 where you can ask your questions. And now the film is starting. I can invite to the stage the people of Chaos Macht Schule, so chaos making school. And we have people, like we have a teacher, we have someone working at a university, and someone from the Chaos community. Welcome to the stage. Welcome to our talk. Education and its journey to the new frontiers. The three of us are in this Chaos project where we educate schools, and we've been thinking about how to fill this curriculum on those topics in schools. We want to contrast our efforts to the efforts of politics in the recent past. The word Neuland that you see here is a citation of our Chancellor Merkel, who has described ITS new frontiers. We have integrated these technologies into large parts of the society, but in school you cannot feel much of it. So over the last 10 to 20, or even 30 years, IT teaching has not changed much. So calling IT a new frontier in school education is certainly adequate. So that you know who we are and from which perspective we observe this topic, I'm going to introduce ourselves. Stefan is a teacher in high school. He's also a member of the Chaos Club in Mannheim. We have Durina. She's a member of Chaos Club Hamburg. She's also a professor at the Technical University where she teaches computer science. And I'm Bunny from the project. We're all three of us are part of the Chaos Martjuli project. It is an initiative from the Chaos Club and we are aiming to further enthusiasm and self-determination, self-determined acting in the digital domain for students. And we go to schools for workshops. We introduce new technologies. We talk about the internet, social networks and similar topics. We always put them in contrast and talk about both society and technology and advantages, chances and risks. We've been doing this for 10 years and we've collected some experiences. Politics actually has brought some changes to digital education. Here in Germany it is part of the districts of the German districts. Education is divided into the federal districts so each county has its own education system and Chaos Martjuli is working in three different federal states. The discussion always mixes a number of different aspects and it's very difficult to understand individual aspects. So digital education is going to be introduced by Corona. Thank you for this introduction. So our title of the talk Education on the way to new frontiers doesn't come from nowhere. There are a lot of new developments in education. So one is how to work with new technologies within the classes. And also another one is about talking about IT classes in general to have them established at school from elementary schools up to higher education. And the other one is having technical equipment in school. It's important to look at all three of those and not just look at it and mix it up in one part but to differentiate it out into these three areas to actually find out where the problems are. So let's look at the technical equipment at schools. It could be a talk on its own. One issue is that there isn't enough technical equipment in schools, tablets, computers. Another issue is that technical equipment goes out of date or sometimes even gets stolen. On the other hand, you can also consider if maybe too much of technical equipment is just introduced. So there are different kinds of cloud services being developed and some are commercial and some are being developed at like specific educational institutions. One, there are different examples which are developed in different educational institutions where you can ask questions if you're not only reintroducing the wheel and could use those resources going into this development in better ways. But actually the technical equipment shouldn't be in the focus so much as there should be a very easy solution to it. In 2016 an educational minister promised millions of euros to equip schools with technical equipment. It's kind of simple to decide to equip schools with technical equipment by just politically deciding to spend money on it. But if we are talking about technical equipment the bigger problem is that teachers don't know a whole lot about it. They just get a short introduction how tools are working, how do you turn it on and off and how to work with special features tools to have. But they are left alone how to actually use them with their educational concepts how to introduce them into their classes. And like if teachers want to involve it they have to come up with their own ways to do it and have to spend free time on figuring that out. So the technical equipment is a little bit like the children we see on the slide with too many presents and the child can only be concerned with one of them and is not able to look into the others but technical equipment is only one of the issues. One is how do classes can be supported by digital medias? When we are talking about this we are looking at different kinds of software. One of them is learning software for example software to learn vocabulary which might be more fun than just working with your ordinary school bag to cover up one part of the page to learn the vocab. But there is also software to support pupils to work together on projects even from at home and also there is administrative software where teachers and headmasters can use for administrative stuff like classenbücher which are class books to register certain stuff about the class. But all of this needs to be used in the right way. If you do it wrong it doesn't make sense, it's very hard. But in the end from our point of view all of these are only tools to create classes. It's not that different from working with an ordinary board or doing a chemistry class in a laboratory. If you really look at it we are not really in new frontiers in this area if I look at the technical point of it. They are being used for 20 years. They are being tried out, they are being used. Some are better, some are worse but that's also not the huge issue. We have come now to the third issue we have identified which puts digital topics as the content of the classes which we think is very interesting. In this