I’ve been hesitant to ask questions about Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastructure project because I fear that it will be yet another issue that divides me from most of my friends and peers (and idols) who work in education. The last time I questioned what looked like echo-chamberish activity in my own network, I was so frustrated by the result that I left blogging for almost a year. I hope this time I can handle it differently!
The bottom line: I don’t understand the inordinately negative reaction to the Open Badge initiative amongst those with whom I am generally simpatico.
Continue reading 'Open Badge Brouhaha'»
With the recent death of Steve Jobs has come a flood of amateur hagiographies and, as one would expect, a similar flood of responses seeking to separate the man from the myth. I get it.
But what bothers me are those who take the opportunity of the death of an innovator as an opening for myth-making of the “there are no individual geniuses” kind because–if such discussions are to go beyond mere angel-counting–then they need to take the very real world of real individuals into account. And the debate, such as it is, often confuses two different notions of the individual, both of which are present in “the network,” usually carrying (or caricaturing) them to extremes.
Continue reading 'The Myth of the Myth of “Individual” Genius'»
I’ve been considering the idea of teaching as a kind of art form–and what that would mean to the activity of education research–for a while, but am prompted to do so again because of recent exchanges with and between Dave Cormier (@davecormier), Martin Weller (@mweller), and George Siemens (@gsiemens).
Let me make clear up front: I am not dismissing, reflexively or otherwise, all education research. Design Based Research and Action Research, in particular, seem designed to deal with some of the issues that most trouble me about a fair amount of education research. And I see an incredible amount of value in research and science (I not an irrational lefty worshiping at the altar of mysticism and superstition, but then again, neither are the vast majority of my fellow lefties).
But neither can I be automatically, generally supportive of education research. Valuable educational research focuses on aspects of teaching and learning that can be meaningfully identified within a field as complex as weather systems and which can be practically replicated with enough reliability to give the research itself, and the resulting use, enough value to balance the costs. There’s not nearly enough of that kind of research and as a result education remains as unpredictable as the weather and as mystical as our understanding of the weather in the 1700s (post-invention of the barometer, contemporaneous with the new thermometer).
Consider the possible parallels between the symbiotic pairs: education and teaching, and literary studies and creative writing (no analogy is perfect; I realize I am taking some[!] liberties with the idea of teaching that don’t fully gibe with emerging pedagogy).
Continue reading 'Art, Education, and Research'»
Howard Rheingold, someone I greatly respect and admire, is clearly seeing something in Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn that I’m missing. Because not only do I usually read Rheingold’s writing and find my neck hurting from shaking my head in agreement so often, but he even uses her book as evidence for saying the same kinds of things I am always saying about attention and multitasking and distraction. Whereas my (first) reading of the book left me feeling much the same way Annie Murphy Paul felt about the book.
How can this be? Logically, of course, our reasoning doesn’t have to take the same paths to end up with the same conclusions. I don’t disagree, as far as I can tell, with much of what Rheingold feels about education and technology, and when Davidson isn’t in manifesto mode, I mostly agree with what she proposes as a solution even if I don’t see the problems in the same way.
Or maybe this is my own blindness manifesting itself, even though I too, like Davidson, saw what I wasn’t supposed to see the first time I watched the video that has become a cliche amongst educators… and I got the number right. My blindness might result from my near-obsession with the stink of techno-utopianism and the rot of technological determinism. When I smell them– or think I do– I tend to quickly become dismissive of the rest of what is being said. Add to that what felt like a pretty shallow and selective use of research into cognition and attention and a too-easy division of skills and abilities by age based on anecdote and wishful thinking (see, for instance, this link I just posted earlier today), and it is quite likely that I didn’t give Davidson’s book a fair shake.
Or, to be totally honest, maybe my own disillusionment with the possibility of significant change in our educational institutions– whatever the motivators– has made me practically allergic to people saying the kinds of things I was saying until 2009 or so… possibly because I have a hard time with the reminder of how I used to feel and/or am suffering from a bit of the self-loathing that comes when one sees people enthusiastic in beliefs he or she has lost and/or I’ve just become too jaded.
All this is to say that I hereby table– no retract– what I have said about Davidson’s book and am going to attempt to keep an open mind and give it another shot. Maybe if I’m willing to be open to it I can rediscover a bit of the excitement and passion I used to have about these things…
“Incremental change can be self-defeating; it’s not a step on the way to the big change. A silly example: suppose that the inventor of the refrigerator found that the only way to persuade people to buy them would be to make a refrigerator that could drop the temperature by just one degree. Now that thing would be no use as a refrigerator, it would be a kind of step towards a real refrigerator. If you distributed these around people would develop ways of using them, they’d use them as storage boxes, they’d use them for all sorts of things because people are ingenious beings and they try to use what they’ve got. So, there’d come about a refrigerator culture based on ways to use refrigerators for purposes that had nothing to do with what we know refrigerators are good for… this is what’s happened to computers in schools. They’re being used in ways that have nothing to do with the potential of the computer to allow the possibility of a radically different way of learning.”
–Seymour Papert
found in The Daily Papert (March 1, 2011).
For those of you who’ve come here looking for information from my 2011 Lilly Arctic presentation (“What If?”), please check back in a few days. I should have video from the presentation and my speaking notes with some links posted soon…
I will be elaborating on most of the “What If?” questions in a series of posts here over the next weeks and months. I hope some of you will be able to help me figure out answers for some of those vexing questions!
