The more I study the nature of technology, teaching, and learning, the more I come to realize that the structure and design of most universities prevents deep, meaningful learning from happening.

Historically, universities have been designed similar to medieval citadels, housing and protecting the keepers of knowledge and all that can be known. These fortified institutions employ the gatekeepers that determine what is Truth, what is knowable, what is proper, and who is (and is not) allowed to enter and exit. In this sense, universities are bastions of oppression. Perhaps universities did not start out this way, but over time it is clear that they have developed what Paulo Freire would call an oppressor consciousness, transforming teaching and learning into an object of domination. The oppressor consciousness is mostly unaware of the oppression it is responsible for. It establishes its authority as an inalienable right, a right that its caretakers earned through labor, effort and the courage to take risks.

Now, before I get too caught up in this idea, I must admit that I have benefited greatly by my university access. I have gained employment because of my diplomas. I even met the love of my life at my university. I have been allowed to network with a variety of sentient beings in a very humanistic sense. And even within its employ, I have been allowed to publicly cry the king is wearing no clothes! and still maintain job security and some limited authority.

So why the condemnation?

As a doctoral student, I have witnessed the development of new pedagogies, new forms of learning environments that build on a learners’ desires and skills and that meet both functional and educational needs. And I have witnessed many academics curse, ballyhoo, and condemn these new teaching and learning ecologies. And as such I have even been branded a “radical” for my beliefs.

What does it mean to be radical?
In my mind, being radical is seeing things differently. For example, it is looking at learning as the connections we form with other people. Being radical involves taking risks. It involves dealing with certain amounts of fear (mine and others) and responsibility. Being radical involves a re-visioning, a re-birthing of sorts; being radical is not a matter of being, it is a matter of becoming.

Paulo Freire was fond of representing the views of the oppressed, those of us working in repressive institutions. He suggested that those who are oppressed must understand that they are oppressed and take action against the oppression in a way that is authentic, human, wholesome, and life-giving.

I believe those of us who see the possibilities that teaching, learning and technology provide are in the initial stage of building a new pedagogy. This new pedagogy starts out by unveiling the world of oppression and through praxis (i.e., through critical dialogue, reflective thinking, communicating), commit ourselves to transformative action. This first stage deals with consciousness-raising; it takes into account the roles, behaviors and ethics of both sides of the debate.

Once the reality of oppression is transformed, this new pedagogy no longer belongs to only those of us who recognize its value; it becomes pedagogy for all. Those that recognize the value of this new pedagogy will be called “radical” or “subversive” since they will want to tip the balance of power in their favor. And this is an important point to consider. Freire suggested that the oppressed must struggle with the dual nature of oppression; i.e., while creating this new pedagogy, we must be aware of the current pedagogy and its forms of teaching and learning and not replace it with the same thing. I have seen many academics and educators use technology to simply do the same thing they were doing before, i.e., preaching from the stage, without thinking about what they were doing or how they were doing it. They used the technology to continue their oppressive style of teaching and learning.

What I am calling a new pedagogy is what George Siemens calls Connectivism and Stephen Downes calls E-learning 2.0. This new pedagogy is based on interactivity, on humans networking, in a usable, relevant environment where students accept more responsibility for their own learning. This new learning ecology provides more freedom and is more liberating in many respects, but with this freedom comes more responsibility, more transparency, more accountability for both learners and educators/academics.

This shift is beginning to happen as more learner-centered environments take shape both formally and informally across the globe. I believe it is our duty as educators, as role models, as netizens, to act critically, and consider the options carefully so as not to fall back into or continue oppressive teaching and learning practices.

As noted in the Wikipedia, “Sometimes the convincing force is just time itself and the human toll it takes, Kuhn pointed out, using a quote from Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

In the meantime, play on drummer...

A terrific reflective post by Scott Berkun regarding why smart people often defend bad ideas.


The problem with smart people is that they like
to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death
rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad.
Worse, if they got away with it when they were young
(say, because they were smarter than their parents,
their friends, and their parent’s friends)
they’ve probably built an ego around being right,
and will therefore defend their perfect record of
invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often
fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if
it’s based in delusion, or results in them,
or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in
your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery,
called smartypants lane, filled with people who were
buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say
“Well, at least I was right.”)

