Written by Michael Karnjanaprakorn

Education is changing, and it’s changing fast. Anyone can put together a personalized educational experience via digital textbooks accessible by iPad, video learning from top university faculty, or peer-led discussion. People of all demographics are gathering their own seeds of education and cultivating lush sets of hybrid tools to deal with the rapid knowledge replenishment that’s essential in an economy where massive career specialization and constant innovation reign.

What we’re witnessing is a bottom-up revolution in education: Learners, not institutions, are leading innovation. This is an era of plenty. I like to call it the Education Harvest.

But there is a huge issue that’s preventing lifelong learners from blossoming into our next generation of highly skilled–and employed–workers: There’s no accreditation process for self-taught learners.

Where is education headed? How are learners driving the movement? And how can we fix this lack of accreditation? Here are the five parts of the Education Harvest:

1. Gadgets And Blended Learning

Classrooms can be anywhere at anytime. When 75% of teens own a cell phone–40% of those phone are smartphones–more learning is on mobile devices than ever before. Karen Cator, United States Department of Education director of technology, said, “I think 2012 will see an expansion of a variety of ways of getting access to the materials that students need for learning.” The confluence of gadgets and learning is yielding a rise in the blended learning movement. The DOE plans to spend $30 million over the next three years to bring blended learning to 400 schools around the country.

We’re seeing evidence of this in digital textbooks by Apple (handheld devices coupled with social media) and Amazon.com (on-demand textbook rental online) to flipped classrooms by Khan Academy, TED Talks, and YouTube to mobile learning worldwide via SchoolSMS (schools sending bulk text messages to parents, teachers, and students) in Kenya and Akash (touch-screen learning tablets) in India.

2. Social Learning and Collaboration

Students are taking responsibility for their own learning, and the lines between student and teacher are blurring. Learners can determine their strengths and weaknesses and connect with one another to help and teach each other based on their areas of expertise–all they need is Facebook and Twitter. Teachers are using platforms like Kickboard, TeacherTube, Edmodo, and Edutopia to share content and lessons with each other online so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel or keep content to themselves anymore. This kind of social and collaborative behavior results in teachers and students working together as peers (gasp!) on individual learning goals, thinking through solutions together.

3. Open Resources and Classrooms

Textbook companies have to change now that everything’s going digital, and top learning institutions are offering their courses for free on the Internet. Educational resources, data, and technology are becoming more accessible than ever through programs like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, CK12, California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative, and The Faculty Project. In fact, the entire Bering Straight School District in Alaska has implemented a wiki-style format for its curriculum. Which city is next?

4. Adaptive, Personalized Learning

Formal learning environments are crumbling, and learners are finding their own paths to knowledge through independent thinking and experience in the real world. Teachers are figuring out how to teach each student the way he or she learns best, and assessment is viewed as an ongoing process, since learning is not a constant. Knewton and Grockit are leaders in this kind of personalized learning, with instruction and quizzes aimed at a student’s specific needs and skills, from K-12 all the way up to higher ed. Lady Gaga’s Empowerment Foundation, supported by Harvard University, is helping students discover their interests and develop strategies best suited to their own, individual future plans.

5. Creative Certification

Codecademy, General Assembly, Udemy, and Udacity all offer their students a certificate of completion, some signed by the instructors of their classes. As Scott Gray writes in the O’Reilly School of Technology blog, “No one, and I mean no one has figured out how to get end-users to pay for individual courses online unless they are attached to some kind of degree or certification.” Using the legitimacy and/or reputation of the course-providing entity or the teachers themselves is a baby-step solution, though. There are serious concerns with badges when it comes to quality assurance and the superficial incentives they create. Those outside of companies with skill-building curriculae can’t obtain legitimacy in those skillsets without being an employee. The more people are culling unassociated resources and experiences to learn specific skills, the more urgent it is for there to be a place for them to record their efforts and success, to study with peers, and to present their learning portfolios to future employers or partners in a meaningful way.

What This Means For The Future

The world of “free radicals”–a term Behance’s Scott Belsky coined to describe those who take their careers into their own hands–is already hard at work on the Education Harvest, and they’re being followed fast by plenty of others. But, while independent learners are cultivating social, high-quality, personalized learning experiences, there’s a problem: There’s no universally accepted proof of purchase to verify the skill level of those who are self-taught.

