Innovative Learning Environments Expo 1
Keynote Presentation transcript
Adrian Camm
Internationalisation - The global learning space
Introduction: This podcast is brought to you by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, Victoria.
Emcee:
For our final keynote today we have with us, Adrian Camm. Currently in two positions, he’s working as the
head of Mathematics at McGuire College and he’s also joining the Department as an innovation leader in
the Innovation Next Practice Division. Adrian was awarded two awards in 2009 at the Australian Awards for
Teaching Excellence, Best National Achievement, the Minister’s Award for Excellence in ICT and also the
highly commended Excellence by Teacher Award. In 2010, he also received the MECU Outstanding
Secondary Teacher of the Year Award. He’s a very sought after speaker whose pioneering use of current
and emerging technologies is impacting positively on student learning outcomes across the state of Victoria
and beyond. And he’s here today to finish off our discussion around innovative learning environments,
stretching you just that little bit further in thinking about the global learning space. Ladies and gentlemen,
Adrian Camm.
Adrian Camm: Thanks Daniel. And there are some amazing stories here today and so I think you pretty much covered
everything I wanted to share. But, you know, I suppose in thinking about what I wanted to talk about today, I
suppose I started thinking about how the concept of globalisation or internationalisation has affected my
own personal practice and the journey started, you know, possibly four or five years ago with various tools
that expanded my horizons and put me on to the global scene if you like, and the first thing that I used was
Twitter and I know everyone sort of groans when they hear about Twitter, but I’ve used Twitter to form a
personal learning network of over 500 international educators from all around the world and this my first
point of call. This is my global staffroom, if you like, and this is where I go for my first source of information.
I have also participated in what’s known as the powerful learning practice international cohort, which is a
consortium of 20 international schools from around the globe that teamed to create a 12-month embedded
professional development program to drive systemic, incremental, but transformational change in schools.
And so that was a great experience for me.
I am also a member of classroom 2.0 which is a social network on the web for educators. It has over 50,000
educators worldwide. They regularly participate in discussion forums, in the sharing of resources, in
interactive Webinars so every week is free interactive Webinars that are run for teachers from all across the
globe to get cutting-edge professional development in a number of things not just emerging technologies
but in emerging pedagogies, interactive learning environments, etc. Sometimes I’ve even hosted my own
Webinars in this environment.
Steve Hargadon, who’s the creator of classroom 2.0, also runs a weekly interactive session on the future of
education where he looks at interviewing the leading thinkers and authors in respects to education. So,
some of the people that I’ve been involved in interactive interview have been the likes of Sir Ken Robinson,
and Seth Godin, just to name a few.
I’m also currently learning a language through a tool known as Live Mocha. Has anyone heard of this tool?
One person. So this was a tool that was created recently and it was created to fill a niche. The creators
came to understand through experience that just learning a language in school wasn’t actually enough to be
a functional speaker in the native tongue, you have to actually learn from people in that area or in that
region. And so Live Mocha consists of a series of modules that you can take at your time but the real power
of it, is connecting with native speakers of the language that you’re learning in real time, for free on the web.
I think we do live in exponential times and the world around us is moving at incomprehensible speeds and
I’d like to think that the arrow on the diagram represents how time is changing and the line is struck to the
arrow where we are today. So we are moving at incomprehensible speeds. I know from my personal,
professional life that we just don’t seem to have time for anything anymore. Our perception of time has
changed and I have a little bit of theory on that; because we live in exponential times we —most of us
actually grew up on this graph. We’re on the linear section of the graph.
We haven’t even actually got to the exponential part yet. We haven’t even got to the curve. But students
today, students have been born on this curve. I think that’s why we’re saying declining standards in literacy,
and numeracy, and things like that, is because they’re expecting a dynamic change in learning environment
not something that’s static and passive.
We can’t really begin to comprehend what exponential times actually mean. I think Ray Kurzweil, who is a
respected author and futurist and inventor, actually says it best when he says, “With 30 linear steps you get
to 30. But with 30 steps exponentially you get to one billion.” And—I think that the change that we are
currently experiencing is nothing compared to the change that we’re going to be experiencing in the very
near future. It’s going to be changing the way that we work, the way that we live, the way that we go to
school, the way that we communicate, the way that we travel. And, in thinking about this rapid rate of
technological change, I think we really need to give it some context.
