The underpinning message throughout the keynote was the need to focus on and respect the learner, with his or her particular needs, strengths, abilities and ambitions, and to understand this as the key to a truly learner-centred approach in education. With subtle wit and humour, Pasi shared his own experience as a maths teacher who once wanted to be a mathematician. Teasing this out, he described the stereotypical view of a maths teacher that has established itself in the minds of students, and the disservice we do to the field of mathematics – or any discipline for that matter – when we allow the focus on the content or the discipline to become more important than the learner. In the learners’ experience their interests will typically traverse multiple disciplines and be more holistic, integrated and ‘linked’.  This focus on the learner and the learner’s perspective is pivotal in building a successful, future-focused approach to schooling.

The Warning

The warning Pasi gave us is simple, and is tied in made explicit in the title of the keynote: if we don’t lead with small data we’ll be led by big data.

The problem is that education policymakers around the world are now reforming their education systems through correlations based on Big Data from their own national student assessments systems and international education data bases without adequately understanding the details that make a difference in schools.

(https://pasisahlberg.com/next-big-thing-education-small-data/)

By ‘big data’ he is talking about all forms of assessment and achievement data that is currently being collected and collated at a national and international level, sifted, sorted and represented back in the form of statistics and trends upon which large scale decisions are made about curriculum, policy and resourcing. We know this well in New Zealand with the recent experience with National Standards and the pre-occupation with OECD data that appears to cause immediate swings in what is deemed to be important.

Pasi’s key warning here is “Don't confuse correlation with causation”. Just because the data can be construed to reveal certain patterns or trends doesn’t make it true in the context of a specific student or school. To illustrate his point he used a combination of OECD data and national data on the amount of ice cream consumed to "prove" that ice cream consumption positively affects education scores!

The more concerning warning came when considering how technology may be viewed as providing a solution to meeting the demand for mass-personalisation. The argument presented is compelling – if 75% of education spending is on people, and we could reduce a third of the "people" by using artificial intelligence (AI) in education this would present an attractive proposition for budget-conscious politicians. But what will it mean for educating students as a whole person?

To illustrate that this is a very real and current concern, Pasi used the illustration of alt-school – a network of progressive schools in the USA. These schools advertise themselves as being completed learner-centred, providing learning that is self-driven, competency-based, personalized, socially embedded, and open-walled. It sounds like the ideal scenario – highly personalised pathways for individual students, powered by a sophisticated AI that is monitoring each student’s every move using a series of cameras throughout the environment, and monitoring their every keystroke and response to online content and instruction.

There’s no doubt this approach works, and produces students capable of passing exams and demonstrating their gains in learning – but what’s missing? Where are the relationships with others? Engagement in play? Interactions with people? Development of empathy and other affective qualities that may best serve the future of humanity?

A key question here is to ask, “if it is truly personalised learning by the AI, where is the child's voice? How can it be personalised if the child does not have some form of input?”

So the challenge is around just how seriously we take this possible future – and not to simply cast it aside as a ‘pipe dream’ that is the work of science fiction, because after all, ‘technology will never replace a teacher!”

The call to action

The call for action directs attention directly on those of us working with learners in schools – the teachers. Pasi challenged us to trust our raw instincts, to be amongst what is happening, not just observing from a distance. This will require a greater degree of professional trust is the key to the small data conundrum.

In Finland, trust is for us the full trust and freedom for our schools and teachers, believing that they can develop goals, teaching standards and content appropriate for their children. The trust is instilled deeply in our culture; it is not a single behavior in a particular situation.

(https://pasisahlberg.com/interview-teachers-need-a-sense-of-mission-empathy-and-leadership/)

Small data is what we gather when noticing the small stuff that is occurring in the specific context of the classroom or individual student learning, and will make a difference to the big picture when we combine what we observe with our professional wisdom. Pasi’s point is that this ‘small data’ reveals patterns and insights that the ‘big data’ with its statistical trends and correlations can never do.

Pasi’s call for action is that we discover together, at the local level, the power of collective professional wisdom. It is the little things we do as teachers with our learners that makes the difference.  This resonates well in the NZ context where we’ve valued Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJs) as a part of the assessment process – but if we’re to be serious about taking up Pasi’s challenge, we will need to become even more serious about ensuring we build our professional capacity even further – and deeper – so that we can be even more secure and confident about the ‘professional wisdom’ that we are able to bring to bear on the observations we make.

