This article below was found by chance but I think it formulates the Agenda behind 21st century education.  This is a movement that will move children to online education. Parents will say that makes sense they stay on the computers anyway, might as well learn.  However, the reality is that human beings are being re-wired to neurological predispositions that remove our ability to laterally think, to work collaboratively in classrooms, to engage face to face, to learn socialisation skills, to learn from others, to feel community, to live their own lives to their fullest potential with advanced awareness of emotional intelligence. I see pathways opening up or some would call them downloads (popular expression). We are not computer programs we are human, we have the potential to go beyond the stars, to manifest our potential through the law of attraction, to follow our own destiny that we were born to, to discover we are far more than we KNOW.  To feel the world around us as a sense of FULLfilment.  The other thought forms are literally a programming language that dumbs down the human spirit in my view.  I feel it intuitively and I can see where the computerisation of children will indeed lead us.  As a peace educator and World Peace Clown I could see that children respond to play, they respond to laughter, fun and curiosity.  They love to play with other children and they chat with each other.  Hooking them up to computers in my view is deeply concerning. The invention of iPhones and the disconnection I witness all around me as the break down of community, families, global commons, public space as capitalism extends its ethos through profit making by any means and ensuring people are trackable. This is my concern. 

The article below shows how defence is part of this brave new cyber world, how corpoations will profit from children and how they will be progressed in ways that don’t expand their creativity but ensure they think the same.  I find it fascinating to imagine how other minds came up with this. However, if money is the goal then the cleverness in humanity will find ways to reach that goal, rather than maximising their own human potential as growing human beings, Star Trek comes to mind, expanding beyond space and time. The other path is like is the mine craft of the masculine vision of the future, it is not the feminine.  The feminine will point to freedom and vistas of knowledge never known. This is where creativity, ingenuity and breaking out of boxes will take us.  Compartmentalism will only create more boxes disconnected as silos of isolation losing the real meaning of life, I FEEL. 

This article I discovered on the internet and demonstrates another perspective. 

How exactly did the Department of Defense end up in my child’s classroom?

You cannot fully understand what is happening with Future Ready school redesign, 1:1 device programs, embedded assessments, gamification, classroom management apps, and the push for students in neighborhood schools to supplement instruction with online courses until you grasp the role the federal government and the Department of Defense more specifically have played in bringing us to where we are today.

In 1999, just as cloud-based computing was coming onto the scene, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13111 and created the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative or ADL. (this is not there) Try https://adlnet.gov/ and  http://www.act.nato.int/advanced-distributed-learning

Section 5 of that order set up “The Advisory Committee on Expanding Training Opportunities” to advise the president on what should be done to make technology-based education a reality for the ENTIRE country. The intent was not only to prioritize technology for “lifelong learning,” but also shift the focus to developing human capital and in doing so bind education to the needs of industry and the economy.

Representatives of Cisco Systems and Jobs for the Future co-chaired the committee. Others around the table included the e-learning industry, student loan financiers, educational testing companies, human resource managers, labor market analysts, universities, community colleges, chambers of commerce, city government, and a futurist. George Bush incorporated Clinton’s work into Executive Order 13218, the 21^st Century Work Force Initiative, the following year giving the effort a bipartisan stamp of approval. The Obama administration continued this push for online learning in the National Broadband Plan, which contained an entire chapter on digital education, as well as through a variety of 21^st century school redesign efforts like ConnectEd, Future Ready Schools, and Digital Promise.

ADL began as an electronic classroom for the National Guard and later expanded to serve the entire Defense Department. In 1998 the government decided to use it for ALL federal employee training. And by leveraging its influence over federal contracting the government successfully pushed for standards that enabled wide adoption of cloud-based instructional technology.

As the Department of Defense worked on e learning for the military in the mid 1990s, the Department of Education put together the nation’s first educational technology plan, which was completed in 1996. A tremendous infusion of federal funds was released into schools to support technology purchases and expand Internet access. The FCC’s E-Rate program was established that year.

