"Invisible Technology"?

“Technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.” - Chris Lehmann

Twitter led me to a blog discussing this concept. And the quote confused me. I thought back to the opening sequence of the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, and wondered, were the tools - the technology - introduced there really supposed to be perceived by humans as oxygen is perceived? If that were true, humans would no more adapt and improve their tools than they adapt and improve their oxygen, and that seems like a very bad idea - especially a very bad idea for "education" to embrace.

Humans get taught about tools in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 (not an embed due to copyright, but a link)

I'm not picking on Chris Lehmann who I see as one of the great educators of our time - but - I have heard this “invisible technology” argument many, many times, especially since the iPad announcement (as Cory Doctorow discusses brilliantly on boingboing), and it troubles me, and baffles me.

I guess because when I argue with schools that certain technologies need not be explicitly learned "at all costs," I am typically told, by educators, how wrong I am.

So, perhaps I'm just looking for consistency of argument, or perhaps I think that we do owe our students some solid sense of how tools are constructed, how they operate, and how they are chosen.

If I walk into a school today, what I will see is this: Though we live in a time when one can very easily absorb “written” information without knowing any of the alphabetic or phonological coding embedded in text, the schools seem extremely committed to the teaching of the explicit technologies of the alphabet and phonics. Though we live in a time when simply speaking out loud can create text in many forms, schools schools seem extremely committed to the teaching of the explicit technologies of writing and keyboarding. Though we live in a time of easy to use, solar powered calculators, schools seem extremely committed to the teaching of the explicit technologies of on-paper mathematical calculation. I have even seen teachers explaining to students the proper handling of the explicit technology of books - don't tear the pages, don't leave the books out in the rain, etc.

These are all explicit technologies for utilizing certain forms of information and communication, as Chris Lehmann's student demonstrates here:

different technologies operate different ways - that is important to understand

We spend years and years of school time teaching one specific set of technologies. Reading ink-on-paper as the ancient Hebrews did, writing as scribes did thousands of years ago, keyboarding as 19th century secretaries did, cyphering just as Bob Cratchit did in Scrooge's counting house. Then, when we get to all the contemporary technologies, we suddenly want "invisibility." See an operating system or a file system? No thanks, that's too confusing. Understand why a computer or a phone does something when we tell it to? Not important, that's over our heads. Be able to change the interface, the way a computer or phone works, in order to adapt to your needs and preferences? Crazy, that's so geeky.

Let me quote Doctorow as he discusses the iPad:

"Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

"But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers)."

"The way you improve your iPad isn't to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals."

And I think Doctorow is right. I think we must offer these opportunities to understand, choose, and use tools, because that is both what makes us human and what enables progress. 

In 1880 you may not have needed to know all the details of steam locomotive technology, but it was still important for students to know the difference between a train and a trolley and renting a horse at the livery stable, and how these all operated – at least passenger interface-wise – if you needed to get somewhere. And the more you actually knew, the more choices you had in life.

important to know in 1880? maybe - but how to read a timetable, how to buy a ticket, how to behave on a train, how to be comfortable on a train - all pretty essential

"Technology" is - quite definably - not "oxygen." Technology is the art of manipulating the world. Technology is, specifically, manipulating the world for our benefit. And, as Heidegger always pointed out, the technologies we live with not only give us control, they themselves structure the way we see things - the way our world is not only perceived, but actually operates.

The gun's existence literally means that the human replaces the big cat at the top of the on-land food chain, for example, which alters not only our view of large sections of the planet but how we view night and sleep as well. The existence of the alphabet not only enables a certain form of reading, it constructs many of our organization systems. The development of numbers and numbering alters fundamental concepts of society.

So, even if I can not actually read alphabetical text, it really helps to know how it works. Even I can't subtract a 2-digit number from a 2-digit number on paper (and I typically cannot), it helps me to have an idea of how that happens. And even if you are not a computer programmer it would help if you could see the file system on the iPad, so you might grow up to be the kind of person who could design a better file system.

Thus I don't want technology to be invisible at all, especially not in schools. Right now we spend years teaching kids about the functional technologies of our past, and, whether we continue that or not, we need to teach them something about the functional technologies of their future.

Remember, "invisible" is "unknown." And "unknown" can not really be our goal in education, can it?

- Ira Socol

An Easter Monday Proclamation of Liberation

On Easter Monday, 1916, a group of Irish patriots seized Dublin's General Post Office and other key, symbolic points in the city, and proclaimed the independence of the Irish Republic.

The Easter Rising Éirí Amach na Cásca lasted seven days and ended with the British Empire murdering the greatest leaders of a generation in Ireland in a yard at Kilmainham Gaol. But those events began not just Ireland's liberation from Britain but the entire 20th Century of Liberation which would sweep across Africa and Asia for the next 60 years. Tiny Ireland became not just a symbol, but a literal exporter of revolution to the globe - the leaders of national liberation movements - from the Jews of Palestine to the Vietnamese, from Indians to Kenyans, came to learn  how to free themselves from their oppressors from Michael Collins - the Easter Rising survivor who led Ireland to victory in the Anglo-Irish War - and his lieutenants.

This is not about Irish history, though, this is about education.

