I’m still trying to gather my own thoughts about it—which goes some way to explaining why this, ostensibly about a paper is actually a tangent—but Dave Cormier and a mysterious posse have created a draft paper exploring a perennially important question: what’s next? Preparing for the Postdigital Era is an attempt to:

shift our thinking away from the simple digital/analogue distinction of technology towards a less divisive and more nuanced context for work; a human context that focuses on the essence of our work rather than the appearance.

I suspect that the ideas in this paper inspired @injenuity’s question for Howard Rheingold:

Ask him what ed tech folks and "integrators" are going to do for a living when technology is assumed and invisible.

I pushed back a little on this concept because it seems to me that “technology” never becomes assumed and invisible… specific instances of it do. So the question is either irrelevant—because there will never be an “after”—or the definition of “technology” needs to be narrowed. My relentless prodding (it’s my lot to be the skeptic, which nets a lot of conversation but very few friends) lead to Jen’s clarification that poses a much more interesting question:

Not questioning advancement of tech. Hoping for age when ppl are curious, engaged and aware to explore without help from specialists.

Setting aside that the term “specialist” doesn’t feel like a good fit with many of the “ed tech folks” and “integrators” I know (perhaps they should be excluded anyway since most of them would love to work themselves out of that particular job, not only to open the door for richer activities, but because they know as well as anyone that the changes which demand their services just keep on coming), I can’t think of a technology that hasn’t involved specialists when it was new… and the more active and participatory a technology is, the more valuable such specialists are. For a while, anyway.

The biggest question might be what happens in a “postdigital” age, but the more productive question is smaller: what happens in a post-current-technology age, when those few technologies and applications (literally and functionally) that survive have become common and commonly-understood enough that specialists aren’t needed (for that set of technologies at least)? To circle back to the reason Dave’s paper is important: nothing. Or at least nothing good. Not unless the actions and states of mind that allow one to be engaged and aware are actively and consciously promoted and reinforced. The lack of curiosity, engagement and awareness that typifies our environment (not just in the single sphere of education) has nothing to do with the complexity of technology. Quite the opposite: it’s reinforced by the affordances of that technology which make it easier than ever to satisfy our need for engagement with the equivalent of junk food.

By analogy: no one really disputes that modern agricultural methods and food production techniques, which have resulted in a greatly higher caloric availability to the average instinctually survival-minded human being, has resulted in an increase in those humans’ average weight. In some countries– like the US– obesity is commonly considered an epidemic and it’s clear from research over the past decade that, in fact, this increase in consumption is directly at odds with our natural instinct to live a longer life. For we lucky ones who live in this environment of plenty rather than scarcity, survival instinct– to eat what you can when you can because you can’t be sure when you will have the opportunity to eat as much (or at all) again– is, in fact, working against our survival.

This doesn’t make me a caloric determinist… in the end we are what we choose to eat. But the effect of the affordances of the technological apparatus that is our food industry does have an effect and it is decidedly not neutral (in any useful sense of the term). In the same way, while we can choose sustained engagement and deep attention, more and more we choose not to. The technology doesn’t make us that way, but the functional result isn’t much different than it would be if it did.

For the most part, people don’t exhibit a lack of curiosity because their natural curiosity is being thwarted by technology any more than they eat poorly because their desire to eat healthy is thwarted by difficulty in finding, obtaining or preparing healthy food.

Dave’s paper is, I think, going in the right direction, reframing the picture in terms of personal, authentic experience—and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the details later—but it doesn’t go far enough in examining the same assumption that inquisitive activity and exploration are natural activities that informs Jen’s question and the damage that has resulted from those assumptions. If anything, I’d guess that biologically it’s the opposite, and culturally our institutions of education and the edifice of many families and peer groups don’t go very far in instantiation/facilitating that mindset when they don’t outright punish people who go in that direction.

Is coming from those who spend their time worrying about a research basis for a phenomenon that is easily observable in any classroom, followed very closely by those who presume that the net-gen is determined by biology. I still can’t post comments to George’s blog, so I will respond to his Net Gen Nonsense post here.

