Do We Really Even Still Need the Question Mark?

       Well, wasn’t that title just a little bit of irony?! But then, I just love such things. There’s a lot hiding behind the question, of course, and it involves the wonderful world of online discourse.

       It is always with some trepidation that I do what I’m about to do, ‘cause I’m painfully aware that a young perspective will be somewhat different than my own (which goes along with the fact that I am not, in fact, a young person). But I began this blog as an examination of the implications of new technologies for human behavior and communication, and that tradition will continue here.
       One of the first communications technologies with which I became acquainted was the LISTSERV, an email-based discussion list which provided archives and a feed to the old BitNet for bulletin board-style display. I’ve written about them here before, and have observed that all online communications platforms are a great deal more alike than they are different. But there has been a slow but profound shift in the style of discourse.
       I will now engage in some very unscientific data gathering. EDTECH, a LISTSERV I used to moderate, still maintains archives going back to 1989. It took a few years for it to pick up steam and become popular, so I picked an arbitrary month: January, 1995. Of the 48 posts that day, 9 originated threads. 2 of those were announcements, the remaining 7 were questions. All of the other 39 were in responses to questions by others. Hence, only 2 of the 48 posts were not associated with someone asking a question of the collected wisdom of the EDTECH list community. And that was just one day.
       For contrast, I fired up my Twitter account and searched the #EDTECH hashtag. Of the 23 recent tweets, two contained questions, but they were both rhetorical, answered later in the same tweet. None actually asked questions. All were announcements or links to resources elsewhere. There were also none on my Facebook feed, although I did not attempt to narrow that by any subject search.
       So here’s the question I’m really asking: What has happened? Maybe people didn’t know very much back in 1995. Or maybe people didn’t know as much about technology in 1995. A lot has happened since then, for sure, but I’m not buying that as an explanation for a behavior change. It’s a little like saying that it was a lot easier to teach US History in 1995, ‘cause there’s been nearly 20 years more history since then.
       Perhaps my study is flawed because the sample is of two radically different populations. Perhaps. The membership of the LISTSERV back in 1995 would have been probably equally divided between K-12 practitioners and higher-ed teacher educators and observes. That pretty much matches the few names I could pick out of the #EDTECH tweet list – I most certainly don’t know them all, hence the “unscientific” nature of my study. Probably the most significant aspect of the LISTSERV population is that these were all early adopters – members of a small group of people engaging in online discussion before it was common, But would that make them less or more likely to ask questions?
       Maybe a much more likely explanation is that the LISTSERV was set up by someone specifically interested in providing a place to ask questions. In contrast, Twitter and Facebook are specifically set up to encourage the declarative – Twitter’s tweet composer specifically asks “What’s happening?” Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” Both seem to encourage the participant to answer those questions, rather than posing questions of her own. But in any case, my sense is that something has fundamentally changed about the nature of online discourse. And my contention is that it isn’t positive.

       All of the education technology observers I know are all about the deeper end of the learning pool – problem/project-based learning, Socratic method, critical thinking, student-driven learning – lots of implied question-asking in those learning paradigms. But when we look at these same people in the open arena of online discourse, things are quite different. Everybody wants to be a leader using the declarative, and no one wants to be a follower asking the question.
       Well into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, our society has relegated the question mark to secondary status. If we really want to know something, we ask Google or Bing, though we call that a "search," not a question. (It's a little easier to see now, isn't it, why "Ask Jeeves" died as a search engine trade mark!) A search engine will not notice, or care, that we don’t already know the answer. Of course, we'll have lost that very basic of human behaviors, asking for help.
         And we don’t even have to use a question mark.

What’s the matter with high schools?

