Today, December 3, 2013, in recognition of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) is launching the “Lives Without Limits” campaign to promote the importance of including persons with disabilities in international exchange programs. The includes stories and features video testimonials from alumni and current students.
President Obama has made disability rights a core part of U.S. foreign policy. The partners of the Connect All Schools Consortium are committed to making all of their virtual and physical exchange programs inclusive and accessible. Join us this month and share stories #WithoutLimits!
Digital Promise’s Karen Cator concludes her thoughtful LinkedIn post, “Education is Having Its Internet Moment,” with the question, “Are we ready?” The fair answer for education systems worldwide is, “no, but we are working on it,” and that is one of the purposes of this October’s Connected Educators Month. Since the publication of the National Educational Technology Plan by Cator’s team at the Office of Education Technology at the U.S. Department of Education in 2010, connected education has gained prominence and advocates across all levels of education. In the past few months, the practice of “anytime, anywhere” teaching and learning has accelerated. More than just having its Internet moment, education is having its “connected moment.”
As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — expanding upon Malala Yousafzai’s UN speech — made clear in August at the USAID Education Summit, “If we want both justice and peace, then we must work for education.” Secretary Duncan’s speech, arguably the best speech of his term in office, laid out an inspiring vision of what education can accomplish. A few days later, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision to connect everyoneto the Internet. These visions recognize connected teaching and learning as a powerful and effective development strategy, especially for marginalized urban and rural youth, youth with special needs, and women and girls.
Our country is not ready for Secretary Duncan’s or Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, but the Connect All Schools Consortium and others are working toward the goal of meaningful connected education for youth worldwide. New platforms and social media channels are connecting teachers and students worldwide in creative ways at increasingly huge numbers. We still need much more investment in our country’s international exchange programs, global awareness curriculum developers, and cross-cultural professional development providers. Disappointingly, Federal funding for international training and education has been cut by 41% in the past four years. While private sector investment in education’s connected moment is crucial, this investment is much more effective when leveraged with local, state, and Federal government investment. If we want justice and peace, we need connected education to be funded as a top national security issue.
Connected education also needs to be represented in the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core have no mention of learning about the world (global competencies), interacting with the world (global collaboration), or working with peers to address justice and peace (global citizenship). While the Common Core are not curricula, the Standards do reflect what we think are important for our next generation to learn; In short, our values. As standards, the Common Core are adequate, but as a roadmap for what American education can contribute to justice and peace, the Common Core come up short.
The good news is that 9 out of 10 students want more world affairs, foreign language, and international education in their classrooms. These students know future employment and tackling global issues like climate change, require global competencies, language skills, and connections with peers abroad. These students want to make the world a safer, more prosperous, and more hopeful place. Let’s follow their lead, connect, and embrace this transformational moment in education together.
Team Antenna in Lajan Village, Kurdistan, Iraq, cheer a green light on their modem! The group is participating in Touchable Earth, the first digital world book for kids where kids in each place explain all the facts about it. The Christopher Stevens Youth Network will support efforts like this in 20 countries.
One day, the “globally connected classroom” will simply be known as “the classroom.”
January 18th is Internet Freedom Day, and we’re celebrating the Connect All Schools Consortium. The Consortium is a leading the effort to move our country closer to the goal that every school in the United States have global connections so that every student have an international experience to gain critical skills, knowledge, and hope for a prosperous and secure future.
The power of the Internet is in its human connective potential. By connecting us as global citizens and local community members, we learn better. We open ourselves to new ideas and in turn shape the thinking of others through diverse input. We and our students become empowered to apply learning within our societies and in the global community in ways that can impact powerfully and positively on lives and environments.
In short, the Internet has the potential for creating an education of hope.
If we want to nurture a critical mass of young people who trust and respect each other, we need an Internet that fosters freedom of expression. If we want to empower future leaders to work together towards a healthier and safer planet, we need an Internet that supports an open and fair exchange of ideas. If we want our efforts to promote peace and conflict resolution through programs like the new Christopher Stevens Youth Network,we need an Internet that encourages empathy, meaningful collaboration, and an education of hope.
If we want every young person to believe that his or her voice matters, we need Internet freedom.
This month, the International Affairs Office of the US Department of Education released its new strategy document, Succeeding Globally Through International Education and Engagement, which:
… outlines the U.S. Department of Education’s International Strategy for 2012-16 and affirms the Department’s commitment to preparing today’s youth, and our country more broadly, for a globalized world, and to engaging with the international community to improve education. It is fully integrated with the Department’s domestic agenda and designed to simultaneously attain two strategic goals: strengthen U.S. education and advance our nation’s international priorities.
