This term I introduced my students to Nings, Diigo and–for some–moodle. Most already know how to work a wiki and all are fluent with Google Apps. That’s a lot of stuff and I expected the kids to feel at least a little confused and frustrated.
And they do.
But their behaviour suggests that their confusion and frustration isn’t caused only by the number of tools they have to use. Indeed, they are quite adept at learning how to work any number of new games. I wonder if another part of problem is that they see a computer as a tool that delivers entertainment and not a tool for doing work. I need to clarify that: I think they do see that you can use a computer to produce things–word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints and so on. But they don’t see that we can use a computer to discuss and publish work. (That wouldn’t be surprising because I don’t think anyone has yet shown them how to that.)
So now when we talk to our students about new technologies, we divide the tools we’re using at IPS into four categories based in function with the idea that this structure might help kids see things more clearly:
Production Tools
Google Apps, Jing, video editors, Garageband etc.
Discussion Tools
Nings, Diigo, IM, email
Publication Tools
wikis (there are other platforms, but these are best compromise of ease of use and sophistication for our grade 6 – 9s)
Administration Tools
Google calendar and moodle edmodo
I realize there is some overlap in the capacities of theses tools. Wikis also make excellent discussion platforms, for example. But my hope is that this structure actually gets us away from talk about the tools and moves us to talk about the function, which I think is more important.
What do you see in your classrooms? How are your students taking up new technologies? How do you deal with gathering up all the output from all the tools?
Addendum
Since writing this post I’ve added a fifth category of tools: research tools such as Google and Bing, but also custom search engines, RSS and Twitter.
I’ve not been impressed by three different web-conferences or web-meetings I’ve joined lately. Conferencing tools such as DimiDim and Elluminate have a few problems, but more fundamentally I think the basic structure of these online sessions is flawed. Too much is happening all at once to be useful, that is if I can take the web-conferences I’ve participated in as typical.
In the most recent session, a discussion of Moodle hosted by Classroom 2.0 , there were over 100 participants in a one-hour session. That would give each person about 36 seconds of airtime–not allowing for a reply from the moderator, guests or anyone else in the chat room–if everyone had his or her turn. But, as it turns out, everyone speaks at will. With so many people talking the comments come too fast to sustain meaningful dialogue. The back-channel is distracting to me–it always threatens to hijack the speaker who feels pressure to respond to the comment stream. That was the case for guest speaker Miguel Guhlin, a director of instructional technology in Texas, who several times had to stop what he was saying and ask the moderator if he should answer questions or press on with his points.
This phenomenon–or bad habit–spills over into live conferences. At Northern Voice this year, the audience did not give James Chutter a chance to deliver his controversial talk on “Mash Media Storytelling”, which is what I paid for, and we all lost out as a result. I understand that socially-constructed learning gives the audience more say in what it wants to know. But this sort of expropriation is not dialogue. It says “We aren’t interested in what you have to say. We want to hear what we already believe.” and that undoes any collaboration. Anyway, how can anyone carry on a conversation about what a speaker has said before he or she has said it?
The volume of back-channel chat that goes on during a presentation seems to me to be a measure of the audience’s interest and engagement–but it’s an inverse relationship: I know that at Northern Voice the number of my Tweets went down when I was really interested; and when the speaker was really good I didn’t open my laptop at all.
At the very least, it seems rude to me to be talking when someone else is speaking. It would be wrong if everyone in a lecture hall were talking out loud amongst themselves while the presenter was speaking, don’t you think? That the back-channel talk is silent and online doesn’t materially change this. I take simultaneous
The best online conference I’ve attended was on opening up educational (OUE) featuring John Seely Brown, Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar and hosted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Participants were asked to listen to the keynotes before the chat room opened. This kept everyone much more focussed during the discussion. And, although the interface was a bit clunky, it threaded conversations so it was much easier to follow the various discussions that evolved.
I can see using web-conferencing in small groups–under 20 participants or so I’d venture; beyond that they get unwieldy. In any case, I’d like to see DimDim, Elluminate and others, find a way to thread conversations in chat rooms. And I’d recommend moderators let their guest speakers say their piece first, before opening up chat.
Art, says writer, technologist and blogger, Darren Barefoot, is the profound, and the profound is that which is deep, timeless and shared. We’ve seen people make profound statements in painting, music, architecture, the book, even radio and television, he said at this year’s Northern Voice . But he asks, Where’s the Art in Social Media?