On the night of Easter Sunday 2010 a few of us gathered electronically to battle with the Governor of New Jersey, Christopher Christie, an extremely wealthy ex-federal prosecutor elected as a Republican in 2009. The Governor, allowing his $60,000-per-year paid twitterer to spend the holiday with his family, was on Twitter himself, explaining why his first mission as governor is to cut teacher pay and funding for education in his state. (see the conversations, with @mritzius, with @lgesin, with me, and the Gov himself)

The Governor, not unexpectedly, comes across as a series of Fox News talking points, constantly demanding "shared sacrifice" - though the sharing extends neither to himself nor his class of taxpayers, who typically live in New Jersey to avoid the actual tax bills they'd receive in New York or Pennsylvania, and insisting that New Jersey needs a solution to its extraordinarily high property taxes while refusing to consider any actual solution to that (an increased sales tax or VAT, a rise in the top marginal rates for New Jersey's income tax). In fact, he is simply bullying the teachers, the group charged with developing New Jersey's future, because he knows that their commitment to their students makes them unlikely to strike or otherwise really resist.

When "reformers" in America today talk about education, they are, of course, not discussing students or children or learning or development - they are talking about political economics. They are interested in "efficiencies" not to make schools better, but to make government smaller. They are too often interested in Charter Schools not as innovative examples which lead to new thinking, but as a way to bust some of the last remaining American unions. They are interested in "choice" not for opportunity, but to continue the vicious racial and class divides in the United States. Yes Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Joel Klein, Mike Bloomberg, Arne Duncan, Paul Vallas, Chris Christie - I am talking about you.

On the same evening, Pam Moran, a Virginia school superintendent, posted a wonderful statement on the always fascinating Edurati Review on why we need to move our conversations about true educational re-design to the "front channel." For, in our backchannels, on Twitter and elsewhere, we spend our time discussing re-design, how to make education work for the most kids in the most places, how to move beyond a system designed to fail kids to one which moves kids forward, how to inspire and support teachers to be their best, how to bring parents in - in all the best ways. And these conversations are great and powerful, but they are hidden, as Pam says, from the "mainstream media" and the current political conversation, and that is a recipe for disaster.

Education is a colonial project - oh, not always as obviously or viciously as Teach for America or the KIPP schools - but it is a colonial project. The idea is to take our children and convert them to the uses of our society. And how our schools do that literally determines our collective future. We live in an American society right now in which everyone from the President on down denigrates teachers as somehow greedy, lazy, badly trained, irresponsible people. We send our children off to schools after the President has applauded firing their teachers, after Governors call teachers greedy. We defer maintenance in schools, we close schools, we refuse to equip schools with the technologies used everywhere else on the planet, we reduce education to filling in multiple choice bubbles on standardized tests - and then we are shocked - "shocked," as Casablanca's police chief said, that kids don't care and don't do well during their school day.

So, today, Easter Monday 2010 we need a new Proclamation of Educational Liberation.

Today we must say that we will stand up for our children and our future. We will do it aggressively and publicly. Today we must say we will challenge our "leaders" - Governor Christie, why do lawyers in New Jersey outearn teachers? Isn't teaching, isn't bringing up our children, the most important thing we as a society do? Governor Christie, shouldn't you and Bill O'Reilly pay a bit more of your income in taxes so teachers can earn a decent living, kids can go to great schools, and middle class families can afford property taxes? President Obama, can you please stop calling education a "race" - races have winners and losers, and we want all of our kids to succeed. Texas "Education" Leaders, please stop using schools for indoctrination and use them to help children grow in to critical thinkers. Mr. Duncan, please stop equating test scores with learning.

We need to raise these questions and challenges every day, to every leader, to demand that they break from their talking points and explain what they mean and why they mean it. We need to engage them on Twitter, on blogs, in letters to the newspaper, in phone calls to radio stations, in letters to reporters and editors and TV anchors demanding better conversations. We must bring this all to that "front channel."

But we have to do more than that. Padraig Pearse played to the grand stage in the Easter Rising and set the spark, but Michael Collins took to the hills and won the war, and we must do the same. Stop being circumspect. Talk to your neighbors, your friends, your families. Speak up at church or synagogue or your yoga retreat. We must change the national conversation not just from the top down but from the bottom up. We must explain our visions of education, and our passion for education, to all who we can get to listen. Because this really, really matters.

Americans have always been conflicted about education and educated people. This might be the only place in the world where we might think someone "too smart" to lead us, the only place where "I'd like to have a beer with him" trumps "how smart he/she is" in electing a president. And without the history of clergy/teachers that Europe and other continents have, Americans have always had minimal respect for teachers. Back in the mid-19th Century Henry Barnard wanted women as teachers because he could pay them less and listen to them less - and that was a bad start. The other "professions," lawyers, doctors, architects - almost entirely male around 1900 - raised their statuses and their salaries through exclusive organizations, teachers - mostly female - were left scrambling to create industrial-style unions to meet their role in industrialized education. So teachers, who have more education behind them than lawyers, work longer hours than lawyers, and are far more essential to the general society than lawyers, get less respect and much less income. And we often build schools as concrete block bunkers because it is cheap, while our restaurants are far more engagingly designed - thus we are fat and stupid.

So, if there is to be another "American Century" we must be better. We must make education desired, respected, and fundamentally understood. And if we don't do it, who will?

