Thursday, November 21, 2013

C4T #4

Summary #1
The title of this post is The Future of (Less) Work. Mr. Fisch starts by telling everyone that he is not an expert when it comes to economics, he doesn't think anyone really is. He then goes on to talk about the very slow recovery from the Great Recession. Unemployment is still high, but corporate profits are doing very well.
Karl Fisch.
A reason Mr. Fisch gives for this is the nature of work changing. Technology, in the form of automation and connectedness, makes it very profitable to employ only a select few. We are in a transition state when it comes to technology. An example given is the “self-driving car.” Mr. Fisch talks about how people would be very skeptical at first, but eventually they would adjust to it. This would make the unemployment rates sky rock. The use of self-driving cars would exclude the need for truck, bus, train, taxi, and other transportation drivers. This would also cause for more unemployment in many other areas, although creating a few job opportunities. He also explains that he fears for the education of the upcoming youth. If the work force is mainly left up to technology then what will they need to know? One thing Mr. Fisch says we need to know how to do is create. “Whether that is creative in the sense of ideas, creative in the sense of solutions to problems, or creative in the sense of making things, I think it’s going to be an integral part of the future of work.” He then closes by asking, “If the future of work is really "less" work and perhaps more "creating", then what should K-12 education look like?”

Comment#1
My name is Demetrius Hamner. I am a student in EDM310 at the University of South Alabama located in Mobile, Alabama. I have been assigned to comment on your blog now and again later in the month. As a student I have first-hand experience of the rapid changes in the classroom. I also agree that most students are not able to be completely creative in the classroom. This would take time for the school systems to be able to incorporate worldwide. As far as the work force I am excited to see what that would look like 10 years from now. Everything is changing all over, but all we can do is adapt to try and keep up.

Summary #2 The title of this post is Modern Learning. Mr. Fisch starts off by telling us that when discussing the future of k-12 education with a few friends they all came back to the same idea “modern learning/learners.” He then returned to his school to further discuss a presentation he did called “Do Better Things.” Many that were a part of that conversation wanted to put it into action. After meeting again Mr. Fisch did another short presentation with modern learning/learners as a jump off point. The presentation was embedded but it wasn't as useful without what he said along with it.
A timeline with stick peeople showing the technology students have.
He then goes into a deeper discussion of slide 15. This slide visually showed the changes of modern learning in a timeline. Their program, Connected Learners, had been recently expanded. Now the entire freshmen class would have a laptop and each year another class until the entire student body had one. The timeline on this slide reinforced the idea that the freshmen of the class 2020 would know nothing about the world before Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone. These students would have been using laptops since the age of 7. A few cultural references were used to enhance this ideal class. Some of those references were: 9-11 has always been the twin towers, they’ve always known what a blog and a wiki are, and “Like” has always been something you did on facebook.” Mr. Fisch then closes by explaining that a challenge educators, parents and citizens face is that no one can grasp the concept of what learning looks like today. Learning and schools must be put in a modern context, but that would be nowhere near what we are used to.

Comment #2 This is a very interesting post. The technology that today's students are exposed to is amazing and with that being said the way they learn has changed. Modern today and modern 10 years ago are very much different. The more technology that kids are exposed to the more they learn, but in a very different way. We all have to adapt to these changes in order to further educate our students. This will only lead to more questions like "How?" "What do we use?"

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