New Horizons for Learning: Transforming Education

Not Just a Change: A Revolution

by Gordon Dryden

For more than a hundred years the world has been locked into an outdated education system devised for a bygone age. Now the new era of instant communications provides the catalyst that will finally force a long-overdue revolution in education, schooling and lifelong learning. Since November 2002, the world's fastest Internet search engine, Google, has been able to scan more than 3 billion pages in under half a second. In another half second it can automatically sort them into graded answers to any questions. In another half second it can scan 390 million images so that students or authors can have a choice of instant, professional images to illustrate their presentations. Yet in education most of the world's 59 million school teachers every day either strive individually to create new lesson plans or, more likely regurgitate information and teaching methods that are decades out of date.

At the same time the explosion in knowledge about the neurosciences-about the incredible learning power of the human brain-means we now know how to learn anything faster, better and more effectively. And this information, too, is available almost instantly to anyone with the tools to ask. We're also living through the first revolution in history where even young children generally know more about the dominant communications technology than most parents and teachers.

At Tahatai Coast Primary School in a low-income suburb in New Zealand, with a 30 per cent "minority" roll:

All five-year-olds do computer animation. They've even animated an orchestra performing Vivaldi's Four Seasons to illustrate an animated feature on forest conservation.

Their six-year-olds have even devised an animated tour of their school principal's brain: to demonstrate the difference between a boring classroom and a stimulating learning environment.

All seven-year-olds have their own individually-designed websites-and many line up to get into school each day from 7 a.m. to get on line to chat with friends around the world.

Their eight-year-olds have won second prize in a national digital short-story writing competition, against adult competitors-using Internet links that let the "reader" construct his or her own ending.

Nine-year-olds use digital tools to design their own school of the future.

Ten-year-olds have produced an award-winning videotape of their own school.

In other model schools, students now have instant access to some of the world's best teachers, greatest ideas, finest libraries, art galleries and reference works. But most children who go to school often sit bored in classrooms designed for a bygone age.

It's almost as if the instant-communications revolution has left most education in a timewarp. Sure, almost every school system says it's introducing "information and communications technology". But around 99 per cent are doing it wrong-simply because they are trying to graft twenty-first century technology on to a nineteenth-century school model.

Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, already plans a better one. He calls it the Semantic Web. That's "a smart network that will finally understand human language and make computers virtually as easy to work with as other humans." The ultimate goal is "to turn the Web into a gigantic brain. Every computer connected to the Internet would have access to all the knowledge that humankind has accumulated in science, business and the arts since we began painting the walls of caves 30,000 years ago."

While this new Web will start by 2005, the existing American school system is performing so poorly that 78 percent of U.S. colleges now offer courses in remedial reading, writing and mathematics.

There's even a reluctance to study, let alone follow, the dramatic examples proven every day by successful businesses. Dell, for instance - is the world's biggest-selling personal computer. It achieves annual sales above $US31 billion. And around half of them are directly through the Internet. Customers actually design their own computer, its software and accessories-from a web-based set of options.

That is an incredible model for teachers and students: to have instant access to the world's best brain-based and IT-based lesson and learning plans. But where is the international action to link all those 59 million teachers into a worldwide learning web?
Almost nonexistent.

Yet around the world we find brilliant working models of the new age:

In Sweden, which has for 20 years had the world's widest-ranging refugee program, most migrant children have learned to speak three languages before starting school at age six: Swedish, English and their parents' own language.

As well as Tahatai (which means "by the ocean"), New Zealand has some of the world's best elementary schools": linking ICT with new methods of learning.

At Singapore's Overseas Family School, 2000 PreK-12 students from 60 nationalities enjoy an education around global themes. OFS is the first school in Singapore to adopt the International Baccalaureate curriculum at all ages from three years to senior high school. And all its teachers, students and parents are linked through a corporate-strength extranet.

While "educators" around the world continue to debate the importance of the process of education versus content, rigorous academic standards, "accountability" and high qualifications, the IB curriculum is already solving the dispute in more than 1,300 schools in 110 different countries. It effectively combines all these elements-and more.

In Finland, the Government has engaged 5,000 students to teach their teachers how to use computers and information technology.

In St. Louis, Missouri, the teachers at New City School have collectively written an entire book, on how they're teaching every subject, at every grade, by catering to all different types of intelligence. The opportunity now exists for the world's brightest teachers-and their students-to actively create and share similar resources.