The strategy document lists four objectives:
Objective 1: Increase the global competencies of all U.S. students, including those from traditionally disadvantaged groups;
Objective 2: Enhance federal, state and local education policy and practice applying lessons learned from other countries to drive excellence and innovation in the U.S. and abroad;
Objective 3: Advance U.S. international priorities in strategically important countries through active education diplomacy; and
Objective 4: Develop, monitor and continuously improve ED’s international activities in an integrated and coordinated manner.
The concept of “education diplomacy” is one that the Connect All Schools consortium has championed at the classroom level. So, too, the idea that internationalizing US classrooms advances our national security, while strengthening our overall education system. The strategy document, however, does not mention the role that technology can play in attaining the Department’s two strategic goals. It’s a conspicuous oversight considering that US Department of Education’s 2010 National Educational Technology Plan highlighted that teaching and learning was becoming increasingly global, networked, personalized and mobile, and called for more investment in preparing administrators, teachers, students and parents for globally networked, personalized “anytime, anywhere” learning. The Department also highlighted the role of technology in internationalizing education in August during Connected Educators Month. In fact, the US Department of Education launched International Education Week in 2000 with the US Department of State specifically to promote “the wise use of technology internationally.”
It is difficult to conceive of how the US Department of Education will effectively support education diplomacy—which it calls a “core element” of its work—without using modern technologies or supporting educators to use modern technologies effectively in their classrooms. For example, the strategy document calls for increasing international exchanges, but it makes no mention of virtual exchanges, which are increasingly seen as a powerful new tool to scale diplomacy and cross-cultural understanding, especially for traditionally disadvantaged groups and children too young to travel abroad.
Still, the strategic document is another step forward from the US government in advancing the idea that ALL young people should experience international collaboration as part of their education. And, the commitment by the US Department of Education to “walk the talk” and collaborate closely with their peers globally is important. Why is both classroom and government-level education diplomacy critical? Simply,
… so that we have a nation, and a world, that is informed, engaged, and prepared to deal effectively with the global challenges that will face us.
Two global education champions, Asia Society’s Tony Jackson and Soliya’s Lucas Welch, have published blog posts this week that go to heart of the mission of our Connect All Schools consortium. Both posts are stark reminders of how little US and Muslim relations have changed since September 11, 2001. Both posts, however, are also optimistic in how much more capable we are—with new tools, resources, and knowledge—to positively affect these relations.
Both Tony and Lucas zoom in on the recent Libya tragedy and importance of young Americans understanding their peers worldwide. In his Education Week blog, Tony focuses on empowerment and taking action in our communities:
The most promising approach to changing this is to make the need known. Students, parents, businesses, communities, national security, and every other stakeholder should identify education as a primary means to greater global competency, security, and stability. Specific focus is needed on integrating into the curriculum, knowledge and skills that further understanding of the world and how it works. Find models that work for your communities. Demand that decisions and investments are aligned toward goals that include global competence.
Let’s take what we know about the world today and create opportunities for the next generation to make it better.
On Huffington Post Religion, Lucas begins his eloquent post on the death of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens with a focus on building respectful long-term relationships using new technologies. He asks:
Chris has shown us the power of relationships, but we need to translate that power into the age of social media. We need to determine how we can leverage the power of these new technologies to emulate the way he interacted but at a vastly larger scale, so the hateful bile of fringe Americans is not what defines us, and so our actions as a society are more informed by a respect and understanding for the people they affect.
What if all of the Arab youth who have taken to the streets in recent years had an American in their life who listened to them, showed respect for their values and cared about their rights? And what if our next generation of policy-makers, journalists, and religious leaders had Arab friends and worked to ensure our policies and pronouncements genuinely lived up to the ideals we espouse for them?
The Connect All Schools consortium was formed to assist schools build the relationships and global competencies Tony and Lucas write about in their posts. Since 9/11, consortium members have led the development of hundreds of new programs and projects to foster strong relations between the West and the Islamic world, efforts that focused on building trust, mutual understanding, and a commitment to shared goals.
In the weeks following 9/11, organizations and relief programs with strong global communities—People-to-People International, NetAid, Sister Cities International—joined with programs using new technologies to connect classrooms worldwide—UN CyberSchoolbus, ePals, Global Schoolnet Foundation, Worldwise Schools, iEARN, Schools Online, World Links, Global Nomads—stepped up their support of virtual and physical exchanges with countries with Muslim populations. A priority was helping primary school-aged youth to share their stories and to take action at a traumatic time of national shock and mourning.