"We will loft education anew when we generate an ever-increasing ratio of educators who believe in a mission to create spaces of inspiration for learners and learning.  It will take more than 1 or 10 percent of us speaking the poetic and political voices of passion, joy, and drive to create those spaces in which young people and educators can thrive in these contemporary days. Our vision must become a vision of lift, influence, and power that creates a front channel for our voices, shifting us out of the backchannel.  We need our best educational technologists, our courageous leaders, our creative geniuses to create the front channel we must become. It’s our job, and our time, to increase the inspiration ratio in every community in this nation." - Pam Moran

Padraig Pearse and his compatriots were shot to death for their efforts. I'm not asking for that - just for a bit of time, a bit of discomfort, a bit of effort.

This is something we must do.

- Ira Socol

Welcome iPad and Web 1.5

I've used tablet computers for years, and I love tablets.

I would, if I could, dump the whole Interactive White Board thing and throw a Tablet PC down in the center of every four or five students. With this tool, running Windows7 and no other paid software at all, students could see and hear text, could watch videos, could listen to podcasts, and better still, they could create via keyboard (real or on-screen), via video camera, via microphone, via speech recognition, via handwriting, via drawing, and they could instantly share their creations with their classmates or the world.

So why does Apple's iPad leave me so disappointed? OK, not the iPad itself - Apple is entitled to sell anything it can for whatever price its acolytes will pay ("I’d wear their underwear if they made it."). Rather, it is the embrace of the iPad idea by anyone in the educational community which disappoints me, because this seems - to me - a massive step backwards. 

Yes, we're moving back from Web 2.0 to Web 1.5, and Steve Jobs will only charge you $500 (or $1000) for that privilege. 

When David Pogue tells you that "techies hate it" but "everyone else loves it" he is accurately reflecting those who surround him in The New York Times building, a group who, like Jobs, has always been a bit scared of Web 2.0... of everyone having equal status as creators and consumers, of open source software and free content. So when Pogue writes, "the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on," he is expressing the fondest wish of The New York Times Company, which has never been very happy with the free-for-all that the internet has become. 

"Not nearly as good for creating stuff ... infinitely more convenient for consuming it." 

As Web 2.0 has developed there have been, essentially, two different sides of the equation, but the split looks confusing to us because of the frames with which we see our tech companies. On one side we have Apple, Amazon, Barnes&Noble - all of whom want to be "your content store." Remember that Apple "got rich" by figuring out a way to take a nascent music sharing culture and switch it over to a paid, proprietary format. Yes iTunes is cool, yes, it is pretty cheap, but Napster, of course, was a lot cheaper, and a lot more open. Apple got you to buy music for your iPod then, and now they'll get you to buy your newspaper for your iPad. The iPod allowed creative mixing, but the iPod was not a creation tool, it was a storefront in Apple's conception. The iPad is an extension of that theory, as is the Kindle, as is the Nook.

On the other side, a curious mix of companies and organizations, from Google to Microsoft to Adobe to open source collaborators. For these organizations the goal has been compatible and essentially open content which can be used on virtually any device. This side sells access, creativity, and creation, but has no particular interest in actually selling you content. Of course part of this world goes back to the beginnings of the PC when Apple decided to control all the parts in their machines and Microsoft decided to make an operating system which would work with just about anything you plugged into it.

it's all consumption in Apple's iPad ad

But I'm not here to be anti-Apple. I love my MacBook Pro. I wouldn't have paid for it myself, I run Windows on it half the time, but except for those missing keys Steve Jobs tells me I don't need, its a great computer. I'm here, rather, to be against educators rushing to embrace a controlled consumption tool. I believe that education needs to be significantly about creation, and I believe that education is best served when knowledge flows freely - both with ease and at the lowest possible cost. So I do not want schools embracing a technology which limits creation, and I do not want to deliver our students as customers to Apple or Amazon. We've spent a century delivering them to textbook publishers, and it is time to stop.

should one company control access to your students?

With the iPad we are stepping back to an earlier web, a web centered on consumption, before we all created everything we wanted, however we wanted. Before we all began to meet over Skype video calls and G-mail video. Before we became more creators than consumers in our online day. 

And I don't want to go back, not even half a step. 

- Ira Socol

Reading is NOT the goal

All across America schools are desperately concerned with teaching what are often disturbingly referred to as "the 3 Rs" - Reading, Writing, and [A]rithmetic.

All across America teachers, administrators, parents, politicians from Obama to the Lunatic Right, are worried about whether children are learning to read - and to write - and to add and subtract.

And, all across America, this is wrong.

I was presenting at the CSUN Conference on Friday evening, and as I spoke, I realized that what I need to say first, every time, is that we are asking the wrong questions, we are focusing on the wrong things. And by focusing on the wrong things we have turned school into a self-defeating loop, which makes kids miserable and leaves our educational system a failure.

So, I need to begin here: If we define "reading" as interpreting little Roman alphabetical designs inked on to paper (or even "pixeled onto a screen), I don't care if kids learn to read. And if we define "writing" as learning to form those alphabetical codes with 19th and 20th Century "writing tools," I don't care if kids learn to write. And if we define "arithmetic" as memorizing "math facts" or filling a piece of paper with scribbling to divide one number into another, I really don't care if kids learn that at all.

In schools, we treat all of these skills as a "goal," and none of these should ever be a goal. Because when we treat these things as a "goal" we convince kids - and we convince them of this quickly - that all of these abilities are nothing but school chores, with no connection to their lives. And, in the incredibly short space of a couple of years, we take five-year-olds who are dying to come to school and turn them into eight-year-olds who'd rather be anyplace else. Eight-year-olds who hate "reading," who hate "writing," who really hate "math."

And that is a damn shame.

