Page 15 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

...Even while the debate rages about this time-tested pesticide solution, some Australian scientists noticed a key piece of information: it’s the older mosquitoes that usually spread disease. It takes the short–lived mosquito about two weeks to incubate the pathogen that it spreads by biting someone. So watch out for those grey–haired mosquitoes, because they’re more likely carrying malaria and dengue. These scientists also linked this insight to the fact that there is a type of fruit fly that is often naturally infected with a strain of bacterial parasite that cuts its lifespan in half. Hmm... do we see what’s coming? In controlled lab tests, the scientists worked out a way to naturally infect mosquitoes with a parasite that cuts their lifespan in half, and which also naturally spreads from an infected mother to her offspring, without spreading to other creatures in the food chain. This approach is intended to provide an inexpensive alternative to high–cost repeated mass sprayings.11 ‘New & Improved’
The 5 Paradigm Shifts in Learning
To understand what the real issues are in enabling education to meet the needs of our communities, we need to track the previous paradigm shifts in learning. Throughout human history, there have been a number of these macro-changes in our capacity to learn, and each one increased our capability to learn with greater efficiency.
1. The first paradigm shift in learning was our development of increasingly complex oral language which took place incrementally over the last 2 million years.
2. The second paradigm shift in learning was our ability to form representations of our language, using symbols, enabling us to communicate visually; initially using glyphs which then slowly morphed into writing. Humans created stories using images as far back as 25,000– 30,000 years ago, with the notion of counting appearing about 9,000 years ago. Sequences of pictographs appeared about 4,000 years ago and these morphed into icons, and finally ‘letters’ appeared to represent sounds emerging 2,500–3,000 years ago.
3. The third paradigm shift was the invention of the printing press and the reduced cost of the printed book, allowing new worlds to be opened, but only once the owner of the book had learned to read and write.
4. The fourth paradigm shift is far more recent, arriving in the form of the internet, whereby we could access information in any combination of media, at almost no cost. The internet has substantively changed many aspects of our lives, specifically, how we learn and the sophistication of that learning.
Despite the arrival of the fourth paradigm shift, schools are continuing to focus on students remembering and recalling large amounts of information that has almost no relevance to the their daily, or future lives. Even more interesting is that some schools ban students from taking devices into classrooms or exams, and try to insist they do not use them for homework, while encouraging them to work on their own.
In many ways, we are making learning unnecessarily difficult for everyone, by having students study topics that are composed of numerous and unspecified concepts that are only ever exposed to one context; the topic, or the theme of the current unit of work. Consequently, the test can only reflect what is studied in the topic and that was mostly very context-specific knowledge, along with some vague and undefined ideas and concepts.
11 New and Improved. (2015). What Mosquitoes Can Teach Us About Creative Thinking. Retrieved from http://www.newandimproved.com/white-papers.aspx?NewsID=563
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