Silver Lining for Learning

We are joined by Robin & Travis from The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE | crpe.org) which is a research organization at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. CRPE researches classrooms, schools, and systems to identify the systemic barriers to equity and excellence for every student and ways to overcome them. Since March 2020, CRPE has been the go-to source for high-quality research about the threats to student success and equity posed by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the innovations that have emerged from the crisis Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

We are joined by Dan Krutka and Marie Heath from Civics of Technology who tell us more about the project, its origin, where they are now and their future plans and ideas. The Civics of Technology (CoT) project aims to empower students and educators to critically inquire into the effects of technologies on their individual and collective lives. The team conducts research, develops curriculum, and offers professional development and through that seek to advance democratic, ethical, and just uses of technology in schools and society.While humans have wrestled with their relationships with technology for centuries, the rapidly changing technological landscape of facial recognition, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and other pervasive technologies requires citizens who can address associated social problems. The CoT team of primarily social studies and educational technology educators and researchers seeks to develop approaches, curricula, and research to help students grow as citizens in a highly technologized world.CoT, therefore, seeks to revive an older idea, largely lost to school curriculum dialogues, for technology education that challenges students to critically inquire into the collateral, disproportionate, and unexpected effects of technology on our lives. Across their projects, they work to advance the civics of technology in schools and society that struggles for just democracy. Some important linksCivics of Technology  Main PageCivics of Technology ConferenceCivics of Technology Book clubsCivics of Technology CurriculumMore about our guests below the video Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Life is filled with challenges and adventures. Imagine teaching over 10,000 students in a single class. Sounds quite daunting, doesn’t it? Now what if those learners come from 120 different countries with their unique cultural norms, languages, backgrounds, expectations, technology access issues, and educational opportunities? Would you be a tad worried? Well, what if these people have come to your course to learn a very employable skill called computer coding? Most of them would have at least some expectations of being able to immediately apply the skills that you are teaching. The pressure mounts. And those 20,000 eyes would all be on you…or would they? Not exactly. With the “Code in Place” project from Stanford University, you would actually have around 900 volunteer teachers supporting and helping to individualize the instruction. This online army of volunteers would certainly lighten the load. The Code in Place project has likely the most people virtually assembled to ever teach a single class. Attend this session and find out what is working as well as the challenges and solutions to date for those challenges. Can Code in Place be replicated, expanded, and appreciated in other universities or parts of the world? We will see. More about our guests after the video. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

This is the third of three episodes that we are devoting to education in India. As we had said in the introduction to the first of this series (#123 and #129), with 1.4 billion people, 27% of whom are under 15, India has significant educational needs. Its multilingual, multi-ethnic culture throws in further challenges. Scale, complexity, and diversity — it is all here. Today we will meet with representatives of two organizations focusing on student-centered learning. Priyanka Krishna at Quest Alliance  and Joseph Phillip at Reap Benefit. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

