Derek Wenmoth Core Education

1. IS THE FUTURE OF LEARNING BLENDED?

2. SOME BIG QUESTIONS
• How has our thinking shifted beyond Tomorrow's
Schools?
• What will be the impact of technology on the way we
organise our schools and learning?
• What is the meaning of Community of Learners today,
and is this just for our learners?
• What are the big challenges we need to address?

3. TOMORROWS SCHOOLS…
“…will result in more
immediate delivery of resources
to schools, more parental and
community involvement, and
greater teacher responsibility…
and …lead to improved
learning opportunities for the
children of this country.”
David Lange, Tomorrow’s Schools, August 1988

4. TOMORROW’S SCHOOLS
• Local school is the focal point of system design,
organisation, and experience.
• Self management
• Charter-based
• Increased autonomy - choice
• Curriculum
• Resources
• Staffing
• Parent/community participation
• Governance
• Curriculum
• Competition – reform
• Local accountability - quality

5. ALVIN TOFFLER’S SCHOOL OF TOMORROW
These are the fundamentals of the futurist’s
vision for education in the 21st century:
• Open 24 hours a day
• Customized educational experience
• Kids arrive at different times
• Students begin their formalized schooling
at different ages
• Curriculum is integrated across disciplines
• Non-teachers work with teachers
• Teachers alternate working in schools and
in business world
• Local businesses have offices in the
schools
• Increased number of charter schools

7. A SMALLER, INTERCONNECTED WORLD
• Knowledge, and its application, not raw materials, is
key to the 21st century economy
• Knowledge is dynamic and generative
• Creating, processing, storing, transmitting and
applying knowledge creates economic vitality
• Providing adequate learning opportunity is a global
problem

8. http://p21.org

9. DIGITAL NATIVES??
New technologies give them the
means to learn…
… but not the reason to learn.

10. LEARNER SKILLS REQUIRED
• Lifelong learning skills; knowing how to
learn
• Appreciation of multiple perspectives,
cultures, and approaches to problems
• Ability to tolerate ambiguity and
change
• Creative problem analysis and
problem solving
• Ability to work productively in teams
• Leadership of cross-
functionalinterdisciplinary teams
• Ability to sort and apply new
knowledge

11. CHANGED EXPERIENCE
The real action is in using ICTs to
change the experience of learning,
not as a delivery channel

12. MOBILITY IS KEY
• In the knowledge economy
everything is mobile
• Mobility in terms of
• Physical space
• Technology
• Conceptual space
• Social space
• Dispersed over time

13. CHANGED ENVIRONMENTS
If our students are different, then their
preferred learning environments will
need to be different.

14. THE NETWORKED SCHOOL SYSTEM
• The network is the focal point of system design,
organisation, and experience.
• Greater collaboration among and between schools
• Sharing of teaching staff, curriculum and resources
• Increased student autonomy and choice
• Networked leadership, governance structures
• Aggregated demand for services

15. AN URBAN FIBRE NETWORK FOR SCHOOLS
Internet
School A
School
N4L
School A
School
Aggregation University
Point
Services
Public Library
School A
School

16. CASE STUDY: GCSN
• Connecting all schools in the Christchurch region to a
fibre network
• Sharing resources, professional development etc.
• Collaborative projects among-between schools
• Aggregated demand for services (ISP, VoIP, LMS etc.)
• Video conferencing facilities in all secondary schools,
with online class sharing and scholarship mentoring
• Network proved invaluable following the devastating
earthquakes where schools were forced to find
alternative ways of providing education for students.
• See http://www.gcsn.school.nz

17. CASE STUDY: GCSN
• Key issue for schools following earthquake was
keeping students engaged in learning while schools
were closed, and accessing resources to make
available to them for study
• Many schools used LMS systems for this purpose –
some teachers established Facebook pages in certain
subjects
• GCSN staff ‘crowd-sourced’ resources from around NZ
and internationally.
• HippoCampus (US) stepped up and made their
courses available to GCSN schools free of charge

18. http://www.hippocampus.org/myHippo/?user=myGCSN

19. EMERGING MODEL OF SCHOOL NETWORKS IN NZ
Envisioning a network of networks,
connected by a high speed fibre backbone

20. LONDON GRID FOR LEARNING
http://map.lgfl.org.uk/gol/Map.aspx

21. http://www.nen.gov.uk/

22. VIRTUAL SCHOOLING GROWING IN US

23. THE VLN-C
The Virtual Learning Network
Community (VLNC) is a network of
school clusters and educational
institutions who collaborate to provide
access to a broad range of curriculum
and learning opportunities for students
through online learning.
“Supports the concept of classrooms
without walls, where students have
flexibility to connect with their classes
24/7”
http://www.vln.school.nz/pg/groups/572/vln-community/

24. http://www.vln.school.nz/

25. LCO HANDBOOK
http://www.vln.school.nz/pg/groups/2644/lco-handbook/

26. MATRIX

27. THE “CS” ARE SHIFTING…
Content Community
Competition Collaboration
Centrality Connection
Courses Cross-disciplinary
Cost Consortia
Constraint Choice

28. BIG CHALLENGES
What How
Unpacking assumptions Teaching as inquiry, cycles of reflective
practice
Letting go of sacred cows Accountability meetings, system reviews
focusing on ROI
Ecological not additive Foster small scale innovation, with pilots
and review
Measuring success Applying the same expectation of use and
measures of performance across all levels
of the system – not just for students
Collabetition Begin small, join trusted networks, start
with ‘safe’ wins, keep communicating,
keep to agreements

29. Derek Wenmoth
Email: derek@core-ed.org
Blog: http://blog.core-ed.org/derek
Skype: <dwenmoth>