Every time I address these ideas in front of educators they physically retreat. No one seems to be excited about the potential for education to use these digital tools to give our students a global leg up, in fact, educators seem frightened. When I think about the world before the internet and after the internet it looks completely different to me. To others, it seems, the world hasn't really changed that much. Besides the company of a few writers who I will cite throughout, why do I feel so alone with this idea in the industry?
As Marshal McCluhan said, “First we build the tools, then the tools build us.” [sic]. I believe that even though technology is sociologically changing humans, many remain unaware. Information is moving so fast that humans do poorly to follow along. Although the exact numbers are debatable, researchers agree that the creating and sharing of information is accelerating at exponential rate (3). This means that the amount of information created today quickly eclipses the amount of information produced yesterday.
The human mind evolved in a linear and local way. When the human mind thinks of the number (for example, thirty) it thinks linearly, as in: “If I take 30 steps I will be 30 paces away.” After taking 30 exponential steps (2, 4, 8, 16, 32), however, one would be One-Billion-Seventy-Million steps farther away. The human mind has a hard time understanding such a big jump (4). Today the world is more exponential and global than ever. This makes it very hard to predict trends next week, let alone the distant future. I fear are I dead neglecting the changehappening in education, or as John Taylor Gatto expressed in his 1991 senate testimony, “What we should most fear is that school in 2000 will look exactly like school in 1990. School in 1990 is almost exactly like school was in 1890” (5). I feel as though the education system and my peers are too slow to adapt and that I will be seen as a radical of the system and expelled from it. And personally I fear the opposite, that everyone will adapt as though they had known all along, and I will nothing to show for knowing early.
Part II: Rendering the Problem
For millennia learning has been limited by access to information. For most of human history, learning information has been passed from master to apprentice. The goal of school was to record and preserve information most commonly for religion and aristocracy. After the Gutenberg printing press assured the longevity of information, schools became a repository and delivery machine of information in the West. From there, Horace Mann and other early-modern leaders in education began to determine the role of schools. John Taylor Gatto claims that the Prussian model for controlling citizens with information was the key innovation in the first U.S. schools. It is a plausible idea that education was consciously or unconsciously molded into a machine for the reinforcement of societal power dynamics, however, here is where I believe the internet completely disrupts the definition of school.
Digital learning tools today liberate information, providing access to those who have been disenfranchised by past (and current) education systems. However, they are not without controversy and skepticism. Yes, the internet remains a large source of misinformation and misdirection for its users, but efforts like JSTOR and The Internet Archive (https://archive.org) are on the rise creating more access to good information than ever before. Another critique of digital learning tools is that they withdraw the student too far into themselves and away from their peers, were the real learning is done. To this I reply: digital tools facilitate peer collaboration, not stifle it. Digital tools allow high definition video chats with another person thousands of miles away from an entirely different walk of life. Additionally, they allow unique interest forums on thousands upon thousands of message board topics. These are skills the future leaders of the world need be armed with as much as any analogous form of communication from the past.
Controversy extends to issues of data privacy as well. We are increasingly becoming vulnerable to exploitation and violation of our data. This is particularly disturbing in the realm of student data. Dr. Roxana Marachi of San Jose State University and her colleagues continue to watchdog these processes for us and I direct everyone to investigate these findings themselves eduresearcher.com and on twitter @connectEdProf.
As Freire tells us, by “posing” (6) the problems which we find ourselves involved, we enable the solutions of those problems to present themselves for the first time. It is my hope that posing my dilemmas of the internet and education we may liberate schools from the maxims of old models.
In chapter 2 of his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire lays out what he terms the “Banking” concept of education. Put too simply, the banking model is a system in which the information passed to students has been curated or sanitized. There is no room for asking questions in the banking model, all the information one is allowed to have will be given, not created. With the tools of of education technology students must not remain “domesticated” by systematic forms of education-oppression and teachers should become the revolutionary leaders of their students (7). If you will indulge a quick “ELA teacher” aside: this screams Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to me.
Technology has a bad track record when it comes to predictions of supplanting traditional schooling. Many tech pundits have overpredicted the proliferation of educational technologies. Thomas Edison is often quoted as saying, “I believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks” (education next). Far earlier than Edison, Aristotle bemoaned the convention of keeping written records of knowledge rather than retaining the ability to recite information orally. Further, Audrey Waters of Hackeducation.com has written on how technology consumption is not technology innovation detailing an argument that tech too often attempts to become efficient, efficiency the indexed word of business (8).
