Education? There's an App for that!

There is no doubt that digital and modern technologies have disrupted our modes of teaching. The resources and inputs into teaching have changed to incorporate computer aided approaches, flipped classrooms, mobile phone enabled interactions, video capturing of lectures, digital whiteboards and enhanced realities. The old "Sage on the Stage" has been pushed into becoming the "Guide on the Side" or possibly even further out of the picture by the technology revolution. And yet, the national scores in NAPLAN and our competitive education ranking against other countries are slipping. First responders to this comparative crisis are calling for the return of traditional teachers with their "3R's", or the importation of the world's elite teachers to up skill our home grown teachers, or maybe just a return to the pre-disruption days.

But rather than mourning the disruption of the inputs, perhaps we should be disrupting the outputs from our academic systems. Schools, as places where children were collected and taught by a teacher, evolved as farming communities developed. Children could be taught en masse because those farming communities needed numbers of people to do the same activities again and again to maintain the crops or the live stock. If all the graduates from the school were the same each year, the farms, and subsequently the factories after the industrial revolution, could use them as interchangeable inputs to keep the economy going.

Things have changed though. Certainly, the inputs to schools have improved: from slates to pen and paper and now to iPads and Tablets. The schools are bigger and air conditioned and the teachers are professionally trained. But the outputs may not have fundamentally changed over the decades - successful schools still produce young men and women who can follow instructions; read, write and do arithmetic; and hopefully be ready to enter the workplace.  Our new teaching technologies might help these students to achieve all these things even better, but maybe, given all the other disruption caused by our technology, they may not need to do them any more.

Take "spelling" as a point - obviously still one of those fundamental skills our young men and women need. In my own primary school days, I regularly got an "A" for spelling. But my "A" was for absent! I was a terrible speller - so bad I literally made myself sick. Every Friday morning I had an asthma attack and sat fighting for breath while the others in my class spelled the lists of 20 words memorised for that week. Wouldn't happen today. Today, 2 year olds just have fun while learning to spell on their digital devices - catching monkeys or whatever while typing out words and being rewarded with exciting sounds. Don't get me wrong, I worked hard at spelling and my parents and teachers were hard working hands on too, drilling me regularly and using both carrots and sticks. Didn't work though, and I don't think monkeys or iPads when I was 2 would have worked for me either. But I can write now - and the spelling works - but this is due to other digital tools that are available. I can usually get close enough to a word for the predictive text to list a few relevant options for me to click and/or check with the online thesaurus to ensure I have the right one. But when I cannot get that close, I simply and literally say "Hey Siri, define sigh-cology" and back comes "Define psychology: the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context..." A quick bit of copying and pasting and there you are: spelling skills unnecessary. Just think of all that time I could have saved and all those panic episodes I could have avoided if only I had known that I would not need to try (and fail) to memorise all those words when I was in primary school!

Despite the spelling I could read well. But some of my school colleagues were not so fortunate and went though similar reading-oriented wasted efforts and panic. Now "...there's an app for that!" Seriously. You can point your iPhone at all a sign, some text or a book and your device will read it for you, complete with definitions if you want. Auto translations from hundreds of languages are also available if you ask. Similarly, mathematics and science, history and geography apps abound - if it is data-based then there is likely an App that can extract it. Does NAPLAN still score primary school children on their memorisation of spelling, their reading, ability to recall names of long rivers, or even shortcuts to integrate a mathematical function,  in the absence of any technology more advanced than a pen? Why? Do we need that sort of "output" from our schools any more?

"But what if the technology fails" I hear the traditionalists cry. Well frankly, if our computer networks collapse badly enough that the above technology becomes permanently unavailable then I don't think we need to worry about NAPLAN scores. Our commercial, retail and of course social systems are becoming so reliant on these digital technologies that society is simply assuming they must be there to build on. WiFi and cheap Internet devices may soon become a basic right for all - already free WiFi is commonly available over entire city areas and many schools provide or require all students to have a device. So what sort of graduates do we need for the future? We don't need large numbers who can all do the same thing adequately- the farms and factories now only need a relatively small number of people to supervise the machines. We don't need large numbers of humans to follow instructions well- even present day robots are good at following instructions meticulously.

We need graduates who are good at one thing or passionate about one thing. Basic economics suggests that even if you are good at several things, it is best to focus on your best even if your best is not as good as some one else's second best. Graduating classes, with each individual having a passion or just 1 thing they are good at, supported by technology that allows them to communicate and access the vast historical wealth of human knowledge, may be all we need from our schools. A massive diversity of passionate individuals, supported by the technology, cannot help but create new services and new opportunities that will not be subject to automation or replacement by robots. As a society, we don't need thousands of pure mathematicians or thousands of historians. Just a few passionate ones may do for the country. But we may need thousands of new options and opportunities for the future generations whose old jobs and services have been disrupted by the digital world. That is what we need from our schools

The life of an average tree

How long do you think trees live on average? You know that some trees can live for centuries - the Methuselah Bristlecone pine is over 4,800 years old, but even that age has been eclipsed. In 2010, the claim for the oldest living tree was more than 9,500 years for a tree that has a single root system that old but which periodically pushes up new trunks that only last a few hundred years. But if we count different tree trunks with a common root as a tree, then the oldest and possibly biggest living organism in the world must be the Pando quaking aspen of Utah, USA. The Pando is a single genetic individual, currently more like a forest with over 47,000 trunks, whose genetic makeup could be up to one million years old!

Wollemi Pine clones in the National Arboretum Canberra. How "old" are these?

And what about the Wollemi Pine, also known as the Dinasour tree? There are less that 100 trunks standing in the wild and it seems they are all clones having vegetatively reproduced somewhat like the Pando quaking aspen. Until recently we thought the Wollemi pine were extinct with pollen records disappearing after their hey days 121 million years ago. Are these remaining trunks still a single genetic individual from something started that long ago?

But on average? Probably the average life span of a tree is less than 2 or 3 years.

If some trees can live hundreds, thousands or even for millions of years how can the average be so short? Well, thousands, millions even tens of millions don't live more than a few months. They germinate and are eaten. Or they germinate but there isn't enough rain or sunlight or soil to keep them going and they die before the next rain. They can even germinate but then be poisoned by their parents via a process called auto-allelopathy to make sure they don't crowd the parents out. Even when the seedlings do survive and start to grow, there may be thousands of them per hectare with only room for, at most, a couple of hundred after a few decades. So, they compete for the space and most are supressed by those trees which eventually dominate the site. The supressed ones die during a stage called stem exclusion. So, a lot of trees die very young while very few make it to old age - making the average life span quite short.

But the story doesn't end there. While above ground the trees appear to be competing and even killing each other off, there may be a different story below ground. While exploring all the soil available to them, roots often come into contact with each other ...and often these roots fuse or graft themselves together. If enough roots graft together, sharing the photosynthates produced by the leaves above and the water and nutrients gathered below, how long is it before they cease to be separate individuals? Maybe all forests end up similar to the Pando Quaking Aspen, sharing a common root system even though there are hundreds of separate individual trunks with different genes above ground.

Does it even make sense to talk about the age of a tree in a forest anymore? It is like the human body and its cells. No cell in your body is more than 7 years old even if "you" are 50 years old. Trees, like cells, come and go but the organism can go on.

Happy New Year.

 

...looking for the next "best answer"