To achieve this Pasi recognised the need for educators and government agencies to work collectively to find ways to reduce teacher workload, support special education, fund public schools better and use student voice to design learning.

The three key take-aways that Pasi left us with were:

 

1. Build a trust-based professionalism - trust colleagues, bosses, children – and this will include building trust within the community too, with parents and future employers etc.
2. Build professional wisdom as evidence – we need to give greater priority again to our professional reading, participation in professional associations and in-school professional learning groups (PLGs) where our professional knowledge can be challenged and honed.
3. Lead with Small Data - if you don’t make this a priority, you WILL be led by big data!

While in Japan, Walsh shared his thinking around Masayoshi Son’s ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by starting his thinking 15-20 yrs into the future, and simply working backwards to see what support and infrastructure would be needed to make that future a reality. He then goes to find those companies to invest in and if they don’t exist, he creates them! You see, what Masayoshi does differently is that he looks at the people needed to create a distant dream, not the technology. And so, Walsh surmises, we needn’t be looking at the current crop of Millennials to make predictions about education in the next 12-15 years, as by then, they will be “as old and as miserable as the rest of us!” The people we should be looking, Walsh describes as the most terrifying generation we’ve ever encountered, are eight year olds!

Why are eight year olds so different?

The way our current crop of primary aged students interact with technology is vastly different to the generation previous to them. Walsh points out that this digitally native group of users develops an almost intrinsic understanding of the algorithmic framework that drives interactions from an impossibly young age. It’s this genuine difference in the way they interact with technology that Walsh believes will lead to a very different way of thinking around the way we connect with and explore knowledge.

It’s not the screen that’s interesting, it’s the experiences and the way technology has interacted with it. YouTube has changed the way an entire generation watches TV. Every experience children have now has been customised and hyper-individualised by the data collected by social media. Children now are at the beginning of a true algorithmic society, a social credit score based society. Terrified yet? The currency and fabric of daily life is fast becoming driven by data, artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learning. Computers themselves are constantly adapting, writing their own code and programming, no longer reliant on the dinosaurs of the MS-DOS prompt generation.

"The minute you  joined Facebook, your kids left!” 

Adaptive Learning

The reason adaptive and machine learning has so much potential is because it allows us to truly take the world’s knowledge, understand an individual’s needs and to personalise and tailor it to algorithmic, logical perfection. Students of tomorrow have the opportunity to be taken along their own learning journey, at their own pace and scale, for vastly reduced sums of money. As Walsh points out, this is not to say human teachers are not important, just that we are entering an age whereby content and opportunity can be delivered in a scaled way, that has previously been inconceivable. And we’re going to need it! Walsh continues on to share that the skills, knowledge and understandings required to function successfully in an algorithmic age are not being taught in today’s schools. As we stand at a precipice, faced with the landscape of tomorrow’s society, how can teaching knowledge and skills of yesterday, prepare leaders and learners of tomorrow? We need to start by articulating what those skills might be…

Automation of Industry

When farm jobs started to decline during automation, the westernised education system began to evolve. Many smart and forward thinking people realised the need to invest in new forms of education in order to prepare people for the future. Technology doesn’t destroy jobs, it simply changes them. It’s not always a straightforward process and often the realisation takes a little time. Sometimes enabling technology, even though it can be hugely disruptive, can actually increase the number of people employed in an industry. Take ATMs for example. Some bank tellers lost their jobs, however because paying the number of people who worked as tellers reduced, it meant that more branches could be opened- thus increasing the number of people working for the banks!

It’s becoming a case of looking at the type of people that will thrive in an environment that focuses on both the world of people as well as having a strong understanding of how to leverage data and apply it. Computational thinking is not about teaching children to code, it’s about how to leverage technology to break a problem down and find a strategy to automate its solution. Thinking about the future, this gives students the ability to both understand the essence of a problem as well as a knowledge of the tools and processes to combat it.

Key Skills for the next generation

As we see the rise of this hybrid approach, the understanding of the problem and the data to solve it using computer science and technology, we need to teach the next generation to be more comfortable with ambiguity. We are in danger of preparing students for a world that has become obsolete by the time they leave education. The CEO of Netflix looks for employees that can exercise “good judgement in ambiguous situations.” This is harder than it sounds. As we leave a structured education system that has exams and allocated time, hierarchy and structure, and they walk into a world that has huge unknown, how can we make sure they cope. How do we teach students to process unpredictability and handle ambiguity?

