I’ve just read one of the best posts that shows how the Internet changes everything in education; many just don’t realise it yet. Christian Long at Think: Lab has a long post on the connection between blogging and formal education. Christian starts by describing a new billboard from AT&T that has only one word on it – Blogging – and then talks about a major difference in life for a 15 year old today and ten years ago. This is the ability to connect with anybody in the world on any subject, no matter how narrowly defined:
We’ve discussed a basic definition of blogging (web-based journaling). We’ve accepted that anyone can immediately create a website now called a blog. And if you think about being a 15 year old and wanting to share your ideas about music or sports or whatever comes to mind in a creative and individual way, a social and collaborative way, you can see why someone would create one. Even see the potential for a teacher and a class full of students to create ‘class blogs’ for a project or portfolio. But is there more?
Yes, and it all comes down to something so fundamental to the very existence of schools and even education itself that it’s actually pretty easy to overlook: information and who owns/creates it.
This final point, the question about information and who owns/creates it – is shaking our concept of education to the core. The ability to be the co-creators of worldwide knowledge now lies within the means of a large percentage of the world. For example, anyone can contribute their individual area of expertise to the wikipedia knowledge repository.
The discussion at Education Bridges echoes a similar vein. In the creation of wikibooks as online textbooks for the world, should only the experts build and distribute the accepted official curriculum or should learners be involved in the co-creation of knowledge? Personally, I feel that this is no longer a valid question because of the nature of digital networks. If you don’t allow for the co-creation of information (construct, deconstruct, reconstruct) then your information will gather electronic dust in its uselessness.
Albert Ip states it another way with this picture, which asks how anyone could limit peer interaction to "just" the classroom.
Teachers and educational organisations can longer hide behind the classroom firewall. As Christian says, just imagine:
Imagine that student able to create a blog in seconds and within days or weeks or months have an audience spread out around the world that is genuinely interested in the ideas and stories and links and images that are on the blog, beginning to be taken seriously as a writer or an expert or a legitimate voice, and beginning to use the blog as a way to further explore ideas and develop a far-reaching network of thinkers and beginning to be seen on a level playing field as any adult. And now imagine that student going back to school the next day and being asked to sit still, read books or notes that expect no interaction, being forever being seen as inexperienced and incapable, and not being able to contribute any ideas or questions to the larger body of research or ideas.
Both of my boys are in middle school and have their own blogs. One of them writes a lot, including the creation of a fantasy religion, while the other builds animations and shares them online. The eldest is learning Java on his own, via tutorials he finds online. At school they can use Google as an online library (find, access, use) during their limited time available during "computer lab". The physical library does not have any information for a report on the Avian Flu, and there is only one computer available. Access to Blogger is forbidden.
Teachers cannot teach the students how to get involved in the co-creation of knowledge because they don’t have a clue. The kids live in a completely different world than school. School is fast becoming irrelevant.
Next year, our eldest son will be 15. What will he think of school then? [I think I know the answer]
powerful
This is powerful, powerful stuff. Thanks for sharing your personal example in this context — the contrast between the expectations of school and the learning we (including kids) are becoming capable of is truly mind-boggling.
I bet you’d be interested in Michael’s comment on one of my recent posts — he was a teacher-on-call with a difficult class and found one of the students particularly troublesome. One day while he was in the school library perusing some magazines, he noticed the troublemaker’s face on the cover of a BMX magazine…it changed his view of the kid and has him pondering the hidden talents and interests of every student.
“The ability to be the co-creators of worldwide knowledge now lies within the means of a large percentage of the world. For example, anyone can contribute their individual area of expertise to the wikipedia knowledge repository”
The fact that 10,000 people believe a thing to be true is not sufficient to make it so.
The ability to type words into a keyboard does not make the words valuable, interesting, or accurate. In short – it does not make them “information”.
“Truth lies within ourselves: it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to Know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape than in effecting entry for light supposed to be without.†Robert Browning
The mismatch between the educational model of certification that the student has gained a prespecified kind of knowledge and the model seeks to challenge and foster the learner’s creativity is at the heart of some of today’s problems in education. How can education be redesigned to produce the needed combination of specific skills and development of a lively and creative intellect.
I believe it’s more a case that our educational structures need to be redesigned, Joan. As Churchill said, “First, we shape our structures. Then, our structures shape us”. Our schools need to be transparent, connected to their communities and flexible. That means abolishing factory-production approaches to education, such as standard curriculum, standard class times, age-based cohorts, bells, etc.
Perhaps it’s time to introduce democracy to our public school system.