Apologies for not publishing this post earlier. Last school holidays, Tom March was a keynote speaker at the ACEC 2010 conference. His presentation was terrific and the notes worthy of sharing (even if somewhat tardy!)

It’s broke, so fix it: remaking education for our digital era.

From a kid’s perspective, let’s get this stuff working.
Links can be found at http://tommarch.com

Strategies mentioned are all based on research. As educators today, we face some problems such as:

• Technology: in the beginning, the internet was old ideas in a new platform.
• Concepts now for personal learning.
• Technology is being used everywhere, except for school.
• There is so much control of student use of computers. However, filtering is a non issue as kids have unfiltered access outside of school.
• Culture: now rich and personalised resources.
• Shouldn’t be mass produced factory type of learning.
• Schools in Georgia have 21 streams K-2.
• Challenges? National Curriculum.
• OECDs new millenium learner.
• Schools should be where people are there because they want to be.
• What institution exists where everyone who is there wants to be there? Where no one gets paid, mistakes are fixed by the community. It is Wikipedia.
• Educators are too cautious.
• There is a culture of distrust. Both of the user and the audience.
• We need to be aware of mass production vs crowd sourced.
• Motivation is currently negatively influenced by goals, evaluations and surveillance.
• Intrinsic motivation is needed for superior conceptual understanding, further study likely, positive feelings.
• If wikipedia can go from 0 to 3000000 in 10 years, why don’t schools learn from this?
• Focus: need to focus due to everything being available.
• Internet: Amusing? Intriguing? Building Knowledge?! Innovating solutions!
• Are we always chasing the new? We should be transforming education.
• Problem solving, creating, challenge based learning, authentic task.
• In an age of unparalleled access to information, what do we do to help our children learn? They need

1. Autonomy
2. Competance
3. Relatedness = motivation

• Schools often undermine this.
• Schools don’t really offer choice for students to follow what they are interested in.
• If students are able to follow what they are interested in, then there is increased retention, higher order thinking skills, future interest, better mental health.
• Critical thinking, habits of mind.
• Self designed projects. Joy of learning.
• Students need jobs (as per Alan November) add manage RSS feeds, etc.
• We need to be knowledge building, innovative, learning pathways.
• Danish pupils use web in exams (year 12) create and problem solve.

Is our solution something like wikipedia (everyone contributes) or ipad (already made by someone else)?

• Choice
• Effort
• Quality
• Attitude
• Labour of
• Love

We need to give responsibility and joy for learning back in student hands.

• Authentic choices allow autonomy.
• Effort and self esteem, competancy based. Real learning.
• Connectedness and audience means quality.
• Attitude, learner control, valuable.
• Labour of love. They do it and do it well because they love it.
• Happiness. Self assessment guide via a rubric.
• Responsibility for self management.

There are some ideas worth pursuing here and Daniel Pink’s new book Drive may help explain why student motivation is so important to their success.