Everything has been thought of before; the task is to remember it again.

Suppose Goethe is right: What do we learn about teaching and curriculum by looking backward, instead of forward?

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?

I’ve noticed that from time to time I’ll become caught up in some friendly, but warm discussions on Twitter about how students ought to engage with the read-write web. The most contentious debates are around how open we think the web ought to be. Now it occurred to me that some of the polarity might arise because while we are all talking about the same K-12+ education, not all education is the same from K-12+. Those who advocate more open policies are usually teaching more senior students; those who want more controls are usually teaching younger students. But, generally speaking, we haven’t been all that clear about whom we are talking. It would help in Twitter conversations, and everywhere else, if we prefaced our comments with something like “As a middle school teacher…” or even came up with some useful hash tags: #primaryweb or #middleschoolweb, for example.

I’ve drawn up a table of summing up what I think teachers are saying about web 2.0 at various age levels. The divisions are rough and I trust that teachers understand there will likely be some overlap. But does this makes sense to you? Is this roughly what we’d like to see K-12+?

[TABLE=2]

A couple days ago, Peter Rawsthorne (twitter prawsthorne) and I were talking over our WikiEducator project. In an aside, Peter said we could make an argument–and he’d be willing to defend it–that we shouldn’t introduce web 2.0 technologies to students until high school–maybe even as late as grade 11.

The idea runs counter to so much of what we hear on the subject these days. Yet, in a Gladwell-blink moment, I had to say I think Peter is right. Informed citizens of the 21st Century will indeed need to be able to use the web to get at information essential for democratic participation in civil society. But they will need good judgement no less than they did 2,500 years ago. I have a hunch that if we were to put Socrates or Lao Tzu in front of a computer it wouldn’t be long before they were making more intelligent use of of the web than most. This article in Science Daily, Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis? seems to give some support to the Peter’s notion. I dearly love Dorothy Sayers’ essay, the Lost Tools of Learning, and in my reading of it, the write part of the read-write-web corresponds to the teaching of rhetoric, which she thinks ought to be introduced to children of about 14-years old. Lastly, in a 1994 interview Alan Kay says

KAY: Put a prosthetic on a healthy limb and it withers. Using the logic of current day education, we could say that since students are going to be drivers as adults, at age two we should put them in a little motorized vehicle and they will just stay there and learn how to be much better drivers. Now, we would think that was pretty horrible. But what if we gave the same person a bike? We’re not going to feel so badly [because] the bike allows that person to go flat out with his body and it amplifies that. [The bike is] one of the great force amplifiers of all time because it doesn’t detract from us–it takes everything we’ve got and amplifies it. Most computers today are sold like cars, where as many things as possible are done for you. You don’t have to understand how it works and, in fact, you don’t have to understand how to think because the most popular stuff is prepackaged solutions for this and that. When you put a person into a car, their muscles wither. You put a person into an information car, and their thinking ability withers. I wouldn’t put a person within 15 yards of a computer unless I was absolutely sure that it was a kind of a bike for them.

Q: What would make a computer a kind of bike?

KAY: Well, it’s complicated. When we start asking questions about how students are thinking and what they’re doing, we have to realize that–and this is sort of an extreme generalization, but it’s not a bad one–most things that need to be done with students are not particularly user friendly. [They] require work on the student’s part. Like when they’re learning to ride a bike, it’s not [easy]. Think how many students might reject a bike today if it were a new product because it’s hard to learn. Today, computer systems are rejected unless they’re easy to learn. But with young students, it’s absolutely important to challenge their internals–challenge their internal musculature, their internal ability to make images, their internal ability to think about things and to make representations of things.

Q: How do educators ensure that happens with computers?

KAY: They 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.

What do you think? When ought we introduce web 2.0-type technologies to students? Comments welcome.

Here’s a great Flickr set by Dave Gray that explains the nature of scientific knowledge and illustrates the driving force behind the WikiEducator project my students and I are working on this term.

I’ve recently had conversations around the ideas of public scholarship Gray presents with SFU professor Richard Smith (Twitter @smith) and Dr. Sam Ladner (Twitter @sladner). Read Write Web also recently posted a story, Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in wikipedia or Perish,  on the changing nature of academic publishing and authority. Do we need to Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology?

Richard Baker’s Portraits of Books, which appear in Poets & Writers, make me feel good.

Humans, like the Elephant’s Child, have a ’satiable curiosity. I remember one of my Grade 9 students explaining the point. Human curiosity, she said, cannot be governed. Alan Kay may be right: some creations do amount to a reverse vandalism. But, we’re still here. We haven’t blown ourselves up, or cloned a conquering army. We haven’t done too badly. And so, she offered, the question we should ask is not whether we ought to pursue controversial or potentially dangerous ideas like cloning–or, looking for the crocodile; we need to ask: What will we do after we’ve found him?

I am not sure she is entirely right. At least, I want to believe we have some capacity for self-restraint. But neither is she entirely wrong. Hers is a perceptive and prudent question to ask. Here we are, as it turns out, at one of those after-the-fact moments. Says Christine Rosen in a great piece, “People of the Screen” in The New Atlantis:

We have already taken the first steps on our journey to a new form of literacy—“digital literacy.” The fact that we must now distinguish among different types of literacy hints at how far we have moved away from traditional notions of reading.