Let me say it this way: There is no reason, in and of itself, to "read." We read to access the information in written form. There is no reason, in and of itself, to "write." We write to distribute informationto others. There is no reason, in and of itself, to do "arithmetic." We manipulate numbers to help us understand and share a series of concepts we call mathematics.

And if kids want to access information, to distribute information, and to work with all the worlds which involve numbers (et al), they will have a reason to find a way - with our help - to make that work. But if we begin with the "chore first," we will have the schools we have right now.

Or, as I said Friday afternoon, "Reading is defined as getting information from a recorded source into your head, Writing is defined as getting information from your head into a form which others can access." And to which I might have added, "Arithmetic is defined as having a common system for sharing quantifiable data."

Toolbelt Theory 2.0

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

Reading matters because we want our students to have effective and efficient ways to access stories and information. Writing matters because we want our students to be creators and distributors of stories and information. Arithmetic matters because we want math concepts to be within the reach of our students. But you know what? How they get to these things, should matter a whole lot less to us.

For some kids alphabetic decoding will be a quick and efficient method of grabbing that information. For some kids, writing with a pen will be a great, fast way to get ideas down into recorded form. For some kids, writing numbers and/or remembering "the times table" will be a short route to manipulating numbers.

And for others, those routes will not work, or they will not work well enough to really give them access.

For all those kids, we need to find other routes to get them content, to get them involved, to get them excited, to get them communicating.

Which is all easy now. We have the technology, from Click-Speak to WYNN, from WordTalk to Windows7 Speech Recognition, from audiobooks to mp3 conversion, to switch to access systems that work. We can use calculators (free ones) and Word's Equation Editor.  We can get kids in, connect them right now.

See, there's a reason US standardized test results collapse after fourth grade. Fourth grade tests simply ask kids to regurgitate the processes we've been banging into them for their first four years of school. They do that well enough. But the processes really don't connect to most on a functional level, so that when they take later content-driven evaluation tests, they fail, because they are not accessing the content. They only know how to "read" to "read." I see this all the time, quick, "fluent" readers who have no idea what they've just read, or why. Kids who form letters perfectly but who can't express themselves. Kids with memorized math facts but no ability to leap into algebra or beyond.

And that's stupid. I, for example, have read James Joyce's Ulysses five times. Yes, five times. I can argue with the best of "'em" on this literary classic. But I have never even held an ink on paper version. I have read the book on cassette (or something like 64 cassettes) twice, on CD, and twice with WYNN the digital literacy system. Likewise I have read hundreds of books from The Great Gatsby to Frankenstein to really boring textbooks without ever "decoding" a single alphabetic word.
 
I have written two books with substantial parts of both dictated via speech recognition. I have done really well in structural engineering classes without being able to subtract on paper well enough to keep track of a checkbook. I blog and tweet to the world without beingable to write about half of the alphabet legibly, unless I am copying already printed text.

So please, when your kids have trouble with the "skills" of school, offer them the way around, the path to the "why." Give them a digital reading system and let them access what's of interest to them. Turn on the speech recognition in windows and let them communicate with the world. Give them a simple way to create math symbols and perform calculations, and allow them to see what math can mean.

These "skills" are not "ends." They are "means." And we should be opening the world to our students by any means possible.

- Ira Socol

Ordering School Books?

What should the contract say when your school purchases textbooks, either ink-on-paper ones or digital ones?

NIMAS has suggested this, to ensure that accessible texts will be available for students with "documented disabilities" (a description which varies by US state):
"By agreeing to deliver the materials marked with "NIMAS" on this contract or purchase order, the publisher agrees to prepare and submit, on or before ___/___/_____ a NIMAS fileset to the NIMAC that complies with the terms and procedures set forth by the NIMAC. Should the vendor be a distributor of the materials and not the publisher, the distributor agrees to immediately notify the publisher of its obligation to submit NIMAS filesets of the purchased products to the NIMAC. The files will be used for the production of alternate formats as permitted under the law for students with print disabilities. Note that the delivery of print versions should not be delayed in cases where the NIMAS fileset has yet to be completed, validated and/or cataloged by the NIMAC."

But this is not really good enough. First, the "documented disability" limitation works against both common decency and educational practice (providing students with what they need), but also against the entire idea of Response-to-Intervention, which requires that we test accommodations and remediations before labelling kids.

Today, at the CSUN 2010 Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, Jeff Diedrich of MITS made a better suggestion.

If you buy books for your school your contract should state that the entire contents and formatting of the purchased texts be available by the delivery date in a fully accessible digital version available to every student (I'm paraphrasing his exact wording). And that version will either be (your choice) provided by the publisher or prepared by the school district (the latter option will require early delivery of a copy which can be cut apart and scanned).

Thus, we skip right past all the controversies and ambiguities of US copyright law and the Chaffee Amendment, and move ourselves directly to universal design, where students get to choose their content delivery system. And you do that simply via the power of the consumer.

We don't really want to, another speaker today, re-open the copyright law thing, since, inevitably, that would become all about Disney's 500 year copyright to Snow White and the RIAA's right to sue random people for millions of dollars and the Authors' Guild ability to stop people from reading books. Instead, we simply want to use the powers of the purchase order to create "the change we need."


