Redesigning Learning Environments

I work in a place where professional development is taken very seriously. Teachers are encouraged to seek out opportunities for growth and are almost always supported in their own endeavors, whether it be in terms of time away from school, in-school training or funding for a trip. I have found that in international schools in Asia, educators are constantly considering the 21st century learning landscape. Most teachers I meet in this region want to embrace and promote the ideas of a new educational framework, constantly feeling inspired by people like Stephen Heppell, Marco Tores and Ken Robinson. We've been told that Schools Kill Creativity and Shift Happens (even in education) and we need to Pay Attention. We’ve also aligned our motives and intentions with the ideas and direction found in clips like the 21st Century Pedagogy, Changing Educational Paradigms and Learn to Change, Change to Learn. If you haven't seen these clips, I recommend watching them, not only because they're great, but also they will give you a feel for where the rest of this post is coming from.

While these videos abound at professional development workshops and training sessions making educators oooh and ahhh in support of their revolutionary ideas, educators often don’t feel very empowered to initiate change, let alone even jump on board when we see changes happening in our own schools. Too often we are left frustrated by these ideas because, while we agree with them and believe in their message, we just can’t put them into practice within the settings where we teach. We commit ourselves to what we strongly value and what we think should be possible, only to find ourselves feeling like were stuck at a dead end because we can’t put it into practice in our very own classrooms. It’s not only frustrating; it’s also demoralizing and inhibitive.

So I’ve started to think about what it means to be a teacher with a vibrantly new outlook on education, while still stuck in a traditionally walled, desked, chaired, poster-boarded, cubic classroom.

Recently I visited the Google HeadQuarters in Mountain View, California. Having not done any homework (and not knowing anyone else's personal account) on which to build expectations about the company’s facility structure and design, I was pretty blown-away by what I encountered and discovered.

Everything you need is provided - free full-service cafeterias, coffee bars, snack stations, laundry service, shoe repair, exercise facilities, interest classes, social outlets, sports facilities, fully stocked bathrooms, etc. You could live here, easily.
Everything is inspiring and fun - boldly colourful, quirky and innovative, strangely unusual and awesomely interactive stuff is everywhere.
Everything is open and comfortable - open cubicles adorned with comfort items, windowed and/or open project and resource rooms which let you see what people are doing. the campus is open to public visitors, created a feeling of transparency and trust.
Everything is connected - staff on-site can connect with each other through an internal network, allowing them to see who is available and who is working on what projects
Everything is accessible – Google bikes are scattered around the campus to allow anyone to grab one to scoot to where they need to be.
Everything is realistic – people at Google are really productive. they're working hard and collaborating on projects, designs, innovations, etc. this is a place that tugs at your sense of work vs. home vs. life vs. school.

So recently I keep coming back to this question...
What would happen if schools were modeled after Google HQ?

What would happen if there weren't classes to attend, rather just things to try and stuff to learn. Project-based learning, spanning across age-levels but specified to student interest and, most importantly, applied to real life? Places, not rooms, where research happens, experimentation is rampant and innovations are encouraged and supported by both students and teachers.

What would happen if the only test in school was, "does it work?' or "did it achieve y/our purpose?" leading into "how can we make it better?" and "what would happen if....?"

What would happen if kids were able to hang-out with and learn from the teachers and other students - the ones with whom they connect really well and share common interests with? Would this change their learning?

Giving people, even very young people, a sense of choice instills accountability for their own decisions, encouraging them to mature and allowing them to believe in themselves. It promotes confidence and reliability. It requires a grandiose amount of trust. Many of the small jobs and tasks that schools outsource, can actually be done by learners themselves and often in a more authentic and meaningful way. Which leads me to think even further away from my classroom box and I start to imagine...

What would happen if students and teachers collectively run the entire show? Design the curriculum? Paint the walls? Plan the field trips? Cook the food? Balance the budget? Manage the schedule? Clean the bathrooms? Hire the teachers? Decide what's important? Pay the bills? It could happen...

I was first inspired by reform in educational spaces design by a man named Stephen Heppell who spoke at the Apple Leadership Summit in Hong Kong (2009) hosted by my school, CDNIS. Stephen talked about redesigning the new landscape of education. At the time, I took in his ideas as nice little added extras and not much more. I was not overly impressed because what I saw/heard seemed like basically interior design decorating ideas. I thought to myself, ‘Sure… lovely… wouldn’t it be great if we could model creative/fun learning environments to inspire teachers and learners? Let's give everybody comfort and accessibility while they’re learning! Awesome. It would be nice… but can't be the main focus. What really matters is getting people to change their pedagogy and their philosophy. Physical spaces do not play a key role in this and should probably only be considered only once changes in thinking and practice have been adopted by people at the school.” At the time, I also became a bit hung-up on the idea that only very rich schools would ever be able to afford such added cushy benefits and bonuses of Heppell's 21st century designed learning spaces.

