Room With A View

I’ve been thinking about the audio school folks that all talked about the need to be entrepreneurial. The days of working one’s way up in the hierarchy of record companies is gone. The life of an audio engineer is now about business and contracts. In short they need to be self-employed. I imagine it’s the same for people working in the movie industry too.

My concern is that I don’t see schools–at least international schools–preparing kids to be self-employed. Schools should not follow business models. Nor do I think the role of schools is just to prepare kids to be good employees but I do think they should have enough business savvy at the end of high school that they have the confidence and skills that they can start the process of becoming self-employed. I suspect that most teachers–myself included–do not have the skills or the knowledge to teach this but it still needs to be done.

My family and I spent Thursday going around Vancouver checking on audio schools for my son. He graduates from ISB in a year and plans to be a rock star but he’s thinking about picking up some audio engineering skills along the way. We stopped in at three schools–Nimbus, Pacific Audio Visual Institute, and Columbia Academy. Each school had strengths but some common themes that emerged from all of them were:

• The technology is secondary. One has to have an ear for music/audio.
• The technology is always changing. One has to always be learning.
• People skills are as important as technical skills–maybe more so.
• One has to be entrepreneurial. There’s no job security.

Regarding music and video in schools many of my discussions with kids seem to be about what they can’t do. They can’t copy music because it’s illegal. They can’t use a video or music clip in a podcast project because we don’t have rights to re-broadcast the media. It’s extrememly limitting and for many teachers it means they don’t publish students’ media projects on our website or through other channels i.e. YouTube.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto takes a different view. Instead it suggests that culture has always been built by building on the work of others. It’s just been in the last 30 years or so that copyright laws have made it illegal.

Food for thought.

I spend a lot of time thinking of how education needs to change–to modernize. This article in the Globe and Mail regarding schools in Afghanistan reminds me of how fortunate I am to be able to think about these things.

School enrollment in Afghanistan is up despite attacks on students and teachers by the Taliban.

The BBC reports on a study that states, “A major review of the curriculum for England’s primary schools
suggests that six broad “areas of learning” could replace individual
subjects.”

The areas of learning are:

I spent some time this morning reading and thinking about Brian Lamb’s post Content. I agree with most if not all that he says on an individual level. I’m just not sure how to move an institutional, like the one in which I work, toward the ideas he expresses. Like one commenter said, I agree philosophically but I’m not sure how to make it work practically.

Perhaps it’s not a matter of making it work completely but more we need to move institutions in the directions he suggests. We need to trend them in the direction of syndication, PLE’s, openness, or re-use.

This article by Jeremy Clarkson is a couple of years old but it’s certainly “current.”

Thanks to Gary Stager for pointing the way to the article.

I’ve not been very linear today. What started out as a quick check to see what’s happening at NECC turned into a session on brain based education.

I’ve alway been a bit skeptical about brain based education. I think the brain research that’s going on is great and needs to continue it’s just that most of the links people make when they apply it to classroom practice are not links so much as they are leaps of faith. Often, they use a “brain study” to suggest some kind of classroom practice that we already know to be good. We don’t need a “brain study” to tell us that.

Here’s a video by Dr. Daniel Willingham who teaches at the University of Virginia. He sums things up much better than I do.

Brain based education: Fad or breakthrough–high quality

Here are the links I followed to get to the video and a link to Dr. Willingham’s website.

Stephen Downes
George Siemens
Daniel Willingham

I’m not a fan of writers and others who have little first hand experience in education pontificating on how to “fix” our schools. Having said this, there is value in listening to divergent views. (We just can’t allow those with the divergent views to make policy decisions without input from those with first hand experience in the system–i.e. teachers.)

I’ve been a reader of Robert Cringely for many years–since I watched Triumph of the Nerds on PBS. His column last week is about education and is entitled War of the Worlds. It’s worth a read but basically his thesis is that students are so empowered by communication technology that they are ready to “dump our schools.”

I don’t see this in the students I teach but perhaps it’s evident with high school and university students. Having said this, students have been ready to “dump schools” for many years regardless of technology. (I wasn’t a big fan of my high school experience. Though I enjoyed university.)

Cringely also states that “we’re moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy.” Without the knowledge what does one search? I do agree that students are not good searchers. We need to teach them to be effective searchers.

Finally, he suggests that students don’t need a certificate from an institution with a good reputation i.e. Stanford but rather students need a certification that shows what they can do–some kind of ISO certification. This is an interesting idea but I’m afraid the certification may reduce education to the lowest common denominator in the same way the No Child Left Behind and the standards movement have.

I’m attending the ADE Institute 2007 in Bangkok. The place is hopping with creative energetic teachers ready to change the world or at least classroom practice in their schools. I’m feeling just a wee bit intimidated Actually, it’s geek heaven. Not only have we heard lots about Apple’s stuff but Google reps were here this afternoon.

Having said this, the really cool part is the conversations with like minded people.

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