September 25, 2010

Authentic learning is more effective – and much more fun

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During this autumn I’ve had the great privilege to enjoy the high-quality teaching at the Research Centre for Vocational Education at the University of Tampere. I’m doing my PhD there, which is fantastic as the professors and researchers there are really, really good. It’s been great to experience the joy of learning again! The fact I’ve had to use my weekends for the studies and ride the bus for more than an hour each direction to get there hasn’t bothered me at all. I feel I’m gaining so much that these minor sacrifices are indeed minor.

This has given me a great opportunity to reflect on motivation and learning. Being a teacher and education developer myself, I’ve been thinking what it is that makes my learning experience so meaningful and inspiring. Maybe I’d find answers that help me with my own work.  I don’t have any definite answers yet, but at least the following things are true about my case:

  • I’m genuinely interested in vocational education in the 21st century. It is the field I want to develop and learn more about.
  • I know my studies are essential steps on my way towards this goal, namely the PhD. The goal is so meaningful to me that it turns every step on the way meaningful as well.

But I’ve got to pause here. This is not an extraordinary situation, is it? Isn’t it actually very typical for any student both to be interested in their field of study (that’s why they applied there in the first place, right?) and value the degree or qualification they are aiming at? Why is it then that this wonderful joy of learning seems so absent in many cases? It cannot be that the joy is only reserved to PhD studies, it should be just as prominent in undergraduate studies! This is obviously not enough, I need to think further and find more explanations. Let’s try again.

  • I already have enough knowledge about the subject to be able to connect the new information to my previous experiences. This is because I’m applying the relevant theory into practice all the time in my work. Not in artificial, sand-box learning tasks, but in authentic, real-life situations.

This is more like it, isn’t it? This is a dramatic difference when comparing my learning experience with most undergraduate students. Most of the time, studies offer plenty of theoretical knowledge, but the authentic applications may be years ahead. By the time they are at hand, the theory has already been forgotten. Learning is not something you can stock and take from the shelf when needed. Although this is what our education is largely based on, it is not how deep learning works.

  • I study together with a colleague and spend long hours reflecting and sharing ideas regarding the new information with him. Not because we are instructed to do a “group work”, but because we work in the same team and we see that the collaborative knowledge construction benefits us both. Besides, it’s fun.

Another difference. Students don’t usually work in teams, they only do group works when instructed to do so. But most of the higher education practices, learning environments and assessment methods strongly support individual performance. This is just plain crazy if we think about the 21st century working environments, where teams and networks are the norm. Team learning would be the authentic way of learning, but it is very seldom practiced in higher education.

  • The professors treat us like colleagues, not like students. They respect our expertise. The discussions during the lectures and seminars are all about true sharing and building common knowledge, not about one-way communication, checking homework or teacher asking questions and waiting to get the right answer from the students.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I have the feeling that this type of approach seems to be very difficult for many teachers. Teachers are used to being experts. They are used to knowing the right answer, giving instructions and controlling the situation. But a more coach-like approach wouldn’t diminish the teacher’s status as an expert! There is no way I’d think my own expertise in vocational education would somehow surpass that of my supervising professor’s. However, I might have greater expertise in some other field. Recognizing this enables the types of expertise meet, opening the possibility for an enriching interaction and new innovation. This is the kind of learning organizations would die to establish. But our students are seldom trained for it, thanks to old hierarchical conception of expertise.

There might be more reasons, but already these are enough to illustrate some of the weaknesses of present-day higher education in transmitting 21st century professional skills to their students. I’ve said this before, will probably say it a thousand times more: new working environments require new skills that cannot be taught by old means. Attempting to maintain the status quo despite of the changes in the society does not only make studying less effective, but it also makes it much less motivating and fun.

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August 24, 2010

Common mistakes universities make with social media

Image: Scott Webb

Time flies! I know it’s been quite a while since I last wrote anything here. I’ve been on a holiday in July, and now in August the beginning of the new semester has kept me busy. New challenges are waiting and I must say I’m very eager to start facing them!

