FLEXILEARN

This is Peter Isaacson – Adobe VP for Worldwide Education – on “Adobe in Education– Trends, Challenges and the Road Ahead.”  Talking about student alienation, disengagement, dropping out. The 6 Ds. Displaced, Disengaged, Disconnected, Declining achievement, Dropping out, Draining resources. Drop-out rate at record levels around the world (secondary and tertiary). The high-tech student is ‘displaced’ in the typical classroom – like flying on a plane is an analogy used by a student.  Gets told where to sit, the seats are uncomfortable, the food is lousy, and you are passively under control of the pilot and the stewardesses. Powering down and disconnecting from everything that is ‘important in life’ for the student.  Disengagement contributes to declining achievement. Students are disconnected from acquiring the skills that employers are looking for (You play world of warcraft ? – you’re hired – John Seely Brown ).  The biggest growth industry right now in California is the prison system – many high-school dropouts ending up in prison.

So how can a more digital classroom – powered by Adobe products – address the issue of disengagement and displacement ?

Link between length of time students have been using a computer and student performance on the PISA maths scores – positive influence.  US Dept of Education study showing that blended learning improves student achievement. UK study shows that using ICT across the curriculum supported learning gains in English and Science. Using technology at home for educational purposes improves math and science scores. Etc.

3 stages of technology deployment: 1 – computers in labs. 2 – technology in classrooms. 3 – technology access anywhere (fundamentally transformational). This third level is about social networking and learning 21st C skills. Blend of informal and formal learning.  ICT can be used to enhance creativity – over 80% of teachers agree.

Creativity, media literacy, communication, collaboration are key for 21st C skills. Adobe Youth Voices programme (ala ‘Not School’ ? ).

But all of these ‘solutions’ require a full knowledge infrastructure to enable engaged teaching and learning.  (Biggs said this long ago – ‘the system as a whole needs to be structured for deep approaches to learning..”).  How do we give students across the campus and curriculum access to creativity tools (Adobe) and ICT skills – Indiana University project in the first 12 months 112,000 downloads of Adobe products.  Not just in the Design School but across disciplines.

So Adobe can help schools, instiutions, state systems provide ubiquitous access to technology based on EFTs not software units (this is an improvement) and using hosted services (anywhere access).  OK – I sense a discussion coming on with the NZ Adobe reps….

But – somehow I don’t think that mere access to tools is going to solve the problem.  There is a major issue with skill development for teachers and most critically the need to transform understandings of pedagogy. Simply downloading In Design won’t automatically change and enhance educational design.

Enabling our students for a digital future is the theme for the Adobe Education Leadership Forum – I’m here as a guest of Adobe NZ.  First time at a corporate occasion like this and I’m enjoying the slick organisation and hospitality.  I guess the aim is to encourage ‘decision makers’ like myself to have Adobe products in the foreground when it comes to purchasing learning technology software.  Not a problem for me as I’ve used Photoshop for most of its 20 years – it is the application’s 20th birthday this year ! – and Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc for many elearning and digital media purposes.

My daughter is 21 and has basically grown up with Photoshop – using it in much the same way as I use email, Word or a web browser to think and create visually.  I think about this while listening to the first keynote “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black of A Graphic Designer’s Life” from Freeman Lau,Vice Chairman, Board of Directors, Hong Kong Design Centre. Freeman shows screen after screen of amazing designs from hos own portfolio and students, colleagues etc who work with him – including his own daughter. The thrust is that graphic design has come of age as a profession – an industry supporting many aspects of the knowledge economy and very important in Hong Kong.

Now for Stephen Wilson, CIO, New South Wales Department of Education and Training on “Creating the Right Learning Opportunities for Students of All Ages” – gotta be careful here remembering Leigh Blackall’s comments last time I was at an e-learning conference in Sydney 🙂 – but will be interesting to see how a large scale implementation of digital learning has been implemented across a state school system.  Mobile learning is a main thread here – every student years 9-12 in NSW schools (approx. 200,00) with a wireless laptop (why not an iPhone or iPad ?) – mobile learning is “just like electricity” ….  Education has progressed from ‘tell’ to ‘discover, create and share’ – well, yes.  I think I would like to ask a question about the central monitoring of the wireless network and what ‘filters’ the DET has in place to control the learning environment … but perhaps I will leave that for discussion at dinner tonight 🙂

WIll also be thinking about the themes for me of this conference – Ritzer’s McDonaldization thesis (disrupting rationality through the spectacularly irrational),  the clash between the virtual and the real as explored in Up in the Air (a recent movie starring George Clooney that I watched on the plane coming over – quite good actually), and the tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ technologies as discussed in Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet.  More about these as the 2 days unfold.