From the “Making the Compelling Case Dept.” comes this article from the new International Journal of Learning and Media titled Learning: Peering Backward and Looking Forward in the Digital Era. Written by Howard Gardner, Carrie James and Margaret Weigel, all from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, for me at least it’s one of those must reads that helps put in perspective the many changes that learning is going through right now and helps affirm a vision of learning that may come to pass. As my critical friends frequently point out to me, my own historical context for a lot of these conversations is not what it should be, which is one reason why this piece has a lot of appeal to me. This is a great read, well worth the time, one that I’ll try to summarize the highlights of below.
The thesis here is basically this, that after an extended period of education as we know it, change might finally be upon us whether we like it or not.
In this article we argue that, after millennia of considering education (learning and teaching) chiefly in one way, we may well have reached a set of tipping points: Going forward, learning may be far more individualized, far more in the hands (and the minds) of the learner, and far more interactive than ever before. This constitutes a paradox: As the digital era progresses, learning may be at once more individual (contoured to a person’s own style, proclivities, and interests) yet more social (involving networking, group work, the wisdom of crowds, etc.). How these seemingly contradictory directions are addressed impacts the future complexion of learning.
The authors weave a very readable narrative of the history of schools and learning to present day, making the case that
the European classroom models of the 19th century continue to hold sway: Teachers give out information, students are expected to master it with little help, and the awards of the culture during the years of school go to those who can crack the various literate and disciplinary codes.
There are some shifts, however. Over the last century, education has become more and more universal, we’re moving away from the humanities and language toward more science, technology, engineering and math disciplines, and there is now more emphasis globally on nationalized curricula and international comparisons for assessment. These have not, the authors suggest, changed much about what happens in schools or the learning that takes place.
“Learning is problematic.”
I was particularly struck by this passage about truth, one which articulates really well the struggle that I see a lot of traditional teachers having right now:
In the absence of recognized authorities and standards for determining what is considered true, learning is problematic. This postmodern perspective is not universally shared. Many continue to operate in a climate in which facts are fixed entities taken for granted, information is created and circulated relatively slowly, and authority figures are invested with the responsibility of determining and sharing what is considered true and good. Even so, it is undeniable that new opportunities for individuals to assert the truth, or their truths, are afforded today; educators will likely grapple with questions about what is true, and what is worth teaching and learning, more and more, both now and in the future.
There is talk about new skills that this new world requires.
In these frameworks, the traditional “three R’s†remain but are supplemented by a broader focus on metacognitive skills and an acknowledgment that individuals live in a complex world defined in part by existing but fluid frames of meaning (Geertz 1993). Most would agree that a well-educated individual should be able to successfully participate in a global economy where money, culture, ideas, and people circulate rapidly; to synthesize and utilize vast rivers of information obtained through a variety of channels (textual, visual, multimediated); to engage with this information across a variety of disciplines; to be comfortable negotiating a range of social connections, including interacting with diverse populations; and to serve as an engaged and responsible member of one’s profession and one’s communities.
I think I would add a need to create their own learning opportunities and spaces in which they interact in passion-based, self-directed activities. Or something like that.
The Promises are Realized
While the authors “recognize that we could be wrong” about this vision, it seems we may be at a “perfect storm” moment because of the affordances that new digital media (NDM) create.
That having been said, we believe that a “perfect storm†of NDM affordances, sociocultural changes associated with globalization, and the growing pace and interconnectedness of human life may potentially add up to a formidable tipping point. We operate on the assumption that NDM contain affordances that, if leveraged properly, could create future learning environments and cultures in which the promises of constructivist, social, situated, and informal learning are realized. We recognize that we could be wrong. We also recognize—and will elucidate at critical points—how the integration of NDM practices into a school setting can be challenging, such as the difficulties of implementing more social-based Internet practices in the classroom, or of incorporating youth’s extra-curricular, digital pursuits into fruitful classroom instruction, for example.
I love that line: “We operate on the assumption that NDM contain affordances that, if leveraged properly, could create future learning environments and cultures in which the promises of constructivist, social, situated, and informal learning are realized.” And the key there is the phrase “leveraged properly.” While we may not know exactly what the most effective uses of these technologies are yet, this is where I just believe our work as educators is right now. We need to be deep in the practice of leveraging these connections for ourselves. (Broken record, I know.)
Which leads, inexorably, to this:
While the ubiquity of digital media resources allows for more customized learning within a formal learning context, its primary value lies in the acknowledgment of the legitimacy and value of learning that take place beyond formal schooling.