Now, after my visit to Google HQ, I see the errors in my thinking and prioritizing. What if learning spaces design is the fundamental key to promoting changes to our current models of education? I wonder if the traditional learning environments (that we are trying to create fundamental changes within) simply can’t support such changes. Maybe the design of the physical space is the critical component (to a mixture that requires a multitude of interactive parts, of course)… or let's say, not an element on its own, but rather a catalyst, one that will encourage and facilitate authentic educational reform. Maybe 21st century learning just can't happen in 20th century classrooms and school buildings. What if  the setting is where changes need to begin?

"Now we're looking at a whole different range of schools. We're looking at a schools that produce ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children... who care about stuff, like their culture. And to build schools like that is a whole nuther challenge. And around the world, you know, people are testing the ingredients about what makes that work. And those ingredients are being assembled into some just stunning recipes in different places. It's a very exciting time for learning. It's the death of education, but the dawn of learning." - Stephen Heppell

Notes & Resources

The Best Question in the World, What Would Happen If…

About Stephen Heppell
http://www.heppell.net/
Stephen pioneered, and was the guiding "father" of, early social networking with seminal projects including *ESW in the 1980s, Schools OnLine for the UK Department of Trade and Industry in 1995/6, Tesco Schoolnet 2000 from 1999 - the then Guinness Book of Record's largest internet learning project in the world. Think.com with Oracle from 1999, Talking Heads linking every UK headteacher into a community of practice
Stephen lobbied for the creation of (in 1997) and then created in 1998, guiding for ten years Notschool.net, at the time a uniquely effective project to re-engage children excluded from school by behaviour or circumstances.
In recognition of all this work, along with just 51 others including Damien Hirst, Jarvis Cocker, Harrison Ford, Lauren Bacall, Muhammad Ali; Stephen became an Apple Master in the 1990s.
Stephen is at the heart of a global revolution in learning space design, with a string of major new building projects worldwide including a 0-21+ academy in the UK and a complete makeover of a national education system in the Caribbean.
From - http://rubble.heppell.net/heppell/quiickbiog.html


About the Google Head Quarters
Google is infamous in the industry for treating its employees to not just free drinks and snacks on tap, but full-on gourmet meals, three times a day at a plethora of on-site cafes and eateries, as well as regular BBQs during the summer. Brin and Page have been quoted in the past as saying no Googler should have to go more than 100 feet for food, leading to snack-filled “microkitchens” that are liberally dotted around the Google offices.
From - http://www.rockingfundas.com/2010/06/10-fun-facts-you-didnt-know-about.html


Our corporate headquarters, fondly nicknamed the Googleplex, is located in Mountain View, California. Today it’s one of our many offices around the globe. While our offices are not identical, they tend to share some essential elements. Here are a few things you might see in a Google workspace:

• Local expressions of each location, from a mural in Buenos Aires to ski gondolas in Zurich, showcasing each office’s region and personality.
• Bicycles or scooters for efficient travel between meetings; dogs; lava lamps; massage chairs; large inflatable balls.
• Googlers sharing cubes, yurts and huddle rooms – and very few solo offices.
• Laptops everywhere – standard issue for mobile coding, email on the go and note-taking.
• Foosball, pool tables, volleyball courts, assorted video games, pianos, ping pong tables, and gyms that offer yoga and dance classes.
• Grassroots employee groups for all interests, like meditation, film, wine tasting and salsa dancing.
• Healthy lunches and dinners for all staff at a variety of cafés.
• Break rooms packed with a variety of snacks and drinks to keep Googlers going.

From - http://www.google.com/corporate/culture.html
Life at the Googleplex

Letting Kids be Kids.... All Over The World

There is a discussion hurricane currently swirling around Amy Chua's article, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior from the Wall Street Journal last week. For examples of interesting follow-up and reaction to the piece see Christine Lu's post on Quora and the more recent response from Amy Chua herself in the article Mother, Superior?   I am intrigued by people's extreme perspectives on parenting, although I am not yet at liberty to weigh in on that exact realm, I am of course, more intrigued with people's perspectives as they relate to teaching, growth, development and learning - something I do know a bit about.