There are several reasons for the paucity of the profound: crowds aren’t wise, says Barefoot. Artists may turn professional and leave social media before we discover them. Maybe artists just don’t yet have the feel of the new medium, although the Japanese are trying their hand at writing SMS novels. Some are racking up big sales: Rin, a 21-year old writer, tapped out a story, If You, that sold 400,000 copies when it went to print.
But, sales is certainly no measure of the profound either. Maybe, Barefoot suggests, social media discourages profound thinking. Social media is certainly shared and, as we’re lately starting to appreciate, it is timeless, though not exactly in the sense that Barefoot is talking about. However, social media is not very deep. Social media tools like Twitter ask “What are you doing?” which, said one in Barefoot’s audience, encourages “me-ophilia”, not reflection on the profound.
Lastly, it could be that that the profound is just too hard to find because we are awash in images, video, music and text and we haven’t the ability to sift through it all and make sense of it. The power of expression in social media, as an artistic medium itself, is in the aggregation of things, says Barefoot. He points to the Where the Hell is…Matt? videos by self-professed deadbeat dancer, Matt Harding. Although there are moments in individual videos that are moving–when the crowd in rushes in to dance with Matt, for example–we sense something profound about humility or our shared humanity or the diversity of people when we take the videos collectively.
What social media needs–and this was the common thread in all the sessions I attended at Northern Voice–is a curator, someone or something to make sense out of the endless stream of data that is pouring into the web. “No one goes to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the ‘Ten Most Recent Pics Posted to the Gallery’” said a wag in Barefoot’s audience.
I think we’re seeing a new role emerging for K-12 teachers: that of (web) curator. This is different from knowledge-giver and different again from gatekeeper. Fulfilling that role will require a skill set similar to that of a gallery curator and, above all, it will require wisdom.
The question now is, what are we doing to cultivate those things in new and in-service teachers?
Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0: an excellent paper on opening up education, or OUE, by John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center, and Richard P. Adler, Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.
I quite like the distinction Brown and Adler make between the Cartesian and what they call the social view of learning:
One of the promises of the social learning model–not often talked about–is that it moves us away from the deadening effects of reductionism. So far as schools have followed the Cartesian model Brown and Adler describe, they’ve shut off a great deal of important conversation about what we each and collectively believe about the nature of things. Philosophically speaking, the modern world sees fundamental metaphysical matters as relative: you have your world view and I have mine. Contemporary thought says that even if it was to grant that such talk is indeed about absolutes, such things are not clearly and distinctly knowable, as Descartes would say, and therefore they fall outside any profitable discussion. Metaphysical or faith claims are like flavours of ice cream in this sense. Psychologically speaking, the modern world sees any transferring of what it erroneously deems mere opinion as proselytising or indoctrination. Thus, the very structure of modern pedagogy inhibits robust discussion of the very things that move us most deeply. Moreover, and frankly much worse, the structure of modern pedagogy says such discussions are unimportant. I’m not for a minute suggesting that schools should be promoting one view or another–unless they are denominational schools, that’s beyond their jurisdiction. I am emphatically saying that schools must tell their students that it is important to have those sorts of conversations. The aim, as I said in a paper I presented at Columbia University two years ago, is not to promote a particular philosophy, indeed that would be inadmissible in a pluralistic society, but to begin to develop in young people the capacity to make meaningful philosophical conversation. As they are currently woefully ill-equipped to do so, they are cut off from a rich tradition of inquiry into the human experience. A more immediate, practical need also calls our attention. As it comes ever closer to cultures where metaphysical claims still have status as knowledge, and not mere belief or opinion, the West seems ever more befuddled–quite literally unable to come to terms with the world.
I’m hopeful that a social view of learning might reawaken intelligent conversation about first things, or faith claims or metaphysics–whatever we want to call those frames of reference that shape all we say and do. First of all, the social model is about dialogue, which is something structurally different from the essentially one-way communication in the Cartesian model. In dialogue, we seek one of two things: the truth, if it can be known; and if it can’t, which is more often the case, a better understanding of the problem. We come to these by comparing our views with those of others. That simply can’t be done in the Cartesian model.
