CCK08: Concept Map

 

I enjoyed this one much more than the last one

CCK08: Assignment 3

Who are the real voices of resistance?

Ordinarily, we consider anti-establishment perspectives the voices of resistance. Who, however, are the voices that are resisting change most vehemently? They are largely the instititutions whose stakeholders desire that the mechanisms of accountability, order and control persist over time. The most powerful agent of social engineering is that of education.

I believe that there are systemically dysfunctional attributes in the education system, largely because those same dysfunctional attributes are core values that inform how we as individuals lead our lives. Speaking in general terms, we are molded at an early age in a world where desirable behaviours are praised, and undesirable behaviours are punished. Risk is discouraged, and making mistakes is frowned upon. We learn to feel good about ourselves on the basis of external valuations, and take this as the only de facto means by which self-satisfaction can to be realized. The tradition is reinforced in schools through coercion in the form of praise, stickers, useless dollar store trinkets, sweets, free time, field trips, movies and marks (Kohn, 1999).

Many, many students who are successful in school end up wishing to become teachers, often because their own teachers have been an inspiration to them. Some teachers were formerly bad apples in school, and somewhere along the line they had a teacher who allowed them to believe in themselves where they otherwise would not have. For the most part, however, I would speculate that most teachers understood how to play the educational game, and were justly rewarded in turn. In teacher education programs, the cycle of transmission teaching and the stranglehold of a marks-driven economy continue to perpetuate the cycle.  We must learn how to model a different kind of education for our children, which includes parents assuming greater responsibility and involvement in the education of their children, in collaboration withteachers.

Checks and balances that ensure a high level of accountability in institutions do not lend themselves to encouraging experimental teacher training programs. The risk of these programs is necessarily higher, since any such program would require tremendous unlearning on the part of students, and especially teachers! Self-discipline would replace extrinsic motivation; inquiry learning would replace required texts. Reading selections would no longer be dictated by the canon. Learning would occur by way of personal interests, in much the same way that individuals learn via—the Internet! Open courses and open software would be an option for educators and learners alike. Learners would seek out mentors in the areas within which their interests and passions lie, toward the end of engaging in specialized instruction, either individually or in small groups, rather than via introductory classes with hundreds of students and multiple choice exams to assess student “progress.”

Thankfully, mass consumption of new technologies in the marketplace is necessitating the introduction of these applications in educational settings. However, the fear from within educational institutions seems to be that if the means to adopt these technologies to an educational setting is not discovered, the relevance of education is placed in question.

In the abstract to Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers, Siemens (2008) asks:

How do we design learning when learners may adopt multiple paths and approaches to content and curriculum? How can we achieve centralized learning aims in decentralized environments? (3)

In response, I would like to ask, Why must we continue to design learning? and Why must centralized learning aims continue to be achieved in decentralized environments? To ask these two questions is not to preclude that there are not good answers to these questions. In all likelihood, however, the answers will vary depending on the specific context of the training in question.

To the extent that private enterprise encourages innovation in the workplace, it can be a driving force behind change and innovation. The bureaucratic quagmire of at least some educational institutions can be avoided by visionary venture capitalists who are able to support extensive research and development initiatives with a minimum of red tape and funding restrictions. Consider the following:

As an interesting motivation technique (usually called Innovation Time Off), all Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them. Some of Google’s newer services, such as Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and AdSense originated from these independent endeavors (Wikipedia, 2008).

Depth of learning arises from providing learners with the time and resources to engage with material extensively. That means abandoning forty or seventy minute periods, and creating the space for learners at an early age to daydream without interruption. It means giving kids the tools to learn about themselves through false starts and unexpected diversions. And it means trusting that we do not have all the answers.

References

“Google: Innovation time off” Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 16, 2008 at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Kohn, A (1999). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 

Siemens, G. (2008a). Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing Roles for Educators and Designers. University of Georgia IT Forum. PDF document. Available from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf

CCK08: Assignment 2

“Conducting” Instructional Design

The origins of the word educate hearken back to the Latin root of the word, educare, meaning “to bring forward.” Instructional design (ID) is typically defined along the lines of “the systematic process of developing effective instructional materials.” Web-based technologies are transforming the educational landscape in both formal and informal learning environments. If the courses that instructional designers build are to remain relevant to learners’ needs, then the instructional designer must assume the role of conductor, allowing for the bringing forth of knowledge and learning in addition to the dissemination of information. However, at least in the K-12 system, the realization of this goal remains next to impossible due to the practical constraints placed on distance education teachers. Mandated curricula and the absence of time and support for teachers to gain expertise with new technologies limit the ability of teachers to explore alternatives.

