Internationalizing education with innovative technologies

With teachers already scrambling to meet state standards, testing, and the requirements of No Child Left Behind, integrating a global dimension into their regular curriculum adds more work. Schools face budget cuts across the country (and particularly in the Los Angeles Unified School District) and lack the funds to purchase additional teaching materials. Interestingly, in today’s digitally connected world, teachers have many technologies at their disposal to collaborate globally. Below are a few free resources (mostly electronic technologies) that might be helpful for any school seeking to tear down its classroom walls and reach out to the world.

With access to online resources, classrooms can now easily exchange email, blogs, photos, and even talk to each other over Skype. Teachers and their students can connect to schools in other countries and work together on projects that can last several months or longer. As long as Internet use is conducted from the classroom, most students in the US have an opportunity to participate since nearly 100 percent of American public schools have Internet access (compared with 35 percent in 1994). (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2006). Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005 (NCES 2007-020)) Of course, not all classrooms are created equal and some have many more computers available than others. But, remember, it takes a single computer in the classroom (or computer lab) to tap into most of the following online resources:

Skype – Skyping is an exciting way to connect with children around the world. Students enjoy sharing information about their favorite food, clothing, books, music, movies and TV shows and learning about some of the similarities and differences that exist across cultures. A great resource is Skype Other Classrooms where teachers sign up and their students can start reaching out to classrooms at the same grade level in other countries. And if educators and their students want to take it farther, there is Around the World with 80 Schools, a project started by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, where the challenge to teachers is to connect their students with 80 schools from around the world using Skype. Obviously, it could take several months or perhaps even years (with different student groups) to complete the challenge.

Primary Source – Connects teachers and students across the world and provides curriculum resources and classroom lessons that contain global content for K-12 educators.

ePals – Teachers can choose a topic (such as “global warming” or “festivals around the world”) and then connect with a classroom to partner on a project through email, blogs or forums. For example, while learning about Indian history, American teachers can use a platform such as ePals (see below) to set up a conversation with teachers and students in India. Currently ePals has 537 classrooms in India (with students from all grade levels) that have signed up for an exchange with students from another country.

Livemocha – A free online basic language program with 35 languages offered. Unlike Rosetta Stone and other language courses on the Web, Livemocha pulls you into the world of peer tutoring – you are learning a foreign language of your choice (from a native speaker) but also tutoring someone in your native language. Livemocha is appropriate for high school students and older.

World727 – A listserv for global educators to share questions, ideas, experiences and resources with teachers across the world.

ThinkQuest – Sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation, ThinkQuest provides a teacher mediated online environment that allows students and teachers to work with peers across the world on joint projects. They hold an international competition each year where students solve a real-world problem using critical thinking and technology skills.

Heifer Global Village - Heifer International works to bring about an end to poverty and hunger around the world and has created school programs in three locations around the US where students spend one day with few or no resources and experience what it means to do without. In their words, their Global Village programs show participants that “sometimes having a little means a lot.” Visit their site to watch a 9-minute video clip in which students talk about its profound effects.

The 2011 Global Education Conference will be held on November 14-18, 2011. It is online and free so make sure to put it on your calendar and follow the sessions. The conference is collaborative and takes place in multiple time zones (and multiple languages) and is a fantastic resource for global education resources, connections, and activities. The 2010 Global Education Conference had 15,028 unique logins and presentations from 62 countries!

Last, but not least, I would like to share a truly amazing resource, the Khan Academy, with its 2100 educational videos (mostly geared towards K-12 students) which are free and are available to anyone anywhere in the world! Warning: The videos are engaging, easy to follow and fun and you might find yourself spending some of your free time wanting to learn or relearn quadratic equations or photosynthesis. That is what happened to me after I watched four 10-15 minute videos last night!

A related post on global education in Los Angeles schools can be found at Tikati. Please do share your thoughts or comments on this topic. I'd love your feedback.

Exploring the world

I spent the better part of this year (6.5 months to be exact) traveling around the world and “exploring change” with my husband and two sons. We visited new cultures, discovered the different ways in which people live and share and celebrate, learned a bit about ourselves, and came back humbled and moved by all we had experienced together as a family. While I didn't post to this site while spinning around the globe, I intend to catch up very soon. More later...

