Reading – “Disruptive Innovation” by Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth)

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I was just about able to keep up with the recent Learning Without Frontiersconference this week through Twitter and the LiveStream video: many thanks to everyone involved in the organising of this which made this possible.

I have just read Steve Wheeler’s blog post about the presentation given by Lord Puttnam which Steve titled “Disruptive Innovation” – please read it in full on Steve’s blog – http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/. I would draw you to the whole post, as well as this passage;

“Children today need new skills, he [Lord Puttnam] argued – skills that we didn’t need when we were in school. But because the world has changed, we are now needing to think about how different the world will look like when the children of today leave school and start work. His stark warning was that if we in this country don’t get it right, and marry education and technology effectively to equip our young people to be competitive, then the rest of the world – those countries who have been bolder, and have taken the risks – will shed no tears. Imagine a world in which we can devise entirely new ways of assessment, experiencing new things and acquiring new skills he asked. Lord Puttnam’s message was a polar opposite to the earlier, less well received (and I put it mildly) presentation by Government advisor Katherine Birbalsingh, who called for a return to the Victorian values of privately funded schools such as Eton.”

The whole post is a good read and should be enough for those of us in education, whatever our role, to open our eyes to see what is out there … if we’re saying we’re preparing graduates for jobs that don’t yet exist, why are we using teaching strategies based in the past, not present (and certainly not future)? In the competitive market of Higher Education in the UK (about to get even more competitive thanks to the funding cuts?) the Institution that can produce graduates capable of working well in the new workplace then shouldn’t we all be innovating and pushing the boundaries of accepted teaching?

Steve concludes his post by saying that Lord Puttnam’s;

“… final comment was this: Getting education right is the most important priority for all of us. It’s the whole ball of wax. No state education system will be any use, unless it trains and sustains good teachers. Teacher education in a digital age, using the best and latest technologies is a must”