I often wonder – is it out there?
Is there some disruption that I just haven’t noticed?
Are we really just tinkering around the edges?
Is my friend Yong Zhao right – have we just maximized the old system and not really considered how we move to the new system?
I have 186 posts tagged “change” (actually 187 after this one) with them speaking to the small and large transformations happening around us in education. In recent posts I have looked at topics including the changing role of technology, new curriculum in British Columbia that is focused on big ideas and core competencies, and reporting changes that attempt to give better and more timely feedback to students and parents.
As I write these posts, I find myself reading more about the changes happening around us outside of education. I try to get my head around the future of transportation in an era of autonomous cars, the future of medicine when the services of a doctor and hospital can largely be carried out at home through digital medicine, and the state of our world if 100 becomes the new 60.
And while some of these changes are still hard to bring to focus, we have so many examples of shifts in industry all around us. There are many long lists available showing all of these changes. I know when I buy a book I go to Amazon not my local retailer. When I want to look for used items for sale I search Craigslist not the Classifieds. In Denver a few weeks ago, I never thought of getting a taxi, and Uber was my go-to. Our television conversations are less and less about cable and more and more about Netflix. And just a couple of months ago a friend showed me airbnb (I am a little behind) and I can’t see why I would go back to looking for travel accommodations in the old ways anymore.
And that brings me back to education. If you have followed my posts, or heard me speak, I often make the point that in this rapid change happening around teaching, learning and schools, there is some satisfaction and relief that schools are not looking largely different. We find it reassuring. Schools also perform a crucial role as a community gathering place and the skills are really more about how we live and get along with each other as they are about some finite academic outputs.
That said, I wonder if I am missing something. Or maybe rationalizing. I imagine those in other disrupted fields also thought it couldn’t happen to them. I did think that the Khan Academy might be the disruption to our K-12 system. The Khan Academy has many of the features associated with other disruptions – being free, digital and widely available. I think the Khan Academy is interesting and important, but it is not our Uber.
I am left wondering, are we the exception to the rule? Is there enough in the value of education the way it is largely done now to allow it to continue to survive and thrive or am I missing something.
This kind of thinking can make your head hurt. It is time to go back to thinking about school timetables, textbooks and the kind of desks we want for our classes. It is far less scary.
Hi Chris,
You might find Mike Caulfield’s post on the open education movement from today relevant to your extended question: https://hapgood.us/2016/05/19/de-legitimization/
Mike
Thanks Mike – this is a great extension of the conversation and so true . . . I so often feel the world of education we are quick to turn on each other. It is one of the reasons I know fewer Superintendents are sharing ideas through blogs – they are tired of being attacked for their motives when they are really motivated by starting a conversation. Good stuff!
Always thinking about the looming disruption to education (which may be the shift to student ownership via SOLE GeniusHour Makerspace among others) and then I stumbled upon an interesting reflection connecting to this via Bill Nye: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-05-12-bill-nye-the-science-guy-on-science-education-unequal-wifi-and-misuse-of-the-word-disruption
Thanks Ian – a really good point fro Bill Nye – that not everything has to be disruptive. It is a bit of the improvement / innovation discussion. We really want both. We want to continue to get better while also looking if we should get different. I do find that sometimes we need to celebrate improvements in our work with early literacy just as much as we celebrate coding and robotics in the classroom. Literacy skills are crucial but celebrating them can get lost with all the cool gadgets we are using in other areas. I wonder if Genius Hour, Makerspace etc. are just the latest efforts to maximize the old system (nothing wrong with that) or are they signs of a new system – good stuff!
Which also concerns me – are we not seeing something? The Netflix/iTunes model may have also been seen (at first) as an ‘enhancement’ but ended up changing everything. Is there something we can’t see that’s right in front of us?
One of the reasons I am moving from a career in university student services to K-12 teaching is that it is inherently more difficult to automate. At the university, many of my tasks could have been automated with the right technology design – the institution had already scaled to become impersonal and the connection of the median student to those at the institution was not particularly strong. Savvy students would build community and connections with profs and staff, but they were the minority and the bulk could be served nearly as well by the kinds of artificial intelligence that are scaling now.
