Thought provoking and inspiring words from Sugata Mitra. This video is a must watch for anyone involved in school policy making, technology or wider education. This award-winning video by Sugata Mitra explains the context of our modern school system onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org

Life Long Learning

Arithmetic is dead!

 Dr. Sugata Mitra poses the question whether children in 20 years time will need the skills associated with arithmetic. Or perhaps, like the skills taught 200 years ago of riding a horse or shooting, arithmetic will instead become a thing of the past and children will be doing it as a hobby or sport...

This Blog has been set up to run alongside the Research undertaken at the University of West London on Future Learning / an inquiry into how technology can effect pedagogy. The wonderful thing about this blog is that the fact all the small video clips, newspaper artistic and online media that has become the foundation and basis for much of the ontological and philosophical background of the research journey and can now be shared and discussed 'live', giving viewer the chance to comment, becoming part of this exciting research. 

Future Learning Short Documentary

This moving video is a wonderful insight in to future of how the education systems may look, with a specific reference to how technology being used to 'revolutionise' the way children learn.  Dr. Sugata Mitra one of the leaning authorities in technology and pedagogy is a strong believer in the need for change in education and explains his 3 key proposals for the curriculum of the future. What do you think?

Sir Ken Robinson - Leading a Learning Revolution

In this emotional and thought provoking discussion Sir Ken Robinson talk through his vision of future education questioning historic educational constructs and sights key drivers needed for change.

Noam Chomsky - The Purpose of Education

Noam Chomsky the "father of modern linguistics" discusses his views on the nature of education, the future and the way forward. Chomsky's views on the impact of technology, whether education should be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment raise many questions.

MOOCs on TED - Anant Agarwal describes why massive open online courses (still) matter

MOOCs or (massive open online courses) are free online education programs designed by schools and university to give people free access through online video and audio lectures the learning of their full time programs.

Through these blended courses Anant Agarwal is pairing online education with face-to-face student-faculty interactions, reshaping the university campus experience. 

These courses make us question how we value knowledge and what is the best use of if... MOOCs give the learner the power to enquirer and develop at their own pace in their own directions. 
They are free to pause and re-wide or leave altogether to choose another area. They also open of opportunity for mass collaboration on new un-thought of projects and ideas...
From TED

How do we know things? And how do we learn?

René Descartes believes that some of our ideas are acquired independently or are really innate. Colin McGinn in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast describes how he believes Descartes views on the mind can help us, particularly with regards to Leibniz's insight that innate ideas must be initially unconscious in the mind.

What is Knowledge?

When in our education setting we talk about knowledge and learning what do we actually mean?

Anthony Grayling talking about Rene Descartes on the Philosophy Bites Podcast does a great job to explain the origins of the term and the roots of the term 'Knowledge'. 

 

Anthony Grayling, author of a recent biography of René Descartes, explores Descartes' Cogito argument, the pivotal argument of the Meditations, in conversation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of Philosophy Bites. From: http://philosophybites.com/2008/02/ac-grayling-on.html

A Tidal Wave is Coming

Whether we like it or not change is coming... Throughout the history of education we have had 2 major revelations. The first being the development of the written language, this allowed for the ideas and knowledge of one to transcend in both time and place. The second revelation was the development on the printing press. This allowed for the mass production of higher quality, relatively inexpensive texts that could be made available to a larger group of people quicker. 

And right now, we are in the mist of the latest dynamic educational revolution – the ‘e-education revolution’ as I like to put it, where knowledge is created and disseminated faster than ever before. It is no longer the case that we need to learn or remember information, but instead now the skill of quick searching and retrieval of information using new skill, like ‘key words’ and ‘direct searches’ have become in themselves desirable attributes. As with the printing press we are now able to share our knowledge but with technology we can share this knowledge with the world with just one click of a button. 

Take for example the skill of playing the guitar or piano, if a child from the UK or US wants to learn to play the piano or guitar today, their first port or call is not the music shop (as was the case to buy a text book 10 years ago) but today the first port of call is YouTube where they will find thousands of skilled teacher sharing their knowledge for free.

University, schools and other quick thinkers have been fast to spot this trend, with Salman Khan founder of the Khan Academy in 2006 a key example. Khan’s YouTube videos (originally made as a little extra help for his small cousin) have become largest and most watch online learning research ever with his videos having over 3,627,327 views.  Featuring over 3200 videos and 350 practical exercises. Khans mission

How the Flapping Classroom Works

The penguins are coming!! This short video explains how there's nothing fishy about flipping your class!

If the penguins can do it -  we all can!