Four Barriers? Really?

[Nathan Lowell]

The following is a blog post I left for my students to consider while reading the first chapter of our text - "Toward Digital Equity: Bridging the Divide in Education" by Solomon, Allen, and Resta. Connie suggested that I bring the post here for our discussion as well. I haven't tried to edit it but rather have left it pretty much intact as both "conversation starter" and "exemplar of bloggy goodness in an educational setting." Feel free to discuss from any direction you like.
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In Solomon, Allen, and Resta, the first chapter provides an interesting and abbreviated over view of the evolution of the computer in education spaces. There’s some good information in there. My problem with the set up of four barriers to educational equity:

Barrier one - “Access to up-to-date hardware, software, and connectivity.”

As you read about this in detail next week, consider what the term “up-to-date” means. There is no barrier to “up-to-date software.” Go to http://portableapps.com and download everything you need. It’s free. You’ll need a $10 usb drive to store it on.

How new is “up-to-date hardware”? We tend to focus on cpu clock speed and drive space, but the reality is that for educational purposes, the basic five year old desktop machine is more than adequate. Memory upgrades are easy and inexpensive and even outdated Microsoft operating systems can be purged in favor of free, high performance replaceents which can make some of those old machines dance rings around much newer and faster models.

Connectivity? More is better of course but I would submit that the problem with online resources is not the bandwidth but the time. Dialup is purgatory at times, but some simple tuning - and a willingness to offload heavy network use to podcatchers, bittorrent, and other time shifting technologies can get around some of it. ANY connectivity is better than NO connectivity, but the specific educational benefit of fat pipes over skinny ones is open for debate. If we continue - as educators - to design for the Lexus crowd, then people on public transportation have every right to complain it.

Barrier two - “Access to meaningful, high-quality, and culturally responsive content along with the opportunity to contribute to the knowledge base represented in online content.”

This is one of the artifacts of the radical change in outlook that’s occurred over the last five years. I can give you access to buildings full of meaningful, high-quality, and culturally responsive content by sending you to the local library. That’s not exactly a barrier to educational access. It’s also not terribly useful if you don’t know what you need to look for. Google doesn’t work on the library shelves and, frankly, LC and Dewey don’t do that good a job at abstraction, but that’s a side issue.

The best way I can demonstrate the flaw in this supposed barrier is to ask you to answer the following question:

“Do you want a book that explains whatever-it-is or do you want to connect to the person who can explain the book to you?”

I’ve long maintained that the value of the internet is not to connect people to content but to connect people to people. The latest spiffy Mike Welsch video maybe interesting, intriguing, or amusing but until you actually connect with somebody else over it, it remains a private conversation which may or may not have taught you something. Like the author of a book, the video has been broadcast into the present, and while it’s a powerful message, having access to Mike rather than his video might ultimately be more useful.

Barrier three - “Access to educators who know how to use digital tools and resources effectively.”

This is a “Duh” moment for me. Teachers need to know how to teach. We don’t consider that teachers who can’t use an overhead projector in their classrooms are barriers to education because they use the tools they know fluently to reach their students. The *big* problem here is that the majority of educators operating in online environments don’t know how to teach there. At all. Period. One single fluency would be enough.

Barrier four - “Access to systems sustained by leaders with vision and support for change through technology.”

There’s so much wrong with that statement, I don’t know where to start. To begin with, we need a good understanding that the “system” in this context is “a school.” We need to acknowledge that the leaders in question are not actually IN the school, but are the hands on the switch at the school district. We need to realize that the “system” is becoming irrelevant in most meaningful ways.

The largest problem and the biggest obstacle to equity represented in this barrier is that the system is designed to be inequitable. Changing the design to promote equitable access will take a lot more than technological change. It will require a rethinking of the political and fiscal underpinnings before any meaningful “change through technology” can occur.

Further, each of these barriers carries a presupposition that “access” is a necessary and sufficient condition. If we only had *access* to tech, content, teachers, and administrators, then all would be well. The reality is that we already have access to most of this and even five years later, it’s not doing a whole lot of good.

