The Teaching-EdTech-Read/Write Web blogosphere has been on fire the past few weeks. It must be that sweet spot in the summertime when the pain of the previous term has worn off and the upcoming is far enough away that it looks like a beautiful new star rather than the headlight from an oncoming train. At any rate, there are two big constellations of topics floating around that deserve attention. In this post: the intertwined ideas of technological and pedagogical tipping points, the death of teaching, and incrementalist approaches to change.

Leigh Blackall kicks things off with Teaching is Dead, Long Live Learners (and Illich’s Deschooling Society). Stephen Downes uses his Half an Hour to semi-counter that teaching isn’t really dead, just the presentation/transfer/authority mode of teaching is dead. David Warlick is of the opinion that we need a flat classroom learning engine that puts these ideas to work. Meanwhile, Doug Noon wants to dig into the ethos behind this assumed and presumed change.

The presentation/transfer style of teaching is the Keith Richards of academia: already dead, but neither he nor his legions of listeners seem to realize it yet. From my perspective this is undeniably true… however I realize that my position, like that of most edbloggers, is skewed far towards the cutting edge. Students, literacies, and technology may change quickly, but classrooms generally do not. And they aren’t going to start doing so now. I am fully confident that my children– who will be attending college in the next 5-10 years– will experience very little in the classroom that is different from what I experienced a decade ago. Which was itself not much different from those a decade before that. I wish it were different and that wholesale revolution were possible, but it can’t happen within the system and I don’t see any alternative for it to really happen without.

This ties into more revolutionary thinking: Doug’s considerations on change triggered Clarence Fisher’s thinking on Literacy as Battleground and tipping points when it comes to technology and educational change. Most interesting to me is the question of the effectiveness of incrementalist approaches to change (as a comment notes: no one jumps a 20 foot gap with two 10-foot jumps). Clarence feels an urgency for change and has called for a leap-frog approach in attempting to catch up with students’ practices in new literacies.

Almost two years ago I presented to the Instructional Technology Specialists program group on this topic. My presentation was called “Incrementalism, Evolution, and Revolution.” My basic premise was that a) the academic world is incrementalist by nature and that this has worked (such as it has) because the underlying structures and assumptions for and by educators have remained the same and, b) things are no longer the same– technology and students (and the connections that tie them together in the form of social software and networks) are changing at rates never seen before. I even trotted out the parable of the frog in the beaker and the blind men describing the elephant.

The difference– I maintained then and continue now– is that this is not an attempt at change by well-meaning teachers but a revolution that is happening outside of our control, in our student population and there will be a tipping point in this process when the academy finds itself wholly inadequate and unsuitable to those they presume to serve… and no time to patch their outmoded mechanisms. I imagine the same shrill rage that will come when global-warming naysayers are finally forced to face the facts; it’s a sad satisfaction… too little, too late.

There’s an important matter of scale to be considered: one teacher’s incremental approach may be another’s revolutionary change. The same commentor who talked about being unable to bridge a 20 foot chasm in two jumps spoke shiningly of changing one classroom at a time. Is even that too little? Is there hope of anything else? I have no idea and thus firmly ride the fence, continuing teaching students and teachers alike in the hopes that my small contributions will help. We continue to try to implement organizational change at work for greater effects; even my new working title of “Disruptive Technologist” is significant.
As I see it, we (educators) are left with three choices:

1. Do Nothing

2. Try to continually remake the world in our image

3. Choose to be a wolf and live with the consequences…

I know which path I prefer…