The Front Lawn
Saving the World through Educational TechnologyArchive for creativity
Categorizing the Tools We Use
I hadn’t really thought too much about a hierarchy of the many educational tools available to us until I read Elizabeth Helfant’s most recent post about it on her excellent blog Art of Contemporary Learning. Do read the post.
The first three categories Elizabeth highlights involve web tools and appear to be based to a large degree on the factors of participation and specificity by and for the students. Level one tools are content management tools like Moodle and Blackboard. Level two tools are participatory including wikis, blogs etc. Level three tools require more creativity, may be less text-based, and allow for portability via embeds. Beyond that the tools are categorized by how they are are used in class; these include student work-flow and assessment tools.
Thank you, Elizabeth for sharing this model and soliciting feedback on it. It got me to thinking, and the way I perceive it, there’s actually a lot of overlap among the different categories. For example, if a wiki is used as a formative assessment tool with multimedia, fair use citations, collaborative discussions, and other embeddable objects, what level does that fall under? If we apply these tools without using them as some sort of formal or informal assessment then why are we using them at all? It helped me to think about it in a more Venn-ish way to represent how these things might layer up to create a powerful learning experience. Call it the CPA model, if you want, for creative, participatory, and assessed.
Seems like we could throw several other circles in there for collaborative, problem-based, and contextual, to name a few, if we wanted to build the mother of all Venns. If anything it highlights the complexity of digital-age pedagogy necessary to prepare students to handle the complexity of our 21st-century problems.
A model of digital-age learning
Why do we Teach That?
In a talk at ASB Un-plugged, Bruce Dixon from the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation shared a key point in any discussion about why we need to urgently transform teaching and learning to a 21st century environment. Bruce says The Dilemma is that while we continue to put more and more effort into testing kids and teaching to those tests, these very skills that are tested are the easiest to automate. These are skills that the people who learn them will be out competed by a computer in the near future, if not tomorrow. Why do we continue to work in this model? Because the cult of information that our leaders are members of think that the deluge of information provided by simple standardized tests actually tells them something meaningful.
Education places an unbalanced emphasis on the left brain. In an article on Left Brain/Right Brain intelligence, Dan Eden claims that more students enter schools as “right brained” students than leave the schools. He suggest that schools actually rewire students brains to be more logical and academically driven, thus students become more left-brained the longer they stay in school. Some never make the switch. The correlation with Bruce Dixon’s big dilemma of course is that we are turning students into less creative, more orderly and logical beings, which is exactly the skill that computers are also very good at, arguably better.
Many argue that in the future, the skills that will truly be valued in humans are the more right-brained, creative skills. Computers will more exclusively occupy those logical, planning, organizational tasks that many humans are just not that good at. What are the potential costs and obstacles of refocusing our educational systems to be more supportive of a right-brained education?
One burning question I have is that while computers are often touted as a vehicle for being more creative, they may just as well require us to become more logical in order to operate them. This is purely anecdotal, and just a thought, but I wonder how different software programs and operating systems might appeal to people with a different brain “handedness?”
