Here’s a provocative movie that argues how Facebook users’ civil rights and civil liberties may be compromised.

My first reaction to the movie clip was to question the reliability and validity of the information presented. I clicked on the link at the bottom of the page which took me here. Not that this brings us any closer to the truth, but it does offer a place to begin further peeling back the layers.

It does seem to be a reasonable question to ask: Where does the information collected by social networking sites go? Who has access to it? What will it be used for?

This also reminded me of how often I quickly click “accept” without completely reading the terms of service or use on a number of online sites.

Popular social networking sites like The Facebook and MySpace offer virtually no organizational transparency which is a definite cause of concern.

Perhaps we will soon uncover the truth.
 

 

 

 

 

I would like to focus my comments around the notion of School 2.0 and what I mean by such a term.

For me, School 2.0 is more a nascent philosophical stance -- that is, a way to think about and re-frame the idea of what a school should be.

I must admit, like Will Richardson, I am feeling a bit unsure about the term "school." The word itself conjures up a range of connotations and images from an "educational place," to a "jail" with associated images of pupils, cliques, blackboards, assignments, etc. School can also signify a philosophy as in a school of thought. School can also be a verb as in to teach or instruct a person.

Ultimately, I find myself re-reading comments made by Stephen Downes wherein he associates schools with control and indoctrination as opposed to freedom and self-discovery.

I was recently invited by the always gracious Barbara Dieu to give a brief chat about School 2.0 in the Tapped In Blogstream Salon. After the session, I found myself reflecting more deeply on what it is that educators like myself are after.

Schools, whether we like them or not, are deeply rooted in our cultures. School is a place where children go to acquire rational knowledge that allows them to function within society. They are places where individual identities are shaped; places where collective consciousness becomes assimilated.

So, what are the social aims of education? What role should education play in connecting individuals to their society?

These questions led me back to the pragmatism of John Dewey and the notion of interdependence.

An individual is both the product of nature and the product of society. Society cannot exist without individuals, and individuals cannot exist without society. Ideally, schools can serve as a place that allows for all the freedoms necessary to create and maintain individuality and at the same time maintain enough restraint to make social order possible.

In reality, communities, institutions, and other social organizations can become inflexible and consequently limit freedom and innovation. Individual personalities can also become rigid and intolerant of change. Thus, the challenge before is to find a process that allows both order and innovation in individuals and society.

Can schools as they are currently conceived be the place that fosters this process?

Dewey saw intelligence as the key to promoting such interdependence. Intelligence offers us "freedom from control by routine, prejudice, dogma, unexamined tradition [and] sheer self interest." Intelligence represents "the will to inquire, to examine, to discriminate, to draw conclusions on the basis of evidence after taking pains to gather all available evidence" (Dewey, 1939). Intelligence empowers individuals to see the world for what it is and to reflect on what it might become. It permits people to recognize choice when it exists and the wisdom to choose (hopefully) wisely.

Dewey believed institutions could be constructed in ways that would help develop human intelligence and distinctive individuality. He believed that to do this is to allow "all those who are affected by social institutions [to] have a share in producing and managing them" (Dewey, 1939). He saw schools as a means for enhancing intelligence and enriching community life -- a place that could foster the development of both individual and social intelligence. As such, schools ideally serve as a means by which we can bring individuals in closer communion with society -- a place where an individual can learn not only about his or her self, but also learn about others. Dewey also argued that it was silly to teach kids to accept the views of teachers uncritically, to passively accept the rules of school, and to mindlessly grind out assignments that have limited purpose or meaning.

So what happened that caused schools to become so relatively far removed from such a concept?

Modern life provides us with many benefits and many problems. Generally speaking, it has been the job of schools to pass on to future generations all that is best in society and prepare children for the problems they will face in adult life.

This brings me to a point where I feel compelled to briefly touch on the notion of teachers and the concept of human nature.

To a greater extent than we would like to imagine, our ideas about human nature are often self-fulfilling. Human beings often become what they collectively believe themselves to be. This understanding offers us both hope and reason for concern. Ideas of human nature that degrade and repress human beings have a self-fulfilling power that we cannot ignore. Likewise, knowing our assumptions about schools, teaching, learning, and education are therefore quite important and often difficult to detect.

When we seek to explain a particular aspect of human nature by asserting that it causes itself, we fall into an unwitting hole which Dewey calls a "lazy fallacy." For example, when we say human beings love because of their loving natures, we have said nothing at all. The consequence of this thinking is that it stops inquiry into the social conditions that promote or inhibit loving behavior.

Lazy fallacies can "prove" anything (short of understanding).

When we rid ourselves of the idea that human beings are inherently good or evil, we often find our thinking about human behavior becomes clearer.

So what does this detour have to do with the notion of school and School 2.0?