This is Gordon Moore. Some of you may know Gordon Moore, most won’t. He’s the co-founder of Intel. And
Intel is the people who power your computers. They’re one of the most successful chip manufacturing
companies in the world. They probably have about an 80% market hold in that industry. Anyway in the
1960’s Moore wrote an article that was published in the Electronic Engineers journal of the day in which he
coined Moore’s Law and Moore’s Law basically predicted that chip technology would double in power every
24 months while coming out at 50% of the cost. So what Gordon Moore was saying is that you will get twice
the power for half the cost every two years.
And Moore’s Law has remained uncannily on the mark for probably the last 50 years. However, we are
seeing changes and to put this in perspective, Ian Duke actually shared this slide or a slightly different
version of this slide at a talk he recently gave at ISTE in the States and he said to put this in perspective, in
1978 to buy a computer, you were talking about a mini computer which costs about $300,000 and it was the
size of the house almost. The next year, personal computers burst onto the scene and you get one for
about $5000 approximately. So we’ve gone from $300,000 to $5000 in a space of 12 months, essentially.
The thing with this personal computer in 1979 was that it had 8K of RAM. The thing in 1979 was you had
the choice, you could go for 8K of RAM or you can go for 16K of RAM. Big choices. If you went for 16K of
RAM, you at least knew you have as much as you’d ever need. But that was just thinking of the day
anyway. And whether you know about computer specifications is irrelevant. So RAM is memory, hard drive
is the storage space, the CPU is basically you know the brain of your computer or how fast it is. If you look
at the developments over the years, in 1984 the first Macintosh was released. And even though we’re going
through some pretty severe economic times, the price still managed to come down. Fast forward to 2010, if
you buy a computer today with 2 gig of RAM, you might regret that for a least a month. If you only get a 350
gig hard drive, where are you going to store the video the videos and songs you download off the internet?
And the CPU, you know 2.5 gigahertz. Now remember, you need 1024 kilobytes to get one megabyte, a
1024 megabytes to get to a gigabyte, a 1024 gigabytes to get to the terabyte. I supposed what I’m trying to
say here, is that this is a pretty clear picture of the exponential times in which we live.
In doing the predictions, I’m a mathematician, or I teach math, and in doing the predictions if you do the
calculations based on the current version of Moore’s Law, within 18 months, if we say that the rate of chip
technology is doubling every 18 months, then by the time we get to 2022 we’ll have computers with you
know 208 terabytes of RAM, a hard drive of 40 terabytes and it’s going to cost $1.37. But, this is where it
gets really interesting:
Moore was recently interviewed and wrote another article for Wired magazine and he basically stated in that
article that with advancements in nano technology and with quantum computing on the horizon, that
realistically, Moore’s Law needs to be modified and it’s probably going to be every 6 to 12 months that the
rate of chip technology is going to double. Now some people disagree with Moore but there is no
disagreement that it’s going to continue for at least another 50 to 100 years before we reach the threshold.
And if you do the calculations based on Moore’s Law every 12 months, the results are astronomical. And to
have a computer of that power costing less than 3 cents, who would buy one of those? What’s that going to
mean for teaching and learning? What’s that going to mean for schools? What’s that going to mean for
industry, for trade, for economics? I think we’re living in profoundly exponential times. And for those that
don’t believe me, consider how far we’ve come in the last 50 or 60 years?
This is ENIAC, one of the first computers ever built and it was the size of probably this room. It broke down
every seven minutes, consisted of vacuum tubes and the reason that it broke down every seven minutes
was that moths or bugs use to find in the vacuum tubes and make them stop working basically. And so
whenever you hear the term “bug” in modern-day computing technology, that’s where it came from. And
there’s a great report from ENIAC, from the computer engineers who were responsible for the maintenance
to the military where they said, “Vacuum tubes seven now repaired, cause of fault, bug” and they actually
sticky taped the moth onto the report. So, I thought that was actually quite of interesting when I learned
about that for the first time.