Participatory research, monitoring & evaluation: Applications in education

Participatory research, monitoring, and evaluation are all approaches which democratize the creation and sharing of knowledge. There is an emphasis on the participatory or socially situated nature of this collective wisdom. Each voice matters, and yet it is the weakest voices that are amplified and given more weight. Perhaps these voices have been mute or silent in the past. Or perhaps they did speak out but were overpowered by dominant players and were not heard. Traditional methods of research and evaluation have emphasized objectivity, the role of the “expert,” and efficient data collection techniques. Participatory monitoring and evaluation (“PM&E”) rearrange the knowledge landscape so that the little people are the most important ones. Careful attention is paid to indigenous “know-how,” local needs, and socially constructed solutions drawn from within the community. Emphasis is also placed on the inter-connectedness of theory, knowledge and practice, and the rich and symbiotic nature of this ongoing interplay or praxis. Most often, PM&E has been applied in the context of development work or poverty reduction, and yet it is relevant in almost every sphere of life. In this article, the emphasis is on the field of education and learning, particularly among lower-income, immigrant, and/or marginalized populations.

Here's a link to the article. Participatory Research, Monitoring & Evaluation: Applications in Education

A landscape of open knowledge

These days I increasingly notice signs that a knowledge revolution is underway. On the Internet, there is more talk of “open source,” “open content,” “open access,” “collaborative knowledge construction,” “knowledge reuse” and “knowledge sharing.” What is striking about this movement to democratize knowledge is that so many traditional divisions are simply melting away. Access to knowledge is no longer based on its affordability. Poorer nations might be able to access information without many of the cost barriers that come with proprietary content and, as a result, have the ability to compete on an equal playing field with richer nations.

Open Content
In one example, MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative has made freely available materials for over 1800 courses that span the curriculum. These course materials are heavily used by students and teachers around the world who adapt the course content as needed. The value is not just in the information being delivered but in the quality of the teaching. Many OpenCourseWare users have raved about engaging professors who in a 45 minute lecture are able to explain concepts that they had struggled with for weeks. They talk about how the MIT approach has changed their understanding of what it means to learn. Of course, not everyone has access to the Internet. But it might be possible to broadcast classes over the radio where the content is presented as a series of audio or video lectures. Warning: When I visited the MIT site, I had to tear myself away because there were so many courses that I was tempted to look at. Give yourself at least an hour to peruse the list. Yes, there is a science bias (it is MIT after all) but there is a very good selection of other “liberal arts” type offerings as well. And some of the courses have been translated into multiple languages as well. Of course, many of the courses might not be locally relevant in

Another “open content” initiative, and one well-known to most Internet users, is Wikipedia. A free online encyclopedia with over 7 million articles (over 2 million articles in English), Wikipedia has over 75,000 volunteer contributors of all ages living around the world. These content providers have each written about what they know best, an area of expertise. It doesn’t always work and there are some errors and inconsistencies. But, here’s an interesting piece of news. A report in the international journal Nature compared the accuracy of science articles in Wikipedia to those in Brittanica and found them to be very close!


Free Software and Open Source
Free software refers to software that can be freely modified and redistributed. It does not mean that the software was created (or is available) at no cost. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) puts it well: “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. Think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.” However, partly because of confusion over the word “free,” the term “open source” is frequently used to indicate that the source code of free software can be modified and reused. A directory of free/open source software has been jointly created by FSF and UNESCO and is available at this link.

Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization, provides tools for authors, scientists, etc. to selectively copyright their works. For example, CC may be used to copyright material as “some rights reserved” instead of the usual “all rights reserved.” This is how they describe their purpose:

Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

There are six different types of licenses, ranging from the most restrictive (which allows users to download content and share with others but also attribute the work to the author with a link back) to the most liberal (which allows users to distribute, remix, and build upon an author’s work as long as the author is credited for the original creation). Or, to take it one step further, authors can choose to make their work available without any copyright protections (no license) by dedicating their work to the public domain. While CC is based on U.S. copyright laws, the organization is slowly adapting and porting the core CC licenses to other countries.


