saw this TEDxPortland video shot last year only recently. while revisiting it that i noticed the opening words of the presenter:
“How many of you are creatives, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, or maybe you just have a really big imagination? Show of hands? … That’s most of you. I have some news for us creatives.”
what’s the significance of this short opening exchange?
i was quite surprised by some responses of people after they have watched the video, for example, “i feel scared”, “what if the machines are going to replace us”, “i admire those who are retiring soon”. but there again, these are quite normal too. however, i did not quite figure out the paradigm behind people with such responses. until, i revisited the video, and heard the opening exchange a second time.
my current hypothesis: people who produces such (downward spiral) responses are not knowledge creators. such words represent the mindset of industrial age production workers – routine, mass-production, clock-in-clock-out, predictability just to name a few. there’s no right or wrong judgment here. but in our business of preparing children for the knowledge age (or augmented age in the video), and where teachers’ beliefs influenced their actions, we need to think like and become a knowledge creator ourselves. what can we do to facilitate this shift in a major bulk of our teachers who learnt and grew up and laboured in the industrial age paradigm for a large part of their lives? how do we help teachers to shift into the creatives, designers, artists mode of thinking?
almost forget, here’s the video:
#enjoy
I do agree. It is a good chance to reflect on the role of the teacher. I would say in Asian culture, where examination directs the whole education system, teachers are playing the role of training their students to get good marks. Sadly, this is well accepted by the society. Teachers are not expected to be creative or let students create knowledge in classroom. Teachers are expected to “play safe”. Once a teacher gets used to this paradigm, her creation and imagination die. Questions as to whether we should prepare our children for knowledge-age or augmented age become irrelevant because another question remains unanswered which is “will examinations be any different in knowledge age or augmented age”? This leads to another issue why examinations remain the same for decades of years? This involves much more complicated factors.
So if I reflect on the teacher’s role, I need to do it inside the whole education system. I believe that a problem never stands alone. It always encompasses a series of inter-connected underlying problems.
Referring back to the technology development, we can see how it influences the way we teach and way we do assessment. However, these changes are superficial. The development of technology does not change the way we conceptualise teaching and learning (in most cases). I guess that is the very first step of changing the role of teacher. We may do a survey asking teachers to use three adjectives to describe themselves as a teacher, then we calculate how frequent they use “creative”. 🙂
@YJ i like the mention of “assessment”. as the saying goes “assessment drives behaviour”, it largely determined what and how teachers do. if assessment is yester-year, i teach the yester-year way; it’s an easy way out. but these teachers may have forgotten that our purpose is not to ONLY teach for the (major) exams. ace-ing these exams is important, but it shouldnt be the key or only purpose driving our teaching activities. else, we short-change our students in the fast-evolving world.
changes in teaching is superficial with introduction of ict. yes, this is becos the rhetoric has been 科技辅助教学. based on my limited conception, “辅助” means supplementary means 可有可无. we have to shift teachers’ conception beyond 可有可无 to 没有了学习就不一样了. so far, i have not thought of a better term than 促成. when ict 促成 a learning design, 它就不是可有可无了。