Book Review: Getting Smart

“If you think our future will require better schools, you’re wrong. The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments.”

Tom Vander Ark in Getting Smart: How Digital Learning Is Changing the World

I am currently in Canada attending The Vancouver Symposium on Christian Education in the 21st Century.  Tom Vander Ark is our keynote speaker for tomorrow morning’s session and I’m eager to hear his thoughts on digital learning.  In preparation for his talk, I read Getting Smart and have spent some time with his additional resources online at GettingSmart.com.  I’ve enjoyed reading some of his thoughts and am particularly excited that he cited some research from the College of Education at the University of Memphis..GO TIGERS!

I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those notes below…

• Learning is the big change lever.
• This book will make the case that innovation is key to excellence and equity in education; that learning is more important than ever; that it is easier, faster, and cheaper to do; and that personal digital learning is transforming formal education—and everything else.
• Search makes the world’s knowledge accessible; now learning is just a matter of motivation and focus.
• The just-in-time learning that Google enables is a far cry from the just-in-case learning our schools are now offering
• This book isn’t about reform, it’s about reinvention.
• Pedagogy. Teacher-centered, lecture-based classrooms are giving way to student-centered, interactive, applied, and project-based learning. Master schedules will give way to interesting blends of customized learning experiences and projects that encourage integration and application. Just-in-time learning will become more common, slowly replacing the current model of just-in-case learning.
• Consider some of the school networks that think hard about preparing kids for their future and not our past. Expeditionary Learning, which draws on Outward Bound principles, is based, in part, on “the having of wonderful ideas.”14 It is precisely this notion of rewarded curiosity that is essential for a leader in the idea economy.
• It’s time to take the lessons learned and the effective models developed over the last decade and supercharge them with technology.
• If you need to learn how to calculate the slope of a line, a quick Internet search will yield a Wikipedia explanation, a Khan Academy tutorial, a couple of learning games, several peer-to-peer learning sites, and lots of YouTube videos. The notion of a textbook as just one way to learn is suddenly very antiquated.
• With demand created by the idea economy, the learning revolution is being fueled by expanding access to broadband, cheap mobile devices, and powerful new tools. It is increasingly possible for anyone to learn anything almost anywhere. That allows us (and forces us) to reinvent the delivery of public education. So let’s get started.
• Boredom may be the greatest challenge we face.
• Mile-wide, inch-deep state standards and multiple-choice testing have subverted the liberal education intent and left us with a boring, less useful, and less relevant set of expectations.
• Students need the ability to sort, verify, synthesize, and use information to make judgments and take action.
• Students need the ability to sell—themselves and an idea. They need to experience and give candid performance feedback and gain appreciation for a quality work product.
• Students need to be able to gather evidence and construct an argument.
• They will face a world with more ways to make a living than ever before, requiring frequent interaction with people from different parts of the world, with different levels of education, and with different work habits. The emotional intelligence to read people and situations across multiple cultures will be ever more critical, from the service counter attendant to the CEO.
• The dynamic economy demands that we take charge of our own learning, figure out what we need to learn, and find or create a way to learn it.
• What is the ideal education model? Technology may put an end to that debate because the answer will increasingly be “whatever works best for that student.” We need to build on children’s strengths, leverage exploration of their interests, shore up in areas where they are weak, and graduate them with a personalized plan. In other words, we need to customize.
• Customized learning will be driven by the instant feedback of content-embedded assessment.
• Capturing more data on more dimensions will allow systems to make smart recommendations for students—key to customized learning.
• We can learn a lot about persevering behaviors by observing the casual game space. Different games attract different players. Some prefer combat over collaboration, some realism over alternative realities, some a race over exploration. Nearly all games provide instant performance feedback. Perhaps most important, most games offer the benefit of public victories and private failures—both important to most kids.
• Simulations, internships, and service learning experiences can all help make learning real and can allow students to succeed and fail with a safety net.
• Our new closeness to information forces schools to think of themselves not simply as places to get information but as places where children will be challenged and guided in new ways to use information. As more skill-building and content-sharing activities are offered automatically, schools and teachers can increasingly focus on the important stuff: critical thinking (what does this mean?), coherence (where does this fit?), and application (what could I do with this knowledge?).
• There is enough good digital curriculum that it doesn’t make sense to buy (or ask students to buy) textbooks anymore. Digital content can be more engaging, it’s easier to update, it’s more portable, and it is cheaper—in fact, some of it is free. Although in the past free education resources—often referred to as open education resources (OER)—have not had the consistent quality, vetting, or organized connection to standards that schools want and need, that is now changing.
• One of the reasons parents want to send their children to elite schools is not just so they can have access to great teachers and a great curriculum. They also want their children to meet and work with other students who are interested and motivated.
• Shy students can make their case.
• Online guidance systems will soon be the backbone of secondary education.
• High schools can’t maintain the old master schedule with limited and traditional offerings with so much access to quality courses and effective teachers.
• It is important to emphasize that engaging in online learning does not preclude participating in other activities and indeed, because the learning is more efficient, it can allow children more time to interact with other children in environments other than the classroom, where they are likely to experience more success and less stress.
• If we don’t address the United States’ inability to innovate in the delivery of public services, it is certain that our children will be the first generation to be less well off than their parents.
• Online learning can quickly bring uniform quality to students statewide where policies allow.
• The combination of tradition, bureaucracy, and protectionism stifles innovation and investment and is why the sector is more than a decade behind.
• The Internet doesn’t conform well to guardian protocols; it is by nature open to inventiveness and novelty. This explains some of the resistance to online learning; it just doesn’t fit the boundaries of tradition and the practices of the past.
• Personal digital learning won’t just change the experience of students in K–12 education, it will fundamentally change the lives and work of those people who are in any way engaged in supporting and educating children.
• In this new landscape of personal digital learning teachers are going to have to fire themselves once and for all from the job of expert and fully embrace the new job of facilitator, guide, and organizer.
• This greater self-awareness and freedom brings with it new responsibilities and opportunities for students to better advocate for themselves.
• Rick Hess and Olivia Meeks concluded Customized Schooling by suggesting the following: The one-size-fits-all school system has passed its expiration date. It is not that there was something innately wrong with the “one best system” or the conventional schoolhouse. Indeed, they represented the best practice solutions of an earlier, more bureaucratic era. Today, however, heightened aspirations, the press of student needs, and the opportunities presented by new tools and technologies mean that old arrangements are no longer a good fit. The charge is for schooling to make the same shift from the centralized, industrial model to a more nimble, customized model that we have made in so many other areas of life.
• The learning revolution under way is the shift from print to digital, lectures to interaction, testing to instant feedback, classes to individuals, schools to anywhere. The revolution will yield powerful learning platforms of customized playlists of engaging learning media, integrated team-based projects that leverage social media and community assets, and tailored student support services. The revolution will yield a new generation of schools that blend modes, extend learning, and incorporate community resources.
• If you think our future will require better schools, you’re wrong. The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments.