Hello! In this forecasting assignment, I thought I would delve into the future of education and the 4th Industrial Revolution. I propose a universal mobile app called EduSpace that will be an all encompassing app to assist both teachers and students in providing a more personalized learning experience.
Follow the link for information on EduSpace https://meipsyshack.wixsite.com/forecasting
Hi Meipsy,
Great resource with some creative ideas.
The public-private partnership was particularly interesting. What a tough thing to navigate. There’s a makerspace in Trail, BC that is funded in part by Teck. It is a public space but Teck has times in which the space is solely there’s to use. This is the space: https://www.midaslab.ca/
It would be so handy having one app eduspace, for everything. I hope that apps will be able to fully integrate with one another because at the moment, juggling so many differen apps is annoying!
Hi Adrian,
Thank you for your comment and thanks for the link to the midaslab.ca. I think you shared this when we were first brainstorming for our OER and I will have to take another look at it. I hope that the public-private relationships will be beneficial to both parties in supporting education without any ulterior motives. Glad you liked the idea of the one app space to be utilized, as navigating and juggling many apps can be overwhelming.
Navigating through your site was a rollercoaster ride for me! I loved your vision outlined on the “What it Looks Like” page. Fully embracing the shift away from rote memorization would be great, a 1:1 tech ratio is of course vital to the scenario you’re proposing, and I love the concept of the instructor floating and facilitating each student’s educational experience. And not for nothing, it felt to me as though “Teacher as Facilitator” was a play on “Teacher as Trickster”, which is something that’s come up in a couple of other MET courses I’ve followed. Was that a deliberate play on words?
Then, continuing the ride, we got to the “Making it a Reality” page and big businesses. I appreciated that you acknowledged the potential pitfalls right off the bat, rather than pretending like they wouldn’t be a thing. Myself I don’t think I can imagine a scenario where a business in a capitalist society would commit many millions of dollars to an educational endeavour in the interest of only philanthropy and with no back scratching at all. I suppose it’s not an impossibility, but it seems unlikely. I totally agree with your assertion though that governments don’t seem too keen to fund education, so to realize your vision, the cash would have to come from somewhere.
I really liked the “Fully Mobile” page – particularly the day in the life section. The instantaneous assessment and feedback idea is what really spoke to me. So often – especially since covid – I’ve gotten projects from students that missed the mark in one way or another, but the problems could easily have been avoided with a slight course correction early on. What you’re proposing here sorts that out real well.
Your “Final Thoughts” page did a great job of summarizing the site. A nugget from that page: “As we are now in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, students need to learn to be creators, collaborators and think outside the box. This will require a fundamental shift in how we do the business of education and districts and governments will need to get on board with this shift sooner, rather than later, or get left behind” (Shackleford, 2020). A fundamental shift is absolutely needed. Not just in education, but everywhere. My belief is that if we can make the shift happen it will lead to governments according education the position it deserves in budgetary considerations – but I definitely agree that this is not something that’s happening right now.
And lastly, the pencil crayon “featured image” you selected to go along with your posting on the 523 site was great and it totally caught my eye. I’d have loved to see that theme run throughout your whole site.
Great job!!
Hi Tyler,
Thanks for your comments and glad that you enjoyed the ride. I am unfamiliar with “Teacher as Trickster” and will have to investigate that further as it has not come up in my MET classes as of yet. As for the business and school partnerships I am hopeful that this would be something that could come to fruition and be something that is supporting schools without an ulterior motive.
Thanks for the idea of making the EduSpace app icon more fluid in the site and that would be easy enough to weave in through the site.
Hello Meipsy,
Thank you for sharing. The site is clear and well organized. The topic is thought-provoking. I really enjoy it.
I also like some quotes in your presentation. For example, Harm’s (2019) words, “The future of education will be fully automated by the transformation of artificial intelligence, machine learning and real-world teaching and world experiences.” What a strong argument that raises my confidence in these technologies.
I enjoy the video of the “Classroom of the Future,” and I also agree that the future classroom will be more like a maker space. Meanwhile, you mentioned that future education would become completely mobile. I am pretty curious about the relationship between the classrooms as maker spaces and students in full mobile learning.
I also realized that EduSpace is an app supported by AI. I have currently reviewed Matt Wise’s A3, which was talking about Adaptive Learning Coach, a similar app providing personalized learning support. I posted the following question that I want to ask you as well: I am thinking of the political and commercial capital influence in such a kind of knowledge. Based on what disciplines this software guides me to access resource A, not B? Because A can make more profit, or is it politically closer? How can I make sure the algorithm behind the AI is reliable and trustworthy?
Thank you for a great job.