These school-to-school programs were widely publicized and generally praised at time when post-9/11 anxieties and the hangover from the dot.com bust led to a number of polls that showed Americans engaging in more online communities, but feeling both ambivalent by online interaction and disliked by their peers in the Muslim world. George Packer writing in the April 2002 New York Times Magazine captured the mood:
The globalization of the media was supposed to knit the world together. The more information we receive about one another, the thinking went, the more international understanding will prevail. An injustice in Thailand will be instantly known and ultimately remedied by people in London or San Francisco. The father of worldwide television, Ted Turner, once said, “My main concern is to be a benefit to the world, to build up a global communications system that helps humanity come together.” These days we are living with the results – a young man in Somalia watches the attack on the south tower live, while Americans can hear more, and sooner, about Kandahar or Ramallah than the county next to theirs.
But this technological togetherness has not created the human bonds that were promised. In some ways, global satellite TV and Internet access have actually made the world a less understanding, less tolerant place. What the media provide is superficial familiarity – images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn’t just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people’s lives remain parochial – in the Arab world and everywhere else, including here.
… But at this halfway point between mutual ignorance and true understanding, the ”global village” actually resembles a real one – in my experience, not the utopian community promised by the boosters of globalization but a parochial place of manifold suspicions, rumors, resentments and half-truths. If the world seems to be growing more, rather than less, nasty these days, it might have something to do with the images all of us now carry around in our heads.
Contrary to Packer’s assertion, however, the images of that young globally-connected children were now carrying around in their heads were images of hope and caring, in the forms of drawings, quilts, and photographs that were shared by tens of thousands of their peers. Furthermore, new curriculum materials were developed and professional development workshops and courses were provided for thousands in the US and countries with significant Muslim populations on how to integrate international collaboration in their classrooms. Online interaction and collaborative publications flourished, and US educators and students began to visit Muslim countries for the first time. Schools in the US began to teach Arabic.
At a time before social media fundraising platforms, US students used new technologies to mobilize their communities to provide humanitarian relief to Afghan schools and Iran earthquake victims. The World Wide Web was an important tool to both share information and enable teachers and students in the US and countries with significant Muslim populations to identify programs fitting their interests and needs. The 9/11 attacks were the most intensive online event in history, and organizations like iEARN became key “exchange 2.0” resources to which teachers turned for information on how to link with and learn about countries with Muslim populations. The growth of connected classrooms hasn’t slowed since.
The success of this burst of post-9/11 classroom connections was amplified a year later when Congress introduced legislation to support programs focused on traditional high-school and university-level exchanges and language programs. In early 2002, Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced The Cultural Bridges Act to fund new exchange programs with countries with significant Muslim populations. The bill died, but informed subsequent legislation that funded the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Program, the Global Connections and Exchange Program, the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) and the Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP), which focused on “critical languages” such as Arabic, but also Urdu, Farsi, Hindi, Pashto, Russian, Chinese, and Korean.
Today, the influence of all these post-9/11 programs continues to be felt at the White House and the Departments of Education and State. In April 2011, at the first Exchange 2.0 Summit, former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale remarked:
We need to explore more ways to strategically and consistently incorporate connective technologies into our exchange efforts. As President Obama has said, we need to “create a new online network, so a young person in Kansas can communicate instantly with a young person in Cairo.” With the help of many of you in this room, we have already started down this path at the State Department. Our Global Connections and Exchange Program has been in operation for ten years. This landmark public diplomacy initiative connects students who may never share a lunch table or walk home together. But with online classrooms, there are no limits on sharing their ideas. Together, they learn to be positive forces for change in their local communities.
Last week, eleven years after 9/11, Newsweek (and Twitter) reminded us that we live in a world of Muslim Rage. In that eleven years, though, much has changed. The number of organizations connecting classrooms worldwide has increased ten-fold, as has international funding for educational technology. Mobile learning, open data, cloud computing, social media, MOOCs, and other tools and resources are evolving and changing teaching and learning at a remarkable pace in both developed and developing countries. More than 6,000 YES program scholars from 40 predominately Muslim countries have returned from a year of high school in the United States, and they are inspired to serve their communities. Thousands more US teachers and high-school and university students have traveled, studied, and lived abroad in these same 40 countries, and they too are inspired to make a positive difference in their communities.
Still, Lucas explains, we need to do more:
Exchange programs are the primary way we have traditionally sought to foster these relationships. But in our hyper-connected world, vastly more people can directly influence relations between our societies, and the costs and logistics of study abroad make it inaccessible or unappealing to all but a select few. (Approximately 2 percent of American students in higher education study abroad, for example, and less than 2 percent of those go to the Middle East and North Africa.) Even if we were to vastly increase the number of students studying abroad, which we should, it would still only be a drop in the bucket of public opinion.
