Week 30 - Trends Influencing NZ or Internationally

Week 30 - Trends Influencing NZ or Internationally
This weeks mission is to look at trends influencing NZ or Internationally that is relevant to my practice. I will be using a reflective model from Rolfe et al. (2001).

Step 1 - What?

I conducted some research into trends and feel like I already have a good handle on many of them as I am a digital technologies specialist that tries hard to use applied learning, support computational thinking, and creative inquiry etc. However when watching the video from New Media Consortium (2017) ‘wicked problems’ were mentioned and this captured my attention as I have not explicitly been focused on these and am unsure about how these might impact my current teaching and learning in the classroom. Have I really been using authentic and complex contexts based on wicked problems?

Step 2 - So What?
I went on to have a closer look into wicked problems and in the NMC/CoSN Horizon Report (2017) I have found some definitions of problems ranging from solvable challenges that we both understand and know how to solve; difficult challenges that are more or less well understood but for which solutions remain elusive; and wicked challenges, the most difficult, which are complex to even define.

So if these problems are complex to even define how do we help students develop the skills and knowledge to deal with these? What is required to successfully consider these in our daily teaching and learning? I found some suggestions and useful information on a Forum from the Ministry of Education Enabling E-Learning website suggest they are difficult because they involve:

• incomplete or contradictory knowledge
• the number of people and opinions involved
• the large economic burden
• interconnected nature of these problems with other problems

Some tips from the website include making sure we look at the potential behaviours that are linked to social problems, and identify what behaviours/action we want to endeavor to change. Also that we can break down the problem, into more a manageable ‘project size’ where students work in teams to collaboratively address elements of real world issues. Also in our NZ context it might be appropriate to include a whole-system perspective that requires us all to be invested and respectfully integrates Māori understandings of our natural world. So some good ideas from here that I could implement.

Step 3 - Now What?
In my teaching I could probably make sure I start with more socially fuelled and value ladened topics and then break down these real world problems into smaller ones that can be tackled by our students. For example next semester I am part of a learning module that integrates Digital Technology with Physical Education and Health. We could look at the positive and negative impacts of technology on our hauora (health and wellbeing) and the impact of hauora on our technological advances. We can look into how we can more explicitly incorporate these kinds of wicked problems into our teaching contexts.

References
Source: Daggett, B. (2014). Addressing Current and Future Challenges in Education. Retrieved from http://www.leadered.com/pdf/2014MSC_AddressingCurrentandFutureChallenges.pdf

Rolfe et al. (2001). Reflective Model. Retrieved from https://my.cumbria.ac.uk/media/MyCumbria/Documents/ReflectiveModelRolfe.pdf

New Media Consortium. (2017, August 29). NMC and CoSN Release the Horizon Report: 2017 K-12 Edition [Video]. Retrieved from Youtube

Freeman, A., Adams Becker, S., Cummins, M., Davis, A., and Hall Giesinger, C. (2017). NMC/CoSN Horizon Report: 2017 K–12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Ministry of Education. Enabling e-learning (n.d.). Forum: Wicked problems and real world issues. Retrieved from https://vln.school.nz/discussion/view/961940.