area also again a lot of things are looked at in the same way where we should differentiate it more. We are talking about IT classes which means educating children on the basics of our technicalised world. This can mean programming languages but it can also be about networks like the internet or also about mathematical basics. From our point of view this is elementary for children, for pupils to understand our technologised world and how to be involved in it. We can discuss how many hours per year this kind of classes should take place or if it should be from the first class to the end or only some years. Other people when they are talking about IT classes actually mean how to use technology like how do you find Wikipedia, how do you use different kinds of slides or software. I think in this room we should be all of the opinions that isn't exactly the same but it is talked about as if it was the same. I've recently talked to a teacher who wasn't educated herself in doing IT classes but only had two days of IT classes herself but now was supposed to teach the students in IT. So how is this supposed to work? So she was saying, yeah I know it's a difference but I can't only do IT classes because I don't really know how to. I will also teach how to use stuff because I don't really have the education myself. And media competence as we understand it is about looking at the digital world as it is today, how to find your place in it and how to make your own decisions in this digital world. This means in the everyday of education learning how to use digital media on your own or with others, how to create digital products like movies or presentations or also be concerned about safety regarding media. Acquivity is fake news or also cyber bullying or bullying in general. So in this discussion we should see that both IT classes and how to use media, there is an important part missing which is self-determination regarding the use of media. So to be clear about the way we are discussing this we mean the capability of understanding and questioning digital developments and the chances and risk regarding this development and to know how this works and this is something different than simply understanding how the internet works or how to program a computer or how to work against cyber bullying. And we think in this area this should be stressed that this should be an important topic in all classes, not only IT classes. And we think this is the most important part of it and this is rarely discussed regarding the big discussion on education and in actual classes there is little development so in different classes they actually learn stuff and like they program stuff or they create networks but these are only individual cases and this is not actually surprising and in the training of teachers it's not a huge topic. There are some programs offered like I've been invited myself to talk about data security which is only a tiny part of the topic but it's only very little stuff offered in this regard and teachers don't have to attend these. So when these school students arrive at university and when I talk with them about the healthcare card or about technology in cars and the university students which turn up at university, they are very surprised by all the options we have regarding to technology and that's not just general students but they are actually studying technologies themselves. And I actually think all of these topics could be taught in schools with different age groups with little or no technical equipment. You could talk about GPS and geography or mechanical learning regarding languages and like we have discussed a lot of options what could it be done but isn't. We see a huge deficit. So we started questioning how do educational policies actually work how do you create the plans what is being taught in schools why doesn't it start developing in schools why doesn't it get introduced on policy discussions very high up there are discussions being held and Stefan will talk about how this is discussed in different federal states and look at the example of Baden-Württemberg. Thank you Dorina for introducing me so that you know what my topic is. I will bring a quotation from Claudia. She was the head of the Conference of Ministers. We wish that students can participate in the social life and they can participate in the democratic way in society and in the constructive formation and change that we currently can see. We look at citations very closely and on the right you see the device that our colleague uses to check terminology and politician's speech. So here is the brochure that this head of the Ministers Conference has published. This is the strategy paper that Dorina mentioned. This is the title page. So we have 16 states here in Germany that each of them decentralized takes decisions on the structure and content, their own decisions. Some have a different first language they all can make changes to the collection of topics themselves. So the Conference of the Ministers, of the Education Ministers, Cultural Ministers is not binding but it is more like an exchange medium. Somebody from the federal government also participates. So it is a very good system and it is actually within the spirit of the Hacker Effect where we like decentralization. Open educational resources are explicitly mentioned. These materials have a free license and they are listed in here and a different kind of working is possible in there. You can collaborate, you can share. And they are fully in compliance with the updated owner's right which is the German equivalent to the copyright. The focus is on using the media and it doesn't really talk about being self-actualized and the topic being able to participate. So the use of the digital media is emphasized. The focus point here does not find our approval. So it causes, it still demands that that education, that teachers get new training on how to use this and how to convey it. There will be problems because the costs will be borne by the distributed organization, by the local... So even though money has been promised to further this out of the billions that have gone to