December 2019 | Shaping the Future TLV Shaping the Future TLV 2020 A world-renowned Unique, Dynamic, Ingenious and Groundbreaking event JOIN THIS GLOBAL INNOVATION ENCOUNTER Israel – October 13, 2020 Part of the shapingthefuture.co.il Global encounter with the main protagonists of the Startup Nation. Innovators and thought leaders unfold how education is being transformed towards meeting the real needs of the Digital Learner. A unique experience for innovators, startups, educators, investors and decision-makers to foresee and build together the Education of the Digital Age. Shaping the Future TLV 2020 A world-renowned Unique, Dynamic, Ingenious and Groundbreaking event JOIN THIS GLOBAL INNOVATION ENCOUNTER Israel – October 13, 2020 Part of the shapingthefuture.co.il Global encounter with the main protagonists of the Startup Nation. Innovators and thought leaders unfold how education is being transformed towards meeting the real needs of the Digital Learner. A unique experience for innovators, startups, educators, investors and decision-makers to foresee and build together the Education of the Digital Age. CONTENT THE DAY EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY DIED 5 THE EDITORIAL TEACHING CHAOS 10 DR. CECILIA WAISMANN, VP R&D MINDCET Today, education is facing a major crisis – its main user, the EXPLAINABLE, TRUSTWORTHY AI FOR reason education is justified as playing a significant role in our EDUCATION 12 societies, does not fit in! The fast-emerging technological breakthroughs have Q&A WITH PROF. RENEE HOBBS 14 transformed the way we live and are, however education has not been able to keep the pace. SMART MACHINES ENABLING ALL This issue of EdTech Mindset is dedicated to a very significant LEARNERS 16 event that chose to face this challenge and propose ways towards finding solutions. Shaping the Future TLV 2019, brought together thought leaders from across the globe THE COMING OF THE “XR MIND” 18 to share their work and insights, in order to inspire EdTech practitioners in opening new doors that will allow learners of Q&A WITH JEFF PULVER 21 the Digital Age to enter, and hopefully find a system that they fit in! KIDS TALK 24 “Designing Human Machine Pedagogy” is an invitation to all EdTech stakeholders to bring the digital learner to the whole HUMAN 2.0: STRADDLING OUR ROBOTIC process of educational solutions’ development, from ideation to implementation. To focus on a generation of learners who AND BIONIC FUTURE 27 experience an almost symbiotic relation between humans and machine, who are developing new learning processes, TEACHERS AS STARTUP CREATORS 31 capabilities and opportunities, and who are actively transforming obsolete educational hierarchies towards the CHALLENGES OF THE FUTURE LABOR rise of a true learning community. MARKET 34 Hoping you will enjoy, learn and get inspired to take actions, HMP AND THE URGENT NEED FOR A NEW CURRICULUM 37 THE POWER OF GEOGRAPHY 40 HMP HACKING EDUCATION 44 Editor: Cecilia Waismann [email protected] EN Editing: Nehama Uterman EdTech Mindset writers: Cecilia Waismann and Maia Aron HE-EN Translator: Perry Zamek Content contributors: Avi Warshavsky, Barak Ben Eliezer, Graphic Design: Neriya Zur, Dov Abramson Studio Prof. Cristina Conati, Dr. David Weinberger, Prof. Eugene Photography pgs. 40-41: Taylor Mickal, National Geographic Kandel, Jeff Pulver, Guy Levi, Ilan Ben Yaakov, Lina Gomez, Prof. Markus Gross, Ran Magen, Dr. Rami Marelly, Prof. Renee Hobbs, Roy Zur, Vicki Phillips. 4 EDTECH MINDSET | DECEMBER 2019 The Day Education Technology Died BY AVI WARSHAVSKY, CEO MINDCET Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law realization of an intuition that it is possible to sprinkle states that any sufficiently advanced technology is the magic dust of technology on an educational world indistinguishable from magic. Clarke’s law touches normally associated with less sparkling connotations. precisely on a sentiment present within modern On the surface, the combination of technology and society. We expect that new technology will work education has great potential to provide answers to wonders, provide us with superpowers, and give some of educational challenges, and this potential us that same frisson reserved for magic. Clarke did not escape the eyes of scientists, educators formulated his law many decades before the dizzying and entrepreneurs. However, technology has been age in which we live, an age that makes us expect able to meet such expectations in areas such as such magical innovations at a rate of one every few communication, advertising, transportation, health, weeks. However, it is more than six decades of the and so on, but not in education. The unsuccessful journey toward technological magic could be described as beginning in a spacious classroom, one in which all of the students wore a uniform “short-back-and-sides” haircut. The students, SHAPING THE FUTURE | EDTECH SUMMIT 5 The Day Education Technology Died with serious visage, sit in pairs in front of small