In Sydney, Australia, students at Beverley Hills High School have learned to speak fluent French by compressing a three-year course into eight weeks-using revolutionary do-it-yourself learning methods.

In Hastings, New Zealand, 11-year-olds up to five years behind in their reading are catching up in eight to 10 weeks through a "tape-assisted reading program", where each child chooses books related to his or her own interests-and reads them while listening to the words on tape. A typical gain in that time is 3.3 years.

In Arizona, high-school teacher Leo Wood-using accelerated learning methods-has lifted his students' achievements in chemistry from 52 percent getting A, B and C grades to 93 percent.

In Alaska, students at Mt. Edgecumbe High School at one stage ran four pilot companies, and earned $600,000 selling smoked salmon to Japan-- as they studied marketing, business, economics and Japanese.

Cramlington Community High School, in northern England, has reinvented itself as a school combining the world's best information technology and the world's best accelerated learning methods. In a country where the national school inspection authority has strongly criticized the "waste" of £1.8 billion (around $US2.7 billion) on school information technology, the same authority has lauded Cramlington as a highly successful model for all high schools. The school's principal, Derek Wise, and learning coordinator, Mark Lovatt, have even written a book on Creating an Accelerated Learning School.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University has spent $US50 million building America's best online campus. But its purpose is NOT to put boring lectures online. "Among CMU's digerati," says Business Week, "public enemy No. 1 is the old-fashioned lecture, where a scholar stands before hundreds of snoozing students and drones on for an hour or two. For them the chief role of technology is to help end boredom." And it quotes Professor Raj Reddy, the former longtime dean of CMU's School of Computer Science: "In the future learning will come from doing. You abolish lectures, and you don't just read about history, you participate in a simulation of it."

In Singapore again, Nanyang Polytechnic runs as "a learning factory"-where students learn by doing. And learn creativity by creating. Significantly, the Polytechnic's founding CEO was formerly head of human-resource planning for Singapore's Government development agency: the body that has helped attract 3200 international companies to set up in the southeast Asian island state.

Those examples may look like isolated facts. Yet they typify what many see as the most important revolution in human history.

Combine all these trends, and some of the models for education, schooling and learning become clear:

Start building a complete new worldwide learning web, to revolutionize schooling and learning, in the same way that the World Wide Web has revolutionized communications.

Form the core of that new Learning Web from the world's 59 million teachers. If business trends are followed, 2 percent of those teachers (1,180,000) are already trend-setting innovators and 13 percent (7,670,000) of them are early adopters of new methods. That is an enormous talent base for sharing interactive learning models.

Then tap into the talents of the world's 2 billion-plus students. The best are already showing us how to use interactive technology to create an entirely new future. Share that message with all, across all cultures and countries, as the new Semantic Web develops.

Build simple online learning templates: linking the world's finest subject teachers and the world's best multimedia learning-games experts -so that every learner in the world has the opportunity to build on those models the same way students currently play Nintendo or Sony PlayStation. (Remember: learning is more effective when it's fun.)

Provide all that information free on the Internet-just as the computer scientists of the world already share their talents. That is the basis of the scientific method: openly share, test and improve.

Provide worldwide professional-development programs for those teachers who are not normal innovators or early adopters: what Silicon Valley calls crossing the "chasm"-which others might call "the fear barrier" to the world of the future-as we learn to marry the digital world of the network to the most amazing computer of all: the human brain.

Plan to involve entire families, entire communities, in the total process. Again, the world's most brilliant learning technology can now be stored for all on the World Wide Web-not cluttering up every PC in the world. And it can be made available either free or at very low cost to every Internet user in the world.

Slash the cost of computers and software-specially to developing countries-by abolishing the need to store all that expensive software on every computer.

Then transform international aid programs, to concentrate not on handouts but on how to learn a living. The poor don't need handouts. They need competence. For competence brings income and pride.

This is challenge of The Learning Revolution. If not now, when? If not us, who?

About the author:

Gordon Dryden is Co-author of The Learning Revolution. The Learning Revolution, by Gordon Dryden and Dr. Jeannette Vos, has sold more than 10 million copies in China alone. This article is abridged from a new, as-yet-unpublished edition, for release in 2003.

A New Zealand-based "global citizen", Gordon Dryden has spent much of the past 10 years searching the world for breakthroughs in learning. He is a journalist, and for many years he was New Zealand's most popular radio talk show host.

website: www.thelearningweb.net
email: gordon@learningweb.co.nz

© February 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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