Another element we need to help learners become aware of is the power of machine thinking and artificial intelligence. Here Walsh sites Deep Blue (an AI) beating world Chess Master Gary Kasparov. Reflecting on this event, it became clear that the computer was not trying to beat the world’s greatest human chess player by a substantial margin, it was simply trying to do the very minimum to win by just one point. What this means is that we need to understand how a computer ‘sees’ the world and problem solving. A computer will conserve resources, not try to focus on the end goal and winning big. A computer will work out the simplest way to win and this way is often not an approach that a human will see, let alone take.

The final element we need to take into account is to teach students to centre themselves, find the right moral compass and make good ethical judgements. Here Walsh suggests that perhaps studying computing is not the best way forward, but the studying of philosophy in order to help build decision making capacity using a strong moral compass. This is not about following the laws of a land, it’s about following the laws of trust, set by humans. As the debates around privacy and our data continue to rage, we are entering a time where understanding the tech is important, but understanding underlying motivations and human behaviour is even more valuable.

“The algorithmic age is an opportunity to embrace new and exciting ways of thinking...”

Q&A with Mike

• Are our experiences within the digital economy going to get wider and bigger?

It’s impossible to not participate in the future. It may become impossible to get a bank loan or go a

bout daily efforts as you’ll have no transparency and digital value. With kids, we have about 9-10yrs where people shelter them from tech. If we don’t teach them how to function appropriately and effectively, then how can we expect them to function?

• How can we avoid programmer bias being transferred to AI?

This is important. We need to interrogate the code that is produced. How was the data collected? Are they discriminatory? There’s a need to have well educated teachers and others so they can be part of the discussion.

• Small data: The rights, the voice and the individual. How do we as teachers ensure that the rights of our children are at the forefront?

People assume it’s a binary thing. They think it’s either about human interest or corporation driven outcomes. I see it as a combination. As we scale up good education into remote communities or for larger class sizes, it should be a partnership. Everyone is at a different rate of learning and we can leverage small or big data to find what someone knows and unlock their potential.

• Teachers in the future: They need to be informed, discerning, questioning and listening. So what might it actually look like?

Teachers need to be as good as the tech they use. I don’t believe classrooms will disappear. The power of humans together is incredibly. People working from home is beginning to end because their best ideas come from the old school analogue way of being face to face. In 10-20 yrs we won’t have virtual classes. If anything the tech will be less visible. It’s the data that sits behind it that will really shape the system.

• Are humans learning to think less for themselves therefore teaching ourselves to becoming less intelligent?

In many ways we don’t have the same memories because we have google! We live in times when we don’t even need to remember phone numbers. Tech has become an extension of our memory and perception. Does it makes us stupid? I think it’s changed us. It should allow us to extend ourselves.

• As someone who travels world as a global nomad- where do you think the patterns around where people live lie? Will travel decrease because of tech?

It feels like we’re going backwards. How did we lose Concord? Even with tech, our ability to see more digitally makes us want to see it more physically. I hope it will make people want to see more. Autonomous cars, flying cars and drones, all will change how we interact and how we design where we learn. We need to remember not to forget what it means to keep in touch and be human.

Let your story be heard in the heavens,

and your mana be restored to the land

(2018, O’Regan)

Kia piki taku rau huia ki ngā tihi tapu o taku pae a Tararua,

e rere whakarunga ki te ūpoko o taku ika tapu,

Kia whiti atu rā i Te Moana o Raukawa ki te tauihu o te waka a Māui, ki te tauranga o Uruao,

Kia hōkai ake rā i ngā tapuwae o Rākaihautū,

tau atu rā ki ngā pākihi whakatekateka o Waitaha,

Kia hiki aku mata ki tō wehi, ki tō tapu Aoraki e tū mai rā,

otirā ki tō mana e hora iho nā e Tahu e!

Ka mihi, ka tangi ki a koutou katoa rā kua riro rā ki ngā hawaiki. Ka tautoko ake i ngā kupu mōteatea mōu Matiaha Tiramōrehu, otirā ngā kupu mihi, ngā kupu tangi, e koro e, moe mai rā. Ko tō reo ki te rangi, ko tō mana ki te whenua! Kāti rā.

Ko Tahu, ko koe e Hana. Ka mahana te ngākau, ka pūhana mai te wairua! Ka hotuhotu te ngākau, ka maurirere te wairua! Nāu e Hana!

