Monthly Archives: May 2022

14. Schools and Digitally Connected Families

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Mal Lee

COVID informed societies worldwide that the digitally connected families of the young had the digital technology and competencies to continue to play a major, often lead role in the education of the nation’s young.

Leave aside for the moment that the family has always been the children’s first teacher, but since the early 2000’s the digitally connected families of the world have played the lead role in growing their children being digital and readying them to use and learn with the digital 24/7/365.

Not governments nor its schools.

They have the agency, digital mindset, resources, and competencies to play a fuller role in their children’s education, particularly if schools are willing to astutely collaborate and support the parent’s efforts.

Research has long shown (Project Tomorrow, 2011) (Lee and Ward, 2013) that while most families have wanted to collaborate with their schools in the use of the digital few schools have demonstrated the desire to genuinely network.

There have been those that have distributed their control of the teaching and learning and created networked school communities, but they remain the exception – until at least the outbreak of COVID.

What the situation is post COVID time will tell.  

You are far better placed to gauge the thinking within your school, and system.

What is important is that educators understand the growing educational power of the digitally connected families, the learning happening in those families 24/7/365, the nature of the learning and how the schools and families can use the new scenario to better educate all the young. 

It is also time to recognise there are now areas of learning where the families will always lead the way, that the agential nature of the learning used by the families contrasts markedly with that used in most schools, how much better placed the family unit is to accommodate accelerating change and what schools can do to support ‘time poor’ parents.

While some might disagree schools and governments should also appreciate digitally connected families now have the wherewithal to decide how their children will be schooled. The COVID experience saw a significant increase in various forms of home and micro schooling, with the surveys suggesting a significant number want the remote teaching and testing option to stay, at least to some degree.

The digitally connected families can continue to provide their children a parallel, largely antithetical mode of learning with the digital, free of any links or support from the school or government, or if the school is off the mind, work with it to create a networked learning community, that pools the resources of the school and its families.

What is now a given is that the families and their children are going use and learn with the digital 24/7/365, lifelong, using a strongly laissez faire mode of learning regardless of the school’s and governments wish.

They are, in many areas of learning not going to use the traditional, linear, highly structured approach employed across the curriculum by schools. The young will continue to learn in context, anywhere, the instant desired.

The ball is in the school’s court. If schools wish to work more closely with their families, they will have to accept that given.

In talking about digitally connected families, one is looking at those that have normalised the use of digital in its many forms, in most every facet of their lives. Their use of the digital mindset and technologies is so every day as to be largely invisible.

Wellman and his colleagues described the development in a Pew Internet study in 2008 (Wellman, et.al, 2008), which indicated that ‘networked families’ had become the new normal in the US. 

Lee and Broadie (2018) preferred the term ‘digitally connected families’, that underscored the digital facet and the profound impact of connectivity, but both studies describe the natural, rapid, global shift to families being digital.

In considering the way forward it is important to recognise the accelerating pace, and global spread of what is is a natural evolutionary development, over which schools and society have limited control.

In early 2010 the schools and their communities didn’t have the devices, broadband connectivity, conferencing and critically the K-12 digital competencies required for universal remote teaching. The iPad, and the touchscreen tablets that were to transform world usage had not been released. Critically students K-6 had yet to universally embrace the use of the digital.

By 2014 they had, with over 90% plus of children 4-7 in the developed world owning or having ready access to an iPad (Rideout, 2014), (Johannsen, et.al, 2016), with children as young as three (Chaudron, 2015) taking charge of their use of, and learning with the digital.

By early 2020 90% plus of young people in the developed world had the technology, connectivity, and competencies to be taught remotely.

Government and school planners played no part in that dramatic global transformation.

The trend is for the current uptake to grow globally – albeit having reached the market saturation point in some nations – and for the technologies to become ever more sophisticated, powerful, and pervasive.

It was an expression of 50 years plus natural digital evolution and transformation, with the exponential element of Moore’s Law and the power of the market becoming that much more evident.

The families bought the technology and connectivity and chose to trust and empower their children to use and learn with the digital largely unfettered. 

Post 2010 the children from the very early years on operated in a laissez-faire environment, and took charge of their learning with the digital, learning how to self-learn, and individualising their learning and capabilities in the process.

Their learning was shaped by a strong digital mindset, with most being informal, non-linear, done the instant desired, in context, with innately curious children preferring a strongly self-discovery approach.

