One of my favorite things that Sheryl says when she talks about the challenges that schools face right now is that this generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology. Most of us grew up in a time when technology was an add on, and for many of us, we still see it as a choice, especially in education. (Just the other day I was at a meeting of about 25 school leaders and teachers to discuss how social learning tools can be infused into an inquiry based curriculum and only one person was using technology to take notes…me.) I look at my own kids and I know that technology will be a huge part of their learning lives because a) they want it to be and b) they’ll be expected to be savvy users of the devices of their day to communicate, create and collaborate (among other things.) They’re not going to be able to “opt out.”
That no choice theme is borne out by a new Kaiser Foundation report that came out this week. The title sums things up pretty well: “Daily Media Use Among Children and Teens Up Dramatically From Five Years Ago”. And here is the money quote:
Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.
Anyway you slice that, kids are immersed in media, and that immersion is having huge effect on the way they see the world and on the way they learn. And while most of that media consumption is still tied to more “traditional” forms like television, the computer now takes up, on average, almost 1.5 hours and it is the fastest growing medium on the list. It lead the director of the study to say:
The bottom line is that all these advances in media technologies are making it even easier for young people to spend more and more time with media. It’s more important than ever that researchers, policymakers and parents stay on top of the impact it’s having on their lives.
It’s interesting to me that she didn’t mention educators in that list of folks who need to be paying attention, because more than parents and policymakers, we’re the ones who need to help kids make learning sense of their time with media of all types. And I emphasize that learning piece of it because all too often those opportunities and being blocked and filtered away in schools instead of made a basic part of the curriculum. Right now, most schools are making what I think is a bad choice by not immersing their students into these online learning environments which are creating all sorts of opportunities for us to learn. In doing so, they’re implicitly saying that technology is an option. It’s not.
Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice not to do nothing.
We may not feel comfortable in a world filled with technology. We may not like the way it’s changing things and, even more, how fast it’s changing things. We may not like the way it pushes against much of what we’ve been doing in schools for eons. But our kids don’t have a choice. And if we’re going to fulfill our roles as teachers in our kids lives, neither do we.
It’s no secret that Lawrence Lessig is one of my heroes in the way that he takes on meaningful efforts to change the world for (what I think, at least) good and his ability to articulate those efforts in compelling ways. It’s also no secret that over the past year I’ve become more disillusioned with the government here in the US. Mostly it’s a frustration about how nothing changes (or will change), how money is the motivator for everything that happens, and how much it feels like we have lost the best of our democracy to special interests. I was a huge Obama supporter; today, notsomuch. I’m totally surprised and disappointed by the whole Race to the Top agenda. I really hoped he would have done better by the kids in this country who desperately need a different vision for “education” (even though they may not know it.) But that said, this really isn’t about a party or a person as much as it is about a system that is plainly broken. Sounds familiar.
Anyway, I’ve been a supporter (both as a contributor of money and time) of Lessig’s Change Congress agenda since it was first announced a couple of years ago. And I think his latest video is worth the seven minutes it takes to watch it since it paints a compelling picture of what’s wrong and one solution, at least, that we can seriously consider supporting. My own feeling is that while we have a lot of serious challenges that we’re facing in this country, none of them are going to be fixed in the long term until we get money out of politics.
One last thing…I’m hopeful that a movement like Change Congress can actually bring together millions of people to actually create change. It would be quite an inspiration for a similar movement to change education.
So this might totally fall flat on its face, but I’m wondering how all you out there who are deeply invested in social learning spaces might respond to this unlikely but hopefully compelling scenario:
Imagine for a moment that high schools as educational places vanish from the earth. How would you go about educating the 14-18 year olds in your lives? What resources, programs, strategies, assessments would you use? Or what would we need to create in order for them to become “educated” in the current sense? What would that world look like?
A few days ago, Gary Stager tweeted me this link in the LA Times about the demise of journalism and freelance writing primarily due to everything being, well, “free” on the Internet. The subhead read, in part, “the well-written story is in danger of becoming scarce.” Gary’s Tweet read “This is disastrous for our culture and democracy…Web 2.0 won’t solve this problem.” And to the first point, at least, I think he’s right. The loss of quality reporting and thoughtful writing has to be a concern, especially for a society that by all indications is becoming more and more disengaged intellectually. (Read this David Brooks column and the accompanying comments and any of the magazine covers at your supermarket checkout stand for evidence.) But regarding the last part of Gary’s tweet, I’m stuck with two reactions. First, who says Web 2.0 won’t solve this? And second, what’s the alternative?
