This is an article by Kirsty Styles based on an interview she did with Ali Blackwell on technology’s role in changing how education works. Ali Blackwell is co-founder and chief technology officer at Decoded, an organisation that helps teachers and companies to understand the online world, including offering one-day coding and data courses.
It’s great that Computer Science is going to be on the UK curriculum – following Michael Gove’s decision to listen to concerns from leaders in the tech industry – but ultimately any education secretary would have listened to the campaign. It’s interesting that any thinking into how we learn has been thrown out of the window though. Banning coursework because ‘students can cheat’ is truly criminal. Coursework is leaning by doing. When you’re learning to code it takes a long time to do well and properly. There is a huge element of learning by doing and making mistakes, which requires new ways of teaching. But how do you get teachers, and legislators, to embrace new ways of teaching?
I’m really interested in the idea of the ‘flipped classroom’, essentially where you’re getting kids to use web technologies to teach themselves. Teachers are not expert in everything and you’re not able to just broadcast your knowledge from the front of the classroom anymore. Teachers simply need to facilitate the learning process using online tools built by experts in specialist fields – using platforms that channel expertise from different fields into great education experiences.
There are lots of great tools out there already, like Code Academy, a free tool to help people learn to code, and the Khan Academy, a not-for-profit which aims to provide a free education for anyone, anywhere. This really is the democratisation of education – anyone with an internet connection can log in and learn stuff. If it’s a classroom or just a screen, it could be a $50 tablet being used by people in developing world, the teacher doesn’t have to know the first thing about the topic but just facilitates using the available tools. Coding kick-started these massive online learning courses – MOOCS – and more and more have emerged following the lead of Code and Khan. Now students all over the world can get access to a great education.
Decoded is now training teachers to code by getting them to build an app over the course of a day, but there is a fear among teachers that they will never be able to teach it, that it’s too hard. But you don’t have to be a published author to teach Shakespeare. What we teach is the ‘101’ of how it all fits together, giving teachers just enough information in a day using ‘accelerated learning’, which includes hands-on, practical elements, as well as team working. We are trying to inspire teachers to want to do it, to want to teach it and to see the value of it. To understand it’s not rocket science – it’s easy, understandable, fun and creative.
We are building an online tool to support teachers in the classroom, which they can use to help students via online tutorials and giving them the ability to track progress. We help people to make that leap into the digital world – so ultimately we can say ‘you are now empowered’. This is ‘give a teacher a fishing rod’, rather than ‘give a teacher a fish’.
Educators actually need to look at the way developers work more generally and apply it to their profession. The web just by definition is about standing on the shoulders of giants – an open resource free and accessible to all, inspired by software developers. The software development industry has always innovated around ways of working – the ‘agile’ development approach, for example, which now informs how people run startups and how big business aspires to act – all came from software developers working together. Many ideas around sharing and collaboration came from software developers too.
I believe that, just as the development world has inspired other areas of education, teachers in the schools of the future will look at how young people are being taught how to code and apply that to all other subjects, from History to English.