To be sure, the shift to a social view of learning is a ways off. However good they are, web 2.0 technologies that might enable that shift are still immature. Watch the editors of Opening Up Education, John Seely Brown, Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, speak about the impact and implications of emerging technologies and you’ll see what I mean.
But even when they do mature, as it appears they will, and even if the model of education changes from one of pedagogy-as-knowledge-transfer to socially constructed knowledge, then it seems to me certain social skills–storytelling and critical discourse–will be more important than ever. Otherwise, the opportunity to get together on the web with people from all over the globe is wasted. Recently we’ve begun experimenting with web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, IM, Google Apps at my school. The students quickly master the technologies. They can learn to edit a wiki page without being taught. But they see these things as toys. Teaching them how to use the technology is easy–and will get easier as the technology develops. Teaching them how to think and how to tell a compelling story is, as it ever was and ever will be, immensely more challenging–and immensely more fun.
I can’t think of any more practical tool for the job than philosophy. (It may be a few years away yet, but I think we’ll soon realize what a mistake it was to drop it from the general curriculum so long ago. For a savage critique of Canadian education, read Hilda Neatby’sSo Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education. Written in 1953 is still largely holds true today.) We’ve been teaching practical reasoning and philosophy to middle school students at Island Pacific School for 14 years. The syllabus covers some formal logic, the structure of argument and fallacies, ethics and a survey of Western philosophy. But we’re an independent school and have more flexibility than any public school.
I’ll admit the program needs work. I need a better look at non-Western philosophies, among other things. And I need to connect it to storytelling. I do not mean connect to novel structure, or those zig-zagging plot diagrams. I’m interested in how you teach what a story is, what it does and in why we have stories at all. “Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history,” says Scientific American, though it makes a rather cold account of campfire tales. Richard Rorty says the best answers to our philosophical questions will be found in stories. Yet, when I ask my students to tell me their stories, they can’t. “How I spent my summer holidays” just doesn’t cut it. At best that would make a chapter. Students often write pedantically, not because they can’t write well, but because they can’t tell stories well. They have no sense of their own lives being part of a narrative, much less any sense of humanity having a narrative. Granted, there is probably something developmental involved here; I think you need meta-cognition before you can write your own story. But I don’t see in any curricula anywhere trying to coax real storytelling out of students at any age. Neither do I see any requiring students to memorize and tell stories. The best place to learn how is in something else we tossed out long ago, to our shame: Canadian First Nations culture. Their’s is a living model of socially constructed knowledge passed on through storytelling.
I’m glad to see web technologies develop. But I’d like to see concurrent development of philosophy and critical discourse and of storytelling in language/literature curricula in grade school curricula. Without those two, Learning 2.0 just doesn’t add up.
(This is a cleaned up compilationof a couple posts that appeared on an old blog. I post them here again because they are the thinking that led me to create Stick in the Sand.)
[...] “intellectual property” is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are troublesome at the best of times, but they’re deadly to any country trying to make a transition to a “knowledge economy.”
The other pieces in Japanese activist, entreprenneur and CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito’s book are equally engaging and, properly, available online at FreeSouls.
I wonder, however, even if knowledge becomes freely available and abundant in a sort of Locke-ian commons, will we run into issues over who owns and controls access to that knowledge? Computers, mobile phones, ISPs, data plans all cost money–a lot of money.
I have two goals for the new term: 1.) to get a better feel for new technologies and 2.) the way each will best add to my teaching–if they can add anything at all. Here’s my list.
Expand collaborative note-taking using wikis. I liked the way the Frankenstein wiki worked out; I just need to solidify the practice and open it up to my other grades.
Trial: I’ll open this up to the other three grades, 6 to 8. I’ll also spend a few classes–more with the Grade 6s, fewer with the 8s–working over revising and editing posts.
Biggest problem: The Grade 6 class. They don’t quite have the maturity to be self-policing when working online. 2.) After 5 years of schooling they are so competitive for marks it’s frightening; getting them to work collaboratively will take considerable coaching.
Try Twitter. (from John Dumbrille & Bob Cotter). Why would I want to do that? My students have been intrigued byt the way IM and wikis capture and store conversations and ideas. Twitter seems to bridge the immediate and fleeting conversations of IM and the permanent record of notes in a wiki. Maybe we can capture those. But, I’ll ask again, why would we want to do that? What sort of conversation takes place in that space? That I’ll have to see.