George: The Net Gen Nonsense blog fits right in, of course, with your predisposition– perhaps borne of seeing too much extremism ala Prensky– to be against the notion that learners are changing. And you seem to equate the idea, again ala Prensky, with being mostly– or even significantly– biological.

I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it’s not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can’t fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term… but I will refrain from kicking them as proof!

More importantly, a whole lot of learning is not about biology but about cognition and the mental processes built on top of that biology. The two points with which you conclude your post (”1) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and create information, and 2) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and connect to each other.”) are changes in learners, and they are changes that happen as a result of living in a very different and quickly changing technologically mediated environment than others. Fight it all you want, but those learners are different. It has nothing to do with age and the biological origins are at best unclear… but it is immaterial. Anyone who pays attention to their students can see this in the divide they face within their classes between the haves and knows and the have not/know nots. Whatever the label, a host of educators nod in recognition of the characteristics regardless of the question of the origins, which has always been my central point in this debate: I don’t care about the reasons as much as I care about the solutions, and I won’t discount what I see and experience because the research (which hasn’t been an enviable guide when it comes to education so far, but that’s a different discussion) isn’t there or isn’t unclear. A refutation would make a difference, but there’s an obvious reason why there isn’t one, and I don’t mean the philosophical bit about proving a negative.

I don’t know how much you teach and how many of those you teach are adolescents, but clearly you see these changes or you wouldn’t so explicitly point out some of the conditions effecting that change in your two concluding points. It’s not as if all of us who teach are likely to be suffering a mass delusion and I think too many people with too many different, varying backgrounds when it comes to experience teaching and knowledge of technology and communication hear the squeaky wheel to be convinced that it’s just an illusion they are bringing to the table.

David Warlick, blogging about a presentation by Stephen Heppell, pointed to this incredibly cool video demonstrating a visual method for solving math problems. These are just the kind of alternative approaches we need to incorporate to be an expansive teacher. I love one of the last comments, presumably in response to an earlier expression of mystification: “Brilliant visualisation. Compare this with the ‘normal’ way and you are doing real mathematics.”

“From what I knew of learning to write I asked Harold Bauer if it wouldn’t be possible to learn to play by playing tunes from the beginning without preliminary finger exercises. He cheered me with the assurance it would. Many second raters present were scandalized. Children are learning now without finger exercises. Think how much easier their education is to listen to.”

–Robert Frost
from Notebook 26

Or is it “Some Parts of the World Without Some Courses?”

[photo by Joseph Robertson]

I’ve just finished listening to George Siemens’ presentation “A World Without Courses” [presentation and discussion] for the second time and it has raised a number of questions:

1. Who is the “we” that George is referring to? At some points it sounds like everyone, at some points it sounds like educators, and at others it sounds like institutions. When George talks about the open question of how we tie these ideas together he posits a situation (wish there were a transcription of the presentation available) where “we” in “an academic setting” are confronted with a students who has been learning in this reputation-based, self-organized world… what role is George seeing for the “we” that is the institution? I took this as essentially a platform that would to some degree replace the institution. If it doesn’t– or if the institution is still in the middle of things granting legitimacy to learning and recognizing levels of achievement– then the whole picture changes. Then it becomes a question more like “how do we mimic the act of granting credit for prior learning on a larger scale?”
2. Learning and learners are treated a bit monolithically here, where learners are like grocery shoppers going to the store with a list in hand (or in mind). Yet institutions play a larger role than that. More importantly, learners at different levels of achievement and maturity have different motivations and abilities to succeed as an independent entity. In the comments to George’s blog post someone mentions the Antioch PhD model that has no courses… would this work for many undergraduates? Adult learners? Developmental-level learners?
3. Perhaps most importantly, I wonder how many of the advantages and examples of context that George lists can be accomplished without institutional transformation, within a world where there are still courses… because, pragmatically, I don’t believe our institutions are capable of transformation. Distributed conversations, reputation systems, distributed information can all be had by moving most activities out of the LMS and by making material available openly. What does the extermination of the course yield above those benefits and at what cost?
4. Along those lines, much of the distributed content and information out there making this learning possible comes– directly and indirectly– from those who can afford to spend time making those things and the institutional support they receive. Is the free, reputation-based marketplace up to supporting that activity?
5. What of the learning sciences? Learners are often unaware of– and then sometimes notoriously resistant to– practices they need to learn effectively. Who helps those students?

