I’ve just read Douglas Rushkoff’s shortbook Program or Be Programmed, wherein he shares “Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” Though his portrayal of various “biases” of digital technology (e.g., timelessness, abstraction, depersonalization) is polemical, he succinctly describes major challenges of new technologies in 144 pages.
His main point is to describe a new literacy – a digital literacy he says we must achieve to continue to shape our world in positive ways. He argues that the consequence of not being able to “program” (or, he allows, at least being familiar with the scope and power of programming) would be to allow digital technology – and those who wield its powers – to overdetermine our lives.
I am sympathetic to this message, but reading his argument served as a good exercise to review the larger picture – and consider how well this kind of story about “digital literacy” hangs together.
One area Rushkoff’s book helped me reflect on was the design of online learning environments. In line with his descriptions of digital biases, current learning management systems are often positively shaped around the “advantages” of digital technologies. Asynchronous discussion boards are favored. Students are asked to use their real identities. There is “space” for collaboration.
So far, so good. But Rushkoff helps us ask: what about the “speed” of dialogue and collaboration? It seems to me that instructional designers (teachers or their assistants) could make the mistake of hoping that student interactions (with the course, and with other students) only increase. Or, similarly, that the administrative evaluators of such courses favor more frequent interactions.
As Rushkoff points out, such desires could be our ill-considered adoption of digital biases, and in fact, slower, less-frequent interactions could be preferable. While he harkens back to the “early days” of online bulletin boards, and points to the “depth” of discussion that came out of less frequent “logging in and signing on” (p. 24), I think it could more simply be a case of “less is more” – that writing and editing take time, and focus can help one achieve better communication. I wonder, therefore, how we could sharpen the design of online discussions to favor more reflective engagement.
There are already great examples of this online. From the way sites like the New York Times aggregates Comments, to the way tools like Disqus track one’s diverse contributions, there is a lot of good thinking about shaping online discussion. How could educational designers incorporate these and other strategies into a “course” experience?
“You are innovators” is the message to the teachers at Learning.com‘s second annual professional development workshop in Portland, Oregon. I’m attending the workshop to learn more about their really interesting new software, Sky. I’m also interested to learn if their message to teachers is accurate, a wishful prediction, a hyperbolic marketing strategy, or something else. Working alongside teachers who are learning to use Sky, I begin to hope, will lead me to an answer.
Sky is the name of Learning.com’s recently-launched digital learning environment – which means, among other things, that it’s a platform for teachers and students to access instructional modules (what used to be called curriculum). Using Sky, teachers can create and assign modules (games, animations, links to online resources) to individual students, groups, or a whole class. Each student can go at their own pace or skip around, leaving a trail of data about their learning experiences.
Seeing a group of 50 teachers, librarians, administrators, and other educators learning to use this tool brought to mind a salient issue looming over the education sector: the transformation of the work of teaching from a classroom-based activity to a community-based activity. By this I mean to suggest that the horizon of a teacher’s work is expanding in two senses – both spatially (i.e., a teacher can interact with people in a distant location in a way that is perhaps easier than stepping out of the classroom and walking down the hallway to speak to a colleague) and socially (i.e., a teacher expected to interact with more people than ever).
To anyone who’s interested in education these days, this is not exactly new news. But watching teachers learn to use Sky, a metaphor floated into mind: teachers are being asked to abandon their role as performers. Software like Sky demands that teachers become increasingly like DJs. In short,
Teachers are being asked to jockey media (of all kinds) in the way that DJs jockey music.
Club DJs are very well versed in mixing music to motivate the club goers to dance and drink. Very successful Club DJs can amass real fan followings. Club DJs have historically been on the leading edge innovation when it comes to leveraging the equipment they have for the best new sounds and memorable effects.
Putting aside the goal of dancing and drinking for the moment, the part of this description that strikes me as apt is the effect DJs have on their audience: they are recognized for leveraging the equipment they have for the best new sounds and memorable effects. As companies like Learning.com put innovative software into teachers’ hands, and when these tools further extend the reach of teachers to more and more content (note: I am using “content” and “media” interchangeably, where media puts the emphasis on the diversity of available content), it seems that their role as purveyors of knowledge – and, therefore, as critics and curators of media – is made more pronounced.
