Classrooms in the wild

From Collaboratories to Public Space:
Bringing the World to Students and Putting Classrooms in the Wild

Find out about opportunities for connecting digital and physical learning on the web, in the classroom, and in informal settings — at all educational levels, from science to social studies, from math to music. What are the implications for teaching and learning? How can students, teachers, faculty, and experts be engaged? How do Open Educational Resources (OER) impact the development of collaboratories?

Panelists:

• Sam Donovan, Assistant Professor of Science Education, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh; Associate Director of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium
  
• Ken Goldberg, Professor and Director, New Media Center, UC Berkeley
  
• Megan Simmons, Education Programs Manager, Coyote Point Museum For Environmental Education

• Lisa Petrides, President, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)
  

Last night I spent a couple of hours with around four dozen educators, administrators, consultants, and professors talking about bringing education closer to the real world.

Just about everyone agreed with the panelists that education needs to be more open, challenging, experimental, and timely. Science education should focus on the “3 P’s:” Problem posing, problem solving, and peer persuasion. Education must impart processes, not content. Students are too impatient to put up with the slow-moving approaches of the past. They want to dive in immediately. A concerned parent and educator said that if things don’t change, students are not going to go to schools

Ken Goldberg put the online Cone Welder project on the displays in the front of the room. Cone = Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments.

This is very cool: a Networked Tele-Robotic Observatory Game.

Have fun while helping scientists document climate effects. Play this online game using a robotic webcamera to help Smithsonian Institute researchers document the presence of subtropical birds that may be affected by global warming.

CONE-Welder is a Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments at the Welder Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.

Students are having a great time, learning science, and performing useful research. In an area where an on-the-ground animal census is impractical, students direct and take pictures with a remote camera. Then, in a social ranking application reminiscent of Flickr, students label the species in the photos and rank them for quality. As in a game, top photographers and labelers are recognized on an online scoreboard. Give it a try; Ken is looking for more participants.

Inspiring kids to reflect on an ecosystem at the Coyote Point Museum in San Mateo.

When the audience joins the discussion, it soon becomes apparent how tough a transition we’re facing. “Teachers don’t have enough time.” I always take the time gripe to mean “It’s not high enough on our list of priorities.” Small wonder. “There are no incentives.” Doing the right thing is not a motivator when giant obstacles are in the way. “We cannot afford computers for our classrooms. I spent $4,000 last year buying supplies and reproducing handouts at Kinko’s.”

I told the amazing Hole in the Wall story about kids learning on their own in India and mentioned visiting a beautiful corporate learning facility that had but one obvious flaw: the meeting rooms were labeled classroom. No, no, no. The objective is to do things, to go beyond mere learning, to escape the artificial environment of the classroom. What if we freed up teachers by looking at them as guides and helpers instead expecting them to of content experts? All this talk of teachers not having time to get to know web technology…. Hells, bells, the kids have already learned to use the web; perhaps the teacher doesn’t need to. How about a teacher/student partnership to improve learning?

Maybe people tuned me out because I’m not a member of the establishment. Perhaps my delivery was poor; I am swooning from the worst allergies I’ve experienced in the last quarter century. I suspect, however, that it was yet another case of the fish not seeing the water. Or maybe it was a raccoon ambling onto the screen of the CONE project while I was talking. Whatever it was, my rant generated no discussion or follow-up.

The participants did not have much impact on me either, aside from re-affirming my revolutionary views for transforming education. To get classrooms in the wild, we’re going to need to blow up the indoor classrooms and rebuild from scratch. I hope I’m wrong.

Links:

Slide show on Flickr

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

Tagged as: classrooms, inthewild, iskme, wested