Stephen Heppell: Learning is escaping from its boxes

I worked with Stephen Heppell for two days last year. More accurately, I listened in to Stephen talking to a group of high school teachers, and then walked with him around their school as he visited classes and stuck his head around corners. I enjoyed myself immensely, and I've been thinking again about some of the things he said, in light of Marco's ideas last month. The time in classrooms with the students showed how well  Stephen, and the students themselves, were tuned to the students' needs - especially their need to be engaged with learning. Some of the teachers read this as 'learning needs to be fun', in opposition to 'learning needs content and learning content is hard work' - there was a fair level of opposition to Stephen's ideas and I thought he addressed their concerns brilliantly. I'll have to see if I can post some of my notes here.

Anyway, this post was sparked by a recently posted video of Stephen:




Stephen Heppell, like Marco Torres, emphasises that the challenge, and the imperative, around new technologies is asking the right questions. We have to think about how learning can change now that we have these technologies, simply because this is the world now. The genie is well out of the box.

A switch off device is a switched off child, and maybe the devil makes work for idle thumbs. If we don't give them things to do with their phones, they'll think of things, and maybe the things they think of aren't quite as smart as the ones we might have suggested.