I grew up in a series world. It seemed that everything was linear. At school, there was usually only one way to do things – the teacher’s way!!! When I was very young, I was made to sit on my left hand so I would write with my right (I’m left-handed). But it didn’t work (funny that).  We learned lockstep, didn’t really question anything and we were told the right way to do stuff. How to spell, remember capital cities, perform simple arithmetic. Every problem had only one solution and everyone had to learn that way. There was a guy I remember from school – a really bright guy who argued with the teacher about the value of learning subtraction. His argument was that no-one subtracted. If we were asked to subtract, say, 176 from 221, we almost always perform an addition sum in our head. We say “What do I need to add to 176 to make 221?” rather than “If I start with 221, what do I need to take away from that in order to get 176?”. Needless to say, the teacher didn’t like it. It was even worse when he started squaring 2 digit numbers in his head. He wasn’t as good as Arthur Benjamin, but he was only 12 at the time.



He tried to teach me once, but I’m not a very number-savvy person, so I never really got the hang of it. When he did it in the maths classroom, the teacher forbade him to use his own method and made him use the method we had to learn in class – threatening to mark him with a zero unless he used the “proper” method.
 
I spend a lot of my time helping educators come to grips with the latest developments in ICT and their application to the classroom. Inevitably, a lot of it is applications-based (increasingly web-embedded applications-based - but that’s another blog post). Invariably, workshop participants want handouts and notes on how to do stuff. Yesterday, we were working with audacity in a workshop and I demonstrated some common features, including how to import audio we had created or downloaded outside of the program. When the teachers came to use the software, one of them asked me to show her again as she had missed it and it wasn’t in the notes. I showed her, but while I did so I asked her what a student would have done in that situation. She replied that the student would probably have fiddled around until they got it. I asked her to explain “fiddled around” and she said that she probably meant experimented. I then asked her why she didn’t experiment and she said it was “different” for adults.

Later on I was talking about editing sounds and cut a piece of voice from one track and pasted into another, using the toolbar buttons. While helping someone, I needed to do it again, but this time used CTRL-X and CTRL-V. This completely threw the teacher, as I used a different method of achieving the same thing. I explained that, depending on the operating system and the application, there could be up to 5 or 6 ways of cutting and pasting data.  The teacher asked me “What’s the best way?” and seemed a bit nonplussed when I told him that the best way for me might not be the best way for him. “Why can’t the software writers come up with just one way of doing things?” he replied. I think he went to the same teacher’s college as my old maths teacher.

Our world is a parallel world. Simultaneous multiple communication, p2p, hyperconnectivity. Everything happening at once, lots of ways to achieve the same goal, personalised learning – all these phenomena move us away from sequential living and serial learning. Teachers still talk about the low level of “technical skills” many of their students have in the classroom. “We were using program X and the students couldn’t understand it or figure out how to use it.” But give them a new phone or a handheld gaming device. Let them loose on a new gaming engine or social networking platform. Then you will see their problem-solving, investigation and goal-orientation skills. There is never “one correct way” for them. There are always many ways, and they are always the right way.

Image Citation : http://www.ted.com/speakers/view/id/177