At the same time IMS Global began to advance implementation of e-learning systems. This non-profit began as a higher education trade group and now has over 150 contributing members, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Pearson, and hundreds upon hundreds of affiliated companies and institutions that use its open source specifications. The Gates Foundation is a platinum level sponsor of four major IMS Global initiatives.

Over twenty years IMS Global members shared research and resources, and built up an industry now valued at $255 billion annually. So if you still wonder why they won’t give education back to human teachers, you simply need to take a close look at the many politically connected interests that are counting on digital education becoming the new paradigm.

IMS Global and ADL teamed up to establish common standards for meta data and content packaging of so-called learning objects. In the world of 21st century education reformers anticipate school will become largely about children interacting with these online learning objects-a playlist education if you will where based on your past performance algorithms will serve up what they think you need to know next. For folks like Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, such an education where students consume pre-determined content seems the ultimate in efficiency. Gamified experiences and online simulations being developed through ADL and DARPA in partnership with many universities and non-profits, will also provides a structure for to capture students’ soft skills and shape their behavior.

The first product ADL and IMS Global came up with was called SCORM or Shared Content Object Reference Model. SCORM provided pathways for the bits and pieces of e-learning content to get to a particular learning management system, like Dreambox, accessed by a particular student. It tracked elements like course completion, pages viewed, and test scores.

By 2008, there was a desire to track a student’s interaction with devices OUTSIDE of fixed learning management systems. New devices and games often did not work within the SCORM framework. Ed-tech proponents wanted students to be able to interact with online content in new ways, so they could record interactions taking place on mobile platforms, directly through browser searches, or via Internet of Things sensors.

ADL commissioned a new specification that could track activity streams as students interacted with online media. The result was xAPI or Tin Can API, which debuted in 2011. Now all sorts of data can be monitored, tracked, and put into data lockers or learning record stores. LRS’s can store information about what videos you watched, what online quizzes you took and the results, what websites you visited, what books you purchased, what games you played, what articles you read or annotated. It can also capture data gathered via sensors, RFID chips, and biometric monitors. LRSs collect data about all sorts of so-called “informal” learning experiences. The MacArthur Foundation has been funding considerable research in digital media learning (or DML) in informal settings for youth.

With the development of xAPI, the Ed Reform 2.0 vision of “anytime, any place” learning, learning where human teachers and school buildings are no longer required, could proceed more quickly. IMS Global is now supporting Mozilla’s open badge initiative. xAPI meta data could eventually be combined with badge programs and Blockchain/Bitcoin technology to create e-portfolios (online credential systems). And if automatic credential verification and micro-payment systems come to fruition, a virtual wallet voucher system could devastate already precarious public education funding.

The Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative is a major player in the development of mobile, game-based, and virtual learning environments. They also conduct extensive research and development on online “personal learning assistants” and with the aim of creating digital personal tutors for all of us. Their research is carried out at four Cooperative Laboratories or co-labs, which are located in Madison, Wisconsin; Alexandria, Virginia; Memphis Tennessee; and Orlando, Florida. Each lab supports partnerships with private sector interests and institutions of higher education.

The Wisconsin co-lab works specifically on academic projects, many involving the Florida Virtual School with whom they have a long-standing relationship. The co-lab’s focus is on competency-based education. They’ve partnered with the Educational Psychology department at the University of Wisconsin Madison to create educational gaming platforms and maintain over 60 other partnerships to research and refine game-based online instruction. Another focus has been on developing MASLO or “Mobile Access to Supplemental Learning Objects,” which is enabled by xAPI technology. The Tennessee co lab has been doing research on an intelligent tutoring system that even recognizes human emotion in the person using a given device and tries to counteract negative emotion.

