Future of ICTs and Pedagogy (From USQ Week 15 2014)

I like to take this opportunity to thank you for David for all his effort helping us throughout this semester in EDC3100 ICT & Pedagogy.2014. It has been a great journey learning, God bless you.

3.1 Predicting the future is hard

Predictions about the future are almost entirely wrong. Here are just some of the predictions made by very smart people about how ICTs were going to revolutionise learning and teaching:

• Thomas Edison in 1913 on the potential of movies.

  Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.

• Sidney Pressy from the 1920s on the potential of automatic teaching machines.

  Within the next twenty years special mechanical aids will make mass psychological experimentation commonplace and bring about in education something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. There must be an "industrial revolution" in education in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education.

• Patrick Suppes in 1966 on computer-based learning

  the processing and the uses of information are undergoing an unprecedented technological revolution......One can predict that in a few more years millions of school-children will have access to what Philip of Macedon's son Alexander enjoyed as a royal prerogative: the personal services of a tutor as well-informed and responsive as Aristotle

Why?

There are many reasons for this failure of prediction. We'll focus on two. I encourage you to think about these as you are working on your Part D Essay, reading and watching the following resources and thinking about your future as an educator.

Amara's law

This "law" suggests that

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

We always think that "technology X" is going to have a huge impact in the next year (it usually doesn't) and we struggle to see just how "technology X" may change society in 10 years time.

Schema

Let's return to the T. S. Elliot quote that started this learning path

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.

The way we understand the world is based on our internal schema, which are in turn based on our experience. How we see the future is constrained by our schema. It's difficult for us to break out of our schema, our assumptions.

If it's hard for individuals to break out of their schema, it's even harder for institutions. Schools are based on a set of schema. Tyack and Cuban (1995) describe the "grammar of school" to refer to the set of assumptions or schema that are embedded in how school's operate. Any innovation (e.g. ICTs) which doesn't make sense within that grammar is seen as nonsensical, or very soon gets appropriate and used in a way that makes sense within the grammar of school.

Hence radical change of school becomes difficult. Seymour Paper draw on these ideas to write an article titled "Why school reform is impossible".

3.2 The Horizon Report

What is the K12 Horizon Report?

In short it is an attempt to predict the future of ICTs and Pedagogy in K12 education. It happens every year and attempts to identify and describe "key trends, significant challenges, and emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years". The K12 version of this report is released each June at a conference in the United States.

2014 predictions

The following table gives a summary of the 2014 reports findings. You may like to read the preview report to learn a little more about these terms.

Key Trends	Significant challenges	Technologies
Fast trends - 1 to 2 years Rethinking the roles of teachers Shift to deep learning approaches	Solvable challenges Creating authentic learning opportunities Integrating personalised learning	Adoption in 1 year or less BYOD Cloud computing
Mid-range - 3 to 5 years Increasing focus on open content Increasing use of hybrid learning designs	Difficult challenges Complex thinking and communication Increased privacy concerns	Adoption in 2 to 3 years Games and gamification Learning analytics
Long range - 5 or more years Rapid accelerations of intuitive technology Rethinking how schools work	Wicked challenges Competition from new models of education Keeping formal education relevant	Adoption in 4 to 5 years The Internet of Things Wearable technology

The 2012 K12 Horizon report identified 6 technologies and related time frames in which they will become mainstream in K-12, they are:

• Over the next 12 months
  • Mobile devices and apps.
  • Tablet computing.
• Two to three years
  • Game-based learning.
  • Personal learning environments (PLEs).
• Four to five years
• Augmented reality.
• Natural user interfaces.

3.4 Don't predict the future, create it

Personally, the last of Bigum's (2012) three mindsets resonates with me the strongest. I don't know what the future holds for myself, let alone the nature of formal education and how ICTs will impact upon it. So I don't bother trying to predict the future. If Thomas Edison can get it so wrong about the impact of movies on books, what hope do I have?

Instead I prefer to follow the advice of Alan Kay

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

It is through the engaged efforts of interested educators that the future of ICTs and Pedagogy will be invented. It will arise out of the efforts of you and I. I hope EDC3100 has piqued your interest enough to encourage you to help invent that future, rather than be stuck within what currently passes for the grammar of school.

Future of this course

Over the coming week the future of this course for you probably focuses on completing and submitting your Assignment 3. Just as you finish that, my focus will turn to getting these marked quickly and the final results processed and released. After that planning will commence on how to tweak the course for Semester 2 this year; and, also on what more major changes might be appropriate for the 2015 offerings.

The important role you play

The most important role you can play in the future of this course is to provide feedback on the course via course evaluation process. The feedback you give is valued, analysed and used to drive the future of the course. You can see some evidence of impact via this blog post and this one. I'm hoping this year to spend even more time drawing on your thoughts to improve the course.

You can complete the course evaluation anytime from now until the 11th of July. In fact, I can see that 11 students (2 from Springfield, 2 from Toowoomba and 7 online students) have already completed the course evaluation. The system currently allows me to see how many of you have completed the course evaluation.

Please be assured that I cannot see any responses until after Semester 2 results are released and when those are released there are no indications of who provided the feedback.

Some early thoughts

This semester has been better than any previous offering of this course that I've been involved with. But it's by no means been perfect. As I mentioned way back in the orientation weekthere is no single best way to integrate ICTs with pedagogy. EDC3100 very much remains a work in progress as we work to make it better.

Given that the course evaluations are not complete, that the final results for the course are also not available, and that I haven't undertaken any in-depth reflection on the semester (not unlike what you do for Part D) I don't currently have any firm thoughts on the future of the course. However, there are a collection of vague ideas that will likely be considered. The following provides a brief summary of some.

This blog post from March this year offers one set of early thoughts on issues that could be addressed. More recent thinking includes:

1. More worked/annotated sample assignments.
   
   A bit like some of the samples provided in this learning path, but for assignments 1 and especially 2. Explicit comments on the sample assignments to identify the strengths and weaknesses.
2. More and better organised scaffolding activities and resources around the standards-based unit planning for Assignment 2.
   For example, a Google document with a sample unit plan within it with audio annotations explaining what is good, what is bad and what is expected?
3. More explicit focus on evaluating and improving the ICT-based learning experiences in Assignment 2.
   This tends to get a little lost in concern over how to fill in the unit plan correctly.
4. More focus on students experiencing, experimenting and critiquing applications of ICTs to enhance learning.
   e.g. the spreadsheet modelling of EDC3100 grades as an example of mindtools. Having students look at lessons plans from various sites and critique the integration of ICTs in those lessons.
5. More engagement by teaching staff with student blog posts.
   
   Rather than focus on tweaking the learning paths - spending a lot of time on information dissemination. Spend more time following student posts, identifying good ones and promoting them. Helping correct mis-interpretations etc.
6. The exploration of how peer-based feedback can be used to increase the level of feedback and also the creation of a PLN within the course.
7. How can the "wisdom of the crowds" of EDC3100 students be better harnessed to enhance learning?
   
   With 300 students in the course, there is a lot of collected wisdom. There's a need to share and benefit from that more. e.g. how can the large number of students on Professional Experience in a Year 1 class share their thoughts and ideas?
8. Can learning analytics employed to help guide learning?