In Seth Godin’s recent book, Tribes he writes about people who work in a balloon factory as being timid and afraid. They are very concerned about pins, needles, echidnas, and sudden changes in temperature. While there is a bit of a rush around New Year’s, the work is essentially quiet and peaceful. Except when the unicorns show up. The balloon factory workers shush the unicorn and shoo it away, but sometimes the unicorn ignores them and wanders into the factory anyway. That’s when everyone runs for cover.
From time to time, someone invents a product with an unforeseen and massive impact on society. The Chinese discovered paper, a Benedictine monk created the clock to regulate prayer, and a German goldsmith used the design of wine-making presses to invent moveable type. When the printing press was introduced more than 500 years ago it brought about a social revolution in the Western world. So ingrained is this print worldview that we are often unaware of the hold it has on our minds. For example, print helped to construct our notions of individuality and the community (notions not always shared by Asian cultures). Our mindsets have been shaped by progress, the linearity of print text, and the Eurocentric prejudice, shaped by centuries of economic and cultural dominance, that truth or best practice lies within our own cultural tradition. This paradigm is now being challenged.
The huge difference between what happened in Gutenberg’s time and what’s happening today is that today it is happening in fast-forward. Expectations are that over the next 20 years bandwidth speed will increase by in excess of one billion times and Wi-Max is on the way – close to fibre speed wireless through the air continuously. The technological transformations of the past 10,000 years will be dwarfed by the transformations we will experience in the next three years and Google is in the midst of constructing a personalised information system which will provide access to an unimaginable breadth and depth of information.
The transformation of education from a book-based system to an internet-based system holds profound implications for classroom pedagogy, but the power of technology is being constrained to work alongside curriculum firmly fixed in the working practices of an earlier age – high levels of memory skills, instruction and pen and paper dexterity. Confining these technologies to the teacher-centred model of education is akin to putting a rocket engine on the back of a horse.
Effectively integrating new technology into educational practice is a process of reflecting on how technology-enhanced practices challenge assumptions about what we teach, how we teach, why we teach, and who we teach. Our job is not to be experts in technology, our job is to be experts in learning. There is no evidence to suggest that technology improves learning, but we know that technology does improve learning when it is utilised by good teachers.
We are the compliant offspring of the Industrial Age, when predictability and standardisation were valued. But how worthwhile is teaching and testing for knowledge that can often be obtained from a five minute Google search? While few teachers would argue that education is about accumulating large repertoires of facts, this is overwhelmingly what happens in classrooms. Today’s adventurous, independent learners are a very different breed from the children who sat quietly in their ordered rows, worked from their books and relied upon their teachers for information. As Will Richardson at Connective Learning cites:
“…while N-Gens interact with the world through multimedia, online social networking, and routine multitasking, their professors tend to approach learning linearly, one task at a time, and as an individual activity that is centered largely around printed text…Not having been raised in the world of the N-Gen student, then, presents some significant challenges for faculty members who must attempt to address the needs of a learning style they have never experienced, may know little about, and may be unable to comprehend fully because of their different skills in processing information…a collection of images on Flickr with authorial comments and tags certainly does not resemble the traditional essay, but the time spent on such a project, the motivation for undertaking it, and its ability to communicate meaning can certainly be equal to the investment and motivation required by the traditional essay—and the photos may actually provide more meaningful communication for their intended audience.”
While equating essay writing with a collection of photos makes the blood boil, the point is that we can teach differently now and the biggest shift is the move away from individual knowledge to distributed knowledge built on collaboration. Schools cannot remain the cloistered little empires that they have become. With the growing availability of tools to connect learners and teachers, teaching is transcending borders. We can easily invite the world’s greatest teachers into our classrooms and there is now no excuse for not bringing expert voices into our classrooms via technology. My Year 9 class recently held a Skype link-up with a Turkish school to discuss perspectives of the Gallipoli campaign. The students were struck by the conditions on the Turkish homefront during the war and the impact of the war of women and children. It is just a matter of time until Australian students are producing a shared Web 2.0 history of World War II with Japanese students.
Check out the blog of TeachPaperless. His Latin students take tests online via their blogs, using online dictionaries, and using Twitter as a place to help one another through the test. Each student translates a different section of the text and there is a requirement for students to participate in the Tweets. Students receive two grades: one for their individual work and one for their helping other students and taking an engaged and active role in the Tweets.
A Personal Learning Network of RSS feeds, social networking sites, and blogs is becoming essential for educators as an intergral part of daily learning and thinking. Google Reader keeps track of all my favourite education blogs and Twitter is a learning tool that allows frequent updates of only 140 characters each to be broadcast. It is not as intrusive as e-mail and it is quick to scan. I can get answers to almost any question in seconds and tweets are usually made up of useful links and great articles. If I am passed a great resource, I look at it and immediately store it for later reference and use. Look me up on Twitter (cpaterso) and join the conversations.
Teaching revolves around community building and we now have the means to collaborate and share responsibility more than ever before. The unicorn is in the balloon factory.