Siemens (2008a) has identified a variety of “networked roles” (1) that educators may assume in the course of instruction: among these “metaphors of educators” are teacher as master artist (15); teacher as network administrator (16); teacher as concierge (16); and teacher as curator (17). In addition, Siemens also suggests that in accordance with these new roles, instructional designers are best described as educators of educators (18), providing technological and pedagogical support and suggestions to teachers.

In the initial stages of the ID process, teachers and subject matter experts do need to be educated about the guiding principles used to inform instructional design. In course development, one may also work with writers, editors, multimedia and graphics coordinators, graphic artists, programmers, production technicians, IT support staff and network administrators, among others. Bringing the talents of all of these individuals together is a way of making pedagogical music.

Instructional design can offer tremendous flexibility (Cain, 2008). There is no reason that ID cannot accommodate “clusters” of course attributes or components that might constitute learning ecologies, as described by Siemens in his Instructional Design and Connectivism presentation (Siemens, 2008b, Slide 16).

Traditionally, assessment has focussed uniquely on assessment of learning (summative assessment and evaluation). Policy-makers (WNCP, 2006) acknowledge the importance of also conducting assessment for learning (differentiating instruction) and assessment as learning—“the process of developing and supporting metacognition for students (13). The task remaining for instructional designers and educators is to identify the means to implement these strategies. Slowly, policy-makers are also introducing metacognition into curriculum frameworks. However, measuring metacognition in instruction will remain a challenge.

The adoption of new social software technologies for collaborative learning, alternative lesson plans, suggested supplementary resources, assessment rubrics, and alternative assessment strategies can all be provided as part of the instructional design process.

For online course delivery, Open Source LMS’s such as Drupal and Moodle are proving to be economically viable alternatives to using proprietary LMS’s such as Blackboard/WebCT. Moodle’s design, however, makes it most useful to teachers who are using a social constructivist approach to explore thematically-based material. Tinkerers may enjoy the flexibility of Drupal and Moodle, with their extensive selection of custom plug-ins; the reality, however, is that at least in the K-12 system, many DE teachers are challenged enough just maintaining the everyday management of student workflow and course delivery, given that DE schools typically offer continuous enrolment to students. In addition, “the class size and class composition limits defined by legislation explicitly exclude distributed learning from those provisions.” (BCTF, 2006, 7)

There is little in the way of ongoing professional in-service offered to these teachers, and they are often teaching high numbers of students in many different courses at once. One advantage of proprietary LMS’s is that customer support staff are readily available for DE teachers, technicians and administrators in the event that they run into difficulties.

Open content initiatives such as Curriki and WikiEducator may provide alternatives to proprietary courseware, but information mining is required to find the instructional nuggets that may be included in any given course. If a course has been developed for a curriculum other than that which is locally mandated, then areas of overlap and divergence must be identified. When a course has been specifically designed to align to a local curriculum, teachers needn’t be concerned with these issues.

So long as the “industrial mindset” (Alger, 2003) remains the driving model behind K-12 education, little will change for instructional designers working to support teachers in the field.

 References

Alger, Brian (October 14, 2003). “Re: Is Instructional Design Becoming a Commodity?” Posted comment. Stephen’s Web. Available from http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=6100.

British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (2006). BCTF Research Report: Distributed Learning in British Columbia Schools 2006-07. PDF document. Available online at: http://www.bctf.ca/publications.aspx?id=5630

Cain, Geoffrey (2008). “Instructional Design in a Connected World.” Blog post. Brainstorm in Progress. Available at http://cain.blogspot.com/2008/10/instructional-design-in-connected-world.html

Siemens, G. (2008a). Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing Roles for Educators and Designers. University of Georgia IT Forum. PDF document. Available from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf

Siemens, G. (2008b). Instructional Design and Connectivism. Articulate presentation. Available from http://elearnspace.org/media/InstructionalDesignConnectivism/player.html.