I want to share with you, a connection I made this week between what I do and this discussion surrounding cultural differences in parenting. I teach in an IB World School. We follow the IB Primary Years Programme (PYP) curriculum framework and instructional design model. The PYY is inquiry-based, student-centered, trans-disciplinary and concept-driven.

I teach Grade 5 and we recently put on a grade level concert, one night of the entire year when the students get our state-of-the-art theatre facility all to themselves to show their parents what they've been learning in their units of inquiry and the performing arts. This year we asked the students to create their own skits/dances/poems/songs about our current unit of inquiry and our amazing performing arts teacher tied it all together with a rockin' soundtrack of songs that connected seamlessly with the ideas we were learning. Our unit was about how humans manage solid waste and it falls within the theme of how we organize ourselves. The students took the information and concepts that had become most pertinent to them in their 5-week unit of inquiry and began to develop their performances. The teachers then allotted approximately 4 weeks for intermittent practices and rehearsal times, followed by 2 solid days of stage rehearsals the day before the show. In those critical two days, the teachers helped by giving advice and feedback as we watched their acts  - 32 in total - which were combinations of small groups and mixed class clusters. The teachers assisted with technical requirements and helped them become familiar with the theater, the equipment, and the time structure, but we never suggested that they change anything about the content or delivery of their performances. For two solid days we all worked collaboratively in the theater, 135 ten-year olds, seven teachers and three theater staff. An amazing thing I noticed, was that their performances did change as they practiced. They took our feedback and mixed it with their own intentions and then applied it to their work to make it better. They were definitely in charge, every step of the way.

What came together on the night of the show absolutely knocked the socks off of the parents and school administrators who sat, happily entertained, in the audience for 90 minutes. It was amazing. The one thing that many people noticed and appreciated was that this was obviously the authentic work of the students. No longer are our annual school concerts the polished performances of robot students who learned to follow a teacher's instructions, monotonously repeating a performance piece that they have zero connection to. No longer is our annual school concert the result of a teacher's hard work, a teacher's expertise and/or a teacher's dedication to education! Why was it ever about that in the first place? Now we boast an annual school concert (in every grade level) that shows 100% of the hard work, expertise and dedication of the star performers themselves - the students! And they know it. They get it. And they love it. So far, from the responses I've heard, so do their parents.

Did I mention that these students (and of course their parents) are mostly Chinese?

Thinking about this school performance and the students' sense of  ownership, collaboration and responsibility has helped me articulate my own responses to the array of perspectives on parenting strategies that have been voiced in response to Amy Chua's article. Here's what I've been digesting.

Ownership A person must have ownership over their own growth and development in order to find authentic value in what they do. People can arrive at a level of ownership by way of numerous pathways, both self-directed and also directed to it by others. There is something to be said, however, for the individual who learns how to direct and navigate their own life journeys independently, to come to an understanding about how the world around them works on their own terms. It is important to have pride and self-worth that is rooted in our own ambitions and desires. Not to say that this can't stem into the joy of fulfilling someone else's ambitions and desires, but the roots must belong to the individual.

Collaboration I feel that this is another important life-lesson and a developmental necessity. Knowing when to be competitive, when to be collaborative, and how to balance the two, is a key to success in the 21st century. Unfortunately, too often we teach our students to be competitive through testing, grading and ranking mechanisms that are embedded deeply into K-12 and post-secondary education. (These may also be influences felt at home, especially if your mother is Amy Chua!). Once these individuals enter the 'real word' - the 21st century world - we expect them to be strong collaborators, effective team players and cooperative contributors. We are not preparing them for this 'real world' if we're insisting that they must always be # 1. Harmony is described as the consistent, orderly and pleasing arrangement of many different parts. A deep understanding of all aspects of human nature - social, physical, intellectual and emotional -  is required to be successful in the world we live in.  When a parent or a teacher removes some of this balance or tips the scales to focus heavily on a certain aspect of development, the resulting inequity begins to dismantle stability. I believe that such a collapse is most often seen as a result of neglecting the social or the emotional. A lack of personal self-efficacy can create a void in an person's metacognition, which is the understanding of their own growth and stages of developmental awareness. Learning about how we learn is most effective in collaborative and safe environments. Children need to be supported holistically in order to begin unpacking their own learning. I wonder if this can ever happen in a household like Amy Chua's.

