education

Marcel Kampman advises and inspires companies, organizations, agencies and brave individuals. He helps them with their mostly complex (creative) challenges and innovation, design and communication issues. To do that, he often taps into his extensive network to assemble or to be part of a team with the requisite variety and depth to frame and solve a specific client problem.

At Lift11, Marcel will present project Dream School, a movement to rethink how we educate and teach our kids. What makes the project exciting is that it is directly linked to the construction of a new school building for an existing school in the Netherlands. Everything will be reconsidered, reframed, redesigned to make it into the best school for the Netherlands (and maybe even the world).

Marcel Kampman

Creative Director (NL)
Happykamping, Project Dream School, Mastermundo
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Laurent Haug: What is project Dream School?

Marcel Kampman: Project Dreamschool is an open invitation to everyone to share their ideas, thoughts and insights on what the dreamschool of today and tomorrow would be. What would it look like? What are the methods? Who are the teachers? Is a dreamschool still a school? Project Dreamschool is an inspirational open platform that actively feeds new education systems and schools with ideas, knowledge and information on the latest trends and technologies, coming from a global network of pioneering thinkers, visionaries and innovators - especially outside of education. We want to leverage local and international ideas to reinvent the action of learning, which for many kids is nowadays a synonym for boredom.

The beauty of the project is that it is not only about talking and theorizing. We have a real situation - currently a green field - where we will build an actual school for 3000 students and 300 teachers. We go beyond dreaming, and have three short years to materialize our ideas and make put them into practice. The next three months of the project will for example be crucial: we need to define how we want to facilitate learning, what the curriculum will look like, this will define how the building will have to shape up and architects will then work their magic for the construction to start at the end of next year.

How does the project work?

IWe go through a foundation that gathers people from many disciplines (business, technology, architecture, government, design, parents and kids) and bring them together (both physically and virtually) to come up with ideas on the challenges that need to be solved. These challenges are divided into categories, like for example personal development, learning, transformation of students, design of the school, how to make teaching enjoyable, etc. Everything we receive we openly share at meetings and online and translate them into local situations, so they can become reality instead of only ideas. It feels like we are prototyping a school together, co-creating a school, and we are constantly learning and improving on the feedback we receive from all those people. Everything we learn, the things that work but more importantly, the things that don’t, we share so other schools can learn from it as well.

What is impressive is the motivation of the community for such a topic: people just want to get involved. The reason is really the topic itself: everybody has an opinion on education because most people had education, and simply wants to get involved and change things. We are tapping into a huge reservoir of energy. It looks like people found out that if you really want to make a difference, it is not about replacing your light bulbs to better ones, but to see education as one of the strategies that can help the planet. Green was the new black, I think education is the new green.

What are the central concepts behind the project?

From growth to sustainability. From industrial to creative. From survival of the fittest to survival of our planet. From me to we.

The world is in a continuous rapid transition. With new kinds of challenges, opportunities and knowledge arising every second. Changes happens so fast, the only thing we can be certain of is the constant of change itself.

This asks for a completely new conception of educating people. Today, we waste too much talent. We simply cannot afford to do so. We desperately need education that celebrates diversity and maximizes each and every person's talent and creativity in order to meet the challenges of the near future and bring forth a generation that can build a healthy, peaceful world.

We are all born with different strengths and talents. Nobody is the same. Which is great, because as a society we can not do without diversity. Diversity creates new opportunities and connections that spark new opportunities and progress. If we want to get everything out of our society, we need to get everything out of our children. That means creating the room where talents can be developed to their maximum. Children had to adapt to the school before, now is the time that the school and education adapts to the children and their talents. That can be anything, from languages to art, from music to engineering .

The goal of a dreamschool is to develop and support all different flavours of talent to the max, so it can be applied in a meaningful way in society to create a healthy, peaceful and prosperous world. It’s about learning, dreaming and making dreams happen.

How do we do that? First we need to have consensus about what talent actually is. It is not something that you have. It’s a part of who you are. Like Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) said: ‘We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.’ A dreamschool is about discovery and development of yourself and your talent.

That you don’t do by sitting on a chair at a desk from 08.30 AM to 04.30 PM on one fixed location, listening to a teacher in front of the classroom. A dreamschool is in use and accessible 24/7. Because life is learning and life is 24/7 and not bound to one location. It’s not static an linear like in a factory or office, but organic and flexible. Research tells us that people will have in average six jobs in their life. Life is about making things up as we go along. School should be the place where you get prepared for this. We want to propose an education given in a holistic way, rather than built around the goal of teaching you a specific job that may not even exist 15 years later when you get out of the educative system.

So, dreamschool is not a school. It’s an experience. And at the same time a place to share this experience with others. A dreamschool ‘maak je mee’ (can’t be translated really — in Dutch co-creating and experience are within the word ‘meemaken’). Everyone is 100% responsible for his or her experience.

At a dreamschool, students and teachers are at the core. Everybody learns from and with each other. Teachers today are occupied with processes, management, rules and lose contact with their students (contact is crucial for personal development for both student and teacher). The quality of the school is determined by the quality of its teaching staff.

