Alford “Slim” Willock’s higher education experience is inspiring and revealing, and a little different than your average coming-of-age story. He is part of the changing landscape of formal education, while his experience highlights foundational values of higher education. Check it out:
More about Slim
In May 2023, Slim graduated with a Master of Science degree in Information Technology from Pace University. He connected to his bachelor’s and master’s programs through the NACTEL (National Alliance for Communications Technology Education and Learning) and CAEL (Council for Adult and Experiential Learning). NACTEL is a CAEL-led partnership of industry employers and unions working with quality educators to create and sponsor online education programs that meet the needs of current and future telecommunications professionals.
Production
It was a great experience collaborating on this video with Slim and the team at the Online Learning Center. To highlight Slim’s experience at Pace, we conducted a studio interview and captured his family celebrating at Pace University graduation in May 2023. With additional footage provided by Slim, we were able to illustrate his home life and work ethic.
Rolin, the author and Assistant Professor & Director of EdTech & Media at Seattle Pacific University, believes content should be remixable rather than merely accessible. (Rolin goes further to discuss “openwashing” of content, which offers an interesting comparison of content makers.) With decades of web content available, it’s helpful to keep this ideal of remix in mind when choosing or creating OER.
Free access to educational materials is important for many learners, but educators can potentially do more with content that does not foreclose possibilities of remix.
Sure, video games are immersive, but are they educational? Only to a very small extent. Educators have been pursuing the connections between immersive media like gaming and education for decades, but I want to offer another perspective: learners have to be suspended between being gamers and game-makers. Here’s a brief reflection on how that can happen…
Put Away the Video Games
Games are really only interesting in small doses. So if you’re going to use them for broader educational purpose, keep it short. This same advice applies to many other activities as well: hooks, icebreakers, brainstorms, research, and perhaps even reading. When it comes to ambitious learning goals, how long does it take until we get bored? Are all engaging educational experiences short in duration? (And is this a feature rather than a bug?)
If we contrast active and exciting learning experiences with more conventional lecture-style information delivery, let’s say the best experiences are the short ones. (Even traditional teacher-led experiences collapse after about 50 minutes, though there is evidence that more interaction is perceived as better.) Is formal education—educational experience that spirals and requires significant exposure to achieve significant recall—ever likely to permanently achieve the velocity to escape boredom for most students most of the time? It seems unlikely, but what if the answer was that it could…
Dynamic Interventions
Teaching often begins with a presentation or a group activity—activities that help individuals explore new ideas while confronting factual information from experts or authoritative sources. A part of our jobs as “producers” in the Learning Theater is to bridge events (and our event partners) from the present into a better-designed-built-environment future.
In the past two years at EdLab, we have begun experimenting with what I will call “dynamic interventions.” These are generally small multimedia gestures that connect classroom activities: a soundtrack, a light cue, an introductory video for an activity, or a background image. The Learning Theater has enabled us to manipulate the built environment in both subtle and dramatic ways during a face-to-face learning experiences. Using light, sound, video, props, and furnishings, we have built many multimedia experiences to enhance what began as more ordinary learning scenarios.
Adding multimedia to an educational experience is not always the right thing. (As in all design, sometimes simple is better.) But increasingly we’re seeing the blending of “simple” and “multimedia” moments as creating the optimal conditions for sustaining learning over the course of an hour, an afternoon, a day, or longer.
Recent events have given us more confidence to steer our partners toward building dynamic interventions into their plans, and I’m excited to see where these efforts lead. But it won’t just be a matter of adding “fun” and “exciting” multimedia moments into lectures that optimizes learning. The learners are going to be active participants in the process of design and execution.
Immersion
I think “immersion” is a helpful word to describe this enhanced educational experience. Often used in language learning to describe a situation where learner can’t help but be confronted with educationally rich experience, it also comes to us with a sense that the learner is sustained in a state of flow. How can that happen?
Only learners can ultimately tell us what they need. Do they need a break? Do they need a boost of energy? Do they need time to reflect and write? Or time to talk together? Involving learners in the ebb and flow of educational experience with dynamic interventions will raise the stakes. Educators can offer learners an environment, but learners will need to activate it.
Collaboration is a key element of dynamic interventions we’ve made so far. (Learning is often more fun together!) With respect to collaborative activities, learners are really asked to be both participants and educators—taking an active role in their colleagues’ learning. Dynamic interventions can help support learners in both their roles by giving their work new contexts as an activity unfolds—and in a highly aesthetic way. Ultimately, I imagine that the suspension of learners between these different orientations can best sustain a flow experience. Time will tell…
Alas, we are just beginning to explore the possibilities of this exciting—and I think somewhat novel, or at least technologically-heightened—nexus of knowledge, creativity, and learning.
What are ways do you think we can further (or best) support the development and sharing of these ideas and our toolset?
Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.
It’s true that Denmark doesn’t at all fit the classic definition of socialism, which involves government ownership of the means of production. It is, instead, social-democratic: a market economy where the downsides of capitalism are mitigated by government action, including a very strong social safety net.