On August 18 I gave a keynote session and workshop in a seminar for language teachers in Turku, organized by the Language Centre at Turku University of Applied Sciences. My topic was social media and the evolving professional challenges in the knowledge society. The seminar was very interesting and I had some really good conversations with teacher colleagues both at the workshop and more informally over coffee and lunch. Sharing our experiences strengthened the idea I’ve had for quite some time now:  there are a few things universities tend to go (repeatedly) wrong with when dealing with social media.

Here are some of my observations. You may have more examples (or you may disagree), and I’d like to invite you to discuss these ideas here in my blog!

1. Social media is not primarily about technology.

Sure, it involves a lot of technology, but it’s not the technology the teachers should worry about (unless you teach software engineering). It’s about social behavior. Aren’t we teachers supposed to be good at this? Why is it so hard for us to see beyond the technology and find the real opportunities social media offers for education?

2. Staff training and competence building related to social media should not be about technology either.

If the core idea of social media is social behavior, not technology, why is it that all staff training offered to teachers in the use of social media is about learning to use a software? It’s a terrible waste of resources. This is not what we need, we are smart enough to learn by doing what happens if we click on one button or another. Give us a break! What we do need is pedagogical support and understanding of the knowledge society as well as the impact of learning environments on the learning results. It’s a much more complex thing than learning to click on the right button.

I’m going to have to share a real-life story to illustrate my point. I attended a wiki training at our university, where the guy from the computer center explained us how to use the software. It was all nice and smooth until one of the teachers was bold enough to ask: “How can I use this in my own teaching?” The guy was a bit confused and answered finally that he didn’t know if it could be used in teaching at all. Another teacher, refusing to be put off by this news, said: “This will surely be a good tool for international projects!” But the trainer had to disappoint her: the software could not be used without the user ID and password of our own organization.

Now I’m not blaming the trainer, of course not. The guy was doing his job and he is very good at it. I also realize and agree that it is essential to teach the staff to use the information systems of the organization. However, something is very clearly missing: teachers will not become better teachers simply by learning how to use a program; they become better teachers when they realize how they can use a given tool to help the students learn better, learn more, or learn more relevant skills. Still, the trainings continue like this, and I don’t think we’re the only university to be doing so. It’s like teaching people how to use a hammer, but leave out the information on how to actually build something.

3. Social media stops being social media the very moment it becomes teacher-led and closed.

Universities would love to have their own, closed and controlled version of Facebook, Second Life and Twitter. There are many real-life examples of these “replacements” around. Our wiki is a good (or should I say bad) example of this. Now let me say this loud and clear: it’s not social media. Sorry.

Getting back to point number 1: social media is about social behavior and interaction. I think we can agree with that. Facebook lets us communicate and interact with faraway friends and colleagues, Twitter helps us interact and learn from colleagues and experts around the world, Second Life makes it possible to attend seminars on the other side of the globe. That’s the whole beauty of it. In the closed versions all you can interact with are your classmates and fellow students – the same people you’d interact with anyway. There might be some added value in following your fellow students on Twitter, but compared to the real thing it’s very limited indeed.

Conclusion: you cannot take conventional learning and make it fit in social media.

You may replace the word “learning” with “leadership” or “management” or “advertising” or just about anything. It’s not just schools and universities, it’s the entire society that is changing. The industrial age rules just do not apply anymore. It’s both liberating and terrifying: we must learn to question, rethink, and instead of repeating create something new.

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June 15, 2010

Africa – the next center of e-learning innovation?

I’ve now given a week of staff training at the Dar es Salaam University College of Education. During the first week we’ve had an introduction to e-learning, we’ve talked about pedagogical planning of an online course and we’ve taken the first steps to learn how to use the Moodle learning management system. 40-50 teachers and professors are attending the workshops.

I’ve given staff training in e-learning many times before, and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I didn’t.

At this point some might be thinking to themselves that I probably mean power cuts, connectivity problems, scheduling, equipment, or something like that. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that the teachers and professors are the most amazing audience I’ve ever had. I’ve never seen such enthusiasm, team spirit, curiosity, dialogue and readiness to learn by doing, experimenting and testing. This group of people is wholeheartedly committed to developing their own skills and the programs offered by the College of Education. They are proving that the joy of learning is not only reserved to children learning things for the first time in their lives, but can just as well be enjoyed by adults with a long learning history.