Yi
Yi
Thanks for your comment. Great questions you asked. As mentioned in my website, I think that navigating public private partnerships and properly coding AI algorithms will take time and effort to make sure it is done properly without having built in bias towards one type of resource or tech product over another. As you mentioned, these are good ideas, but we definitely need to take care in their development to ensure they are done correctly. I think having educators involved in any process for the development of algorithms or partnerships are important. It can’t be left to the government or school boards to make these decisions on their own. The best interest of the schools and students must always be front and center and having teachers involved in these decisions will help ensure that.
The Makerspace education model I mentioned is to emphasize the personalization of education for future classrooms and I think that taking learning fully mobile is important for any classroom of the future. Students shouldn’t have to just leave their learning on hold because they are at home and their project information is left at school. They should be able to work at their pace and continue their learning at home if they choose. There may be times where some part of a Makerspace / personalized learning project has to be left at school, but a large portion of their learning should be able to go with the student wherever they may be.
Hello Meipsy,
this is such a cool idea. It would be great if we could do it. I think that this might be a work in progress, but we will get there sooner or later. The public-private partnership idea is great, I would love to see schools where there is no longer difference between private and public, all the schools could be the same. I like how you put it, “help society by creating thinkers and creators that will be vital to keep society moving forward in an ever-increasingly technological society”.
No textbook, that is interesting, it is bold. Maybe because I am an “old school” learner, I still like to read and learn from books. However, I get the concept of no textbook for users to personalize their learning. I understand the idea of students choosing what they want to learn. However, how well prepared would students be to know what they really want to learn?
For example, core courses. Even if the students do not like the course, but at the end of the course they might have really enjoyed what has been taught. As Anne mentioned above, I believe that there are some subjects or courses that still might need to be classified as required. Students might not like it but it will help them in their future careers. What do you think?
Silvia,
Glad that you liked the idea of EduSpace. As far as the textbook idea, I think that once you put information into a textbook, the information is already old and can’t be updated. You are then leading students to rely on a textbook as their leading source of information for a class. I like Kurzweil’s quote about how mobile phones should be called gateways of knowledge and I believe that to better prepare students for the future we should teach them how to harness the knowledge that can be accessed on their phones and determine what is valuable information and what isn’t. Information on the web is fluid and changing as new ideas and understanding is gained on different subjects, but a textbook is static and old news. An interesting idea I saw floating around on the web was the idea of open source digital textbooks where information can be updated when needed and kept relevant. Either way, I think the idea of textbooks needs to be revisited and made more relevant for the schools of the future.
As far as your thoughts on core courses, please refer to my comments I left for Ceci and Anne. Hopefully that answers your question as well. Thanks Silvia!
Hi Meipsy,
Amazing site! I particularly liked your idea of integrating the Twitter feeds related to Education in the Future. I resonate with you on conceptions like students attendance, one to one devices, no textbooks, teacher as facilitator, etc. I was also drawn to the “21 Inspiring quotes and thoughts on mobile learning” under your references. Like Tyler, I’m going to borrow some of those! I’m so glad that you like quotes as well. Check out my A3 on QuoteLovers 🙂
Ceci,
Glad that you liked the website and I had fun putting it together. I do like using quotes as they help to make thoughts stand out and they are great ways to emphasize important points. I will go and check out your A3 right now!
Hi Meipsy! I love the details you’ve put into pages like What It Looks Like and Fully Mobile. It feels very much like your concept for Eduspace flows perfectly out of what educators and theorists are calling for in education today – a move away from facts-based curriculum and more towards the skills/thinking-based expertise our students will need in the growing knowledge economy. Your idea also tackles one of the issues I recall students bringing up at the beginning of the course when we were talking about things we dislike about mobility – the constant need to spread our work across too many different apps and online spaces. The streamlined experience of Eduspace sounds like a welcome change.
I love that students would be able to use an AI algorithm to find projects and learning experiences that interest them, but I’m hesitant to lean entirely into that approach. If learning is only focused around what students want and not around what teachers think is “good for them”, would we really be giving them an adequate education? I think of a prime example in the graphic design program I run – very, very few of the students want to take the mandatory course “Writing for Designers.” They are in the program because they love design – creating visual layouts, expressing ideas, working with clients, etc – and they do not like to write. But a professional designer absolutely needs professional writing skills, so we make them take the course, whether they like it or not. If education revolved only around students picking what they want, these students wouldn’t learn the writing skills they need to succeed.
How would Eduspace tackle that? Does the instructor still have the ability to “force” the students into topics they need to learn? Does the AI do it? How will students learn the personal management skills needed to tackle dreaded tasks?
Oops, I forgot to close my link tag there and now my entire comment is a link to your site and there does not appear to be a way to edit or delete comments. Haha, whoops.