Consider the following questions:

Do you believe that human beings are good, evil, or something in between?

Should society emphasize conformity, creativity, or something in between?

Should we promote freedom, constraint, or something in between?

Do values grow from the individual, from society, or somewhere else?

Does identity grow within the individual, within the social order, or somewhere else?

Answer these questions, and you begin to uncover and expose the foundation of your ideas on schooling and education.

As educators, our aim must be to work out a model for human nature that finds support in evidence from the (social) sciences, is clear, and can guide us in the formation of educational aims.

If as an educator you believe children naturally cheat if given an opportunity, you will probably stop investigating the environmental circumstances that encourage such behavior. When such a failure of effort occurs, an educator loses the chance to see whether individual competition, grading practices, irrelevant subject matter, and so on, make cheating more likely.

Ideally, what school should do is provide opportunities for each and every child to develop through activities that have personal and cultural meaning. However, this understanding of school is easier said than done given the ways schools are currently conceived and structured, no?

Alright, let me return to something I stated earlier.

Dewey insisted that selfhood and intelligence are not born within us, nor are they given to us by society. Rather, they develop in the interaction of the individual with other human beings. This conception and my previous statements about human nature serves as my premise for School 2.0.

For me, the concept of School 2.0 is still emerging in my thinking. So what I am offering is merely a think-aloud.

School 2.0 should be more than a restraint mechanism. And as Stephen has argued, maybe the whole conceit of "school" as it currently stands should be dropped from our thinking altogether.

We all recognize that before children can walk, they must learn how to crawl. And a certain amount of foundational learning involves the acquisition of rational knowledge: alphabets, mathematical procedures, the mechanics of writing, rhetoric, and composition. (Should we talk about Aristotle for a while?)

My vision of a School 2.0 philosophy is not an "effort at retrenchment" or an effort to "protect one's own turf" as Stephen Downes has so deftly argued. Rather, I am more drawn to reforming schools in the guise illustrated by Stephen Heppel's NotSchool or the Sudbury Schools.

While I recognize that philosophers like Downes and Heppell are discouraged by the notion of schools in general, schooling will most likely continue to be culturally and politically significant in our society. Schools and other formal education structures are not likely to disappear anytime soon. Yet how we conceive of schools as a medium, i.e., what schools are and what goes on inside, is clearly open for debate, reflection, and reform.

Should the notion of school automatically constitute such elements as classes, curricula, teachers, and lessons? Is this a construction we must accept?

This is the heart of what I see the School 2.0 movement to be about: questioning the current conception of schools and envisioning what schools should be like like in the not so distant future.

I do not want to give the impression that debate will simply solve the current crisis that envelops much of the educational landscape. There are enormous political and policy issues, administrative and leadership issues, as well as teacher and teacher education issues that are inherently interlaced. The premise of School 2.0 for me is about examining and exposing the assumptions underlying our current understanding of school and beginning to articulate changes that we see as necessary.

Next Steps: Many brains are better than one.

It would be foolhardy to think that one person has all of the answers. Like Will, I often wonder if those of us thinking aloud about these issues will ever move the argument to a place where it will do some good.

So the floor is yours....

What are your thoughts on how school reforms should be framed and enacted? Are schools, and schooling in general, broken? Am I making too many unsubstantiated assumptions about the state of schooling? What are the priorities? What steps need to be taken first? How might online social networks or blogs benefit school reform movements? Where might teacher unions or teacher associations fit in? To borrow a phrase from Konrad Glogowski, should we be focusing on Professional Development 2.0 instead of School 2.0 as a philosophical stance?

Let me and others know what you think.

Resources: You can also look here for more on School 2.0 and the beginnings of a manifesto (a term I'm not so l keen on).

 

References:

Dewey, J. (1939). Intelligence in the modern world. (Ed. Joseph Ratner). New York: Random House.

Dewey, J. (1939). Theory of valuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Being Casual Friday and the day before Spring Break here in Gainesville, the following are a number of esoteric thoughts threading through my head after re-reading the first chapter of Daniel Dennett’s  book Sweet Dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness.

Blogs and Multiple Drafts

After writing in a weblog for two years, I realize that what I write is often a version of something I’ve written or read before. That echo chamber that is the edu’sphere is merely what Dennett might refer to as a multiple drafts theory of consciousness, a mutation of previously used material being recombined over and over.

We might consider a blog post to be simply a “best of” version of what is being thought aloud, frozen in time. Dennett suggests that this what we do “when we tell others – or even our later selves—about our conscious experience” (p. xi).

Philosophical issues that continue to bewilder

Consider the New Yorker magazine cover below as a representation of consciousness:

What is going on in this person’s brain?

The pointillist rendering of this “conscious man” serves as a salute to modern science and even connectivism.

Each of us is an assemblage, a connection, of trillions of cells of many different flavors all contributing to the whole, the big picture that is our “self.”