Ko te momo i a koe Tiramōrehu, tohunga whakairo i te kupu ki te arero, ki te pepa, pou ranga i ōna tira, pou whakatō kākano ki ōna uri whakaheke, heke, heke, heke ki ō mokopuna te hāpai ake nei i ō wawata! Erangi ka hotuhotu ki ō tini mokopuna e kōtiti nei, e kuare nei i ngā kōrero mōu, auē te mamae e! Ka huri rātou ki hea? Mā wai rātou e tauawhi? Mā te mōteatea ō kōrero e whakakanohi mai, e whakaringaringa mai i te Tahu o āpōpō! E kore tō reo e ngū, e kore hoki e ngaro!

He hae roa, he ngau kino i te korenga o ngā kōrero o ō tātou tīpuna i kōrero i ō tātou kura. Ko ngā pānga tōnui ka taka mai ki ngā whakatipuranga e kīa ana, he tangata hākinakina, he tangata māngere, he tangata katakata, he tangata kēnge, he tangata mauhere, aha atu, aha atu. Pēnā i tāu i mea mai, ‘they know they (stereotypes) exist when they are followed around a dairy…...have to process verbal abuse for speaking Māori to each other’ (2018, O’Regan).

Heoi anō ko tāu pū, kia tika mai, kia pai mai te ao, he whakapapa, he pūmanawa, he pūkenga o tēnei iwi taketake mai i ngā kāwai rangatira. ‘We can be the generation that made the change. We can reclaim our story and help our people understand it’ (2018, O’Regan). I ēnei kupu āu, ka tū te ihi, ka tū te wana, ko wai rā te tamaiti kei mua i a koe, ko Tahu, ko Te Rautāwhiri.

Ko au, ka whakataukī ake i āu kupu akiaki, i āu kupu whakatūpato, i āu kupu whakaaraara ki te ao mātauranga, otirā ki te ao e noho nei tātou kia aro pū ki te tamaiti me ōna kōrero whakapapa, arā he tāonga, he kākano.

E Hana ko tō reo i rāngona ki te rangi, ko tō mana i horahia ki te whenua, e te tuahine - mauriora!

1. O’Regan, H (2018, Oct) Te reo ki te raki, tō mana ki te whenua. Paper presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand CORE Education uLearn Conference, Auckland, New Zealand.

1. O’Regan, H (2018, Oct) Te reo ki te raki, tō mana ki te whenua. Paper presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand CORE Education uLearn Conference, Auckland, New Zealand. - Images 1-3
2. Tāwhiwhirangi, K (2018, Oct) ULearn18 Keynote Speaker - Image 4

Blog post by Hohepa Isaac-Sharland

On Tuesday afternoon, uLearn18 was officially opened with tangata whenua (hosts) calling on the manuhiri (visitors) into the Sky City Convention centre.

The Whaikōrero (speeches) from tangata whenua and manuhuri talked about where their tipuna had travelled from (waka). In between each orator a waiata (song) was sung and at the end of the proceedings, both manuhiri and tangata whenua came together to greet each other through hongi.

We finished with kai (food) and korero (chatting) sign posting the start of uLearn18.

Powhiri from edSpace on Vimeo.

14 December 2017 we began a self-review on How are we including Pasifika within our Learning Environment?

We have decided to unpack this review further as part of our Te Whariki Pedagogical Leadership internal evaluation. By digging deeper into this self-review we will gain a deeper understanding of the changes to Te Whariki 2017 and:
 How we see our teaching practice
 Page 12 – A curriculum for all children.
“All children have rights to protection and promotion of their health and wellbeing, to equitable access to learning opportunities, to recognition of their language, culture and identity and increasingly to agency in their own lives. These rights align closely to the concept of mana”.
Page 31 – Belonging – Diversity is valued – thinking of the diversity of the whanau, culture and language.”
 The holistic journey for children and whanau within our centre.
 Page 62 – As Critical Theories is a new addition to Te Whariki this will help us to look at things with a new perspective and to challenge our thinking and thoughts.

Page 3 of Te Whariki states:
Te Tiriti o Waitangi
“Foundation upon which Maori and Pakeha would build their relationship as citizens of Aotearoa, New Zealand.”
“New Zealand is increasingly multicultural. Te Tiriti is seen to be inclusive of all immigrants to New Zealand, whose welcome comes in the context of this partnership. Those working in early childhood education respond to the changing demographic landscape by valuing and supporting the different cultures represented in their settings”.
We acknowledge the importance of all cultures within our centre – so we have decided to widened our lens to focus on our Internal Evaluation to reflect our tamariki and whanau.