Open Access
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists approximately 3,300 scientific and scholarly journals that are open access, freely available over the Internet, and provide the full text of articles. The cause of open access journals was spearheaded by the Open Society Institute (OSI) at a meeting in Budapest in December 2001. By the end of the meeting, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) had been created and the BOAI has since focused on increasing open access to peer reviewed research literature. It does not concern itself with open access to software, music, movies, etc. BOAI defines “open access” as follows:

"By 'open access' we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." (click here for more information about BOAI and open access journals)

The commitment to open access is echoed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)


So why is all this relevant?

For innovation, knowledge sharing, and social change. Yes, that’s right. A very exciting trend recently is that open source software, open content creation, and open access to knowledge are being used to create creative solutions to challenging problems in society.

For example, the week-long “Code for a Cause” event at the University of Southern California next month (April 12-20) hopes to develop open-source software for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) platform. (Click on my earlier blog entry on the OLPC initiative if you want to learn more about the “$100 laptop” being used to educate children in poorer countries.) At the OLPC Hackathon, USC students, ranging from undergraduates to Ph.D. candidates, will spend a week to come up with unique solutions to actual problems.

The Social Innovation Camp in London this weekend (April 4-6) is an exciting event that brings together some of the best web developers in UK and Europe…for a cause. In their words, “what happens when you get a bunch of software developers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems, and only 48 hours to solve them?” The goal of the SI camp is to create easy-to-build Web 2.0 tools that can be used to develop solutions for social challenges. Expect to see similar camps replicated in other cities very soon….

NCLB: A narrow and myopic approach to education

Every time I think about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) I shudder. How could educated people in the U.S. deliberately muddle the educational system even further? The repetitive mantras of NCLB supporters alternate between “increased accountability,” “narrow the achievement gap,” and “standardized testing.”

The standardization of education seems to have taken away the love of learning for its own sake. Teachers no longer have the freedom to devote an entire lesson to a complex and open-ended question such as “why does child labor continue to exist?” Unless, of course, it will help students achieve higher test scores. There is no time for in-depth projects or student-initiated work because these take up too much time. Not surprisingly, many teachers in the U.S. complain about how the joy and creativity of teaching is getting lost. How the art of teaching is slowly turning into a science.

At the same time, the U.S. finds its students to be less prepared when compared to many other western nations. Take for example, Finland, whose scores on an international math and science test of 15 year olds (Programme for International Student Assessment or PISA) were the highest in the world while American teens were somewhere in the middle. What does Finland do differently? American educators and technology leaders from the Consortium for School Networking (COSN) recently visited Scandinavia to find out more and you can read their report here. They had assumed that it was technology that played a significant role in the success of Scandinavian students. They found, however, that while technology did play a supporting role, it was the teachers and the innovation in the educational system that really made the difference.

What a surprise to find that Finland’s educational system is everything that NCLB is not! Teachers are given complete freedom to craft their lessons. At the same time, it is the student and not the teacher who is held accountable for student performance. Indeed, students understand that they are engaged in learning because it is a worthy endeavor, and not because it will help them land a high-paying job upon graduation. Teachers hold a position of respect and teaching jobs are very competitive. Also, all teachers in Finland must have at least a master’s degree. There is no movement in Finland to create universal preschool. Instead, children spend their early years developing skills (such as responsibility, creativity and autonomy) that will help them navigate their way through life. Children do not enter a classroom until age 7 and then stay in the same school until they are 16. Kids are more independent, often walk alone to school, and learn to rely on themselves at an early age. Of course, the population in Finland is more homogenous and there aren’t significant gaps between high and low performing schools or high and low income kids. In fact, there are no special programs for gifted children. Also, since college is free, there is little pressure from parents to do well in school.