Part III: Action
The 2008 recession and the bailout to follow keeps the distaste of banks fresh in one’s mind when reading the forty-seven year old opus of Freire. The roles of teacher and student that Freire champions, that teachers should be shepherd of the student and not the master, remains scarce in practice. Disruptive forces seems to loom over this ideal model of teaching. In his 1997 work, Henry Labaree explores three potential goals of education: democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. Labaree writes that these ideas conflict, and I continue the thought by exploring how each may be impacted by technology education below.
The immediacy of information, so called “on demand learning,” is of great benefit to democratic equality goal of education. Information is mixed, remixed, scrutinized, sent around the world and back, ripped apart, and put back together in a matter of hours. This has a great impact on analysis of social constructs such as race. As Winant explains in “Race and Race Theory,” (9) race requires, “comparative historical and political components, some sort of sociology of culture or knowledge, and adequate microsociological account.” Internet ideas, or “memes,” are subject to these components which Winant describes in a matter of hours (10). Each time the information moves, it passes through another lense of understanding. This movement, as seen through Winant, benefits democratic equality because by remixing race information and exploring its limits all individuals become better informed. Critics may argue this perpetuates the spread of misinformation. I reply, there will always be those take the meme at face value and are mislead by the information. This is a given of the nature of information, neither good nor bad, it just is.
Technology is a double edged sword when it comes to social efficiency. Nano-degrees are paving the way toward quick certifications which employers can use to get positions filled. Conversely, the automation of jobs could spell doom for many employment sectors. Do nano-degrees improve social efficiency in spite of human-computer outsourcing? I’ve heard the market will reveal the answer by 2050, but how do I prepare my students for a future I can not guarantee? I have had students who fail out of 180 days of instruction only to make up the class at Cyber High in two weeks of summer. Imagine online learning becomes as efficient as brick-and-mortar. What if traditional schools retain prestige only through their sports teams? Well, there would be no interest for people to climb the social mobility ladder. With the ability to get any type of certification, employers will care less about degrees and more about portfolios than ever before.
People today are in awe of technology and expect education to change because of it:
ELON MUSK: I think, just in general, conventional education should be massively overhauled….I mean, the analogy I sometimes use is, have you seen like Batman, the Chris Nolan movie, the recent one? It's pretty freaking awesome. And you've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound, and it's very engaging. But if you were to instead say, “OK...”-- even if you had the same script, so at least it's same script--and you said, “OK, now that script, instead of having movies, we're going to have that script performed by the local town troop.” OK, and so in every small town in America-- if movies didn't exist-- they'd have to recreate The Dark Night with like home-sewn costumes and like jumping across the stage. And not really getting their lines quite right. And not really looking like the people in the movie. And no special effects. And I mean that would suck. It would be terrible.
SAL KHAN: That's right.
ELON MUSK: That's education.
(11)
Elon Musk and Sal Khan are the populist movers in education. Soon, I believe, the role of the teacher will entirely step away from the role of gatekeeper of information. Gone are the days of “vaudevillian” education; no more doing the same lecture 20 years in a row; concluded are the days when students don't know the purpose of school (11). As students and their parents gain access to resources online, they will begin to question curriculum. Most radically, they will question what education is for. Here is when I will activate my agency and shift my role of teaching toward the co-creator of learning.
In his 2015 commencement speech, Dean James Ryan challenged his Harvard School of Graduate Education students to action by avoiding inaction. He called upon what some religious doctrines call the “sin of omission.” The sin of omission states that it is as wrong to fail to act as it is to do something wrong. This tech problem shall not be my sin of omission, I will face it head on with an iron heart (12).
However, my dilemma persists. As I learned in Fredman et al (13), “The Supreme Court ruled in the Garcetti v Caballos decision...that when public employees are engaged in speech that is related to their job duties, they are not acting as citizens under the protection of the First Amendment, which therefore leaves them vulnerable to employer repercussions as a result of their speech.” This is potentially a terrifying problem for me. How then must I enact change from the bottom up of a public institution? One option is to not go public at all. To lead by example in the private sector. But this does not seem right to me. Regardless, I am reminded of the wisdom James Ryan bestowed on another graduating class of 2016. He had five questions for them, concluding with a line of poetry, “did you get what you wanted out of life, even so.” The essential conclusion, “even so,” is a nod to the fact that no matter what life you live, you will always have ups and downs. The even so is the fact that even though I may see some great potential of technology in the teaching world, it is quite likely it will not come to fruition in my lifetime. Still this is my cross to bear and I welcome the work that needs to be done, even so.