I’m not trying to knock any holes in the idea, these are just questions that come to mind. My two biggest questions involve the admitted unknown of institutional roles in recognizing value, accreditation, etc.– that’s a gigantic hole that needs some filling– and the assumption that effective learning just happens when the material is good and the conditions are right. The part of me that is involved in distance education instinctively jumps back at this point… it feels like the free marketplace of unbounded learning would serve only a very small minority of extraordinarily self-motivated and advanced students.

I came across Conrad Glogowski’s edublog while searching for existing material on learning communities and Third Places (turns out we share a similar theoretical framework in this area), and have remained a fan because he regularly provides very concrete, useful details and artifacts of his approach to teaching usually reinforced with examples of student work.

In "Towards Reflective BlogTalk" he shares a useful practice, examples and a handout he’s developed (The Ripple Effect) to encourage students to engage with (and thus reinforce) the blogging environment in their classroom:

While not always unfamiliar or far out on the cutting edge, I also applaud educators sharing their "fundamentals." It’s amazing how often these philosophies and principles turn out to fulfill a critical need for readers. In that category I put Conrad’s first shot at his stages of Creating Learning Experiences:

Around the Corner – MGuhlin.net : From Trickle to Torrent:

While you and I may agree that pursuing our passions in school is a worthy goal, I’d bet a significant number of educators, parents, community members do not.

And just as importantly: many students do not. As I think about the new semester commencing in a few hours and what I hope to do better and differently, I am struck by how hard it is to convince students that I am serious when I tell them that I want them to work on all of the tasks in class with their own interests at heart. A large part of learning is about doing new and unfamiliar things, but those things are best done in the context of something they are passionate about. Something they love or hate or, if they are lucky, love and hate. It’s not about agreeing with me or choosing from some “safe” list of topics… and it definitely isn’t about pleasing me except in the sense that I derive my greatest pleasure when students discover their confident voice as a participating, recognized part of their own network of peers, fans, sympathizers and questioners.

And that’s just the first step… establishing a tiny bit of trust, a small sheltered place in an environment that generally (at best) pays only lip service to creativity and authentic personal participation. Then the work begins for student and teacher both, trying to cram years worth of what should have been taught but most often wasn’t, and unlearn years of doctrine that shouldn’t have been taught but were. It’s “All Summer in a Day”, the education version.

I hereby decree that PLE and PLN now refer to personal _living_ environments and networks. Cinching the borders in narrowly to the word “learning” brings along too much historical baggage, pinning the idea of learning down to a discrete, particular time and process that we endure only as long as necessary before resuming our journey somewhere else.

We need to help students stop thinking about education as something they get done and help them understand learning as a continual lifelong process.

In the archaic– and continuing– model of higher education it is possible to discard the activities and paraphernalia of learning. With more or less nostalgia, “former” students can recall the strange rituals of library-going, note-taking, research, and information management and resource management that they took part in the same way they more or less fondly remember dorm life, cafeteria food, and co-eds. Except for those continuing in academia, where some aspects of being a learner continue in (often rather) abstracted ways, the only thing part of the experience that remains “active” is an institutional email address and machines generating billing statements for student loans.

In the emerging model, students learn to navigate, assess, construct and participate in a living network that comprises the heart of their learning network and they take that with them when their time as part of any particular institution’s offerings come to a change.