I found this post both amusing and intriguing for several reasons. One, it is reflective thinking in action. Two, it ties nicely with a well-linked post from Anne Davis that considers how we, as educators, need to model how we make connections and discover relevancies, i.e., explaining what we have learned in our own words. Anne suggests that this is yet another beauty of weblogs -- how they allow us to truly engage in our own learning.

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education has me concerned.

The good news is the state of Michigan sees enormous potential in elearning.

What concerns me is what the students will be enrolling in. I'm not crazy about standards but they do provide a baseline for dialogue and expectations.
So I am curious to know what students can expect of their elearning courses? Will they be primarily text driven courses, uber-correspondence courses delivered on the web? Will they be sections of cohorts with plenty of reflective and group activities? Will the courses be built on a philosophy of constructivism, connectivism, or essentialism? Who decides who teaches these courses? Are there prerequisites for the people who teach these courses or design them?

So why am I so concerned?

I guess it's because these proposed requirements that Michigan is working on apply to high school students. If we poison that well, how can we expect students to see the value of elearning?

Perhaps I am looking at this all wrong. Plenty of high school and college kids have suffered the slings and arrows of bad teaching for decades and have turned out pretty well. I guess like many educators, I am sensitive to bad teaching. And bad online ecologies have the potential to send all of the gains that have been made over the past decade in developing a new pedagogy down/up the river without a paddle.

I am also worried about the concept of efficiency. (I have just begun reading Andrew Feenberg's Questioning Technology.)
Although it is not stated explicitly in the article cited above, I believe many administrators see elearning as a way to move students through the system as quickly and efficiently as possible. This of course begs the whole question of what schools are for in the first place. However, my spidey-senses are telling me that the online courses to be offered and required in Michigan could end up being text-heavy, non-interactive, independent study courses that do not utilize the variety of social softwares available, which in turn give students a limited understanding of how the interweb can be used well in education.

Again, perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. Working for a large, public, land-grant university and having attended a garishly large, regional high school, I have seen how large-scale innovations end up watered-down facsimilies that do not live up to their promises. Let's hope there's a plan behind the headlines.

A recent report issued by the Urban Institute, “Who graduates, Who doesn’t?: A Statistical Portrait of Public High School Graduation, Class of 2001” (http://www.urban.org/publications/410934.html) makes a compelling case that the United States is in the midst of a crisis in terms of providing basic secondary education services to students and families. The report by Christopher B. Swanson (2004) notes:

• The national graduation rate is 68 percent, with nearly one-third of all public high school students failing to graduate.

• Tremendous racial gaps are found for graduation rates.

• Students from historically disadvantaged minority groups (American Indian, Hispanic, Black) have little more than a fifty-fifty chance of finishing high school with a diploma.

• By comparison, graduation rates for Whites and Asians are 75 and 77 percent nationally.

• Males graduate from high school at a rate 8 percent lower than female students.

• Graduation rates for students who attend school in high poverty, racially segregated, and urban school districts lag from 15 to 18 percent behind their peers.

• A great deal of variation in graduation rates and gaps among student groups is found across regions of the country as well as the states.

What these statistics and report do not state explicitly are the reasons for this abysmal state of affairs. The social, economic, and racial gaps in American education are not new (Berlak, 2001). Neo-conservative politics, pundits, politicians, and policy makers have been economically and systematically undermining public schools over the past two decades (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1993). More importantly, Aronowitz and Giroux (1993) suggest that what has been missing from this scene are passionate, critical educators willing “to match neo-conservative politics with a corresponding set of visions and strategies” (p. 223).

Rather than passively sit back and watch schools crumble into the dust, critical educators have at present a golden opportunity to re-think the nature and purpose of public education and create public learning environments where social justice can take root and prosper.