Over the last year, a coalition of organizations has formed to advance exchange 2.0 – a next-step in international education that leverages the power of new technologies to vastly increase the number of youth who have a profound cross-cultural experience as part of their education. Each of these organizations … has developed “virtual exchange” programs, which are integrated into curriculum and have demonstrated significant impact cultivating relationships and developing cross-cultural respect and understanding. Based on the cost-efficiency of these programs, it is conceivable that such programs could become a fundamental part of education in the coming decade and literally millions of new relationships could be fostered across the divides where they are most needed.
It may seem from the protests and violence of the past two weeks that there has been little progress in increasing trust and respect among people in the US and in predominately Muslim countries. But we have made progress, and we will continue to do so, led by young people using new tools and resources to connect us closely and help us build enduring relationships, as the examples above show.
Connect All Schools consortium partner World Savvy released its 2012 Global Competency Survey yesterday, and the results are both timely (there is a Libya question) and contradictory to the assumption that young people in the United States are not interested in learning about the world. Rather, young Americans are keenly aware that it is both in their best interest and in the national interest that they understand global issues, engage with their peers worldwide, and gain the skills needed to find employment in today’s global economy. For decades, the lack of global competence of US youth has been an easy mark for ridicule. A bevy of books, reports, academic studies, and surveys from National Geographicand others have assumed (and alleged) that US students are not only globally unaware, but also are not interested in learning about the world. Yesterday’s survey results, for example, show that after nearly eleven years of the United States at war, only 28% of US high school graduates can identify in which region Afghanistan is located. Disinterest seems a reasonable assumption. The World Savvy survey results, however, contradict this assumption:
The young adults polled in this survey overwhelmingly report an interest in, and professional need for, global literacy in their lives today. In fact:
86% of those surveyed say they agree that a solid foundation in world history and events is crucial to coming up with solutions to the problems in the world today.
Nearly 9 in 10 believe that developments abroad can have significant implications on the US economy.
79% say that it is important in today’s world to be comfortable interacting with people of different cultural backgrounds (on par with the perceived importance of writing skills (78%), technical skills (76%), and math skills (77%)).
80% believe that jobs are becoming increasingly international in nature.
Yet, the gap between what youth seek for their education and what they receive remains wide:
While the vast majority of young adults see the importance of global literacy, only 12% of respondents say that they “agree completely” that in their 6th-12th grade education they received instruction that helps them to understand the roots of global issues that affect their lives today.
… [T]he majority of the young adults surveyed (63%) indicated that they did not discuss world events in their high school classes.
So why don’t American adults prioritize global competence as a valued outcome of an education as much as American youth do? If the national security argument is so strong for youth gaining global competencies, why do policy-makers demur encouraging classrooms to connect globally? If the economic casefor youth gaining modern job skills is that compelling, why don’t philanthropists, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and the media increase coverage and support for international issues, cross-cultural exchanges, and new global education tools and resources? The next American generation, perceiving what is in our national interest, are asking us to help them engage with their peers worldwide. It is time to listen to what youth want to learn, rather than to criticize them for what they haven’t learned. It is time for all sectors of our society to help our schools to enable all of our youth to experience international collaboration as part of their education.
As a kick-off to the badge competition at last week’s DML Conference, UC Irvine Professor Mimi Ito and her team launched the Connected Learning research initiative with a snazzy infographic, a video, and a provocative Ignite talk, where Professor Ito exclaimed that connected learners are “the 1%.” With a nod to Occupy movement, the research network aims to address:
“… this historical moment where we see the rise of social media, the Internet, and a growing disjuncture between formal and informal learning. We suggest a new paradigm for considering the promise of sociality and media and learning, centering on hybrid learning networks which support interest-driven learning, cutting across school, home, after-school, and peer cultures.”
Like many of the thoughtful participants at conference, the MacArthur Foundation-supported Connected Learning team is asking important questions around peer and multi-generational learning, civic engagement and social justice, including:
How effective can the exploding sector of open learning and peer-to-peer learning be?
In what ways can digital media boost learning for marginalized communities?
Can social media and digital technology improve the impact of after-school programs, especially for disadvantaged youth?
Does learning that is connected to a learner’s interest help produce young people who are more civically engaged and more active 21st-century citizens?
