E-Learning-Bringing It Together-Habits of the Mind II--Practiced Discernment

If we consider it an important goal that learners be able to solve real world issues effectively, then equipping them with the right skill sets for this age needs to be an imperative. Yet, as we see the media reports of the many problems being faced by our societies in the 21st century, problems that we have been told repeatedly will have solutions, we can't help but wonder why we seem to be so impotent in addressing them effectively.

I am going to suggest to you that part of our problem lies in the way that we have been educated and how we are continuing to be educated.

When we think back to our own experiences as students under the old industrial model of education, we can make a number of observations of that experience in hindsight:

1. Everything that we were required to do to meet the requirements for each level of our education was planned out for us. Our times spent in the classroom and out of the classroom were calculated to the minute.
2. We were carefully supervised and this included where we were to go on the Internet, what we were to do when we got there and when we had to return. If by accident (tongue firmly planted in cheek;)), we clicked on a link that we were not supposed to do, we were shepherded like sheep back to where the instructor wanted us to be.
3. Actual instruction on how to learn in an online environment was not systematically taught to learners from one grade level to the next. Instructors were acting in the role of the "sage on the stage" instead of the "guide on the side". As a result of this, many assumptions were made about the web skills of digital natives that were not realized in practice. Unfortunately, this was more a comment on the naivety of the instructors than that of the students.

Growth of the Internet and the 21st Century Learner

With the industrial model of education still firmly in place in education, the Internet grew exponentially. As a result of this growth every individual who had access to the Internet now had a voice that could be heard by millions of others.

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In the past, one of the common creeds in a free society was that "everyone has a right to their opinion on issues". I would suggest that given the needs of 21st century societies and the freedom that the Internet allows for self expression that in regards to learners we need to change this creed to read: "everyone has a right and responsibility to hold a critically informed opinion".

The old industrial model of education produced a mindset pattern that followed a way of dealing with real world problems that doesn't fit with the realities or goals of a digital world. The pattern in simple terms and in the order of priority looks like the following:

BODY----->EMOTIONS(or AFFECTIONS)------> WILL-------> MIND

If you keep in mind that one of the primary purposes of the old industrial model of education was to create life long consumers, you can see in the various media how much effort is devoted to the acquiring of things that satisfy body and emotions. Many social issues appeal first to wants and emotions to obtain commitment to a cause BEFORE those being appealed to have the necessary critical skill sets to properly assess the validity of the cause being put forth. In the 21st century, this pattern needs to be turned upside down so that it looks like the following:

MIND-----> WILL------> EMOTIONS(or AFFECTIONS)-----> BODY

Before we engage learners to commit to causes or problems, we need to encourage and nurture the use of critical thinking skills in the analysis and possible solutions to an issue. Once all sides to an issue have been looked at in regards to all the evidence and assessed as to validity, we are then in a position to take a stand that we can defend. It is at the level of the will, that we commit to change, creativity and innovation. Emotion enters in when we communicate our stand with the intent of thoughtfully engaging others. Our emotion is then not shallow display but one based upon having thoughtfully engaged with the issue.

Habit of the Mind: "Practiced Discernment"

In order to change this mindset, to engage the mind first in online learning we need to introduce and nurture a mindset that I describe as "practiced discernment". Discernment may  be defined as:

"The ability to obtain sharp perceptions. It involves going past the mere perception of something and making nuanced judgments about its qualities or properties".

You will notice that in its title there is the implication that this is a skill set that needs deliberate and continual practice.The online environment creates the challenge of separating white noise from valid, enriching substance that adds value to knowledge and innovation. The librarians in a digital world know a great deal about this challenge.

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More about the characteristics of this habit of the mind called "practiced discernment" in the next posting.....

E-Learning--Bringing It Together--Habits of the Mind I--Creating Thoughtful Engagement

As has been mentioned in past posts, there are certain habits of the mind that need to be introduced and nurtured with respect to this generation of E-Learners. In doing this we are able to help E-Learners eliminate bad habits of the past that they have acquired from not only being part of the old industrial model of education but also from being connected to the web for all of their lives. These old habits are counter-productive to a vision that sees the developing role of educators and learners as agents of change within a rapidly changing world.

Art Costa and Bena Kallick (2008) introduced us to 16 habits of the mind which encapsulated the type of cognitive habits that the learners of the 21st century and beyond need in order to become agents of change who create new knowledge and skill sets favourable to innovation.

One such habit of the mind that needs to be introduced and nurtured is what I call "thoughtful engagement". Thoughtful engagement is demonstrated when a student produces evidence that shows he or she has not only read what is required in order to complete a learning task but has also included thoughtful reasoning supported by evidence based upon other sources of information that they voluntarily include to support their lines of reasoning.
This skill is one that we often attributed to "good academic students" but we no longer have the luxury of being able to depend on a minority of students. The simple truth is that all students are capable of developing this habit of the mind that is quickly becoming an essential of 21st century critical thinking.
The obvious question that needs to be asked is:

"If all of our students are capable of developing this habit of the mind, then why haven't they demonstrated this in the past?