Pause a second a second, reflect and you’ll appreciate it is how most all of us learn everyday with the digital.

It is a mode the young and old will use throughout life, as we continually adapt to the evolving technologies and societal transformation.  

While schools, and particularly the bureaucracies are wedded to the belief that everything in schools all must, and indeed can be planned, the power of the global megatrends is such that even the largest of corporations realise that at best they can shape the megatrends to advantage.

That holds also for schools.

The COVID experience has already accelerated the networking of schools as organisations and their links with their families. 

COVID obliged them to rely on the digital resources of their families and do so while ever living with COVID.

While it has been argued that schools networking with their digitally connected families is optional the strong suspicion is that option has already gone.

The pace, and power of society’s evolving expectations, combined with the continued necessity of school’s having to operate with COVID, while struggling to get teachers in front of classes suggests some schools at least have accepted they must network with their digitally connected families to remain viable.

  • Chaudron, S (2015) Young Children (0-8) and Digital Technology Luxembourg, European Commission JRC and Policy Reports 2015 -http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC93239
  • Johansen, S. L, Larsen, M.C and Ernst, M.J (2016) Young Children and Digital Technology – Aarhus University, Aalborg University, Danish Media Council for Children and Young People, February 2016 – http://www.aau.dk/digitalAssets/201/201213_national-report_2015_denmark_proofread-2-.pdf
  • Lee, M and Ward, L (2013) Collaboration in learning: transcending the classroom walls, Melbourne ACER Press
  • Project Tomorrow (2011) The New Three E’s of Education: Enabled, Engaged and Empowered Speak Up – How Today’s Students are leveraging Emerging Technologies for Learning – http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/pdfs/SU10_3EofEducation(Students).

Pdf

  • Rideout, V (2014) Learning at Home: families’ educational media use in America The Joan Ganz Cooney Center 2014
  • Wellman, B, Smith, A, Wells, A and Kennedy, T (2008) ‘Networked Families’ Pew Internet October 19, 2008 – http://www.pewinternet.org/2008/10/19/networked-families/
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13. The Digital Competencies of Teachers. Their Growth

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Mal Lee

The COVID experience not only accelerated the natural growth of the teachers’ digital mindset, and its application in teaching but it also sped the in-school use of the digital competencies the teachers were using every day in their personal lives.

Both are developments that have profound implications for principals, school communities, education systems, teacher educators – and treasuries.

They point to an aged formal system of readying teachers for a networked mode of schooling that has failed to deliver and it being superseded by the naturally occurring development that grows the digital competencies of all the world’s digitally connected.

A number of us argued in the 80s that the latter should be the approach adopted in schools.

Rather schools and systems opted to employ ineffectually, for 40 plus years a traditional, ‘expert’ designed, structured linear approach that had its origins in the Industrial Age.  

Schooling worldwide since the introduction of personal computers into the classroom has seen the technology mainly as a tool, to assist improve academic performance. For most it has never been about change or evolution. Rather it has been and continues to be for most educators a ‘passive’ but increasingly sophisticated technology that can enhance traditional academic teaching and student performance. 

Some of us, considering the implications of Moore’s Law (1965) contended the digital would never be a passive technology, and that as the exponential power of computing impacted it would naturally bring marked societal and organisational transformation, and the necessity of the world’s peoples to continually adapt their ways, thinking and skillset. Seymour Papert succinctly observed:

…What we are interested in is not what will happen if you bring in the technology and change nothing else, what we are interested in is how that technology helps us to rethink everything else…’ (Papert 1990, p. 9)

Our belief was that in using the evolving digital technologies in context teachers would naturally grow their competencies as the technologies became evermore powerful, sophisticated, user friendly and ubiquitous. We recognised good use could be made of in-house workshops and mentors but even in the 80’s contended the most effective growth would always come from natural, just-in-time, in context usage, where the teachers had agency of their growth. 

Suffice it to say the establishment and its wish to control dismissed the natural evolutionary assumption.

Rather it contended that all teachers, K-12 must be formally taught how to use the ‘educationally appropriate’ tools, with all needing to be taught a largely constant, common set of competencies. 

That stance was actively supported by generations of technology companies, all arguing all teachers must be able to use – and buy – their kit.

It is as if there was, and is, something laudatory about promoting global sameness and constancy – and hierarchical control.