In the K-12 side, we have a duty of care, which is a bulwark against the kinds of disruptive change we see with Amazon and Uber. It’s one thing to ask an algorithm to recommend your next book purchase, it’s another to trust a room full of 30 11 year olds to that algorithm. This is self-evident.
And so, the great advantage of K-12 to me was that it was, and likely will remain, an inherently human endeavour (unless/until we create the cyborg-style learning seen in the Matrix). Teaching is idiosyncratic. Students are idiosyncratic and to transmit culture, ethics, community, and civil society to the next generation, as we are privileged to do, is not easily disrupted.
Even Silicon Valley’s ideal ‘disruptive’ school (http://www.wired.com/2015/05/altschool/) isn’t truly disruptive. Why? Because it doesn’t make education more cost-effective. It can be argued it is more effective, or that it turns the industrial form of education that seems to be de rigeur in the US on its head, but not at a lower cost-per-student. And we all know that any innovation that increases per-student costs is not viable in a publicly funded system.
With that in mind, I’m all about disruptive change – bring it on. Schools are, in many ways, very different today than in 1990 and that’s great. But they are also at some fundamental levels undisrupted from the 1990 model. I am confident that the bricks and mortar school, that ever-important locus for community, the human-scale classroom, the need to transmit culture and civil society rather than just information, and the fact that 10 year olds can’t be left on their own to surf educational websites all day means that K-12 teaching is and will remain, as you suggest, a relative constant in a world of constant change.
Thanks Stephen – some really smart thinking. I think it is an important distinction to separate what is happening at post-secondary with K-12 as the goals are different. There is a piece around raising citizens that is core to the work in K-12 that does not easily get disrupted. It is an interesting balance – I think we are foolish to suggest that K-12 won’t change because it is too important in its current incarnation, but also we need to push-back against the notion that the system can be “Uberized” in the name of progress.
Good stuff!
Thank you, Chris!
A further thought on a lot of the disruptive technology: part of its disruption is that it avoids regulatory environments. Uber offers convenience through its app, but really it competes on price. It gets lower costs by paying drivers less and by avoiding regulations that the taxi industry needs to pay. When a city tries to play ball and offers to regulate around the new technology, Uber is often not interested in playing ball.
Other providers like Amazon concentrate their workforce in low regulation jurisdictions where they can pay low wages to warehouse staff. Amazon also is well-known for churning through professional staff (they are well-paid, but those who don’t produce at 110% are sent packing quickly).
So the tech innovation puzzle isn’t always about disruptive technology, a non-trivial segment of these disruptors are, at least in part, simply using technology to disrupt or game costly regulations, which is a strategy that isn’t really available to education systems that want to issue a BC transcript.
I started to answer you, but my answer turned into an entire blog post
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/05/is-there-education-uber.html
Thanks Peter – an excellent post and very good addition to this conversation. There is no doubt that “Uber” style examples would really not just change the delivery of education but have far greater impacts on the purpose of the work. I am wondering what other fields are most useful to look at knowing that the taxi business, movie industry or others like them are interesting but not great comparisons for education. I think health has some useful connections as it represents another government run (at least in Canada) service. Even post-secondary is not a great place to look, as its purpose is actually quite different than K-12.
[…] week at his blog Culture of Yes, Chris Kennedy asked “Is there an Uber coming to education ?” Kennedy rattles off a list of techno-changes that have broken into business in recent years. We buy […]
It is Deja Vu All Over Again
Rebirth of the Teaching Machine: This Time It’s Personal
http://philmcrae.com/blog/rebirth-of-the-teaching-maching-through-the-seduction-of-data-analytics-this-time-its-personal1
We are at one of the latest of many stops in the 120 years where educational technology is being positioned as uber like panacea.
Learning is highly relational, creative and based on social perception. All things that machine learning and artificial intelligence will not bring to the table.
Phil McRae
Thanks Phil your blog post is an excellent extension of this conversation. And I agree with you on the basic premise of education and the human element as being so crucial and that separates it from the many disrupted examples. I am very interested to see what is happening and will happen with health care as it has far more similarities to education than taxis or cable tv. I would say the “art” of being a doctor may become more important as the science of diagnosis is something more people can do on their own in their house rather than having to go to a hospital – I think this shift is one that may be similar to the shift in the changing role of teacher. While most of us would agree with power of the human interaction being a difference maker in education it is still informative to see all the shifts happening around us.