Responsibility A sense of responsibility for one's own actions, awareness of cause and effect, and experiencing the inherent value of making mistakes, are vital to creating the balance and harmony needed to cope with the world we live in. I believe that we need to focus less on challenging children to learn skills and memorize content (because these develop naturally with each individual's specific interests), and move towards teaching children to understand, and evaluate exactly how they understand, how the world around us works and how to successfully work within it. They need to become responsible for themselves at an early age.

In terms of Amy Chua's written article, I had a hard time respecting what she wrote. I have subsequently had a hard time respecting many of the responses I hear or read because everyone keeps perpetuating the stereotypes described in the article. Here are my thoughts on respect and the perspective Amy Chua chose to share with the world.

Respect I am amazed by commenter support and confirmation of stereotypes that were distastefully scattered throughout Chua's article. Why are we establishing and substantiating these generalizations and blanket summaries of Chinese parents vs American parents? Staging a competition about 'who is better' or 'who is right' based on national or cultural identity is.... blatant discrimination, plain and simple. I am happy to see blogs like The Good Chinese Mother and articles like, In China, Not All Practice Tough Love which explain a fresh look at parenting in the 21st century in China. Presumably it should have been obvious that within any nation and within any culture, variations in perspectives on parenting strategies are as diverse as any other perspectives on issues such as politics, religion, the environment or education. We know that stereotypes can dominate the perception of a country or a race. We've seen it all too often in our lifetime. But I think it's important to note the rate of change that we are living in right now. Those stereotypes we know are evolving so quickly and over time I think it's fair to say that the lines which once defined them are becoming blurred by the global pallet of multiculturalism and the influence of communication technology to connect big cities.

This discussion is fascinating. The world of parenting and teaching is also the most dynamic place to be! Imagine knowing that your influence is going to shape the generations of our collective future. Ultimately, I have an investment in the notion that humans will always do things very differently and from these differences, we will continue to challenge ourselves, explore the unknown and learn about the world around us from each (and every different) other.

My M.Ed Application

Here is a fun Wordle of my statement of purpose and my resume which I recently used to apply to the Learning, Design & Technology Masters of Education program at Stanford University's School of Education. Writing a statement such as this one and hammering out a modern resume was a fabulously challenging experience for me. Getting my statement down from 5 pages to a measly 1000 words, meant that I scrapped a lot of my favorite fun adjectives. Therefore, you will not see such an abundance of eloquently poignant and illustratively descriptive words as you probably would expect to see in my regular writing.
No real surprises here.

A Case Against the Graduate Record Examination

Ahhhhh! I despise exams. Particularly multiple-choice ones. And particularly ones that have a magnitude of importance.  I recently had the torturous pleasure of taking the GRE, a standardized test which is required for entrance to most post-graduate programs of study in the US. I didn't do very well and subsequently became quite defeated by the process of the test itself. It had been 8 years since I'd written an exam of this calibre. I didn't put an adequate amount of effort into studying. I am not an effective test taker when it comes to multiple choice exams. I don't deal well with failure or exam anxiety or timers. The computer adaptive testing (CAT) format is completely frustrating. I could go on and on about the multitudinous reasons for my failure to perform as I had hoped, detailing why my poor performance wasn't a fair judgement or an accurate depiction of my abilities. The truth is I did poorly, period. I'm not trying to avoid or excuse that fact, but I do want to share some insights and ideas with you about why I feel that standardized testing is completely ridiculous.

At a time and in a place where K-8 educational standards and practices reflect a general, albeit slow, move away from standardized testing, traditional assessments and formal reporting practices (ok, maybe not in the US, but definitely in settings like the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme), how is it that universities and colleges still form the basis of their acceptance policies on ranking applicants in terms of their test scores? The GRE is required for almost all fields of graduate study in the US, including Education. I want to learn, grow and invest my future into reforming pedagogy and reevaluating practices that impede our current generations of learners and learning styles. I want to have an undeniable impact on the way teachers teach and the way learners learn and I have the impetus to do it (and do it well, in my opinion). Yet I probably can't get myself into a highly-ranked, well-recognized department of Education to pursue a Masters degree because I don't perform well on standardized tests.

Young learners of today, especially in the IB PYP programme, aren't often exposed the world of standardized testing and we've seen vast improvements in skill development and real-world understandings that will empower young people in a furutre of critical and creative problem solving and innovative design. But will they still have to pass a test to get into university in 10 years? It is likely. Will they have to pass a test to get a job? Hopefully not.

