What’s the future of curriculum in the networked age? [new report] bit.ly/WKkNsY

— DML Research Hub (@dmlresearchhub) March 20, 2013

I am dipping into Ben Wiliamson’s The Future of the Curriculum (available as a free download from the MacArthur Foundation and the MIT Press here).

Wiliamson opens with an interesting statement

“…little research has been carried out on the practical and conceptual implications for the school curriculum in the digital age” (p. 1).

I was thinking about that in the light of my own practice and the practice of other secondary teachers in the Republic of Ireland whom I classify as both digitally aware and digitally critical.

Many of us are only putting our toes in the water having been content so far to append and integrate digital into the existing curriculum rather than using digital to leverage transformation of  the entire curriculum.

Curriculum reform is highly political and in the current European economic context can evoke a reaction to hang on to what we have on the basis that it served us well or change everything now in that the new economy requires new ways of thinking and doing.

Digitally aware and digitally critical teachers are cautious.

There are issues that worry some of us, especially concerning ethics and data, that I and others frequently write about.

Yet we also understand the need for change in education, particularly in understanding the competencies required (in my view – computational, analytical, expressive and artistic) for us to be able to interpret our current realities.

The volume of data allows great possibilities (amongst lots of others) in understanding disease, negotiating plans in business, music and language awareness and indeed understanding the human condition!

Teachers need to be central to the discussion of educational reform – Wiliamson quotes the  critical educational theorist Michael Apple in his opening chapter

“More than ever, curriculum planning is being performed in an “unreal world” at a distance from the day-to-day tasks of schools”.

Teachers – ponder!

Image: MacArthur Report Series / MIT Press