This week I was at the Consortium of School Networking Conference (CoSN) in Virginia. The theme of this year’s conference was leadership, policy, and innovation. The presentations and conversations I had at the conference brought all of these themes in focus for me.
Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, was the closing keynote speaker for the conference. In a private reception, he talked about how in business what is valued is novelty, nuance and customization and how it is ironic that the current trend in school is that we emphasize routines, right answers and standardization. He talked about how these are the wrong things to emphasize during our new global economy. Technology is doing more and more of the left brain work we used to do. Right brain thinking is harder to replicate. The Internet has made facts ubiquitous and free therefore they don’t matter as much.
In the closing keynote he talked about the following six aptitudes needed for career success and personal satisfaction: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, and Play. These aptitudes overlapped with what was discussed on the panel discussion I moderated on ultraportable devices. The panel was made up of Leslie Wilson, from the One-to-One Institute, Gary Stager, Susan Einhorn, from the Anytime Anywhere Foundation, and Sam Farsaii from the Irving School District. One of the things that came out of the panel discussions is that these machines are not made to be smaller clones of the desktop computers we are used to. As Gary Stager said, “They are not made to run Microsoft Office, and Novell”. Instead their design is centered around making the very things that Daniel Pink was talking about possible for students on a global scale.
It is interesting that we live in a time when our economy needs students with right brain abilities yet our current policies are in conflict with this. In his article, Framing Constructivism in Practice as the Negotiation of Dilemmas: An Analysis of the Conceptual, Pedagogical, Cultural and Political Challenges Facing Teachers, Windschitl (2002) identifies three barriers that teachers have to overcome to evolve into constructivist teaching; conceptual, pedagogical and political. Conceptual barriers have to do with understanding the theory and making it personal. Pedagogical barriers have to do with designing curriculum and constructivist experiences. Political barriers have to do with what Windschitl calls “educational conservatism”. He describes the process as “negotiating for authority and support to teach for understanding” (p. 133). The pressures educators feel from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) would be a good example of political pressures that actually work against implementing constructivist theory into the classroom. In many school systems, this legislation has resulted in increased pressure to follow rigid curriculums that are designed to help students perform well on standardized tests. These types of curriculum support traditional literacies, but often leave little room for higher-order thinking, new media literacies or 21st Century Skills, the things that laptops and ultraportables are best suited for.
Daniel Pink talked about how we need to give teachers and students more autonomy. He said, "When you give motivated teachers autonomy, extraordinary things happen".
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