Project Tomorrow Report

Project Tomorrow is a national K-12 education research group whose mission is to "ensure that today’s students are well prepared to be tomorrow’s innovators, leaders and engaged citizens of the world," which they hope to achive by encouraging innovative uses of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) to help students "develop the critical thinking, problem solving and creativity skills needed to compete and thrive in the 21st century".

Each fall they survey hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, administrators, and parents about the uses of and hopes for educational technology in the "Speak Up National Research Project". From the data released in 2011 (full report here: http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/pdfs/SU10_3EofEducation(Students).pdf), they identified 3 key trends:

• Mobile Learning: Educational experiences that are enabled by mobile devices and applications provide a multitude of untethered opportunities for students to be more engaged in learning and extend the learning process beyond the classroom
• Online / Blended Learning: Online and blended learning enables a greater personalization of the learning process and facilitates opportunities for students to collaborate with peers and experts, thus empowering a new sense of personal ownership of the learning process by the student.
• e-Textbooks / Digital Content: The use of e-textbooks and other digitally rich content engages students by providing a real world context for the learning process and allowing learning to extend beyond the classroom walls.

Lawrenceville is doing a number of things which are in line with these: our pilot programs with iPads and Androids are a perfect fit for the first two, and our association with the 8 Schools in a blended learning project addresses the second.

Elon University / Pew Internet Project report on Millennial's Cognition

A new 36 page report from Elon University and the Pew Internet and American Life Project (http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2012survey/) states that the Millennial Generation (born between 1982 and 2002) will both "benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives".
The groups surveyed over 1,000 thought leaders (and critics) from industry, government, and education, and asked them to consider how exposure to the Internet and digital media are changing the cognitive functioning of today's students. The results showed a fairly even split between positive and negative opinions.
Earlier work by Pew had shown that 95% of teens ages 12-17 are online, as are 96% of those ages 18-29. Given that level of penetration, the participants were asked to consider possible scenarios for 2020 based on the statement "In 2020, the brains of multitasking teens and young adults are 'wired' differently from those over age 35". Two major themes surfaced:

• constantly connected teens and young adults will thirst for instant gratification and often make quick, shallow choices
• major education reform is required to emphasize new skills and literacies to better prepare students for the world they will live in

Some of major skills needed for future success were determined to be:

• public problem-solving through cooperative work (crowd-sourcing);
• the ability to search effectively for information online and to be able to discern the quality and veracity of that information, and then communicate these findings well (digital literacy); 
• being able to bring together details from many sources (synthesizing); 
• ability to concentrate; 
• the ability to distinguish between the "noise" and the message in the ever-growing sea of information

One of the most telling quotes comes from Microsoft researcher and teen expert danah boyd (yes, no caps) about what may be the next social divide:

"Concentrated focus takes discipline, but it's not something everyone needs to do," she wrote, "unfortunately, it is what is expected of much of the working-class labor force. I suspect we're going to see an increased class division around labor and skills and attention."

The web introduction to the report echos that concern:

"There is a palpable concern among these experts that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies. 

Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century - MacArthur Foundation

The MacArthur Foundation has gathered some great research on how learning needs to change to adapt to the 21st Century, based around these three questions:

• How are young people changing as a result of constant exposure to digital media?
• How should learning institutions change?
• How should learning environments change?

In the Director's message (http://goo.gl/963bO), Connie Yowell explains how the foundation shifted their focus from " traditional school reform" to "learning," and lays out the results from over 106 studies they funded:

Through our work to date, we understand that at least three key shifts must occur if the educational system is to transform from the current 19th-century paradigm (based largely on paper-and-pencil tests) to a 21st-century vision:

• A shift from education to learning. Education is what institutions do, learning is what people do. Digital media enable learning anywhere, anytime; formal learning must also be mobile and just in time.
• A shift from consumption of information to participatory learning. A new system of learning must be peer-based and organized around learners' interests, enabling them to create as well as consume information.
• A shift from institutions to networks. In the digital age, the fundamental operating and delivery systems are networks, not institutions such as schools, which are a node on a young person's network of learning opportunities. People learn across institutions, so an entire learning network must be supported.
  . . .

Connected learning is not about technology. The principles of connected learning weren't born in the digital age, but they are extraordinarily well-suited to it.
Connected learning is not about turning our backs on teachers and schools. Thousands of teachers and educators across the U.S. are working hard, often in the face of adversity, to reimagine learning for the next generation.
Connected learning is also not about throwing out traditional literacy skills. The importance of reading, writing and critical thinking are as important as ever. But so are new literacies like advanced problem-solving and collaboration that will be critical in the increasingly interconnected world we dwell in.
Connected learning also is tuned to the reality that technology and the networked era is threatening to stretch the already-wide equity gap in education unless there is decisive intervention and a strong public agenda. In a world so full of knowledge and an abundance of learning possibilities, isn't it our responsibility to work as hard as we can to see that every child has a chance to unlock his or her potential? (from http://goo.gl/efdyN)

The main Re-Imagining Learning page is here: http://goo.gl/EdNd2

They have set up two other sites which describe the connected learning principles, the emerging community, and ongoing research:

• http://connectedlearning.tv/
• http://clrn.dmlhub.net/

New Media Consortium's Top 10 'Metatrends' Shaping Educational Technology

The New Media Consortium is well known for their annual Horizon Report which looks at "emerging technologies for teaching, learning, research, creative inquiry, and information management": http://www.nmc.org/horizon-project

At the end of January, 2012, they gathered 100 educational thought leaders to mark the tenth anniversary of the Horizon Project, and asked the question "what will be the role of technology in the next decade?"
 http://www.nmc.org/news/download-communique-horizon-project-retreat

The top 10 items were:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.
2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to.Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and ereader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices. 
3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges. Mobithinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85% of new devices can access the mobile web. 
4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.
5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media. 
6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry. 
7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments —but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa. 
8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount. 
9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia — and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.
10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.