What's coming next?

The VISTA Year in Health Sciences will be completed, along with the additional VISTA years in scientific reasoning, new technology, and engineering (with an aerospace focus).

In addition, the VWA, of which VISTA is a part, will be built. Following is a list of the proposed VWA (Virtual World Academy) curricula. This list came out of a meeting in early 2006, attended by a group of people from diverse backgrounds and nationalities, who have in common a deep interest in changing the nature of how education is conceived, and what kind of education is delivered around the world.

The group was convened by Roger Schank, Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University and currently the CEO of Socratic Arts. Present were Sebastian Barajas of Learning Works in Spain, Magali Jurado of the City of Knowledge in Panama, Hans Konstaple from the Netherlands, Zaheer Kidvai of BITS in Pakistan, Dimitri Lyras of Ulysses Systems from the U.K. (and Greece), Steve Wyckoff from ESSDACK in Kansas, Bob Daugherty from Knowledge Investment Partners, and Mike McGarry from Socratic Arts.

Proposed VWA Curricula

1. Telecommunications

This curriculum would set out a series of tasks to be accomplished that are representative of the type of tasks a worker in telecommunications might need to accomplish during his or her professional day. There might be several possible career paths within this field that students might elect to learn about. Students would play the role of workers and would be faced with the kinds of technical problems that workers in telecommunications need to solve. Problems would progress in complexity.

2. Health Sciences

We are developing the VISTA Health Sciences curriculum that has two goals that students will pursue simultaneously. The first is to create health care professionals capable of doing basic things in the health professions. The second goal is to create a practical science curriculum that instead of teaching students about plant phyla, chemical equations, and physics formulae, teaches students about how their bodies work and about medical decision-making and health and nutrition issues for children.

3. Entrepreneurship

Many members of our group expressed an interest in our building a curriculum in entrepreneurship. The reasons for this are twofold: the first and most obvious is that a local economy full of people who are interested in creating new businesses is likely to be a good thing. Helping young people understand what is involved in starting a business seems to be an important thing. Moreover a good SCC in entrepreneurship would need to help students start a simple business during the course itself. The year long intensive nature of the SCC leans itself easily to doing this, especially if we are talking about an internet-based business. Students would learn to build web sites and to get search engines to find their sites in addition to learning about handling the everyday accounting, sales, and management issues, etc.

The second issue is getting students to believe that school is relevant to their needs. In many countries students drop out long before school is over because they cannot see the point of learning about literature or geometry. Creating curricula that meet students half way, helping them do what they feel is relevant in their lives while still teaching them how to reason and communicate and do mathematics that is relevant in their lives is important.

4. Marketing

In Panama there is a real need for helping people, especially women, learn how to sell products that they have made traditionally in their cultures into a worldwide market. This is seen as a way of jump-starting local economies that are poor, as well as reviving and encouraging local arts. This was seen as a valuable idea for Pakistan as well. In Kansas there is someone who sells tumbleweed to buyers around the world.

How do people with little education learn to fashion a product that will sell and market that product on the global stage? An SCC that met the needs of such people, teaching business skills, and teaching about markets that local artists would never have seen, would be quite valuable. Clearly some of the material built for #3 above would be useful here as well.

5. Aerospace

In Kansas there are 4000 unfilled aerospace jobs. An obvious reason for this is that nothing in today’s high school would teach or encourage the kind of skills that might be needed in those jobs. An understanding of mechanics, aerodynamics, electronics and such is missing from high school. We can build an aerospace SCC that like the health sciences SCC does much more than simply train people for jobs. Science learned in realistic contexts is an important idea. Today, science knowledge in school seems to be taught in service of making little scientists: experiments, formulas, equations and such all speak to that as being what is really going on in school. Instead we propose a curriculum focused on aerospace that would both interest students because planes and rockets are part of the world in which they live and because technical jobs that rely and such knowledge are going unfilled.

