Keynote: Andrew Thompson: Education 3.0: A framework for Change in Teaching and Assessing 21st Century Skill

The Presenter: Andrew Thompson, Former minister of Learning, Saskatchewan, Canada, now educational advisor to CISCO

Wikipedia link to him

The Gist: 

• Newspaper heading "Majority of pupils failing to master 3 Rs"
• 20Th century education shaped by Ralph Tyler's Rationale
• What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? (Defining appropriate learning objectives.)
• How can learning experiences be selected which are likely to be useful in attaining these objectives? (Introducing useful learning experiences.)
  
  
• How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction? (Organizing experiences to maximize their effect.)
• How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated? (Evaluating the process and revising the areas that were not effective.)
• Rooted in the 20th century
• How are we adapting it now?
• Trying to spread education to all
• Accountability - how to compare students and schools
• There has a lot of progress. Primary school attendance about 80% globally
• 21st century change
• Fewer children being born in Asia, in 40 years this will impact economy, less cheap labour
• Growth will need to come from higher skilled labour and technology
• Teachers are going to be even more important in producing higher quality education
• We will be 18 million teachers short by 2015! 
• The new three Rs

• Responsive Communities
• Relevant to Students
• Results Oriented
• Responsiveness: Economic and social, what skills do they need as citizens?
• Relevance: Formal --> Blended Formal?Informal. Anywhere anytime education
• Results: Acquisition model --> Application model
• The most important quality that employers are looking for are creativity and problem solving
• "Online access to content is allowing us to be answer rich but question poor"
• Web 1.0 - Information, Web 2.0 - Participation, Web 3.0 - Collaboration 
• Virtualised communities is where we will be
• Have to change classrooms to make them collaborative, interactive and engaging; need Intelligent systems for Energy management, Asset tracking, Building controls. Safety: messaging, signage surveillance.
• Change: Assessment. TIMMS and PISA
• Assessment 
• It Matters, 
• You cant improve what you cant measure 
• Poorly done. Negatively impacts resource allocation, diverts attention and distracts teachers
• Need to meet principles of coherence comprehensiveness and continuity
• US exploring competency based assessment using e-portfolios and a comparative pairing approach. But who is the judge? Just teachers? Anyone with an edu email address?
• Computer assisted assessment is getting cleverer, moving beyond multiple choice
• Learner response systems (eg ActiVote) ideal for formative assessment 

• Next century learning will have to:
• Change systems
• Change Practices
• Change outcomes
• It will all be in a collaborative outcome
• How will we do it?

My Thoughts:
Daunting! So much change to come. We will need much more education for teachers. Heck, we will need more teachers. 
We need to get tertiary education systems onboard. So much assessment is driven by the need for an entry score.