students, parents and teachers – have come to live tables. In front of each student is a machine that and operate within the internet realm. Each of them takes up most of the table. The machine is new; it is conducts a significant portion of their interpersonal both mysterious and prestigious in appearance, and communications through technological means, carries with it the aroma of newness. The children belongs to virtual communities, learns from are attentive, active, and highly motivated. They YouTubers. Each of the stakeholders makes their write their answers into the machine and receive decisions primarily on information that is accessible immediate feedback. A tall, bespectacled man, in the palm of their hand, and acquires skills through with the air of a researcher, walks around among video games. In such a world, technology is the the students. This man, B.F. Skinner, one of the space, the environment, in which we operate, as well founders of modern psychology, is in the classroom as also being the medium. Whether we like it or not, to demonstrate his teaching machine before the technology is redefining the whole of the learning cameras. Skinner’s machine allows each student to setting – the library, the textbook, the classroom and learn on their own, progressing at their own pace. the teacher: all of them take on new significance in The machine was presented as a way of coping with the information era. In an era, such as this, there the problem of the heterogeneous classroom, and is no real justification for a defined domain named the challenge of motivating students. It is easy to “educational technology”; its interactive content is find this 1957 film on YouTube. The gap between not substantially different from other interactive the educational technology presented in that clip, content that we encounter in social networks, and what we today call educational technology, is digital games or in current affairs websites. There comparable to the gap between the silent movies is the collection of data, but this does not have of the early twentieth century and the cinema of the to differ from the collection of data on any other Netflix era. Nonetheless, and in spite of countless platform trying to optimize its outcomes. The relevant developments, Skinner not only created difference between educational platforms and other one of the first solutions in the field, but also set platforms is becoming more akin to the difference the tone for the solutions that followed him. The between a textbook and any other book – just like promise of the machine is that a student goes in on a textbook, platforms are educational because one side not knowing, and comes out educated at they are intended to teach us something, they are the other end. The machine aspires to be a kind of directed at an audience in a particular age range, magic solution that saves the teacher time to deal and they maintain certain ethic limitations that with more important issues. Many solutions in the other platforms are not obligated by. Educational world of educational technology, perhaps most of technology in the old sense is dead, because of them, have made similar promises - saving teacher – or thanks to – the success of the technological time and covering a significant part of the teaching revolution that has overtaken mankind. process. THE SKINNER SPELL WHAT DOES EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY Skinner’s teaching machines not only defined the DO? boundaries of educational technology, but also The Skinner paradigm’s answer to the question presented an in-built pedagogic conception. Some “What does educational technology do?” - helps would describe the pedagogic influence of Skinner’s us educate just as we have always done, but more learning machines as the “Skinner Spell,” a kind of efficiently. Such an answer is relevant as long as our magic spell cast over the field and which influenced learning framework exists without technology, and it dramatically, but which extracted from it a very where technology is a kind of external add-on that high pedagogic price. Skinner’s learning machines we can add, or not add, as we choose. However, in offer a paradigm that has seven characteristics the present age, technology has moved from a tiny which are, to a large extent, still as true today as they corner on the periphery of learning, and has taken were in Skinner’s days. center stage. In today’s world, all stakeholders – Alone: The proposed solution is aimed at the 6 EDTECH MINDSET | DECEMBER 2019 individual learner, located in the classroom but Linearity: Progress in learning is linear. The progressing at his own pace. This is an arena student cannot progress to the next stage before in which the student sits alone in front of the demonstrating understanding of the present stage. machine, generally without any social or communal Learning is rigid and unidimensional – one proceeds interaction with other learners. along a single, pre-defined axis.