6. Tourism

Many of the places we are dealing with have a real need to develop their tourism industry. One part of this is teaching local people about their own history, about foreign cultures and foreign peoples, and about how to make people feel good about their visit. In addition there are issues such as site development, maps, hotel management, restaurants and so on.

We think, therefore that this is yet another area where the focus on jobs and real life tasks can make subjects such as history and economics and foreign languages, which are seen by students as dull and irrelevant, suddenly seem worth learning. The Tourism SCC would create virtual travel for its students so they can experience other places and determine what was good and bad about their virtual experiences in an effort to ultimately decide issues about what to do in their own locale. Then they could practice working in virtual tourist environments to learn skills that would make them employable and help the local economy.

7. New Media

To meet student interests as they exist today it is important to create an SCC in new media. In this SCC students would learn to write for television, movies, and the web and would learn about video and audio production. There is no question that such a curriculum would be motivating to young people. It would also teach employable skills that will be especially valuable in developing countries that are beginning to create television stations but still rely on importing content from foreign cultures.

8. Web Magazine

We have already built part of a Web Magazine curriculum (with help from the University of Chicago writing program). It was deployed at a high school that was willing to allow the senior year to be replaced in its entirety by this SCC. Because there were state requirements that needed to be followed, the SCC was set up so that each month, the students produced a magazine issue on a different subject (e.g., a science issue or a history issue.) Students assumed the various roles of a web magazine staff from editor to art department head to web master. They experienced some of what it feels like to write and work with others to deliver a product on a timely basis.

9. Graphics and Animation

Here again we have a subject that is highly motivating to students and for which there exist jobs to be filled and for which training is hard to come by. We propose an SCC whereby students produce designs for websites and animated short subjects while working in a fictional world that employs them as part of a production team.

10. Scientific Reasoning

In general we believe that the traditional science curriculum is irrelevant to today’s student. At the same time they will live in a society in which a comprehension of science is increasingly important. For those students who may never see science after graduating high school it is important to create a curriculum that teaches them how to reason from evidence; how to understand what constitutes evidence; how to make a scientific argument; and from what evidence one can draw a conclusion. In this SCC problems are posed that someone might see in everyday life (whether the water is clean, how to know whether a drug is safe, basic survival in the outdoors) and in the life of a politician (deciding what environmental issues make sense to spend money on, determining the value of a research program). Students need to learn how to determine relevant evidence and draw a conclusion and support and defend that conclusion in written and oral arguments.

11. Software Development in the Modern World

We have built various SCCs for master’s programs at Carnegie Mellon University. One of them that is important for today’s world for people in developing countries, is how to work together in teams on software development projects initiated by large companies in the developed countries. It would be possible to adapt an SCC for high school students and for recent high school graduates that both taught them about how to do software development and how to work on large software projects with overseas supervision. Obviously team work, language skills, and issues of dealing with foreign cultures would be taught here as well as the software development process.

12. Engineering

This subject is not typically taught in any high school yet the world is always in need of engineers. Basic engineering knowledge is valuable for any person in today’s world. There are jobs that people with basic engineering knowledge would be qualified for. In addition there are many people who might decide to go into engineering professionally if they had had a taste of it in high school. For these reasons we believe it would be desirable to create a full year SCC in engineering.

13. Great Books

The University of Chicago runs a Great Books program which is very popular. We believe there is value in putting this program on line so that people anywhere and anytime can meet and talk about ideas. At UC there are leaders who direct the discussions and determine a set of books to be read that form a coherent theme. These should not be limited to any particular set of books and the idea can be adapted to any culture and any literature.

14. English as a Second Language

This is clearly an important issue in today’s world. We have built a fair amount of material in concert with Columbia University’s ESL program. A full year SCC would allow students to immerse themselves in English while still living in their own country. They would pay particular attention to writing skills and telephone skills which are an increasingly important part of using English when one lives in a developing country.