The answer to this question centers on our purpose for education and the nature of engagement. We can identify a number of past barriers to students developing this habit of the mind:

1. The purpose of education was to instill conformity to a particular mould that we expected all students to fit into. Only a minority were re-routed to become agents of change and usually only those who belonged to the upper class levels of an industrial oriented society. The minority who were to be agents of change were expected to only make changes that would continue to strengthen the industrial model. Learners were expected to simply remember and then regurgitate in an uncritical fashion all that was required to ensure conformity to the "one size fits all " mould. Protocols in assessment were set up to support this mindset.
2. With the advance of technology and the Internet coupled with the industrial model being used, the "cut and paste" generation was born. With the availability of vast knowledge resources on the Internet and the lack of change in pedagogy to fit a new digital world, students when confronted with the same old subject based projects simply used cut and paste to complete assigned work. Also, the online world attitude picked up by learners was that the Internet was free and therefore recognizing anyone owning knowledge was a non-starter for learners. To compromise, learners in a new digital education world were true to the industrial model and their role by simply "cutting and pasting" information from the Internet in order to complete assignment requests. To give legitimacy to their work, they cited their sources according to prescribed protocols. However, the question that needs to be asked is at what cost?

"Where was "thoughtful engagement" with the learning experience for the learner?"

Given the stated purpose of education, "thoughtful engagement" was not really required. Yes, you did have to understand what you were reading but you were not really expected to create new knowledge or skill sets.

In the 21st century, we need learners who will be creators of new knowledge and skill sets if we are ever going to be able to tackle the problems that the present and future societies face and will face. Innovation will not occur without students having a habit of the mind called "thoughtful engagement". It must become so natural to them that it is like breathing. It is also a warning to instructional designers that pedagogy can not be a static construct but must be thoroughly adaptive and able to use what technology has to offer to meet the needs of thoughtfully engaged and dynamic digital learners.

E-Learning: A Blueprint to the Future- The Finland Initiative--Part III

The last post ended with a question whose purpose was to get you to think about the potential of cross disciplinary learning with the focus on the need to recognize that when confronted with real world problems in the 21st century, we need to stop thinking in terms of the compartmentalization of disciplines and start thinking in terms of the collaboration of disciplines in applying their specific skill sets to a common real world problem. From a business perspective, it is the application of the best intellectual assets in a collaborative arena to a common problem which, as NASA, discovered was the best way to go.

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One thing that I need to make clear is that when I suggested S.T.E.M. or S.T.E.A.M. as the configuration, I am not suggesting that these are the only configurations for cross disciplinary learning. What I was suggesting is that we need to do away with the strict compartmentalization of subjects in education and move towards "clustering of subjects" in such a way that the skill sets will complement each other when applied to real world issues. As Finland is starting to do, arranging topics set into a thematic framework can help establish the important habits of the mind, such as collaboration, very early in the education life of learners. I also believe that it is absolutely crucial that the basic literacies be woven and reinforced into the foundation of whichever configuration that is used.
Another potential configurations might be: H.E.M.G (History-Language-Mathematics-Geography). This configuration might not be used at the primary level but might be an invaluable approach in the study of current conflicts in the world. The nature of the real world problems highlighted within the thematic structures determine which configuration would be most useful. This is arrived at through a collaborative effort

Role of the Educator?

Obviously, the role of the educator changes. The often used saying, reaching the status of a clichee, is:

 "No longer the sage on the stage but the guide on the side!"

The educator is the individual who organizes effective learning experiences and develops mentor contacts on the web that students will use as complementary resources in a blended learning context.

What About Technology and Online Education?

Imagine, using LEGO MindStorms to design the next Martian rover and having a NASA scientist as a mentor, an M.I.T. robotics scientist to help with the programming and the design.( S.T.E.M)! This is the potential for education through the creation of professional online mentor networks.

Middle and Senior Grades

The essentials of effective collaboration using problem based learning principles should be well grounded by the time students reach middle grades. It is at this level that I believe that another crucial habit of the mind should be introduced and nurtured in its development. I am referring to the trait of divergent thinking. Real innovation is dependent upon the ability of learners to see the possibility of more than one solution to a problem than just one.

One of the lessons that I have learned regarding the traits of middle school pre-teens and teens, is that they can be notoriously innovative when they feel the need to beat "the system". It is at this point that I think it would be good to channel their innovative tendencies to things that benefit humanity instead of frustrating it. One of the areas that requires the greatest of caution is teaching young people the coding languages of computers. It is unwise to do this in a moral vacuum.