Neil Gershenfeld from MIT who is the Director for the Centre for Bits and Atoms states that we’re entering
what is known as the personal fabrication era. Basically, what Neil Gershenfeld and his team are doing at
MIT is creating personal fabrication units for the masses. So in every home in the coming years what you’ll
have is a personal fabrication unit that is attached to your computer. So if you wanted to design a new bike,
you would design a bike on your computer, then you would send it to your personal fabrication machine and
it will build you one, out it will come. So have a think about what that’s going to do? Have a think about what
that’s going to do in the world, for the—not just for the world of education, for economics, for industry. We
are living in profoundly exponential times. I think it’s actually exciting but it’s actually scary to think about.
Now it might sound like science fiction to some of you, but these personal fabrication units are commercially
available in their very primitive stages for about $300,000. But it’s not all serious today. I love the MIT,
anyone that hears me speak, I always speak about MIT because I think it’s an amazing place, it does
amazing things but at the media lab at MIT, I think their slogan embodies what learning should be all about
in the 21st century. And it’s ‘lifelong kindergarten’. And at the lifelong kindergarten not only are they
producing technological developments but they’re also having fun.
One of their gadgets is known as ‘clocky’. It’s an alarm clock, so when the alarm goes off and you hit the
snooze button, it runs away and hides. Or the scream bag; the scream bag is like a backpack but you
actually wear it on the front, so when you’re sitting in an insufferable meeting you can actually lean into the
bag and scream, close the bag, and then when you leave the meeting you can let the scream out. Sounds
like an insane idea right? Until people ask where can they buy one.
But this is today’s technology. This isn’t in 10 years, this is happening today. This is a contact lens with an
integrated circuit built in, wireless internet access and what it actually does is that it projects a display into
your field of vision. And you can interact with that field based on gestures, yeah just based on gestures. So
basically you’re interacting with a screen that’s in your field of vision that no one else can see. This isn’t far
away people. This is the Nokia—one of the mobile phones that Nokia is going to be releasing in the next 18
months. It never needs charging. It actually charges itself on ambient radio waves. You’ll never have to
charge it.
This is one of my personal favourites. If you can actually see that picture what you actually see is that
military person who has something strapped to his legs and his back. It’s what known as the hulk. Human
Universal Load Carrier. This is what’s known as an exoskeleton. Lockheed-Martin and the U.S. military
have combined to form this exoskeleton which enhances the speed and strength of soldiers and it basically
gives them unlimited endurance carrying up to a load of 200 lbs.
This is happening now, this isn’t in the future. I think now more than ever we need to be creating or
producing students who are adaptable, who are critical thinkers, and who are creative problem solvers.
Content is no longer king, I heard someone say that this morning and that’s a great line. Content is
definitely no longer king. And, in speaking about globalisation and global communities and
internationalisation I think it means different things to different people. But, Yong Xiao who Katrina talked
about this morning actually sums it up really nicely, and he calls it death of distance. And technology is
driving this death of distance and it’s changing the way that we think about the world.
Michael West, there so many great stories of globalisation and how it’s changed the world in the last five to
ten years, and I thought I just share a few before we can get into what globalisation actually means for
education. Michael West who’s a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, in his
anthropological introduction to YouTube, which you can actually find on YouTube if anyone actually wants
to watch it. It’s a great video. But he actually talks about globalisation being new forms of identity and new
forms of community and new forms of expression, new forms of empowerment. Who has heard the story of
the one red paper clip? It’s an old one but I think it really highlights what we’re talking about globalisation or
internationalisation.
Carl McGregor started off with one red paper clip and through the power of the Internet made 14 trades
within the 12-month period and ended up trading his one red paper clip for a two-bedroom house in
Saskatchewan, Canada. 14 trades. And some of the trades that he made you know you might think are
ridiculous. He traded the red paper clip for a pen. Traded a pen for a doorknob, traded the doorknob for a
camp stove, camp stove for a generator, generator for a keg of beer and so it snowballed. McDonalds is an
interesting story that I learned about quite recently.