The million dollar question is: how could such an attitude spread to all teachers and students everywhere?

It is also obvious that these teachers really want to help their students learn. I’ve also read articles on e-learning written by UDSM teachers. I’ve been impressed with the advanced student-centered pedagogy and learning community thinking.

With such spirit and skill, miracles can happen. Just watch, African e-learning and mobile learning might very well be the most innovative in the world in no time.

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June 8, 2010

Education, entrepreneurship and development

I’ve now spent a week in Dar es Salaam, a few more are to come. I’m here with 4 friends and colleagues from Tampere. We’re here to work together with people from University of Dar es Salaam, in four projects of the university. The projects are about developing e-Learning at University level / teacher training / secondary schools, and about entrepreneurship. Whereas the three first ones seem to be quite obviously interrelated, I’m growing to understand that all of them are much more tightly connected to the last one than one would imagine.

We are a small-scale project with a very limited budget, we operate with human capital instead of money. We offer our professional skills, not equipment, facilities or other kind of funding. It gives our project one advantage: the teams consist of people with genuine passion to improve education. I’ve quoted Anver Versi in my blog before. He said in one of his editorials: “invest in education and all else will follow”. We believe in it.

This week has made me rethink this motto. Not that I’d doubt whether investing in education is a solution or not, I’m quite sure it is. It’s rather the question of how to invest in education. Allocating more money to support building schools, educating teachers or buying equipment? Making laws that make education compulsory to everyone? Building better roads to make schools more easily accessible? Improving agricultural practices so that parents would not be so dependent on their children’s contribution to the work? Raising taxes in order to be able to finance all of the above?

Many of the highly educated people of sub-Saharan countries move abroad to work after graduation. At the same time, the great majority of growing, profitable businesses are owned by foreigners. The relation between entrepreneurship and education becomes clearer. It’s not all that different in Finland. I’ve been watching great engineering skills (and quite an amount of R&D funding) directed to small-scale hobby projects with no commercialization strategy. I’ve heard too many young Finns say they’d like to do almost anything else but start their own business. People stare at Nokia and paper industry, believe they suffice as our world-scale companies – and cry at the same time as these companies lay people off when the old business models are no longer profitable. A lot of complaining, not much action.

We must invest in education, but we must think carefully and responsibly what the investment should be like. Initiative, courage, problem-solving skills and creativity are key skills, both in Tanzania and in Finland. They are the skills associated with entrepreneurial spirit, and the purpose of the industrial society schooling has never been to nurture them, quite the opposite. We seriously do need 21st century education, both in developed and developing countries. This is not a new, fashionable pedagogical mantra, it’s a real key to real problems.

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May 11, 2010

Traditional schooling is a threat to learning

Image: k8marieuk

Mikael Jungner, the former CEO of YLE Broadcasting company in Finland, shocked the nation with his exceptionally direct speech at the end of April (article in Kauppalehti 29.4.2010, in Finnish only – sorry!). He believes the leadership culture in Finland is in a deep crisis: “senile” (he really did use the word) managers cling desperately to their authority, titles and old procedures, give orders, work behind closed doors and fail to see that the world has changed for good.

Wait a minute, this isn’t a business blog. Shouldn’t I write about education? What’s it with all this business and management talk?

But the sad truth is that I have just written about education. The situation is pretty much the same in schools and universities as it is in business life: we hold on to old structures and hierarchies, curricula and methods of assessment, without realizing that they’re no longer a part of this world. Mikael Jungner claims that the “traditional boss is a threat to the competitivity of Finland”. Similarly,  the traditional schooling is a threat to learning.

As Mikael Jungner points out, passion and enthusiasm are the most effective fuel for profitability. Do I even need to say what they do to learning? Do I need to underline what outdated teaching and assessment methods, dull learning environments and hierarchical structures do to passion and enthusiasm?

