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.
which is funny and obviously a little provocative. Do I want to be my students’ bitch? And what about those of them that object to collaboration, synthesis, assessment, participation, reflection, open learning, or simply writing? Are there any easy questions in education?
Somewhere outside the creepy treehouse and being an intrusive autocratic presence in students’ lives is some happy middle ground, but it can be hard to discern. Some objections have obvious answers… I would never require that a student use their own blog, though I might (and often do) require that they blog. But how do we answer the more serious objection by students?
When things of this nature have come up in the past, I’ve fallen mostly on the side of being OK with these kinds of challenges to students and their often conventional ideas of what learning is (in comparison to people like D’Arcy Norman I’ve probably appeared downright autocratic if not dictatorial). If nothing else I justify these decisions by seeing them as challenges and provocations, which are an important part of my own practice.
But these are decisions that depend heavily on context: of the course, the student population, the individual student, the activity, my desired outcomes (and theirs), and which constellation is in the ascendant.
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…
Annie Murphy Paul’s review of Now You See It exposes, with a delightful amount of spark, Davidson’s book for just what it is: a vapid, Prensky-style book of fantasy sure to grab the attention of those who don’t– or won’t– think hard or for themselves.
“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.”
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!
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.
I love the things technology can do for me as a learner, educator, artist, and enthusiast, and I suppose the purely geeky– or Bava– side of me can appreciate brainstorming on what the “21st Century Classroom” should look like, but in the same hopeless way that I wish I lived in a world that had to hold bake sales to buy bombers, I likewise wish I lived in a world where significant media sites like Slate were holding discussions about what education should look like rather than what the classrooms where a small part of that education takes place should look like.
I’ve watched the same insufficient teaching practices migrate from the classroom to audio conference to web conference to virtual worlds to asynchronous online courses… am I doomed to witness the eternal recurrence of thin teaching in an infinite number of new guises? What’s the point of trying to change the classroom if, in the end, it just results in students sleeping through lectures with jacks in their heads or surfing mindlessly in their augmented realities while transfer-style education is being dumped on them, the barbaric yawping “Bueller? Bueller?” washing over them in high-def?
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