In order to make this vision a reality, Aronowitz and Giroux (1993) suggest in a Freirean sense that we need “to assess the failures of left educational thinking in the past decade, and the reasons for the success of neo-conservative educational policy and the "authoritarian populism" on which it has been able to construct a broad national consensus” (p. 223). In other words, to begin fixing the current crisis situation, critical educators need to start by carefully examining the policies that put us where we are today. Theoretically, once we know where we came from, we can better decide where we need to go and how we might proceed to get there. However, knowing from whence we came is no guarantee that all party will agree on the next steps.

Perhaps this is part of the reason why the neo-conservative agenda has dominated over the last few decades. The neo-conservative movement has defined itself in such a way that provides little room for debate in terms of its goals and objectives. The more liberal movements have in essence allowed themselves to spend too much time defending their movements’ agenda (or lack thereof) and thus losing rhetorical and ideological ground to the authoritarian populism identified above.

What is so striking about the current neo-conservative movement in American politics is not its popularity; Americans by and large have always been a relatively conservative lot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_conservatism). The belief that people can and should govern themselves (i.e., populism) seems relatively sanguine and is not the reason for our current crises. Perhaps then it is the notion that authoritarianism, hegemonic as it is, is partially to blame. Moreover, it seems it is the assertion of the American people to accept this current form of authoritarianism that has come to place us in the turmoil that we find ourselves in today.

The neo-conservative movement is essentially a “potent combination” of what researcher Jeremy Gilbert (2000) describes as “anti-bureaucratic, individualistic sentiment with nationalism and social conservatism.” In other words, this neo-conservatism, which has gained a strong foothold in American government and culture, is a politics that appeals to popular emotions that unfortunately reverberates with an authoritarian (i.e., oppressive), not a democratic, political agenda. Neo-conservatism policy and discourse suggests that the American people are by nature hopelessly conservative, narrow-minded, individualistic, and poorly informed. And the one way to counter such totalitarian policy is to re-write the agenda.

Small pieces, loosely joined
What Aronowitz, Giroux, Freire and others suggest is that we, as critical or radical educators, need to do, is assume some of the risk. Yet, for many, taking action would require them to place their family, their career, their livelihood, at stake. As Freire suggests, the struggle for freedom from oppression requires taking risks, risking something new and never before experienced. This, in and of itself, creates fear in those taking action or what Freire might dub a “tragic dilemma.”

So what is a critical educator to do? How can an educator practically and realistically confront a culture of domination and still feed, clothe, and support their family?

The answer seems simple enough: we elect officials into office who believe in an egalitarian, collectivist, tolerant, forward-thinking democracy that runs counter to the current selfish, fear-mongering “representatives” running our country, states, and counties. For our hopes to be realized, radical educators must respond to this current political situation and declare that the agenda must be re-written so as not to patronize the public by assuming it to be incapable of rational thought or liberal feeling. Critical educators need to create a pedagogy that tells a different story about ourselves; one that seeks to involve us all in its telling.

Re-Vision
Perhaps the answers lie not in individually taking on “the system.” Perhaps the answer can be found by many individuals, physically separate, yet united in their cause and goals. Current neo-conservative educational policy, preciously dubbed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), has been working against children, family, and schools for almost ten years now. NCLB largely prescribes measures to close the gaps cited in reports like Urban Institute’s; however it attempts to do so as unfunded policy mandates. Meanwhile, the crisis goes on as unrecognizable to a majority of our nation because of the rhetoric espoused by the current administration that focuses on natural disaster relief, wars in other nations, the threat of terrorism, looming gasoline crises, tax cuts for the nation’s wealthiest citizens – government-sponsored, xenophobic individualism. Therefore, if we wish to challenge the current agenda, we, as critical educators, need to focus our message and make our issues tangible. “Why not learn the lesson that the tabloids have always known, that nothing swings an argument like a threat to the safety of children”(Gilbert, 2000)? Why not challenge the public and the news media repeatedly with the distressing statistics about the number of children not being served by our school system?

According to Gilbert (2000), “a genuinely democratic, genuinely populist approach to education would encourage a real dialogue between teachers – who would be treated as the dedicated and well-trained public servants that 99% of them are – and parents – few of whom want to see their children tested rather than taught, driven into competitive hysteria in under-resourced classrooms rather than allowed to develop as human beings- and would not subject both to the diktats of a class of managerial technocrats” (i.e., school boards).