Scott Leslie invites me to “write a post” in order to continue a conversation that already has a home because the genesis (actually an outgrowth) of that conversation was offensive. I don’t see the point. But I will stir from my blogging slumber to share what I, from my somewhat (or formerly) inside but mostly outside position learned from the whole incident and various dynamics that have swirled around it. I learned that:
- I can expect very little generosity or charity from “friends” when it comes to assuming that I am acting out of good faith in my online interactions. There but for the grace of chance go I that I haven’t made a mistake as offensive as Leigh’s photo was (yet), but it isn’t because I’m particularly smart. It’s good to know that if I do make such a mistake, the worst will automatically be assumed of me. The response to Leigh’s admitted mistake was not only disproportionate and astoundingly lacking in generosity and good will, but also a great illustration of some of Sherry Turkle’s thesis in Alone Together about the nature of online “friendships.”
- The elephant in the room of institutional dynamics w/r/t innovation and revolution and how to coherently come to terms with the potential hypocrisy of attempting to stage the latter while being subsidized by the former is a regular topic in private that people are exceptionally uninterested in pursuing in public (and I count myself in such a bind as surely as the Right Reverend Jim Groom and the amazing #ds106 event he has kicked off). I have to believe that this deep-seated reluctance accounts for both the lack of generosity shown toward Leigh and the strange readings of the post that preceded This Great Matter.
- I’m way out in left-field when it comes to dialogue and engagement and teaching: I’m honestly astounded at some aspects of the kerfluffle. I still don’t understand how anyone can miss the (I would have thought) unmistakable “teachable moment” represented by Leigh’s posting of the offensive image. Further in that regard, I don’t understand how anyone can confuse the important distinction between the image itself and the posting of the image. Perhaps this comes back to the first point, but the first thing I thought when I saw the image was “wow, that’s not cool,” followed quickly by “why would Leigh do that?” I only know Leigh slightly in person, but I’ve followed and interacted with him online and my distaste for the image was not the end of the matter, but the beginning. I immediately wondered what was going on here. Until this incident, I assumed this was just standard practice, like taking offensive or controversial images or stories in a journalism or English class and digging deep into what they signify, what their intent might have been, etc., even if the immediate and most shallow reasons for why they went wrong are obvious. In the context of a course like #ds106, an approach of engagement seems even more critical: Leigh’s picture was intended to tell a story that went horribly wrong in the telling, but that doesn’t mean the underlying premises are undeserving of discussion or that Leigh isn’t worth the time to engage with to see what he meant to say or convey. Unless, of course, the entire premise of ds106 (in particular) or one’s stance in the world (in general) precludes critical engagement of this kind or is meant to be a kind of non-critical artistic space in which creation is the only important thing, examination and critique being then inherently non-interesting.
- There is, in fact, an interesting discussion to be had about the appropriation of Nazi iconography. A recent article in Slate talking about “biker” use of Nazi imagery made the point that “To most bikers, a swastika is no more about killing Jews than it was about Hindu good luck to the Nazis. It’s about being a badass—and that’s it. The whole point is that it’s divorced from history.” There’s a fascinating tension here between the idea that imagery can be divorced (enough) from history to the point that it can come to mean something else and the way that such imagery relies on the fact and effect of the historical time and events to have any power at all. And then consider that the appropriation of the image of Mao Tse-Tung, presumably springing from the same impulse, received almost no attention at all despite that fact that, even by generous estimates, Hitler was responsible for only 2/3 as many deaths as Mao. Again, much more could be unpacked here that probably (and sadly) won’t be.
- The general response (or lack of response) to Larry Sanger, Jaron Lanier, Sherry Turkle, etc., illustrates a level of groupthink, technophilia, and reflexive defensiveness in the educational technology community (as I have encountered it) that is deeper and more disturbing than I thought. Perhaps it’s inevitable that a group of people who are (or feel) knit together in the way many of the primary participants in this saga are will slowly harden and become alienated from self-examination and resistant to critique that questions the (mostly) implicit orthodoxy of the views they share (such is the way of institution building, ironically). I find the generalized combination of resistance to technological determinism and the assumption of technological progress disquieting in both myself and others.
There are many more second-order considerations that intersect with these events, most importantly the nature of the #ds106 course and how it fits (or not) into the MOOC landscape, what its activities and success mean (or not) for other teachers– i.e. is DS 106 to MOOCs as Wikipedia is to most wikis?– and how all these fit into the discussions of educational entrepreneurship and institutions, but the ability of myself or this community to have this discussion feels stifled right now.
The right Reverend Jim Groom is making his entertainment mobile, taking his freak show, circus rings, maniacal menagerie, and all the rest on the road with his new open course in Digital Storytelling (AKA DS106). The course officially starts today, but I suspect people will continue trickling in for a while. Will you be one of them?
The official course objectives are listed as:
- Develop skills in using technology as a tool for networking, sharing, narrating, and creative self-expression
- Frame a digital identity wherein you become both a practitioner in and interrogator of various new modes of networking
- Critically examine the digital landscape of communication technologies as emergent narrative forms and genres
I read this as: make cool stuff with and alongside others in the massive playground that is the web.
Michael Feldstein has much more cogent and insightful thoughts about the course.
I won’t be participating because a) I’m lazy, and b) the entire scale of my abilities in the world of creating visual art and stories are solidly less than zero… my engagement with digital storytelling outside of words lies squarely in the realm of the audience member. But if you have even the slightest inclination in this area– or aren’t sure if you do– I can’t think of a better way to get your wheels turning!
Where was Jim when I was practically pilloried for questioning the utility of rubrics (I think I said they were the spawn of Satan or something along those lines) a few weeks ago at the WCET Conference?
@ Soon you'll be telling us how to dress, and eradicating any sense of wonder to the process. Rubrics and assessment eat babies.
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