Earcos 2012 thoughts - the Edge into Education

Nice quote from Dr. Milton Chen's keynote - whose intentions are to 'put the edge into education'.  Eh there's a media-friendly soundbite if ever I heard one.  Dr. Chen also spoke about moving from textbook to project-based learning, and social and emotional learning.  He cited numerous examples, of which some include students learning to fly realistic airplanes using Microsoft's Flight Simulator.
I agreed with his notion of the move towards learning being any time, any place, and path and any pace - what in fact we have all been moving towards in ICT for a good few years.

He then mentioned Carol Dweck and her Mindsets website...which is always a fascinating source of information about how human beings develop mentally, and how we can nurture them and avoid accidental programming of negative mindsets.  Dweck has been mentioned many times by the controversial Matthew Syed - controversial because Syed claims that talent can be learned and nurtured, and is certainly not something that is god-given or that we are genetically programmed towards.  Persuasive as this argument is, it does raise an issue with the potential impact upon the fundamentals of teaching and learning.  If, as Syed is convinced, that success is bred from Purposeful Practice then this gives great credence to the arguments that human beings learn a particular skill through something not dissimilar to rote learning - to practice again and again and again in a coached manner by an expert until it becomes imbued within their psyche.  In which case why am I, as a reflective educator, working so hard to move my students towards a more project-based or challenge-based learning style?  Am I rejecting the notion that rote learning is a highly effective method for training human beings to excel at a particular thing?  Or am I in fact saying that this in itself is not enough, that as an educator I need to give my students more - a richer, more rounded experience than simply regurgitating a skill that eventually becomes second nature?

Dr. Chen then outlined 6 leading edges of education:

1. Thinking
2. Curriculum and Assessment
3. Technology
4. Time/place
5. Co-teaching
6. Youth

...which are the subject of a slideshare here.

He also took us back to an era when George Leonard wrote the incredibly insightful 'Education and Ecstasy' in 1968 - nice link here to a website that is itself historically interesting.  Finally he shared with us the pioneering work of Alan Kay, who amongst many other things conceived of the Dynabook - again back in the day in 1968.  I found a wonderful transcript of a report written by Kay himself here, noting that he recommends the Dynabook would ship with at least 8K of Ram...