I was interacting through the future of education interviews with Steve Hargadon and Seth Godin and Seth
Godin was talking about the McDonalds in Washington and Oregon in the United States have outsourced
their drive-through to a call centre in North Dakota. So let’s think about that for a minute, you’re in
Washington D.C., you pull up to the drive-through at McDonalds and you place your order to somebody
that’s not even there. So it travels through the internet, they placed their order on the computer and they
send that order back through the internet, back to McDonalds so someone can prepare what you’ve
ordered. All so that McDonalds can save 20 cents an hour.
I think businesses have to respond to this idea of globalisation and internationalisation and it is causing
businesses to come up with new innovative models. And one of the great stories I think was the story of
Goldcorp Mining. And if anyone’s read Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, I highly recommend it. Tapscott shares
this story about Goldcorp being a small Toronto-based mining firm that is struggling, they’re besieged by
strikes, rising costs, they can’t find any gold, and in fact they’ve actually ceased mining. And what actually
happens is there’s a lot of disruption between within the leadership. An aggressive takeover bid is
successful and a young entrepreneur Rob McEwen takes over who has no actual experience in the mining
industry at all. He sits down with these engineers and he comes up with this great plan. He says “If we can’t
find gold on our mining site, perhaps someone else out there can”. So he takes 50 years of mining and
geographic data, creates a competition and uploads it to the web. Now to put this in context, the mining
industry is very secretive. Up until this point in time, it was a fundamental assumption that you kept your
data secret.
McEwen challenged this assumption and through the power of the internet he had mathematicians and
physicists, and computer scientists and all these people contributing to the analysis of their data which in a
very short period of time, led them from being a fledging 100-million dollar company who was about to go
bust, to a Juggernaut 9-billion-dollar, empire almost. They’re one of the most successful mining companies
in Canada. All because Rob McEwen challenged the traditional assumptions. These assumptions were so
fundamental and I think we, in education, need to challenge those fundamental assumptions because
technology is driving this idea of death by distance and technology is driving this idea of globalisation or
internationalisation.
For some reason education—people don’t like change. It’s hard. It’s uncomfortable, it’s difficult. And going
through some of the literature, it’s always been that way for education. This is from a principals’ publication
in 1815, “we depend on paper too much”, so paper was the technology of the day. We were against it then.
From 1905, from publication from the National Teacher’s Association of America, “students today depend
too much on ink”. “Pen and ink will never replace the pencil”. Let’s get real here. From Rural American
Teacher, 1928. So now we got over the relying on ink too much, but now we’re crying about store-bought
ink. “Students will never be able to make their own ink if they buy it from the store.” Then we went against
fountain pens. What was this new technology that was going to disrupt our lives? Ball-point pens. What
are we teaching kids by learning them to use ball-point pens? I’m not making up these by the way. I know
some of you are thinking that I have probably made these up, I haven’t.
I was talking to my grandfather about change and he’s an old man, very knowledgeable about thing or he
likes to think that he is anyway and I was talking to him about change in just in general and I was actually
showing him my iPad and a few other things but we were talking about change and he said you know it
reminded him of this old saying, he’s the master of old sayings. And he said, well, good advice from a horse
trainer that he heard one time was that ‘If the horse dies dismount’. Good advice I thought.
And so then we started thinking about education. How does education relate to that dismounting the dead
horse? And there are some interesting things there and I really like the way—well this is the way we’ve
always ridden the horse. I hear that all the time. This is the one we’ve always done it. But the last dot point
there: arranging to visit other sites where they ride dead horses more efficiently. Now, I know that the
Department of Innovation and Next Practice Division might be putting a stop to that soon with their new
innovative learning environment immersion trials so, hopefully that will come about in a favourable manner.
All jokes aside though, students today are different, right? And whether you buy into Mark Krenzie’s idea of
the net generation or the “N” generation or the digital native or the idea that today’s gen is more confident
and confident and brilliant with technology or more tech-savvy than previous generations, what is clear is
that they are different. If we relate it back to that exponential curve, they’ve been born on the curve. They’re
expecting their lives to be dynamic, their expecting their lives to change in a rapid rate. They expect their
learning experiences to be non-linear, to be personally meaningful. And I think technology is not only driving
this idea of death of distance, it’s also driving the age of personalisation or the idea that technologies are
enabling kids to do things today that weren’t possible even just a few years ago. We’re removing all the
barriers.
