A MUST-SEE for Every Educational Administrator in the World
If you have access to an educational administrator at any level, please pass this along.
If you are an administrator, hang on.
I implore you to watch and think about this video. This “kid,” Dan Brown, has nailed what’s going on in the world beyond the borders of traditional educational establishments.
Then, let us know what you think.
All I have to say is WOW! What he said is so true all of the information we need is on line. Billions of dollars can be saved if the educational system would provide a guide for students to go by and let them explore information on the web. Instead of a test students could produce a project containing past present and future facts and concepts about the topic being explored.
This is a very dangerous view on education as it will change the entire infrastructure in education. Their will be little need for buildings, teachers, administrators and so on but this is the current state of need for an educational system that is outdated and has been for the last 10 years. All I can say is get ready and hold on because the wave is coming.
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Michael Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Thanks for your comments, Dhyronn.
Of course, changing anything in the status quo (whatever the subject, time, and place) is always tough, and usually takes longer than you think.
However, I think the access to information and thousands of alternative learning resources is giving lots of people pause when it comes to “traditional” modes of education.
Personally, I find this all very exciting and hope that those who see the very real trends will benefit from the changes in the works.
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Lynde Iozzo Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
That’s pretty funny. It’s the same thing high school teachers have been saying forever. We are required and evaluated on different levels of teaching and how we teach problem solving, and all of the different “modes of learning” styles that students have, visual versus aural, kinesthetic etc. Then when they get to college it’s lecture time, forget multiple styles of learning.
If education were simply learning “facts” I’d agree with this student. However, much of learning is learning processes and mental disciplines of thinking not readily available on the internet.
Add to that that the online school kids that drop into my classroom have zero in the department of social skills.
Add onto that, that students still need to learn saavy when it comes to “facts” on the internet. Hey, I have whole sets of students who believe velcro is grown on farms due to “facts” and information on the internet.
Add onto all of this that I teach in a rural community where three schools have to fight over one lab (which has business classes at all hours) and many of my students do not have online capability at home. Oh, the teachers have the knowledge, but not the access to technology.
Oooh, I’d love to teach online, don’t have to worry about dress code, snotty attitudes or helicopter parents . . . clear proof when things are turned in. Forget about public speaking, or learning how to read, I’m sure it’s all on the internet. The arts, that too, the collaborative process could get dumped– it’s all on the internet, right?
Gee, society will have to pay teachers well enough for them to afford the equipment to get online.
I’m all for technology . . . it’s access to technology that is unequal. Also American students take “free, public” education for granted, while many parts of the world don’t provide education if you are poor or a female. Maybe if compulsory education ended after 8th grade, then they could hold down a job and if they realized they needed more education, they could come back and get it for free instead of wasting their time and the educator’s.
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I don’t think just educational administrators should see this. The Congressmen, Senators, Governors and President should see it. All of our accountability testing and standards ultimately come from them. Until the government realizes that just spouting back facts is not getting these kids anywhere, we will not make any progress. And until we break our kids from wanting to know the “right” answer and let go of safe and easy ways of thinking, we won’t be able to progress to Dan’s level. Somewhere along the way, we let kids think that they can’t be allowed to fail. The kind of education Dan wants is full of failure. Without failure there can be no success. Only in education is failure seen as a bad thing.
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Michael Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Thanks, Nancy, for your comments. And, you’re absolutely right! Any and all decision makers should see Dan’s take on all-things education.
In addition, I find your thoughts on failure enlightening. As a business that’s involved in trying to stay with and just a step ahead of our market (educational technology, teacher professional development, and student tech readiness and assessment), we often are forced to take risks. especially when we have to make educated guesses about where our customers will be a couple of years from now, often when they don’t even know.
Of course, with risk, comes failure… but, learning from a failure and moving forward are simply part of our business life (@SimpleK12 anyway). So, yeah, I’d love to see students be allowed to fail all the time… as long as there’s a process in place to keep them moving forward and the encouragement to try again.
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Yes, the world is changing and we do have to change with it. Many classes in my field of education were giving facts, and sure I can find those online. It is nice to have someone to ask and reassure you about the facts you are reading.
Online classes are great! I love sitting in my own house and completing assignments at midnight in my p.j.’s. It is inconvenient to drive to class and search for a good place to park. It is much more efficient to do work at home. But, some people need the “people” aspect of things. They need someone to feed off of. They need that discussion. It is tough to ask the computer about thoughts and feelings, and people have thoughts and feelings about facts. I, myself, prefer a little of both.
Many people are not motivated or structured enough to do all their studies online. I am hoping my doctor had lots of hands-on and didn’t just gets the facts online.
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Dan Brown’s central message is great. I agree with him & I applaud is courageous step to abandon a corrupt system. I think the truth, though, is even bleaker than he is suggesting. The purpose of institutional education is NOT to inspire imagination, encourage problem-solving and the ability to think at deep levels. The purpose of education is NOT to encourage civic participation in the democratic process. The purpose of institutional education is NOT even to teach reading, writing, math, history and science. Institutional education is nearly 200 years old in the United States: if these were its purposes, we would have a significant majority of citizens who vote and communicate with their elected officials, who see challenges as GOOD things to invite into their lives (not BAD things to avoid at all cost,) who embrace the life of the mind and general understanding, who read and write for pleasure, who know their own history, who understand concepts like compound interest and usury, and who can delay gratification at least long enough to be able to AFFORD the cost of that gratification. Powerful interests anticipated the loss of value of information generations ago! They don’t have to worry about the “liberation” of information as long as a critical percentage of the population doesn’t have the ability to EVALUATE and USE information. And they set up schools to maintain their control of these abilities. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want – but LOOK at the segregation of resources by economic regions: wealthy parents send their children to wealthy schools, middle-class parents send their kids to middle-class schools and poor parents send their children to poor schools. And those parents? And their parents’ parents? What schools did they go to?