The education paradigm of the future is all about the doers, not the academics or theorists. A paper degree won’t stand a chance against action. Start your own company, build a website, organize an event, get a side project, and you’ll make it. The accreditation of today is a powerful hybrid of tangible evidence of hands-on learning and social proof. Those who “course correct,” so to speak, and let their passion and personal interests drive their self-powered knowledge acquisition, will succeed because of the portfolios of evidence they’ll naturally build as they learn by doing. Those who mentor and partner with them will endorse their credibility and provide the final link of trust.

Six of the top 10 Fortune 500 executives do not have an Ivy League degree, and 19 of the top 100 worked their way up to success without a college degree. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out–or, opted out, we might say–from the traditional educational institutions that stifled their creativity and influence. Today, you advance in the world based on your performance, not a piece of paper declaring your expertise in “knowing a little about a lot of things.” Employers are hiring for specific, narrow skills that aren’t fully learned in college, and they’re thinking, “What else have you done other than go to college?” when they field monotonously similar resumes.

There’s proof of a new anti-resume: my company, Skillshare, as well as Kickstarter, Mzinga, and The Unreasonable Institute refuse resumes from job applicants. Links are the new CVs, portfolios aren’t just for artists anymore, and experience reigns. The most important skill we’ll have in a world where 50% of people see self-employment as more secure than having a full-time job is the ability to go out and get the right knowledge for the right purpose at the right time. But it won’t be worth peas if there’s no way to measure the yield of our efforts. Welcome to Education Harvest.

Originally published at Co.EXIST

Have you ever been in a situation when you are at a friend’s house, you both have your laptops and you both want to share large documents that are too big for email with one another QUICKLY. Your dropbox is full and you don’t have a flashdrive with you! So what do you do? One of the quickest solutions is to try file-sharing with Skype. I discovered this recently when I was in just that predicament. File-sharing with Skype is so quick and easy that I am DEFINITELY going to make a lot more use of it. Here are the steps.

Many people think that online learning is impersonal, distanced and lonely, since the teacher and class are physically separate. However, that does not need to be the case. Web users have been using social networks for over a decade to connect and engage meaningfully with people around the globe – collaborating, sharing information and building connections.

Interacting socially has many benefits for learning, which is why GetSmarter has introduced the “social newsfeed” to its courses. Every newsfeed is course specific and allows students on that course to see information about their peers on the home page for the course. The features include status updates, “like” buttons on the forum, reminders about birthdays and comments. The information is collated and filtered, then added to the newsfeed.

Interacting socially like this has several benefits. First, it allows the course teachers and administrators to get a better understanding of who the students are and what they are interested in, which will make for more tailored content and group discussions. Second, if gives students some space to relax and chat as they study, giving them a sense of camaraderie, motivation and community. Third, it allows students to network in groups of like-minded individuals, build valuable industry connections and potentially find new business partners.

The convergence of online functions means that online educators can include added dimensions to the learning platform. While electronic documents, automated assessment tools and the wealth of data available online are vital components, social functionality creates a richer experience. Social feeds and the space for personal interaction bring students closer together in their common pursuit of learning and increasing their skills.

Online learning platforms have already evolved considerably. For example, GetSmarter already integrates electronic course notes, video lectures, weekly discussion forums, self-graded quizzes and a wealth of resource links to other online information. Adding a social layer was the logical next step to taking advantage of the resources and technologies available online. And since the social tools are integrated directly into existing functionality, students will feel at ease using them to enhance their learning.

To learn more about GetSmarter’s set of university-accredited online short courses, visit www.getsmarter.co.za

The “flipped” classroom is an idea that teachers shoot a video of a lesson, then make the video available online for learners to view at home. Class time is devoted to problem solving and guidance. It’s an approach that flips the delivery of the lesson to homework.

Dorian Love posted an excellent piece with various viewpoints on Flipping The Classroom last year on Teacher’s Monthly. Here is an infographic explanation of the flipped classroom from Column Five Media. What do YOU think? Add your comments below.

