Global education requires swift moves

Time never stands still when you are grabbing online opportunities for more authentic and meaningful student learning.

 

I can remember back in 2010 when my online colleagues, Tania Sheko from Australia and Marie Coleman from Florida US, set up the collaborative photo sharing project Through Global Lenses for our students. The idea was born, developed and implemented within a few weeks. Pure innovation and bold pioneer spirit!

I feel similar skills are needed in more and more jobs these days. Long gone are the days of static, routine work in many careers. As a teenager, and all through my university years, I used to always work in a post office during the summer holidays. Especially July used to be quite a quiet month with so many offices and factories closed for the workers' summer holidays. Consequently, I was often able to spend long working hours secretly reading a novel under my counter as hardly any customers came in. Today, there are hardly any post offices left! At least in Finland, they have been merged into kiosks, and grocery stores, making these places far busier for the workers as a result.

Yet, schools are still trying to hold on to the old industrial model of restricted curriculum, and yearly repeated lessons of going through static textbooks. How is this preparing our students for the world outside school? I can see the difficulty, though. If I was following a textbook with my EXE English group, I couldn't possibly spare my valuable few lessons to jump at the chance of international collaboration as I'm doing now.  What a pity it would be to lose such unique opportunities of real-life learning!

Since last Friday, the new blogging interaction initiative between my school in Finland, and Melbourne High School in Australia, has proceeded in leaps and bounds. Several tweets have been exchanged between us teachers, for one thing to tackle both our comment settings. Students are using either Posterous, Blogger or Wordpress as their blog services, and all of them require different specific sign-in procedures, making it difficult or even impossible for students to write comments. We have now opted for open commenting to make things easier. Of course, it is advisable to monitor comments closely in the blogosphere, especially when it comes to under-age students. At the same time, though, closed platforms are rather restrictive for any international collaboration. Naturally, we teachers will still keep an eye over the comments, and take necessary moderating measures if things get out of hand with spammers or inappropriate anonymous commenting.

Another new development over the weekend, too. The international "lady trio" has joined forces again, and Marie from Florida will have her blogging 'Introduction to Technology for Education' students visit our school blogs to get a first-hand glimpse into what is done in some schools today. 

Learning has suddenly become so much more vibrant and relevant for all of us again!

The generation gap

This spring I finally saw my first 3D animated films. I wouldn't probably have chosen to go myself, but luckily my family dragged me along, and I agreed with them that, as a teacher, I need to experience this first-hand. It was fascinating, but enough to make me feel dizzy at times. I'm beginning to suspect that my brain is wired so differently from today's young people that the generation gap between me and my students is getting wider by the second. Will it one day soon be too wide for me to reach any of my students any more?

This reminded me of a recent report on a research study at the Centre of Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In the research, fifteen-year-old students and teachers of Finnish or foreign languages were interviewed about their media consumption at school and in their freetime. What media do they use, with whom and for what purposes and what types of texts do they read? One of the interesting questions was how well school had managed to respond to young students' changing media preferences. The report, called 'Maailma muuttuu - mitä koulu tekee?' (freely in English: 'The world changes - how about school?'), was published last December.

The gist of the findings was quite predictable: students use many different media (mostly the internet), but read mainly short, visual and story-based texts, whereas teachers focus on traditional, more in-depth, printed media. At school students are expected to produce linear essays and read fiction and newspaper articles, although in their freetime they mainly read comic strips, short magazine articles or various texts on the internet. Unsurprisingly, the most important tool for teachers at school was the textbook, and even in their freetime tha majority of teachers preferred printed books (fiction or nonfiction) and the traditional press. Where is the dialogue, where is the process-nature that is inherent in the new online media? This video, embedded in Chris Betcher's blog some time ago, is very apt here.

All this, of course, raises the eternal dilemma of the school system seemingly preparing students for meeting school requirements only with little transfer of skills or knowledge to life outside school. Nothing new, but maybe in the case of the new media more teachers will start taking it seriously now that there is some academic research (printed inside the covers of a book!) to back these views up.

It shouldn't all be black and white, though. I, for one, enjoy good novels - in a paperback, not on the screen! - and my morning paper, too. At the same time, though, I am keen on different online environments and conventions to keep learning. Similarly, I know young students who are avid fiction readers. In the end, many types of media and texts have their place and serve different purposes - exclusiveness is the problem.


Photo: Generation Gap by Joi on Flickr