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Table of ContentsArithmetic - We have tochange our thinking!

5 Year Olds, iMovie, andSOLEs

Where to next?

“Arithmetic is an outdated life skill like swordplay or horse riding.” Sugata Mitra

In his book Beyond the Hole in the Wall Mitra makes the alarming point about the future ofmaths education.

At the supermarket. you can't tell if the cashier knows arithmetic or not. Your groceries arescanned electronically and prices tallied automatically. Yet the cashier probably still performshis work capably. Arithmetic is an outdated life skill, like swordplay or horse riding. Four hundred years ago, these were vital skills;today they are relics of a bygone world and primarily enjoyed as sports.

Not many educators would argue that our role continues to be one where will fill our empty vessels with knowledge, yet a highproportion of our maths education seems to continue to be just that.

Conrad Wolfram puts it beautifully in this Ted Talk

He breaks down maths education into 4 parts:

*Posing the right questions

*Real world ------> Math Formulation

*Computation

*Maths Formulation -----> Real World, verification

He then suggests that we stop wasting 80% of our students time on Step 3 (calculation) and instead use computers for this. Thismeans that our students can spend more time on the more important steps (1, 2 and 4)Wolfram argues:

People confuse ... the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. So just becausepaper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper insteadof a computer to teach mathematics.He goes on to further argue:it's very important to get computers in exams. And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life

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here. This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happensThen he leaves us with a challenge:

So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being there,computers that are now ubiquitous almost. Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a smallnumber of years. Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject ofthe future. Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun...'''This fits in very well with the MIE approach. '''

Let children explore mathematical concepts for themselves in ahighly connected environment.This year we have been trying this concept out (in addition to the more traditional maths programme). We have a thing called'Problem Posing Maths' where children are required to seek out and ask ''questions'' - as opposed to barking ''answers'' (we havecalculating machines for that).For example, when teaching perimeter we deliberately give them ambiguous information. Traditionally children are given textbookquestions like this which requires them only to calculate:

Whereas our approach looks more like this:

This way the kids have to ask and research the questions:

How do I measure a rectangle?How do I calculate perimeter?How do I calculate area?How many cms in the base?How many cms is the height?How do I know the information I have is correct?

The calculation is therefore a small part of the activity - the problem posing is the real maths and the maths that they will do in theireveryday lives. It really wouldn't matter if they used a calculator because the learning is in the problem posing...

Too often we do the learning for the kids and leave them only with somethingthat a simple machine can do.This will be the focus of my session at ICOT

5 Year Olds, iMovie, and SOLEs

Get your brand new Wikispaces Classroom now


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May 2012Remoteness was first addressed by Mitra in a geographical sense. For example (in the context of Delhi) he found that the furtherschools are from the city, the lower the educational outcomes. He then went on to discover that remoteness was not just adeveloping nation problem but happening in all countries across the globe. Even in developed nations there continues to be areaswhere there are clusters of 'under-achievement'. When it comes to access to, and knowledge of, digital resources this is oftenreferred to as The Digital Divide.Like remoteness, the digital divide can lurk anywhere. It is often assumed that the higher the decile, ranking the more accesschildren have to knowledge and digital literacies. However this is an incorrect assumption - there are many cases where children indecile 10 schools can have very limited access to eLearning and, at the same time, many decile 1 schools have exceptionaleLearning programmes and opportunities.It can also be the case that there are digital divides within schools. For example, there are many teachers who bring old devices infrom home, encourage students to use their personal eLearning devices (often their smartphones), beg borrow and acquire oldercomputers from wherever they can, and basically do anything they possibly can to increase the computer to student ratio. Yet, in theclass next door, there could well be only one classroom computer sitting on the teachers desk while their Tela laptop remains athome and is lucky if it is used once a week for facebook and trademe.Just as Sugata Mitra has said, the most important factor to increasing learning is very much down to the individual teacher. Too oftena student's digital literacy experience is limited by what their teacher can do. How often do we hear "I can't do eLearning unless I getadequate PD first".Enter Minimally Invasive Education. Today a couple of exceptional junior school teachers and myself pooled all our iMacs together tosee if we could encourage our 5 year-olds to gather in SOLES (Self-Organised Learning Environments) and teach themselves howto use iMovie.Within less than an hour they were creating projects, dragging photos into iMovie, adding sound effects, adding titles, addingtransitions, and recording their own voice-overs. They were self-teaching, they were exploring, they were empowered. The topic oftheir inquiry this term is Beauty and Joy. As an outsider looking in I was overjoyed and it certainly was a beautiful thing!

5 year olds and MIE

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Where to next?

From a lecture in Bombay (May 2012) Mitra outlines his research on Remoteness, The Hole in the Wall Experiments, and theGranny Cloud. He shows how the children in his experiments were able to Self Organize their learning and reemphasizes theimportance of connections and working together in groups. When Mitra talks of children learning on their own, he means in theabsence of adults (not in isolation). It is crucial that children work in groups and these are often refereed to as Self OrganizedLearning Environments (SOLES). As stated in a previous post Mitra discusses that his research has shown that the future ofeducation requires the following skills: Reading and Comprehension, Search and Synthesis, A system of belief. He goes on tooutline his new research: If children can self-organise their learning, can they then self-learn these fundamental skills? In otherwords: Can children in remote areas teach themselves to read in SOLEs? This is the new and exciting next step in his researchwhere he will be investigating this very thing. Can we open up a whole new world of opportunity for our remote learners? We canonly wait and see. Sugata Mitra's full lecture here:



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COMING SOON:

ASSESSMENT!

Over the next few months I will be exploring the notion of Assessment with Jo Fothergill . We will be arguing that assessmentneeds to be:

flexibleself organisedowned by the children and the communities that they live inless Eurocentric

We will be looking specifically at children in remote areas and we will be looking at the effects that Eurocentric assessment tools andpedagogies have on our remote learners.And while you are waiting watch this!

Future Learning Short Documentary

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