Click the infographic to zoom in:

Written by Matt Burns

I do not want my children learning math proofs on iPads. I simply do not see the value in it. iPads will not help with identifying sentence clauses or writing an essay. There’s a place for interactive learning and there’s not. It’s a clear line. Give science and history teachers iPads loaded with demos, videos and soundbites. Allow children to pinch and zoom DNA strands and the inner workings of WWI trenches. But make my kids do math drills on paper with a dull pencil. Please.

Simply put, the movement to digitalized learning scares me. iBooks 2 is just the start. Digital interactive learning has always been the future but I fear for my children now that it’s here.

Education evolves. Just several generations ago children were taught differently. Some subjects were clearly taught simply so children could learn how to learn. Basic history for example. Columbus did not discover the new world yet that’s what is taught to children through the classic poem. Most of us also learned cursive writing where previous generations also learned calligraphy — both somewhat useless skills today.

Kids are now taught to pass tests. Knowledge is externalized, stored on some Wikipedia server or graphing calculator until needed. Learning is still prevalent in schools, but the storage of facts and thoughts is not. Digital textbooks will only further this problem. Just click on a word to get its definition, says Apple.

My fear isn’t unique. iBooks 2 signals a stark change in education in a similar but more pronounced fashion as older tools. For instance my late grandfather, an engineer for the Michigan-based utility company Consumers Energy, proudly gave me his slide rule before my first trigonometry class. His hope was that I learned math rather than just learning how to get the right answer. I still have that slide rule, but I unfortunately never learned how to use it. I instead learned how to program Mario and Tetris clones into my TI-86 graphing calculator.

You see, my grandfather, like most of the greatest generation, knew math. He knew how math worked. That generation learned math methods in primary school prior to addition or subtraction. They learned the process of math since the tools were not developed yet to aid in problem solving. By the time the baby boomers came along, calculators were becoming commonplace and the process of externalizing knowledge had begun. Save an extraordinary math teacher, most of Generation X and Y saw math completely through the eyes of a calculator. Now ours kids are poised to learn through the iPad’s dual-core A5 processor.

Of course tools like calculators and digital textbooks are created and used with good intentions. Calculators let students perform actions like graphing before they completely understand the process. It gives a visualization previously not available. The same thing applies to digital textbooks as they are designed to make learning smarter, more fun, through interactivity. Students can get instant feedback on math problems rather than waiting for the teacher. Lessons can be broken up in 20-minute segments as that’s often the attention span of most people. But it’s important to remember that a calculator, and now an iPad, is a supplement and not a replacement for proven teaching methods.

Learning is expensive for everyone involved. Apple is smartly marketing iBooks 2 as a cheaper alternative. I remember paying $400 for an outdated textbook and the school only buying it back for $15. The college kid inside of me is excited. Cheaper books, less to carry to class, and a digital content management system — all awesome. iBooks 2 has a place at the collegiate level but my excitement has little to do with actual education but rather the additional conveniences offered.

My children are just now entering the school system. They have computers in the classroom that are part of the curriculum. Computers and iPads can be powerful tools, but they need to be used in a limited fashion in primary and secondary schools. Today’s children already have short attention spans. Hand an iPad to any child between kindergarten and twelfth grade and see what happens: they will jump around between apps. Then tell them to read a chapter of digital biology textbook. Nine out of ten will probably watch a video of a frog jumping at least a dozen times during the allotted time. Printouts and real books command focus in a way greater than an electronic device. Minds might wander away from the text, but at least they won’t be playing Infinity Blade II.

It’s easy to get caught up in Apple’s hype machine. It sounds great during Apple’s carefully crafted dog and pony show. iBooks 2 is no doubt a powerful tool — I wish I had it in college. This isn’t a luddite rant against the cotton gin, as I fully appreciate the positive impact that digital textbooks could have on learning. But I’m more fearful that the amount of pure learning and knowledge retention will be replaced by flashy videos and loud graphics. Remember, Apple’s primary goal is to make money, not educate our kids. Learning needs to be reinvented but I’m not sure the proper way is through an app.

This article was originally published on TechCrunch.

A group of dedicated and passionate volunteers from Siyavula teamed up to create South Africa’s first, truly-free Physical Science texbooks for Grade 10, 11 and 12 called Everything Science. You can download the textbooks right now using the links below.

