Ken Carroll

Some Friday afternoon thoughts …

Although there is some original thinking in the edublogs - George Siemens, Stephen Downes - the vast majority of edublogging is derivative. That is to be expected, I guess. It helps to flesh out and disseminate ideas into the broader conversation, though it can lead to conventions that quickly form around ideas, perhaps before they should.

This is partly because activity in the space is still (necessarily) at the level of theory/debate, and less, perhaps, at the level of application. It shouldn’t be so surprising as the blogosphere is ultimately a conversational medium. And of course there is also much to discuss about how pedagogy works on the web. It’s all kind of new and emerging.

But even though the phenomenal rate of change that technology is bringing about isn’t going to slow down, there’s always some reason why social and institutional change takes so long. The same is true in business: Jenna Sweeney talks about mobile learning’s ten year gestation here. Meanwhile, Donald Clark recently posted on how deeply the old teacher/institution centric philosophy is embedded into our language.

So, I think it’s worth asking how we are dealing with all of this. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or lost in the details. Somehow it seems we are hoping to discuss or research our way out of it. I’m looking at a pdf on learning from a recent and influential learning conference, where 40 researchers gathered. 40 researchers? I’m not saying that those findings were wrong, just that if its only about research, then you probably have a bias for theory over application.

Applying it

I guess I see a need for application. This is the only way we are going to test the theory and move on. I am actually an obsessive reader of a pedagogic theory, but I guess my work is about applying ideas. My instinct, then, is to look to the market for validation: to get products into the market and see what people actually want.

Nor would I want to get embroiled in the near impossible efforts to reform education. I think we need instead, to try to look at the problem in another way. Let me offer two facts I heard from Gary Hamel this week:

1. Over 10% of all we know, we learned in the last 5 years.

2. IBM will soon release a supercomputer that performs a quadrillion operations per second.

Our school system is a lost cause (helped along through politics) and absurdly out of step with change in the real world. We will spend years arguing over it, and trying to reform these 19th century institutions, but I’m wondering what the point is. I’m not being flippant. I have a daughter entering 4th grade in September and it pains me to think of the needless but nauseating rigmarole of what she will have to go through.

If I were not tied up with other things, I think I’d be tempted to look for investment to fund a school of New Learning and drop every pretense of the ancient formulas. It’d need a year or two to raise the funding, and get it up and running - faculty, location, connectivist ‘curriculum’ and so on. Any such ’school’ that focused on the reality of digital learning and embraced the unprecedented change that is surrounding us, would have to be more relevant than what now exists. It could even make business sense - to begin it would have to be a private school - but it could simply set the bar for alternatives and that has to be a good thing. (Obviously you’d need to appeal to some progressive parents but it could be done.)

During the recent brouhaha it became clear to me that both DIY and edupunk can mean different things in different contexts. So I guess I’m making a case for DIY (in the positive sense), though by that rate, all entrepreneurship is a kind of DIY.

This just in: As I write I see that the new York Times blogged about ChinesePod today.

Ken Carroll

Some teachers see their work as a subversive act. To them, perhaps, western democracy is lacking, and requires their intervention. There is also an assumption that the teacher possesses the truth - that he knows with some degree of certainty what needs to be changed in our society and why.  

This is not how I see it. The real purpose of education, I believe, centers around  the pursuit of truth. The teacher’s role is to help learners find truth, not to instill a particular political view of the world, and still less to set them on a course of active subversion that the teacher chooses.  

There is no single truth in politics or morality. No paradigm explains either, and no teacher can ‘know’ political truths -  he can only hold opinions.  The learner has to be free to seek truth and form his own conclusions. To my mind, imparting political  ’truth’ is a form of coercion, something you find amongst ideologues or authoritarian systems. I believe teachers have a moral obligation not to push their own political agenda in the classroom.

As citizens in a democracy we have obligations (not just rights) towards it.  Subversion for its own sake is not one of them.  There is a difference between fairly debating the good and the bad in our society, and encouraging students to undermine it.  If teaching is subversive it is unlikely to present both sides of the issues. So, imbuing students with hostility towards their own democratic tradition (even where we vehemently disagree with a particualr government) is an anti-democratic thing to do. Consider the company you keep in that category.

