StigmergicWeb

I’m sitting at my kitchen table doing some marking (mid semester marks are due in 2 weeks), and I’m listening to and watching David Warlick in his keynote address to the K12Online Conference (thanks to Dean for the link). I like a lot of what David says, and I respect his thoughtfulness in the field of educational technology. Something is bugging me, however, about the keynote so far. Its not something that David specifically is responsible for instigating, although he and many others (perhaps even me) are guilty of perpetuating - the myth of the digital native.

Perhaps I’m just feeling like a cranky old man because “the big four-oh” is looming in front of me at the end of the month. Perhaps I’m just needing to get this off my chest. I don’t know exactly where this myth came from - I think that Don Tapscott or Mark Prensky may have initiated and incubated it. In his widely cited article Digital Natives Digital Immigrants Prensky describes digital natives thus:

Lest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive, let me highlight some of the issues. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to “serious” work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

It sounds very familiar to me - it is a particularly accurate description of children. I have a couple of them (and some would say my wife has three, but she is far too polite to say such a thing out loud), so I feel qualified to comment on this.

When I watch students working with computers, I don’t see any evidence of digital natives. Their ability to use a computer to create a product - graph, spreadsheet, movie, etc. - is no greater or less that adults. There are undoubtedly some students who are very sophisticated computer users, but as a percentage of the population I would judge that they are equally well represented in the adult population (although I tend to hang out with a particularly geeky crowd given the opportunity). Most students and most adults are quite naive users - they learn simple tasks easily enough, but more complex tasks take more time (although somewhat less with students) and at the end they accomplish these complex tasks by following a series of memorized steps. Quite often the steps they follow are not the most efficient ways of getting the job done, but it does the work. A colleague of mine observed that students don’t really understand the technology any better than most adults, they are just less afraid of making mistakes. They may figure things out on a computer faster, but they are just as likely to be mistaken as an adult.

My concern with the use of this convenient but, I believe, incorrect paradigm of digital natives and digital immigrants. If we project certain qualities and attributes onto our students, instead of learning what they really can do and what they really need to learn, we do them a great disservice by not providing the education (that is, formalized school learning) that they need. We also show great disrespect to them by attributing traits to them instead of coming to know them all as unique and valuable human beings.

Towards the end of his keynote, David suggests that we are learning in new, 21st century ways. I have to disagree and suggest that David (and others) seriously consider these sorts of statements. People are learning in the same way that we always have - mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work. While it is true that the scope of the communities from which we learn has greatly expanded, the way we communicate (that is, the genres of communication) has not changed although the tools used for communicating (that is, the media of communication) have changed. We write personal essays and journals as people did hundreds of years ago, but we publish them online and call them weblogs. Michel de Montaigne was undoubtedly the first a-list blogger. We send e-mail and messages back and forth to each other, but does this represent a qualitative change from written correspondence? Wikis, with their collaborative writing affordances, have always reminded me of the notes scribbled in margins of books which I personally experienced in university - some of the marginalia were actually quite thoughtful and well written. Our audience may now be world wide and the capability to publish may now be open to anyone, but we are still following genres that are well established and predate any so-called digital natives or their digital immigrant parents.

Graham Atwell has published a screencast of his presentation Personal Learning Environments - Live at Edinburgh.

There’s just so much I like about his presentation, but two main ideas stand out in my mind:

• A personalized learning environment is not an application. It is a suite of services which could be, I suppose, web based or locally run on a PC. Most important, Graham points out that the suite of services is made up of small tools, loosely connected. This is a theme I’ve written about before. I love hearing other people talk about it - it means I’m less likely to be raving or demented, at least about this particular topic.
• Learning, especially informal learning is not something that can be commoditized, monetized or discussed in the context of free markets. Learning, and education, is a public good - the more people in a society that are learners, the better off that society will be.

I keep meaning to write more on this last topic, but my life seems to drag me away from writing and blogging as much as I’d like to. Ah well, someday I’ll get back to being a more dedicated blogger. I estimate that day will come in 2011 when my son starts Kindergarten. Until then, we’ll have to make due with what I can fit into my schedule.

I meant to mention this earlier, but it seems like Stephen is back somewhat from his hiatus. Given the hysteria around web based e-mail accounts, MySpace and other threats to the educational orthodoxy, the timing couldn’t be better.

Its good to have you back, Stephen. We need all the help we can get, now more than ever.