The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising Scores, Ruining Schools by Alfie Kohn was published in 2000 with outstanding evidence about how standardized testing is detrimental to learning and an inaccurate assessment of student understanding or academic ability. From Alfie Kohn's website, News & Comments, January 2010 he states: "As for the research studies: Collectively, they make it clear that students who are graded tend to differ from those who aren’t in three basic ways. They’re more likely to lose interest in the learning itself. They’re more likely to prefer the easiest possible task. And they’re more likely to think in a superficial fashion as well as to forget what they were taught." 

Most teachers and schools that I am familiar with, through my short career, focus on promoting an authentic interest in learning, actively engaging students and helping them invest in their own development while providing an environment which fosters life long learning for learning's sake. Authentic assessment is essential and formative feedback is fundamental. We must begin to accept that grading, ranking and comparing of students to one another, goes completely against the intuitions of learning and promotion of growth.

So (if) it's true that within International K-8 education, we are beginning to change, to move away from standardized testing and traditional forms of student evaluation, where will that leave the future generations when it is time for them to pursue post-secondary level education? How will they cope with the levels of scoring, summative assessments and testing regimes? How will they fare when all critical and creative thinking abilities, collaborative and cooperative learning habits, and so-called 21st century learning skills are thrown out the window during an undergraduate degree? We are slowly beginning to model our K-8 learning environments to reflect what the working force will demand in the future, but most universities and colleges haven't fallen in line. How will students navigate this unknown realm of mid-terms and final exams? How will they even get accepted into these institutions?

So back to the GRE and me. Why do I fail so miserably at multiple choice questions? For my undergrad degree, I studied Biological Sciences and many of my courses were evaluated almost entirely by multiple-choice testing. And I managed. Here's a perspective on multiple-choice questions and deep thinkers by Banesh Hoffman, a mathematics professor who worked with Albert Einstein and wrote a book in 1962 titled The Tyranny of Testing. He particularly discredits multiple-choice testing, stating in an interview: "Multiple choice tests penalize the deep student, dampen creativity, foster intellectual dishonesty, and undermine the very foundations of education". (Source: The Myth of Measurability, edited by Paul Houts, (Hart Publishing Company, 1977), page 202.) Hoffman continues, "It is not the presence of defective questions that makes multiple-choice tests bad. Such questions merely make them worse. Even if all the questions were impeccable, the deep student would see more in a question than his more superficial competitors would ever dream was in it, and would expend more time and mental energy than they in answering it. That is the way his mind works. That is, indeed, his special merit. But the multiple-choice tests are concerned solely with the candidates choice of answer, and not with the reasons for his choice. Thus they ignore that elusive yet crucial thing we call quality." (Source: The Tyranny of Testing,(Collier Books, 1962), page 92.)


In my undergrad, I managed to get myself through exams with a few techniques and strategies, all of which were useless in the GREs computer adaptive testing format, where you can't see the questions ahead and/or go back to the ones you've completed. I have zero time management abilities when I can't tell what is coming up. For example, in the verbal section you must answer 30 questions in 30 minutes. I couldn't quite master the 1 minute per question approach and was frequently stressing about the time I was taking on selecting my answers. Near the end, I had managed to catch up and was happy to see that I had exactly 4 minutes remaining to complete the final 4 questions. Seemed like I was on top of things. I hit the continue button, just to see that the final 4 questions were based on a 5-paragraph text laid out on the screen. It would have taken me 4 minutes just to read it once thoroughly (I am a slow and careful reader). So I had to skim the article and then race through the last 4 questions, basically throwing out guesses. You can imagine how great that felt.

Well the GRE is now behind me. I can chalk it up to an interesting and experiential learning activity. It definitely helped me reflect deeply and question my own philosophy of assessment and evaluation. I might try to write the GRE again in a few months. I might not. I still plan to apply to pursue my Masters degree and hopefully I will not be judged entirely on my testing ability, because ultimately, it is not a skill set that I am seeking to Master.

IDEO - The Future of the Book

What's your idea for the future of books?