Chris, I love this post. I too have often wondered if there is potential for education to experience what the other ‘disrupted’ fields like transportation or technology have. So far, my thinking leans toward ‘not yet’. Education reform/change seems insistent on tweaking our system, with small incremental changes, mostly around the edges. With excellent results, the need or space for such disruption is not urgent. As such, our system just seems to trundle along. That said, my own learning experiences rarely fit within the traditional model of K-12 education. When placed in a one-size-fits-all learning environment, I find my learning to be shallow and disconnected. The pacing is wrong, the other learners are at differernt places in their journey, and I often leave frustrated. Given the choice, I do not select a K-12 model for my own learning. And yet, knowing this to be true for many learners, most of us within the K-12 system contimue to work to improve our system and the experiences of our learners, without significantly disrupting the system. And that leaves me hopeful that an education “Uber” could happen. Perhaps one day an educator (or student, or parent) will present a new model, one that is as simple as Uber, as user-friendly and intuitive as the original iPod, and as affordable (relatively speaking) as the latest Tesla.
Thanks for getting this dialogue going…what a great conversation to have.
[…] blog from @chrkennedy talked about disruptions in education (is there one coming; is it here;???) https://cultureofyes.ca/2016/05/19/is-there-an-uber-coming-to-education/ I always appreciate the reflection Chris provides as a lead educator blogging his insights and […]
I’m working on it. Checkout warmersun.com
(2/2)
Spelling system errors not only affect English-speaking learners in reading, but also in writing and learning. It affect immigrants in an even more vicious manner as most will also be stigmatised by an non-native accent which will restrict their integration.
The main obstacles that change-seekers face is the disruption that it could cause to –in this instance– many other systems and people. But, it does not need to be that way. Intelligent implementation can mitigate many of the obstacles.
Let me address the common objections that are often used to prevent any change.
1. I do not want to learn a new system.
You won’t have to. That is our pledge. I do not want to either. This reform is not for me, you, but for the next generation.
The change will occur in school, starting with as many Grade 1 classes as it is possible. Opting out will be possible. In year 2, another group of Grade 1 will start to learn the new system. The first group will go in Grade 2 and will keep learning the new system (or rather learn using the new system since they will have it mastered decoding and speaking already).
2. There are too many accents (AKA dialectal variations in pronunciation).
For the last 250 years (and more) accents have NOT vanished even with an extremely POOR system representing them. Any chance they will vanish with a better phonemic system?
We need a better phonemic system. A reform would not mean spelling using a phonetic system like IPA. It will seek to represent one letter-sound (phoneme) with one letter more often and reduce/eliminate “multiplicity” of spellings and even systemize the choice of spellings. (bear, but dear? Why many different ways of spellings the same phoneme: ea, ee, ie, ei, eo, e_e, y,…)?)
Better phonemic languages that ease learning of reading, speaking, and spelling (Italian, Finnish, Spanish) have many accents as well. They do not have a perfect representation of all accents. It does not need to be a 100% phonemic system to make it a much better system. (A /a/ phoneme pronounced as a /ae/ in one dialect or /a/ in another is still a generic a. It is not /o/ or /i/.
A reform will not try to represent ALL variations and will not fix ALL the issues, but it will be a VAST improvement over what there is now.
The internet, public education for all,… are helping standardizing many accents.
Variations for multisyllabic words (the majority of words) are very minimal. Most people can understand another speaker of another dialect.
Some dialects will suit the new system better than others. Accents will continue to be preserved, but should a country wish to make it easier to learn to read and improve the links, no one will stop them. The system will have some flexibility. It will not be so precise. It will have a few flaws. It will not have hundreds of thousands of errors. Maybe hundred or a thousand of words will need a little bit of teaching. A period of 5 years will be used to evaluate different systems and their implications for the various dialects. Again, accents will NOT be affected. They are taught by relatives and society at large before a kid ever learns to read.