Western and Northern Canadian Protocol for Collaboration in Education (2006). Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind. PDF document. Available from http://wncp.ca/media/40539/rethink.pdf

 

 

CCK08: Reflection Week 8: Part 3

Qallunology and the Hidden Costs of Technology

Note: footnotes originally included in the following excerpts have been removed for ease of formatting and readability.

Derek Rasmussen, a former Policy Advisor to Nunavit Tunngavik, wrote the article “Qallunology: A Pedagogy for the Oppressor” in the 2002 edition of Philosophy of Education. Since its initial publication, I have not been able to find a copy of the article available online. In the essay introduction, Rasmussen states,

Inuit observations are cited in this analysis to help shed light on Euro-Americans, those whom the Inuit call “Qallunaat.” This term “Qallunology” was coined by Zebedee Nungak to denote what we might colloquially call “the study of white folks.” Given that the property-based individualistic civilization that characterizes the Qallunaat emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, the words “white,” “Western,” or “European” denote its closest parentage and its place of birth, not the skin color of its current adherents or its current geographical limits. In his book, The White Arctic, sociologist Robert Paine said that his one “message” to whites was to drop the illusion that they were “in the Arctic to teach the Inuit,” and instead focus on “learning about white behavior.” Qallunology says that if Euro-Americans really want to study something they should study themselves; if Qallunaat really want to rescue indigenous peoples they should stop pushing them overboard to start with; and if Qallunaat educators really want to study something helpful to Inuit, they should study why Education was invented, and how it is a result of the ideology of scarcity (1).

Though many are now familiar with the roots of North American education being derivative of Prussian military training (in fact, this is finally being included in introductory history of education courses in universities), we are perhaps less familiar with Aboriginal perspective on education that existed and persisted over thousands of years prior to European colonization of the Americaas.

Rasmussen does not mince words when he describes European attitudes towards education indigenous peoples:

Qallunaat rush around the world proselytizing their alphanumeric fetishism, supposedly rescuing “primitive” civilizations from their richly integrated physical oral-mental cultures. Meanwhile they pat themselves on the back because they are out in the igloo or under the banyan tree teaching liberatory pedagogy to the suffering locals so that they can hang on to that twenty percent of the world’s resources that the Rescuers’ civilization has not gotten hold of yet (2).

Rasmussen contends that education is the means by which traditional community values, once uprooted, are replaced with a mentality of spiritual scarcity and depravity:

Education is the main compensatory mechanism invented to deal with uprootedness and the collapse of family and community relations, and to train converts to the new non-social economy. Education is a “designed process which is carried on in specially constructed places under various kinds of bribe and threat,” as John Holt defined it. It always denotes some kind of “treatment.” Education is an “odd, modern social phenomenon” that entrenches the belief “that competence in the world derives from being instructed about it, taught about it.” The word “education” itself does not show up in French until 1498, in English not until 1530, and in Spanish not until 1632. Europeans first began to conceptualize the “world as school” in 1759, and when, thirty-three years later, a Cambridge tutor introduced the idea of grading student papers “human thought succumbed to writing and writing had succumbed to numerical evaluation” These dates could be said to mark Europe’s surrender to the “ideology of literacy”: the beginning of the widespread belief that knowledge is a subset of writing and that “learning can be sliced up into pieces.” (4)

If this assertion is accurate, then how can a Connectivist model, within which learning ecologies are posited as the basis of a design for learning, be realized? To my reckoning, where context is as important as content, and where learning is being treated as part of a larger ecology within which the learner is embedded, how are the variable factors that influence the ecology in question parsed out?

There are limits to how much can be achieved in a classroom. Wisdom can only be gained by engaging with life, by honouring ones heritage and by mastering the skills necessary for independence. We used to have this when we lived on the land….Wisdom was essential for survival on the land, but it is not essential for survival in institutions…. What happens in most schools is that children and teachers are caught in a mechanical organization that has no interest in wisdom or independence. There is no preparation for life, just preparation for work in another controlling institution (7).

Rasmussen’s article provides examples of how citizens of the world would benefit from the Qallunaat first examining their own behaviour, before investing energy in the study and judgment of the behaviour of others. Compulsory schooling for Aboriginal peoples destroyed their traditional way of life. Meanwhile, factories continue to spew out deady chemicals, which in turn affect Inuit communities. For example,

…over sixty percent of the Inuit children under the age of fifteen and almost forty percent of Inuit women of childbearing age were found to have PCB body burdens exceeding “tolerable” guidelines.14 Mothers in Nunavut have twice the allowable levels of dioxins in their breast milk. Nunavut’s and America’s communities are tied together by America’s invisible exhalation of death. America breathes out, Inuit die (3).

