Disassembling the Education Cat

       I apologize in advance.
       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.

Douglas Adams

       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.

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..

Beyond Facebook: Social Networking and Learning

Facebook!

        That's pretty much all you need to do to get someone's attention these days. Between business and public organizations staking out Facebook spaces for interactive and promotional purposes, and just about everybody's family gathering there, it's become the “new Google” – a place you can search and find almost anything.
        The enthusiasm has generated a great deal of interest in educational circles as well, since the platform at least implies a user-driven (i.e. student-driven) learning paradigm, with further implications for collaboration and group knowledge construction. As a result, a lot of districts are examining whether it is really appropriate to block Facebook within a school district's wide area network. The pivotal word, as always, is “implies.” How does one best leverage this sort of thing for instructional purposes? Some of the ways are obvious. If you establish groups of “friended” students, then they can discuss, work, and share in the pursuit of any learning projects.
        Of course, “how” also implies “where” – that is, should we be using Facebook itself to translate “implies” to “supports?” There are severe challenges associated with using an extremely popular platform like Facebook for school-based instructional purposes. Since students (and teachers, for that matter) are already using it for personal purposes, there are massive numbers of distractions. And, of course, there's a lot of content which won't be appropriate for students (an issue which doesn't have a consistent and uniform standard across K-12). There's another problem as well. Facebook, as an extension of other social networking tools kids leverage (texting, instant messaging, Twitter, forums and bulletin boards), has its own learned pattern of common usage, including Internet slang, and inappropriate language and images. These behaviors spread virally through social networking platforms. Using the platforms for education requires that teachers and technology coordinators counter these patterns, since they'll work against the educational goals of a teacher. In the face of this battle, many teachers will be overwhelmed, and will abandon social networking as an instructional tool.
        Of course, the viral nature in which use patterns and behaviors disseminate through social network-like systems can be leveraged to promote appropriate use. But a new study (mentioned by educational technology observer Ian Jukes on his 21^st Century Fluency Project blog) shows that, in fact, “viral” spreading of behaviors is a much more powerful resource when the community in which social networking is taking place is, in fact, a “clustered network,” a network in which all of the players know each other: “…social behaviors may spread more quickly in a clustered network…[since] the redundancy created by multiple ties between individuals close to each other in the network will reinforce the diffusion of the behavior.”
        Such attention to connections is implied by the idea of “learning communities,” another concept associated with the same underlying ideas as social networks. As many professional development programs have discovered (both within and outside of education), online learning communities designed to support a specific audience with a specific professional goal have a much better chance if they are built on the foundation of an existing learning community, usually with ties to face-to-face interaction such as you find within school faculties, content area groups, or other face-to-face meeting groups. Those are the “clustered networks” mentioned by the research.
       The implication is that, for students to learn through social networking, they'll need to be in a closed environment which leverages other, pre-existing networks. In a school, a classroom may or may not represent such a network (my own research has shown that not all classmates feel connected to each other), but that is only one of several “clusters” a school might deliver, or create. With such multiple connections, behavior change, appropriate use, as well as community building and collaboration, have a great deal better chance of happening. There are dozens of tools districts can use as closed and connected network platforms. In Fayette County, we're using an open source tool, Mahara, to support pre-existing “clusters,” teach appropriate use of social networking in general, and support knowledge construction in a variety of ways, including the sharing of e-portfolios. Already, students, through their connections and teacher leadership, have stepped up to share and encourage each other's appropriate use.
        The promise of this way of connecting and learning need not be associated with a single platform such as Facebook. As a matter of fact, the possibility of student-driven learning and behavior change may very well be hamstrung by the use of an environment with so much competing baggage. But that doesn't diminish the power of the underlying paradigm.

Social networking!

