More on the 'knowledge' debate

Jane Gilbert in her own words, in response to the attack on schools for supposedly 'losing the plot' on knowledge.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/education/news/article.cfm?c_id=35&objectid=11127235

Google simplifies the 'flip'

Checking out the Google Blog, I see that they have literally just made some changes to Google Forms that make the flipped classroom so much more accessible and useful.

Users can now embed video into a Google Form.

It  becomes much more practicable to follow the Professor Eric Mazur methodology of getting students to preview content AND do something useful/meaningful with it.

Responses can be collected analysed to look for common misconceptions, or  shared easily with students the next day to encourage co-construction of knowledge.

VERY powerful. Well done Google.

The fate of knowledge?

Over this past weekend I have read two articles in the New Zealand niggling in that 'under-mining' sort of way at the NZ education and qualifications systems are.

This article in particular got me going - "Let's bring knowledge back into schools"

I was staggered. By coincidence I'd just written the following as a part of my regular fortnightly 'Curriculum News' in our College parent publication:

The whole concept of knowledge has changed. In my student days, knowledge was still largely a matter of ‘knowing stuff’. Only at post-graduate level did it become important to be able to ‘do something’ with that knowledge. Today’s world is very different. Knowing stuff is still important, but today it is equally as important to be able to ‘do stuff’ with that information. In my opinion one of the great strengths of NCEA lies in the demands it places on candidates to take what they know and think deeply about it. In 2005 Jane Gilbert (NZCER) published a book titled ‘Catching the knowledge wave’, in which she “takes apart many long-held ideas about knowledge and education. She says that knowledge is now a verb, not a noun—something we do rather than something we have—and explores the ways our schools need to change to prepare people to participate in the knowledge-based societies of the future.” This is not the forum in which to discuss the implications for society and the economy, but it certainly reflects on the fact that the demands on your boys today are far greater than they were on many of us as students. In my own subject area boys need to ‘know stuff’ about economics, but more importantly they need to be able to ‘do stuff’ with that knowledge, to think critically, to explain and analyse, to create meaning. In this sense NCEA places far higher demands on secondary students than ever before.

Suggestions that secondary schools are not teaching knowledge are at best mischievous. As I said in my column, we teach thinking, but we cannot think in the absence of knowledge. Perhaps the problem is exactly what knowledge do we teach. The rate of increase in the world's knowledge is so huge that it is almost impossible now to say exactly what knowledge we should teach beyond certain basics.

For example, we would probably all agree that everyone ought to be able to read and write. By 'write' do we mean with a pen? A keyboard? Using voice recognition software? Or are we in fact talking about the skill of putting words together to coherently, accurately and effectively communicate meaning regardless of the medium that we use?

We would probably all agree that students need to be numerate.  What does that mean? Probably something different for an accountant when compared with a plumber compared with a games app developer. Do we try to prepare all students in case they want to be accountants or economists?

If I stop being facetious for a moment I think that we could all agree on basic levels of literacy and numeracy that are required, but whatever field of knowledge we discuss, reaching agreement about which parts everyone should know is probably more difficult than it appears to be at first sight.

So schools take a stand, they 'draw a line in the sand' about what knowledge is required, but more important than the knowledge itself is the ability to think about that knowledge. Schools endeavor to teach students how to think, how to 'do stuff' with the knowledge that they gain. You only need to investigate the 'Excellence' level demands in most (if not all??) achievement standards currently on the Qualifications Framework to see what I mean. To suggest that schools have focused on skills at the expense of knowledge is in my opinion wrong. Where is the evidence I'd ask.

What is true I would theorise is that as Jane Gilbert says, knowledge has become a verb rather than a noun, and too many people have failed to realise how fundamentally our world has changed in this regard.