Not just because I'm married. (As a stand-up comedian of distant memory once said, "Always start any conversation with your spouse with 'I'm sorry' -- chances are it'll be required, perhaps even demanded, anyway.") I apologize because my normal habit is to dig down through the silver lining in anything, and find the dark cloud. Being, of course, that this blog originally started as a protest (see "About this blog" for details), I am simply continuing the tradition here.
I also apologize 'cause this posting marks a return to the abstract -- in stark contrast to the previous one, which was all hands-on.
I have mentioned that I started my early adult life as a musician -- a performance major on viola, a singer/songwriter, a performing tenor, the son of a PhD musicologist and choir director. I lived through the "digital revolution" in recording and sound production. There are a lot of folks in my past (and some in the present, for that matter) who fought the move to CDs and MP3's. They contended that sound itself was analog and continuous. Reducing it to a series of zeros and ones made it clunky, machine-like, un-human. (I was certainly not one of them -- I do not miss my turntable, and destroyed enough vinyl to cover a kitchen floor the size of Wyoming. Work with me, here, it's a metaphor... ;-)
The conference I just attended, based on a 20-minute presentation format, had the impact of carving up educational practice into a series of small pieces. This reflects trends happening all over education...
- National trends in curriculum, assessment, and teacher certification ("Common Core," "Quality Core," "National Board"...you name it), in conjunction with major "big data" movements (Kentucky's Continuous Instructional Improvement Technology System/CIITS is one) have the effect (if not the intent) of reducing the goals of instruction down to easily-measured discrete bits of knowledge.
- The tablet/personal device revolution has taken the world of computer programming and tool design out of big projects and platforms, and reduced it to discrete pieces called apps -- small programs which do specific things, often written and marketed by people with no educational vision.
- As illustrated by presentations like "20 web tools in 20 minutes," the "Interactive Internet" reflects the app trend, with thousands of tools doing clever, discrete, and isolated tasks.
- All of these changes are being shared and discussed through Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, which sound-bytes them, often without analysis or comment.
The end result is a massive jumble of pieces of discrete information assaulting the classroom teacher (and everybody else), who often has little ability (and all too often little interest) in sorting it all out. It places pressure on teachers to translate these discrete pieces into instructional practices which address big goals and practices, such as project-based and collaborative learning.
I'm not stupid. I do know that my professional life surrounds me with masses of early adopters and bleeding-edgers, and these are exactly the sorts of things they do, and are interested in. I'm also not stupid enough to ignore that, behind the tweets lies a community of thinkers and practitioners who drive exploration and innovation interactively. But the difficulty in reducing things down to discrete pieces is that one forgets what the whole looks like. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat."
Twitter did not invent the professional community. Online professional communities started with The Well, moved through UseNet (now Google Groups), diversified to bulletin boards and LISTSERVs, deepened and connected through RSS and the blogosphere, and only recently leverage social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Each of these platforms improved on the previous ones, and each sustained the loss of some of the earlier platforms' benefits.
One thing that has changed, of course, is the level of participation. The Well certainly can't boast that it supported a billion members. But it would be a mistake to assume that the advantages of recent social networking platforms provide the sole reason for such increases. They provide only incremental improvements over what is already a huge advantage -- a way to connect anyone to anything across space and time, something shared by all the above platforms. It's just taken that long for a billion people to discover and embrace it. But I digress.
The goal here is to keep our eye on the cat. As long as presenters and participants identify Twitter as the community, you've tied the characteristics of professional learning and knowledge construction to the platform -- it's foibles and limitations, its business model, its retched excesses, its 140 character limits...but even more important, its shelf life. The speed of change continues to accelerate If we want our professional practice and discourse to improve, to continue to re-invent and extend our ability to "commune," we have to pay first heed and attention to the people and ideas the platform are connecting.
Research really bears this out. An article in The Atlantic looked at participation in Facebook and social connections. According to the authors, FB does not improve or alter one's overall happiness or social connectedness -- it provides a distraction from the world of face-to-face family and relationships, and tends to reinforce them, but it does not replace or enhance them to any level of statistical significance. Restated, happiness and social connectedness does not increase for folks with high levels of FB use. If we applied that to the world of online learning communities on FB and Twitter, we can extrapolate that attending to the platform will not, in itself, improve your participation in the "social connectedness" of your professional life. Attention to professional connections needs to be working already -- that is, that world needs to have a life separate from the platform.
Again, I apologize. I know that these tools and trends are important (I do participate in them myself), and they have the possibility to make things better. And a quick look at new tools is, if nothing else, just a lot of fun for teachers and observers. My only goal here is to insure we don't forget the cat. If you're focused solely on discrete pieces (and platforms which tend to traffic in/promote discrete pieces), the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working community.
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| Douglas Adams |
Twitter did not invent the professional community. Online professional communities started with The Well, moved through UseNet (now Google Groups), diversified to bulletin boards and LISTSERVs, deepened and connected through RSS and the blogosphere, and only recently leverage social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Each of these platforms improved on the previous ones, and each sustained the loss of some of the earlier platforms' benefits.
One thing that has changed, of course, is the level of participation. The Well certainly can't boast that it supported a billion members. But it would be a mistake to assume that the advantages of recent social networking platforms provide the sole reason for such increases. They provide only incremental improvements over what is already a huge advantage -- a way to connect anyone to anything across space and time, something shared by all the above platforms. It's just taken that long for a billion people to discover and embrace it. But I digress.
The goal here is to keep our eye on the cat. As long as presenters and participants identify Twitter as the community, you've tied the characteristics of professional learning and knowledge construction to the platform -- it's foibles and limitations, its business model, its retched excesses, its 140 character limits...but even more important, its shelf life. The speed of change continues to accelerate If we want our professional practice and discourse to improve, to continue to re-invent and extend our ability to "commune," we have to pay first heed and attention to the people and ideas the platform are connecting.
Research really bears this out. An article in The Atlantic looked at participation in Facebook and social connections. According to the authors, FB does not improve or alter one's overall happiness or social connectedness -- it provides a distraction from the world of face-to-face family and relationships, and tends to reinforce them, but it does not replace or enhance them to any level of statistical significance. Restated, happiness and social connectedness does not increase for folks with high levels of FB use. If we applied that to the world of online learning communities on FB and Twitter, we can extrapolate that attending to the platform will not, in itself, improve your participation in the "social connectedness" of your professional life. Attention to professional connections needs to be working already -- that is, that world needs to have a life separate from the platform.
Again, I apologize. I know that these tools and trends are important (I do participate in them myself), and they have the possibility to make things better. And a quick look at new tools is, if nothing else, just a lot of fun for teachers and observers. My only goal here is to insure we don't forget the cat. If you're focused solely on discrete pieces (and platforms which tend to traffic in/promote discrete pieces), the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working community.
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