I could sense a growing disturbance in the force for some time now, and here is the first (and probably not the last) manifestation:

Weblogg-ed - Reinvention Chapter 2 - I Quit

In a nutshell, Will Richardson has quit his day job to pursue his muse, wherever that may lead him. Will, I am happy for you, slightly envious, and just a bit concerned. I am happy because you are following your bliss, and I truly believe that the world would be a better place if more people did that. I suggest you read Paul Graham’s essay on How to Do What You Love for further guidance in this.

I’m envious because as a teacher I’m working in a system that I see as having some serious flaws. I teach in the province of Saskatchewan in Canada, so I’m pretty lucky because I really believe that the educational system here is not only a pretty good one, but it truly has potential to grow beyond some of the current limitations. The limitations are still there, though, and sometimes I chafe a bit because of them. Our system is set up to do a really great job of educating students of the 1960s, but that describes the teaching staff and not the current students. Still, I manage some occasional small innovations. But I know that a lot of teachers, blogging and non-blogging, feel some frustration with the system and want to get out of it. That’s one of the reasons I’m worried.

I don’t know how things are for teachers where you are, Will. I know that despite a pretty good (and potentially great) system here, there is a great deal of frustration at the sometimes glacial pace of change. Any publicly funded enterprise will be the same - the tax-paying public tends to be quite conservative (and even Conservative here in Canada, but that’s another story), at least when it comes to paying taxes. But we’re never going to change the system from the outside, because once we’re outside we no longer have a vested interest in creating that change. I’m concerned, Will, because your example may demonstrate to others that the way to deal with frustration is to exit stage left. I hope that doesn’t happen in general, and I hope that doesn’t happen to you specifically - I still want to read your ideas on education and the betterment of the public system of it in a year, and in 5 years! The only way to get some real change is if we all walk in together singing “You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant“

Good luck, Will. I hope you avoid any trap or distractions that might try to lure you off course. I think I speak for - well, I speak for myself I suppose, that’s the whole point of having a blog - so speaking for myself, I need to let you know that I will feel deeply disappointed if you end up as another suit-with-a-book-to-sell-earning-more-money-for-a-30-minute-pep-talk-than-teachers-earn-in-a-month. We need you to do better than that.

Keep the faith, and remember what is motivating you to do this!

This much I do know. We need to get everyone, and I mean everyone access to the knowledge and people and ideas that now make up the Web. Educators need to be a part of this evolution, and maybe the revolution, too. I don’t yet have a clear idea what role I can play in that, but now, at least, I’ll be open to it should it come.

(And update your blog software so I can leave a comment without registration!!!)

There are a few writers in the ed-tech world that I can count on for writing something that just gets my brain in a resonating hum, and David Wiley has done it again::iterating toward openness - Freire, the Matrix, and Scalability

To be honest, I suppose the resonance I found in this post is second hand, since it describes David’s resonance with a presentation recently at AERA in Montreal. The presenter, who goes unnamed but I would sure like to know who it was:

connected Freire’s ideas of oppression and the transparency of systems of control to the Matrix, and then went on to analogize the work we educators are called to do with unplugging people from the Matrix.

Wow - Freire and the Matrix together at last. This sounds like a good combination to me. The heart of Freire’s writing is always the spiritual nature of the individual, which seems to me is also a major theme in the Matrix.

Quoting Freire, he said that we should not fear to be laughed at, ridiculed, called unscientific, or even called anti-scientific, but that we must base all we do in education in love. Love for the student, the learner, the other.

Of course! This seems so self-evident with my experience as a teacher. David goes on to contrast this with his experiences in automated instruction.

As I interact with an intelligent tutoring system, what will be the source of my inspiration? Who will be the teacher I remember forever, with whom I form a transformative bond of trust, who I know cares and worries about me? Where is my connection to an other? Where is the modeling of competent, passionate living? Where is the enculturation into a community of meaningful practice?

Aha!!

I have wondered what the purpose of public schools can be in a media context that can deliver individualized instruction to each student’s computer at home. I believe that schools should be relevant and important public institutions. And I’ve wondered what made them so important. The answer is its the love! Good schools are very caring institutions. Teachers are by and large very caring individuals. When we automate instruction, the best and most important part of teaching is taken away.

I would agree with David when he cautions us against the focus on improving scalability of instruction:

There is a political problem with talking about the scalability of instruction that makes it morally inappropriate. “Scalability” looks at the ability to reach large numbers of learners, and the economics of doing so. This is morally inappropriate because “scaling to a large number of learners” implicitly and purposefully excludes some learners. Generally, we assume that the excluded group is comprised of potential learners without the financial means and other resources available to secure access to educational opportunity. (Or it could be that one group is excluded in order to provide an economic or military advantage to another group.) Regardless of which reading of scalability one may choose, we should never talk about scalability of instruction because the language of scaling is the language of exclusion for the sake of profit. Instead of talking about “reaching large numbers of students” we should talk about “reaching each and every potential learner.”

