The fourth industrial revolution
How do you educate students for the future when technology develops faster than you can teach it? Education reporter Adele Redmond reports from an international conference grappling with an accelerating pace of chance in the classroom.
Tim Muir could program a micro:bit faster than the other teachers in the room. He’d already taught himself the software required but for most, this was their first time programming the credit card-sized ‘‘baby computer’’ hardware.
‘‘I’m a P.E teacher so I never thought I would be doing this kind of stuff,’’ Muir said, attaching a motor to the device.
As the head of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at St Thomas of Canterbury College, Muir would like to use the micro:bit in class, to have students create solutions to real-world problems with them. Recent trials of a ‘‘micro:bit curriculum’’ prompted a 38 per cent increase in girls learning how to code, and students as young as 10 can program them to provide security systems and traffic controls, among other uses.
But he said there were other things to consider: ‘‘It’s like, do you get one for each kid or do you get them for a class of 30? We already ask them to bring their own device.’’
Equity issues were front of mind at the Microsoft Education Exchange, an annual international event held in Singapore last month, especially because some countries’ schools worked with so little. One South African teacher had 53 students sharing a single computer; Richard Appiah Akoto, of Ghana, taught his class computer programmes by drawing them on a blackboard.
More than 300 delegates from 91 countries, including 11 Kiwi teachers, grappled with the challenges of preparing themselves and their students for the ‘‘fourth industrial revolution’’, an increasingly interconnected, cloud-based system in which technology develops faster than people can be taught to use it.
‘‘There’s always one kid in your class who knows more than you do,’’ Methven Primary School teacher Sue Furndorfler said.
Today’s schoolchildren are ‘‘phygital’’, unable or unwilling to draw distinctions between physical and digital realms, conference-goers heard. Being tech-literate was no longer sufficient: students needed to be tech-creative, able to mould technology to their needs and those of the global economy.
An IDC study commissioned by Microsoft has predicted digital products and services will account for 55 per cent of New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2021 – last year they were worth just 6 per cent.
In the Asia-Pacific, there is already a 48 per cent gap between demand for, and the available supply of, tech skills in the workforce. About 26 per cent of the region’s jobs will be outsourced or automated in the next four years, the study said, with the drop offset by nearly as many new jobs.
Roughly two-thirds of students entering primary school this year will work jobs that do not exist yet, so the the ability of countries like New Zealand to respond as the digital revolution accelerates depends on its future ‘‘skills makeup,’’ according to Microsoft executives at the conference.
‘‘Learning the tools is becoming increasingly secondary,’’ Microsoft’s vice-president of education Anthony Salcito said.
‘‘It’s really not about technology ... It’s about thinking differently about how you structure yourself as an educator. You have got to embrace your role changing.’’
Teachers needed to shift their thinking from teaching computer skills to computational thinking, he said. Schools could give children all the tablets and e-readers in the world but ‘‘that’s not nearly enough and it’s the wrong way to focus’’.
Salcito said tomorrow’s graduates would be tasked with using quantum computing methods to solve multinational quandaries like global warming, sustainable mass food production and antibiotic resistance.
‘‘These are big challenges and, frankly, the computing power we have is not sufficient.’’
Entrepreneurial mindset
Nick O’Donnell, a policy director for professional networking website LinkedIn, said the mostprized ‘‘hard skills’’ among employers were cloud computing, statistical analysis, and data mining. However, ‘‘soft skills’’ like leadership, communication, and time management were equally valued. ‘‘I suspect when you add these together you get an entrepreneurial mindset,’’ he said.
But Christopher Clague, managing director of The Economist’s intelligence unit, said few were willing to undertake the training to gain those hard skills. Multinational surveys by the organisation found people needed to spend three to four hours a week on activities like coding to see results.
While most were willing to commit to one or two hours’ training a week, one in five respondents didn’t want to take that on. ‘‘That’s a big red flag,’’ Clague said.
Singapore feels that disparity acutely. While its education system is often considered worldleading, producing top-of-the-table academic results and bilingual children, the average age of a Singaporean worker is 43.
With a population of 5.6 million and no natural resources, ‘‘we often say our only resource is our people,’’ said Chan Lee Mun, the chief skills officer of SkillsFuture, a government authority tasked with preparing its workforce for a tech-based economy – and the lifelong commitment to education it requires.
‘‘For Singapore, being a very small and open economy, this means we have to constantly find new niches and new business models.’’
Much like New Zealand, the first-world island nation has invested heavily in education. Rather than fees-free tertiary study, SkillsFuture offers earnwhile-you-learn programmes and a $500 training credit to all Singaporeans over 25.
Soo Joo Gong, the organisation’s chief futurist, said she was ‘‘quite skeptical when my deputy prime ministers said ‘give everyone $500’’’ in 2016, but 47 per cent of eligible citizens have already accepted the offer.
She believed the ‘‘intel about what is needed in your industry’’ was just as valuable to workers as the funding.
‘‘It’s about what we can do as an ecosystem to bring supply and demand together. Engage businesses, come together and decide what you can do.’’
Technology and society
Thoughts about the wider economy are often far from the classroom.
Teachers spoke about lacking confidence with technology – not knowing if they had, or could impart, the right skills – and of a generation fluent in social media, but not necessarily software design.
They wanted to students to be unafraid of failure but needed to accept that failure would be part of their learning as well, according to presenters at the conference.
Molly Zielezinski, a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s graduate school of education, said attempts to strike a balance between embedding technology in education and addressing its effects on our socialisation were troubled by the personal tech bubbles we operate in.
‘‘The truth is we use our devices countless times every day,’’ she said. ‘‘More often than not we have our privacy blinders up.’’
A former teacher, Zielezinski said unspoken rules guiding how teenagers in particular use technology meant positive experiences went uncelebrated, and negative ones uncorrected.
Most of the convention’s attendees exhibited at least five of 12 symptoms in a test of technology addiction: Using your phone while driving, feeling anxious when separated from your device, and forgetting what you picked up your phone to do should be reminders to ‘‘double check your purpose’’, Zielezinski said.
She said children needed change if they refused to get off their phone, couldn’t hear people talking to them while using a device, or exhibited compulsive behaviour such as excessive selfies or deleting Facebook posts that don’t get enough ‘likes’.
Microsoft vice president Salcito said teachers and tech developers needed to ‘‘understand how students are feeling’’.
‘‘[Technology] opens up the global world to students and that brings some bad stuff. It creates risks like cyberbullying so we have got to have students who understand and are sensitive to that.’’
Opaheke School associate principal Nikkie Laing said the New Zealand schools’ curriculum gave teachers more opportunity to respond to students’ growing demands to ‘‘rewind and revisit’’ lessons, both in and outside of class. She recounted meeting a Russian teacher who delivered the same lesson on the same day each year because she wasn’t permitted to teach anything else. ‘‘She’s going to have to be much more innovative than me,’’ Laing said.
She believed technology was an ‘‘amplifier’’ that make good teaching better and bad teaching worse. While she and many of her colleagues had much to learn, Laing said connections like those made in Singapore would continue to support her. ‘‘You don’t know what you don’t know but for me that’s only a tweet away.’’
‘‘There’s always one kid in your class who knows more than you do.’’
Methven Primary School teacher Sue Furndorfler