Trial: I think this will have to be linked to the WikiEducator project somehow. That means I’d run it with just a small group of eight students. We’ll ow what we’re Twittering about once we settle on content for wikiEducator.
Biggest problem: It won’t do to set up a private microblogging network because that is a closed space and takes away any advantage of Twittering. (For that reason, Edmodo seems like a dud.) So, we’ll need a parent-education program to go along.
Bring parents into the 2.0 converstation. When I set up Google Apps in the school I gave families–not students–the accounts with the understanding that the students are the primary users. First of all, I think the students’ edcuation comes from a collaboration between students, their families and their teachers, so everyone needs to be using the same tools. Secondly, and more to the point here, if students are going to be properly equipped to work in a socially networked world, they need to actually work in a socially networked world. We can’t hamstring their experience with security controls so tight that they actual change the experience. This means that parents will need to be on board and helping students to use social networking tools responsibly and safely. I’m reminded here of the work of Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School and author of In a a great video on TED, he talks about our drive to overprotect our children.
Trial: Host a couple parent information nights. We did this very successfully when we launched a new assessment practice for the school. That gave us great buy in from families.
Biggest problem: Managing the risks, or perceived risks, that come with working on the open web.
Try blogging.Posterous now offers group blogging and that looks like it will get us around one of our security concerns, namely having to create new IDs for students every time we set up a new service. But, as with Twittering, my question is, What will we blog about?
Trial: I think we have to set up a blogging project with another group of kids outside our school. We may explore this in our WikiEducator project. I’d really like to set up a joint project with First Nations students from the Squamish and Lil’wat nations here in Howe Sound as part of my Master’s thesis. More on this later, but the idea would be to mashup Google maps etc. to rename, redraw, retell the Howe Sound story so it reflects a collective understanding of both cultures.
Biggest problem: I like the idea of having my students engage with people from all over the planet, but getting enough people outside the school actually to engage with them to make blogging significantly different from a classroom conversation will not be easy. Building a blog and driving traffic to it is a lot of work, work that I think takes away from the business of middle school education.
Experiment with tagging web content. The work that Peter Rawsthorne and John Dumbrille
are doing on tagging web content has tweaked my interest as a teacher. I really like the way this is not platform dependent and would be easily transferred to work on a cell phone–which is where I think things are going to go in the classroom. This may transcend things such as Delicious and Diigo.
Trial: The WikiEducator project.
Biggest problem: Tagging needs Twitter.
Buy a cell phone. No kidding–I don’t have one; I worry that if I do, people will start calling me. But, I love some of the things Rob De Lorenzo is doing over at his blog, The Mobile Learner:
When I taught grades 7 and 8, we [...] kept running into the problem of students not using their agendas. This may have been due to the fact that it is not always convenient or practical to walk around with ones school agenda everywhere one went and the agenda is really useless if one doesn’t constantly look at it. Paper agendas are static devices that don’t actively work with individuals to remember to get things done. Cell phones, however, are different. Kids keep their phones with them all the time and keeping an agenda within their phone’s calendar is not asking kids to change their habits too much as they already use their phones for many other things other than for voice communication. However, the most important benefit in my eyes is the ability to allow kids to set reminders when things are due. This common feature has the powerful ability communicate back to students in a way that is impossible with a paper agenda.
Then there are the calculators built into cell phones. Why do we encourage students, especially those in elementary, to spend money on purchasing a calculator when they already have them built in to their phones?
In addition, to be able to take notes on a cell phones is very powerful. While on any sort of excursion, students can record their observation right from a device that they carry with them and easily collect those digital notes and make them accessible on a computer. [...] Many cell phones that kids are carrying around have bluetooth and cameras as well. Using these devices, students can take photographs of observations on a field trip or science experiment, and collaborate with other students by sharing their content (photographs and notes) by sending them to group partners via bluetooth.
Toni Twiss has a great paper, Ubiquitous Information: An eFellow report on the use of mobile phones
in classrooms to foster information literacy skills, she’ll send to you if you email her at toni.twiss@gmail.com
Trial: I’ll try calendaring with the Grade 8s or Grade 9s, assuming they all have cells with SMS. Even if some don’t, I may do it anyway as a way of building a case for a bigger trial either in the last term or next year.
