This past year I had the opportunity to sit on the
California State Superintendent of Education’s Education Technology
Taskforce. Comprised of primarily
educators and school administrators ( I was an outlier), we had the charge of
providing Superintendent Torlakson with a series of strategic recommendations
that would help shape his California Education Technology Blueprint;
essentially a plan for how to transition, if not transform education in the era
of modern technology. Our report can be
found here: California State Superintendent of Education’s Education Technology Taskforce Report.
Some fascinating facts to set the context for our work…currently,
it can take up to six years for the State to adopt a new textbook into the
approved curriculum. Technologies are
born, mature and then die within that timeframe. A
newly introduced text today would not even mention the IPhone, let alone
Twitter or the whole App phenomenon. How can a traditional textbook keep up
with this pace? Second, while most
students, and nearly all by the time they reach high school, are digitally
savvy and connected, utilizing and indeed developing new ways to integrate
technology into their everyday lives, they are required to turn their devices
off in school. So one of the most powerful
tools for communication, creativity, information and learning is shut off by
policy in the very setting it could and should be most useful. Finally, instruction continues to be measured
and indeed funded by formulas that value hours of time students are sitting in
the classroom rather than the quality of the learning.
Clearly some daunting challenges… Combine these with reduced resources, pockets
of resistance to change from every corner (teachers, school boards,
administrators, textbook publishers, etc.), and an ever changing playing field,
more and more at an accelerating pace, one can appreciate the depth and breadth
of the challenge for formal education.
And while I encourage you to read our recommendations, and
indeed take the opportunity to engage in the process of transformation, for the
purposes of our field I think there are some interesting lessons and parallels from
these challenges that we should be paying attention to.
First, there needs to be the simple recognition of the fact
that the world outside is moving at a pace of change and innovation that our
institutions are rarely able to adequately adapt to. I’ll use some recent work here at Chabot Space
and Science Center as an example. In
conjunction with our Bill Nye’s Climate Lab, we developed a highly engaging
interactive website designed to connect and integrate the visitor experience
with the Climate Lab. We used an award
winning design firm and indeed created a rich and wonderful site…in fact we
were nominated for a Webby for our work….One problem…at the time we started the
development of the site, the only robust option for the integration of video
into the content (and we had lots of it) was to use Adobe Flash. By the
time it was launched, the IPhone and IPad were well on their way towards market
dominance, and Apple had made the decision to not support Flash…oops.
So back to the drawing board, we have decided to abandon the
site, and migrate the entire online experience to a mobile game format that
will be available across all platforms…but here again, even during the time of development,
IOS 6 is launched and Amazon comes out with the Kindle Fire. We’ll
be able to deal with this, but the point is, what will happen 6 months after we
launch…after one year? Look around your institution…how many cool digital exhibits
or interactives look dated or downright ancient, at least by modern tech
standards. The point is, I feel we need
to seriously rethink how we go about integrating technology into our exhibit
development cycles. One approach is to
figure out how to best use our visitor’s devices, rather than trying to impose
our judgment on which platform will best serve the user…unless we do so, my
feeling is that we’ll be wrong more often than we’ll be right.
Another point from the task force is that in formal
education we need to ensure that there is a connection with learning and the
real world. A short hand way of thinking
about this is moving from theory to practice or applicability. A simple example might be that rather than
having lectures on chemistry, have the student work in a lab or a brewery to
see and experience the application of chemistry in the real world…Beer! For our field, I feel that too often we do a
great job of laying out the theory, and even compelling examples of it, yet rarely
connect back out to current applicability.
The challenge here is that our examples are often static, fixed in time
and place (and yes, even if they are “digital”), while the real world is
dynamic. Again, tough to keep up, yet
that’s what is expected of us in today’s world.
Finally, another principle from the taskforce that I think
has some applicability for us is that learning should occur “any time, any
place and at any pace”. This speaks to
the point that learning can, should and does take place at times other than
sitting in the class listening to a lecture.
In fact, many argue that little real learning occurs in such a
setting. Yet like the classroom with its
Victorian era constructs, we too often require the museum visitor to take us on
our terms rather than meeting them on theirs.
I feel that long term this is not sustainable. Like every other content provider (look what’s
happening in journalism, television, music and yes, text book publishing) if we
do not actively participate in our own creative destruction, we will become the
victims of its outcomes rather than the master.
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