colleagues will have plenty to say on the accidental barriers preventing a more rapid adoption of effective practice. We do have a wide variety of school types - from UTCs to parent led free schools, and universities already have a rich variety from the OU through Oxbridge to Birkbeck, that ought to offer fertile ground for rapid progress.
please tweet using #etag3c, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 3c
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished
please try to stay focussed on "New emerging teaching and learning"
Most of the above is without surprise - there is very broad agreement that those are indeed directions in which we are heading. Indeed for most of them it is not hard to find existing examples of institutions that are already there, or largely there.
However, our brief was to be bold and we don't want to exclude the braver ideas. An example as we discussed this was that although the UK has not had much of a track record of langauge learning, perhpas we could be the first to embrace and be really good at machine translation - Douglas Adam's Babel Fish idea does look like a realistic outcome of real-time translation technologies.
So for this section we would welcome braver thoughts and suggestions from all of you, to sit alongside our own thoughts.
please tweet using #etag4, or mail to feedback@etag.support using the subject ETAG 4
suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy
we also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished to help these Wild Card ideas along.
please try to stay focussed on "Wild Card ideas"
and thanks for your input everyone - short and terse helps, bullet points not prose if you can, feel free to point with links to anything relevant to your contrubution and do please keep your eys on the ETAG site for further progress and news
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this page created by Stephen Heppell on Wednesday, February 6, 2014 2:37 AM and last updated Friday, May 2, 2014 11:44 AM