A few notes are in order: 
(1) Remember, digital does not mean accessible. Many textbook publishers go to great lengths to provide completely useless digital versions, which cannot be read by screen readers, or otherwise be used creatively by students. However, Pearson Publishing is beginning to offer highly accessible html versions, so consider that.
(2) You always want format flexibility. The more digital versions you can easily create, the more accessible your school will be. DAISY versions do a lot, but can be clunky and hard to learn, and not all versions work with all DAISY players. Plain Text (.txt) or .doc (Microsoft Word) versions are easy to use, but often lack the formatting basic to many textbooks. HTML has a lot of advantages, as is shown by those produced by the Accessible Book Collection.
(3) Bookshare is a fabulous resource but books tend to come in just one format. Conversion isn't always easy.
(4) There are good resources at the Accessible Instructional Media page on the MITS-Michigan's Integrated Technology Supports site.
(5) You might also want to take a look at "The Right to Read," so we build understanding that unless access to what is in books is the same for all, we are choosing to leave people behind.

- Ira Socol

The Civil Right to Broadband

Many Americans have a very limited view of human rights. At least a substantial minority not only doubt the right to health care (and thus life), but doubt all rights to privacy (see supporters of "The Patriot Act" and police search policies backed by "conservative" right-wing judges like Scalia, Roberts, Thomas), and surely a majority doubt the right to a home or a reasonably equal opportunity at education.

So I may not be on the main political pathway in the United States when I bring up the idea of a Finnish-style civil right to Broadband Access, but here I go, hoping that those in more socially advanced nations might hear the call.

Let's suppose I am in a hotel - imagine it is an Embassy Suites, a Hilton operation. I stay at Hilton properties from time to time. If you stay at a Hampton Inn you get great rooms, even a lapdesk for computing from bed, and free internet. But if you pay more, at an Embassy Suites or a top Hilton property, some of those perks disappear.

 Seaport Village, San Diego, California

So, let's say I'm staying at this hotel. It's very nice. I'm overlooking San Diego harbor. Last night there was a concert and fireworks off the fantail of the USS Midway, just across the street. The coffee sucks but the free breakfast is quite nice, as is the staff. A fresh copy of USA Today arrives at my door each morning...

But internet costs almost $13.00 (US) a day, and I don't read ink-on-paper newspapers. So, as someone with a "print disability," the Hilton chain is discriminating against me, violating my civil right to equal access to a routinely provided customer service, my civil right to equal access to information, and my civil right to access to the communication tools of citizenship.

And that is wrong.

Just as it is wrong to assign homework which requires (or may benefit from) information access if not all students have the same kind of information access. Student A's report on Zimbabwe comes from a home filled with books and with broadband computer access. Student B's report on Zimbabwe comes from a home with no books and no internet. What is the homework measuring? Student C can go online from home for help with math homework. Student D cannot. What is the homework measuring?

Student E, a first year university student, has access to the internet and the library's research tools from home, Student F, her classmate, does not. What will their respective grades likely show?

Job Applicant G can look up the employer on their phone on the way to the interview and remind himself of key points. Job Applicant H cannot. Who has the advantage?

Yes, there are ways around this. Student B can spend five hours after school at the public library, if it is open that late, if computer access can be continuous, if the walk home is safe, if he has no responsibilities at home. Student F can do the same with the college library, if she does not have to work, or care for her family. Job Applicant H can have a better memory, or be more organized. But, whatever you say, one group is at a decided disadvantage.

We shouldn't always have to be "better than"...

In the US, and in most nations, the last "civil right" might be the opportunity to be "equal." If, for example, a black man like Barack Obama had made the "mistakes" as a young man that George W. Bush made - drunk driving arrests, walking out on a National Guard commitment, drugs, etc - Obama could not possibly have become President. Obama had to be much "better than" an equivalent white candidate.

A black male, a "print disabled" person, a poor person, has to be much "better than" just to be close to equal, and nowhere is that more true than in the typical school.

There are many things we must do to break the persistent cycle of social reproduction which keeps people in poverty generation after generation, but one of those steps is universal access to information.

In other words, a civil right to broadband.

- Ira Socol

The School I'd Like

I rarely respond to internet memes or challenges, but this one struck me as interesting. If I was designing a school, if I was creating my educational utopia, what would it look like?

The schools I see are almost all failures. Not because of bad teachers, as Newsweek claims - there are bad teachers - but many more great and very frustrated ones,  and not because of unprepared students, though students who come from struggling American homes abound, and not because of a lack of competition, equating education with Walmart is just sad, but because we live with a fundamentally flawed design for education.

So, "my school" would seek to address those fundamental problems.

Summerhill School

I have to admit, it would not be on-line, though much would happen in "the cloud." I think that there is value in creating a safe learning place, apart from an increasingly intolerant-to-kids-and adolescents world. This is part reversal of our current norm, and part not. Our schools, as destructive as they are to many kids, as intolerant (by design, we proclaim "zero tolerance") as they are of mistakes and failings and differences, are still refuges for many - places where violence and disrespect and even hunger can be left behind. So I like the physical place. I like a physical place filled with spatial and environmental options - noisy to quiet, outdoor to indoor, light to dark, private to collaborative, active to passive...

I believe in creating beautiful educational spaces, spaces which encourage, uplift, inspire. So many of our schools look like brick and block bunkers - increasing the prison metaphors - and I want to do the opposite. And I like schools which sit at some kind of divide, campus and city, or commercial and rural, or land and sea, because I think there's wonderful inherent tension there, as students straddle two worlds, learning the essential art of code-switching through every day experience.

There is an art to this, and it should be an endlessly changing art, with students empowered to use spaces as they need - think Black Box Theatre more than fixed purpose spaces.

