The Classroom of the Future... tomorrow!

Spurred on by Margaret Wente's shrill diatribe against teachers and their unions in Ontario (not wholly undeserved - I could say two or fifty unpleasant things about the Ontario College of Teachers), and by the end of the school year, I started thinking about what would an effective classroom look, say, 7 years from now. A lot of this is going to be generalizations though, but I think the numbers bear out. So given that:
- the supposed purpose of education is to provide valuable skills and knowledge to the new generation
- the costs of education per student are going up, while enrollment is actually slowly decreasing, and education is consistently the second highest portion of government spending not just in Ontario but across Canada
- education is seen as being vital to a 'successful' career
- teenagers are busier than ever with part time jobs, community hours, trying to find internships to help with business/pre-law/pre-med/etc. applications
- all phones will be equivalent to today's cutting-edge smartphones
- Internet access will be ubiquitous (it might be heavily censored in the future, but at least access to it will be a given in Canada)
... I think that the current model of education will be dangerously unsustainable and counter-productive in every way. The province is already trying to cut $70 million this year in under-used schools (see link above), and this number will only increase in the future even as class sizes increase. Education as it is right now is unsustainable. It is unsustainable economically, it is unsustainable environmentally (the cost of power, the cost of fuel to transport students to the school, the tremendous waste of supplies created by ever school, cost of constant renovations), and it will soon become unsustainable morally.

"Wait, what?!" Hear me out. Schools no longer have a monopoly on information for young people, nor do they any longer have much of a moral ground when it comes to teaching some kind of objective knowledge and giving useful skills. Maybe up to a certain point (say Grade 6 or 8) the institutional, structured, orderly classroom is preferable, but afterward the students are wasting time and potential. I'm not talking just about gifted students, I'm talking about students in general. The only reasons the lesson periods are as long as they are is because we (education system and society) need to: a) keep them from 9 to 3, b) because the classes are damn big and much of the lesson gets lots in the static and needs to be repeated. The high school years as they are structured now are a big waste, and the amount of time spent on transmitting the curriculum requirements into their fragile young minds can be condensed. Even if we keep 12-grade system, the amount of time per grade could be reduced without sacrificing quality. Assuming that we are willing to do some radical changes, that is.

So here we go, let's put our futurology hats on:
- Education needs to be far more virtual and distributed than it is now. Rote memorization of knowledge in the age of ubiquitous internet access and smartphones is laughably obsolete. A smartphone with net access is for most intents and purposes a crude exocortex memory. The age of polymaths and encyclopaedics is over - you can either be an expert in a very specific field, or you can know a little about a lot of things and depend on freely accessed knowledge for anything that requires greater detail. What we really need to focus on is the development of research, search and analysis skills. We assume that young'uns today are super-duper tech savvy because they spend so much time on their damn phones, but nothing is further from the truth. I can do things with browsers, spreadsheets, word processors, or PowerPoints that leaves their mouths gaping, and I'm not even especially computer-literate.
- To make education more virtual and distributed than it is now, reverse classrooms need to be implemented widely, from Grade 9 on. What is a reverse classroom? The teacher posts the lesson in the form of a document, a YouTube video or podcast (typically 20-30 minute length), Smarttech lesson, etc. online and assigns work related to the lesson. The students watch/read the lesson on their own, and come to class to work on their homework, assignments, or get further assistance from a teacher. Only we need to gradually push the envelope further. The work can also be completed online - a simple bot could watch the completion of work and compile a report for the teacher on which students did their work and in what time. What does the teacher do with the rest of his/her time? Well...
- The class sizes will become bigger. That is inevitable as the governments (witness McGuinty's slow about-face on teacher wages going on right now) will reduce education expenses. With reverse classrooms, however, the class sizes will approach mid-range university classes (40-50 students per teacher). The teacher, however, will spend most of his/her time evaluating work, preparing lessons, assisting with any inquiries, and facilitating. Facilitating what...?
- Student apprenticeships. This is not a new idea and indeed many schools already implement it, but rather stupidly only for those students who have no chance at all of academic success. Well, we should replace those community hours (so many of which end up being faked anyway) with meaningful and varied apprenticeships. Build a professional online network of Ministry-of-Education-approved local businesses in each school area. Let students have a large degree of freedom when selecting their apprenticeships, let them try out a different job every month, maybe even hold bidding competitions on who gets what position.
- A typical student day might be something like getting up in the morning, checking messages from guild members (read on!), teachers, heading off for a few hours of apprenticeship. While on the way, listen to a lesson or two, fire off a couple of questions or quick homework. After work meet up with guildies online or IRL, raid some lessons (OK OK, I'll get to it in a second), complete the work. Once or twice a week come to progress meetings with the teacher, or remote in.