In defense of the authors, a lot has changed since the first days of the new millenium. Unfortunately, while the technology has changed radically, the re-defined culture has not yet been uniformly perceived by the people who live in it.

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Five years ago, when this book was written:
- Ning didn't exist
- Distance Education was still an oddity
- Technology integration in the classroom was having your projector mounted in the ceiling

A lot has changed, but one thing hasn't. We still think it's ok to assign a book that's out of date, out of touch, and frankly mis-leading as a text in a college class. This volume came recommended to me as a "good source" for examining the relationships between technology, culture, and education. It is, but mostly as a jumping off place to explore how things have changed and how out of touch the institutions really are.

[Skip Zilla]

(Here's a book that's not out of date you might want your students to read.)

Kevin Kelly's book in progress at Technium and "copied" as an article titled Better Than Free at InFed.org attempts to answer the question "What can't be copied?"

(Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the popular Technium, Cool Tools, True Film, and Street Use websites. He is the author of Out of Control.)

[Skip Zilla]

Kevin Kelly gave an engaging TED talk, How does technology evolve? Like we did, a couple of years ago, too., that's stuck in my eye on technology. If your students haven't seen it, it might be worth their time to view it.

[Laura Gibbs]

Nathan, I am so in synch with your comments here. Agree agree agree.

The one I wanted to chime in on from my own perspective as a teacher is the people-to-people connection. The single biggest change that has happened for me by going online is to make the student community into my classes a network of connected readers and writers. Instead of writing for me, the students are writing for each other, reading each other's writing all the time, and I am just the coach who is helping them do the best they can with their writing (some of them have been badly served by past schooling and are college seniors with big writing problems... very little REAL writing happens in college these days - almost no real revision, lack of feedback etc. - and the effects are undeniable).

So, instead of writing because writing is required, students are able to write in order to share stories, ideas, information, experience, WITH OTHERS. That totally changes the name of the game - they are so motivated to write for their peers. They may have already decided that they don't care about writing something of poor quality for me (I'm just the teacher, and I'm paid to read whatever they write) - now when they are writing for their peers, who are doing them a favor by reading their writing, they want to impress them, entertain them, win them over. They learn from each other - by seeing lots and lots and lots of other students' writing, they can get all kinds of ideas they can use for themselves.

This is all so easy in the digital world:
blogs - free
wikis -free
websites - free
images and image hosting - free
web-based documents - free
randomizing tools to connect ALL students even in big classes - free

The only real barrier to my online teaching would be the low expectations that students bring to class, based on the passive, impersonal, and superficial work they are doing in most of their other classes. I have to do a lot of work to make them realize that they really can take charge of their own education (and that I am not the locus of learning; I'm just the catalyst) - they pick up this vague prejudice against the Internet from their regular professors, and that vague prejudice really holds them back, so that they often do not even realize that right here, right now, for free (excellent computers in our school library and labs, open 24 hours a day), the Internet provides amazing learning opportunities for all, especially for people who are working together and helping each other online.

[Connie Weber]

Laura, this is so true:

"So, instead of writing because writing is required, students are able to write in order to share stories, ideas, information, experience, WITH OTHERS. That totally changes the name of the game - they are so motivated to write for their peers."

And this relates to the discussion that Skip posted: open education movement, which you have also participated in.

Nathan thank you very much for starting this as a forum on Fireside. BTW, I love your humor running through on the recent posts: "my inner Eeyore" and "Technology integration in the classroom was having your projector mounted in the ceiling"!

[Nathan Lowell]

I wonder why it is I never see the typos until the post has been up a while?

[Connie Weber]

what typos?
I don't see any.
Good to have you around, I'll say it again.
Getting back to talk about "what technology used to mean":
I thought I was getting technological in 10th grade when I took a typing class. And it was REALLY big news later on in my life when the teachers moved from the "ditto machine" to a photocopier.
This reminds me of talking with my dad about how refrigerators used to be... I'm getting really off track now but maybe you'll forgive me: they used to cut blocks of ice out of Lake Michigan (about one foot thick) and sell them to townspeople to put in little wooden cabinets. That was what a refrigerator was. Not the ice-making, water-fountain spouting, climate-controlled two-door gizmo with separate sections like some people have now...