Though all of these activities have their parallels in later work and life, few former students (again, outside of those who become career academics) will again need to perform traditional research activities or face a pile of assigned reading and even fewer will will be authoring papers or cramming for exams. But if we do our jobs properly they will be participants in professional communities; they will have a desire for self-expression; they will be members of the pro-sumer class. They may not need to figure out MLA format and how to format footnotes in word, but they will need to know how to blog, wikify and twitter. They may not have to create an annotated bibliography, but they will need to know how to marshal and share resources with del.icio.us- and flickr-like systems.

“Going to school” is an activity that has a life and dies; learning is a continuing process. Enrollments and degree programs terminate; personal living networks accompany learners through life– the ultimate educational institution– serving as companion, confidante, and oracle alike.

Chris Watson has some thoughts about what makes a serious student/learner. A few things I think any learner should be doing (i.e. be taught how to do):

• Connect – finding the people and resources that they can learn from and creating their learning network.
• Collect – managing materials, links, resources and artifacts in a trusted collection system with social, connecting features where appropriate.
• Reflect – intellectual engagement demands explicit reflection… even Einstein, famous for his thought experiments, wrote thousands of letters, thousands of discarded papers, and hundreds of journals.
• Participate – a serious learner is an active learner and an active learner participates… and the network effects that make todays learning environment special are only realized through participation.

I also wonder about the dangers of being too serious… in my experience there’s not that much distance between serious engagement and psyche-altering obsession, between wanting to know as much as one can about everything and staring into the abyss of all that one person can never know. I constantly struggle with maintaining my balance not just with how much there is I don’t know in even my chosen specialties (which fosters helpful humility) but to accept that it’s healthy to have activities in which I will always be a decided amateur, even a dilettante. There are many good reasons to pursue various hobbies and interests which have nothing to do with becoming the best, or being a professional, or even being very good at them.

We’ve all heard what I learned as “Dale Cone’s Pyramid” (people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, etc). Apparently it has been pretty thoroughly debunked.

I’m not convinced that there isn’t some truth to the general idea in many circumstances. Will Thalheimer’s reaction is composed of more than a little straw:

If we look at the numbers a little more closely, they are highly unconvincing. How did someone compare “reading” and “seeing?” Don’t you have to “see” to “read?” What does “collaboration” mean anyway? Were two people talking about the information they were learning? If so, weren’t they “hearing” what the other person had to say? What does “doing” mean? How much were they “doing” it? Were they “doing” it correctly, or did they get feedback? If they were getting feedback, how do we know the learning didn’t come from the feedback—not the “doing?” Do we really believe that people learn more “hearing” a lecture, than “reading” the same material? Don’t people who “read” have an advantage in being able to pace themselves and revisit material they don’t understand? And how did the research produce numbers that are all factors of ten? Doesn’t this suggest some sort of review of the literature? If so, shouldn’t we know how the research review was conducted? Shouldn’t we get a clear and traceable citation for such a review?

Yes, one has to see to read, but it should be pretty obvious that the comparison being made is to, for example, reading instructions on how to use a torque wrench to fasten a bolt to 180 ft/lbs and seeing that action performed. Similarly, “doing” would be actually using a torque wrench to perform the action with instructional guidance, “hearing and reading” in this model refer to hearing the methods told to you once as opposed to reading them once, etc.

The pyramid resonates with people because it parallels a kind of common sense which reflects the educational experience: learners tend to remember (or learn) more from doings something themselves than seeing it done, and seeing something done is often more memorable than hearing it described, etc. Which, in the absence of other clearer guiding principles isn’t necessarily a bad rule of thumb. When I have a choice in the matter, I would rather have students performing activities instead of just watching them be performed, or watching them in some visual manner rather than just hearing or reading about them.

This isn’t a universal rule, but neither is it something to get too hysterical about. And while it is fine to ding Wikipedia for perpetuating the myth, it’s far from a damning indictment of Wikipedia’s bogosity given that this myth has been well and oft repeated since long before Wikipedia (or any other digital media) was around.