the banks and been taken back, nothing has materialized for education yet. So this is from a little bit earlier. There was a decision. So it talks about making it part of teachers' education and teachers' further education. So it's been clear for a long time that this should be done. And the 16 countries are asked to implement those. So the speaker's state has actually started doing this and he is a teacher so he knows this. And his minister, Miss Eisenmann, currently is the head of this working group. So he's taking one letter that has gone to all schools where teachers are encouraged to sign up for an initiative that's a teacher's training on digitalization. And if you read it carefully, then the focus is on the use of digital media. So actually it is a good encouragement for people to go to training and do new stuff. One aspect we find questionable. So if we start in 2018 training the teachers, when will it start actually percolating down to the students? When will it find a result in educated students? So we see that there will be a generational gap. There will be a gap of some students that have never received this education. In addition to the further education for teachers, there's the initial education of the teachers. And he's gone back to his old teacher training facility and the leadership there is deeply engaged in making those topics part of the curriculum for teachers. Again, in that case, the focus is on use of digital media and not an assessment of impact. He comes from Heidelberg. In that town there's an agency that only focuses on those topics. The town is using OpenStreetMap and doing creative projects with that. There's a project in the local library. Hackathons are being done. The mayor has made digitization a priority topic. So it all sounds very good. But from my work in Germany-wide, I understand that this is not the only place and others are not as far. And that's cause for concern. Here again is the scope for the topic that is to be conveyed to students. And it is ranked highly in the priority. And it will be implemented in fifth grade. There will be 30 weeks with one hour each for this topic. Everything else is up to the schools. The schools have many responsibilities and most schools will find it extremely difficult to do justice to the topic or even exceed it. The next point in my slides is new topics. Here it says computer science as a subject in school will be strengthened. Things like caliope mini are being mentioned and scratch is also being mentioned. So it helps getting acquainted with some areas of computer science. In some schools grade 7 gets a furthering course on computer science and he himself is teaching it. So different from the from the median building which covers impact analysis and using technology for one's own goals. Computer science is well defined or already much better defined than the other one. There will be an option, there has been and will be an option to choose computer science in grades 11 through 13. Now we have to make sure that we clearly distinguish between computer science and median building which is the the impact of media on technology. And this needs to be conveyed to the teachers as well so that they can clearly teach it in the one or the other course. So the conclusion if you look at the educational policies and the political discussion is that classrooms are still very analog which aren't as different from what I've seen in the 80s and 90s to my own time. Back in the days schools had separate classrooms and different from that computer rooms which were locked and only occasionally were visited in classes. And that's still the case in many schools and only very few schools have computers in their own classrooms. If you look closely at this picture behind the teacher there's a smart board so at least there's a little bit of digital stuff inside and if you look at Berlin there's actually quite a lot of smart boards in classrooms that's kind of common but you have also to see that with smart boards there's a lot of possibilities where you can do quite a lot of them but they are mainly used to show movies. So when I do workshops and schools when I go to classes I ask the students how do you house it with you? Do you use computers in schools? Do you use them for homework? And mainly the students say no they rarely use the internet maybe they use it for classes not for classes but for homework on their own but like not in the classes itself. So in conclusion when we look at the political discussions the consequences are fatal and become bigger the topic of media education isn't integrated in the teachers' trainings until the teachers are properly trained in this and arrive in the schools this will take even longer so until this topic reaches the schools it will take even longer and in addition to this there are already a lot of teachers in the schools or just finishing their own training and starting to teach and they will stay in the schools for many years longer and they aren't probably trained in this so they are still educating students without having this knowledge and further education for teachers is hard to realize because just going to a weekend about how media education won't be enough to actually help the teachers who have no idea and if you only talk about the technical equipment in schools we are missing out on the much bigger problem which is the education of the teachers so the expensive costs of buying new technology won't solve the problems as long as the teachers aren't able to use it properly it will just be thrown out money it's not enough to just put up computers but you have to tend to them and keep them up to date and these are costs which aren't considered by schools so the administration of the computers is mostly done by the computer science teachers and this teacher very often doesn't have a lot of time to do this so in practice a lot of this work gets done in the teachers free time and also computer science teachers aren't educated in administration so if you look at companies administrators get a lot of money and are specifically trained to this but if a teacher has to do this