For learners …

For teachers …

DOWNLOAD

Besides operating within both the education and digital industry, the team members at Quirk Education have a sincere passion for online learning. We thought it would be a great idea to put together a nifty infographic which explains how online learning came about, and importantly, why it’s beneficial. This infographic serves to introduce you to the awesome possibilities of learning via the Internet, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Click image below for full size …

After Christmas each year, the main media hype – unless anything untoward occurs here or on the   international scene – is all about the Matric results. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the assumption that a well-educated workforce is absolutely necessary for economic development. And if the Matric results are the critical indicator of the education system, then good or improved matric results portend a bright economic future for the country, and vice versa.

Well, not so, according to Ha-Joon Chang, author of the provocative little publication 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism (Penguin, 2011). Born in South Korea, Chang is a specialist in development economics and Reader in Political Economy at Cambridge University. A regular contributor to the Guardian since 2008, he has been vocal about the failures of our economic system.

The connection, it is argued, between education and economic success is that better educated people are more productive – as can be seen by the fact that they earn higher salaries. It seems logical then to assume that ‘an economy with more educated people will be more productive’, and that countries where there are fewer highly educated people will be less productive. Those who subscribe to this formula refer to the fact that the wealthy OECD countries have a longer school duration average than the poorer Sub-Saharan African countries, and that the countries which have achieved ‘miracle’ economic turnarounds (e.g. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore) have extremely high literacy and enrolment rates and are ranked highest in the internationally standardized tests such as the TIMMS and PISA.

This viewpoint is frequently articulated in South Africa: We are constantly reminded of our low ranking in literacy and numeracy tests by comparison with the rest of the world and even with our African counterparts, and the dire impact this has on our economy.

But Chang argues that the link between education and economic success is tenuous and simplistic. In so doing, he debunks Tony Blair’s famous summary of his government’s top three priorities during his party’s 1997 election campaign, namely ‘Education education, education’.

‘There is,’ Chang claims, ‘remarkably little evidence showing that more education leads to greater national prosperity.’ He goes on to present very cogent and convincing facts and figures which show that there are countries with a lower level of education which perform better economically than those with a higher level, and vice versa

This is evident both at the the level of the so-called ‘miracle economies’ and the lowest-performing economies, as well as those in between these extremes. An example of the first category cited is that of Argentina and South Korea. In1960, Korea’s literacy rate was 71%, compared to Argentina’s 91%. Yet Korea’s economic growth has been much higher: in 1960, its per capita income was only just more than one-fifth of Argentina’s; today it is three times higher.

In the second category, Chang shows that, despite increases in the literacy rate between 1960 and 2004 in Sub-Saharan Africa, the per capita income declined in this region during that period, which shows, he says, that ‘investing more in education is no guarantee of better economic performance’.

Similarly, as regards those that fall between the two extreme cases, he points out that the data reveals that there is ‘very little evidence to support the view that increased education leads to higher economic growth’.

What are the reasons for this lack of correlation? Firstly, many of the subjects which are studied at school have no direct link to worker productivity – history, art or literature, for example.  Secondly, even those that do impact more on productivity – such as Maths or Science – contain much that is not relevant in the workplace. This explains why Norway, one of the richest countries in the world. can lag behind poorer countries such as Slovenia in international standardized Maths tests – what was tested there was not relevant to the workplace.

Chang points out that the same applies to higher education. Switzerland, for example, though one of the richest and most industrialised nations, has the lowest by far university enrolment rate amongst rich countries (half the OECD rate).

Education obviously does play some role in promoting economic development; but its role is far less pivotal than is normally assumed. Chang suggests instead that there are various political and economic strategies that governments do or do not adopt which serve to distinguish more clearly between rich countries from poorer ones, particularly those that create opportunities for work and provide a support system which enables people to cope when things go wrong. This entails, he says, a mixture of free-market economics and a welfare state, and he cites the Scandanavian countries as prime examples of this. It is this, he says, rather than their excellent education systems, which have enabled them to become among the richest countries in the world.