And that, is what we have to be preparing our kids for, that learning that is going to happen, using these technologies in these mediated spaces or “networked publics” throughout their lives. It’s about self-study, self-direction, independent learning. Right now, as the authors suggest, our biggest challenge is we’re not teaching kids to be that type of learner.
However, there are serious challenges associated with implementing an NDM-based pedagogy. NDM may be seen as sources of entertainment and escape, not learning; additionally, the determination of the proper level of scaffolding can be difficult. The Internet’s potential for learning may be curtailed if youth lack key skills for navigating it, if they consistently engage with Internet resources in a shallow fashion, and/or if they limit their explorations to a narrow band of things they believe are worth knowing. Left to their own devices and without sufficient scaffolding, student investigations may turn out to be thoughtful and meaningful—or frustrating and fruitless. A successful informal learning practice depends upon an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking.
Schools as Almshouses
There is much, much more here to read, and I don’t want to just list all the really powerful snips that are in there, but the conclusion is compelling.
Part of the answer to change surely lies beyond the walls of schools themselves. Parents, government, the professions, even the marketplace, are all important stakeholders in the state of learning. Alignment among these diverse constituencies may be hard to achieve; here political leadership of the highest order is essential. In the last few decades, the phrases “learning communities,†“lifelong learning,†and “the learning society†have virtually become clichés. Yet like many clichés in education, and elsewhere, the terms themselves are more familiar than actual instances of the phenomena they describe. In our view, no society is likely to thrive in the future unless it actually is dedicated to lifelong learning; and this, in turn, will require both a society that values learning, and communities that continue to learn. As educators, we hope that this learning will continue to take place in educational institutions. But unless the schools are equal to the task of absorbing the new digital media, and making acute use of their potentials while guarding against their abuses, schools are likely to become as anachronistic as almshouses, teachers as anachronistic as barber-surgeons. Any culture that wishes to survive will ensure that learning takes place, but the forms and formats remain wide open.
Amen.
As always, would love to hear your thoughts.
And here is where I think our focus needs to be: parents. This topic (parents, I mean), for some reason, has come up often this week. We need to remind parents, or tell them for the first time in many cases, that they are the primary educators of their children. We need to teach parents how to use/navigate through the current technologies and how to best use them with their children because their children should be, and are, using these tools outside of the classrooms. Start when the children are young and when the parents are most (usually) involved with their children. Of course, the availability of certain technologies varies by location and the socio-economic make-up of a community. But, more and more families have access to the internet, cell phones, etc., that give them the tools they need to participate in the new learning experiences about which you discuss. And when parents, children, and teachers are collaborating, that is very exciting, rewarding, and what it ought to be!!
I agree completely. I am a parent, and I have always been hands-on with my children’s education that includes their introduction to and use of the computer and internet. Despite the current national educational focus on standards and testing I have been able to keep my children excited about learning through the computer and of all things THE LIBRARY! My son is in 6th grade and this is the first time in his education history that his teachers are using the internet to communicate with both me and my son. It is exciting! But why has it taken this long, and why is my daughter’s school not doing the same thing (they are both public schools, but his is a magnet).
I am not only a parent but also an educator. I am currently working on an education reform project at http://www.futureofeducationproject.net. The changes that I am experiencing with my sons school CAN become the norm. We just need to get to work making it happen. If you are interested in doing some of that work log on!
Education-as-we-know-it is a much more recent concept than you suggest here. Yes, some elements were crafted during the Reformation by Luther and Calvin (the source of both the “one way” idea and the dependence on “single-person literacy”) and this came to North America with the Puritan fanatics. But really, what our classrooms are like are a specific creation of the “second industrial revolution” – crafted in the 1830s and 1840s by William Alcott and Henry Barnard, and refined and organized by the Committee of Ten at the turn of the last century. It was a design solution for a specific idea of citizenship and labor.
But it survives because it works perfectly with American capitalism. It has fought off all technological changes in since the Chalkboard (about 1840) because it works perfectly with American capitalism.
It divides students into “winners” and “losers” based on socio-economic classes and thus preserves elite power. Suggesting that New Media will change this is more difficult than stating that it WOULD change it, if schools actually altered their power structures.
Here’s a complimentary, but differently angled, vector concerning history, education, and Web 2.0 culture — the latest blog entry at ParticiFaction, “Goodbye Gutenberg, Hello Hive Mind”:
http://particifaction.blogspot.com/
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Education has always been so political.
This excerpt from the article got me thinking.
