Page 18 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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The video below14 adds to our understanding of the effect that increasingly clever machines and robotics will have on our world.
Some educators see technology as a threat to what school should be focussing on, rather than an opportunity to have learners move from remembering knowledge to developing understanding, connecting and applying their learning to create solutions to real-world problems.
Resource 2: The Machines Are Coming
We refer to ‘students’ as those attendees of schools that have little or no agency over their learning. Students that have agency over their learning are now referred to as learners or ‘learner-educators’.
Public education is undergoing the most significant paradigm shift ever in its brief 200-year history. The fourth paradigm shift in education that we are experiencing is simple enough. We have gone from an information-poor landscape just 20 years ago, where we could borrow two books for two weeks from the library, to a seemingly endless horizon of learning resource. That resource is available in every possible combination of media at virtually no cost, and is accessible from a device that most of us carry around in our pockets. The next paradigm shift will ultimately repurpose and refocus schools.
The fifth paradigm shift transfers the end-point of learning more definitively to deep understanding, along with the application of that understanding. Our curiosity and our human capacity for complex learning via our brain’s four+1 learning systems, provides us with the ability to be creative, with the accompanying capability of innovatively generating new knowledge, ideas and concepts. Innovative ideas and concepts hold the possibility of being applied to create ingenious applications/solutions, that may be products, systems, environments or new media.
By design, our brain is a learning instrument and its primary function is to allow us to learn— Anything, Anywhere, Anytime and with Anyone. (A4). If we were to define the vision for school today, then we would arrive at a statement that focussed on the ability of everyone to be competent and able to apply the Learning Process to a wide range of domains in our lives such that we could learn anything we needed to understand, Just-in-Time. This is a considerable shift from the current focus of schools but what it also does is meet the demands that this century is increasingly placing on us all.
Our mission as educators is now morphing to become: ... that we will empower learners to take increasing agency over their learning via the acquisition of the competencies and then apply that agency and the Learning Process to build their knowledge and understanding. Learners can then apply their knowledge and understanding to innovatively and ingeniously solve the challenges and leverage the opportunities, we all face individually and collectively. As the dominant species on Earth, we will promote equity in all aspects of our lives and acknowledge our responsibility to protect all species and their environments.
14 Andrew McAfee: The Machines are Coming (2011, November 28). ‘The Agenda with Steve Paikin’. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0g8DDsv1MM