Emerging Technologies Consulting

On Monday, I posted the audio for the SXSW panel on Edupunk and I’ve written before about Edupunk as a metaphor for DIY education.  The term and the ideas behind it have sparked a fair amount of controversy as the debate has divided people into roughly two camps.  In one camp are people who are cynical about formal educational systems and don’t see any need for them and in the other are people who believe that formal educational systems have a central place in society.  The first camp seems to think that the second camp doesn’t want change, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.  Martha Burtis wrote a wonderful response to this discussion, on which I left the following comment:

I like school, too.  But I also learn in other ways, ways that are sometimes dismissed in schools.  What I’d like to see in these conversations and in the future of schools is a both/and approach instead of an either/or approach.  That is, we can have both formal and informal learning.  Lectures have a place right alongside small group discussion.  But we need to be critical of practices and practitioners in a way that we’re not right now.  I’ve had some great lecturers in my life, but I’ve had some devastatingly bad ones, some bad enough to drive me away from an entire field of study, and that should never happen.  I’ve also had some student-centered approaches that in theory should have been fabulous, but instead, put way too much on the students in a way that we were unable to really learn anything.  I think the difficulty we’re running into with education and learning more generally is that learning is a very personal process.  Everyone needs different things to learn and sometimes different things for different topics.  The system of education, it seems to me, attempts to most efficiently provide a learning environment.  I think what’s happened, especially at the K-12 level, is that a kind of inertia has set in where easiest is substituted for most efficient.  It’s easier to teach to the test by rote, for example, than to do project-based learning that may indeed teach the same skills, but is more time-consuming and riskier.  And this didn’t happen through some grand conspiracy.  It happened one teacher at a time, responding to requirements and incentives.  What that means, and what I’m hopeful for, is that change can happen one teacher at a time.  Because there are teachers and professors who provide a learning environment that’s successful.  And what I’m hoping for is a kind of network effects situation where teachers and students collaborate on this project of learning, and show others how it’s done, so to speak.  I somehow lost that attitude as I got more and more involved in the administration of things, in the desire for efficiency that became “whatever’s easiest” (which turned out to be Blackboard).  Instead what I should have focused on, what we should all focus on, is working from both ends, convincing individuals to change who in turn help foster change among their colleagues and convincing those at the top that easiest isn’t most efficient all the time.  It’s a challenge, but a good one.  I love school, too, and I want to see the ideal school in my mind thrive, but to do that, as Gardner said in the SXSW panel, it will need to evolve, and evolution is not a top down process.

Although there’s a lot in both the post and the comment, it still can’t really scratch the surface of the complexity of the situation.  My sense is that what Web 2.0 enables is putting a lot of external pressure on educational institutions.  More than ever before, informal learning outside of an institution is possible.  And the ways in which people are engaging in that learning process looks very different from what they did in school (for most people).  People are writing and creating, interacting with each other and experts, listening to lectures, yes, but engaging with them in ways that go beyond taking notes or asking a question in class.  And so, institutions are looking at those practices and saying, hmm, what should we do?  And some teachers are incorporating those practices, encouraging students to be creative, to engage with each other, both in the classroom and outside of it; the teachers might even be bringing in experts in new ways, having them comment on blog posts or visit via Skype.  And some teachers are not incorporating those practices, out of fear, out of a lack of knowledge, out of a sense that their way is just fine (and it actually might be!).  We need a real way to assess those practices and figure out whether they create a good learning environment or not.  Testing doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Can you learn without schools? Maybe.  But I think schools can provide the foundation for lifelong learning when schools are using practices that encourage that.  I just don’t think we’ve figured out what all of those practices are and the role that technology plays in encouraging those practices.  It’s a work in progress.  And maybe it’s slow progress, slower than some people want, but we still need to keep moving forward, rather than getting bogged down in either/or debates.