As we educators grapple with what is or is not true, and with who is asserting “their” truth and to what benefit, we might continue teaching students by demonstrating how they might make up their own minds about what the truth. The truth does seem to keep changing, depending on who is “in charge.”
Like so many articles about education, the excerpts here confuse learning with teaching.
I definitely agree that parents are the most important people in a child’s life. It is therefore very important that they have the desire and need to be the kind of parent their child deserves. Many parents do feel that they would like to spend quality time with their children but are not able to do so. They are at a loose end with what they can do with their child. One such blog that I feel really helped me was http://www.learninginafreeenvironment.blogspot.com.
Try it out. I felt it was worth following. I follow it for my parenting needs.
Thank you for going through the article and pulling out the juicy bits. As a professor, I am always struck by the call for digital innovation by administration, but the barriers to it from physical plant, computing infrastructure, and even, administration through assessment of faculty files. True innovation in teaching and learning must necessarily blur the line of instructor/student as well as discipline/process. Parents are important (I am one and work hard to get my son to use his hand-me down laptop for more than gaming, even though I force myself to see the learning inside of his gaming), however, because they often insist on accepting truths from authorities rather than instructing their children how to find facts and then analyze their meaning, there is only so much one can expect from them. 20th century folks trained with 19th century paradigms working hard to not become losers so that their children may do better. I get to see those kids at a point in their lives where they think they have it all figured out, but they have not been challenged to learn and in turn to teach what they have learned; only to memorize what is touted as truth and spout it back to be rewarded for parroting. That is not learning. Right now, I am struggling with the idea of literacy, somewhat addressed in the blog. More and more, I think that reading is not related to writing nor to discussing. This does portend the need for individualized learning in a group process. This blog post is fantastic for the issues it raises.
Most importantly, our findings show that while personal and non-personal bloggers have some things in common in terms of their ethical beliefs and practices, there are also some distinctive differences. For example, non-personal bloggers valued attribution and truth telling the most, but for personal bloggers truth telling was less important than attribution and minimizing harm. The type of ethics most practiced by the personal bloggers was minimizing harm, while the non-personal bloggers practiced truth telling, attribution, and minimizing harm equally. The personal bloggers were also less consistent in practicing the ethics they said they valued than the non-personal bloggers.
As an ultimate, your blog can also be used as a classroom management tool. Post assignments for your students, reducing the chances that they didn’t know that a project was due. Include links to educational websites that will enhance your students’ knowledge and understanding of concepts and topics discussed in class. Post extra credit assignments on the blog as an incentive to students who check it regularly.
Now the question comes of having a classroom blog will also help parents to be informed of what’s going on in the classroom. This, in turn, will lead to more parents taking active roles in their children’s education. Write up a synopsis of what the class has been studying each month, or at the end of each term. Be sure to get parental permission before posting photos of students on your site. Photographs of in-class projects, science experiments, and the students working in groups will help parents to feel as though they are well-informed of their child’s daily routine.
Now further we need to encourage our students to keep blogs as well. This can be a classroom or an individual project. Blogging will further help our students to express themselves and to practice valuable computer, keyboarding, writing, spelling, and grammatical skills. Also it hence becomes mandatory for the kids to teach them how to upload photos from a digital camera if possible. This is ultimate to their interest and research.
Thanks for the great summary. One stumbling block that I’ve seen however, is that some high schools seem to look at digital technology basically as a tool that will enable them to do what they’ve always done only just more efficiently. When researching some local district technology plans, I saw a lot of references to online tutoring, testing,references sites, as well as the usual stuff about using technology to make administrative jobs easier. But there was virtually no mention of the ways in which actual paradigms of teaching and learning would be changed. Considering that these local plans take their cue from the state one, I can only conclude that the “teacher-centered” learning culture is something that the typical school, for one reason or another, cannot bring itself to step away from.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I agree no two children learn the same way and as educators and as parents we need to find out how each child learns and encourage them to learn in that way. We need to adapt to the students instead of them adapting to our lecturing technique. We need to make learning fun and easy for them so they will want to continue to learn for years to come. Education never comes to an end and we’ll use the knowledge forever.
I to agree with Stacy. The saying “treat every kid the same” is complete ludacris! Kids all learn different ways, and it is up to the teachers to find tthe best way to teach the students.
I agree that parents are the primary educators of their children.
I personally believe that the important of it all is not who teaches the student, but what methods of teaching are absorbed by the student.
Different people, different kind of techniques in learning something.
We all just need to explore and go to the balance of life.
I agree to the fact that students don’t learn the same way and definetly not at the same pace. I feel that the teachers need to be very aware, and they also need to teach to all types of learners.