3. There will be a need for some people to learn the new system.
The 20 to 40 will need to be familiar with the new system, but free programs will be able to transcode from the current system to the other and vice versa, seamlessly and fast. Transcoding is much faster than translating. It is also much more accurate.
The cohort that will go into the labour force after 12 to 16 years will speak the same language. Speech recognition software and transcoding programs will do the rest.
4. Street signs and vendor signs will need to be respelled/respelt.
No. The new spellers will be able to decypher the old system.
5. ALL documents will need to be reprinted.
No. But, current digital documents will be transcodable.
Should a citizen be interested or be in need to read printed documents, I am sure we can figure out text-to-speech recognition software to deal with that issue or have someone read it to him or her. Realistically, this will be a minor issue. We could have “interpreter” as well.
6. Will translators lose their job?
No. A good segment of the population will still function in the current system.
No. The new spellers will need translation as much as the older generation.
7. Will teachers lose their job?
If a Grade 1 teacher were incapable or unwilling to teach the new system, they could be given the task to teach those children who are opting out.
There will be a 4 or 5 year preparatory period to start the transition (Year 1/Grade1) which should give people plenty of time to shift.
Unions will be consulted and a system will be put in place to facilitate the transition for all.
Retirement by attrition would be one of the ways used to replace teachers.
Grade 1 teachers are often able to teach other grades.
New students will need a few teachers to teach the old system as a second-language mode.
8. The language will lose the morphological links between words that will be lost or reduced with a new more phonemic system.
Everyone knows the link between language and linguistic, for instance. Both words resemble each other, but the link is not automatic. A more phonemic system will sometimes improve the relation and sometimes obscure it. At the end of the day, some of the words that are linked by how they look, require the learner to remember the pronunciation of the words and less the spelling of the words. On the other hand, a more phonemic system will require the learners to commit to memory the meaning of more words. A newer system will improve the link between words that are spoken and words that are written/read. The current system obscures the link between words that are spoken (heard) and words that are written/read.
Furthermore, Is ready about reading? Is readjust about reading well? There are lots of false positives in that sense in the lexicon. Lots.
9. Is it worth it?
Illiteracy rates in the 30% levels in most Commonwealth countries will drop with a simpler system.
A simpler system will be MUCH cheaper to teach (fewer specialist teachers will be needed).
Fewer kids will be pulled out and shamed as reading disabled.
Less crime as more people will be able to read and write. (Robots will do the menial work that illiterate people sometimes must do).
Happier labourforce.
Better educated/literate labour force.
Better economy.
More people around the world should be able to learn an easier system.
Easier travelling and understanding between people.
More people will be able to read books written in the new code. Higher profits for English-speakers.
10. Which industry will lose?
Publishing houses will benefit. Lots of material will need to be digitized in the new code.
Teachers (attrition and re-assignment will need to be addressed)
tutoring agencies and tutors could lose out.
Psychologists who assess students’ reading and writing abilities/intelligence.
11. What do these new spelling systems look like?
Some are using most of the spelling rules that exist now. They are just regularizing many of the patterns. (Masha Bell has one system.)
Others attempt to maximize the opportunity as a second shot at this will prove unlikely. Iezy Ignglish is such a system. It attempts to systemise the easiest pattern, the vowel+e pattern found in many words (friend, clue, foe, larvae,…). The vowel+e pattern is easier to learn and to decode than the vowel+consonant+e pattern (late, cute, core, mite, mere). The simpler pattern would do away with the cumbersome doubling of the consonant rule to change the vowel value: pat/patting, mate/mating.
Others can be found on the English spelling society website.
12. Will communication between the ones who know the new system and the ones that don’t be affected?
The language/speech/conversations will be the same.
The only communication mode that will be affected is the written mode, but is there anyone who thinks that most people will not have smart phones or tablets or computers to allow this?
The internet will need transcoding work, but programs can easily be created I am told by programmers. These programs will be able to transcode tons of material and will do it faster that any translation program (and much better).
Did I miss any? Of course I did.
Of course, since kids do not vote, it will take an incredible shift in thinking by the majority. Theodore Roosevelt did feel this issue was important enough to make change. though. It is possible. Many countries have had reforms, but many could have used better plans.