Ok, back to the topic at hand. This is the barrier that strikes me most:
You wrote:
"Barrier three - “Access to educators who know how to use digital tools and resources effectively.”

This is a “Duh” moment for me. Teachers need to know how to teach. We don’t consider that teachers who can’t use an overhead projector in their classrooms are barriers to education because they use the tools they know fluently to reach their students. The *big* problem here is that the majority of educators operating in online environments don’t know how to teach there. At all. Period. One single fluency would be enough."

I'd like to keep addressing this one. Are you saying that there are a lot of good teachers who simply can't transfer the good teaching into the new environment? Or am I reading that into the statement because that's what I think? I really do think it could be done: we can get the high quality "old school" teachers into the new environments to spread their influence more broadly. It's just taking a lot of hand-holding and support... I'm not giving up on this! (I'm ever, always the pie-in-the-sky idealist...)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Connie, I have to admit that at least on the college level I am a bit pessimistic about good transfer between the teaching strategies that mostly hold sway in college classrooms and what can/does work online.

It's not about the technical skills (now with blogging and wikis and nings, there are plenty of technology platforms that are very user-friendly) - rather, it is the attitude shift in terms of what happens online.

If the idea is that the teacher (professor) is an expert who is going to expound, while students sit, listen, take notes, and take tests, putting that online is not going to work. I'm not a big believer in the lecture hall at all, but if it succeeds (and sometimes I guess it does), then it succeeds because of the personal aura that those professors bring into the room, and the eye-to-eye mesmerizing contact (I'm not being entirely metaphorical here) that holds their students' attention in person, the timbre of their voice, the passion in their speaking. Cult of personality does indeed hold some sway.

If that turns into a powerpoint presentation or a streaming video that the student watches, takes notes about and then takes a test about (the dominant model for online education at my university), we are not going to make real progress at all.

I'm very pessimistic about college education in general - and what few charms it somehow manages to exude are easily lost online. As I see it, the real power of education online comes from getting students to work together, rather than having them all sit staring at the professor at the front of the room... but if the model is that of the lecture hall, moving it online is a step backwards, rather than a step forwards.

[Connie Weber]

Ah, yes, Laura, I totally agree. But it's not the top-down, "here are the knowledge bits" teachers I'm talking about but the ones who are good at listening. I wasn't thinking of the lecture halls, but of the off-school walks and heart-felt talks, the study group meetings, the passionate discourse about the subject.

Those skills CAN be transferred into social networking.

Powerpoint, gag. I have been bored to tears and beyond by guest presenters who use powerpoints like file cards flashed up in front of us to make what was a boring talk even more boring. So deadly. (And many of these are supposedly leaders in education.)

But Laura, I wouldn't give up on college, in general. Of course, I'm spoiled in what I see (just as I am terribly spoiled by the kind of class I teach) because I see most closely a student going through UM Honors program, an exquisitely deep and rich setting for nurturing collaborative--and independent--learning. I see it through my own child's experience. The professors are wonderful. (My only complaint would be that they run the kids ragged. Don't college profs know that people need at least a little free time?)

Thanks for the wonderful comments. Please help me get rid of some of my naivete. Not much hope for getting rid of my rose-colored glasses, the idealistic viewpoint. But I'm a good listener, I hope! I wish I could give everyone what the young people around me get in education. And I'm working to help the students I am involved with CARE about giving to the world. I think it's working... help me to see!

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Connie, I meet wonderful students in my classes every semester, but with only a very few exceptions it seems to me that they get their education here DESPITE what the teaching situation is, not because of it.

Admittedly, this is a research university which has no real commitment to teaching at all - professors on the tenure-track are evaluated ONLY on research at tenure time (teaching does not count at all); professors do not have any training in teaching and little/no opportunities to learn about teaching on the job; the incentives for doing a good job with teaching are nil, while the incentives for an active research life are HUGE; and so on. The system is stacked AGAINST teaching in every possible way at research universities... there are other schools at which the situation is not so extreme, I'm sure - but my whole educational life (undergrad, grad, and my teaching career) has been at big state research universities, and I have seen almost no teaching that inspires me. I love working with my students, but it's definitely a swim-upstream experience professionally. :-)

[Nathan Lowell]

I like what Laura has contributed to this thread, Connie, but what I was really talking about was that the barrier three is really just another over generalized platitude without any meaning.