       This, of course, is probably unfair as a lead to an editorial. High schools get that a lot -- for some reasons they own, and a bunch they don’t. Yes, they’re slow to respond to change. Yes, they often have bad failure/drop-out/low-performance/low-attendance data. Yes, their teachers often fail to reflect national standards.
       Of course, in our data-driven education world -- and in a political environment where a regional legislature with almost no education experience has more influence than a well-considered and published education researcher -- a lot of instructional practice is changing for some very bad reasons. Not only are we beating up on how well high schools are doing, we’re sending a bunch of mixed messages on what they are supposed to be doing in the first place! Do we really want all students to attend college? Do we really want all students in STEM programs? Do we really want our students to just do well on quantifiable high-stakes tests? Do we really want our education aimed solely at how to be a good college student/employee/citizen?
       The end result is that high school teachers and administrators often feel completely at a loss. The attention brings sanctions, reform initiatives, negative press, leadership changes, teacher accountability measures, more and more tests, and a host of other things intended to help, but, ultimately, end up just contributing to the piling-on. The end result is a collection of professionals who feel threatened and powerless.
       In the face of that, not surprisingly, the response is often to hunker down and circle the wagons. Principals do their best to make sure the school is the source of their reform and change. Teachers close their doors, narrow their focus, and attend to that which is in front of them. As a frequent observer and participant in programs at the high school level, I’ve seen this over and over and over again. Even high schools who are viewed in the district and community as high functioning often exhibit the same behaviors. (As a district tech resource teacher, the most telling response I get from school-based folks is "What are you doing here?")
       But is that "circled wagons" response effective, or is it dysfunctional?
       It can make one feel better – more empowered, more in control, more connected to the immediate school community who have, as their common mission, the correction of that bad image for, at least, their school. I won’t begin to comment on whether it might be effective as a general strategy, but I do worry about how it fits into all of the implications of 21^st Century teaching and learning. If a student has more information instantly available through his smart phone than a teacher learns in a lifetime, will closing doors help? If a student can take a course at the school across town, or online, or from freely-available MIT/Kahn Academy/HippoCampus instructional resources/course syllabi, does it make sense to insist that all learning opportunities come from the school he attends? If a student participates in an international learning community through social networking outside of school, does it make sense to restrict his contact in a classroom to the thirty students there? If there are hundreds of thousands of motivated, involved, attentive experts online, does it make sense to force only one teacher to provide that experience?
         There are lots of education observers who promote an extension of connections to learning experiences as a way of addressing education reform. One of the most interesting of them might be Logan LaPlante, who, as a 13-year-old, did a TEDx talk on “Hackschooling.” His experience, to say the least, is atypical – upper middle class family, parents who took him out of formal schools and allowed him to structure his own educational experiences. But he gets a lot of things right, including connected and integrated learning from a variety of sources.
       What’s the matter with high schools? It isn’t that they don’t care. It isn’t that they don’t have what it takes. It isn’t that they can’t change. In our super-connected world, my only fear is that, it’s because they aren’t listening.

The Paradox of Student-Centered Instruction

William M. Jones

       My dad had a couple of firm observations he would make from time to time. He was a college professor cum university administrator, a true intellectual with a lot of experience negotiating human space. He always used to say, “You know you've had a good idea when you hear it coming out of the mouth of someone else.” He inevitably followed it up with “…and when that happens, you should smile, nod, and agree that it’s a great idea. Nothing more.”
        One could no better define a lot of what is being promoted in education reform today.
       This essay will be unusual for this space on a couple of levels.

        Although the presence of education technology has lent a great deal of support to some of the ideas I’ll address, the presence of technology tools is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for them. Hence this isn't about that. In addition, I will not attempt to plunge head-long to a conclusion, an answer to a question. Instead (Socrates would be proud!) I will merely ask the question, and hope that by posing it we can make some progress towards answering it.
        My dad’s remarks have two serious underlying assumptions which reveal two different, even conflicting, ideals in human behavior …

“…a good idea…coming out of the mouth of someone else…” Humans are almost desperate to own what they do and say. If an idea is good, it’s remembered, but our pride and focus often removes our ability to remember the source. When this happens in industry, it’s called advertising. After all, every company wants to be the inventor of their product, no matter how derivative it is. If it happens in academia, it’s called “published.” Although there are new ideas coming from academic research, such research is often the rephrasing and re-branding of a small variation on a preexisting idea.
        If it happens in schools, it’s called student-centered learning.
       That might sound cynical, but the research is out there – student-centered learning really does work. If you get students to own what they learn, they are motivated, engaged, and proud of their success. They will do better in school, and they will do better in life after they leave school, because their relationship with learning and success is an internal one, not dependent on the presence of celebrating teachers, grades, and other external motivators.