It  may be true that, as an individual, you are either working to support political status quo, or working against it. But again, this is an issue for outside the classroom. Students are not our pawns - they also have rights. We are not hired to subvert, just  ask your employers, the parents, the learners themselves.

Ideology (again)

 The edupunk debate was a watershed. What for me was a discussion about a really bad software company was for others an issue of ideology. Can of worms: the people who drew anti-corporate political messages about Blackboard need to consider this: 

 If “edupunk” is anti-establishment and anti-corporation, does that mean a true Edupunk does not use any tools provided by large-scale companies? So does that mean no Google? no Flickr? no QuickTime? Alas - these are all tools provided by corporations. (Link.)

Neither this case, nor society at large, can be defined in terms of class warfare or one group oppressing another on the basis of ideology. That is way too reductionistic a view of society. (It’s also unnecessarily confrontational.) Besides, it is fully possible to take Blackboard to task without resorting to ideology. Politicization makes proper discussion untenable, particulalrly where it is reduced to Marxist analysis. 

Of course it is true that a free society has its own ideology. Many, many layers of meaning and ideology underlie free societies, but these include the ideology of democracy itself, of free speech, and of economic freedom, etc. It may even be true, as Gramsci pointed out, that one of the ideological foundations of democracy is that democracy does not have ideology, when of course it does. Either way, no single paradigm captures the complexity of an economic or social system. All it will do is distract from the real issue of learning.

Note, too that we have formed our own hierarchy in the edublogosphere. At the head of it sits Stephen. Like the rest of you I read Stephen assiduously, because I learn from him every time. He simply is a leading light in this field. But whether he likes it or not, Stephen has become an authority. Shouldn’t we be subverting authority figures? Is he oppressing us with his ideology? (No, he is not.) How about a cultural revolution? An attack for the sake of it? How much sense would that make? Not much.

I don’t plan on writing about politics again, so let me just say that subversion for its own sake is wanting. My vote is to keep ideology out of this debate. Can we just stick to the learning?  

 Ken Carroll

Am I the only one to find this Edupunk meme ridiculous? The adolescent ethos, music, etc, are matched only by the adolescent narcissism,  anger, wilful non-conformity,  sanctimony, and tirades against authority. Fine, except this is all coming from teachers!  

No seven ages of man here. These guys look intellectually and emotionally indistinguishable from their students. In keeping with that ethos comes their abhorrence for  The Man, the capitalist who is at the root of all Edupunk problems, and the guy who oppresses society, and the downtrodden. Normally, only teenagers take the time and energy to seek out with such vehemence these archetypal injustices. Are these father-figure issues? (You have to wonder at times, what must go on in their classrooms.)

But that rage contrasts with a dopamine credulity towards those who claim that ‘ industrial capitalism is a ridiculous game’ or the depravity of things like the DIY culture.  It was a destitute Marxist trope that animated this meme last week, via a science-fiction novel, written, btw, by a guy who flirted with Naziism.  It is from that novel that they lifted the ugly communist/fascist metaphors - vultures of capital, and captialism’s will to power, etc, to attack, er, Blackboard.  (As if that target were otherwise likely to go unnoticed.) The rebellion as  temper tantrum, had begun.

Now, Edupunks  are starting a movement  to expropriate power from the capitalists (and with cool music supplied by all the major labels!) Apart from that, there is nothing new from them.

 Except that Edupunks are seeking to politicize (and I would argue, infantilize) discussion in this space. Already this has begun. If there is one thing worse than what Blackboard is doing it is the attempt to reduce this discussion to ideology. I don’t know about you, but I do not see counter-culture and conspiracy as serious educational domains. 

 It is also dismaying to see the lack of edublogger critiques. Everybody loves Edupunks, it would seem. (I thought this was all about multiple perspectives, not an echo-chamber.) So here is my take: Allowing Edupunks to define themselves as agents of humanitarian uplift is absurd. Forty year old tenured men in hoodies, talking about revolution is no more than perpetual adolescence and self-indulgence.  By appointing themselves as the Defenders the Oppressed they are pre-empting the right to lecture on the subject. Personally I reserve that right for someone with a grown-up argument and a relatively serious attitude.

Of course they have the right to say whatever they wish and that is fine. Ultimately, however, I would not recommend that we politicize learning 2.0 and certainly not by reducing it to the level of  of DIY culture. Have they raised a real issue after all?

 Ken Carroll