Back in olden times, teachers used blackboards, then overhead projectors, then lcd projectors tied to powerpoint spewing computers on carts. We don't look at classroom teachers who cannot (or do not) use all the greatest projection/amplification/whatever-bell-and-whistle available as somehow deficient. One of the best classes I ever had was a stats class where the prof would regularly fill a 24' long whiteboard with hand calculated demonstrations of various statistical processes and functions. This was in 1990. Certainly into the "over head projector" days altho perhaps not hot into the "lcd-projected-powerpoint" paradigm of college lecture.

He was able to communicate, engage, and *teach* using his body, his voice, his charisma, and his simple technology. He was brilliant. But he didn't use "digitial tools and resources" at all - let along effectively. Not even the rudimentary tools that were available pre-web.

The problem with the barrier statement is that it implies -- and a lot of people believe this -- that you have to use all the fancy crap or you're just not communicating, not teaching. Teaching -- in any environment -- requires fluency in at least one channel that the teacher and student share. For most teachers even now in the early stages of the 21st century, online fluency doesn't even include email. My online students (who are k-12 teachers) have trouble with simple email tasks like attaching and sending word processing documents. Not all of them, certainly, but enough.

By failing to acknowledge or even define what they mean by "digital tools and resources" the barrier is assumed to be fat pipe resources like audio, video, and -- may all the gods help us -- narrated powerpoints.

My point is that a teacher does not need 25 ways to connect to a student. What a teacher needs is one good one. Anything beyond that is gravy. This barrier is satisfied if the teacher can communicate with the class via an email list serve. From that perspective -- and the notion that my students still have trouble with that basic skill -- I supposed it IS a barrier.

Now, that explained (maybe), I am also convinced that there are a lot of teachers who simply cannot transfer into the online environments. I use the evolution of cinema -- from silent film to talkies -- as my analogy. A lot of teachers have "squeaky voices" and it just doesn't translate online. For some teachers, they're "stage actors" and need the immediate audience feedback of a live audience to keep them focused and on topic. They cannot bear the idea that the audience cannot see their live performance.

But also keep in mind that my perception is that "Distance Education" is an redundant. All education is at a distance. As soon as you have a learner who is separate from a teachers -- that existential other -- then you must use some technology to bridge the gap in space and time. The gap may be small and the technology may be nothing more than spoken language, but the gap exists, a bridge must be used, and that bridge is a technology -- which is the definition of "Distance Education." The artificial discriminants of classroom, online, satellite video, etc are only discussions of media use and efficacy -- not discussions of education at all.

Likewise "Distance Learning" is an oxymoron. The purpose of "learning" is to assimilate a body of knowledge into the cognos of the learner. If it's inside, then how can it be "distance?"

But those are sort of external to the notions of the barriers.

[Skip Zilla]

Nathan,
Your distinction between questions concerning "media use and efficacy" and questions concerning the "education" of students is fundamental to understanding how a synergy of the two is the art of balancing their contributions to achieving personal and social ends.

It may be that my previous replies in this discussion thread strayed off topic. My aim was not to be impertinent, but to nest this discussion within a larger cultural and historical one. I've made reference to Kevin Kelly in my replies because he points to the overwhelming cultural and economic imperative which digital processing has grown to be as expedient (not merely useful) to economic and social life as we know it in our urbanized, global civilization.