And this community learning space must exist freely in time as well as space. It must at least embrace the traditional long university day, and perhaps be a 24 safe place. Students should, certainly after a certain age - if not always - use it as they require, the fixed schedule is a sad hold-over of the industrial revolutions, and has no place in education.

Likewise, the school would float within the calendar, not govern it. I don't believe in semesters or "marking periods" or whatever. Learning does not work in artificial school time divisions at all. I know I usually get most interested, most connected, to a course's content, or to a project, after about ten weeks. It is at that point that I could really roll. Of course, at that point its time, in most schools, to wrap it up and abandon the topic. Students in my school could could sit down with teacher-mentors and plan a path, and perhaps a timetable, but of course they could adjust that as it went along.

No grades, No grades

The two "grading systems" would be gone. They are both destructive and useless. I imagine a K-12 school, maybe a K-14 school, with two divisions - K-4, and 5-12 (or 14). Within these divisions children would progress at their own rates, and they would work with groupings based on interests and capabilities. There would be no "grade level expectations." No "standardized" testing. No students "retained" or "promoted" apart from their age group. (One of the most bizarre arguments in American education is the objection to "social promotion." The entire education structure right now is based on age-linked cohorts, of course we have "social promotion.")

And there would be no grading either. Call it "A" "B" C" or "100" "95" "90" or "4.0" "3.5" 3.0" it is all meaningless. In "my school" students would evaluate themselves, peers would review their work, faculty would review their work. They'd either go on or go back and rethink. We should be teaching, not accepting failure.

No subject divisions

Everything a student can study can, and should, bring every "subject" into play. Shakespeare? There's literature and writing, history and citizenship, sciences from construction through lighting, the mathematics of sightlines, the geography of England. Bridge Design? There's math and physics and chemistry and environmental science and politics and history and art and literature. Anything can include anything if the teacher-mentor pushes questions which need to be answered. And technology now allows students to reach out to information and people who can help with all of these things.

Few things damage education more than the artificial divisions the "Carnegie Units" created, it is time to consign these to the past.

Students at the College of the Atlantic

Technological Freedom

The students in "my school" would have technological freedom, they would be encouraged to discover the best ways to use media and ICT to support their learning, to build their "Toolbelts." The school could be wireless, or it could be open to 3G networks, but it would be open to the world of today, and to the world which is coming. Just as a vast paper library indicated a "great school" in 1970, an openness to the world's resources indicates a "great school" now. And just as good students learned how to use those paper libraries 40 years ago, good students today must explore the many ways to access the world's information systems now.

We wouldn't have an "Apple School," or an "iPhone School" or a "Google School." We wouldn't even be 1:1. We'd have far more devices than students around, including the student owned devices. We be linked and connected, and offer choices at every turn.

All materials would be available in multiple representations, and students would be encouraged to choose the representation system which best worked for that student in that moment. In these ways we'd be constructing lifespan learners, and lifespan technology users.

A part of the community

Students need some separation from "society." They need to be in a safe place where mistakes and failure are fine. But they cannot be "apart" from their society. Students come in to school with the world clinging to them, we owe it to them to let them find explanations, solutions, answers. We owe it to them to help them become their own change agents.

Connection also provides opportunity, as Neil Postman wrote in 1969:

"Let us assume that the City of New Rochelle, like many other cities, has serious problems with traffic control, crime and law enforcement, strikes, race relations, urban blight, drug addiction, garbage disposal, air pollution, and medical care. Students would be formed into teams, each team consisting of a teacher, a high school senior, perhaps a lay member of the community, and ten or a dozen students. Their task would be to select one of these problems for study, with a view toward designing authentic, practical solutions to it. They would do whatever they needed to do in order to learn about the problem (including previous attempts to solve it) and to communicate to others their own solutions. For example, imagine one team has selected the "crime" problem for study. Some students could spend two or three weeks at the police station, serving in some capacity that would allow them to observe the problem from the perspective of the police. (Some might even go out on calls with police officers.) Others might report regularly to the criminal court, observing the problem from that vantage point. Students could spend many days on interviewing assignments: insurance men, police officers from other towns, ex-convicts, prison wardens, merchants, town officials, et al. Students could review the available literature (both non-fiction and fiction), correspond with prisoners, write to law enforcement officers in other countries. The classroom would be used as a place of assembly when students needed to assess their findings, and to plan and organize additional inquiries. It is important to stress here that the activities described above do not constitute "field trips." Most of the students' "school life" would be spent outside the school where the realities of the problems being studied are to be found. However, included in the process must be a serious attempt to offer solutions and to communicate these to the appropriate people. This might require meeting in school for the purpose of writing resolutions, letters, pamphlets, handbills, etc. Or the students might wish to publish a newsletter about the problem, or produce an audio-tape for broadcasting on the local radio station (in which case some students might spend a week or two at the radio station), or produce a film for presentation to the town council. The possibilities are almost inexhaustible."

