I am happy to agree with your assessment that school’s must change and adapt. While many other industries have adapted, changed, or disappeared, Education has not. The system I entered as a teacher is the too similar to the system my parents entered decades ago. While change is coming it is moving too slow. In an era when people want instant results or they move on to the next panacea, how can we focus people that this is the change they need.

Enjoy your day,

Kyle

I am happy to agree with your assessment that school’s must change and adapt. While many other industries have adapted, changed, or disappeared, Education has not. The system I entered as a teacher is the too similar to the system my parents entered decades ago. While change is coming it is moving too slow. In an era when people want instant results or they move on to the next panacea, how can we focus people that this is the change they need.

Instead education will be “irrelevant-ized’. I think that is Krugman’s point and a point I have made for years. Like a clogged artery, the body will just route around the sumbitch. The internet has provided this affordance for cheap. If you make a tool ubiquitous enough and cheap enough and useful enough, they will use it. The Internet is our new school (whatever that implies) and because of it I don’t think it really matters whether or not we have some ultimate reform of the system. At some point the school becomes a quaint like a buggy whip or the high speed dub button on your old cassette deck.

My new motto: complexity is a bitch, get over it.

It means (to switch metaphors) that we need to value the adaptive over the institutional model. An adaptive teaching model in our current predicament most probably requires a wildly adaptable institutional model. We need a way that says the only charter a school needs is to help its students learn and to be accountable in some reasonable way for that learning. What we need is a way to make schools-of-one just as viable as schools-of-many. What we need is a world full of learning brokers or coaches or entrepreneurs or what-have-ye who can coggle together a virtual architecture of formal and informal systems to help us learn.

I can think of two examples that exemplify this: Ravelry and Stronglifts. These are both ‘convivial’ tools in the best Illich-ian sense. The former is a knitting site that is so much more. It is a school where you can learn to knit. It is a place to teach others. It is a place to ask questions and provide answers. It is formal (the site has a structure and rules) but it is also informal (the site has as many forum on as many topics as can be imagined). My wife is a better knitter because of it. Plus, she is now much better versed in the tools of our socially networked metaverse.

The latter, stronglifts, is a personal training website specializing in showing its participants how to get stronger. I have been reading this site from its inception where it has gone from zero to 15,000 subscribers in a year. Its owner/blogger/manager is a Belgian named Mehdi. Recently, he started doing personal training. ONe might well ask how someone can teach weight lifting over the web. He combines some old school and some new. He has a forum on his website run on good ol’ phpbb. He has a paying forum within that site for his students. In this weight lifting academy he has individual training logs for each student. I keep diet and training logs every day or nearly so and he comments daily. The most interesting part is that I make videos of myself as I lift and then upload them to YouTube. I mark them private and send a share invite to him. He watches the vids and makes suggestions. This dance of feedback and change works for me (although he is a fierce taskmaster whom I have nicknamed Torquemada).

Root hog or die. That’s what one of my music acquaintences, Mojo Nixon says. I know that this is hard. I spent $150 on gas last week for my various vehicles. I am going to have to learn how to reduce this burden or find other work, but I am already moving towards that change on several fronts. What I am saying is that school can no longer afford to look like it does any more than I can tolerate 30% increases in transportation each year. Garmston’s suggestions in your post, Will, are all well and good, but I don’t think most folks will tolerate the consequences that flow from it. It’s like the suggestions in the new book, Brain Rules. We know what we ought, yet we do not. I do believe that as our affordances change so too will the ways out. Just like a real hog, schools will find a way, but I guarantee you that they will appear to us in ways that unexpected, new, surprising, and perhaps both better and worse than what we now have. Coomplexity is a bitch. Get over it.

Interesting post, but what happens when students resist the change you bring about? Recently we have had some serious student backlash against the use of social media in the classroom. While I haven’t really looked closely at how it’s being applied in the learning environments (summer project), I suspect it’s not being used in a truly transformative capacity. However, the question still has merit: students will be resistant to using social media as well as teachers because there is little definition to it. It’s not school. They cannot figure out what teacher’s want or what they have to do in order to get an “A.”

Eventually, the eroding payoff of higher education created a crisis in education itself. Why should a student put herself through four years of college and several years of postgraduate work to acquire academic credentials with little monetary value? These days, jobs that require only 6 or 12 months of vocational training — paranursing, carpentry, household maintenance and so on — pay nearly as much as if not more than a job that requires a master’s degree, and pay more than one requiring a Ph.D.

So enrollment in colleges and universities has dropped almost two-thirds since its peak at the turn of the century. The prestigious universities coped by reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one — a place for children of the wealthy to refine their social graces and befriend others of their class.