Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Friday, December 18, 2009

How To Design Schools And A New Education System For The Future: A Video Interview With George Siemens

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How to design schools and a new education system for the future? Is it possible to extract only the positive aspects of the current education paradigm and create a brand new schooling model?

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Photo credit: Jose Manuel Gelpi Diaz

Somehow we have to recognize what is it that schools do well, what functionality do schools serve for a society... but how can we do that without institutionalizing the experience.

[...] All of our society is structured to institutionalize our experiences.

Work institutionalizes us. There is the odd person who can take what you have done and sort of make your own freedom and do your own work, but most people... we move into an institution for employment, we move into an institution for health-care need, we move into an institution for schooling needs...

What happens is you cannot then just stop and break one part of your life apart and not institutionalize it.

According to George Siemens, you and I are so used to living our lives in such kind of "social installments" that we do not even realize how everything we experience is compartmentalized. Parents go to work and kids go to school because they are supposed to. NOT because this is the best option they have.

Sure, smart parents can homeschool their children. Parents do have this option (at least in some countries), but it does not mean this is an easy decision to make.

In fact, how are you supposed to supervise the education of your kids if you have to work all day long? You should be unemployed to do that. But then who is going to take care of your family? This is why homeschooling sounds like wishful thinking for most of the parents out there.

How can you and I de-instititutionalize schools then? Is there a way to conceive the idea of teaching outside the classrooms without disrupting the entire society?

In this video interview with Robin Good, educational technologies expert George Siemens shares his vision of a new tentative education system for the future.

 

Future Of Education: Is It Possible To De-School Society? - George Siemens


Duration: 9' 09''



Full English Text Transcription



George Siemens: I guess it is a step back a little bit and probably worth looking at what is it that schools are there for, what is it that they are doing. As far as frustrating as it is, schools and societies that have higher levels of education are also more prosperous.

Somehow we have to recognize what is it that schools do well, what functionality do schools serve for a society... but how can we do that without institutionalizing the experience.

We want to take the good stuff of school and we want to get rid of the stuff that is demotivating, the stuff that takes students and pushes them out of that experience and gets them frustrated and upset.

I want to give you an example: I have a daughter who has just loved school up until she hit grade five. Up until then she was, I guess, just blessed with good teachers. Teachers who made learning fun, they played games in class, they got together, and they did just these neat little activities that she would spend her weekend on.

She would spend five-six hours a day, without me telling her to spend time, putting together projects and experiments, because they were fun. They did not feel like work to her. They were challenging, they were engaging and she loved doing this.

I never had one day that I can recall, up until this year, when she said: "I do not like school." Every day she was the first one up, she never missed the bus, she was upset if we had something up or she had to miss a day of school.

This year that all changed. This year she got a teacher who taught. She moved from fun, exploratory, engaging learning to memorizing and getting activities done that he felt were important for her to do... The fun was gone, there were no more games, as she said numerous times: "Somebody should teach him how to teach."

The reason, I think, it is exclusively based on the fact that she had this experience of learning that was personal, it reflected her interests, most importantly I think for kids, it was fun.

Children have this natural creativity, this natural ability. They like to explore, from the time they are are born. They like to engage with things, they like to to touch, they like to to interact. They are not very good at sitting. The reason because they are not very good at sitting is because their minds are wired to figuring out the world.

The moment you take students, you sit them down and you say: "Now listen: you are really handicapping them, because their brains are not wired for that yet. It takes years of schooling until they can do that well." This, I guess, was her first encounter with that experience: Where the world moved from being fun, exploratory to sit and listen.

The advice that you are asking about for your son or for other children:

  • How do we make it fun for them?
  • How do we make that relevant?
  • What kind of a model can we have that actually works in the long run?

I wish I had a simple answer, but part of our challenges... all of our society is structured to institutionalize our experiences.

Work institutionalizes us. There is the odd person who can take what you have done and sort of make your own freedom and do your own work, but most people... we move into an institution for employment, we move into an institution for health-care need, we move into an institution for schooling needs...

What happens is you cannot then just stop and break one part of your life apart and not institutionalize it.

What I mean is that I cannot just say to my daughter: "Do not go to school, hang out with me for a day." It would be a great model, we could spend time, she could ask questions, I could engage, I can give her learning activities. The problem is: my work is institutionalized. My work would say: "No, you cannot", "George you cannot", "Your daughter cannot hung out with you at work all day, you got work to do and she has got to be in school".