Great teaching has, of course, always been about being knowledgeable about, and delivering, content (with bonus points for delivering the right content at the right time). But a significant change that software can make possible is the amount of media that a teacher has access to, and therefore, has the possibility of being knowledgeable about. And this goes beyond mere facts and static content – even beyond dynamic content, methodology, and analysis – and into the area of the learning tools that students can use in conjunction with that content and those processes.
So what are some of the new tricks that Teacher-DJs will have to learn, refine, and become known for? The following come to mind:
delivering simple, efficient, and multi-modal learning activities to students
directing students to great, fresh, and relevant resources
providing a directed (but not inauthentic) way to experience the Internet
sharing responsiblity for student work (and related actions) on school-suported publishing platforms
A related way these changes will likely play out is that authorship will increasingly become an important aspect of teaching. Whether a teacher is authoring content for students, describing and/or reviewing content for fellow teachers, or describing and/or reviewing content for a wider audience (including parents, administrators, and communities), the immediacy (and sheer reach) of the Internet will amplify the importance and potential of this work.
For example, Learning.com has ventured into the realm of positioning teachers within a network powered by sophisticated social software. Using Sky, teachers can create and share lesson plans – lesson plans they may have always had, but perhaps never before in a form that was so ready for sharing so widely. Software features that support searching for, selecting, and rating others’ lesson plans raise the significance of formerly merely digital tools (e.g., putting lesson plans online) to a new level.
An interesting effect of this kind of social software will be that there may be (will be?) increasingly more social pressure on teachers to create and share their work with other teachers. So teachers will be authors not only in the sense that students will use their multimedia assemblages (which seems like a good way to describe their products in software like Sky), but in the sense that other teachers will be able to access their work. By sharing work in this way, and as a community of teachers becomes interested in the depth and quality of a fellow teacher’s work, each teacher may subsequently be judged by it. And though this may have been the case previously on a more local level (e.g., interactions between a teacher and his/her department or administrators), social software is fundamentally changing the professional landscape of teaching by transforming social interactions between teachers.
Understood in this way, it seems that social software is becoming intertwined in what some consider the history of the de-professionalization of teaching. Though, as we see in the comparison to the work of DJs, it is also creating new possibilities of professionalism through a kind of grassroots process – where the day to day work of teachers (lesson-planning) becomes a new kind of lingua franca in valuing a teacher’s abilities and achievements. This is promising stuff. But where there can be little doubt that software like Sky will change teaching, how long it will take for the policies and realities that regulate the day to day activities of students under the watch of lumbering bureaucracies is less clear. And so,
It is still unclear if social software can be a vehicle that gives teachers more power to directly transform the education sector.
Looking into the heart of software like Sky, one sees how teachers are being asked to change the way they work in both obvious and subtle ways. Making a comparison to the work of DJs is, after all, probably not fair. But I think it’s a helpful metaphor. DJs take a lot of pride in their work, and are recognized for their unique contributions to spaces, events, and communities. Rather than evaluating a cultural shift in teaching as a good or bad thing, this kind of lens helps me better understand the kind of work teachers are being asked to do.
Are teachers innovators? Software like Sky gives them an opportunity to innovate. Not all will, but those who do will participate in an interesting transformation – and potentially a watershed period – in the history of the education sector.
When does one decide to become a generalist? When did I?
Seth Godin insists that “art” should play a central role in the workplace. In Linchpin, he argues that seeing work as art is not only good, but imperative. I believe, however, that Godin would be better off calling his linchpin a generalist rather than an artist. This shift also highlights a consequence of Godin’s view: namely, that there are really two (very different) roles for linchpins: at the top of the proverbial corporate ladder, but also at the bottom. (After all, while considering his great flight attendant-come-linchpin as a maker of “generalism” rather than “art” is less satisfying, I think it’s a more reasonable view.)
Godin doesn’t say much about the linchpins that are stuck at the bottom. The good thing for reigning capitalists: they’re cheap, and relatively helpless. Why? There are so many of them. Democratic education is designed to produce generalists – but a sad consequence of poor educational performance is that it leads to bad generalists. Isn’t developing expertise a natural response to this situation? Indeed, hasn’t this been the emergent role of “higher” education? But now the predicament: the milieu of abundant expertise has taken the glamor away from generalism.