Project Dreamschool is not an organisation, but a movement. A movement forward. But also backwards, left, right, up and down. We move every way if we see opportunities (in Dutch we say ‘we bewegen alle kansen op’). A dreamschool is an organic and integral part blended into a local community. Interaction between the school, parents and the local community creates a solid reason for existence. It is a place where you can connect with the different parts of society, not a moment of your life where you become secluded and protected from people that are different from you. This is why no dreamschool is alike, because no local situation is the same.

A dreamschool is a place where diversity is celebrated. It’s a place where people get the opportunity, the room and support to be and develop themselves in their full potential. Where people can equip themselves with everything they need, to be part of and add meaning to an ever-changing society, through inspiration, knowledge and perspiration. Where they can come up with new solutions tomorrow for problems we do not yet know today. Where they can inspire and teach themselves and others.

So, a dreamschool should be there for every child of today. Because they create the world of tomorrow.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about the MIT's OpenCourseWare, an initiative that interests the participants of the upcoming Business School 2.0 workshop.

The OpenCourseWare changes the education world because it makes course materials available on the Web, free of charge, and open to the educators and learners anywhere in the world. The concept was born in 2003 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began providing its courses online for free. OpenCourseWare allows self-learners to access high-quality knowledge for free, gives alumni a link to their school, provide educators with teaching materials, and enables prospective students to virtually get into university classrooms. The program is free and offers no reward other than knowledge.

In 2005, MIT and other higher education organizations formed the nonprofit OpenCourseWare Consortium with the objective to provide “free and open digital publication of high quality education materials, organized as a course.” As of mid-2008, more than 200 higher education institutions and organizations had joined up with the Consortium to offer courses ranging from art history to economics. The course content varies and may have a combination of lecture notes, quizzes, exams, video clips and audio lectures. The movement also includes its own YouTube channel, YouTube EDU, which hosts videos from more than 100 colleges and universities, as well as Academic Earth, which lists video lectures. Apple, too, with iTunes U, allows curious minds to download video and audio lectures to their iPods for learning on the go. What used to be expensive and inaccessible becomes convenient and accessible to everyone.

Making course ware from premier institutions available online to all for free is a frank success. The OpenCourseWare Consortium boasts more than 100 million visits since its launch in 2006. The MIT OpenCourseWare alone, which provides 1,900 free courses oline, has recently published data (http://www.tofp.org/blog/?p=420) that show impressive numbers :

• More than 53.7 million individuals have now visited the MIT OpenCourseWare’s site & affiliated sites (1 million in April 2009 alone),
• OpenCourseware servers have now delivered over 3.1 billion files (“hits”) since launch,
• 8.5 million zip files of full course content have been downloaded from the site,
• 2.1 million OpenCourseWare videos have been downloaded from iTunes, with its videos viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube.

The competition between universities and technological improvements add up to education for anyone interested in learning. By making up-to-date educational content widely available, OpenCourseWare upgrades the level of standard education and focuses faculty efforts on teaching and learning on their campuses. The school expertise, the expert knowledge, will be crucial components of the future Business School model.

Ammie Eichenbaum, World Med MBA participant
Sources : Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Education-portal.com, The CS Monitor.

Recently I interviewed Nicolas Nova, editorial manager of LIFT, at the Mobile City Conference in Rotterdam, NL. The topics covered in this interview are: The future of education and learning, blended-learning, remote-accessed field trips, communication, collaboration, the changing roles of teachers & professors, surveillance, privacy and The Lift Conference. I was very impressed with Nicolas's reflections on the topics mentioned above and I make this interview available to the lift community in order to inspire thought and discussion on the topics Nicolas addresses.

An enhanced podcast can be obtained here: http://www.mamk.net/?p=727

Kushtrim Xhakli works at the IPKO Institute in Kosovo. He speaks about how innovative projects can transform education.

Ewan McIntosh is the National Adviser for Learning and Teaching Scotland, the education agency responsible for curriculum development. He talks about how social media creates open education.

While education has a cost it is priceless. The bono pro initiative supports deserving students who could otherwise not attend tertiary education in Switzerland through honour loans.

bono pro supports financially students (up to CHF 5'000 per year over a 3 year period) through a donors syndicate (individuals and institutions). It also offers practical support to students through a network of coaches/mentors.

bono pro is based on the values of community and solidarity. By signing the bono pro charter, beneficiaries make the moral – but not legal – commitment to contribute to the fund at a later stage. In other words, it is not a loan, rather a gift with thin strings attached.

bono pro is a private, non-profit-making association, independent of any political and religious affiliation. It was founded in Decembre 2006 by Marc Laperrouza et Ralph Hefti.

Find out more at www.bonopro.org.

Sugata Mitra is a Professor of Educational Technology at the Newcastle University. He presents about "Outdoctrination: Society, Children, Technology and Self Organisation in Education" at the LIFT07 conference on Thursday, February 8, 2007.