Technologies, Schooling, and Relevance

from Occupy Wall Street (Reilly, 2011)

I.

From the NY Times today:

“Every time I go to a new country, I buy a SIM card and activate the Internet and download the map to locate myself,” Osama Aljasem, a 32-year-old music teacher from Deir al-Zour, Syria, explained as he sat on a broken park bench in Belgrade, staring at his smartphone and plotting his next move into northern Europe.

“I would never have been able to arrive at my destination without my smartphone,” he added. “I get stressed out when the battery even starts to get low.”

Aljasem is one of the tens of thousands of migrants entering the Balkans, seeking a different way of life. According to the NY Times, WhatsApp, a cross platform messaging app is said to be an essential tool of migrants from Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

II.

My son told us yesterday that he and his gaming team are now ranked first in the United States and third internationally after the last round of competitions. His five member team hails from the United States and Canada. He'd like to attain the semi-pro level in the game in the next year or so as he is now ranked just below semi-pro. His team members range from 16 to 19 years old. This year's international pro competition paid close to a million dollars to the winners and each year sees that winning pot increase sharply as do the numbers of those watching and attending the competition in Europe where E-sports are a rage.


III.

Later today, my husband will undergo video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS).  A tiny camera (thoracoscope) and surgical instruments will be inserted into his chest, between ribs, through several small incisions. The thoracoscope will transmits images of the inside of his chest onto a video monitor, guiding the surgeon. The surgeon is not a young man. He is not a 'digital native' by any stretch--given his 40 years of experience. Fortunately, for us, his digital status has little bearing on his skill or his commitment to learn what must be learned in order to practice his work. He'll text me when he's out of surgery so we can speak.


IV.

In the next few weeks or so, most students here will have returned to a U.S. school where technologies will be doled out like prized pigs and/or kept concealed at the bottom of school bags by kids depending on each school district's definition of acceptable use. Technologies, like smart phones, will continue to be confiscated like contraband at some school sites. At other sites, teachers and administrators of the 'non-digital persuasion' will be allowed to pretend that the technological revolutions that are happening here and across the world do not affect them and by definition, their students. You can almost hear them uttering, "No need to alter how I teach."

Now, I am not suggesting educators should or should not have opinions about technologies and learning.  I'd expect most to have strong opinions. What I am saying is that as some educators and school systems continue to work as if it were the 1950s, the world beyond those school doors is quickly showing how irrelevant such positioning is.

Schooling and Learning and Tech, Oh My!

Gathering Landscape (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I.

It begins this way: I'm at a coffee shop and I overhear two teachers talking about a shift to a 1-to-1 environment at their school next September.  I learn that each student will be issued a Macbook Air. The teachers' voices sound excited and more than the words, their tone catches my ear and I lean a bit closer just as one says to the other:

"It will make note taking so easy."
"Absolutely. We can email our PowerPoints to the kids."

II.

A few days later I am perusing the table of contents for the March issue of ASCD's Ed Leadership, Technology-Rich Learning.  As I read I think, there's an absence here, especially an absence of young voices, of counter narratives.

III.

Maybe we need a new language. One that affords us ways of (un)seeing education--of recasting
this familiarity in new cloth--
      [seeing what is before us
                          in ways we have trouble naming--in utterances that feel
   unfamiliar to the mouth, that

(hopefully)
   give us

                   pause].

IV.

I have long been fascinated by a passage from Martin Heidegger's Building Dwelling Thinking.  It is one I have kept nearby, read and reread, and misunderstood for years.

An odd friend at that.

In explaining the function of the bridge, Heidegger writes:

The bridge swings over the stream "with case and power. It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land. With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.

It is this mind that sees the bridge as that which gathers earth as landscape around the stream that we most need now.

V.

Much of what we talk about when we talk about technology (note the singularity of the term) remain still lifes that fit inside an old frame--a dressed up transmission model with consumption as its main aim and stability as its rudder.