We are descendents of sperm and egg that can be traced back through a thousand different lineages and yet, Dennett argues, “not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares” (p. 2).

Dennett proclaims that each cell is “a largely autonomous microrobot, no more conscious than a yeast cell” (p. 2). A hundred kilos of yeast does not care about a Braque painting; yet we do.

Our body, Dennett avers, is simply composed of parts that can be equated to yeast cells “only with different tasks to perform,” insisting that our “interests and values have almost nothing to do with the limited goals that the cells that compose you” (p. 2).

He suggests that many scientists and philosophers have regarded the means by which we manufacture consciousness is actually a product of a “spirit,” an extra-something stationed somehow in our “bodily headquarters.”

This dualistic point of view still makes sense to many. Why is that?

Is it because we like closure, that we want things to make sense whether we can truly grasp what is really happening around us or not? (Perhaps this desire is reflected in notions of economy and efficiency that so many systems are aimed toward.)

To stir matters up more, Dennett offers, “we are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no nonphysical, nonrobotic ingredients at all” (p. 3). It is nearly impossible to explain in scientific terms what goes on in our heads, the figures, the motions and emotions. We are made up of parts that work together like a machine. When we examine our interior we can see the pieces/parts working together, and yet none of these parts appears to explain consciousness or our perceptions.

This approach begs the question: Can consciousness be a matter of machinery? Or is it something we will never understand? Is an explanation of consciousness beyond our intellectual powers?

Dennett then reminds us of philosophers like Chomsky who assert that consciousness can never be explained, that consciousness is a mystery not a puzzle.

 
Are we there yet?

Cognitive science has pulled us through this relatively recent accounting of consciousness by suggesting that a mechanistic account is not necessarily appropriate.

Is it then possible to look from a third-person perspective rather than a first person account to bring recognizable patterns into focus? Could consciousness be an emergent by-product of the “organization” of these stigmergic cells? Could we, given the appropriate conceptual tools, recognize the woods for the trees?

Dennett believes that an explanation exists outside of the current scientific perspectives that explain actions like metabolism and growth; the phenomena of the mind are quite un-similar to the phenomena of biology. And this is exactly what makes computers such a delicious metaphor for the mind.

Connectivism and network theory

Computers can perform millions of different processes “that call for discrimination, inference, memory, judgment, anticipation: they are generators of new knowledge, finders of patterns” (p. 6) similar to what human minds hope to find. The circuits that make up a computer can serve as a mechanistic interpretation, a simulation, if you will, of how perception works: “The explanations of whatever talents computers exhibit are models of transparency” (p. 7).

As I seek to better understand the theory of learning that is connectivism, it appears to me that connectivism asserts that we create knowledge in a similar way. Here consciousness is a product of network connections that inform discrimination, pattern recognition, judgment, etc. allowing new knowledge to be generated. However, does such a theory of learning reduce learning to a mechanistic interpretation? Is this what connectivism or any theory of learning after?

For many cognitive scientists, computational models are the coin of the realm, providing proof-positive the trillions and trillions of processes that make up consciousness and learning.

What if science could show that neurons contain a tiny dot of consciousness? How would we explain how a composition of trillions of such cells form into a being and can consciously consider works of art like Braque?

Is consciousness more than the sum of its parts?

Computers and zombies

This is Dennett at his mischievous best:

“How can the little box on your desk, whose parts no nothing about chess, beat you at chess with stunning reliability?” (p. 12).

And if our cells were merely made of parts working together in unison, totally mechanistic, unaware, and un-conscious, what’s the difference between a human being and a zombie?

Scientists might argue that what makes a human conscious is that he or she lives in a stream of consciousness-- a zombie lives in a stream of un-consciousness. Why? Because the truth is the truth whether we are conscious of it or not. Right? Well…

Here we might say what differs between consciousness and unconsciousness is intuition itself. As of today, intuition resists mechanistic reduction.

While zombies might also resist logical, physical, and metaphysical explanation, the fact that they are no less conceivable, deserves fractional consideration…. there are no ””fundamental laws” from which one can deduce that zombies are impossible” (p. 16).

So, is intuition irreducible? Are zombies merely cognitive illusions? Are computers brain feasting zombies? Is such thinking representative of lazy fallacious reasoning? Can our wet brain really be replaced by millions of microprocessors?

I’ll end here so we all can soak on this for a while.

In the meantime, here’s 7 minutes from Shaun of The Dead – the First Zombie Encounter (nsfw). Sweet dreams indeed!

 

Reference: Dennett, D. C. (2006). Sweet dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

As I hone in on topics for deeper research, I find that it’s always good to seek the counsel of others. Research is not only about problematizing situations and concepts, it’s about framing situations and concepts in such a way that permits “problem spaces” to be opened up and addressed more clearly.