Biggest problem: Cost. Data plans in Canada are not cheap–about $70 month.
I am trying really hard to find the leverage promised by things 2.0. Here’s the starting list of things I can do with emerging technologies that I couldn’t (easily) do otherwise. You’ll notice there’s nothing revolutionary here, but I nevertheless count these as very valuable:
Have students take notes collaboratively. Of course, students have always been able collaborate, but wikis and platforms such as Google Apps or Zoho, among others, make this a whole lot easier. And easier is an important advantage in the classrrom. Wikis seem best here because they make organizing and referencing a collection of notes simple.
case: During our study of Shelley’s Frankenstein, I asked each Grade 9 student to make an oral presentation on key elements in a chapter of the book and then lead a follow up discussion. The rest of the class took notes and I filled in philosophical and historical background when needed. Afterwards, the presenter posted his or her notes to the class wiki. Then, every other student in the class was asked to make edits and revisions so that as a class we had the best possible set of notes. The point here was not to teach note-taking, but to create the best understanding of the novel. I see now that I should have spent more time coaching the kids on revising the notes–most material went up verbatim. But the practice nevertheless made a huge difference for the students. Because they were collectively responsible for note-taking, the students were individually relieved of the worry of missing something important in their own notes. That let them all be more focussed on the class discussion.
Use IM to hold brainstorming sessions. Students are masters at handling multiple simultaneous conversations online. I’ve found IM to be a clunky tool for working through linear problems–walking students through a procedure like setting up a wiki page. But in a freewheeling session the medium seems to encourage playfulness and greater intellectual risk-taking. But, most importantly, any IM tool keeps a transcript that can be review, searched and mined for data and ideas.
case: Eight of my Grade 8 and 9 students are working on a project for WikiEducator, as I reported in my blog post IM-mediate Observations. In three, three-hour online sessions. The students found it frustrating to have to figure out complex problems such as uploading and linking images to a WikiEducator page (this may not be a bad thing in the long run, as they ahd to learn patience and perseverance). But they were impressed that they could go back and look over the things they said when we were brainstorming ideas. I ran another experiment with a whole class of English students in IM and found the same results.
In the words of one of the students: “Instant Messaging for classes I find is a good way to share each other’s ideas because everyone can speak up whenever they want; it is very flowing. I like that people comment on each others opinions. Whether they disagree or agree it all adds something to the conversation that is not recognized very much in class. It would be good idea to have an order people speak in and you would say pass if you had nothing to say. [But] this eliminates the idea of flowing comments. If you have to say something you are forced to remember all your comments until it is your turn. It is very limiting. Obviously IM won’t work for all classes but we can experiment with it. I think IM will work best for discussions.”
Use IM to include students who are absent. Mostly my students want to come to school and hate missing classes. IM can hook them up when they’re away. Says one student, IM “is also very useful for people that are not at school. Whether they’re sick or on vacation they can participate in the class.”
case: The student quoted above was home sick but online when I started a class in IM. She jumped in on her own accord. A second student, also home sick for several days, was careful ahead to get the times for an upcoming WikiEducator session so she could participate from home.
Use IM to answer homework questions. This requires setting something like office hours so students know when they can get answers. The phone would also work, but it only allows the teacher to talk to one student at a time. IM lets a teacher have multiple conversations simultaneously or to hold group chats around the same problem.
case: Our math teacher uses IM extensively to answer simple questions outside of school hours. He finds he’s able to turn around what would otherwise be a frustrating homework session for some students. I’ve done the same, but I’ve been more jealous of my time than he.
Use Skype to hold parent-teacher conferences. You could also use Google Chat.
case: We’ve used Skype to run several parent-teacher conferences. In each case, the parents said it gave them a greater sense of being in the meeting than they could have had from a telephone conference.