Some might remember that at the height of the Microsoft hegemony the desired key computer competencies for all teachers from kindergarten upwards were those required to use Windows on PCs.

For many education technology ‘experts’ the perceived nirvana has been, and continues to be, the identification of a set of key digital competencies, their codification in a set of mandated standards, and obligatory formal teacher training and accreditation. The quest is exemplified in the 2017 European Digital Competence of Educators (2017).

In that quest there has been an almost universal disregard for wider society’s adaptation to the digital and the propensity therein of digital users to teach themselves how to use the technologies they desired. It was as if schools weren’t part of a networked society.

Perelman astutely observed in School’s Out in 1992 that near all the world’s users of personal computers were self-taught.

Thirty years on, and 50 years since Gordon Moore alerted the world to the natural exponential growth in the power of computing five billion plus (ITU, 2021) digitally connected people, over 60% of the world’s peoples have taught themselves to use some 5.5 billion plus highly sophisticated smartphones and all manner of other digital devices (Ericcson, 2021).

Among that five billion plus are most of the world’s teachers, all using in their personal lives their desired digital devices, and naturally growing the desired digital capabilities.

Significantly teachers K-12 worldwide immediately drew upon those devices and capabilities when the COVID pandemic forced the school doors to close and the remote teaching to be done from the teacher’s homes.

They instinctively used the competencies acquired in being digital, with near all having the confidence, understanding, competencies, connectivity, and digital devices and infrastructure required to undertake most of their teaching competently online, invariably without any help from government.

Reflect on the competencies you used, and how you developed them.

Likely the most important was the confidence not only to use those competencies in your teaching but to build on those capabilities when needed. Relatively few teachers had been schooled in the use of Zoom, or Teams, or the use of smartphones to conduct remote tutorials, but within weeks they were naturally using all manner of new online facilities.

Allied was likely the shaping of your application of the technology with a digital mindset. You knew the scene would continually evolve, the technology would become ever more sophisticated, that you could teach yourself the desired new competencies desired and how to draw upon the resources of a networked world.

The speed with which teachers K-12 worldwide were able to teach remotely would suggest many of the competencies you employed were the same as your colleagues, and like them your interests and area of teaching would have seen you also employ a suite of distinct capabilities. While all teachers could search, check their sources, record, create multi-media presentations, video conference, socially network, prepare PDFs, archive, and use all of digital communication the same teachers all rightly made use of their particular, often idiosyncratic competencies. Early childhood teachers, teachers of the autistic, senior physics, digital music, and modern history rightly have used the digital competencies and resources pertinent to their work.

The suspicion is that you, like your colleagues, naturally grew your digital competencies by using all manner of digital technologies 24/7/365. You never stop to think how many competencies you have, what they are or how yours differ from your partner’s or children, simply appreciating that in a connected world one has constantly to adapt, be it with the smartphone, streaming services, or smart speakers. 

Every teacher, every citizen in living in a world of accelerating digital transformation has continually to learn how to use the new services and devices, and to put in the cupboard the dated technology, your beloved iPod, digital camera, games console, standard definition TV, CDs, and DVD player.  

Teachers, as individuals have always had particular skill sets that they have brought to the teaching. There has always been the pianist, social organiser, wordsmith, photographer, and the numbers person to whom staff could turn for support.

The digital and the networks have not only provided teachers the freedom and opportunity to develop their interests and passions to a very high level, but also to share that specialist capability within the networked school community. Think of the specialist digital capabilities of your colleagues. On staff there could well be the spreadsheet, blogging, VR, digital lighting, video conferencing, audio recording, copyright, and podcast gurus.

Staff room experience affirms teachers rightly laud and appreciate that individuality and those specialist competencies, no matter how way out some might appear.

Significantly, like all digitally connected, you decided which digital competencies you wanted, how strong you wanted each to be, which were of limited importance, understanding what to do to enhance those competencies or to acquire new capabilities.

While at first glance seemingly obvious it bears underscoring the ‘core’ digital competencies of the digitally connected will always be rubbery, impacted by context and ever evolving; evolving at an accelerating rate. Key technological developments will continually change the core.  

Globally schools and governments have long held a strongly hierarchical, insular view that they as the employer in charge of the ‘factory’ will decide on the digital competencies required of its employees.

Scant thought has invariably been given to the wider societal context, the digital transformation underway or the effectiveness of the socially networked world in identifying and growing those competencies.

