Unchaining Learning
ConnectEd Conference questions how globalization and technology are challenging the educational paradigms of bricks-and-mortar campuses
By Sherry Schwarz
How can universities educate the next generation of global citizens and professionals? In what ways will technological innovations shape global education? How can we promote and improve education worldwide to reduce inequality? These are only a few of the questions that U.S. and international educators, students, entrepreneurs, government leaders, and representatives from NGOs and businesses grappled with at the first annual ConnectEd Conference in Monterey, Calif., from January 22-24, 2008, hosted by Middlebury College and The Monterey Institute of International Studies.
“The relevance and urgency of these issues are demonstrated not only in the world community but also by our unwillingness to cross linguistic and cultural borders, leading to war, suffering, and wasted lives and resources,” says Monterey Institute of International Studies President Clara Yu. “ConnectEd is a conference about ideas and how to bring the best of these ideas into reality. We’re here to build an ecology around the best minds in education.”
The Conference was structured around the key themes of Innovation in Education, Language and Cultural Competence, Educational Mobility, Transnational Issues, International Higher Education Competitiveness, and Educating the NextGen.
“We need to promote and encourage the internationally mobile student. The most important weapon against the War on Terrorism is to promote international understanding and awareness, and the best way to do this is to allow our students to engage one another,” says Leon Panetta, who has had a long and distinguished career in public service and is co-director of the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy. Panetta suggests that the United States needs to model the Bologna Process, which is creating a European Higher Education Area to support greater student mobility within Europe and with the rest of the world by making it easier and more transparent for outside partners to cooperate with European universities and which is also reforming and enhancing its education system to make it more competitive.
“Fear is bred through ignorance and isolation,” says Panetta. “We need to integrate global and environmental and social problems into all the degree programs [and] there has to be a partnership between education, government and private business.”
Reforms such as those Panetta proposes are intended to make U.S. education more relevant as other world regions build competitive educational systems.
To get from here to there, Gordon Freedman, Blackboard, Inc. vice president for education strategy, says America needs a framework: “We are at a point when we have young people on one side and institutions on another…Our old generation is stuck in a vertical structure, while the new generation is in a horizontal structure.” Freedman suggests there is a need to work together to come up with a new model of education that incorporates students and also enables students to learn from one another.
A number of speakers proposed new frameworks, such as Scott McNealy, founder and chairman of Sun Microsystems. McNealy spoke about the idea of an open university. “Institutions are institution-paced, not student paced,” he comments, urging that “very progressive innovation” is needed on current models of education and that schools will need to take greater chances to forge more connectivity, community-building, and equal access to education. “Why do we have Facebook and YouTube, and not EduTube?” he asks. (Although, McNealy is developing something of an EduTube called "Curriki.org", a user-based global education and learning community website that is self-paced, free, and open-source.).
While some Conference attendees heralded technological innovations, whether Currkiki.org or One Laptop Per Child, as the new paradigm for education in the 21st century, others remained skeptical. Freedman perhaps best summarized the concern when he suggested it’s not enough only to give students access to knowledge, if they can’t get to understanding. A number of academics presented on how they are using web-based instruction in the classroom as a way enrich and “supplement” person-to-person learning.
But it wasn’t only the technology proponents who recognize the need for changing America’s educational model. Educationalists at the Conference, from high school teachers to graduate school students to university professors and presidents, also reiterated this imperative.
Tom Benson, president emeritus of Green Mountain College and executive director of the World Leadership Corps, says, “We are now seeing the unchaining of learning from the traditional academies, in the way that the Gutenberg press unchained us from books.”
Improving education worldwide by having rich countries pay for some of the education in poorer countries was another proposed framework. “The world is better off today in most ways than it ever has been,” says Jorge Castañeda Gutman, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs for Mexico. “But it is also more unequal. There are greater gaps between countries and within countries are greater gaps today than ever before.”
To address the widening gap between those who have and those who don’t have, those who know and those who don’t know, Castañeda is looking to education as the answer. Referring to the immigration debate in the United States, Castañeda says that America would do well to educate Mexicans in Mexico, following continental Europe’s model of financing the Irish, who now have a flourishing educational system. He acknowledges it would be costly, but he believes that in the long run it would be worth the investment to help build Mexico into a stronger neighbor and ally.
Another more foreign-policy oriented approach to reforming higher education came from Robert Kaplan, distinguished international affairs reporter and author. He believes that the 21st century will be as militaristic as the 20th century, and he spoke about the challenges of global anarchy, providing examples from a number of hot button regions, including Burma (Myanmar), Korea, the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia, the Balkans, and several African countries.
To remain competitive in this changing world, Kaplan says that new generations of American students will need to be multilingual and better trained to understand foreign cultures. “Language and areas studies are very important,” he states. “Inside area studies, I’d [emphasize] literature. You can’t really understand culture until you understand literature. We [also] need to teach students studies in comparative literature.”
Despite the political differences in our country, one thing all Americans stand for is that “we more or less agree on expanding the borders of civil society, human rights, and transparency to the four corners of the earth,” he says—though, he emphasized that while this desire will drive democratic transitions, "we have to be prepared for the instability that accompanies transitions."
When asked what traits the ideal 21st century American leader should have, he responds: “We’re going to need a much more cosmopolitan leader…someone who is very comfortable making decisions, someone who speaks foreign languages and is more international.”
How to ensure that future students are more attuned to the global issues of the 21st century is a question that reverberated throughout the conference. Both academics and technologists agreed on the need to rethink how students learn and what technologies are most relevant; the majority also supported the idea of expanding cross-cultural experiences for students.
Allan Goodman, president of the International Institute of Education (IIE), says: “We erect barriers to the education of the next generation. We urge students to specialize very early and it often leads to double and triple majors, cutting out time to study abroad.” He commented that not supporting enough faculty to go abroad means that study abroad is left to small study abroad offices and advisers without sufficient resources. “We should require all university graduates to speak, act, and think in another language,” says Goodman.
While no specific major reforms were discussed, American and international presenters shared examples of innovative global education practices already underway, from using distance education in humanitarian action and public diplomacy to promoting virtual interaction through video-web communication to internationalizing health education and religious studies.
“[The] key to globally proficient and culturally aware students is not just preparing them for jobs but for the world they live in. Education has to take the time to understand the challenges we face in this modern world,” says Panetta. “Students have to understand the world we live in, the issues that confront it, and be part of solving it.”
To learn more about the ConnectED Conference, visit its website. The post-conference section of the website includes conference videos, the 2008 Conference program, a participant list, and more.