Time to stop debating

I helped out with a little debate thing that was happening in the school recently. It was a bit of fun for the most part and reminded me of when I used to do debate with my university students in China, but I did kind of wonder if debates are actually a good idea.

One thing I’ve been trying to work on recently is changing as I get new information. It sounds really obvious, but so few people do it. Most of us just take the ideas that we have all ready and when something comes along to challenge that, we throw up a whole bunch of fortifications built with supporting evidence and gut feelings and argue it out as battle to be won, when we really should be listening to the other side and trying to find out what the truth of things is.

Politics is where you see it most. You’ll have some poor politician stuff towing the party line despite all the evidence going against them, but I’ve noticed it a lot of facebook and other social media recently as well.

Okay so I’m not saying we stop debating in school, but maybe we need to balance it out with a good deal  of tough arguments where students have to work together to come to a compromise based on evidence rather than just fighting for their side. Maybe that would be a lot more useful.

Edutainment

I never really started doing well at school until I hit high school. That's round about the same time that I got my first PC. While I'm grateful for the education I had, I think I can say that I learn as much from playing games and watching Star Trek as I did from school.

Games have quite a bad reputation, especially among people that never play them. They see flashing lights and characters running around and assume that it all mindless killing and to be fair for some games it is. But when I was growing up – and now as well – it wasn't that kind of game that I enjoyed.

I grew up with games like Master of Magic and Master of Orion (from the same people that made the first Civ, but it's in a fanstasy and sci-fi setting). These games were far from the shoot em up killing sprees. They were about managing empires and often in quite detailed ways. If you wanted to play them well you had to be smart. You had to work out the maths for empire management and balance the economy with research. You had to know the races in detail and learn big words like lithovore and transcendental. You had to have some basic knowledge of science – especially physics and they inspired you to learn more and to read more. It was the same for RPG's as well. Games like Ultima and Bloodwych. Thinking ahead for your character, reading the detailed stories, problem solving, asking questions about morality and philosophy and engaging your imagination. People who have never played these games before should try them. I'm sure they would be stunned by the complexity.

So am I advocating dropping school curriculum and replacing it with intelligent gaming? Well, not yet – that would put me out of a job for a start. But I think we have to recognise that games can be a very positive thing especially for some students. It's a good learning style for some people, so why don't we use it more? Instead of telling children to stop enjoying themselves and to stop playing “waste of time” games. Let's instead direct them towards games that are going to challenge them – note though that I'm not talking about some of these forced education games that appear in schools and learning websites, but rather proper popular games that children are going to enjoy and which they can practice in a fun and indirect way, all the things that we are trying to teach them in school.

Note: if you're looking for an educational game I'd say the best one that is out at the moment still has to be Civilization 5.   

21st Century Education

While rather ironically taught in twentieth Century education style, the course I had today at school on twenty-first Century English did make me think. The whole idea was that thanks to technology, students have now moved beyond the good old fashioned teaching style and that new things have to been taken into consideration to really deal with these changes and develop students for the real world. That means taking into account things like the Internet and social networking.

It's great that academia is starting acknowledging that things are changing and I think any step towards modernisation of education is a step in the right direction. However, it does seem that the kind of education that they are talking about is something that would have been suitable for when I was at high school and their in lies the rub: academia does not live in the present, but only in the past. It's a twentieth century model of research trying to find ways to deal with twenty first century children, rather than becoming twenty first century itself and it doesn't work any more.

Think about it. Most people with doctorates are no spring chickens to begin with. I mean they might have profile on facebook or twitter, but do they really use it? Is it actually a part of their lives? Maybe, maybe not, but it doesn't matter, they can still study it, right? After all you don't have to have been a drug addict to understand drug addiction. Then again, I bet it helps.

But that's not really the main problem. The thing is, that the world is changing faster than ever before. When someone prepares a study on education and technology, it's going to be out of date by the time it gets to publication, never mind by the time that it filters down through the system and into the actual classroom. So what we are getting now are educational methods based on students who in many cases have already graduated and even if it is current, we are teaching them to deal with the technology as it is today. Not the technology as it will be by the time they have finished their education.  To put it into context, when I started school, around 1987, I don't think I had ever seen a mobile phone or used the internet. Almost thirty years later the thought of not having a net connection scares me.

So what to do about it? Well of course we could try to modernise academia, although that in itself seems like quite a mine field and far outside my world as a lowly teacher. As for predicting future technologies, while fun, it does seems like a rather hit or miss idea - Myspace was a sure thing for a while. For me though it seems that the best thing I can do is help students learn to adapt, because that, more than any skill is what's going to be needed if students hope to do well in any future no matter what technology they encounter. Maybe it would be better then if we worked on universal education - skill that are useful no matter the technology, or lack of - rather than trying to keep up with the current trends.