without training the technical infrastructure inside the school isn't well maintained and so if someone actually wants to use it it sometimes doesn't properly work a good example is the internet access at schools in a lot of schools you can't really count on this and when we go to the schools we often ask them can we count on the internet access and the schools often respond to with yeah we have internet access but like don't count on it working internet and digital media in general is giving possibilities to participate in society and not only to consume things and if you consider this you have to question whether politicians have understood this actually and another development is that huge IT companies are developing in the area of education and if politicians don't keep up to this this development will be reinforced for example Google with their Chromebooks is very common in American schools in German this isn't quite hasn't gone this far but Google has already started opening educational centers where they want to educate the society and want to reach a lot of people and the problem we are seeing here is that companies have their own financial interests and political interests and this is going to impact the content being taught there so maybe we should be talking about what should education generally be about should education and schools be a VT training to just train for one job but well actually maybe not maybe it should be teaching you for life in general schools should include job training but shouldn't be the job training so especially in our topic IT and technology students it's being discussed that students should learn certain skills to keep up in jobs and this discussion isn't a new one it has always been there and in the past it has somewhat worked but I think in future it's going to be more difficult I think in the past it kind of worked because back then you could very well see how jobs are going to be like and could train people for this but if you look at the present and at the future jobs are changing very fast and we can't really tell how they are going to look like when the students have finished schools so it's hard for schools to prepare students for an always changing job market but should be more about general education and should focus on people knowing how to use the media and how they can use it to be involved in society if we now look back to our history of chaos in schools we started helping schools with this topic 10 years ago we always had the idea behind our heads that the thing that we do is something transitory technology progresses faster than education, politics and we somehow expected that school will take on those topics because it should be its topics and secondly because the gap cannot be closed by us because we don't have the capacity now we realize that that isn't so transitory as we thought because politics basically isn't doing any of it and the gap left by politics is being filled by big corporations and that is something that we say very critically and so besides the workshops that we go to schools for we started taking our opinions into the education politics we've shown them at a conference we've demanded to make digital self determination a central topic educate the teachers relieve the teachers so that they can do this and these were just some of the demands that we made in May make your own contribution to education politics if you have children that go to school we would hope that you join us and now we will perform the questions and provide you some answers so we have 20 minutes for Q&As hopefully you've brought a lot of questions with you there are microphones all around in the hall just line up at the microphones thank you for chatting on the lights in the room so I can see stuff so there is the first question my name is Thomas I'm a teacher at the VET school so I'm trying to do digital education and with my colleagues I've realized the issue is in the fixed and close mindset that a lot of teachers have a fixed mindset and are telling themselves that they know everything about their topic and don't have to learn new things and this is a big hurdle to jump over if you look at primary school education this is very far away so what's your experience with this fixed mindset as a teacher myself I do teacher training myself and I see some of the situations partly I agree with your assessment there are colleagues which do have that mindset the school is a little bit like a bell under which you keep food and perhaps sometimes they don't really see what's outside this doesn't quite answer my question so we've talked a lot about that there are teachers that do not want this and what we this is why our demand is to educate the teachers and to force them to go to those trainings if you look for which teachers are against it then you're missing those teachers that would do more if you gave them the freedom to do so so the next question you haven't talked about the division within the educational system we have I've been a computer science teacher for years I've originally studied mathematics and so I've educated myself on IT and I'm from Lubig and the financial budget often isn't going through the policy process and if you look at the gymnasium which is the highest type of school where you can have a different degree they get a lot of money because they have a big lobby but if you look at the other types of schools which aren't valued as highly they don't get financial support coming from a poor city I come from Heidelberg and Heidelberg is a rich city and they find it simple more easy than others to have fashion schools but you can see how the real school is behind on computer science there are decisions for the whole state and the actual spending of a budget is up to the local communities and there was a change in the law so that communities could be supported in doing those things there is a question from the internet are there good examples for IT education in the different areas you have talked about for primary schools and where can you find material for this we don't want to advertise individual products there is free