Rasmussen asks, “Instead of exotic slide shows on the Arctic, why do not American schools take exotic field trips to Bethlehem Steel and US Steel’s iron sintering plants in Chesterton and Gary, Indiana (3)?”

E-Waste Dumping Ground

In turn, why is it that only last week, due to the efforts of investigative reporters in China, that the injustices being committed in China were brought to the attention of Canadians via The National in the report, “E-wast Dumping Ground“ ? Though the educational technology sector is by no means the only economic driver behind the regular upgrading of computer hardware, there is certainly a relationship to be drawn between the ability to use the most up-to-date hardware and software applications, and the drive to be at the cutting edge of technological development. Are we aware of what happens to our old computers? How many computers have you discarded in your lifetime? What can we do to turn the tide of companies that are illegally shipping old computers to China, where in turn they are dismantled in hazardous conditions?

I do not have simple answers to these questions. Nonetheless, especially in light of the discussions this week on the subject of power and authority, I believe that we are alll obligated to question our own involvement in what may very well be the hidden (or possibly overt) curriculum of educational technology: stay current. Buy now.

CCK08: Reflection for Week 8 Part 2

Unlearning Pedagogy

In  an earlier post, I made reference to George Siemens’ model of a Connectivist learning design as being based on “learning ecologies” as opposed to using a more traditionally regimented scope and sequence for course delivery. I stated,

Siemens contends that designing for Connectivism concerns creating a design for the space and ecology of learning. What is new about this idea?

Stephen responded in turn by asking about my background readings in this area, to which I replied that I do not have a strong familiarity with literature in the area of learning design. Yesterday, I realized that the greatest body of educational literature (paradoxical as this may sound) with which I am familiar concerns teaching and learning outside of the framework of compulsory schooling, teaching and learning. When I worked as a Learning Consultant for the SelfDesign Learning Community, the work that I did with individual families essentially constituted supporting unschooling or deschooling by being a liaison between families and providing assessment of learners that was aligned to the K-10 curricula of the Ministry of Education. Recall, if you have read my previous post on this subject, that the SDLC is affiliated with the Wondertree Foundation for Natural Learning.

The Master’s Thesis of Michael Maser, the current director of the SDLC, was an exploration of Virtual High. Virtual High transpired in a large house in which the originators of the Virtual High progam lived alongside their teenaged students, and which encouraged and supported those learners to pursue their passions. The thesis was called Virtual High Learning Community: Towards An Ecology of Being (Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education, April 1997).

This morning, I recalled a discussion that I had in 2002 concerning the idea of writing a book called The Ecology of Education. Beyond the many educational books concerning all varieties of unschooling, deschooling, home-based education and emancipatory pedagogy that have informed my personal educational vision, I have also been influenced by ecopsychology, a term introduced by Theodore Roszak (formerly a mover and shaker in the education field in the 1970s) and Murray Bookchin’s work on social ecology.

Doubting myself, unsure about whether I was even clear on the meaning of the term “learning design” after Stephen’s asking me about my background reading in this area, I did a Google search on the term and settled on the first issue of the Queensland University of Technology Journal of Learning Design, whereupon I took great pleasure in reading the first article in the journal, “Unlearning Pedagogy” by Erica McWilliam.

McWilliam’s article summarizes what she identifies as the “Seven Deadly Habits of Pedagogical Thinking.” Below are excerpts from the article that resonated most strongly with me:

Seven Deadly Habits of Pedagogical Thinking

Deadly Habit No. 1: The more learning the better.

Bauman [2004] elaborates:

Just as long-term commitments threaten to mortgage the future, habits too tightly embraced burden the present; learning may in the long run disempower as it empowers in the short…. ‘Your skills and know-how are as good as their last application’. (p.22)

In this liquid social setting, forgetting (or what Bauman calls “de-learning”), becomes as important as learning. For Bauman, it is “the interplay of learning and de-learning” (p.22) that is crucial here.