Use Diigo collaboratively to build bookmark libraries. Diigo is a great tool; and the developers are sympathetic to the security concerns of schools. In the same way wikis help groups build pools of notes, Diigo helps them build pools of references. The annotating feature is outstanding and it’s easy to build topic-specific groups for organizing bookmarks.
case: I set up my Grade 9 students with Diigo accounts. We first built a library of references for Frankenstein. Later I set up my grade 8 students with accounts. Now, any time I need to send my students a url, I add it to one of our Diigo groups. I can also highlight key points on a web page, annotate it, leave directions on the page in a sticky note etc. The Grade 9 students took off on their own, collecting and annotating web pages for their Masterworks projects. (In Grade 9, the graduating year at IPS, each student takes on a project of his or her own choosing. We give them each committee of one faculty and two external advisors who meet with them six times over the year. n June the students publicly present and defend their work, which is typically a 25- to 35-page paper or equivalent creative project, such as a play.)
The two statements in the slide ought to be obvious; and it ought to be obvious that they have been forever true. This is because technology is always new, which is the same thing as saying it’s nothing new. James Pillans’ blackboard and chalk were cutting edge educational tech when he introduced those in the classroom in the early 19th century. “The inventor of [this] system,” one Josiah Bumstead said, “deserves to be ranked among the best contributors to learning and science, if not the greatest benefactors of mankind.”
The more interesting thing raised here is that no one has said enough yet about what “effective” means, (or about why we would want students to connect and collaborate online). My hunch is that it doesn’t mean anything different than it did in Pillans’ day.
You may have seen this video, but the last 30 or 40 seconds makes a point relevant here and is worth another look if you have:
Learning systems architect, Peter Rawsthorne, and I have now run three, three-hour online WikiEducator sessions with me in the room with them and peter working online, often from a cafe. We had a lot of fun together while working through the business of making wiki pages and pondering some far-ranging discussions about ownership of content and Creative Commons licensing. In January, we’ll start building content for WikiEducator.
Along the way, we’ve gathered some data about how 13- and 14-year olds interact with technology and about what they think of socially constructed knowledge.
Our immediate observations:
the students are quick to get any new technology to work and they are old hands at IM; but using IM for something other than idle chat was a novel idea for them.
the students focus on the last one or two things said in an online conversation so the threads easily unravel
the students can’t resist being funny in IM, especially in group chats, although they do settle down: by the third session, they were focused and kibbitzing no more than you’d find in a good round table meeting
that said, the students generally gave more good quality comments than they usually do in the classroom (this, however, may be because they were working in a small group)
the level of participation by each student parallelled their level of participation in class: some were prolific, some hardly typed a word
the students were impatient when instructions for the mechanical tasks they handle so easily, such as set up their profiles in WikiEducator, come via IM; it would have been faster to have the instructor in the room
making students work through complex ideas and instructions without a teacher over their shoulder had them working to help each other: once one student figured out how to upload a picture to a wiki page, he or she was happy to spread the wisdom
the students liked the idea that the conversation was recorded and that they could review it later at their leisure
the students are excited by the project and by the prospect of working with international students
they are really excited and motivated by the idea of collaborative constructing knowledge
Our lessons learned:
the students see IM as a toy, not a tool
they need to work more using IM so they begin to see it as a useful tool
so, teachers need to work more with IM
all this points to the need to develop the art of online conversation, or online critical discourse, which flows differently than face to face or phone conversations
IM in even modest-sized groups seems to be good for brainstorming ideas, not least of all because the students have a searchable transcript of their conversation to mine for ideas long after the discussion is over
completing mechanical tasks using IM is frustrating because the students work faster than an instructor can type; it helps to have a reference page with detailed instructions/video explaining what to do
big screens are good as you need to keep a chat window open while working on whatever project is at hand; otherwise you’re flipping back and forth between windows too much
I agree with Alan November that students need to develop a new kind of literacy to be able to work intelligently online. But–surely–that’s only a means to some other end. Yet, most of the conversations about technology I hear, on Twitter for example, but in staff rooms, too, are about working with new technologies, rather than working with ideas. I worry that we are putting the cart before the horse. A lot of technology is just inverse vandalism, says Alan Kay in a 1994 interview called A Bicyle for the Mind, Redux. Teachers, he says
…have to learn how to ask extremely hard questions about whether there’s any content there. A lot of technology is just what I call inverse vandalism, which is people making machinery just because they can. When educating, the first thing you need is ideas that you want to have the student learn. There has to be some resetting of what content actually is. If you have the ideas, you can do a lot without machinery. Once you have those ideas, the machinery starts working for you. Paradoxically, the most profound ideas I know about computers are easily done on an Apple II. Most ideas you can do pretty darn well with a stick in the sand.