Here there is always a teacher and always a student, regardless of the presence or absence of a school building.

Yet, when I listen to teenagers talk about learning, I think we have run aground.

VI.

I live with a teenager and so it's not too unusual then that I was listening for him and his friends in the Ed Leadership issue. Would we talk less about teaching and more about learning?  Would we understand that dwelling is a requisite of building and thinking comes from dwelling?  I appreciated the questions Will Richardson raised in the first article in the issue, "Students First, Not Stuff" and especially cheered when he quoted Seymour Sarason (2004) who told us, “productive learning is the learning process which engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more” (p. x).

Where is more?

VII.

When I ask my son what he might say about learning and technologies, he tells me:  It's about not knowing where you are or perhaps headed. There is no (pre)made map you can consult. And maybe that's why you can't wait to be in it, even when you don't know where in is.

My son would tell you that programming is a key literacy in his life. Java and Apple Script are giving way to an emerging interest in C++ and PHP.  As I listen to him easily list these interests, I understand that it isn't just the languages that matter,  but also the idea and practice of emergence and agency that permit desire to become dimensional.

After Will's article, I find less and less dimension and more prescription.


VIII.

We, who are so practiced at fixing, need to become unmoored, unsettled, ungrounded. We must remind each other that "the banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream."

We keep getting that backwards, thinking we can outrun the very logic that undoes us.

IX.

"Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build," says Heidegger and I wondered who among us dwells and how such dwelling resituates our talk about schooling as learning.

X.

The real plight of dwelling, Heidegger concludes is that in our search "for the nature of dwelling" we "must ever learn to dwell."

That's what is most absent in conversations about schooling and technologes and learning--the raw admission that we too must dwell.

XI.

When I think about the changes upon us that I sometimes can name, I understand that

It's less about readiness and more about doing.
It's less about discovering and more about being.
It's less about journeying and more about nomadism.
It's less about expert and novice distinctions and more about participation.
It's less about the dichotomy of right and wrong and more about context.
It's less about the prescribed curriculum and more about the made curriculum.
It's less about the fixed organization of student, teacher, and content be them flipped or not and more about middle spaces where (un)forming has infinite gesture.

XII.

Perhaps most startling is that it is less about them, and more about us.
They have already left and we are still unseeing.

XIII.

We have so much to jettison if we are to see the banks emerge.

Re-imagining Education

from video by Nic Askew

A few films to trigger thinking about what it means to educate and be educated.

RE-IMAGINING THE EXPERIENCE OF EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING

Play 

THE FILM QUESTIONS

---

One / ‘Might we have underestimated the value of ‘play’?’ Two / ‘How would your life look if seen through a playful state of mind?’ Three / ‘Might confidence sit at the heart of an extraordinary education?’ Four / ‘Might a playful frame of mind stand to transform the experience of education?’ Five / ‘Might a playful state of mind enable the strength of our true human spirit?’

Creative 

---

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘In this rapidly changing world might creativity need to sit at the heart of an education for all?’

Two / ‘Might education now need to embrace these new forms of literacy for all students?’

Three / ‘Might our future call for creative, literate, self expressive and resourceful students?’

Engaged

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘What might be the consequence of reframing education around the experience of the student?’

Two / ‘Might curiosity have always sat at the heart of an extraordinary education?’

Three / ‘How might our imagination bring the experience of education to life?’

Mentor

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘Might we all have the opportunity to mentor another?’

Two / ‘How powerful is a single moment of validation to a young imagination?’

Three / ‘Might your influence travel further than you might imagine?’

Four / ‘Teacher or not, might you have a part to play in the education of another?’

EVERYONE | MIMI ITO

THE FILM QUESTIONS 

---

One / ‘Might the information age free us to pursue learning centered on individuals and not institutions?’

Two / ‘Perhaps each of us has a part to play in the possibility of education?’

Three / ‘Might a broader definition and responsibility for education bring us all closer together?’

Everyone