“….you should smile, nod…Nothing more…” My dad knew all too well that the best chance a good idea would become a program or policy required leveraging the enthusiasm and engagement of the person who just promoted it. Attempting to correct their mistaken ownership would simply cut off the engagement and enthusiasm, and, by extension, the idea itself. (As an aside, one could argue that that which we affectionately call “politics” is simply the process of inducing others to have and promote the ideas we hold as important to our own interests. That explains a lot these days!)

       To be a good teacher is to be a celebrator of a student’s ideas and work. After all, if a student is going to own her ideas, a teacher will have to step aside and allow that to happen. My dad proved that it worked in academic politics, over and over again. To encourage people to succeed, one should provide them the ability to create, and be celebrated in their creations as the owner, which, often, is quite different from true ownership, since most ideas owe a lot (sometimes everything) to previous work by someone else. There is a fundamental humility in the act of being a good teacher/mentor – the ability to set aside ones’ ownership of information, and one’s ownership of the learning or development process.
       So, we've defined a good teacher. The question I have is, if “fundamental humility” is the method by which we can induce others to succeed, it would seem to be a great human characteristic in general. (In fact, I could have spent volumes just on that issue alone.) So, how does one induce a “fundamental humility” in the mind of a student on the one hand, and celebrate their ideas as original ones they own on the other? From a somewhat narrower perspective, is this new education reform movement doomed to fail to produce the characteristics of a good teacher?
       I will admit to deliberately ignoring a few things in this discussion. Our students do learn a great deal from watching what we as teachers do (rather than what we manage to get them to do). And, of course, a “hunger for learning and information” has, built-in, a certain humble assumption – that one doesn't already know everything already. But I watch the rise of arrogance and self-centeredness in everything from politics to reality television, and I wonder whether there might be an inherent paradox at work here, a duality of messages.
        For us in educational technology, student ownership of the learning process is, one could argue, a logical partner to the presence and use of student-owned devices and information pipelines in the classroom. One-to-one computing and “Bring your own device” support encourage such an approach. So how can we have our proverbial cake and eat it too – have students engaged in owning the learning process, but with the selfless sense that, in fact, one’s place in the world of knowledge and learning is humble, connected, and dependent?
        There are several confounding issues which color this debate.

• The nature of technology adoption. People on the “front lines” of technology adoption are often very proud, even arrogant, of the choices they've made – the tools they've selected, the skills they've learned, and the implied behavior changes they have embraced. As has been shown over and over again in history, early adopters tend to become policy wonks and gatekeepers, maintaining their prime location at the head of the curve, and often forgetting the primary goals of the pursuit in the process.
• A teacher’s self-image. It might very well be that a humble, supportive facilitator isn't what the overwhelming majority of teachers signed on to be. If we bring access of external information and experiences to students (with it the change in instructional practice that implies), we may ignore or deliberately subvert a personal vision with which a teacher entered the profession. (This is, of course, separate from whether they should change – after all, reform movements often sort as much as they change, causing some potential teachers to leave or avoid the profession. Can we be sure we won’t simply create a teacher void, or a large number of unhappy teachers?)
• Process vs. information. Owning the process of knowledge construction can be viewed as quite separate from owning the information used therein, and the resultant product. Is this the hair we’re asking teachers and tech-driven tech reformers to split?
• Real vs. constructed engagement. Many of the advocates of information-access-driven education reform feel that this increases authenticity – students are able to use and interact with information sources and players who are actually doing what the students are learning. It’s the same for project-based learning, a movement sharing a great deal with the sorts of ideas we are discussing here. But the overwhelming majority of the learning goals of PK-12 instruction cannot, and should not, be truly authentic. After all, most students cannot write novels or symphonies, nor can they be empowered to do dangerous chemistry or physics experiences. Teachers routinely provide constructed (but safe) sandboxes for such experiences. What happens to student autonomy and ownership then? 