The digital world can bring us reading that is:
- Informative with less bias
- Personalized to who we are
- Interactive, engaging, and rich

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

The Green School, Bali, Indonesia

Today I visited the The Green School of Bali, Indonesia. I have watched developments at this school unfold online since it’s conception in 2007, and always daydreamed that someday this would be a place where I would spend some of my career. I am drawn to both Bali and the school; Bali is an island of stunning cultural, historical and natural beauty and The Green School is a school of outstanding principles built on solid foundations of sustainability and global stewardship. The school is also dedicated to providing numerous scholarship opportunities to local Balinese children. The school is open for public tours on Mondays and Wednesdays at 3pm. The Green School has received a lot of international media coverage because of its educational philosophy, its experiential teaching and learning practices and is awe-inspiring structural design. Many famous people have come across the threshold bamboo bridge, a little like tumbling down the rabbit hole, entering into the magical school setting in the middle of the Balinese jungle.

Our tour guide, Ben, has been a part of the Green School team since 2008. Originally from the United States, I quickly learn that he is well travelled and even more aptly versed, in many languages.  He greets and welcomes all members of the tour in their native language, from English to Mandarin to Japanese to French to Malay to Indonesian.

The tour begins on the bridge above the Ayung River, but soon we are walking through a very tall rice paddy. One of the visitors asks, "Why the rice is so tall?" and Ben explains that the rice, which is grown organically and cared for by the students, is a native Balinese rice, a variety that almost no one grows anymore, even in Bali. Ben elaborates with a descriptive explanation of an integrated inquiry that all grades at the school participate in where the students grow rice, learn the history and cultural significance of rice in Bali, host rice ceremonies with local villagers and then eventually harvest and eat their rice.

We continue on to the edge of the river where we observe a pretty large water vortex. Built by the school and supposedly the second of its size in the world, this electricity-generating vortex is a fish friendly way to harness kinetic energy from a river or stream. This system was originally designed by Austrian engineer Franz Zotlöterer. It channels a small portion water from the side of the stream, where it enters a toilet-bowl shaped funnel containing a large, slow-moving water wheel. Unlike traditional hydroelectric power generation, this system does not work on a pressure differential, it draws the energy simply form the dynamic force of the spiraling water which exits the vortex back into the stream. Awesome!

Moving on along a lava rock pathway (one of many on campus), we pass the senior student-built 3-story clubhouse (part of a hands-on design lesson focused on integrating math, physics and architecture). Further up the hillside, we see the student support center and head into a high school classroom overlooking the river. Here we learn the origins of the Green School. For the quick version please check out the history section of the Green School website which explains how its founders, Jon Hardy and his wife Cynthia, created the Green School. The Hardys were inspired to give something back to the people of  Bali, a paradise which they have called home for 35 years, and an island which inspired and supported them along their road to success creating the globally successful John Hardy Jewelry empire. The school was created with a passion for everything local, and it is the local environment which most obviously informed thier decisions along the way. Holistic education consultant, Alan Wagstaff as well as Jurgen Zimmer, a professor at the Free University in Berlin, helped develop the educational philosophy and curriculum design of the school in tits beginning stages. The Hardys also set up a bamboo construction company just down the river from the Green School site which was commissioned to design and build all structural features of the school. You can tell this place was conceived by a union by artists and skilled tradesmen. The bamboo furniture throughout the school captures the intricate insides of bamboo design with careful lines and attention to textures, creating a simple and natural beauty.

The tour guide then takes us into a few homeroom classrooms, which were much larger than I'd imagined. I love the reused car windshields, painted white and used as white boards throughout the school. Each lower school classroom, with a cap of 25 students, has its own cool-down area for days when the jungle just gets too hot and sweaty. It turns out that Jon Hardy, in the early 70's, graduated from art college in Canada and had a passion for inflatable architecture. Inside each completely open-air classroom there is an inflatable canvas dome set on top of a miniature classroom pit, well equipped with an air conditioner, bench seating and performance/teaching space for an entire class. Very neat.

Over the course of the next 2 hours we are guided though the rest of the campus which includes the recreational sports area, with kids playing on a field with bamboo soccer goals as well as under a large thatched complex with bamboo basketball hoops, and a we take peak into the Performing Arts center where an after school African drumming workshop is taking place and the large African Mariba and Gamelan ensemble is displayed to one side. We learn about the traditional mud pit and spectator area used for Indonesian ceremonies, school performances as well as practicing other international forms of martial arts. We walk through the healing center of the school, designated as such by an authentic dowser from Astralia who also found water for all of the school's wells. The healing circle is marked with a giant brown crystal from Brazil embedded in the earth (think the size of a dog house). We look in on the endangered bird breeding cages and Green Camp gardens before arriving at the "Heart of School" in the glow of late afternoon light. The Heart of School is a stunning 3-story tripple building comprising offices, students study areas, the library, computer lab and resource area, fine arts studios and open lounging space where an afternoon yoga class is happening as we arrive. The Heart is the largest bamboo building in Asia, and possibly the world. It is breathtaking to stand in the center, climb up and down the 3 staircases in your bare feet and be encompassed by a human-made building that so distinctly resembles a bamboo forest with all the perfect lines and angles.