Six years after NCLB was first signed into law there is no improvement in student achievement or standardized test scores. In fact, according to a recent news release from the National Education Association (NEA), fourth-grade reading and math test scores and eighth-grade math scores increased at a faster rate before NCLB than after its implementation. The movement against NCLB in its present form is gaining momentum and there are currently over 100 bills before Congress that propose measures to improve NCLB. Visit this link to see if your senator or representative is co-sponsoring any of these bills. It might not be the Finnish educational system but we have to start somewhere

Thinking deeply and across boundaries: The International Baccalaureate program as the foundation of a sound education

I recently read an Education Week piece about a 3,200-student South St. Paul, Minnesota school district that plans to be the first public school system in the U.S. to offer the demanding International Baccalaureate (IB) program to all its students by the fall of 2008. Not just wealthy students or academically advanced students. The IB curriculum will be taught to all students in the district. The head of South St. Paul Junior High, Kathleen Johnson, believes that “this is probably the best K-12 education you can get.”

The IB curriculum was developed in the 1960s for the children of European diplomats and has since spread to 125 countries. In the past year, there has been a surge of interest among American schools (perhaps to turn out students who would be competitive in a global economy) and the IB curriculum is fast becoming a part of the US educational scene. There are three different programs-- the Primary Years or PYP program (for students aged 3-12), the Middle Years or MYP program (for students aged 11-16), and the 2-year Diploma program (for students aged 16-19).

The mission of the International Baccalaureate is to use education to create a better and more peaceful world. A lofty goal one might argue. And why should a demanding or rigorous curriculum create a better world? A hallmark of the IB curriculum is the emphasis on depth rather than breadth of knowledge. Students learn to train their minds, to probe and analyze, to reflect and discover, and to persist in learning for its own sake. At the same time, the curriculum teaches values such as international-mindedness, cultural awareness, caring, and community service. The result? IB graduates do turn out to be global thinkers with inquiring minds and cross-disciplinary interests, judging from alumni stories on the IBO website. And, yes, they do go on to college! In fact, many colleges even prefer the IB diploma over AP classes because of its Theory of Knowledge class (which explores the nature of knowledge across disciplines and injects a cross-cultural perspective), the extended essay (a 4000 word piece on a topic independently researched by the student), and the 150 hours of extracurricular activities, sports, and community service (which gives students time to appreciate non-academic pursuits).

Howard Gardner, who has written extensively about multiple intelligences and educational reform, laments the emphasis on fact-based learning and standardized testing in many schools today. When asked about his thoughts on IB pedagogy, he had the following to say:

“For many years I have been an IB fan. It has taken seriously more of the issues in the world of today (and tomorrow), and has been less influenced by fads, and the test-taking obsessions of ministers of education, than any organization of its size. The development of separate programmes for the early and middle years is also meritorious and I applaud the inclusion of the arts as subjects worthy of serious study. The theory of knowledge course is consonant with the importance today of metacognitive capacities and the need for synthesizing thinking that integrates separate disciplines and rival perspectives.”

See full interview with Gardner here.

But the costs of an IB education can be quite high. What about access for lower income students? According to the IB Director General, Mr. Beard, those are the specific students they want to target next. “We’re focusing on schools with Title I.” (Currently, about 36 percent of IB schools in the United States are Title I schools and they provide free and reduced-price lunches to over 1/3 of their students.) Also, thanks to the efforts of the California International Baccalaureate Organization (CIBO), educational lobbyists, and Assemblyman Mike Honda of San Jose, AB2363 was passed in 1998 and provides $25,000 per year for all CIBO diploma schools, to be used specifically for teacher training. Since then, further legislation has provided funding for MYP schools as well. There are currently over 85 schools offering IB in California.

The South St. Paul experiment to teach IB district-wide should be watched carefully. I believe that it could serve as a model for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to slowly introduce the IB curriculum in its own schools. And here’s some exciting news – an interesting new charter school within LAUSD, Goethe International Charter School, plans to open in Fall 2008 as the first charter school within the district to offer an IB curriculum (and English-German immersion), starting with grades K-3. Maybe the IB fever will spread to the rest of LAUSD?

One Laptop per Child: Why must every child have a laptop and what does it do for them?