I mean sure, we can wring our hands and lament the slipping away of what many of us older types (ugh) feel are the best parts of our culture, the parts (good journalism included) that preserved and promoted democracy and citizenship and art by setting high standards and celebrating the complexity of the world. But all the hand wringing in the world is not going to slow down the train of participatory culture, this place where 4.5 years of mostly insipid YouTube video is being uploaded in the next 24 hours. Whether we see the Web as beast or feast, it’s long past the moment that anyone can argue it away on the grounds that decency and civility and intellectual engagement are being lost. And to me, at least, that leaves us with how do we make the most of it? How do we (and it’s not “can we?” because I believe we can) take this huge disruptive force that is the Web and turn it into something that celebrates culture, promotes and supports the best of our democratic ideals, and improves the world in ways that maybe we can’t yet imagine?
Frankly, what’s our choice?
Clay Shirky writes compellingly about this in his most recent Edge piece, which, btw, is one of over 160 such pieces encompassing 130,000 words from some of the smartest folks out there that you can curl up with in front of a nice fire on a cold winter afternoon (and night.) I love this snip:
Unfortunately for us, though, the intellectual fate of our historical generation is unlikely to matter much in the long haul. It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.
We are in many ways “freaking out” right now about how these things are changing. And, specifically to Gary’s point, Shirky offers this:
This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.
I won’t speak for Gary, but I would guess by his Tweets and comments over the years that that comes close to how he and others feel. But it’s the next line that I think sums up the choice we have in front of us pretty clearly:
So it falls to us to make sure that isn’t all that happens.
While the “us” there is certainly each and every one of us, there’s no doubt that’s a bar that is especially being set for educators and for parents. I’m convinced this doesn’t have to be disastrous. But I’m also convinced that we’re not working hard enough as a society to make sure that we find and promote the real intellectual value of these tools in literate ways. Because they exist, and because, like it or not, we’re the ones who in Shirky’s words have to set the norms for their use. I love the way he ends his essay:
The Internet’s primary effect on how we think will only reveal itself when it affects the cultural milieu of thought, not just the behavior of individual users. The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of ‘comes from everyone’ and ‘goes everywhere.’) We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won’t matter much, but the norms we set will.
Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.
I know, I know. I’ve sipped the Shirky Kool-Aid pretty hard. But we do have a choice here, let’s not forget that. I don’t think any of us in this network sees the Internet as a place with just “a modicum of educational material” in a sea of flotsam and jetsam. I hope we see it more as that “communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change” because if we don’t, if we don’t figure out ways to start setting those norms for our kids and others, then we surely will be on the precipice of disaster.
My favorite conference of the year, Educon 2.2, is only a few weeks away, and I wanted to post my “conversation” here to see if there might be some…um…conversation about how to best make the, ah, conversation valuable at the conference. (NOTE: I had originally intended to lead a conversation on “Greening Education” but I’m switching this new topic in.) So if you have any thoughts about the topic or about how to add value to the live session (which will be streamed), please let me know.
Title: The “Decoupling” of Education and School: Where do We Begin?
Description: The next ten years promise to be hugely disruptive for the traditional idea of school as more and more alternative learning platforms are created and expanded. This conversation will focus not on technology but on the larger shifts that will have to occur for schools to evolve into a different role in our society. Driving the discussion will be these quotes from Allan Collins and Richard Halverson’s recent bookRethinking Education in the Age of Technology:
“If educators cannot successfully integrate new technologies into what it means to be a school, then the long identification of schooling with education, developed over the past 150 years, will dissolve into a world where the students with the means and the ability will pursue their learning outside of public school.”
“Schools were prevalent in the era of apprenticeship, and they will be prevalent in whatever new system of education comes into being. But the seeds of a new system are beginning to emerge, and they are already beginning to erode the identification of learning and schooling. As these new technologically driven seeds germinate, education will occur in many different, more adaptive venues, and schools will have a narrower role in learning.”
“Our generation faces a…radically new, design challenge. We are dealing with a mature, stable system of education designed to adapt to gradual change, but ill-suited to embrace radical change. The pace of technological change has outstripped the ability or school systems to adapt essential practices. Schools have fiddled with learning technologies on the margins of the system, in boutique innovations that leave core practices untouched. The emergence of new forms of teaching and learning outside of school threaten the identification of learning with formal schooling forged in the 19th Century.”
What does this new design look like? What are the big questions regarding learning, teaching and schooling that we need to begin to address? How will the roles of elementary schools and high schools begin to evolve? How will we address the divide issues that these opportunities outside of school create? And how do we personally plan for these changes as learners, parents and teachers? If we agree, perhaps we can create a concrete list of starting points for these conversations to begin and continue in schools.
A few days ago, 
My favorite conference of the year,