In dismissing the notion of natural digital evolution and transformation schools and systems have since the early 80s employed in general terms a controlled, structured approach that has had as its the focus

  • common mass use
  • the mechanical skills required to use the ‘educationally appropriate’ tools devices
  • the competencies the ‘experts’ believed would enhance academic performance, not those of everyday life
  • teachers, K-12 – often across the education authority – mastering common computer/ICT/digital competencies
  • getting teachers to teach and test the identified competencies
  • the use of formal, linear instructional programs and, regular testing to develop the specified competencies. Control is paramount. Over the years all manner of ‘licenses’ have been awarded teachers on completion of those programs
  • out of school staff training, undertaken when it fitted with the instructor’s schedule.

Teacher adoption of the prescribed competencies has been very slow.

In the 80s, 90s and even the 2000s many, possibly most schools and systems, still believed schools needed only a few expert teachers with the digital competencies, and that it was better the computer/ICT experts taught all students.

Around 2015 it was not uncommon even in the developed world, particularly in secondary schools, to have 75%-80% of teachers not using the digital every day in their teaching.

And yet early in 2020 when COVID closed the school doors and obliged them to teach remotely most every teacher could do so.

As could the students from kindergarten upwards.

Both the teachers and students drew on the competencies that came with being digital in a networked society.

And virtually overnight embedded the expectation that every teacher K-12 would normalise the use of the digital in their teaching, would increasingly shape that use with a digital mindset and use the digital competencies they used 24/7/365 in every facet of their lives.

Unseen to most the COVID shutdowns affirmed the observation made 40 plus years ago, that the growth of teachers digital competencies is best done naturally in the everyday use of the technology in a supportive environment, where the teachers control their own growth.

Teachers have that agency in their personal lives.

COVID, and the networked environment gave many teachers that agency in their teaching, at least for a time.

The expectations of the ‘new normals’ will work over time to extend that agency permanently in the classrooms.

That said most education decision makers won’t have seen, or indeed accept the success of the natural evolutionary growth of teacher’s digital competencies. 

There are few signs that they will relinquish their perceived control.

I may be wrong.

What is the situation in your school? Is there any hint the school, or the system is rethinking its approach and giving staff greater agency and support to grow their own competencies?

The suspicion is that the issue of digital competencies will be another of the suite of traditional approaches being challenged, that will in time see the demise of the prescribed competencies.

  • Ericsson (2021) Ericsson Mobility Report November 2021. Ericsson 2021 – https://www.ericsson.com/4ad7e9/assets/local/reports-papers/mobility-report/documents/2021/ericsson-mobility-report-november-2021.pdf
  • ITU (2021) Measuring digital development. Facts and Figures 2021. Geneva International Telecommunications Union – https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/facts/default.aspx
  • Papert, S 1990, The Perestroika of Epistemological Politics. Keynote delivered at the World Conference of Computers in Education, Sydney, 1990.

12. The Imperative of a Digital Mindset in Networked Schools

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Mal Lee

To succeed in a disrupted world, leaders will need to forge an agile and connected enterprise with a future-focused workforce. For both individuals and organizations, there needs to be a reconciling of the demand for digital skills to deploy and manage technology, and the human skills to live and work with this technology. Positioning the enterprise for success as the work of humans and machines converges, will require a digital mindset. (KPMG)

The same kind of exhortation has been expressed by the other global management consultancies and throughout the business management literature. Lewis (2020) writing in the Harvard Business Review noted

……having a digital mindset means being constantly on the lookout for ways to introduce digital technology to your role, your team, and your organisation.

You’ll struggle to find the same advocacy in the school leadership literature. A Google search will unearth little.

Nor will you find it in lead teacher advertisements, the teacher standards, teacher accreditation documents or initial teacher training programs.

You will however find the mindset shaping the personal lives of most of the world’s teachers and the four billion plus digitally connected. While few have likely fully appreciated the profound change that has occurred, particularly in the last decade, it takes only a few prompts for them to appreciate it’s distinct nature, the magnitude of the shift, its continuing evolution, and the extent to which the mindset shapes their personal lives, 24/7/365.

The digitally connected have grown in their everyday use of the digital and networked world, a mindset, a set of expectations and behaviours that see them instinctively opting to use the digital in most facets of their lives. While strongest in the young, who have only ever known a digital world, the mindset is to be found in varying degrees in most every age group.