It's a Mash-Up, Google/Amazon/Netflix World -- Data-Driven Instruction

         Something very odd happened when I finally got around to updating my Facebook profile: suddenly the ads appearing at the right hand side of my wall were, shall we say, just a little bit more targeted. The mention of my love of sailing produced ads for tee-shirts with sailing themes. My use of the word "education" produced a slew of ads promoting degrees and lesson plans. And, of course, the politics -- the suggestions for interested "likes" and connections were selected through Facebook's best prediction of what I already believed and thought. The same has been true of my perusals through the pages of Amazon.com, where "suggestions" are obviously coming from data gathered from the very few things I've purchased, and the dozens of things I've examined. (I'm one of those who uses user reviews there to help evaluate things I really have no interest in buying.) Netflix is also trying to do that as well, though it's even further off the mark.
        I admit to the traditional conspiratorial take on such processes, but I also know that, since I am aware that's how such things work, I can avoid the problem by simply avoiding the services. After all, since I use them to gather data, it is probably unfair to assume that these services don't have a right to gather data from me. I also have never purchased a tee-shirt suggested by Facebook, so I do not feel a loss of control simply by the ad's presence.
        But there are implications there for how we do the business of education. After all, as education professionals in the world of "data-driven instruction," high-stakes student (and teacher performance) assessment, so-called classroom performance systems, and lots of other data-gathering tools, we are, in fact, encouraging our teachers to produce and analyze such data about their students, and then using that data to drive our interaction with them. Is that a bad thing? No, as long as we know its limits. And, even more important, as long as we know the implications such data-driven activities have for the nature of learning, interacting, and being human.
        A brief article in this week's New York Times Magazine (Sept. 19, 2010), written by Microsoft engineer Jaron Lanier, helped bring this home for me just a bit. In celebrating the personal way in which his father taught in public schools, he decried how information access seems to be doing damage to the way in which students invent themselves...

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen...What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don't learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good (p.35).

But then, that's what we're encouraging our teachers to do with them, and what they're watching us do to them as they negotiate the world we (and the commercial interests we endorse and embrace) present them online.
        It is not my intent to make this yet another call for the teaching of critical thinking (though it is that), or an indictment of our over-indulgence in data-driven assessment cycles (though it is that, as well). What we should do, as teachers, is to take a very long look at the technology tools we choose, and the way in which we choose to use them, to see what sorts of pedagogical and learning level implications they carry.
        A simple online computer does not, in itself, come with much implied pedagogy. But Google, of course, does -- it assumes that the user's interests, needs, and understandings can be well predicted by algorithms written by (as Lanier calls them) geeks pushing key words and concepts around. The kinds of questions Google answers can only be basic and informational, the lowest sorts of learning goals on Bloom's ("taxonomy of learning") or Webb's ("depth of knowledge") scales. At the secondary or post-secondary level, even at an information level, Google won't be able to reach out to the best minds on many topics, even if the student asks a well-founded question of it. But unless the results of this work is used to encourage a student to start with a blank screen, it is unlikely that the results will be reflective of much of a change in the student.
       Probably the hottest types of educational technologies these days are so-called smart classroom tools. These tools are becoming quite clever in their presentation, the types and quality of the questions they present to students, and the speed in which the answers are processed and presented back to teachers. But what pedagogy do they most often imply? What opportunities do such tools present to allow students to invent themselves?
        That is not to say that the questions a classroom performance system asks of a student are not worth asking, or the answers worth knowing. There are lots of pedagogical goals which are excellently served by such systems. But Arthur C. Clarke once stated that "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!" This rather callous assessment of bad instruction might be revised somewhat...any pedagogical/learning goal which could be best delivered by a machine, should be. Most of the questions a teacher-driven performance system asks could be asked and taught quite successfully in the absence of the teacher. If, however, our instructional goal is for a student to process and present information, opinions, and products drawn onto a blank slate, then a teacher is required, and different tools should be selected.
        This sort of examination of goals and implied pedagogy has, as its core, huge implications for instructional delivery and selection of appropriate tools. It also has huge implications for the current structure of instructional delivery. If we are selecting tools to place them in the hands of teachers to support the ways in which they already teach, then we're missing out on huge opportunities to improve efficiency, and better manage the advantages a teacher brings to a student. If we are selecting tools which simply support a student's ability to mash-up learning fragments rearranged for teacher consumption, then we have squandered an enormous opportunity for students to create, and in creating, re-define themselves.