Perhaps a critical, democratic, populist approach to the issue would present just such a case. Of course, it is not only the government that is unwilling or unable to articulate such a position. The guardians of democratic politics in the US today “either lack any conception at all of what it might mean to be popular or actively refuse such an aspiration…. As for the remnants of the revolutionary left, their decades-long record of failure to inspire a popular following speaks for itself” (Gilbert, 2000).

So who are to be the agents of this new politics?
Perhaps the institutions with the most power to take up the cause of closing the gaps and bridging the social, economic, and cultural divides would be the teachers’ unions. Union political funds could become the greatest potential resource for progressive campaigning that there has ever been in this country. The unions could sponsor a number of campaigns aimed at popularizing democratic, liberational politics.

Again, according to Gilbert (2000), “it is not as if this campaign would require a coordinating committee, a manifesto, or a paid-up membership. All that would be required would be a common insistence – by whatever means necessary –“ that we, the American people, are not docile, ignorant, easily duped, insensitive hypocrites.

“This sounds simple enough, but it is not. Those with a psychic investment in the idea of themselves as liberals, reformists, rebels, and outlaws would have to divest themselves of it, learning a language, which did not automatically alienate the majority, understanding that there is no a action as effective as persuasion” (Gilbert, 2000). Those who have trained themselves “never to speak a word that might offend or alienate” the masses will have to discover the courage to tell self-proclaimed conservatives that it might not always have to be the way they expect it to be.

It would require all of those who dream of a liberated and populist democratic land never to forget who “the true enemy” is: “not those who seek a different degree of social transformation, but those who oppose it all together” (Gilbert, 2000). It is the destructive message of the neo-conservatives and their allies in the press that must be resisted with an alternative set of democratic values that everyone already subscribes to. Whatever the very real differences between us – cultural, political and ideological – they are nothing compared to the gulf that separates us from unconscious oppression.

The important point to note is that it can be done; we as critical educators can make a difference. It occurred with the election of the Roosevelt government in the 1930s, and with the civil and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. “The failure to keep that revolution popular was what opened the door for the rise of the new right: only its reconnection with the people will consign neo-conservative oppression to history” (Gilbert, 2000).




References:

Aronowitz, S. & Giroux, H.A. (1993). Education still under siege, second edition. Critical studies in education and culture series. Ed (H.A. Giroux and P. Freire). Westport: Bergin & Garvey.

Berlak, H. (2001). Race and the achievement gap. Rethinking Schools Online. 15(4). Retrieved 04 December 2005 from http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/15_04/Race154.shtml.

Gilbert, J. (2000). Towards a democratic populism. A Signs of the Times discussion paper. Retrieved 04 December 2005 from http://www.signsofthetimes.org.uk/dp1.html.


Swanson, C.B. (2004). Who graduates? Who doesn’t? A statistical portrait of public high school graduation, class of 2001. The Urban Institute Education Policy Center. Retrieved 04 December 2005 from http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410934.

Although I'm not sure I agree with all of his choices, Mark Millerton from ArticleDashboard[dot]com has released his choices for the Top 10 Innovative Web 2.0 Applications of 2005.

I didn't see flickr or Writely on the list, nor did I see del.icio.us. Hmmmm....

Dion Hinchcliffe has a nice Web 2.0 app list that runs closer to my taste in terms of reviewing, comparing, and categorizing applications.

What I find interesting about the Millerton piece is that we have no idea who Mark Millerton is. So why should I listen to him?

This idea of authority and authorship has been echoed recently in the Wikipedia debate that has been creating a lot of frisson.

I recently ran across a sound argument on David Wiley's site that I believe frames the topic well. It seems ultimately what is needed in our primary grades is a mix of a media literacy training and a bit of falacious reasoning training.

As we all know, the interweb can spread incorrect news just as quickly.

I can’t thank Ulises Mejias enough for posting his syllabus on Social Software Affordances.

I have become a big fan of Ulises and his work over the past year and decided to tackle his reading list for his social software course.

I am juggling two texts at the moment and wanted to share the “easier” of the two with you first.

Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (2004) by Paul Dourish is a good primer for understanding the significance of human-computer interaction (HCI).

