Learning Futures

What will happen with NMC? What is the future of the Horizon Report, that future-focused look at educational technology? What is EDUCAUSE planning? Will EDUCAUSE change the Horizon Report? And will the NMC acquisition change EDUCAUSE?

Good questions all. We've been asking those and other questions and seeking answers in many places, particularly with members of the NMC community itself. We've learned a lot and yet still have so much to learn.

Here is our plan for the NMC Community and the Horizon Report, in a format that might look familiar.

A new survey published on the 5th of July by Education and Employers in partnership with TES and NAHT reveals the importance teachers place on introducing children to the world of work. The survey asks 250 primary school principals and teachers across England about their opinions on career learning in primary and its impact.

Headline findings:

The majority of teachers answering our survey believe children should be learning about the world of work and different jobs in their first years of primary school.
Nearly half (47%) believe this should start from Age 5 and under
A further 21% believe this should start from Age 5 – 7 in year 1 and 2
Overwhelming majority of primary schools were already carrying out activities with the aim of increasing children’s understanding of the world of work.
Most primary schools have not heard about the Government’s new Careers Strategy, which specifically mentions primary for the first time.
In line with our previous work in secondary, nearly all teachers in our survey agreed that introducing children to the world of work was important in:
Linking learning to the real world and in doing so increasing motivation to work hard
Challenging gender stereotyping about jobs and school subjects
Broadening aspirations
While teachers appreciate the importance of these activities, there are challenges which prevent them being organised on a regular basis:
The majority of our respondents believed time constraints are the major barrier in organising more activities with employers (60%).
The second biggest challenge is availability of employers/volunteers and teachers and difficulty in communication and/or scheduling a suitable time for both groups.
The findings were formally launched at the 5th International Conference on Employer Engagement in Education and Training.

Four young Roebourne residents have created a 12-minute virtual reality film, Future Dreaming, starring future versions of themselves as they guide viewers around their lives on the fictional planet Daya.

In this important new report, a positive and plausible vision is set out of how learning could be transformed by artificial intelligence in education (AIEd). For example, technology available today could be applied to support student learning at a scale previously unimaginable by providing one-on-one tutoring to every student, in every subject. Existing technologies also have the capacity to provide intelligent support to learners working in a group, and to create authentic virtual learning environments where students have the right support, at the right time, to tackle real-life problems and puzzles.

Howard Rheingold, author, virtual community pioneer and self-described “online instigator and expert learner,” has interviewed more than 100 innovative and inspiring educators who exemplify connected learning: a fundamentally different mode of learning from education that is centered on fixed subjects, one-to-many instruction and standardized testing. The following are some of his most relevant picks for learner agency, co-learning, making, 21st-century learners, networked publics, media literacy, civic engagement and pedagogy.

Research for this project began in March 2018 over a twelve‑week period, with over 100 hours of surveying, compiling and annotating nearly 300 academic articles and government white papers, specialist and general media reports and educational literature covering both theoretical and current issues in education.

Nearly 20 hours of interviews were conducted with participants featured and quoted in the white paper, as well as follow-up interviews and correspondence.

Participants were selected for their experience in all educational sectors – primary, secondary and tertiary – as well as both private, independent and public schools.

Primary Futures Australia  aims to widen the horizons and aspirations of primary school children by helping them make the connections between their learning and their futures.

It is completely free to all primary schools as part of the successful Inspiring the Future Australia program.

Through Primary Futures, teachers can access a vast network of volunteers from different backgrounds and professions – from Apprentices to Chief Executives, Archaeologists to Zoologists or employees from small, medium sized or multi-national companies all of whom have signed up to inspire school children in their indicated geographical region.

The underlying premise of this paper is that lifelong learning, people-skills and problem-solving need to be developed for our societies and economies to be successful. If we want to rise to this challenge, we need to recognise that learning is a socialised process; learning means we know how to do things with information and skills in social contexts. As a result, we can only support, encourage and evaluate professional learning(1) if we have evidence about changes in practice. This cannot happen in a one-off or series of top-down, pre-ordained assessments or within competence frameworks. It needs to be situated in people’s working contexts. It needs to allow for multiple moments of assessment that include a full range of perspectives relevant to those contexts and support reflection on practice.

Every field and every industry is grappling with a version of this problem, trying to stay ahead of the technology to yield its greatest good while offering protection from its potential for harm. In that sense, the signal that must receive most of our attention is not one from the future after all. Rather, it is a signal from the past: that is, every life has value and dignity and a right to self-determination. What that means in an increasingly technological world may be the most important question of the next twenty years. EDUCAUSE can help us find the answer.

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