In the comments to Wiley’s post, Dave Bauer proposes a solution to the focus on scalability of instruction:

The answer is to stop thinking about “providing” education and start thinking about facilitating or encouraging learning. Learning is what people do. Education and all that implies, is about delivery of a commodity. Learning is about internalization and ownership of knowledge.

I would probably say that learning and education are two sides of the same coin; they are the same process but one, learning, is an internal process, while education is what happens in the environment to stimulate learning. Schools, for example, are a social technology for the purpose of education. What he refers to as education I would refer to as instruction. Instruction is a kind of method that can be used for some kinds of education and learning, and it is often used in schools. Am I being overly picky? Probably, but I think the distinction is important.

Stephen Downes has once again managed to drop the seed crystal into the super-saturated solution that is my brain (at least something about my brain is super). In a recent essay, Emergent Learning: Social Networks and Learning Networks, Stephen has drawn together several threads from his OLdaily newsletter to weave a common theme about the transformation of online learning.

I’ve only just started reading it, and following some of the links, so its too early for a complete commentary yet. One quotation which did catch my eye (and make me think about it a few times) was this gem from James Farmer, posted on his blog:

People don’t exist in environments, they exist in themselves and their semilattice-esque relationships with other actors (communities, individuals, spaces, inanimate objects…).

To get the full meaning of that, I needed to re-read Christopher Alexander’s tremendous essay A City is not a Tree. His perspective on cities in 1965, when this essay was written, is homologous to the realizations that many of us are writing and blogging about. Even my earlier posts this week about my feelings of dissatisfaction with schools stems from the same gap between our abstract idealization of systems (like cities or schools or other educational systems) and how they really are. Like cities, schools (and other educational systems) are actually semilattice-esque. They are not hierarchical, like a tree structure, with clearly defined and distinct units. Perhaps the reason that schools are often described as being tree-like is because the people doing the writing are teachers and administrators, whose perceptions of the school may be quite hierarchical - the school is divided into different academic departments, the departments have teachers within them who teach specific classes, etc. If I recall correctly back through the mists of time, students will perceive a school as a more richly networked system than a tree-like structure. As a student, I am in a class with certain people in the first period, and when I go to my second period class some of the same people are with me. Some of the people around me I will socialize with outside of school, and some I won’t. Each student is going to have a unique web of relationships with the people in each class.

I’m looking forward to reading through Stephen’s essay some more, and following up on some of the links. More commentary to follow - stay tuned.

I’ve just spend about an hour reading up on some differences between Blackboard and Moodle. My recent love affair with Moodle has been documented here earlier (the experiment continues, and is working out even better than I imagined), but I thought a little equal time should be spent looking at the competition. So I went to blackboard’s site (nope - no link, I’m not going to up their page rating), and I found it tainted with the miasma of corporate culture that is threatening to choke the learning out of the education system. I’ll need to write about this more sometime, but the marketing-speak about efficiency and standards-based confidence just makes me want to hurl. (Where did that word come from - I must have seen Wayne’s World on TV recently!)

There’s a term that is missing from the marketing spew coming out of the educational corporations, and that’s fun. Do you remember education being fun? I do - it happened when events conspired to shake up the usual classroom routine, like on snow days. They were pure magic! If you were one of the few students at school because your bus was running that day, you would have your choice of spending your time in the gym, in the library, in the art room or playing board games. I remember the greatest feeling of accomplishment when I could sit and read a book or work on an art project for 2 hours without stopping because there were no bells dictating how my time should be spent. Where’s the room for snow days when the concerns of our educational systems are on reliability, 99.999% uptime and efficiency?

I don’t think that all is lost, however, because I think there are an awful lot of teachers who remember just how great those snow days were, and how much learning took place when we relaxed our concern about education long enough to have a little fun.

The Problem with Abundance :: Remember Peter de Jager? He was one of the prime prophets of Y2K apocalypse scenarios - I’m sure producers of gas powered generators are still living well thanks to him. He has aparently metamorphosed into a futurist (which is somewhat like being a religious prophet, but with better a better tailor and you get invited to much better conferences), and here is a piece from him discussing how abundance can be a problem in a culture that is designed around scarcity.

This is, to me, a fascinating idea. I have noticed in schools that our daily activities are based around scarcity of learning resources - teacher as the transmitter of knowledge, standardization of textbooks and exams - while we actually live in a world of abundant learning resources. There is a incongruity that I believe students are aware of, at least preconciously; perhaps this is why so many students view school as irrelevant.