A willingness to change

Nothing is bigger than this. "My school" should always be willing to change - in fundamental ways. Yesterday Alec Couros linked me to this quote:

"It is interesting to me how many progressive and leftist scholars one can find in the academy, and yet so few of them actually challenge the terms of the debate within the academic system. Progressives who turn a critical eye to all the other institutions in society often seem unwittingly to assume that the academy is either a neutral or benevolent institution that simply needs personnel changes or different policies and procedures. Because the actual structure of the academy goes unquestioned—from tenure processes to grading systems to academic hierarchies—even progressives get trapped in the academy’s meritocratic myth, which either makes them insane or turns them into fascists. All the collective action we support outside the academy seems to disappear inside it—as we slave away in our offices in order to make sure everyone knows how busy and hardworking we are. Instead, we could be working together to support each other, build community, demystify the academic industrial complex, swap survival strategies, and promote life for all of us." (Smith, 2007, pp. 144-145) Complete reference: Smith, A. (Fall/2007) Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion - Volume 23, Number 2, pp. 140-145

And this illustrates the trap so many educators fall into. They build, or enter, a structure, and then accept that structure as a "natural" and unchangeable experience. It should be neither.

Great schools change as students need them to change.

My own dream? Trinity College, Dublin. Any job openings?

I could say much more, but I'll leave it there. And ask you: What does the school of your dreams look like?

- Ira Socol

41. Othering Students [the "digital native" conspiracy]

a "chapter" from a bizarre, long paper I wrote titled "Literacy (as) Tyranny," perhaps best described by one reviewer as a "precious polemic." (There are thirteen chapters, but these are given random prime numbers for reasons I will not detail here.) re: This NYT Idea of the Day

“As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.” – Motoko Rich in The New York Times, 27 June 2008.[1]

Standardized. Enemy. Precious. Common culture. Only.

“While oral culture has a rich immediacy that is not to be dismissed, and electronic media offer the considerable advantages of diversity and access, print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability – and the many sorts of human continuity it allows – would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment.” – Dana Gioia, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts in the preface to Reading at Risk, 2008.[2]

Irreplaceable. Focused. Contemplation. Complex communications and insights. Intellectual capability. Human continuity. Impoverishment.

"I cannot live without books," Thomas Jefferson wrote to Adams late in life, knowing Adams would understand perfectly. Adams read everything --Shakespeare and the Bible over and over, and the Psalms especially. He read poetry, fiction, history. Always carry a book with you on your travels he advised his son, John Quincy. "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. In a single year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, among all Americans with a college education, fully a third read not one novel or short story or poem. Don't be one of those, you of the Class of 2008. Make the love of learning central to your life. What a difference it can mean. If your experience is anything like mine, the books that will mean the most to you, books that will change your life, are still to come. And remember, as someone said, even the oldest book is brand new for the reader who opens it for the first time. You have had the great privilege of attending one of the finest colleges in the nation, where dedication to classical learning and to the arts and sciences has long been manifest. If what you have learned here makes you want to learn more, well that's the point. Read. Read, read!” – David McCullough, Address to the Graduates, Commencement Exercises, Boston College, 19 May 2008.[3]

Cannot live without. Always. Central to your life. Read. Read!

We are clearly in grave danger. Let us, for a moment, skip over the fact that neither McCullough nor Gioia, or even The New York Times, can define, or be bothered to attempt to define, “reading.” Let us simply focus on the overwrought panic expressed above. This is not just language normally associated with grave security threats, it is the language of crusaders. Failure to stop the drift of our children away from books and toward digital screens is every bit as imperative as victory at the Battle of Tours (or we might say, Battle of Poitiers, or, in Arabic: معركة بلاط الشهداء ‎ (ma‘arakat Balâ ash-Shuhadâ’) the Battle of Court of The Martyrs[4]), the A.D. 732 battle for the soul of Europe.

Standardized. Enemy. Precious. Common culture. Only. Irreplaceable. Focused. Contemplation. Complex communications and insights. Intellectual capability. Human continuity. Impoverishment. Cannot live without. Always. Central to your life. Read. Read!

On the side of the printed and ‘legitimately’ published book – on the side of light – we have standards, culture, commonality. Focus, human continuity, complex communications, and intellectual capability. While in the dark flicker rate of the computer or mobile phone screen we have impoverishment and our mutual destruction.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the constant refrain of much of our literary canon. As Joseph Conrad saw the creeping threat of the non-literate natives in The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness, and the even more powerful threat created when those from our “common culture” become entwined in that darkness,[5] (Young, 1995) so we are now being told that our culture is being threatened by a powerful invader and those traitors who have aligned with them. They will as surely destroy our libraries and the fabric of our lives as the barbarian Norsemen destroyed the abbeys and libraries of ninth century England.

The threat, of course, is from our children, and we can argue (Rich), wail (Gioia), or pray and plead for conversion (McCullough), but the threat is real, the threat is imminent. Our future has become our destruction.

Standing at the gates of our civilization is a horde: Simply take the reverse of Gioia’s words about the literate society he sees as lost – unfocused, uncontemplative, simplistically communicative, with no insight, no intellectual capability, and no interest in human continuity. With this view in mind, we would certainly expect our classroom interactions to be a battle.