So what’s it like to be a school-aged person in the world today? You don’t have to look very far to see an abundance of despair (or, perhaps more tellingly, decadence). I think the reign of expertise is at least party to blame: expertise is the new mediocre, and the media’s obsession with expertise obscures the role of generalists.
In Post-Medium Publishing, Paul Graham makes the very elegant point that people have never paid for content. He explores this point from a few directions, pointing the way toward a future with low-cost distribution and high-quality “events.”
Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it… In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?
If he’s right, it’s amazing how slow publishers of all kinds have come to appreciate this – even as they run their businesses into the ground. (Perhaps they are just being optimistic that they will survive long enough to retire!? Anyone under 60 should probably adopt a different strategy.) The same could be said of academic institutions.
While academic publishers are conveniently tied to institutions with event models, I suspect they will increasingly see “traditional” publishers move to compete in the academic marketplace… offering new and powerful educational experiences. Will they be able to compete head-on with colleges and universities? I suspect they will. After all, they’ve been distributors all along – it’s just a new kind of content.
I haven’t been to the MOMA in a while, but I just found the James Ensor Exhibition website which more or less offers a ‘virtual’ version of the show (and serves as a rich online ad). I felt it gave me a ton of information, and also made me want to go to the real thing! That’s not an easy thing to achieve with web design, but art may be well-suited for this since there’s the so-called “aura of the original” that can perhaps best be perceived in person.
I wonder what the equivalent is in education? What is the in-person or social interaction that you would want to have in person even if you could get almost everything of (a practical?) value online?
Note: I did end up going to MOMA and seeing the Ensor show. It showcases a fantastic artist on the cutting edge of his profession… and Modernity as well!
Acording to this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, new campus is being built to spec in Chaska, Minnesota – that is, they are building it without knowing who the tenant will be, with the intention of leasing/renting space to a variety of schools. Is this what the college of the future looks like?
Perhaps. It’s a slick idea. As we’ve recently seen on Willoby & Himrod, U.S. colleges are exporting education around the world. So why not grow new campuses at home in the U.S.?
This could lead to competition for students, opening up whole new markets for undergraduates and professionals who would like to receive a degree from a distant college, but who prefer face-to-face instruction.
Will remote facilities be able to deliver the goods? Two possible developments, neither of which feels so good: 1) more traveling for star professors, and 2) more adjunct positions using a ready-made curriculum.
This article in the Times provides a brief introduction to a fad that’s sweeping through Silicon Valley these days: escapism.
Timothy Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek”, promotes “pulling the plug” on your fast, information-driven life (though no one, it seems, has actually read the book).
I admit, it sounds exciting, but then the details start to come to light: hiring personal assistants in India (who tells them what to do?), outsourcing your relationships, primarily getting your news from waiters – it’s obviously a very different kind of life.
While self-help gurus come and go, the impulse to “escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich” never seems to wane. But, for me at least, the thought (and details) of actually succeeding serve more as a grim reminder of how much fun it is to solve real problems. Sure, there’s plenty of ways to live off the fat of the land in modern times, but isn’t it more fun to try and work in an area where the impact of creativity and hard work is important enough to persevere for more than four hours each week?
I ran across this fun and informative lecture by Jon Ippolito discussing various tensions between cultural production (in general) and the current culture of intellectual property law – where he introduces his idea that “cheating is the pedagogy of the internet.” It’s the written version of a lecture he gave at Columbia University a few years, when I was lucky enough to hear him. His ideas and criticisms about pedagogy and the internet led to his project called The Pool.
I’ve been trying to take some of the ideas he touches on here and push them forward a bit. The law stuff is great, but perhaps it’s not the most accessible inroad to thinking about academic honesty. In lieu of that, I’m interested in what kind of conceptualization of education we would need to make room for new technologies that accelerate cheating. (Maybe it would turn out to be an approach to education we’ve always needed?)
I’ve just read Douglas Rushkoff’s shortbook Program or Be Programmed, wherein he shares “Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” Though his portrayal of various “biases” of digital technology (e.g., timelessness, abstraction, depersonalization) is polemical, he succinctly describes major challenges of new technologies in 144 pages.