Many contemporary learning theorists, I would suspect, want to express concerns about the limitations of Bauman’s definition of learning. If to de-learn is to forget, then learning is, by implication, remembering. Indeed, Bauman makes this explicit when he goes on to define ‘learning and de-learning’ as synonymous with “memory and forgetting” (p22). There is much more to learning than memory, we would want to insist, and we have known that for a long time.

Bauman’s thesis remains nevertheless an interesting one – that, in a “liquid-modern” social world, the work of assembling and structuring new social relations is no more important than the work of “keeping them eminently dismantlable” (p.22). His focus moves beyond the individual and the cognitive to incorporate the moral and the aesthetic, and the interplay among these various social elements. So Bauman’s ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’ have more profound significance than one individual’s mind or brain. They connote a cultural and ethical disposition to knowledge that is relational, unfinished and revocable, and an imperative to processing that serves the purpose of assembling and dissembling social relations.

Having opened up the space of pedagogy as an interplay between the cognitive, the moral-ethical and the aesthetic, Bauman is less clear about the principles for getting the right mix of learning and de-learning as interplay. For him, “…how to mix them in the right proportions is anyone’s guess” (p.22).

If we are to entertain Bauman’s thesis about the value of de-learning for the context of “liquid modernity”, we begin to de-stabilise what is the apparent Truth of our time-honoured pedagogical mantra – that learning is all that matters. Instead we have to come to grips with the idea that some learning is unhelpful, and thus that in certain circumstances ignorance might be better than knowledge.

Deadly Habit No. 2: Teachers should know more than students.

In The Weightless Society (2000), Leadbeater challenges the myth that lurks behind habitual thinking about the teacher as knower, ie, the myth that we are becoming a more and more knowledgeable society with each new generation. If knowing means being intimately familiar with the workings of the technologies we use in our daily lives, then, Leadbeater asserts, we have never been more ignorant. He reminds us that our great grandparents had an intimate knowledge of the technologies around them, and had no problem with getting the butter-churn to work or preventing the lamp from smoking. I expect that few readers of this paper would know what to do if their mobile phone stopped functioning and I certainly have no idea what is ‘underneath’ or ‘behind’ the keys on which I am typing. Nor, I confess, do I want to know. But that means that we are all very quickly reduced to the quill and the lamp if we lose our power sources or our machines break down. Thus we are much more vulnerable – as well as much more ignorant in relative terms – than our predecessors.

Deadly Habit No. 3: Teachers lead, students follow.

A corollary of the idea that teachers ought to know more than students is the idea that teachers should provide the starting point for learning activities, and that students should engage in the tasks set by the teacher – ie, that students should follow where teachers lead. There is some interesting work currently being done about the knowledge economy itself which can help us re- evaluate this potentially deadly thinking habit. I refer in particular to public policy analyst Gregory Hearn’s (2005) work on the shift to value ecology thinking [my bold and italics]. Hearn maps “an emerging fundamental shift in the way that value creation is thought about in business” (p.1), and the conceptual architecture he provides in his analysis is very helpful for re-thinking the idea of a teacher as the starting point and the student as ‘following’.

Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be consumed by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dissembling cultural products. In colloquial terms, this would frame the teacher as neither sage on the stage nor guide on the side but meddler in the middle.

I am especially fond of the phrase “meddler in the middle”, because it reminds me of the “crazy wisdom” or “holy madness” approach used in Vajryana Buddhism and in Rinzai Zen (which uses koans) , where teachers educate their students by presenting them with situations that cannot be resolved logically. In those moments where students recognize the futility of trying to come to terms with the situations in question intellectually, they come to understand the world from a new perspective, one within which logic and absurdity mutually coexist.

The teacher is in there doing and failing alongside students, rather than moving like Florence Nightingale from desk to desk or chat room to chat room, watching over her flock, encouraging and monitoring.

Second, the new value ecology raises the possibility that the teacher who does not add value to a learning network can – and will – be by-passed. The rhizomatic [my bold and italics] capacity of networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may be located in a linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded from their students’ learning networks. That would be an effect of being perceived to be delivering content but not adding value. Once again, this is not a matter of how much take-up of technology is evident in the pedagogical work, but whether or not pedagogical processes bring student and teacher together in their shared ignorance and mutual desire to make new sense of their world.

Deadly Habit No. 4: Teachers assess, students are assessed.

In the words of G.B. Shaw, “power is responsibility; that is why most men dread it”.

