Educational Origami

Ian Jukes sent me this article and I must admit I groaned when I read it. Aside from the bias and in my opinion sensationalism added to the article to make for “better reading”, this article paints only half the picture.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080791/Dimming-How-brainpower-todays-14-year-olds-slipped-radically-just-generation.html

I can not refute the findings as I do not have the research to look at, but I can question the perspective that the research has taken. I can also question the relevance too.

The researchers tested 800 students 13 and 14  year olds and compares them to a 1976 test. They conclude that the students “intelligence” is on a par with 12 years olds in the 1970’s and that this is a result of games and television. They comment too, that higher level thinking slumped dramatically.

Apparently, the average student of today’s cohort is “dimming down” compared to his or her 1970 peer. This is not a fair perspective of the our students inhabit compared to their 1970’s peers, because the world they live in is so drasticlly different. I would challenge the 14 year olds of 1976 to do what the 14 years old of today can do in terms of media, computers etc. The 14 year olds in 1976 are now 46.

Lets have a brief look at 1976 in terms of computers and technology. The computer history museum notes these as the key points for this year.

• The computers of the day were the Z80 and the Apple 1(Apple sold 200 of these before it released the apple II)
• The first Cray super computer was produced
• The queen sends her first email

Lets look at the world of our 14 year olds.

• I went to the World Meters site for computers it measures the number of computers sold this year According to their sales clock the have been 236 MILLION computers sold this year
• by the of 2008 there will be 1 billion computers in the world.
• They thrive in a world where, according to IDG “by 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006″. The digital universe in 2007 was estimated to be 281 exabytes
  or 281 billion gigabytes.  source.

What do our students do.

• Our students locate, evaluate, create, mix and remix in the current medium of communication, a digital medium. Increasingly this is also the medium of learning.
• They sort, filter and evaluate multiple information streams often in multiple formats and mediums
• They communicate in real time with their peers with a huge array of tools (chatrooms, IM, text, twitter, skype, etc) while multi tasking.]
• Theya re collaborators. They collaborate in real time and asynchronously. This isn’t Pen pals and royal post, this is real collaboration. Collaboration is a Key skill of the 21st Century.
• They are adaptable, information & technology savvy.

I would ask and challenge the 46 year olds to do what they do, to use the tools that they use with the degree of fluency and ease and then tell me that they are “dimming down”

If we could take the students of 1976 and the students of 2008 and have them sit a 1976 test and a 2008 tests of key facets of their world, not surprisingly the 1976 stduents would excel in their world and achieve poorly in the 2008 world and visa versa. Such comparisions are largely irrelevant. In 1976 the slide rule was still in use, do we teach our students how to use this now? Could you imagine the screams we would hear if we had a “Bring back the slide rule” campaign. Could the 14 year olds in 1976 have easily collated information from multiple medias and processed these into a video, podcast, webpage. No! Why becuase these were not invented. Could our

The article talks about higher level thinking, but in this too I suspect they only looked at some of the aspects of higher level thinking. They seem to ignore many many aspects of Higher Order Thinking Skills and focus on a small and narrow aspect.

source: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy

So is the intellectual ability of our 14 years dimming down? Are their Higher order thinking skill diminishing?

…or are they changing to a new paradium?