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These are just a few ideas that I think that Finland education should consider. We will have to wait and see how their plans come to fruition.

Next.......Bringing the elements of the blueprint together..

E-Learning: A Blueprint to the Future--The Finland Initiative--Part II

With respect to the Finland Initiative, we have to ask the question:

" If the elimination of subjects in favour of cross disciplinary learning is an important organizational goal, what would it look like in real time?"

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One of the elements that has to be included in the configurations for cross disciplinary learning is creativity. As was mentioned in the last post, learners begin with a high level of creativity when they enter the education system but as they proceed through education systems based on the industrial model of education, the level of creativity decreases dramatically by the time learners hit the middle grades because the system goal is to instill conformity. What we need in this century and the next are not people who have been conformed to a set "one size fits all" way of thinking but we need learners who have been educated to be problem solvers, creators of new knowledge and skill sets. We need learners who naturally think, discuss and collaborate to solve real world scenarios in innovative ways. We need to dispense with the myth that only certain individuals are capable of this type of thinking and the majority just have to accept it.

Credit: Scott Barry Kaufman

In an article dealing with creativity and what really happens in the brain, Scott Barry Kaufman(2013) in an article titled:" The Real Neuroscience of Creativity" (Scientific American) suggested that based on current neuroscience research, our concept that creativity is a right brain process from beginning to end is simply wrong. He makes the following statements:

" ...Instead, the entire creative process--from preparation to incubation to illumination to verification--consists of many interactive cognitive processes (both conscious and unconscious) and emotions...Importantly, many of these brain regions work as a team to get the job done, and many recruit structures from both the left and right side of the brain. The most recent work suggests that "cognition" results from the dynamic interaction of distributed brain areas operating in large scale networks.."(Kaufman 2013)

What Kaufman and other cognitive neuroscientists such as Anna Abraham , Kalina Christoff are saying is that what we have in the creative process is a microcosm of collaboration among networks on a neural level. 

Therefore in developing the Finland Initiative, we should not see this myth as a barrier to our expectation that creativity is an element available to all learners. It is very inclusive.

Cross Disciplinary Configurations

Primary Grades:  STEM vs STEAM

" Which of these two configurations, STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) would be an effective problem solving approach at this level to begin to educate learners on the path to becoming agents of change in our societies?"

This is the question I would like to explore as one of the elements of the blueprint to the future of E-Learning and it is here that we can draw parallels between the brick and mortar world of education and the online world of E-Learning.

E-Learning: A Blueprint to the Future-Bringing It Together-Part I-The Finland Initiative

The important idea behind putting in place elements of a blueprint is that at some point you have to bring those elements together to produce a usable blueprint. In this post, I will describe how this blueprint might be realized in a blended learning context within a brick and mortar classroom and then describe how these elements would fit in a totally online E-Learning context.

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The Finland Initiative

On March 20, 2015, it was reported in "The Independent"(www.independent.co.uk) in an article titled:" Finland Schools: Subjects Scrapped and Replaced with Topics As Country Reforms Its Education System "(Richard Garner) that Finland was making a radical change in the ways in which the education system educates its students. The education system of Finland is well known as being at the top group of education systems in the world. It ranked 3rd after Singapore and China in the international student assessment rankings (PISA).

So the obvious question is:

"What prompted this change from an education system that is widely recognized as one of the top systems in the world?" 

Finland's Revelations About 21st Century Education

1. The Finns have come to the conclusion that the industrial model of education that has been in place for around 200 years does not serve the needs of societies in the 21st century. If the purpose of education is to educate students and educators to be agents of change who will create new knowledge and skill sets in synch with bringing about a culture of innovation, this model and its constructs will not do that.
2. The compartmentalization of subjects is a product of the industrial model of education. If a major skill set is to educate students to be collaborative problem solvers using the higher revised critical thinking skills required to analyze and arrive at solutions to problems then a cross disciplinary approach to learning is required that enables students to use the skill sets from more than one discipline in order to get a greater understanding of real world problems.
3. The "Phenomena" based teaching approach where topics with the perspectives of multiple disciplines are incorporated has been chosen by Finland as the vehicle for bringing this about.

In order for Finland to give vital form and function to this initiative, IMHO, there are a number of considerations that must be looked at and processes put into place.

