[P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement

Fri Oct 18 13:37:39 CEST 2013

Dante-Gabryell --

This is wonderful stuff.  I know of Mitra's work and find it exciting.  Some of us in the UN Commons Cluster are working on these ideas as well and how they fit into education of and about all the Commons.

But as a 30+ year (Western-US) teacher and the founder of the Transformative Education Forum , I would caution at the over-enthusiasm of the computer-focused translation of this idea of "learner-centered".  It is clearly an amazing and freeing tool in countless ways besides providing the "Library of the World" to any child, nearly anywhere with access to one.  But it reduces dangerously the historical, pedagogical and epistemological theories of learning and the human child themselves, down to dangerously reductive concepts of what in fact is most important "to learn".  Whose "information" gets processed and with what underlying results?

It is one of my deepest concerns with the over-promotion of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) in the Western world, dramatically by "education promoting companies" who want to sell this model to everyone else as the US is currently doing promoting "No Child Left Behind" worldwide through the World Bank and Brookings Institute.  But for those of us in the education field all our life, there is definite need to examine these issues, like certain brain theory results accompanying early child exposure to computers as their dominant learner - interaction.  The TEF tries to address this issue of needed complete intelligence development with arts, humanities and especially the social/cultural/emotional learning not developed with this priority or technological "default".

Anyway, more is available on this on the TEF website, but particularly the TEF Principles.  There is a serious caution here about just how much and what exactly, the "machines" can and do teach when used primarily? So much cheaper though, for those trying to go into the field of education for their own profit and on top of it, leaves out those more philosophical, even human justice and equity arguments that actually really matter for children around the world to ultimately make sense of their lives and societies.

Best,
June
June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist

Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum (note website re-work, so ignore "non-standard" notification :-)
Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign 
Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association 
Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education 
Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development
Member, UN Commons Cluster

________________________________
 From: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
To: p2p-foundation <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org> 
Sent: Friday, October 18, 2013 4:03 AM
Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Wired : learner centered movement

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 2:16 AM
Subject: Wired : learner centered movement
To: "econowmix at googlegroups.com" <econowmix at googlegroups.com>, "netention-dev at googlegroups.com" <netention-dev at googlegroups.com>, "global-survival at googlegroups.com" <global-survival at googlegroups.com>

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/

a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. 

entire article : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/

student centered movement : http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/

" TED has created a toolkit full of ideas for jumpstarting student-centered learning in your home, local community, or school. It’s called SOLE: How to Bring Self-Organized Learning Environments to Your Community. Download it here and share your story afterward on the SOLE Tumblr."
further large excerpts :

Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process. 
...
“If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,” Mitra says, “like bees around a flower.”
A charismatic and convincing proselytizer, Mitra has become a darling in the tech world. In early 2013 he won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, to pursue his work.  
He’s now in the process of establishing seven “schools in the cloud,” five in India and two in the UK. In India, most of his schools are single-room buildings. There will be no teachers, curriculum, or separation into age groups—just six or so computers and a woman to look after the kids’ safety. His defining principle: “The children are completely in charge.”
Mitra argues that the information revolution has enabled a style of learning that wasn’t possible before.
...
Mitra’s work has roots in educational practices dating back to Socrates. Theorists from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi to Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori have argued that students should learn by playing and following their curiosity.

...
In recent years, researchers have begun backing up those theories with evidence. In a 2011 study, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Iowa scanned the brain activity of 16 people sitting in front of a computer screen.

...
The study found that when the subjects controlled their own observations, they exhibited more coordination between the hippocampus and other parts of the brain involved in learning and posted a 23 percent improvement in their ability to remember objects. “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one who’s controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well,” says lead researcher Joel Voss, now a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.

...
A similar study at UC Berkeley demonstrated that kids given no instruction were much more likely to come up with novel solutions to a problem. “The science is brand-new, but it’s not as if people didn’t have this intuition before,” says coauthor Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.
Gopnik’s research is informed in part by advances in artificial intelligence. If you program a robot’s every movement, she says, it can’t adapt to anything unexpected. But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says.
...
Evolutionary psychologists have also begun exploring this way of thinking. Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”

Some school systems have begun to adapt to this new philosophy—with outsize results. In the 1990s, Finland pared the country’s elementary math curriculum from about 25 pages to four, reduced the school day by an hour, and focused on independence and active learning. By 2003, Finnish students had climbed from the lower rungs of international performance rankings to first place among developed nations.

...
Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”

...
But these examples—involving only thousands of students—are the exceptions to the rule. The system as a whole educates millions and is slow to recognize or adopt successful innovation. It’s a system that was constructed almost two centuries ago to meet the needs of the industrial age. Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented.
...
Want to help teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa make a difference? Here’s how you can get involved in the student-centered movement.

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net 

Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ 

_______________________________________________
P2P Foundation - Mailing list
http://www.p2pfoundation.net
https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/p2p-foundation/attachments/20131018/ea63127d/attachment-0001.htm 