DARPA-the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is also in the business of developing gaming simulations and intelligent tutoring systems. They work closely with the office of the Navy. Their “Engage” program was set up in 2012 and through partnerships with Carnegie Mellon, Texas A&M, UCLA, and the University of Denver, created numerous games for K12 students based on Alternate Reality Teaching “Our Space” in virtual environments. Instruction in Social Emotional learning was built into the games. Their Full Spectrum Learning project aims to create an online platform that can monitor students and identify their strengths and weaknesses and revise the experience adaptively based on the data generated.

The arrival of ADL, changed public education in a very fundamental way. It is no coincidence that the destructive No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law in the year after it was created. Over the next fifteen years, with bipartisan support, education incrementally gave way to training, creativity to compliance, serendipity to standards, and human connection to digital isolation. As the curriculum became narrower and narrower, emphasizing standardized test scores and demonstrations of skill, education became a hollowed out exercise, something could be digitized and outsourced to corporations.

Data-driven, standards-based tactics have been intentionally employed to regiment the very human process of teaching and learning. During ADL’s first decade, the imperative was to get technology and Internet into schools. Once that infrastructure was in place, they could concentrate on restructuring the curriculum making screen-based education central and pushing the teacher into a secondary role on the sidelines.

Common Core State Standards were a big part of that process. The National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers created the standards in 2009. Not as many people know about the Common Education Data Standards that were established at the same time. CEDS enabled the collection and sharing of vast amounts of data across sectors from Pre-K through Community College.

The Learning Registry is another important piece of the puzzle. It was created in 2011 as a partnership between the US Department of Education and once again the Department of Defense. It is an open source distribution network of learning resources that holds meta data and para data. It is important to understand that learning objects can be tagged in many ways, including adding tags for a variety of standards. For that reason even if we get rid of Common Core State Standards, it wouldn’t necessarily make a dent in slowing down the rollout of adaptive, digital curriculum.

In addition to meta data, which is data that describes individual education resources, the Learning Registry also collects para data through the use of emitters that can be mounted on smart boards in classrooms.

Para data describes how online learning resources are used:

• Who’s doing the searches?
• What students are in the room with the person doing the searches?
• A history of searches conducted
• What is being viewed, downloaded and shared?
• What is favorited or embedded?
• To which standards is the selected content aligned?
• What tags have been added to content?
• How is it being incorporated into the curriculum?
• What grade is it being used in?
• Where is it being used?
• What is the audience is for the item?
• What the instructional setting is.
• What is the experience level of the class and the teacher?

The devices in our children’s classrooms are largely there because a specific set of government policies have prioritized technology over human educators for the past fifteen years. These devices are watching us as much as we are watching them. And we should be aware that many of the programs in use are direct outgrowths of work done by the Department of Defense in partnership with private sector interests and institutions of higher education. Technology can be used for good, but not if it is given an unconditional pass in our classrooms. Shine a light on educational surveillance. Ask questions. Talk to others and organize!

A 4-Minute Version of the End Game

A 4-Minute Version of the End Game

Knowing that not many people are going to dive into a one-hour talk, I tried to distill the main points from “Ed Reform 2.0-Personalized Learning in Orwellian Times” down to a 4-minute video introduction. Forgive my terrible handwriting and sketching. But that aside, do you think I’m getting closer to a message that people can absorb?

1. Poetic Justice says:

January 16, 2017 at 4:36 pm

Reblogged this on Poetic Justice and commented:
At chilling look at where we are today in the war over the minds of not only our children but all of humanity.

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1. ciedie aech says:

January 16, 2017 at 7:18 pm

The statement that “[d]ata-driven, standards-based tactics have been intentionally employed to regiment the very human process of teaching and learning…” adds an eerie edge to the fact that I began hearing rumors years and years ago that our low-income school’s NCLB test scores were being sent to the military without student/parent consent as a means to help military recruiters forecast which students would be most likely to fit a desired profile. http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/two-tier-testing

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