This is the second of three episodes that we are devoting to education in India. As we had said in the introduction to the first of this series (#123), with 1.4 billion people, 27% of whom are under 15, India has significant educational needs. Its multilingual, multi-ethnic culture throw in further challenges. Scale, complexity and diversity — it is all here.Today we will meet with representatives of two organizations focusing on student centered learning. Sandhya Gupta at Aavishkaar Foundation and Eshwar Bandi with Inqui-Lab Foundation.Transforming math and science education for students and teachers is an important advance for all countries to achieve. STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) knowledge and skills are best acquired through various forms of active, experiential learning rather than passive assimilation. Exciting models for accomplishing this goal are in place in India. The Aavishkaar initiative, led by Sandhya Gupta, builds students’ and teachers’ engagement, achievement, and confidence in research and development through math & science camps as well as training workshops. The Inqui-Lab Foundation, co-founded by Eshwar Bandi, provides both Think & Make in-person programs and online School Innovation Challenges that are very effective in helping children and youth to innovate for problems around them and in supporting them in acting on their ideas. The episode will describe ways that parts of these transformational models can generalize to other settings across the world. More info on our guests below the video. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future is quoted as saying: “We overestimate technology short-term, and underestimate it long-term.”  How does this apply to AI?  First, we now know that fears of rapid impact on employment were vastly overblown, as they were based on extrapolations of capabilities continuing in an exponential fashion, rather than plateauing.  Furthermore, the progress has been for narrow applications which were, in engineering-speak, “bounded problems” like protein folding most famously.During this session, we will examine the true abilities and gaps of AI, as delineated in Charles’ co-authored book on Artificial Intelligence in Education, and discuss whether and when these might be resolved in ethical ways.  Armed with that view, we will then address how advances in AI impact education at three levels:Curriculum – What we teach for employabilityInstruction – Intelligent Tutoring Systems may be overblown, but narrow slices are possible (e.g., foreign language acquisition)Assessments – analytics are a clear fit, but it is mostly data science techniques; we need to define what AI is in this context, above and beyond algorithmic techniques and basic adaptiveness.Another impact of AI on education is changing what capabilities educators should cultivate and what students need to learn for their future occupation. Over the next two decades, our partnership with computers in accomplishing work roles will typically involve intelligence augmentation—an interweaving of human judgment with machine reckoning— even though a few human jobs will instead be done completely by AI. For instance, AI designed to support the work of teachers might use metrics like how much time students spent on an activity, the number of questions they answered correctly, and the number of attempts in order to evaluate whether particular students need additional instruction in a topic; AI would provide a recommendation to the teacher. The educator then assesses the validity of this suggestion using a host of data points (e.g., students’ levels of engagement overall, personality, performance in adjacent subjects, well-being) and decides how to best craft additional, engaging instruction for the student. Much as how the word processor enhanced human efficiency, productivity, and capabilities, AI can augment human abilities through reckoning—with potentially a great benefit in which the human-AI partnership is capable of more than either person or machine in isolation.  Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Silver Lining for Learning is an ongoing conversation on the future of learning with educators and education leaders from across the globe. Hosted by Chris Dede, Curt Bonk, Punya Mishra & Yong Zhao, these conversations began under the “dark cloud” of the COVID19 crisis and continue today. We see these conversations as space to discuss the creation of equitable, humanistic and sustainable learning ecosystems that meet the needs of all learners. These  conversations are hosted live on YouTube every Saturday (typically 5:30 PM Eastern US time) and are archived on https://silverliningforlearning.org Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

In this episode of Silver Lining for Learning, we will meet with Vicky Colbert, a sociologist from Colombia. She is co-creator of the world-renowned Escuela Nueva model. Escuela Nueva, Spanish for “new school”, is a progressive education model that emphasizes learner understanding over memorization, and strives to foster the development of interpersonal skills. Importantly, instead of a lecture-based approach, it employs a child-centered pedagogy with extensive collaborative learning. Studies show that it improves literacy and numeracy among disadvantaged youth while encouraging the development of active and reflexive learning as well as self-esteem, creativity, and civic and democratic values. The skills fostered by an Escuela Nueva school are meant to help graduates flourish and quickly adapt to the challenges and possibilities brought by the increasing technological world around them. Attend this session to learn about this method and perhaps rethink aspects of your vision of effective schools and schooling. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

What is creativity? How can we cultivate creativity in education? Can it be assessed? If so, then how? These are all significant and unsettled questions in creativity education. Professors Ron Beghetto and Yong Zhao edited an issue of Review of Research in Education (RRE) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to explore these issues around creativity in 2021-2022. The issue has been published and can be accessed here.They are editing another issue of RRE for 2024. The theme is side effects in education. Educational side effects are effects that accompany the intended outcomes of educational policies, initiatives, and practices. While some side effects can be beneficial, they can also be adverse, negative, and damaging. In this episode, we have invited the two editors, Professor Ron Beghetto and Professor Yong Zhao, who is a co-host of Silver Lining for Learning, to discuss creativity education and side effects in education. Learn more about our guests below the video. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org 

Today, learners face an unprecedented challenge: adapting to a world that is changing more quickly than ever before. The skills, tools, and knowledge needed to thrive in a global knowledge economy are evolving at breakneck pace, and the artifacts we’ve traditionally relied on to capture these skills (e.g., the four-year degree) aren’t well-suited for the task. Learners and employers need a more agile, accessible, and specific way of recognizing what people know and can do.We will hear from a lifelong learner (Brittany Storie, Director of Workforce Skills at Pearsons) who has experienced career benefits since earning alternative credentials, and we’ll discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the credentialing ecosystem more broadly. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org