| A Conversation with Joyce Malyn-Smith: Part 1 |
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Name: Joyce Malyn-Smith Title: Strategic Director of Workforce and Human Development Education, Employment, and Community Programs, Education Development Center, Inc., Newton, Mass.
EDC is a 50-year old international nonprofit that develops, delivers, and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges in education, health, and economic development. It manages 325 projects in 35 countries. Malyn-Smith is also the Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation’s ITEST (Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers) Resource Center, which helps young people and teachers build the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a technologically rich society. The program serves more than 100 NSF-funded projects. She spoke to HotChalk about how digital natives’ learning experiences with technology alter the classroom teacher’s role. Q: What’s right about U.S. K-12 education?A: Each of us sees the world through the series of screens that reflect our own experience. I spent 20 years as an educator in Boston public schools and 15 years as the director of large, national, mostly tech-related projects at EDC. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is our teachers. How many times have we heard the question to leaders and celebrities, “Who has made the biggest difference in your life?” In so many cases, the answer is a teacher. Q: And what needs work?The weakness in our education system is that we are not ahead of the curve, but instead, continually playing catch-up. This is particularly true in regard to young people, who are today’s “digital natives.” They are the power users of technology who continually change and use information in creative and sometimes unintended ways. They are accessing large quantities of information around any topic they want to learn about, at any time of day, to any degree of specificity. We need to help teachers to understand their new role in guiding of today’s youth, to help them understand that their role is more important than ever before -- but that it’s a different role. Q: What is the changed role of teachers?A: First, they need to help young people check the accuracy of their information because today’s youth are bombarded with so much information that they have difficulty understanding what’s true and what’s not true. Secondly, young people have developed these spikes of learning around their topics of interest. It’s very deep learning, but they don’t know how this knowledge fits into a historical framework or cultural perspective, or aligns with known scientific principles. Teachers have a critical role. It’s one of helping young people make sense of the information they’re gathering, and helping them place this information into a context that pushes our collective intelligence to a higher level. Q: What are examples of fitting this knowledge-without-context into a larger framework?A: Science concepts, for example. If young people have an interest in music and are researching Stradivarius violins on their own, they may learn in a science class that the climate of the period in which those violins were made produced a type of wood that contributed to the rich sound of that instrument. This extends the concept that we are just beginning to understand -- that climate impacts the world in many ways. Students interested in video games and video game programming and producing might learn in a class that there are very high-level mathematics and algebraic content skills that could help them to do that. Q: How do digital natives differ from the older generation of “digital immigrants?"A: The implications of this extensive use of technology by young people is that they’re developing a new way of thinking and a new way of solving problems that’s patterned after habits developed through their technology use. It’s similar to the procedural algorithmic thinking of computer scientists, called computational thinking.
 Sheila Riley is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist. She is also an experienced online editor and ESL curriculum developer, and teaches ESL at City College of San Francisco.POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM
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Education: Ed.M., Teaching, Boston State Teacher’s College; Ed.D, Education, Boston University 
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