The term “meritocracy” was coined by sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satire, The Rise of Meritocracy. Pro-tip: he was satirizing meritocracy, and was not happy that his work led to the popularization of the idea as a positive political philosophy. (I’ve recently run across this history in Edward Luce’s book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism.)
I appreciate this perspective, and am coming to believe that the tension between the ideals of meritocracy and social justice in the U.S. has never been more pronounced (let’s say since WWII). With the education sector sitting right at the heart of this tension, what does it mean for our work at EdLab?
For one, it suggests we should be mindful of how educational tools can be used to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. With inequality in the U.S. reaching impressive (though controversial) heights, it’s hard not to imagine that America’s “bootstrapping myth” is less realistic than ever.
It also suggests we have to be increasingly mindful of how education is positioned as instrumental for economic mobility—as compared to, say, an arena for curiosity. It’s easy to regard the latter as a elitist or privileged notion of education, but this uncharitable view could also be seen as a “view from inequality.” In other words, if economic goods were more equally distributed, there may be less pressure on education to lead to outcomes that were directly related to one’s economic status.
It’s fair to expect that in the coming years we’ll increasingly hear that education should serve the economic interests of Americans. While I agree in a narrow sense (that education should make every student more literate in regard to economics), in a broader sense, it’s a sad and self-defeating outcome of existing (and still rising) inequality. This instrumental view could be a dangerous dead-end for American education, rife with ceaseless testing, accountability measures, and narrowed (read: “low”) expectations. But one could object, “It’s time Americans get serious about educational outcomes to finally get ahead!”
This seems plausible, but consider if it’s putting the cart before the horse: Inequality could be a political problem, not an educational one. This is an important view from a “social justice” perspective, albeit one more often (only?) held by “Leftist” politicians and academics (Robert Reich being one of my favorites—check out his recent book, Saving Capitalism).
What does education look like if we don’t align it with a meritocratic-friendly perspective? I suspect it looks a lot like good teaching, great schools, and serious fun. In other words, like what we already know “good” education to look like. The problem, on this view, isn’t that our educational tools are substandard, or that it’s increasingly unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans (and even less so for the majority of global citizens in an increasingly connected world). The problem would seem to be that America is a plutocracy that can’t figure out how—or why—to invest in education.
Maybe the revolution we need isn’t an “educational” one, but what if an educational revolution is the only kind we can bring about? That is a striking problem and opportunity.
Talk of racism in the U.S. has grown tremendously this year. I feel a key underlying issue of racism itself is a lack of imagination, or effort to use one’s imagination in such a context.
“Colin Kaepernick (7) and Eric Reid (35) Take a Knee”
Why are some people racist? Do they feel superior to others? Or rather, do they fail to understand the struggles of others? These are some preliminary questions that come to mind. Sometimes we focus on a failure of empathy to understand racism, but the broader concept of imagination is also interesting to consider.
An exploration of an “imagination deficit” could be defined by at least a few different moments:
A lack of awareness of others’ struggles.
An inability (or reluctance) to consider alternative perspectives than one’s own
An unwillingness to accept, embrace, or champion change
The latter aspect of an imagination deficit—an unwillingness to accept or embrace change—is particularly bothersome in a world full of institutionalized racism. For it’s from the vantage of acceptance that one can enact behavioral change (not espousing racist views, for example). And alas, it’s the hard work of taking the final step of championing change that makes real change possible.
We can also understand an imagination deficit by coming at this the other way around: a resistance to change. Why, after all, do some people resist change? Are they so comfortable? Are they so worried about losing power or control?
Either way, the ability to imagine a future that is more fair and just for everyone would seem to be a key motivation.
I wonder if an argument from imagination could be useful in conversations with racists. (Did Maxine Green think so?)
I suspect that an inability to imagine a different future isn’t only manifested in racism, but sexism and discrimination of all sorts as well.
I would love to expand this into a longer reflection on the liberal ideal of progressivism.
On this day, hundreds of thousands of people are marching together throughout the world to protest Donald Trump’s inauguration yesterday. I write in sympathy with these marchers, with the hope of creating more understanding between the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump, and the 66 million who did not. (Yeah, it’s a long shot, so I’ll try to keep it short.)
Here, I want to acknowledge Donald Trump as a moral leader. I think that we “on the left” don’t create enough space in everyday conversation to allow for this. We tend to get stuck on the immoral (or even just amoral) actions we’ve witnessed, and lash out with the claim that “he is not moral,” and so on. This kind of communication is likely to underscore many of the demonstrations today.
But I’ve done a lot of thinking about morality in the course of my education, and I think we should acknowledge that there are many visions of the good. Action that is in line with such visions are generally regarded as “moral.” Groups of people vie for the moral high ground—the argumentative advantage that their good is the good. When history settles, the winner gets to “write it,” as the saying goes. Prematurely then, we hope we are the victors, but sometimes we are not.
