Category: Social Change

You read a lot about change and the need for schools to rethink and reinvent themselves for the needs of 21st century learners. It’s sometimes frustrating for those of use who really want this change to happen when we feel we have to drag our less eager colleagues along kicking and screaming. It must also be pretty frustrating, threatening, scary, to those who are quite happy with the status quo and are content to leave things just as they are. It’s hard to understand why we need to change what we’ve always done, especially if it’s always worked for us in the past.

One of the nice aspects of the blogosphere is the way it so easily enables one to stumble upon interesting thoughts written by others. It’s especially rewarding when you come across a different thoughts from different places, but that just happen to strike you at the around the same time so that those ideas just bounce off each other, each giving depth to the other. Serendipity I believe it’s called…

So I present these two post grabs for your consideration… the first is from David Weiss. David is a software developer at the Macintosh Business Unit of Microsoft and this post is some advice that his father gave him about change.

1. I am different. So I need to figure out how others think, because they don’t think like I do.
2. Learning about change is not changing.
3. Most people agree that improvement and change is needed, until it means they have to change.
4. Getting someone to want to change is hard.
5. The power of the group, has something in it that facilitates change. (Carl Rogers)
6. Most leaders say, “You need to do this… You need to change… Good luck! See you later.” Instead of, “You can change. I can help.”
7. It’s important to setup an environment that balances building the person and getting the job done.

At around the same time, I came across these thoughts from Wil Richardson’s blog. Wil was, in turn, quoting others when he wrote…

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin

“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler

There is little doubt in my mind about the need for some serious change in our approach to the way we help kids learn. Although I see a lot of teachers making some effort to think about the need for this change, I am continually struck by how unwilling some of them are to actually DO something about it. The quote from Darwin really rings true for me… if we don’t embrace the changing nature of our students and the 21st century digital culture in which they are immersed, we run a real risk of becoming irrelevant to the kids we teach.

And yet, I can totally relate to the thoughts from David Weiss’s father, that change is hard, change is painful and people sometimes need love and kindness to get through it. You can’t force change upon people, they will do it when they feel they are ready, but we have to get the message through that the time to do it is right now.

Our world, and our schools, are not static places. They change. Culture changes. Society changes. Technology changes. And whether we like it or not, we have to change with them.

Tags: schools, society, change, culture

About six months ago, due to a major change in my own personal situation, I moved back into my mother’s house. Fortunately, she lives in a big house and I moved into the downstairs part of it where it is pretty much self contained and self sufficient. I have my own bedroom, loungeroom, bathroom and study area, so things could be a lot worse.

What I’m finding fascinating though is just how little time I spend watching TV or listening to the radio these days. In the past 6 months I think I have watched TV about 4 times, and only then because I was completely bored. I don’t even have a radio, except the one in my car and I never listen to that. Instead, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts which I subscribe to via the iTunes directory. For entertainment I watch a lot of video blogs, again sourced largely via download through the iTunes directory and viewed using my Mac or my video iPod. I even get regular news and weather reports directly on my 3G mobile phone via the 3 mobile web service, called Planet 3, and rarely read an actual newspaper anymore. I have a large number of RSS feeds that deliver customised news and information directly to my computer. And all that extra time I used to spend watching TV is now used to create content rather than consume it, and instead I find myself blogging, podcasting, writing and editing my own media.

And it’s not just me… tonight, my kids are here visiting. My 15 year old son Alex is sitting at his laptop watching a vodcast of the Chaser’s War on Everything, and will probably go play a video game of some sort in a minute. My 12 year old daughter Kate is using my video iPod to watch a few episodes of Family Guy, and before firing up the iPod she spent some time updating her new blog.

The TV is not on. There’s no radio. And we don’t even buy the newspaper.

This whole “Long Tail” concept is really hitting home to me. I am seeing and experiencing the reality of this huge shift away from the delivery of traditional media content by conventional means like TV, radio and newspapers. Alex was telling me the other day how he read that all of the major TV stations in Australia are experiencing a large decline in ther viewership. It’s no surprise that newspapers and magazines are selling in smaller numbers than ever before. And radio stations are stuggling to maintain listeners. Traditional media is in big trouble…

Meanwhile, we keep seeing an explosion in the number of people using the Internet as their main source of news, information and entertainment. Blogging and podcasting are growing exponentially. Mobile phones are moving into the delivery of full broadband-type services and are selling by the hundreds of millions.

My own kids are a living example of just how much the nature of information flow has changed in the last few years. They are no strangers to this… they live out on the long tail of cultural change. They are just typical kids, and this is their world. And yet I know that many of their teachers are blissfuly unaware of just how much their world has changed. Many hardworking, well meaning teachers are completely unaware of the magnitude of these changes. For my own kids and thousands more like them, going to school means turning up and being taught using a methodology and a mindset that is essentially the same as it ever was with very little acknowledgement that things have changed as dramatically as they actually have.

If these sorts of changes do not represent a fundamental shift in the way our society works, then I don’t know what does. I fail to see how people can not recognise this huge cultural paradigm shift that has taken place, and that our world and the way we communicate and learn has changed irrevocably.

technorati tags:longtail, media, podcasting