This text’s main focus is tangible and social computing as it relates to embodied interaction.

Tangible computing encompasses the idea of distributing “computation across a variety of devices… spread throughout the physical environment and are sensitive to their location and their proximity to other devices (p. 15).” This concept is easily demonstrated as I move my computer around my house or office wherein I can connect to any number of printers or wireless hubs that recognize my computer.

Tangible computing seeks to augment other physical objects, a pen, a piece of paper, a toy, etc., with computational power. For example, as I pick up a piece of paper on my desk, a host of other related documents could be summoned on my work station providing me additional related references and resources.

Research in tangible computing is also interested in harnessing computational power with physical artifacts other than traditional graphical interfaces such as keyboards and mice. In essence, tangible computing is interested in exploring how to get the computer “out of the way” to provide people with a more direct interactive experience when harnessing computational affordances.

Social computing research also embodies the idea of how people and computers connect and seeks to uncover “the mechanisms through which people organize their activity, and the role that social and organizational settings play in this process (p. 16).”

This concept is readily being explored by a number of researchers with George Siemens work on Connectivism being one of the most accessible.

Both tangible and social computing draw on the ways that we “experience the everyday world.” Both ideas share the understanding “that you cannot separate the individual from the world in which that individual lives and acts (p. 18).”

According to Dourish, tangible and social computing are ultimately centered on the notion of embodiment. Specifically, embodiment focuses on three areas: the role played by the environment in which work takes place; how work really takes place (i.e., not work in the abstract, but in reality –- the unplanned, unforeseen, the unexpectedness of working environments); and the recognition of the variety of roles artifacts play in our daily interaction with them (e.g., my pen makes a nifty letter opener at times).

Dourish takes his notion of embodiment from the work of phenomenologists, where experience and interaction, thinking and acting, are aspects of the same experience. This lens provides us a means of investigating our world where tangible and social computing draw upon each other to guide our thinking towards how humans and computers interact, as well as inform and support the design, analysis, and evaluation of interactive systems.

Dourish covers a number of examples of embodied computing and phenomenology in his text providing the reader plenty of evidence to support his arguments for looking at HCI in such a manner.

What I find most fascinating from reading Dourish is the idea of computing in the ubiquitous sense. I have been comfortably tethered to my screen and keyboard for many years. I find my computer and desk at home to be a place of composure; a place where I can read, write, investigate, reflect and relax. I have never given much thought to the idea of my refrigerator telling me I’m low on cranberry juice and that a complete grocery order based on my shopping patterns has been placed at my local supermarket and will be delivered within the hour. Yet, this idea is not out of line given the computational and communicative power that exists at the moment.

Rather than framing the question in terms of “is this a good thing?,” I wonder how embodied computing will change the way I interact with the world. How will tangible computing change me and my habits or how will tangible computing and embodied artifacts adapt to my habits?

I feel it is important to recognize how computational power has changed our world and how it will continue to evolve and change our behavior, our way of interacting with the world and with others. Thus my parallel concerns with social justice, reflective thinking, and liberational politics.

There is a composition course offered at my uni in what is referred to as a networked writing environment. This environment is a rectangular room with no windows and about twenty five PC workstations networked together. Students interact digitally on assignments yet are sitting within inches of each other. They face a screen, not each other. They dialogue with their keyboards, not verbally. And I ask myself, what on earth is going on here? Is this a case of lack of foresight, a lack of thinking about the use of space and computational technology? Was the course set up like this on purpose and to what end? If this were an online course where students were separated by time and space, I could relate to the concept of a networked writing environment. But as it stands, I am sadly confused. Using technology and computers for the sake of using technology and computers is a mistake. My hope is that as we continue to study “where the action is” we do so in a fashion that is thoughtful, meaningful, and supportive.

Should we teach courses on distance teaching and learning in a face-to-face environment? Do I want Amazon telling me which books it thinks I might be interested in? How can I be sure my vote was properly counted in the last election?

If embodied interaction and social science go hand in hand I will feel a little bit safer. But only a little. Even so, I look forward to seeing what the future holds. Especially when I run out of coffee.