Hi Anne,
You raised such a critical question, Anne! If education revolved around only students picking what they want, would we really be giving them an adequate education? In a K-12 setting, we often hear students saying why we need to learn this or that, we are not going to use it in the future… Is math necessary for one who is going to become an artist? I know there are different voices. Check out the New York Times article if you get a chance. Personally, I believe there is a reason for all the subjects that currently exist to be included in the primary and secondary education. For example, math, it teaches students logic, trains students’ reasoning ability and promotes cognitive development. You’ve given a solid reason why an art student needs to learn writing. Bravo!
Anne, Ceci
Thank you for your responses as well as for your kind words and feedback. On my website I mentioned that teachers would also have access to a teacher portal on EduSpace to allow them to further tweek student projects to match the concept based curriculum. I do agree that if students had free reign to only do what they were interested in, they would miss out on important skills that they need to build throughout their educational careers. Projects would be multi disciplinary and teachers would work with students through EduSpace to make sure projects were in fact, cross curricular. Educators would still have time to work one on one or with small groups to teach mini lessons about important skills. Teachers would also be able to take time out during different parts of the day and teach mini lessons about important concepts and skills. I agree there are still important concepts that need to be taught to kids, but this can be done in smaller chunks and smaller chunks tend to stick better in the brain.
Before doing this project, I thought similarly about school subjects, but after listening to this video (it is also in the website) and doing some other research, I started to see that school subjects in the traditional sense are remnants of our factory model of education. According to Max Ventilla in the video, having 45 minute classes where students read the chapter, answer questions and have a quiz at the end of the week, are teaching students to think like robots which won’t prepare them properly for the world that is coming. There is also an interesting article by Marc Prensky where he talks about how the “education” of math, science, social and language arts is not preparing students properly for tomorrow’s world. Interesting views for sure that definitely move our ways of thinking in education today.
Thank you for your detailed reply, Meipsy! Appreciate it. I’ve downloaded the Prensky article and believe it’s going to be a great read. Thanks again for sharing 🙂
Sorry… I forgot to link the New York Times article. Here it is: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html
Ceci, good point about the subjects. There are so many students in primary that you just know what subjects they are not going to love by their body language when you announce the subject were going to do, or when they come into the class the first thing most of them do is go over the shape of the day (that is the time table). When they see something that they do not like, you can just see them sink. So if this app allows them to pick what they want I still think they need the basics as a must. Math, language arts before they all just pick science, art, gym. I know the primary kids would 🙂
Hi Meipsy, thanks for sharing your A3 EDUSPACE. I found it really interesting how the ideas you mentioned are ones that we are trying to put in place in schools today! I think you did a great job creating and sharing your A3. It was very informative and I love reading information and ideas on how to move classrooms into the new technology age. I liked how you used twitter to showcase more discussions on technology and education. I really liked that quote about mobile phones are gateways, I am going to borrow that one. Another thing that stood out for me was how schools will no longer have subjects but rather big concepts. Do you think we will do away with grade labels? Students could just pick and chose what they want to learn, what interests them which could be their individual learning plans. Students would then be placed with other students who are interested in same things rather than grade level? Another area I enjoyed was classroom spaces being organized to promote student learning. I know here in B.C. we are promoting that, having flexible seating and NO OLD DESKS! I love that! My one question is do you think all teachers can be sold on this idea? If not how would you try to persuade them. Thanks for sharing your A3, You did a great job!
Tyler,
Thanks for your response and glad that you like the idea of EduSpace. In my view I don’t think grade levels will disappear as a grade level is still a way for students to move through their education with their age level peers. I think that students could definitely have opportunities to expand on their ideas and push the limits by possibly working with older students on some projects throughout the school year, however too much of this might cause anxiety in some students and not be beneficial.
I think there are always going to be some educators who won’t like the changes that are coming to education but need to be guided and helped to see the positives that come with these changes. I think it starts with administrators seeing the need for these changes to occur and then leading by example. It then takes other people within the school environment to be patient and willing to help guide those that are resistant to these changes. You need mentorship and modelling of how to effectively teach in this new environment by experts that exist within your own school. If we take it slow, provide PD opportunities and are patient and give time for these changes to take place,I believe things will work out fine.
Hi Meipsy, I agree with you 100% it starts with admin. You need a solid admin team that has the support of the entire staff to make a great change or decide to run with a certain program. (if you are going to do something as an entire school). I have worked in many schools where you are encouraged to do whatever makes you happy. Its a weird feeling, sometimes you are alone and sometimes you are doing something and find others then you form a group for support.
As for getting rid of grade levels, I love it when kids get to work together and mixed up. If its big buddies or clubs, its such a great team building time for the entire school. The little kids open up to the big kids, and the big kids who might have had some issues opening up, become great friends to the littles. Its such a great thing to see in kids. Toss in technology and they have a great time! Students today love tech anything you give them with technology they will love. Again, great job!