Does this mean, then, that expenditure on education is a waste of money? Were Pink Floyd right about the children needing no education? Obviously not. In order for a country to progress economically, its workforce needs to be literate and to possess certain kinds of knowledge and skills. And even subjects such as history and literature which may be regarded as a waste of time from a strictly economic point of view, are important as they ‘enrich people’s lives and makes them good citizens’. Says Chang: ‘Even though this justification for educational spending is increasingly under attack in an age in which everything is supposed to justify its existence in terms of its contribution to productivity growth, it remains a very important – in my view, the most important – reason to invest in education.’

So the hype about the matric exam results is justified; but it should be for the right reason, and not be regarded as the key or only indicator of the prospects for economic growth in the country.

Dr Malcolm Venter is a retired Cape Town high school headmaster, part-time university lecturer, editor and provincial                 executive officer of an educational public benefit organisation.

Written by B.A. Birch

Educators across the US are on red alert as students begin to gain access to sophisticated gadgets that help them cheat. Going as far as to digitally insert answers into soft drink labels, kids are finding new ways to deceive educators and exam boards, writes Greg Toppo at USA Today.

“There’s an epidemic of cheating,” says Robert Bramucci, vice chancellor for technology and learning services at South Orange Community College District. “We’re not catching them. We’re not even sure it’s going on.”

There are companies thriving on providing these kits for students. One, called Spycheatstuff.com, allows students to mail-order a kit that turns a cellphone or iPod into a hands-free personal cheating device featuring tiny wireless earbuds that allow a test-taker to discreetly “phone a friend” during a test and get answers remotely without putting down the pencil, writes Toppo.

A new study by Common Sense Media has found that more than 35% of teens ages 13 to 17 with cellphones have used the devices to cheat.

52% of those polled admitted to some form of cheating involving the Internet.

Earlier this year, Omar Shahid Khan, 21, an Orange County student, pleaded guilty to stealing Advanced Placement tests and altering college transcripts. Khan is said to have hacked into the school’s grading system by installing spyware on school computers.

“This is about the pressures that kids are feeling in school,” says Jill Madenberg, a Great Neck, N.Y., college consultant. “The pressure to do well, the pressure to get into a good college… It’s literally all over the country — it’s an epidemic of sorts.”

Experts have been keen to point out that these technological advances aren’t increasing the number of cheating cases, they’re just making it harder to detect.

“The naïve folk belief is that cheating never used to be a problem,” Bramucci says. “It’s always been a problem.”

As a former high school guidance counselor, Madenberg believes that the recent Long Island SAT scandal will act as a positive catalyst for students to discuss the pressures they feel.

“There’s no question that people are beginning to look at that,” she says.

This article was originally published on Education News.

Holy Cross Primary in Cape Town is a school without a playground.

The school has 600 learners and a staff of 16, as well as about 6,000 square-metres of unusable land in front of the school. The biggest problem is that the land is littered with rubble, glass and rubbish. There remains little other space for the children to use, and as a result, they spend their lunch breaks playing in the road.

Quirk, a digital marketing and branding agency, is located metres away from Holy Cross and decided to bring the learners a little 2012 cheer on their return to school this year.

“Think back to your school years, and imagine that at every lunch break you would have to file out into the street for a bit of R&R. Not an ideal thought, is it?” wrote Marc Coppin of Quirk on the company’s blog.

As it turns out, Quirk wasn’t the first to notice this situation, and there have been many attempts at cleaning the field. Unfortunately, that particular piece of land is tied up in political red tape, with the presence of land claim rights halting any attempts at improvement.

‘Well, bugger that’, said Quirk Cape Town, collectively, ‘we’ll do something about it, anyway.’

And so they did. More than 100 employees of Quirk made their way down to the field in December 2011, armed with black bags, steel rakes and garden gloves. During the course of the day they managed to clear almost four tons of rubble and have planted and fertilised grass across the field in an attempt to restore it to a condition that is suitable for children.

If more local businesses volunteered just a tiny amount of time and resources to a nearby school, we’d see a very different mindset emerge on businesses supporting education in South Africa. We can’t keep ignoring the poor state of our schools for much longer. My hope is that South African business will support education in a bigger and more hands-on way, much like the caring people at Quirk. You never know – in a few years you might just be employing a child from one of those schools … so make their education count.

Thank you Quirk!