People always ask me why does education matter to me and why I am so passionate about educational
change and educational reform and this is one of my main reasons: I love giving kids the opportunities to do
things, to do things that weren’t possible, to do things that they might not have an opportunity to do. This is
my nephew Caleb who started grade one this year. And last week he was at my house and he picked up
my iPad and he knew how to use it. He hadn’t seen one before, he hadn’t used one before, he just picked it
up, started using it and I said, “what are you doing?” and he said “I’m looking for the games”. He didn’t need
any training on how to use this new technology. It was a native experience to him, it was intuitive.
But I was talking to him also earlier on in the year about school and I was asking him about school and I
said well, “how was school today?” and he said “good”. And then I asked him “what did you do in school
today?” He said, “Nothing”. A unique answer for a kid that age, I thought. But then I said “what do you like
best about school is it reading, is it writing, is it playing with your friends?” And he looked at me for a
moment playing lego on the floor, he stopped playing, he looked at me and he said, “I just like learning”.
And I really wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting that because by the time we get to year nine, the catch
cry of those students is “I’m bored”. And I think that they’re bored because the entire structure of our
educational system is based around the idea of a one-way, one-size fits all model. It clearly is no longer
relevant.
The model is based on the idea of the lecture. Of the student being passive recipients of information. And
even back then, you know in the early stages of our history, where to learn you have no choice but to go
and listen to the great thinkers of the day. Even back then there was evidence of disengagement, as you
can see by the look on the face of the ladies sitting at the front. I think we need to rethink. I think we need to
rethink education. That’s clear. We need to rethink the fundamental assumptions just like Rob McEwen did
with Goldcorp. We need to challenge the traditional models.
We need to rethink the role of the teacher. We need to rethink the role of the student. We need to rethink
the role of homework as well because of tools like Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a really powerful tool
that has been around for quite some time now and it’s basically a computational knowledge engine. If I want
to know the answer to any math problem, any chemistry problem, any SOSE problem, I’ll type in into
Wolfram Alpha and it will give me the answer. Now it’s different than Google and I’ll show you why, if I type
in a complex math problem—so the mathematicians in the room will understand what I’m putting in here but
basically I’m asked to find a calculus problem which is the integral of sin to the fourth power x, sin to the
power of x plus cos to the power of x with respect to x. I hit equals and what it does is it gives me a series of
answers. It tells me the input in correct mathematical terminology, it gives me the graph—okay, I’m just
going to change my mind here.
So I’ve changed it to sin to the fourth power of x plus cos to the fourth power of x. So what it does it gives
me the form, it gives me different graphs, over different domains, it gives me alternate forms of the integral,
it gives me serious expansions, it gives me a whole host of information but the power of Wolfram Alpha is if
you hit ‘show steps’, and it gives you step-by-step working out with solutions that each step on why they
performed that particular calculation.
This changes the game. Who’s sending those math sheets for homework? Well this challenges the
traditional notion of the type of work that we set for our students. In the 21st century, in this globalised world
that we live, with these fantastic web tools that are becoming available, a student with sufficient motivation
can now learn what he wants, when he wants, from who he wants basically. All he needs to know—all he
need is an internet connection.
This is the MIT’s open course work. Has anyone heard of MIT’s open course rendition? A few people. One
of the most prestigious universities in the world giving away their stuff for free via the web. Video lectures,
course notes, exams, solutions, readings–for free. All MITs undergraduate courses are now available on the
web for you to take in your own leisure for free. I’ve got the first year undergraduate physics course on my
iPhone. Every video lecture, a whole years-worth of physics I can now learn whatever I want from the best
people in the world.
But while this is such a fantastic resource, it actually highlighted a number of problems for MIT. This actually
MIT’s amphitheatre known by its number 26100, where all undergraduate or first year physics courses were
traditionally taught, but with all open access to materials via the web, attendance at these lectures were
down to 50% and fail rates were high as 15%. MIT identified through a series of investigations and through
research that the reason that this was happening is because the format of the lecture itself is fundamentally
flawed and outdated in a world of information that is everywhere. Information is literally in the air around us
now with wireless technology. So what did MIT do? They created an innovative learning environment. This
is what they call a TEAL room. TEAL stands for Technology Enhanced Applied Learning, where all
introductory physics is now taught at MIT.