If the rethinking of pedagogy as co-creation of value re-positions teacher and student as project partners, as co-directors and co-editors of their social world, who then is the rightful assessor of the value of that cultural assemblage? The work is no longer clean of fingerprints, but is tainted by co-direction and co-editorship at every level. So what does it mean to make judgements to credential individuals on the basis of the quality of the co-creation? And what new dilemmas does this set up around ‘objectivity’ and assessment?

…But tension remains between the ‘democratic classroom’ as an ideological ideal, and the role formal educational institutions continue to play as credentialers and reporters to industry and the professions. Experiments that involve students deciding their ow curriculum and evaluating their own work have in general remained just that; Neill’s Summerhill was never likely to become every future employer’s dream.

But apart from the desire of external agencies to know what a particular set of credentials guarantee, there exists within pedagogical relationships a strong resistance to the idea of self or peer assessment. Students – especially high achievers – are very likely to resist any apparent move to ‘downgrade’ the quality assurance that ‘objective’ assessment purports to afford. Such students are likely to share with many in the community a belief that, in its purest form, ‘democratic assessment’ is oxymoronic

Whatever about the ideological struggles that persist in educational scholarship, the matter of assessing a co-edited and co-authored work remains an ethical challenge. While the rhetoric of team building is ubiquitous in universities as it is in other corporate organisations, assessment remains stubbornly individualistic. We assess and promote individuals and then we ask them to be effective members of teams.

Deadly Habit No. 5: Curriculum must be set in advance.

If pedagogy might be rethought as the co-creation of value, then curriculum cannot be ‘fully formed’ and set in place in advance of pedagogical activity… While this does not imply that teachers have a new licence to be unprepared for pedagogical activity, the nature and purposes of what counts as preparation must change. From fixed and immutable, curriculum needs to be conceptualised as content for meddling with. And this means a significant shift in what many teachers prioritise in their teaching. While the written text remains important, the remixable curriculum demands that the contribution of other ‘non-text’ media – visuals, animation, sound – be elevated from their currently marginal status in an overwhelmingly text-dependent curriculum. In Lawrence Lessig’s (2005) terms, we need to come to see “redaction” as central toeducation, not lesser than education.

Once the plan is written, care is usually taken not to stray too far from it or to be distracted by students with other agendas. This logic, in large measure, runs counter to the requirements of a remixable curriculum. The predictable or planned experience gives way to genuine experimentation, with outcomes neither known nor guaranteed. As a co-creator of value, the teacher shares with students experimental tasks in which failure is both likely and anticipated, where students and teachers fail without shame or disappointment. Bauman’s dictum that: “[y]our guess and know-how are as good as their last application” (p.22) applies equally to teachers and students. Put bluntly, where the stability of the plan is the hallmark of good pedagogy, then the experimental culture that is a corollary of the remixable curriculum is virtually impossible to achieve.

If our higher education institutions have a deadening effect on experimentation, the same cannot be said about the excitement of university managers around technology uptake. As Strathern (1997) points out, technology “comes with the friendliest of epithets” (p.317) in the university culture – the more of it used in ways that the university management approves, the better. Thus the self-managing academic demonstrates improved teaching performance by pointing to the use of more and newer ICTs… The problem here lies in the naïve hope that more and newer ICTs will mean a more exciting set of learning possibilities. Where curriculum remains fixed and immutable, however, these good intentions remain just that. There is no doubt that new information and communication technologies offer all sorts of new possibilities for remix – but, as Sassen reminds us, they cannot of themselves be relied on to change anything.

Deadly Habit No. 6: The more we know our students, the better.

I asked a group of Masters and Doctoral students in my faculty about the nature and purposes of education. ‘Raising self-esteem’ proved to be an almost universally agreed purpose, ranking alongside ‘helping people reach their full potential’. What flows from this logic is a heavy investment by these teachers in the development of a positive and friendly teacher-student relationship. And this is achieved in turn, by getting to know the students as individuals. Such determination is not to be thought of as prying but as seeking appropriately to teach the ‘whole person’.

