Your thoughts on the educational system and further reading
I did not expect to see so much valuable feedback on the previous post! I would like to go into more detail about it and the series I am going to write here.
I shared the post in the Buffer Slack Community to gather some feedback. And it was awesome and truly valuable:
Shortened attention spans
Alfred Lua said, that he agrees on the shortened attention span I mentioned. He read about deep work recently, which is in fact the total counterpart of short attention spans:
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.
There is a whole book about deep work and I borrowed that quote above from the product description.
Because of this, I disabled all the notifications on my mobile phone to stay away from my phone while I do some coding tasks.
This leads to what I call quality time with my phone. I unlock it every now and then to check if something happened. Leaving the badges in tact, I see within the glimpse of an eye if something happened and I can work my way down to “Notification Zero”. Maybe you want to try this on your own? Joel Gascoigne did the experiment on his own.
People who want to reach you will call you either way, so not answering your emails the minute you get them is not a bad thing after all.
Gamification
Furthermore, Alfred found that gamification idea interesting and raised the question if it influences how we think about risk and reward.
This is a pretty interesting question I did not ask myself before. I am not sure about the change of attitude towards the risks and rewards. From a childish perspective, I would say there is no risk, but a lot of reward:
Someone knows my current position? Fine, let him come over. There are no harmful people in the world, so why not meet up with a 40 year old man? He is my fan, how should he otherwise have seen my Snap on Snapchat? Let me give him an autograph. This soothes my craving for recognition.
I think you should have an alert mind, but that’s something your parents have to teach you. If you were raised as a well-protected child, you don’t know about those abusive people.
Posting something doesn’t cost anything, so there is nothing to loose (except your face, probably.) The rewards will come with Likes, Shares, Favorites, Comments, Subscribers, Followers and so on.
Paul Thomson drew my interest on RedCritter Teacher, a software which allows teachers to award student’s achievments with a virtual currency and badges — Gamification in the classroom perfected.
It allows you to hook the “scoreboard” onto a TV in the classroom, so every student can see the success every other student made over time.
Even though I like the idea, I am not totally sure if students take it for a competition to win or a team goal to achieve. Because, as soon as you show that someone else is better than the average, they are called nerds. That is at least my experience and happened to me once when I got the best mark in a class test. But still, it is an interesting approach and I will keep an eye on them.
David Hamman jumped into that conversation as well and mentioned that we should work out what we can do about those short time spans of concentration.
He mentioned three things to work on:
- Use it in education
- Find out why it is short and how to stop it becoming shorter or reverse it
- Find ways to counteract the shortening
This is pretty interesting and I could not agree more on all of those points!
Taking advantage of short attention spans is a good idea. I could think of so called lightning talks. They are basically held to give an audience a brief overview of a topic. Unfortunately, the school tries (and has) to explain more difficult things than would fit into a fifteen minute talk. Nonetheless, students can keep up for this time. Afterwards, there should be a really quick Questions and Answers session to keep everyone in the loop, letting other students explain what they understood.
David goes on with an amazing quote from Muriel Rukeyser:
Universe is made of stories.
Of course, when I am giving a talk I am not explaining in detail how I made this and that feature for a website, but I tell how a customer approached me and asked for it. Doing it this way, the audience feels empathy for the customer and can understand how I approached the solution to the issue.
David has a bunch of other awesome questions:
With education as a whole — do we know what we want kids to learn and take out of school?
I’m not sure if we need to know what students are going to take out of school. Sticking to the fact that every human being — including students — behaves and acts differently and has certain fields of interest, there should not be a really basic field of knowledge. Of course, you need to know how to read and write, you need to do some basic math for your grocery list. But is it really important to a student who is really into languages to know how to substitute integrals? Or the other way round, do you have to be able to analyze rethorical devices if you are exceptionally good at calculating Pi?
What skills are we teaching if any? What values do we want kids to take out of education?
There are a few common social skills — often referred to as soft skills — I would recommend to be taught. Due to the fact that parents are very influential in their childrens’ life, they should teach them most of them. Those who lack them might need to get some help in school. Students need to learn to have self-esteem, to speak up if something is wrong the moment it is, they should practise teamwork and flexibility where needed. There is a very, very long list on Wikipedia.
Regarding the values, I think this differs a lot from country to country and we will have a hard time figuring out which ones are the right ones. Equal rights for everyone, man or woman, disabled or not, white or black, would be the first one. Basically: Never treat someone the way you don’t want to be treated.
Knowledge — be the light and they find their way, in my opinion, instead of telling what to do and how?
This is an awesome quote and question at the same time! Let the students find their own way, but help them where they need support. Students don’t need to know everything as soon as they leave school, I learned a lot (probably more than I learned in school) after my A levels. Nobody tells you how the everyday work job is. How to make your tax return. How to be a good human.
Problem solving skills. Students need problem solving minds and skills to find a solution in a reasonable time for any (reasonably) given problem. Finding all primes is not a reasonable problem, for example.
Using Mobile
David goes on with the mobile phones (I refuse to say smart phone at times, because neither the phone nor the owner is smart more often than not.)
He points out that we (well, the parents with pubertal children, or their generation, luckily that excludes me) gave the phones to the kids without knowing what was possible back then and what is possible right now.
We had no experience and no interest in getting any better with the current hardware because we knew what we could do with it and that was sufficient.
Kids had an affinity to leverage the smartphones and soon, everyone had an iPhone or some other device to play Doodle Jump or any other game.
Was it a good choice? Is every change an improvement?
Handing smartphones to children was a very bad choice. Due to the fact that they didn’t know how to use it properly, they are addicted to it. Back in the days when TV was the addiction, the times you could watch were very limited. With the TV it was easy: There was one remote and if you took it, there was no chance to get the TV back on or switch channels.
Nowadays, the children have smartphones in their pockets. And if they want to keep it away from you they will. Same for their rooms. They will be able to keep it away from you no matter what you do.
The problem is rather that we allowed it in the first place. Handing out mobile devices was our choice. And it is super simple to say “Go and play with your phone.” instead of “Let us play with your LEGO bricks or play some football.”
It is all about your time. It is too precious for you to spend it with your feisty offspring.
David linked an extraordinary Medium post regarding this and I wanted to share it with you as well: “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds — from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist” by Tristan Harris.
A shift in work culture
Paul also mentioned the part about the changed work culture featuring more remote workers and things happening asynchronously. And he linked me a PDF file called “Stop Stealing Dreams” by Seth Godin.
Right after the preface, I had to stop. It is the most awesome preface I ever read. And I think I will end this post with a quote from it:
Dedicated to every teacher who cares enough to change the system, and to every student brave enough to stand up and speak up. — Seth Godin