Among the things we didn't see, but learned about nonetheless, were the school's composting toilets of which students have been experimenting with methane extraction as a renewable energy source, an on-site recycling program, Balinese black sows that digest all the school's organic waste, as well as countless bio-intensive gardens which are managed by staff and students to create food for the entire school. The school is also serviced, campus-wide, with wifi. 

The Green School has had its share of ups and downs. Far from being financially sound, even with the support from their founders and the general visiting public, they continue to struggle to make ends meet. From starting out a few months before the economic meltdown in 2008, ironing out the kinks that are inevitable in starting a brand new school in the middle of the Balinese jungle, to constantly changing staff and changing student body, it is a wonder that they have gotten to where they are already. The school has received its share of global attention, both for its innovative ideas, its core values and educational philosophy, and its unique place in our world, creating global citizens and leaders of the future. John Hardy spoke about the school at TEDGlobal in England this past summer and many people have been, seen and reported on the fascinating and inspiring school culture that is emerging from within the magical jungle paradise. What a place! If you ever have the chance to see it in person, I highly recommend checking it out.

This is a photoset of pictures by Build Back Better on Flickr 

Einstein's Dream Come True

I remember when I was younger, the bestselling book, Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, spent a few months on our family room coffee table. It inspired many conversations with friends and family and I, a teenager at the time, was especially intrigued because its ideas were represented in such a way that I could grasp them, even if only slightly more significantly, than the ones in my high school science textbooks. Each chapter of Einstein's Dreams being a fanciful rendition of a proposed daydream which Einstein, as a young scientist himself in 1905, likely could have delved into considering his intimate contemplations with time and relativity at that time.

A memory that has stuck with me involves one of its 30 chapters, a chapter about people experiencing time differently depending on the altitude at which they live on Earth. My first interpretation was that people at higher altitudes who make a larger orbit as the earth spins on its axis, would obviously experience time more slowly. With this rationale, people living in valleys making a smaller orbit and would experience time faster than those living up high. For my own proof, I imagined a race track where 2 people, one on the inner track and one on the outer track,  set out to walk one complete lap with the finish line representing death. Who would get there first? The person on the inside, of course. To me, that meant that the people in the valleys (the inner track) would experience time more quickly and therefore live shorter lives. So you can understand my perplexed reaction when I was told that my ideas were in complete opposition to Einstein's theory of general relativity.

As my mother desperately tried to explain that the reverse of my postulation was in fact more in-line with the theory of general relativity, she used one of Einstein's Dreams to illustrate her point. In this dream (based on gravitational time dilation, which is the effect of time passing at different rates in regions where the gravitational potential if different; the lower the gravitational potential (i.e. closer to the center of a massive object), the more slowly time passes) people flock to the valleys in order to live longer lives and eventually, the valleys become crowded civilizations devoid of beauty. Meanwhile a few people, willing to trade the romance of an extended life for the serenity and peacefulness of the mountains, live happier and more contently, albeit for a shorter lifespan at the peaks. At least, that's how I remember my mother recounting the chapter; how close that is to Lightman's description is up for obvious debate. In the end, it all still made little sense to me and seemed intuitively contradictory.

Today I was tickled to stumble upon this recent article, Einstein's theory is proved - and it's bad news if you own a penthouse. Turns out that some scientists at the US National Institute of Standards & Technology have proved Einstein's predictions by placing atomic clocks at different heights and recording their lapsed differences. Their results? Well it looks like a person will age 90 billionths of a second faster (per average lifespan) for every foot above the ground in which they live. Not to be surprised by these findings, because it was never a matter of actually proving Einstein right. There's absolutely no need to do that. What's amazing is that with modern technology we can systematically prove that Einstein was right, just over a hundred years since he was daydreaming about time and space... completely unaware of what lay ahead for the world of science and technology. If he could be here now, what would he be dreaming about?

For further reading, buy the book. Alternatively, here are a couple excerpts from Random House.

Powerful Presentations - RSAnimates

RSA - 21st Century Enlightenment - could be described as a UK version of TED.  From their website:
For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress. Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.