It is a mindset that expects instant connectivity, 24/7/365, anywhere, anytime, at speed and control of one’s chosen digital device/s, with the agency to use them how desired, when wanted, to do what and how they wish. It assumes everyone, from a very early age will choose the technology, configure it, use the apps they want and critically to learn what, how, when and where they want. Moreover, they expect to directly access the desired material, without going through gatekeepers.

While one might rightly debate the traits that combine to make the digital mindset, but most summaries would include:

  • An instinctive preference for a digital solution, and an acceptance that many traditional practises will be superseded by the digital
  • Normalised everyday use of the digital and social networking
  • A working understanding of the mores of the networked world 
  • Natural continual adaptation to the rapidly evolving digital and networked world
  • on-going enhancement of the desired digital thinking and competencies
  • a strong appreciation of the up and down sides of the digital and network use
  • Just in time, non-linear, experiential learning, done mainly in context
  • A preference for self-discovery, while being willing to network and learn collaboratively when desired
  • Increased and rightful individualisation of the digital capabilities, that flows from each if us having greater control of our learning, and being able to pursue our particular interests and passions.

The digital connected, in going about their everyday life, find themselves ‘being digital’ (Negroponte, 1995), on trend to grow and strengthen that situation lifelong.

Nearly sixty years ago Marshall McLuhan (1964) famously alerted the world to the reality that ‘the medium is the message.’

In today’s world the message is digital and networked.

The strengthening of the digital mindset has been accelerated by COVID, and particularly by governments’ taking as a given the population being digital, connected, and having at the centre of their lives, a smartphone.

Significantly the COVID experience also accelerated the nation’s teachers bringing the digital mindset into their teaching, as well as the digital competencies they had naturally grown in their personal lives.

While the educational leadership at the school and system level, and within most educational faculties have yet to have the digital mindset shape the school and its teaching most teachers used the mindset to advantage.

Significantly they used it astutely in teaching remotely with their digitally connected families, understanding the importance in so doing of working collaboratively, of individualising much of the teaching and support, of giving the students and their families agency, and resourcing the remote teaching.

A digital mindset shapes, as noted in earlier posts, a very different type of schooling to that with its roots in the Industrial Age.

It challenges much of the ‘grammar of schooling’.

The reality facing all school leaders is that society’s worldwide are going to increasingly shape the way forward with a digital mindset.

As will most every private and public sector organisation.

COVID accelerated the world’s teachers use of the thinking in their classrooms.

The new normal is already, as discussed, looking to be accommodated by all schools.

That accommodation is markedly assisted by a school and system leadership looking to shape the way forward with a digital mindset, and not one from an aged past.

  • McLuhan, M (1964) The Medium is the Message. NY. MIT
  • Negroponte, N (1995) Being Digital Sydney Hodder and Stoughton

Schooling 2050

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Roger Broadie and Mal Lee are embarking on the quest to identify the major trends and issues that they believe will impact on the nature of schooling in 2050.

The late management guru, Peter Drucker, very wisely remarked

  1.  Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window
  • The best way to predict the future is to create it.

We will limit our quest to the identifying the megatrends on course to markedly impact the nature of schooling in 28 years, and the major issues school decision makers worldwide will likely have address it they are to create the desired schools.

The great benefit of Naisbitt’s seminal, and immensely popular 1984 publication on Megatrends was that it provided the general reader a succinct and clear appreciation of the trends likely to impact both society in general and its organisations.

It is well worth a revisit to appreciate how prescient was much the work, and its continued validity today.

That is what we hope, in our own humble way, we can do for global schooling.  

One of the oft forgotten realities is that the ‘grammar of schooling’ worldwide is remarkably similar.

So too is the way the young of today’s digital and increasingly networked world use and learn with the digital 24/7/365 outside the school walls.

Our plan is to identify the similarities, the global trends, the philosophical and political flashpoints, and the issues to be addressed in shaping the desired schools.

As the digital evolution and transformation accelerates and impacts near every part of society school leaders in the next couple of decades will be expected to adapt to the evolving scene, while at the same time contending with ‘political masters’ who will invariably wish to maintain control of ‘their schools’.

It should make for an interesting challenge.

Between us we’ll draw on over 100 years of experience with schools and several decades of writings and research on the digital evolution and transformation of schooling and the education of the young.

Over time we intend inviting colleagues and interested readers to contribute to the thinking and finally drawing together of our read of the scene