software that is available there is a project called the Kaliope Mini Kaliope Mini is a microcontroller with the blocks programming language but there is scratch from America and these are initiatives open source initiatives it is the target it is the aim that by third grade an engagement with programming languages happens in Hamburg I know an elementary school that has media technology part of their curriculum it doesn't happen in full context so if you look at 16 federal states we can see 32 different educational policies which one of those is the most developed regarding digital education which one is your favorite kind of state so difficult question to a decentralized organization Kaz Marchule is organized not as a central entity but in a distributed fashion and we haven't gone through those schedules individually and in a detailed fashion we are familiar with the strategy paper but we don't really know how the individual states have implemented it we did look at the Baden-Württemberg one very closely and we have earlier mentioned the deficits that it has the original problem of watching one calculates down to so hi I'm from Berlin and I work with school students at a university and through my studies at university I'm looking a lot about deductics so educational theories so I see issues everywhere so it's one time it's always promised that it will get better but there isn't a lot happening so there are methods like flipped classrooms which are well implemented in universities and the promises made by politicians the reason for our talk is the aim of this talk is to gather support and rally support for more money in education in the beginning of the talk you said classes are still very similar as they were 30 years ago so unfortunately it is a case that there are actually more people leaving schools or people who can't read or write so there might have been something different so when you're talking about general education if you look at the basics classic teaching methodologies which can be solved with paper is there a more general or radical approach to say let's keep our hands away from digital technology and actually use old technology to soften this change do we have another hour to discuss this? no I agree that it's not an argument that you need technology to teach computer science there is a very large portion of the curriculum that you could convey in an analog fashion but the children do use them devices and so it makes sense to use them but a large portion of the chances of the child depend on parents are able to provide oh there is another reason we find that students privately use technology and if we don't address those things in school then this is a deficit parents are not schooled in communicating those arguments so leaving it entirely up to the parents to address this topic I would find it difficult so there is not a microphone which is kind of hidden behind the cameras thank you very much for the overview about today's situation my question is kind of simple maybe it also has a simple answer your slogan is do something what can an individual actually do do you have any ideas about this? as Dorina said if you yourself have children during the parent's evening emphasize those topics make sure that they are tabled ideally then this eventually reaches the children a second thing is parents have offered to go into school and talk for a couple of hours if the teachers in school have not enough schooling thirdly there are many opportunities to participate in public discussion on education can we just participate in your project? the fifth of our demands is please start including experts into the topic it could be the context of Kauß-Maschule or project or it could be taking a class to a make-up space and look at it also this is a way to organize such an excursion or you can choose one of the initiatives Kauß-Maschule is one of them Jugendhakt youth hacks is another one so you can look for some other and choose one that suits your best and join it you can start entirely from scratch so here is the mailing list the bottom entry on the slide where you can join and there you will find many pointers to existing initiatives that you could join thank you very quickly band voice that's my topic so I can support schools and youth centers there is a limit of 16 embeds I think this is a limit if you have a cold class with tablets what should we do do you have any experience we don't have a recipe that we can present we have the same problem but my hope is the more people raise the problem the more likely it happens in our country we have a technology one of our problems is that the technology that we have set our minds on is vectoring and it just doesn't help enough and the Wanke billions were meant to to use those things and schools are bound to look for private offerings that's why you don't always need internet for that it becomes clear that digital self-actualization has become into focus because you don't need so much bandwidth to teach it are there any positive signs coming from other countries regarding the digitalization of schools are we the only ones or other countries struggling I personally have a friend in Finland not spoken with him and in Finland there is a trailer from the education ministry and I would like you to watch it it's very different from here let me refer to the keynote where we quoted Valholland and he said in 1984 in British elementary schools computers were being taught last question so the demand for media competence is an important one but if it's coming from companies or higher up in politics that's a different case so I myself find it hard to educate people on digital competencies without blaming them but also pointing out that there are other powers at play it is important to raise awareness for the problem and last year at the chaos congress we've shown things where complex technical events are made transparent and you are surprised how quickly students understand the implications and become aware of problems like data retention laws so the time is up thank you for the talk you've been listening to the translation by Katie and OS 10.000