Our Internal Evaluation question:
Questions to think about: “How are we supporting the different cultures that are represented in our centre?”
 Will it shift kaiako practice?
 How will it benefit children, whanau, and community?
- To what effect, how effectively, to what extend?

Ministry of Education:
Kotahi te Kākano, he nui ngā hua o te rākau.
This whakatauki emphasises that in our community we are all different. In early learning we celebrate those differences while maintaining our relationship with each other. Provocation:
HOW well do you know my identity, language and culture?
HOW do you affirm my identity, language and culture on a daily basis?
HOW are situations created where I can share my identity, language and culture with you?
HOW do you share with me cultures other than my own?

For this internal evaluation we have:
Involving all staff in the process, whanau and the wider community.
We researched children attending kindergarten cultural backgrounds.
On the information of the cultural diversity within our centre we researched resources, books artefacts we had to reflect the different cultures.
Discussions with whanau helped us to gain a deeper understanding of who they are, where they are from and an opportunity for whanau to share their views on what they would like to see to reflect their child’s culture within the centre.

Highlighted in Webinar 4 – Do you know me? (Belonging) is “Authentic celebrations - to know the culture of the whanau and children at the centre.”

From information gathered what did we discover?

What are you? A Blues or Hurricanes fan? A Mac or PC user? Prefer a Holden or a Ford? Having a discussion (or even argument) around important things that really matter to us is nothing new.  I'm currently (enjoying) working my way through an online course, learning more about, online communities and what makes us come together.

As shared in a previous blog, What’s the difference between a social network and an online community? an online community is a group of people who develop relationships around strong common interests. This group commonly crosses boundaries to come together (age, interest, abilities, needs) where relationships become incredibly important, as we turns an audience (viewership, lurkers, likes) into a community (interactive).

It starts with strong common interests, then an interaction or spark is created, community members (us) are invited to disclose some information about themselves (experiences, facts, emotions) which in-turn creates an emotional connection where relationships will start to develop. Without interaction, we are just building an audience. Strong common interests is what is going to drive our community, ie: what do they want to spend our free time talking about?  

Some people like to talk about lifestyle products, hobbies and what they spend their time on, emotional reaction to causes, sport teams, events etc or what identifies us - from brands to job/work related conversations. Some people like to argue Ford vs Holden, others...Mac vs PC.

What is our strong common interest in edSpace?

I see our community growing when people are joining as part of a course/event, project or programme and some even arriving after a notification, nudge or a shoulder-tap. I think we can come together to talk all things education, to share experiences and help each other in our mahi.

What do you think our strong common interests are?

We'll collate these results, and let you know what you want more of - so you can be an integral part of our community planning and activity.  

Social Networks

​Social networks (offline and on) are usually made up of predetermined relationships with people we already know or have met - friends, relatives, coworkers and acquaintances. Social networks unique to each of us and the tools often used are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.

1. Bound together by pre-established interpersonal connections
2. Each connection has his or her own social network
3. Characterized by a spider web-like "network" structure

Online Communities

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a passion for something that they know how to do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better. Etienne Wenger.

The biggest difference between social networks and online communities is that communities are often formed by people from different backgrounds who may not have met yet but are held together by a common interest or goal – might be a passion, belief, interest, need, common project, or profession. Social Network vs. Online Community: What Is the Difference?

Clearly people join the community because they care about this common interest that glues the community members together. Some stay because they felt the urge to contribute to the cause; others come because they can benefit from being part of the community. Social networks vs online communities: The important distinctions to know

1. Bound together by a common interest or topic
2. ANY person can be a part of ANY community
3. Characterized by a more complex overlapping and "nested" structure.

In the edTalks video, Establishing a professional learning community, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach defines a professional learning group as, a group of individuals coming together, to construct co-created content in a co-created community - where the tone evolves over time with key roles established, in the pursuit of organic, purposeful, healthy and productive conversations about learning online.

edSpace is our community of practice. What brings you here? What would you like to contribute and how do you see this community benefitting you? We'd love to hear more 

Image sources: Creative Commons and Pixabay.

Also see:

• Welcome to edSpace
• About us
• How can online learning impact on our practice?