Conservatives, like me, worry that this digital literacy will become faddish, like constructivism or multiple intelligences or multiculturalism in teaching. Rosen worries, too.

But if enthusiasm for the new digital literacy runs high, it also runs to feverish extremes. Digital literacy’s boosters are not unlike the people who were swept up in the multiculturalism fad of the 1980s and 1990s. Intent on encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, they initially argued for supplementing the canon so that it acknowledged the intellectual contributions of women and minorities. But like multiculturalism, which soon changed its focus from broadening the canon to eviscerating it by purging the contributions of “dead white male,” digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours?

As my former student would ask, What to do now?

I’ve placed various “technologies” teachers might use into three groups. The dark blue set are completely closed to the web or are read only web technologies. The medium blue can be closed, partly open or fully open, depending on teacher and parental preferences; but for the sake of this post, assume that they are partly open and that is an adult is screening incoming information, membership and so on. The light blue set are completely open. (I realize we can restrict blogging and micro-blogging using private networks created in such platforms as Edmodo, but, this defeats their purpose so let’s also assume that these are open and unrestricted.)

I am interested in knowing where people think students in various grades can work independently, with the teacher as an instructor or collaborator, but not as a security supervisor. I’m also interested in seeing how Webspiration works as a collaboration tool.

I’d really appreciate your contributions. I’ve started with four badges for Grades 6 to 9–the four grades in my middle school–that you can copy and paste onto the appropriate technologies. Feel free to copy and edit the badges to add different grades, too. You can add notes, more “technologies”, delete things you don’t think belong. If you want to add your two-bits worth, send me your email at SITS and I’ll make you an editor.

Thanks!

What makes good wiki? It depends on what you want to do with a wiki, I suppose. Bill Ferriter’s (Twitter @plugusin) excellent wiki, Digitally Speaking, led me to his blog, the Tempered Radical, where he lays out five Wiki Roles for Student Projects.

He’s done a good job describing what needs to be done when a group prepares a good wiki page. But I have an issue with turning tasks into roles. I worry that this creates an illusion of collaborative work but hides the fact that there is little or no synergy in a division of labour. Delegation of duties amounts to one person, the group leader, multiplying his or her personal resources by using others to move things along in the direction he or she chooses. Ferriter is aware of this, I think, when he says,

One of the lessons that I’ve learned about wiki projects with kids is that the organic creation that defines Wikipedia doesn’t always work with middle schoolers!  [...] If left to chance, that same unbalanced participation pattern becomes evident in classroom wiki projects as well. [...] I’ve found that when using wikis as a group project to assess learning, middle schoolers need a set of specific tasks. Sometimes, shared participation is more important to me than individual exploration. (“Wikis.” Digitally Speaking)

I’m looking to use a wiki as a platform for building socially constructed knowledge, which is something different from both shared participation and individual exploration. When musicians play together in an ensemble, they make socially constructed knowledge. Yes, each plays his or her instrument, like the way each of Ferriter’s students completes a wiki role. But, if they are good, the musicians are doing much more than mecahnically plucking and blowing though the score. They each are telling the other musicians what the mucic means to them. On top of that, there is a give and take in playing off each other that parallels the dialogue, revising and editing that happens in conversation–or on a wiki page. A wiki page, it seems to me, is at heart a a record of a dialogue, out of which comes the truth, if it can be found, or, more likely, a better understanding of the problem at hand.

In setting things up for the project, I’ve drafted what I think are the Wiki Attitudes for Student Projects. They are, as I think may will recognize, the intellectual virtues, traits (very old ones) that support dialogue and critical discourse:

Patience. Building knowledge collaboratively takes time and patience. The point of working in a wiki is not to find an answer–you can often look that sort of thing up, or ask someone directly; the point is to come to a better understanding the matter at hand and that can take a lot of back-and-forth. A wiki can work something like a conversation, but one extended over time and space, where a group of people work together to make sure everyone in the group understands equally well.

Integrity. The wiki is a collaborativeproject and that means we ought to hold everyone–especially oursleves–the the same standards of argument, respect and good spirits.

Courage. Wikis are public documents, shared with many others, and it takes courage to speak honestly and openly on them. Sometimes we will have to stand our ground when many others are trying to push us off our position. Our ideas and comments will be open to critique and we need to be able to face that fairly and with a spirit of good sportsmanship.

Empathy. A wiki can generate many different, sometimes conflicting, ideas and opinions. Even if we do not agree with them, we must try to reconstruct accurately the arguments and reasons for opposing views. This is not to say all views are right. But, in imaginatively putting ourselves in soemone else’s shoes and looking at our arguments from their point of view, we can gain new insight and understanding of ourselves and our own ideas and beliefs.

Perseverance. Sometimes understanding comes easily; but when it does’t, we have to struggle through a lot of hard work.

Faith in Reason. Not all discussions on a wiki will be contentious; sometimes–often, we hope–they will be just telling good stories. But when issues do clash, a wiki tries to give the freest play possible to reason as the tool to resolve them.

Fairmindedness. All ideas presented in a wiki ought to be treated equally, that is without reference to our own biases or vested interests.

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:

(Source: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1223153029)

(Source: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1223153029)

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.

Part 2

Part 3

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’s So 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 compilation of 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.)