The problem is, and I have often talked about networks and being properly connected, there is a drawback, a sort of integration and connectedness.

Sometimes we are so connected and so integrated that we cannot change one part of the system without disrupting everything else.

If you, Robin, want to disrupt your son's education, you certainly can because you have freedom, in terms of being self-employed. If I wanted to, I would not have that freedom, and most of us in society would not have the freedom.

So the question becomes not how does Robin Good handle educating his child, because you have different options than many of us do because of life choices you have made...

The question becomes: "How do we take the vast majority of people who are employed by a school, employed by the government or employed by a business? How do we create a school system that works for them?" They cannot stop working to self-educate their child, and by the same account they cannot bring their children to work.

Now in the US and Canada there is a growing movement in homeschooling. Some parents are saying: "Education for my child is too important", "I need that connection with my child",
"I am not even going to bother sending him to school." Again, there is a financial choice there.

I know an individual, he is a professor at a university in the States. They homeschool, they made a big choice. Society often requires two income families. They have made a choice to do with less, so that she can stay at home and homeschool their children. Again, not everyone has that choice.

We move into a more radical thinking, like Ivan Illich who suggests we de-institutionalize schooling, we de-school society. It is a compelling model, he probably has one of the earlier thoughts on learning webs. He threw out learning webs in 1972-1973. Here is a guy that was saying: "Hey, we need to be able to connect these interested students with individual experts in different ways." He was throwing this out at that time already, but now, think of were we are: 35-36 years later, we still have in fact, not the same institutional system, we have a more institutionalized schooling system that we did 35 years ago.

We have not moved more to enlightening and opening up the passion for students to learn. I am sort of at that point now where I think: "What will it take for us to make schooling fun and engaging, that is not centered on curriculum, but that is centered on learning?"

I spent a lot of my time in emerging technologies, so I am inclined to say: "Maybe there is some hope in these tools for doing that". Maybe there is a way for a student who is taking a course in grade three to suddenly say: "I love learning about whatever... Malaysia or I love learning about Italy in school...".

Now they can go online, they can watch YouTube videos, they can take virtual tours, go into a Second Life build of this country and experience the key, the big artifacts.

Suddenly what has happened is: even though schooling still constrained and still institutionalized, the individual, when we get out of school these children - I have seen this with my own kids - they go out and the world is open for them again.

Last summer my daughter, who was 14 at the time, she went out and started on a social networking site called Horse. She spent her summer buying virtual horses, selling them, trading them, she set up a club and a committee, she had elections for vice-president of her committee.

When I was a kid, I spent my summers laying on my butt at the beach. And here she is, passionately engaged in learning about horses, learning business through buying, selling and trading, organizing people, forming groups. I would suspect she learned more about finance, social organization, interacting with other people during those two months in school than she did in her entire school year cycle.

My hope is that even though we might not yet seen formal education de-schooled or society de-schooled, we are going to see the development of a parallel system, that students can engage in based on their passions. That parallel system is the world of social networking, the Internet, the emerging technologies, the games they can play, things they can build in Sims, or courses they can take online.

My daughter is hugely interested in ancient Greece and the development of ancient Roman society.

Open Yale which is an initiative from Yale University where they have got first-year-lectures in university available online. She loves those videos, she can listen to some exceptionally talented professor explaining the development of Rome and the development of Greek culture. Ten years ago or five years ago the world was not open enough for her to hear this directly from world experts.

There are a lot of positives, but I still have to say when I think of your son and I think of my children at school, I still have to say: "there is a lot more work to do than that we have done, but these are early cracks of light coming in and I find that particularly motivating."




Original video interview recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia. Article editing by Elia Lombardi and Daniele Bazzano. First published on December 18th, 2009 as "How To Design Schools And A New Education System For The Future: A Video Interview With George Siemens".




About George Siemens

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From late 2009, George Siemens holds a position at the the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute in Athabasca University. He was former Associate Director in the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. George blogs at www.elearnspace.org where he shares his vision on the educational landscape and the impact that media technologies have on the educational system. George Siemens is also the author of Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book "Knowing Knowledge" where he developes a learning theory called connectivism which uses a network as the central metaphor for learning and focuses on knowledge as a way to making connections.

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posted by on Friday, December 18 2009, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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