Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: Learning

  • 100 days 100 tools

    I just realized we have exactly 100 days before April 1, the start of the new school (and financial) year in Japan. Since my department is requiring every new fresh(wo)man to get a laptop, there is a huge responsibility for the faculty of the department to use them in class and as part of the curriculum.

    Mark Warschauer, in his book Laptops and Literacy, says that the people most crucial to the success of wireless programs and students using laptops are the faculty.

    I’m the IT Committee in our department, and I’ve got a lot of experience in this area, but also realize that you can’t teach this kind of thing. You just have to show how important it is to upgrade from paper and lectures to technology, and allow students to interact more naturally and with a greater variety of “channels” of communication.

    So I’ve set myself a challenge. 100 tools in 100 days.

    These tools and their explanations are aimed at non-native speakers of English, and those without much computer experience. You would be a typical end-user, able to use email, a browser, and some kind of word processor.

    These tools are aimed at language teachers. They should help you teach better. The focus here is on teaching, and adapting your style to what students and administrations are coming to expect. Sometimes they are software, or a web page, or a new technique.

    They focus on helping students develop their own language skills, providing autonomy through example.

    My next post will be tool #1.

  • Ministry of Education back tracks

    On the backs of babes.

    backpack200-bbIt seems since the scores are falling in international tests, and Japanese kids aren’t learning stuff you can test as much, there is a panic to find a solution.

    About 10 years ago there was a move to restrict time at school because kids were not very well-rounded. They tend not to play together, or learn about cultural activities. To increase “humanity” among the kids, they were given most Saturdays off (yes, they used to go most Saturdays). The number of school days dropped from about 240 to 210 (the US has about 180).

    The drop in scores on these international tests didn’t start appearing until about 5 years after the change. Of course, the first thought on the cause of the drop was the changed schedule. No solid indication of causation here, but everyone thought something must be done.

    So what did the Ministry of Education come up with? Reinstate Saturdays, and double the page count of the textbooks. You see, the system here in Japan is incredibly centralized. There is a week-to-week curriculum that everyone in K-12 follows. So a kid could move from Hokkaido down to Kyushu over the weekend, and pick up exactly where he left off. (The textbooks might be different, the content is the same.)

    So now the kids will be carrying much heavier backpacks, and the publishers fat and happy. There is a constant outcry when new textbooks are brought out, because of their (non) treatment of WW2 and things like the Rape of Nanjing. Now they will have twice as much room, but we can be fairly certain there won’t be twice as much content.

  • Quarterbacks, Teachers, and Financiers

    What they have in common? Skills that cannot be easily measured. This is the point of a very long article by Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker: Most Likely to Succeed in the Annals of Education section.

    What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?

    Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success is on my list now. Treatment of micro-skills that lead to success in such varied areas of football, education and investing deserve to be looked at with the detail that Gladwell lavishes on them.

  • Life is what happens…

    While you are waiting to be successful. Watch this short clip of Alan Watts, a 1960’s “guru” of eastern religions, recorded with visuals made and produced by the makers of South Park. Very Curious.

  • The Future of the Educational Marketplace

    I was reading Stephen Downes‘ article on the Future of Online Learning, and ran into a paragraph that hit home more than the rest, about the marketplace for course content.

    Today, much of the value derived from the learning marketplace is based on an artificially imposed scarcity – a scarcity of seats in classrooms, a scarcity of credentialing agencies, and a scarcity of educational publications, for example. These scarcities will disappear as governments prefer to fund education directly, and at cost, rather than support such business models.

    Government directly supporting learning and bypassing the “business models” of educational institutions. This will cause an incredible upheaval. I guess the best way to weather this change as a learning facilitator, or provider of “knol”s would be to sharpen delivery methods and make sure my content is valid, relevant, and reliable. This will be all about building a reputation and a community of followers, whom we used to call students. Hoo-boy, do most of us have our work cut out for us.