For the past two years I have been exploring social media/social software in the context of teacher professional development. By social media/social software, I am referring to computer applications that allow participants to socialize, to read, write, collaborate, aggregate data and information, and to create and synthesize knowledge over the Internet both synchronously and asynchronously. In a host of circumstances, social media empowers participants/actors to tap into the expertise of others at local and global levels. I am particularly interested in investigating how educators develop professional competence using social media like weblogs and social networking sites.

Below are a few examples of questions I am currently wrestling with. I am curious to know if you think they can be opened up and addressed clearly. What am I overlooking or oversimplifying?

I.

How does social media allow educators to develop their professional practice in collaborative contexts? Are educators learning something different or differently via social media compared to face-to-face networks? In other words, does participation in social media networks that support professional development result in better outcomes for educators such as greater student achievement or a greater sense of self-efficacy?

[In many ways, this is a loaded question: Empirical research cannot directly link everything that practitioners learn to student outcomes. Yet, depending on how an environment is designed, we might be able to trace the combination of knowledge and skills an educator is using to effect student success.]

II.

How are educators enacting what they learn in online communities for practice in their own professional practice? More specifically, we might focus on inquiring into how educators utilize feedback in this context?

III.

Can an online community for practice environment be designed to track what and how teachers learn, how they use what they have learned, and to what effect? What would such an environment look like? What are the principles that would govern the design of such an environment?

IV.

Can an online community for practice environment provide the structure and support needed for educators to link broad principles to concrete applications, to understand deeply and transfer their learning to their professional practice? How would we measure such variables?

[Sigh] I feel like I’ve been batting these concepts around for some time and I am having difficulty seeing the forest through the trees.

Any feedback would be most helpful. If you can think of any additional dimensions that need further investigation, please do tell.

Also, you may have noticed the use of the term community for practice. I am using this term to signify a community that is specifically designed to support practitioner discussions, the sharing of ideas, resources, and information relevant to a particular practice. Unlike a community of practice, a community for practice is not necessarily a joint enterprise negotiated by participants based on the conditions, demands, and resources that shape practice.

Again, feel free to comment and punch holes in this perspective.

--- 

Diagram retrieved from Logic + Emotion: Visualizing the Social network. 

I have always had trouble with the argument that teaching is more art than science. On the surface, it reduces an extremely complex activity like teaching or painting to a simple act of creation or classroom management, neither of which are simple at all.

 

Art, science, and teaching are generative processes that run off a set of rules that, in turn, set in motion a series of actions that produce new ideas, new ways of seeing, new understandings, new knowledge.

Sociologist Dan Lortie (1975) coined the term apprenticeship of observation to describe the process by which prospective teachers develop their understanding of teaching based on their own experience as students. While prospective educators do have a great deal of experience in a classroom, most have not considered teaching through any pedagogical filter, or in a practical, problematic, or scientific sense.

Learning to teach is more than acquiring skills. It involves the ability to develop:

• an authoritative presence
  
  
• a good radar for observing and interpreting what many students are doing and feeling at each moment
  
  
  
  
• skills for explaining, questioning, discussing, giving feedback, constructing meaningful tasks, facilitating work, and managing the learning environment – all at once (Hammerness, et al., 2005).
  

Hardly a simple or mechanistic task.

Good teaching is also informed by factual and theoretical knowledge as well as an ability to adapt to different contexts and different student needs. It is not by luck that good teachers acquire such adaptive expertise. This process of becoming involves time, experience, an open mind, a strong pedagogical framework, a desire to improve one’s practice, and the ability to actively reflect upon and enact changes based on internal and external needs.

Perhaps my trouble with the argument that teaching is more art than science is that the notion of art seems to get short shrift. The creation of that which we call art involves a high level of discipline and a mastery of specific skills that often takes years to build.

In this sense, artists are a lot like scientists – artists make observations, they derive ways (theories) to explain these observations, and attempt to challenge these theories through experimentation.

Similarly, successful artists, scientists, and educators operate within a framework that involves

• Vision -- “imagining the possible;”
  
  
• Understanding – a knowledge of content, methods, forms, purposes, etc.;
  
  
• Tools – both theoretical and practical;
  
  
• Practices – a repertoire for enacting and engaging; and
  
  
• Disposition – habits of mind and developing and refining one’s philosophical or moral stance (adapted from Hammerness et al, 2005).
  

 

So while it is perhaps fun to rhetorically separate science and art, such an exercise does injustice to the level of understanding and ability associated with science, art, teaching and learning.


References:

Hammerness, et al. (2005). How teachers learn and develop. In L. Darling-Hammond and J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world. (pp. 358-389). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Lortie, D.C. (1975). Schoolteacher; a sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.


Art:
hokusai – the wave

cezanne -- still life with apples and oranges