They are usually…circumspect in their response to [the] question, [So what do I need to know about you?], less willing to give permission to pry. But the point is nevertheless made. The good teacher builds and maintains a close warm relationship with students and this means knowing ‘the whole person’, whether or not we want to be ‘known’ as a psychological subject. In this rationality, ‘openness’ is a marker of the good student and ‘interest in the person’ a marker of the good teacher. My point is not that we should be looking to return to a culture defined by the lofty arrogance and elitism of academics, but that one that respects students enough to challenge them by messing things up with and for them. The role, as Geoff Garrett, Head of Australia’s CSIRO put it at a recent senior management forum, is to become ‘chief disorganiser’.

Deadly habit No.7: Our disciplines can save the world.

It is my hope that I have demonstrated the problem with Deadly Habit Number Seven in my treatment of Deadly Habits One to Six. The approach I have taken to my own unlearning has been to range across academic disciplines and outside them in search of bright and shiny objects that can be used to generate different pedagogical thinking. Unfortunately, I have for some time now found relatively few compelling ideas about pedagogy coming out of mainstream education research, or professional development or leadership and management literature broadly defined…. Finally, I intend to save myself from another deadly habit of academic authorship – the deadly habit of summarising main points at the end of a paper. This will allow the reader to dispense with the deadly habit of needing to be reminded about them. In Bauman’s terms, the invitation is both to remember and to forget.

CCK08: Reflection for Week 8 Part 1

Power and Illusion

In the Oct 31 Daily, Stephen Downes commented:

From my perspective, the power I (Stephen) wielded this week in forcing a ’subscribe’ to the Moodle forums was actually an illusion of power. One student got it: “If Stephen hadn’t turned off the function as quickly as he did, I wonder if we would have taken power into our own hands, by simply not posting to the Moodle forums?” The power to do something else, to communicate using alternate means, to simply not use the Moodle forums, was always in the hands of the students – if they cooperated with each other.

I had been thinking exactly the same thing, but did not repond to Downes’ prompts to reply regarding the auto-subscription function in Moodle for precisely the reason suggested: because as an individual, not using the Moodle forum was how I chose to “communicate using alternate means.”

 In The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Volume 1: Power and Struggle (Extending Horizon Books, 1973) by Gene Sharp, the author remarks:

•  Obedience is essentially voluntary (26).
• It is not sanctions themselves which produce obedience, but the fear of them (28).

Being auto-subscribed to a Moodle forum is hardly an injustice in conventional terms. However, to the extent that Stephen was wielding his authority in a manner contrary to what students in CCK08 would expect, it begs the question: did an abuse of power occur? If we were to organize amongst ourselves as students to protest Stephen’s actions, first we would need to agree that a wrongdoing was committed. If it was agreed that an injustice had in fact occurred, then we would need to decide how we, individually and collectively, would choose to respond. Would we have agreed that collective mobilization was the course of action that ought to be taken? How would we have reached consensus about what was the best decision for us as a group? How would we implement our individual and collective responses? And finally, how would we move forward with the rest of CCK08 in a positive and constructive manner, shedding the abuses that have been conducted against us, if we chose to move forward with the course at all? Would we demand that Stephen resign from his role in the course? Would we demand an online apology?

The issues within which we find ourselves embroiled in the education system are so systemic that oftentimes it is impossible to identify how we ought to conduct ourselves when we know that injustices are being conducted against ourselves, our colleagues, and our students.

 John Taylor Gatto, voted both the New York City and the New York State teacher of the year, eventually chose to leave the teaching profession and is now a strong advocate of home-based education. He has reached the conclusion that working within the education system in order to try and transform students and/or the system itself cannot be realized. I believe that coercion plays a tremendous role in how we as teachers typically conduct ourselves in the classroom.

Especially if we are working with adolescents, for instance, classroom management is a reality that can require that students understand through no uncertain terms that unacceptable behaviours will have consequences. However, the affective and the cognitive domains must remain distinct in education, and therefore formal graded assessment is conducted not on the basis of a student’s behaviour or even engagement (for the most part) in class, but on a student’s ability to communicate knowledge and understanding back to a teacher through a variety of negotiated (some more forcefully negotiated than others) means. But the bottom line is that marks are the currency of the classroom. Even if students are promoted to the next grade whether on the books they have failed classes or not, formal assessment remains mandated by education authorities. Sure, we can be subversive about how we allocate marks; but we must allocate them all the same.

What options do students have? The vast majority realize that if they do not “play the game” at a minimum level their only option is to drop out of school, which their parents will not typically encourage.

But as educators, we all know this. Though I am no longer a teacher, I am still at a loss.