The idea
When I first heard about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program I had mixed feelings. I wasn’t excited when I read about all the opportunities that the program might create. I had read about books being donated to create libraries for children in Nepal. That made sense. But laptops for children in a small Andean village in Peru? Computers that incidentally cost between $100-$200 apiece. Why not textbooks and notebooks and pencils? How about creating more classrooms? Or building wells near schools so children in Ghana do not have to walk two hours each way when they get thirsty during the school day and need a drink of water. “Don’t be too quick to judge,” I told myself. Find out more about the OLPC program, its underlying theory, and its goals. So I set about to read everything I could about the program. Then I had a chance to play around on one of the OLPC computers at a local expo last weekend. I have to admit, it is quite cute. But let’s talk about why this cute laptop exists at all.

The vision
The vision of Seymour Papert, Nicholas Negroponte, and other researchers in the MIT Media Lab is to advance constructionist learning in developing nations with the XO computer (the computer used in the OLPC program). They believe that the computer allows children to think, learn and explore in ways that would not otherwise be possible. The notion of individual ownership is important in their equation – each child would have his or her own laptop, just as they might each own their own pencil

The technology
We know that the XO is strong, waterproof, easy to use (with a hand crank for power), has a simple interface, and is easy to fix. Children can pry the computer open with a screwdriver and are taught to repair minor problems on their own. Clearly, they have complete control over and responsibility for their new tool. We also know that the XO has a rugged design and is virtually indestructible in the normal course of learning and school activities. Some critics have discussed the flaws of the computer – small keys, slow, occasional crashes, etc. I won’t bother to go down that road. Besides, I assume each subsequent generation of the XO will be more robust and reliable. As I scour the Internet, most of what I find is written by developers who are highly enthused about engaging open source languages, games and activities that can be tapped into by these children. I am quickly familiarizing myself with open source software and applications for education. But technology on its own isn’t a panacea, not without a clear set of goals and expected outcomes, supporting theory and research, and an appropriate evaluation plan.

The research theory
I am familiar with constructivist theory as well theories about situated learning, social and distributed cognition and collaborative learning, and I have studied this set of ideas carefully over a period of several years. All of these paradigms emphasize the social and shared nature of knowledge construction. They argue that teaching in a typical classroom environment is somewhat unnatural and abstracts the process of education. Learning through experience or apprenticeship, they argue, would be more relevant, rich and engaging. Lev Vygotsky wrote that challenges should be within the “zone of proximal development,” a zone where tasks are difficult and might require a mentor (a peer or a teacher) but are not impossible. John Dewey emphasized the social (not individual) and experiential nature of knowledge creation and the notion of deliberate exploration and learning by doing. In contrast to Plato’s teachings, where there is a rational world of knowledge from which we learn the “true” nature of things, the constructivists argue that it is the individual who creates his or her own model of the world through active learning, reflective activity, use of language (such as talking aloud while problem solving), social interactions, and contextual and cultural connections with the surrounding community. So how does this get applied with the XO?


Other programs
In 1999, the Hole in the Wall project in India installed computer kiosks (with a single computer) in playgrounds in slum areas. These children lived like street urchins and did not regularly attend school. Because there is just one computer and many children, they eventually (after an initial period of chaos) learn to self-organize, work together, and share ideas as they explore possibilities offered by the computer and the Internet.

Hole in the Wall has since spread to multiple sites across India (over 100 computers), and was recently adopted by the governments of Cambodia and Uganda. A driving concern in all these countries is to narrow the digital divide between urban and rural children and to increase levels of computer literacy. The motivation is a little different from OLPC: Hole in the Wall is using technology to expose children to resources and knowledge available through the Internet and hopes to provide them with the skills and resources to compete in a global economy. But some of the effects might be similar (this would depend, of course, on the effects of the OLPC program). Children are often observed accessing information and then engaging in dialogue and sharing their ideas as they co-construct knowledge. Multiple evaluations suggest that the program complements the traditional schooling environment, and that children are improving their critical thinking and problem solving skills, computer literacy levels, and overall academic achievement.


Evaluating results
What are we evaluating here? In other words, what are the goals, expected outcomes, etc.? I have created a list of preliminary questions and issues that I believe should be addressed as part of the OLPC program in order to create a rich picture of the effects. I’m still fleshing out my proposed questions -- watch for a future post on this topic...