I think it may be unwise to pursue this moral position in the time of Trump. (Perhaps just too late.)
A more pluralistic understanding of morality has the consequence of raising the bar on our descriptions of the good. We have to say more about what we want, what it means, and why it deserves to be part of our vision. Of course we do this; we do it all the time. It’s the kind of talk we all look for in a visionary leader. But—and be honest now—when was the last time you sat down with a spreadsheet and charted out all the pieces of your vision, how they are connected, and what the costs are of achieving them? It’s the kind of thing we generally do shorthand (e.g., pulling bits from the news or op-ed pieces), allow others to do for us (re: especially “the political class”), or maybe even forget to do.
I think the cost of this omission of tallying the sum total of our vision of the good (assuming we even have one, or only one), is higher than we think. If, for example, our vision isn’t as coherent as we think it is, then we need to be more open to criticism. My suspicion is that many people voted for Trump because Clinton seemed to smug and sure of herself—and not particularly what she said or how she said it, but how her representation of policies didn’t sit well with the people actually experiencing economic despair.
Or, in other words, the Culture War maybe played a smaller role in Clinton’s loss than we think. Yet I’m not making an “It’s the economy, stupid” argument. I think the problem is about articulating a coherent vision of the good. I think it’s what Obama was able to do, though I think it’s fair to say he spent down most of the “capital” the Left has—for better or worse—pursing a diverse, meaningful agenda that unfortunately was not seen as doing enough fast enough for many Americans (well okay, maybe in a hasty sense it’s an “It’s the economy, stupid” moment). I don’t know if it was possible to do more, but he certainly didn’t go out of his way to cooperate with the Republican-led Congress.
So here came Trump with an alternative vision of the good. Racist. Sexist. Anti-immigrant. Isolationist. Anti-media. Anti-science. Anti-democratic. Fascist. But importantly: distinctly alternative.
It’s a vision nonetheless. It’s not even particularly coherent; I’m not sure how one can hold a coherent vision that’s anchored in an anti-science denial of global warming. But it was different than visions afforded by the Democrats. It was starkly different from even most visions outlined by more traditional Republicans. It was essentially an anti-establishment vision, and he wowed enough Americans to rise to power.
Philosophically, then, I acknowledge Donald Trump as a moral leader in a weak sense—allowing for room that his vision is compelling for some people as surely as other leaders inspire others. To acknowledge this is to step (however unwillingly) into a different political landscape than we’ve become accustomed to. I think it means we should at least contemplate abandoning the competition for “moral leadership” in a strong sense—meaning that we are somehow striving towards ultimate agreement and understanding, and a unanimously-shared view that a singular vision of the good has once-and-for-all risen above all others. As in the Christian-Judeo sense.
I think it’s important for the Left to start now from a different place. We should, instead, be focused on how the policy positions Trump represents (or, indeed, is unable to define) differ from our own. Particularly how we think they will lead to outcomes that we find undesirable. Once we’ve agreed on how to articulate that, we need to be more strategic in enacting communication that directs attention to our visions.
Yes, my heart is with the pussyhat, but my mind charts a somewhat different course for future moral leaders to help us achieve justice around the globe.
This short essay was drafted in an afternoon. I hope to be able to clarify and expand it over time!
The slogan is deeply judgmental yet optimistic: “Make America Great Again.” Until now, a week away from the inauguration, I’ve mostly turned a blind eye to it. But there it is, now firmly lodged in our collective imagination.
There is some truth in it. K-12 education education in America isn’t “great.” But it never really was, broadly speaking. Americans are often an optimistic bunch, however, and we’ve invested a great deal in public education over the past century. Have we seen this investment pay off? Slowly, steadily, I think we have, though American education remains firmly middling compared to other (albeit smaller) countries.
So, with respect to education at least, we can certainly do a lot better. But the slogan “MAGA” is unsettling because it harkens back to a history that is no longer a good yardstick for measuring our progress. America has changed. The world has changed. We’re more inclusive and diverse now. Many of our classrooms are more progressive now, and we’re trying to make progress in many areas at once (link to the “Guiding Vision and Definition of Principles of the Women’s March on Washington).
But I’m skeptically optimistic about education.
I think we’re going to see education get worse before it gets better—this will be true for most aspects of American life over the next 4 years, unless you’re lucky enough to be a billionaire (… or vested in Russia’s political regime?). With Republican support for vouchers and other options that put public money into private hands, it looks like a federal investment in public education will be on a swift decline.
But after that—when the jobs don’t really come back, and the money doesn’t really end up in the pockets of most Americans—I think Americans will wise up to the false promises, the angry dismissals, and get-fixed-quick schemes and realize that education is worth the investment and worth the wait.
I hope we have the time. I hope we have the patience.
This seems plausible, but consider if it’s putting the cart before the horse: Inequality could be a political problem, not an educational one. This is an important view from a “social justice” perspective, albeit one more often (only?) held by “Leftist” politicians and academics (Robert Reich being one of my favorites—check out his recent book, 
