Tuesday, school visit and KERIS
It’s Wednesday morning here, and I’m headed to breakfast in a moment. The conference is going well. A lot of different people from different parts of the world with things to share. We’ve started talking about increased collaboration between the WorldBank and MLTI. I’ve also extended an offer to KERIS to visit Maine. We saw their offices yesterday. They have a very large organization, almost 200 people. They produce a lot of digital content, and I think they would benefit greatly from seeing MLTI in action.
They shared with us yesterday their Classroom of Tomorrow which consisted of ClassmatePCs and an interactive Whiteboard. The whiteboard had an interesting functionality where the camera could recognize certain patterns and replace the pattern on the display with some other shape and information. It was too sophisticated as it couldn’t handle more then one pattern at a time, the idea is interesting. They had a collection of small paddles that had a square with geometric shapes in it, kind of like a bar code, that the camera and computer would recognize. So, hold up the paddle, and see something different and get more information.
Similar to an iPhone app that uses GPS locations to mark labels on things when viewed through the camera. Imagine having a pair of glasses that could do that using GPS or some other marker so that as you walked around, you would learn more about that thing. Interesting for a museum to make a self-guided tour. I remember a PBS show with Alan Alda that showed this kind of thing with facial recognition software so that as you approached someone it told you who they were.
Prior to visiting the KERIS offices, we visited a girls vocational school. The school reminded me a lot of the high school I visited in Guiyang last year. Although it had one major difference…the building from the outside looked as large as the school I saw in Guiyang. I commented to one of the other folks in the group that the school must house 4000-5000 kids. When we got inside, they gave us a brief orientation to the school and told us that the school had 724 kids. It was never clear to me what all the extra space was for. I think at one time, the school may have housed more students. We learned that the school was a tuition-based school, so perhaps at one time it was either free or it simply had a greater popularity. It was supposed to be a very well renowned school.
Students get last minute instructions from the teacher
They described their curriculum to be split into one of three tracks, International Trade, Internet Business, or … a third that I now can’t recall. I’ll have to look it up somehow…its actually now Wednesday morning as I was interrupted yesterday morning, and I never finished this post. Too much going on, not enough sleep…anyway, point is, what they described as their curricular design and what we saw didn’t really fully match up, but its tough to say what is lost in translation as well as the fact that we only saw a couple classes.
Anyway, my impression is that the cultural sense of school continues to be very powerful here as it was in China. Not dissimilar to challenges we face in Maine when we try move a school to a student-centered model, but parents and teachers have a different idea of school based on their own experiences in school. So far, no one seems to have the simple answer to total school reform!