Instead of chalkboards with a lecturer up the front, a professor now walks around with a team of teaching
assistants engaging students as they work out related concepts in small groups. So blackboards and
whiteboards and huge display screens situated throughput the room. They have access to network
computers, they use virtual manipulatives to explore abstract concepts and I think the students are engaged
in social learning. I think the power of that is, is in the data that MIT collected. Attendance went from 50% to
80% and failure rates have dropped to less than 2%. Learning institutions around the world are now
adopting these ideas and it is this idea that I based my own classroom on. The required changes in
pedagogy and curriculum involve moving away from the textbook, we all know that. But the question often
becomes how do you do it?
And I’m a big advocate of project-based learning and I think you can start simple and you can build on
powerful ideas and you can let kids drive where they want to go with their learning in relation to what you
need to cover. So in the context of electromagnetism, you would have them firstly explore the principles of
electromagnetism by constructing a simple homopolar motor. Then you might extend them and get them to
construct a DC motor out of simple materials. But with a lot of teachers a lot of schools, that’s where it
stops.
That’s not what happens in the real world. You need to engage the students in engineering challenges
where they have to design, create, test them and modify and then perhaps they need to start all over again.
So getting them involved in interesting projects and interesting problems where they need to think outside
the square, where the answer isn’t available on Google. I think that’s something that’s really important as
we sort of go in or go through the 21st century.
Chris Lehman, the principal of the Science leadership Academy, says “what if school wasn’t preparation for
real life, what if school was real life?” I think that such a powerful idea. A group of students at Chris’ school
at the Science Leadership Academy created one of the world’s first flow processed biodiesel generators
and they have a patent pending on it. But this is where it gets really cool; it’s seven times more efficient than
existing biodiesel generators. They put a creative commons licence on it and they gave it away for free.
Ecuador and Guatemala took this design and now use it power their schools and their villages from the
crops that they produce.
I think it’s amazing. And kids are capable of amazing things, we just have to give them the chance. We
have to think outside the square. We have to challenge the fundamental assumptions. Very quickly, this is a
photo that Anne Mirtschin from Hawkesdale P12 shared with her involvement in the global or the Fat
Classroom Project. The Fat Classroom Project is very similar to Think Quest where you solve interesting
problems, real world problems, in a global team. So here we have a team that consists of members from
China, from Korea, from the United States and from Australia.
Christianson and Horn in their book Disrupting Class state that by 2019 over 50% of high school classes will
be online. Now whether you buy into that notion or not, that means we have to think differently about
schools because what is it that we’re offering that will make kids want to come to school? It’s got to be
about more than content. You’ve got to be providing something for them. And just a very short story before I
finish, the Florida Virtual School started as a pilot in 1997 and now has over 100,000 enrolments per year,
so you can take any course online. But the great thing about Florida Virtual School is they’re actually
investigating gaming, the gaming environment as a learning platform. And this is their attempt. If you want
to take a course on American history, you actually play the game. By finishing the game you then have
completed that course, very interesting.
It’s interesting to see where we’re going. I’m completely out of time but I think we are heading into this
global environment, this global world where we are seeing the death of distance—anyone that says it is not
about technology is lying to you ‘cause it is. Technology is driving this change and it’s relentless. It’s not just
about technology but it’s definitely about technology.
I think we need to sort of push the boundaries, we need to challenge the traditional assumptions, we need
to give kids the opportunities to do all these things and we do need to change. You’re going to come against
resistance to that change but you need to say, “well, you know we’re going to chance because we’re willing
to do whatever it takes to make a significant difference in the lives of the students we teach. And we change
because we know that teaching is more than a job, and we change because students today are different”.
Thank you.
Close:
For more information about the topics discussed in this podcast, please visit the Department of Education
and Early Childhood Development website www.education.vic.gov.au