What do you think?

“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”

       The above is the motto of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by eBay cofounder Peter Thiel. Their concern is that tech companies have lost interest in the “big questions” being asked by society – poverty, climate change, disease, productivity...big changes that make things better in a profound way – and are, instead, merely happy to rearrange existing content in creative ways, for the sole purpose of making money. In the lead article of this month’s MIT Technology Review, Jason Pontin compares our current state of technology advancement to that of 50 years ago, a decade which began with President John F. Kennedy’s charge to NASA, to “…commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the Earth.”

       Kennedy’s challenge was met, but the effort was herculean – at one point the NASA budget was 4% of the total US Government budget. There were hundreds of technology problems being researched to support the lunar mission. But, more to the point, this charge, and the scramble by both public and private organizations to meet it, took place (could take place!) at a time when technology was viewed as a vehicle to make fundamental improvements in how we do the business of being human. It certainly helped that the US economy was on the rise then, but even if that were true now, the interest in funding research and development projects with distant and grand goals seems to be gone… from the political landscape, but also from the interests of entrepreneurs. Hence Founders Fund.

       That, of course, is not to say that Twitter and their social networking brethren aren't valuable. They are. But they provide only incremental change over previous technologies which did similar things. And, as such, they answer a question that no one was actually asking (or has largely been answered already). It’s like the difference between the questions “How can I make a better mousetrap?” and “How can we make personal transportation compatible with the coming massive increases in global wealth and population?” We can already trap mice. A better one might be profitable, but it’ll have only an incremental impact on our lives. In contrast, the second question has two few entrepreneurs asking it, and too few research and development projects addressing the large number of technologies that must be a part of its answer. It might have worked in 1961, but it's not working now.
       So, as an educator who selects and uses technology in the classroom, why should you care?
       There are three lessons we can apply directly in our classrooms.

1. Set the goals first. Often, the way tech innovation gets lost is that entrepreneur selects a technology (social networking connections online, for instance), and then tries to figure out how to make it different enough to be attractive and profitable. In the classroom, that mistake plays out by selecting the technology before the learning goal. If you’re selecting your technology first, you’re just generating self-interest and temporary motivation in students, without actually embedding its use in the greater interests of learning. Even global education technology “answers” like 1-1 laptop programs and universal access to “intelligent classroom” tools can only work if they are paired with real learning questions.
2. Make instruction real. This is closely related to #1 above. As an example, project-based learning is very popular now, and fits well with some of the other goals associated with technology-rich instruction. As anyone with experience in this lesson paradigm will tell you, if the goals (the "guiding questions") of the projects aren't real, engaging, and important, students won't care, and won't learn.
3. Connect across the curriculum Many of the current tech start-ups are often just the same techies, trying to re-invent the same techy answers to the same techy questions. The real innovators out there are connected to real people, real needs and interests, and real goals. As a matter of fact, the best technology start-ups are began by people with arts and humanities degrees, and tech company hirers often specifically target such people. In our world, technology use which provides and leverages connections across disciplines will have the best chance at achieving goal #2 above. It will also serve to connect all of the teachers in your building in the joint pursuit of preparing students for innovative and constructive work after they leave us.

       Thomas Friedman and others have stated that our students (and the economy in which they’ll live) will only survive if they learn how to connect, create, innovate – a truism which transfers to educational practice, and should serve as the mantra for tool selection and technology use in the classroom.

Would You Buy a Used Car from this App?

       With Facebook's IPO already in the wild (and apparently not doing that well), I am prompted to look at how its heavily-analyzed and second-guessed business plan might fit into the social history of homo sapiens. 

