It’s interesting to reflect on how often we hear or use the word dropout and yet barely give a second thought to its meaning or more importantly what it implies. Along the way it has become a measure of school success or more notably school failure, and is used in a similar manner across higher ed. […]
What Do We Mean By Dropout? Read More »
Who benefits most from the current model of higher education? While the existing model may have served post-secondary students well in times past, there is increasing evidence that we need to rethink the extent to which it is meeting the needs of today’s modern learners. For decades successive generations have accepted and built on what
Is Higher Ed Broken? Read More »
Where does school improvement end and transformation really start? I don’t know about you, but more and more I am hearing the terms used interchangeably, and if you throw in school reform the conversation can get very muddy. While reform is a term most often applied to ‘fix’ a school or school system that is
The Science of Transformation Read More »
In recent times I have become quite intrigued by the impact assumptions have on the effectiveness of our decision making, and sadly our wonderful world of education, and in particular edtech is too often cluttered with a myriad of unfathomable assumptions on which poor decisions are made. As an example we could start with some
The Era of Sanitized Computing Read More »
It’s hard to think of many words that are more misused or abused in our schools than “vision,” and even if we discount the number of times it’s confused for mission, its role as the North Star too often seems to be trivialized if not by definition, then certainly by execution. Certainly the article Will
How Bold is Your Vision? Read More »
About two weeks ago, I ran a whole day workshop at a large, high-performing public elementary school. We’d been working for most of the day around their plans to move to a modern learning environment, but as is typical of many schools their use of technology had really only played a marginal part in their
Knowing What You Need to Know Read More »
Don’t you look forward to those times when you walk into a classroom and the place is alive with learning? It might be kids lying on the floor with their laptops, some connected up to control devices, others remotely running robotics, while over in the corner there is a a cluster of students staring at
Reflections on a Parallel Universe Read More »
About 5 years ago I worked with a small team to set up a research and development facility known as ideasLab in a Western suburb of Melbourne. It was an exciting project, built around answering a simple question: What’s now possible? The premise of the question followed a national initiative which meant that more than
Captured in Context Read More »
As we start the new calendar year, and in southern climes a new school year, it’s probably a good time to test our holiday brains with some simple questions around what we call “school time.” Have you ever wondered who actually decided that around 180 days was the perfect amount of time students should spend in
In Changing Times Should We Consider Changing Times? Read More »
How should we scale great schooling? If individualisation is the mother of innovation, then surely variability must be the enemy of equity, and addressing that enemy poses an interesting ideological dilemma. If, as in France for example, we believe in providing an ‘equal education’ for all students, then just how far are we prepared to
Finding the Right Balance: Autonomy and Variability Read More »
For all that we have written about the shifts we are starting to see in our schools, there are an increasing number of questions that need to be answered. Where do we start and what is the path or roadmap going to look like? There is plenty of discussion currently around ‘deep learning’, so is that
One Small Step…in Time Read More »
As the year draws closer, I’ve been reflecting on which are the words we use in education that we have managed to normalise, appropriate, or in some cases bastardize over the past twelve months. No doubt ‘narrative’ has to be a big contender for a top 3 spot and it would all be very funny
The Transformation Fantasy Read More »
I’m sitting in the office of Pasi Silander, Development Manager for the Helsinki Department of Education, and I ask him what he thinks really matters for young people in Finnish schools. His answer doesn’t have a 4 letter acronym starting with ‘P’ in it, in fact it doesn’t relate in any way to tests, scores
What If the Finns Got it Right, Again? Read More »
It’s a funny thing, but despite all the predictions and over-the horizon talk we continually hear around emerging technologies, I can’t recall any ‘futurists’ predicting the impact personal technology access is now having on our very young children. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with anticipating future trends per se, it’s just that we seem
Babes in the Technology Woods Read More »
Something’s happening. Call it a groundswell, a rumbling…whatever you like, but it seems to me that the call for educational change has suddenly gotten louder. No longer is this a cry from the wilderness for a simple ‘70’s renaissance, nor is it a belief in the miracle of technology, but rather this time it represents
Disruption, Delusion and Deep Learning Read More »
