One of the authors, Michael Horn, attended the recent Hacking Education meeting hosted by Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures. We were able to follow along on Twitter. While the full transcript is not yet out, Fred Wilson’s summary makes clear that students will increasingly drive their own education: “Learning is bottom up and education is top down. We’ll have more learning and less education in the future.”
Kids and adults learn at different rates and have different preferred learning styles. One student may learn algebra based on the equations, while another may understand only by viewing spatial representations of the underlying concepts. Imagine the permutations, even within a single classroom, of learning styles, rates, and topics to be taught. And ideally the presentation of a topic would be highly engaging, so the learning experience is intrinsically motivating for the student. It would be impossible for a teacher to deliver customized instruction to each student in a learning style appropriate for that student and subject material and in an engaging manner.
Disrupting Class concludes that the classroom of the future will be student-centric rather than teacher-centric, with self-guided learning, largely computer-based, and the teacher acting as a moderator and coach. User-generated software is a key component of this future classroom – it is the only way that this huge set of specialized instructional modules can be created. And standard social community tools like ratings, tagging, recommendations, etc. will allow students to find exactly the module they need.
When nothing is available, the student may create his/her own learning aid. And in creating this tool, the student may in fact master the material. From Disrupting Class (p. 141)
We learn material much better when we teach it than when we’re sitting passively in a classroom listening to someone explain it to us. That’s why technologically enabling students to create content for this second stage of disruption will be so healthy for student-centric learning.”
Is all of this far fetched or way out in the future? Well we’re seeing examples of this already with Sharendipity.
Here is a Spanish study tool created by 10-year-old Emma Tracy. (Emma is the daughter of Greg Tracy, our president.)
Let’s step through how this application came about.
Sharendipity is a general platform for creating software. It allows sharing at any level from code snippets to objects to templates to full applications, all in an intuitive drag and drop, fully live, engaging environment. Sharendipity itself has no explicit support for flashcards or matching games – it also doesn’t provide support for the object dragging paradigm used in the Spanish study tool. But it allows these behaviors and templates to be created and shared by users – the community can evolve the platform at multiple levels.
The Decimal Sort educational game incorporated a drag and drop paradigm. This drag and drop capability was shared.
A match game was created for putting planets in the correct order: Planet Challenge. It re-used the drag and drop behavior.
Planet Challenge was generalized into a template, allowing anyone to create an image-to-image matching game: Image Match Template. A similar template using words was also developed: Word Match Template
Emma created Northeast States using the template. (In the course of creating the tool she mastered the Northeast states, and made a confident prediction in the comments section: “I’m going to ace that test tomorrow!”)
Emma created the Spanish face parts match game. Greg helped her add some Spanish audio.
The Spanish match game was turned into a template, Spanish Match Template, so now other students can easily create Spanish study tools.
This process is exactly what excites us about the potential of Sharendipity. Emma preferred to match the Spanish terms to an image of a person’s face – that’s her learning style for Spanish. Another student might prefer to match the terms to English words. Who knows how different students might want to learn this material – we don’t, just like we didn’t know that someone would develop a drag and drop UI behavior. Sharendipity has the power and extensibility to allow this evolution to occur in the community.
We’re looking for more people to experiment with Sharendipity for educational applications. If you’re interested, get in touch with us. Or just go to Sharendipity and build whatever you need!
We’ve always been big fans of Clayton Christensen. He coined the term disruptive technology, and his classic book, The Innovator’s Dilemma is a must-read for any startup: it makes the case that established companies have a much tougher time than startups developing disruptive technology.
Sharendipity is a disruptive technology, and the recent Edutopia article validates our vision in the educational space.
Dr. Christensen makes two points in the article: 1) that the future classroom will be student-centric rather than teacher-centric, and 2) that in the future students and teachers will create their own learning software, which he terms “user-generated software”.
From the article:
We think there will be a second stage to this disruption as well that allows users themselves to create learning software modules. A student struggling with a certain concept, or her parent or teacher, will be able to log on to a Web site where she can find a software solution that another student, parent, or teacher developed for that specific challenge. Parents and teachers will be able to diagnose why children are not learning and find customized instructional software written to help students who closely match their children in learning style. As content is used over time, users will rate it, just as they rate books on Amazon.com and movies on Netflix.
Well that’s a pretty good description of Sharendipity! From collaborative, web-based software creation tools to user ratings, Sharendipity would seem to be exactly the tool Dr. Christensen is looking for.
The speakers and attendees of this conference are largely trying to put “education” on its ear and change the way students not only learn, but are evaluated. They all see the benefit of games as a tool for learning and teaching. However, their research goes well beyond simply adapting text books to games. The argument being made by James Gee and others is that through game play, individuals are constantly learning through exploration, content creation, creativity, and open problem spaces. Situational game play forces players to understand a great deal of logic at times, not to mention causal relationships between game elements or even other players.
The conference included researchers as well as practitioners who subscribed to these benefits at some level as a means for engaging students and teaching a new form of literacy. I look forward to following up with many of them to provide access to Sharendipity in their classrooms and after school programs.
More detailed conference analysis can be found from some of the GLS insiders…
There is a terrific article by Marc Prensky in the March issue of Edutopia titled “Programming: The New Literacy”. Marc makes the case that literacy will soon be defined not just by reading and writing skills, but also by programming skills.
He reminds us of a level of programming everyone is already doing with our phones and remote controls. What’s most interesting is that he expects everyone to graduate from this type of menu-driven programming to a point where many of us will be using scripting languages, Flash, and/or piecing together open source software to meet a specific need.
“As the highly literate adult of today might pen a witty birthday card note for a young niece or nephew, the highly literate adult of tomorrow might program the child a game. And though today’s highly literate person may enjoy a sophisticated novel or nonfiction book on a plane or train ride, tomorrow’s highly literate person may prefer to change, by programming, whatever story or other media he or she is interacting with to suit individual preferences, and might then, with a little more programming, distribute those changes to the world.”
We share Marc’s vision in terms of the end goal. But I think we differ in how we’re going to get there. Rather than educating everyone on programming, we believe the best way to get to this form of literacy is fix the tools. If tools are available to create and distribute software without the need to program, then creativity can be harnessed more effectively. Surround that with a community capable of sharing ideas and software components, and now creativity can actually be accelerated.