Just a few days ago I ran into a wonderful example of true passion and enthusiasm – and great learning experiences. I had the opportunity to speak with Juho Hartikainen, the president of SCORE Game Development Club. He is a student at Tampere University of Applied Sciences, and together with fellow students, he wants to make games, collaborate with game industry, attend relevant events and create new innovative projects. There’s not enough of that included in the curriculum so they’ve worked on these things at the  SCORE club, outside school hours. These students have learned a great deal of valuable professional skills: networking, communication skills, presentation skills, language skills, interpersonal skills, project management, team work, responsibility – not to mention creating games – all through informal learning. These things are not in the curriculum. They have created their own learning environment, own learning methods, own networks, and become highly competent professionals in the field of game development – not because of, but despite formal education. And SCORE (or game industry in general) is no exception; this is a growing tendency.

Now, let me get back to the threat posed by traditional management. Here’s what Mikael Jungner says about traditional management in business life:

In many organizations the management has no clue of the real world…People who are completely at sea decide how enthusiastic people should or should not work.

If we take a close look at our curricula, learning environments and teaching methods, we are bound to see how this relates to education. Our school system was created to meet the needs of the industrial age. It hasn’t changed much since. Of course, the industrial age is long gone and the skills our present day society needs are very different from the ones needed back then. Schooling has the industrial age model built in it. It means that it naturally leads to the acquisition of the industrial age skills – which, of course, is a complete waste of time and terribly harmful to the economy. Now you can see what I mean by the threat.

PS.  Seth Godin writes about the same thing in his blog: It’s easier to teach compliance than initiative.

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April 7, 2010

Learning is supposed to be fun. Period.

Learning is fun. It doesn’t necessarily seem all that obvious when looking at a teenager behind her desk, yawning with boredom, leaning to the table. But you’ll have to admit it, learning is fun. Little children scream with joy taking their first steps, riding the bicycle for the first time, fitting a piece of the puzzle in its place. Little children love to learn.

Adults love to learn. Remember the first time you got that backhand right, or managed to order a meal in Spanish during your vacation? The joy and amazement of breathing underwater for the first time, giving a successful presentation in front of an important audience, playing that difficult guitar solo better than ever before? Come on, just admit it: learning is fun. Difficult, at times, but fun.

What went wrong with the school system? Why don’t we hear the screams of joy from schools? Of course there are the people who keep saying that learning is hard work, it’s not supposed to be fun, and it’s only natural that children try to avoid it. I’m not buying it for one second. Learning can be hard work, it requires persistence and motivation, but it is supposed to be fun. We are supposed to love it. There should be screams of joy, but instead this is a far more familiar sight in a classroom:

Image: Matthew Stinson

There’s one more thing I need to stress out here: fun doesn’t mean the same thing as entertaining. Fun doesn’t mean superficial, simplified or amusing. What fun does mean, though, is motivation, satisfaction, discovery, reward, development, innovation, creativity and imagination.

Hand on your heart: how much of that does our school system provide to our children?

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April 5, 2010

Greetings from SITE 2010, San Diego

SITE (Society for technology and teacher education) 2010 is now over, after a week of interesting presentations, discussions and new contacts. I remember once again why events like this are so important for us teachers to attend. We all have our local problems and challenges, and of course they are the ones closest to us, but it’s easy to lose the big picture when only staring at them. Education is facing new challenges – and opportunities! – globally. It was great to hear from colleagues from all over the world and find new perspectives to our common issues. We’re in this together, and it’s a great strength and inspiration.

SITE had almost 1200 participants from over 50 countries, all sharing the same passion in making the world a better place. That’s what education is all about, isn’t it? There were some 800 presentations, all describing efforts to improve education by designing better learning environments, implementing new and innovative teaching and learning methods, re-defining pedagogy to serve the 21st century learning needs and collaborating with others to gain a wider perspective.

I and my colleague Timo Nevalainen gave two presentations as well, a full paper about the changing world and changing teacher, and a roundtable about Second Life in teacher education. The full paper presentation is on video, so if you missed it at SITE but would be interested in hearing it, here you go!

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