In a very real sense, even discussions among well-meaning educators who, for example, seek to rescind NCLB-like policy initiatives and to implement strategies aimed at developing more liberally educated and socially cooperative individuals, become less consequential as socioeconomic and geopolitical matters weigh in more heavily in public discussions. I'm greatly concerned that a growing, and much more commercialized educational-technological complex will overwhelm schooling as we know it in the name of progress. Although all education is essentially local, whole societies concerned with geopolitical advantage will sanction a new breed of educational technologists who consume with public monies what large corporate providers of technologies sell. Again, although education is conducted locally, consider this analogy. Perhaps what we might expect to happen in domestic education spending can be be seen by looking at what happened as military-industrialists were publicly sanctioned to protect their fearful societies from foreign enemies; war-making was technologized at great public cost in peacetime. Is this the kind of cultural imperative that might transform education in the 21st century, not toward the "we the people" kind of education aimed at truly free and just communities, but toward much less enlightened use of technologies in schools aimed at taking the edge off our collective fears?

Again, Nathan, your distinction is fundamental--on the one hand, a matter of the neutral literacy and application of technological capabilities; on the other, a moral and political choice as to why we apply them. To draw the distinction in starkest of terms, Adolph Hitler encouraged members of his regime to master the technologies of radio and film-making to propagandize his own people and others and the technologies of aeronautics and rocketry to bomb civilian "enemy" populations. Had he succeeded in his imperial plans, all of us today most likely would live in a wondrously technologized civilization which only a few would find personally liberating. When I consider how commercialized radio and television media have become, I wonder if the Internet will in time follow suit. Can you genuinely say that radio and television serve us as persons as well as their technological founders imagined? Too many of us believe that somehow the introduction then widespread use of digital technologies in education will transform schools for the better without our active intervention to ensure that democratizing kids learning is the "moral" and social goal. Hopefully, we'll recognize in time that political decision-makers may choose a much less enlightened use of those technologies.

[Nathan Lowell]

OK, I may need a Skip-to-Nate translation on this. I'm just a simple guy with simple ideas, but I *think* I got the gist of your comment.

There's no question that digital tools provide important access to means of production in the new economy, whether it's Attention or Entertainment or Information ... whatever it really turns out to be. But when we're talking about Education -- about the barriers to access to the Institution of Education as it currently exists -- which is what this post is really addressing, all that is moot. The future of the Institution is another very different discussion - which I think is where you're going.

The problem of course is that we're back to the Railroad analogy for Education. The railroads were supplanted by the airlines. Many in the railroad business never saw it coming. The need for speed, the money value of time - first for business and then for leisure -- essentially replaced train travel with air travel in a single generation. In many ways, the use of these digital technologies in the classroom and within the existing paradigms of the Educational Establishment -- even the discussion of barriers to education when couched in terms of arbitrary collections of technology -- is the moral equivalent of sticking wings on box cars. Sure, you're using the technology but you're still only going to Poughkeepsie, and if you really need to get to London, or Tokyo, that winged boxcar isn't going to be adequate because you can't use that technology to get where you want to go -- no matter how many wings you stick on it.

You're actually describing -- I think -- an awareness of the coming singularity event that will soon engulf Education the same way air travel engulfed and virtually wiped out train travel. A "much more commercialized educational-technological complex" seems less likely to me than the evolution of the credentialing function into something where schools no longer hold the monopoly on providing credentials. As the credentials provided by Education continue to devalue in the marketplace, other mechanisms for providing employment and certification will be developed. It seems almost inevitable.

As for the parallels between the internet and radio/television, the major difference is the barrier to entry. In the case of radio and tv, the means of production are controlled first by government licensure, and second by very high capital investment. It's entirely possible that the US will kill its own economy by abandoning net neutrality and I suspect your notion of the net following the way of radio and tv in the US will be prophetic. This is especially true if the FCC gains traction in regulating the content of the internet, ignoring the reality of the medium as a whole. If that tragic -- and all too likely event should come to pass -- then yes, I can see that the US will become an internet wasteland.

As for how the inventors would view our use of radio and tv, I think you're taking perhaps a too narrow view of what that technology has spawned. True, broadcast radio and broadcast tv are - for the most part - miserable. But the technologies they've helped create have undoubtedly gone far beyond what their inventors might have dreamed.

Frankly, I'm much less optimistic that the political decision-makers even realize how stupidly backward the whole paradigm is at the moment, let alone that they may - somehow - discover the error of their ways in order to "choose a much less enlightened use of those technologies."