For those of us who have occupied (small “o”) the “connected learning” space for a couple of decades, it is good to see a major foundation fund this research and give classroom civic engagement and social justice issues a higher profile. Conspicuous by its absence, however, is any reference to teachers and students connecting with their peers worldwide. In fact, global classroom collaboration researchers and practitioners in many countries for many years have asked and answered many of these same questions: Does global classroom collaboration boost learning for marginalized communities? Yes. Support peer-to-peer learning? Yes. After-school programs? Disadvantaged youth? Civic Engagement? Yes, yes, and yes.
We hope that the omission of globally connected learning in its launch is not an oversight, and will be an area the team will move into soon. Other teams have found globally connected learning a rich subject to study. Under the guidance of Professor Margaret Riel, for example, graduate students at Pepperdine University, for example, have used Learning Circles each year since 2002 to support and organize action research as part of their online Masters of Arts degree program in Educational Technology. If Professor Ito’s team intends to look at the many superb global classroom programs run by the Connect All Schools partners, it will undoubtedly benefit the research. To launch this research network without any reference to the impact or increasing capabilities of classrooms to connect worldwide seems to miss a key aspect of connected learning.
Furthermore, to launch this research network about connect learning without connecting with research teams in Tunisia, Egypt, Uruguay, Australia, India, Iran, Korea, Russia, Kenya and other countries where social media and digital technology is having a significant impact on teaching and learning, seems a missed opportunity, especially since most mobile learning innovation is happening outside the United States. To study Occupy it makes sense to study it alongside Arab Spring. Why not research the impact of social media and youth civic engagement in collaboration with Tunisian and Egyptian education researchers? Or why not work with Korean researchers to examine if games can used to address social issues? When it comes to connected learning, it makes sense to research with the world, not just about it.
The goal of Connect All Schools is to give every US school the opportunity to connect with an international partner by 2016. We’ve made the case that globally connected learning is both a national security issue and good foreign policy strategy. Connecting classrooms globally is also an issue of social justice. We invite the Connected Learning team to learn more about how relevant, engaging, and empowering globally connected learning is for children around the world.
Similar to how the international development field obsesses about “sustainability,” the educational technology field obsesses about “scalability.” When these two fields intersect—exemplified by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Sugata Mitra, and now m-learning—big questions are asked.
Just as The Walking Dead is not really about Zombies, the recent post by @mathalicious equating Khan Academy with McDonalds is not really about the perils of video instruction. It’s about the fear of scaling teaching and learning, and what happens when we disregard the important bond between student and teacher. Why on earth do we want tech messing with this bond? Isn’t teaching and learning just a too big and complex and intimate human endeavor to try to scale?
Although @mathalicious raises some good points, the following worry seems far-fetched:
“On another level, though, Khan Academy and its donors may preclude better products from coming along: products built by experts that actually can improve how students learn. And ultimately, this may be the most dangerous thing about Khan Academy: not that it exists, but that it’s the only thing that does.”
Leaving aside the issue of what defines an “expert” and the idea that everyone in a community—even coders!—can and should support teachers and students improve teaching and learning, Khan Academy is not going to preclude new products from coming along, nor is it the only thing that exists. In fact, one of the exciting things about Khan Academy is not Khan Academy, it’s MathTrain TV, and what’s to come in the next few years as youth worldwide create, teach and learn with their peers, with and without their teachers, schools or Khan Academy.
The big question of sustainability and scalability in teaching and learning is, therefore, not about which platform or technology exists; it’s about how youth worldwide are going to work collaboratively to address critical global concerns to help future generations be healthier, better educated, and more prosperous. Effective global collaboration requires care and nurturing by teachers who commit to build trust and respect among their students. It’s a long-term investment that so far has been resistant to scaling.
Maybe meaningful cross-cultural collaboration is too big to scale, but we’re expecting our Connect All Schools consortium and other national partners and policy-makers to change that. President Obama remarked last week, “We’re going to keep on trying to engage as many countries as possible, mainly because it’s good for our national security.” It’s good for our teachers and students, too, and new technologies can play a role in supporting this engagement.
We shouldn’t expect an e-mail message or a Skype call to immediately transform teaching and learning overnight. So, let’s give US classrooms plenty of opportunities and encouragement to reach to partners around the world. Connections between classrooms may take years to develop, and may affect teachers and students differently over time. This will include a changing relationship between teacher and student. We shouldn’t fear this new world of globally connected, mobile, social, “anytime, anywhere” teaching and learning. Zombies, on the other hand, …
Today, December 3, 2013, in recognition of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) is launching the “Lives Without Limits” campaign to promote the importance of including persons with disabilities in international exchange programs. The includes stories and features video testimonials from alumni and current students.
Connect All Schools Blog 