As opposed to one big showdown event every year like TED, RSA hosts monthly themed events, each with a slightly narrower scope. Instead of talks, they have lectures. Recently in a creative twist, a group of technical illustrators created a few animations to accompany the lectures. For people who suffer from attention deficit disorder or simply are not auditory learners, this is an amazingly effective way to engage an audience for a 20 minute talk and keep people tuned into the basis of the argument or direction of the dialogue. If only someone had only done this for me during my 50 minute lectures of my undergrad degree! (and then given me the video to review and reflect on later).

These quirky and fun RSAnimates, published on the RSA website and on YouTube, quickly caught the attention of the people at TED, who highlighted a selection in their Best of the Web collection.  About  3 weeks ago, directed from the TED website, I watched the RSA Animate - The Empathic Civilisation based on a lecture by Jeremy Rifkin, and, feeling inspired by the powerfulness of the presentation technique, forwarded it off to people I know in the field of education.

The conversations that were subsequently inspired concerning how this would be a superior way to for children to actively absorb long speeches and lectures inspired to me to think a bit more about why, generally, people felt excited about this scribed presentation style. As humans, we try to differentiate our presentation of information to appeal to a wide range of learning styles and audiences. This is especially true for teachers in diverse classrooms who are tuned into the different learning styles of their students. For decades, presenters have tried to engage their audiences with visual devices and strategies such as PowerPoint or Keynote, video representations and visual enhancers framed to sequester the attention of individuals who struggle to focus, one way or another, for sustained periods of time. The evolution of TED, for example, demonstrates the progress we've made on creating powerful presentations. This particular animation style, seen in the RSAnimates, like visual cues on steroids, is an amazing example of artistry that effectively enhances a presentation.

As for the content of this particular presentation, I found it easy to follow and conventionally interesting. I can see how this could be engaging for a wide and varied audience. My test came, however, when I realized that there were other RSAnimations on topics I knew much less about and would have otherwise been disinclined to ever watch. For example, David Harvey's Crisis of Capitalism or Slavoj Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. When I watched these animations, I was able to digest and sort-out the material embedded within the lectures in an excitingly new way, an intake much more dynamic than what I experience through simply listening. Maybe this explains why I've never been motivated to listen to podcasts! My brain struggles to stay connected to just the auditory input, especially when there are visual distractions around me (fairly consistently).

 A few other RSAnimates that I found wonderfully interesting to watch include Philip Zimbardo's The Secret Powers of Time and Mathew Taylor's 21st Century Enlightenment. Hopefully you enjoy them too!

I wanted to learn about the artists involved in these productions as well as give credit and draw your attention towards them here. I discovered, disappointingly, that there isn't often reference to these artists. By simply browsing the RSA pages and/or watching a few of these videos, you won't find mention of the scribes (unless of course you are more thorough than I am and you actually watch things through to their ultimate conclusion!). At the end of the YouTube videos there you'll find a logo for Cognitive Media, who are the illustrators behind the scenes.

A teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be.

Educational scientist, Sugata Mitra, changes children's lives by allowing them to teach themselves on computers embedded in walls in impoverished areas in the world. See the website, Hole in the Wall, for more information on this amazing project.

The main idea here is that children learn best when interested. Of course. Self-directed learning and authentic inquiry describe the most fundamental way that humans learn from their experiences with the world around them. It is important to have ownership over our own learning, an investment in something that matters to us, and critical understandings are most often born out of 'figuring things out' for ourselves. This type of experiential learning empowers the learner to feel satisfaction and understanding from the experience, and therefore motivates and drives the learning cycle onwards.

It is important to note that this type of learning doesn't only happen with technology. A child can have deep learning experiences outside in nature, through social interactions and with non-technological objects in the physical environment. It is obvious, however, as we see in numerous examples around the world, across cultures and between stages of development, that technological devices are a focal point of interest and enthusiasm for children. They provide instant feedback and create an interactivity that inspires the user to dig deeper and keep learning. 

Sugata Mitra suggests, "Education is a self-organizing system where learning is an emerging phenomenon." This doesn't mean that teachers are irrelevant, or even gaining insignificance, within the system. Their effectiveness is being challenged. Learning is not something that teachers can teach children. Learning needs to happen collectively, collaboratively and with a positive outlook. A playful, supportive and humble attitude is often a teacher's best quality. This can be the driving force behind inspiring and motivating self-directed learning as well as the essential, underlying safety net used when encouraging learners to become risk-takers and step outside their comfort zones. This is when and where all the good stuff happens.