ECONOMICS, KNOWLEDGE BUILDING, AND THE NET GENERATION

Donald N. Philip

Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology

(www.ikit.org)

OISE/UT

The Current Economic Situation

239,100 jobs ‘gone for good’ (Toronto Star)

Auto Repair? More like rocket science (St. Petersburg Times)

Both of these recent headlines (Jan., 2008) underline an important trend. As we progress further into the Knowledge Age, traditional manufacturing jobs disappear and are replaced (if they are replaced) with jobs requiring a much higher skill level than before (upskilling).The challenge for education: Most of our population must now be educated to the post-secondary level through formal apprenticeships, community colleges of university courses.

Even worse …Most of the new jobs being created require innovation as a routine part of the work, partly because of an increased rate of change.Bindé (2005): “The values and practices of creativity and innovation will play a major part in knowledge societies, if only through their ability to challenge existing models in order to better meet societies' new needs. Creativity and innovation also lead to promoting new types of collaborative processes that have already proven themselves to be particularly fruitful” (p. 19, emphasis added).The challenge for education: We need to educate for a society of innovation. Our current educational system has almost no provisions for such education.

The Net Generation• About 90 million young people

• See Don Tapscott’s book (left) for a very thorough treatment of this topic

Learning characterized by:

•Non-linear learning;

•Construction and discovery learning;

•Learner centered education;

•Lifelong learning;

•Teacher as facilitator; and

•Others (omitted for reasons of time).

However …Barnes et al. (2007): N-Genners are somewhat lacking in the intellectual discipline of previous generations; that, despite their familiarity with computers, they have poor information literacy skills; and generally have short attention spans. Working with them, many

educators go for shallow rather than deep learning skills. Salaway et al. (2006): Only about a third of the current crop of students are full-blown Net Genners–a substantial group have good recreational computer skills, but lack instrumentally useful skills. As well, a trailing edge have few or no useful computer skills.Nonetheless, the N-Gen is a true phenomenon, growing, and presents challenges for the educational system.The challenge for education: N-Genners learn differently, and a substantial number of them lack the expected instrumentally useful skills that are expected in higher education.

Knowledge BuildingKnowledge building (KB) is a model of education for the Knowledge Age and the Net Generation.KB is idea-centered education, aimed at the improvement of ideas (innovation).Students work in the manner of a research community as found in universities or Knowledge Age businesses.In a KB class, students are presented with a problem of real concern in the world, and present their ideas to solve it. It is through work with their ideas that new knowledge and understandings are created.Traditional learning takes place as a by-product of this work.

Knowledge ForumIn keeping with the current trend of building software to support and augment human intelligence, Knowledge Forum (KF) has been created to support the KB process.KF creates a public space in which students can present their ideas, and evaluate and critique the ideas of others.Through this process, ideas grow, change, and improve towards more sophisticated understanding of the problem, and towards possible solutions.KF has a number of metacognitive supports, etc. to facilitate the KB process.

Assessment Tools

KF is continually evolving. Our most recent step in this evolution is the addition and refinement of a suite of analytic tools that allow the teacher and students to see inside the learning process in a new way.

This allows for new forms of formative assessment that can cause teachers and students to change their classroom behaviour.

The Current SuiteWriting measures tool;Vocabulary growth tool;Semantic analysis tool (dramatically changing as we speak);Contributions tool (new notes, responses, annotations, references, etc.);Social network tool.All of these tools analyze automatically at the click of a button, making the analyses quick and easy for teachers and students.

Example: The Social Network Analysis (SNA) Tool

Like all of our tools, data are presented visually, in this case, in the form of a map (sociogram) showing communication patterns among students.

Students (and teachers) are presented as nodes (dots) and communications among them as lines connecting them.

The SNA Tool

Teachers can quickly see who is and who is not participating effectively.

Questions?