Alright, so here's my crazy/maybe-revolutionary idea of the day. Education needs to start taking cues from the psychology behind social networks, facebook games, and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs). All three of these are so wildly successful because:
a) we connect to other people and we can share our success and brag about it
b) the tasks are broken down into small incremental steps, and the completion of each step rewarded with small but increasing rewards
c) as rewards increase, so does the difficulty
d) they create a community built around common interests and goals
I think it's all too plain how the MMO/social network can apply to education. The requirement for teamwork and cooperation and social learning is already written in the curriculum, but it's not very meaningful in the current homework. Students can complete work in short bursts, with each successful completion opening up new challenges, but also rewards. What rewards? Maybe preferential bids on apprenticeship gigs, grades, whatever. Even money (see the effect financial rewards have on grades - heck universities and colleges already do so with bursaries and scholarships)! So while the overall grades and performance of the student will be assessed on an individual basis, progression through curriculum and additional perks will be possible through social interaction and actual teamwork. Heck, plug in augmented reality eventually and it will really be like something out of science fiction!

Unevenly distributed future

I am only 130 pages in "The Makers" by Cory Doctorow (yes, that Cory Doctorow of the blogosphere fame), but it already might be the best book I've read in the last 6 months. No, wait, scratch that - 12 months (Kraken did come just about two years ago). There is a Big Idea on every page, it's bursting with enthusiasm, imagination, and - despite the outwardly bleak post-post-industrial after-the-Crash American setting - even optimistic book. It is crazy, intelligent and incisively funny in the way that Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac" or "Cryptonomicon" (it even deals with similar themes of entrepreneurship, startups, business ethics, futurism, social implications of technology, and wild crazy adventure), or Stross' Halting State were. I will have more to say about "The Makers" when I finish it, but at this current pace it'll be quite soon - I literally had to force myself to put it down today. Errrr, the students can do pre-exam review on their own, right?


P.S. Why so many links in this post to Amazon? No, I'm not shilling for Amazon (although if you're from Amazon and want to give me money I will not say no), but if you have not read any of these books you need to order them right now from Amazon, or your nearest public library, or your nearest mIRC portal and then put your life on hold until you read them!


P.P.S. Doctorow's book is already inspiring me to rant on a few topics. Expect more activity as the school year winds down and my free time goes up. Some of the upcoming topics may include:
- what will happen if all personal debt was erased overnight
- the new model of education
- political revolutions in fantasy
- lessons from this teaching year
- my European vacation!

"Will there be rabbits George?"

Haha! And you thought this blog was dead! You fools! It only rises again and again, stronger and stronger! (Or other Greyjoy words to that effect) I guess recently I've had more free mental time what with the school year winding down at all, and also more intellectual stimuli, so there are a few blog entries incoming, but today I want to talk about settings and setting the scenes in RPGs. That's of course a huge and nebulous topic, but I just want to throw out a couple of recent observations. Having recently taught Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" I remembered how much I love Steinbeck, much more so than Fitzgerald or Hemingway. There is real pathos, real emotion, and well - real reality, in his words. He is also adept at making a fictional setting as real as it can be in relatively few words, and there are a few lessons that Game Masters running a RPG can take away.

First of these is to not worry so much about verisimilitude when setting a game in a real-world location. What Steinbeck demonstrates so powerfully is that what matters is not getting every single tree, stone, and brook right, but getting the sense of the place right. Is Soledad Valley real? Yes. Is the ranch from "Of Mice and Men" real? No, but it might as well be because it is so believable and it fits with what knowledge and preconceptions we might have about ranches in southern California in 1920s and 1930s.

Secondly there are the descriptions in pre-made adventures. Normally I like pre-made adventures; they make my life easier by reducing prep time, they give me ideas, maps, and ready-made characters to use in other games. Most of them, however, commit the cardinal sin of poor descriptions. They are either extremely verbose in attempting to explain to the players not only what the scene looks like, but also where everything and everyone is in relation to players; or they are too sparse. I think the primary use of a scene description should be to establish the feel of the scene and the most evocative and important details and then get out of the way. If you need to explain to the players where specific details are in relation to them, use a map or wait for them to ask specific questions. Steinbeck does occasionally take a page to describe a place, but these are exceptions. He can establish a character's presence or the imagery of the scene in but a short paragraph, because Steinbeck realizes that he doesn't need to be Dickens.

Lastly, do not be afraid to use literary cliches to describe a scene. This is not to say that everything that comes out of GM's mouth should be a cliche (God knows I'm guilty of that often enough), but that cliches are cliches because they work. They act on our minds, evoking certain understanding and imagery that has been ingrained in our memory by media, literature, art, etc. They also work because cliches can quickly summarize an understanding that would otherwise take far more words to achieve. This applies to characters as well as settings and scenes obviously.