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I was linked to this page by a friend, and I feel compelled to post a few comments, both because, as an university lecturer, I deal with it professionaly and because I find it personally intriguing.
My background: I’m from Germany, hold a law degree and am currently working on my phd, part of which requires me to teach lower semesters.
On subject:
I have trouble understanding his main point, even after viewing it three times. If it’s “education shouldn’t soley be based on memorizing facts”, then yes, that’s something I agree with, but it’s also blatently self evident. It doesn’t have anything to do with our current age. It would have been as wrong fifty (or a thousand) years ago as it is today. It certainly isn’t how most university classes are held (though too many, I agree)
If he says the constant and worldwise availability of information makes it unimportant to learn facts, he couldn’t be more wrong.
For one: Even though the internet is great at creating the illusion that all information worldwise is accessible at all time, it’s simply not true, at least at this point in time. Sure, I don’t need to buy an atlas to chart a route, or buy a book to tell me the capital of Myanmar, but the more you move away from mainstream, the more obscure the information you are seeking gets, the less likely you are to find substantive answers. And those fringe areas are where “new” knowledge is created in the first place. From my experience in the field of law alone, i’d say that 60 % (likely more) of all online “facts” concerning law are either blatently false, incomplete or at best misleading, and from talking with people in other areas of study, that seems to be quite universaly true.
The information that IS reliable comes from respected sources, but then, what’s the difference between telling your students “Open textbook page 25″ or “open textbook online edition at http://www.textbook.com/25“? There is no material difference, you will still need to digest it somehow. What will happen in the futur is that the lines between off- and online will blur out of existence, but the basic mechanics stay the same.
Of course, the better option is to tell your students: “Learn about Subject A” instead of telling them what exactly to read, and let them choose their own sources. But again, that’s nothing specific to the age of internet. I went through 4 years of university without EVER being told what to read. At the start of a course, the professor would give recommendations on books to read but leave it up to the students where to get the knowledge. The first thing you learned (on your own, through bad experience) was that reliance on the internet often proved to be fatal.
Secondly: No matter where or how you get the information, you will still somehow need to learn it for a variety of reasons, the most important being that only learned and memorized information can be applied.
Sure, the internet provides information on almost (and in the somewhat near futur literally) everything, and I don’t actually need to memorize anything to access it, but without having learned it at some point, it’s of limited use to me.
Example: I can get information about Hitler and the third Reich online without a problem, I can read up on why he gained power and how he transformed Germany into a dictatorship. But that does me little good in drawing lessons from it and being weary of developments that would indicate the same thing happening again. In order to do that, I need to have read about it at some point, I need to be able to recall that information and I need to be able to apply it to a new situation. Now the last part, applying knowledge, is the important part of course, and educators need to focus on that, but the actual amassing of knowledge is still a prerequisite to that, and always will be.
Furthermore, only having sufficient knowledge in a field will allow me to ask the right questions to begin with. Take the above example: Say I live in a state where a similar situation is about to occur, and, as stated above, I wouldn’t be able to recognize it because I have never learned the information. Now you might say, just go on the internet and read up on it. Which is fine, and technically possible, but because I’ve never learned about it, I wouldn’t look for it in the first place.
That’s the reason why we still require students to memorize knowledge, to a certain extent, even though they could look it up without a problem.
To summarize, nothing in his video actually tells me what exactly the Internet in particular has changed (and in the last 10 years) that would require institutionalized education, as he calls it, to change, besides adopting new technology to its existing arsenal (which, on its own, is a big enough task and will change the face of education to be sure). The methods might change, but the principal stays the same.
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While most of the information a person might want is available online, if one does not memorize/ learn about it, then the existence of the online information is useless. In order to use the information that is freely available, you must be able to draw connections between pieces of information. That is the sort of thing that education should teach, how to draw connections and conclusions. Even with free information, there is an extreme need for educators to first teach the basics of all fields of knowledge and then teach how to use this broad base of knowledge to become an expert in a particular field of study. Unfortunately, this probably means memorizing many facts. The best educators will make this process enjoyable so that students will want to delve even deeper into the pool of knowledge.
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Hm hm.. that’s interessting but frankly i have a hard time determining it… wonder what others have to say..
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I totally agree that adults need to get adult-oriented, on the move, in the class, relevant education. Teacher training needs to be in the K12 classrooms with real kids and real problems.
However, I’m not certain about the K-12 system of learning being put on a do-it-yourself basis. First of all, like it or not, schools watch kids during the day while Mom and Dad are working. So, leaving a kid at home to use the computer to learn may not be a wise decision. Secondly, kids are smart. Games are fun. Texting is even more fun while gaming. How are we going to keep them on task to meet the demands of today’s market? When we get those questions adequately answered for K-12, then the revolution in K-12 can begin.
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I love this video and was with Dan 100 percent…until the very end and he admitted dropping out of school. His points were VERY good and dead on, but I can’t take him seriously now. The video now looks like a collection of complaints from an “outsider”, rather than enlightened thoughts from someone knowledgeable.
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The fact that the internet dramatically changes where information is located does not change the reality that education is a process of certifying who knows what.
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While we’re discussing the matter of A MUST-SEE for Every Educational Administrator in the World – SimpleK12, There can be no greater advantage of HS than the family bonds that are built and strengthened. Just think of the sibling and parental bonding that can be built in an atmosphere of constructive education.
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