And it is a battle with an alien force. ‘“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee [said in Motoko Rich’s New York Times article]. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”[6]

“You see them everywhere,” John Palfrey and Urs Gasser write in the excerpt from their book Born Digital that they have chosen to post on their website. “The teenage girl with the iPod, sitting across from you on the subway, frenetically typing messages into her cell phone. The whiz kid summer intern in your office who knows what to do when your e-mail client crashes. The eight-year-old who can beat you at any video game on the market—and types faster than you do, too. Even your niece’s newborn baby in London, whom you’ve never met, but with whom you have bonded nonetheless, owing to the new batch of baby photos that arrive each week. All of them are “Digital Natives.” They were all born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online. They all have access to networked digital technologies. And they all have the skills to use those technologies. (Except for the baby—but she’ll learn soon enough.)”[7]

Palfrey and Gasser add these sentences: “Maybe you’re even a bit frightened by these Digital Natives.” “There is one thing you know for sure: These kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that you did growing up.” “Digital Natives are tremendously creative.”[8] “Digital Natives perceive information to be malleable; it is something they can control and reshape in new and interesting ways.”[9]

Palfrey and Gasser are not being negative. Their entire book is about promise: “And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways—if we let them.”[10] And yet they choose to describe “Digital Natives” as unitary, born differently, and completely outside “our” experience. They begin by describing an entire complex generation as outside of society-as-we-know-it. “Native” – as a word - carries significant connotations in American culture and American literature. The Visual Thesaurus[11] links it to words like “aboriginal” and “indigenous.” Wikipedia says, “However, in the context of colonialism - in particular, British colonialism - the term "natives", as applied to the inhabitants of colonies, assumed a disparaging and patronising sense, implying that the people concerned were incapable of taking care of themselves and in need of Europeans to administer their lives; therefore, these people resent the use of the term and consider it insulting, and at present Europeans usually avoid using it.”[12]  It should be fair to assume that two Harvard University law professors[13] did not choose this term out of naiveté. 

These “natives” use odd and simplistic communication structures. They do not speak in grammatically (for English) correct sentences. Rather they “text” and “IM” and “tweet.” They lack sophisticated language and rely instead on ideograms, whether “lmao” or ;-) or even J. They lack the intellectual focus necessary for sustained straight line study. And, they are “born” to all this. In other words, they are exactly like the Native Americans and enslaved Africans white Europeans encountered in eighteenth and nineteenth century North America. Exotic, strange, and while interesting, dangerous. Surely no complex culture could be lying among those painted buffalo blankets or recursive stories told on the plains. Surely, if Africans are to display any possible intellectual heft they must learn to dress and speak like an Englishman.

Let’s go back to Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English. Does she actually believe that, “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message”? Her statement seems to imply that she believes these children are indeed, “born digital,” and that these actions are genetically determined instincts, and not a skill set. This is a surprising view of Darwinist Theory indeed, but perhaps not unexpected in an educational system in which it is often accepted that “success in mathematics depends on some innate ability” (New Jersey Mathematics Coalition 1996)[14] Whether this “genetic origin” notion is used as praise (‘Asian students do so well in math.’) or slur (‘Black students will never go to college.’) the goal is to eliminate performance incentive for the teachers by creating a “nothing I can do” paradigm.

Carol Jago does not want to teach text-messaging, or she is incapable of teaching text-messaging, but her assertion that the teaching of how best to use a communication tool is unnecessary is absurd. We “teach” many things, from how to throw a ball more accurately to how to read specific genres to how to write more clearly. We teach them even if students arrive at school having learned about these things in other contexts.

“Ultimately, like other forms of marketing rhetoric, the discourse of the “digital generation” is precisely an attempt to construct the object of which it purports to speak,” says David Buckingham in a paper written for the Macarthur Foundation. “It represents not a description of what children or young people actually are, but a set of imperatives about what they should be or what they need to become.” [15]

Those who speak of the “digital generation” and of “being born digital” and of “digital natives” are not choosing a unique path. Much literature has been created defining “generation gaps” throughout US history, and the process of “othering” children (Howe and Strauss 1992). Surely the communications battle between the “Missionary” and “Lost” Generations, between those raised with books and newspapers and those raised on film and radio, between the earnest intentions of Upton Sinclair and the creative freedom of Fitzgerald and Dos Passos,[16] parallels the arguments we see today. But the lack of uniqueness can not be equated with a lack of destructiveness.

In an educational system that has consistently struggled with “the other” (Lareau 2000, Tatum 1997, Macleod 1987, 1995), embracing a notion which makes all students “alien” carries with it the likelihood of a complete classroom communications breakdown. And there is no faster way to create that sense of alienation than by othering the language of any group not holding power.

Othering Students by Ira David Socol is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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[1] Rich, M. (2008) Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times, 27 June 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html

[2] Gioia, D, (2008) Preface to Reading at Risk. National Endowment for the Arts.Washington DC. p. vii

[3] McCullough, D. (2008) Address to the Graduates, Commencement Exercises, Boston College, 19 May 2008. http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/08/McCullough_BCCommencement08.pdf

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours

[5] Young, R. (1995) Colonial Desire. Routledge. London. p. 2

[6] Rich, M. (2008) Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times, 27 June 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html

[7] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt.php

[8] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt.php

[9] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt-2.php

[10] Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U. (2007) Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. Basic Books, New York.  http://borndigitalbook.com/excerpt-3.php

[11] http://www.visualthesaurus.com/landing/?word=native&ad=mwcom.dict.txt1

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native

[13] http://borndigitalbook.com/authors.php

[14] New Jersey Mathematics Coalition (1996) New Jersey’s Mathematics Standards. http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/nj_math_coalition/framework/standards/std_vision.html

[15] Buckingham, D. (2008) Introducing Identity. In Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. MacArthur Foundation paper. p. 15

[16] Howe, N. and Strauss, W. (1992) The new generation gap. The Atlantic. December 1992. http://www.etext.org/Politics/Progressive.Sociologists/marthas-corner/Generation_Gap--Atlantic.Dec92