       I will admit to a little Facebook participation, though, as you might infer from the title of this blog, I’m not much of a fan of “sound-byte” platforms which celebrate the short quip over the thoughtful analysis. I square that circle by using Facebook primarily as a method of keeping up with my family, and a short list of friends I like and respect.
       Recently, I noted an article posted by one of those friends, about the “un-friending” trend on Facebook (and Facebook’s attempts to stem that tide through redesign), with some interest. There’s a lot happening in Facebook of which I don’t approve, and I must say I’ve un-friended a number of folks in that category. I view this trend as a good thing, in general.
       But this essay isn’t about that.
       When I clicked the Facebook link to the “un-friending trend” article, I was immediately prompted to add a Facebook app which posts back what I’ve read. The article itself was actually hosted on VentureBeat, a technology blog with heavy social networking ties. The app seemed to be branded by The Washington Post (their icon was there), but I could find no other evidence of any association between VentureBeat and The Washington Post. But no matter. What got my attention was the app. If I agreed to its use, it would automatically post back to Facebook the simple fact that I had opened the article. Not that I liked it, not that I agreed with it, not that I thought it was good, not that I even read it…just that I clicked through to it.
       This, of course, is the trend. Facebook wants you to post your location when you’re sitting in a restaurant. It wants you to post your purchase when you go shopping. The underlying assumption is that simple consumption is worth celebrating, worth noting, worth passing as data to someone else…without even the pretense of having actually approved of the restaurant or purchase. The result is a white noise of meaningless data crowding into the same space as the “likes” and forwards.
       There are so many things wrong with this idea that it’s difficult to find where to start. Data does not constitute information. Information does not constitute ideas. Of course, ideas require information, which require data, but the direction of flow here is absolutely critical. Facebook, and just about any smart phone app you can think of that requires access to your GPS, is really only interested in data. It wants you to display where you are, what you’re doing. If you choose to enhance that with what you think about where you are, and what you’re doing, then that’s up to you, and Facebook certainly supports it. But, increasingly and predictably, social networking is being driven not by ideas, or even information…but by plain data.
       Here’s how this is supposed to work. I read something. I’m excited about its ideas. I submit my analysis to a friend who already respects my opinions, and based on that respect, the friend reads the same article. She may or may not be as excited as I was, but she will place what she thinks of the article in the context of how she views me, and my ability to think critically about what I’ve read. In short, she will have taken the time to read the article based on the fact that I read and recommended it. '
       This process reflects the notion that, to select and process information, we need context, and we need help. None of us are stand-alone data processors. We depend on people who know more than we do on a particular subject to help us wade through the data. That’s the true value of a social context for ideas.
       In contrast, automated “I ate at this restaurant” and “I read [i.e. clicked through to] this article” has absolutely no help. It’s all just data, and we’re still on our own deciding if the article is worth the read. Even the person who generated that “read” data didn’t know what the quality was before the Facebook notice appeared. The Internet has done a bang-up job of delivering almost any information to almost anyone. That does not make us all experts. That does not make us all able to negotiate all that information without help.
       All too often, the folks I have decided to un-friend are exactly the ones who send on without thinking the latest political rant, the latest insensitive joke, the latest spin on a celebrity gossip tidbit. Facebook, and those apps on your iPhone, are one step beyond that. I can quickly figure out the folks who mindlessly forward without a critical look,  un-friend them, and stop the stream. But if it's an app, I know nothing about the article, and nothing about the person who supposedly read it, ‘cept that she clicked something Facebook tricked her into clicking. (Who would guess that “cancel” would take you to the article without the post-back?)
       Yes, we need to teach our students how to think critically, how to evaluate ideas and information meaningfully and dependably. Fifty years ago that meant evaluating the people we depended on for ideas. I am absolutely still convinced that the idea of the “expert” is still important, and there’s no way we can negotiate our way through all the data thrown at us without them.
       But one thing’s for certain. A Facebook app will never be one. And with a new, incredible pressure on Facebook to pull data from, and push advertisements to, the massive collection of users it serves, this is going to get worse.
       And especially watch out for apps selling used cars..