Here are four suggestions that I would make:

1. Creative thought on the part of students and educators must be encouraged and nurtured throughout all grades. Under the old model of education, creativity was sacrificed in the name of conformity as students moved through the grades. Everyone was conformed to the idea that there is only one right answer to problems. Creative thought was discouraged in such an arrangement.
2. New habits of the mind that are in tune with requirements of working in a digital connected world in a blended education format needs to be started and nurtured throughout the grades. For example cross disciplinary thinking combined with collaboration and development of divergent thinking skill sets can be nurtured through design thinking with respect to the learning experiences presented.
3. A new and evolved "expanding horizon" approach to the organization of topics in curriculum should be considered in which students at early grades would work collaboratively on real world issue that are local and familiar but expanding outward through the higher grades. This recognizes student development from concrete thinking to more abstract thinking individuals. The expanding horizon approach would be on two levels: in brick and mortar classroom and online. In the middle and higher grades a greater emphasis on divergent thinking in approaching real world problems is important to nurture.
4. A thematic approach for the organization of topics should be considered with an emphasis on PBL both in the brick and mortar classroom and online

If you remember correctly, I suggested that the STEM supporters have the right idea. In part II of this post, I would like to describe to you hybrid combinations of subjects that might help the Finns achieve what they are hoping to in their changes in education......

E-Learning: Business Innovation, Collaboration and Professional Mentor Networks

In a previous post, it was emphasized the need to develop a learning community within a business and how effective collaboration that involves all employees when it comes to training is an essential. It is an essential so that a systemic innovation mindset becomes a natural way of thinking, learning and discussion for all levels within the organization. However, it is important to emphasize that no business is an island and that there needs to be effective collaboration that sees connections to important professional networks due to the vital knowledge and skill sets that they provide to the learning community within the business organization. With the rapid change in technology and the emerging of new skill sets as a result, it is vital that a business have the most current "strategic intelligence" that impact the performance of the business.

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In the past SME's were relied upon to help Instructional Designers in creating effective relevant training experiences for employees. However, with the proposed re-defining of the roles that I have suggested, it is important to ask a few questions in regards to their role:

1. Can SME's keep up with the rapid changes occurring within many disciplines that have a bearing on the business' innovation efforts?
2. Can SME's be asked to develop these external connections to professional networks or should that be the role of a new entity within the business that I call the "Council of Innovation and Learning"?

What would these professional networks look like?

Ideally, they would have some of these characteristics:

1. They would be made up of professionals who are on the leading edge of their disciplines. These would be disciplines that have a relevant impact on the product or services that the business excels in. They would be finely tuned to ongoing research in their area and able to translate how different lines of research will impact a business interests both in the short term and the long term.
2. They would be able to collaborate with the learning team within the business and advise them on direction that training should take, given the present status of the business and the goals it has in establishing a culture of innovation within the business.
3. Along with the Council of Innovation and Learning they would have a presence in providing a forum for innovative ideas that employees have where employees can receive relevant feedback from professionals as to the potential of the ideas have for the company.

Building a culture of innovation should be based on the "expanding horizon" concept where you start with building the learning community and mindsets within the business first and then expand out work to make valuable connections to important professional networks that are global in their reach.

Sir Kenneth Robinson offers some additional insights in his presentation titled: "How to Build a Culture of Innovation". I will leave it to you to think about how these principles would apply or not apply to your aspirations as a business seeking to lead the way in your area.


 

Next....E-Learning: A Blueprint to the Future--Bringing It Together

E-Learning: A Blueprint to the Future: Instructional Designers, Trainers and Business Innovation-Part II

The goal of today's business should be to establish and nurture a learning culture and culture of innovation within their businesses. The big question is how??

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In Part I of this post I suggested that the addition of a LPE or Learning Principles Expert to the training team is a start. The responsibility of this person would be to use his or her understanding of how people learn within a collaborative settings within a blended learning setup within the company and also in an online collaborative network which would extend outside the company's walls to create learning experiences that would lead to deeper sustained learning that if done well, would impact performance of employees in a measurably positive fashion. This would be done in collaboration with the the Instructional Designer.

So, speaking in regards to what this would look like within the company itself, it is helpful to look at the characteristics that would define highly effective collaborative organizations. Jacob Morgan of the Chess Media Group published an article in Forbes Magazine(2013) titled: "The 12 Habits of Highly Collaborative Organizations". The link is below:

The 12 Habits of Highly Collaborative Organizations

Although his description is dated, it does give you some clues as to what to consider when setting up a collaborative network within company walls.

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However, no business is an island in the digital age and business is first and foremost mortal. In order to flourish in a digital global economy, business needs to establish connections to what I term as "mentor networks" that provide valid and up to date expertise in the form of ongoing collaboration on projects that not only allow a company to excel in its chosen area but also to be a leader in innovation in areas that it excels at.The development of the skill of strategic intelligence gathering and adaptability are survival skills in this economy. Vibrant vision and astute leadership are the hallmarks of a company that strives to be a member of a global culture of innovation.

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Next....Connecting  Business Culture with Culture of Learning--The Mentor Network Described.