Introduction and Apology

[Nathan Lowell]

Greetings, Earthlings. I come in peace.

Whenever I join a group of "Educators" I feel like an alien, so the greeting is appropriate.

The reason for that feeling is that I come from "Technology" -- and only in the last ten years have I become more immersed in things Educational. I built my first computer about 40 years ago as a junior high school science fair project. Back before there was "Middle School." It was a binary adder, but it only won second prize because the math and science teachers didn't really see the value of a numbering system that only used 1s and 0s.

Some things haven't changed a lot.

After a full 20 year career in "data processing/management information systems/information technology" that included working up from data entry clerk to VP of Information Technology, I made the shift to corporate training and spent five years in corporate training classrooms doing stand up training on Microsoft Office products and the like.

Along the way I discovered the internet and first logged on when there were only 10million people playing out here. Back before the Web. Back before Gopher. Back when the world was Archie and Veronica, Telnet and FTP. Instant Messenger has been around since the beginning, but the interfaces have improved. Chatrooms and MUDs were the early MMORPGs and they laid the ground work for an industry.

So, when I made the transition and started working on my MA in Educational Technology, I learned that Distance Education was fighting this horrible problem. I found out that Distance Education courses "isolated students" and that was contributing to a massive problem with student persistence. Students were finding it demoralizing to be missing the interaction with their peers by being forced to sit for long hours with just them and the computer.

I confess that this puzzled me and set me on the path to curmudgeon-hood. (Getting the PhD didn't make me any more enthusiastic.)

So after learning this "fact" -- distance education isolates students -- I went home and logged on. I asked my friends in Singapore, London, Fargo, Boston, Sydney, and Osaka if they felt isolated by being online.
None of them did. I took polls of my group-mates, between slaying dragons and leveling up -- usually while we were healing and regaining expended mana, if they felt isolated by being online. None of them did.

So, I went back to the teacher and asked why it was that students felt isolated.

I got a blank stare back. "Well, because when you're online its just you and the computer."

"What about the other [then] 85 million people on the internet at the same time?"

Blank stare.

"What about the other students in the class who are online at the same time?"

Blank stare.

"If I log onto your online course, how do I talk to the other students?"

"OH! You can't, of course. We can't have students wasting time talking to each other. There's content objectives that need to be addressed."



The punchline of course is that the reason students feel isolated in distance education courses has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with the implementation. We build online courses the same way we build classrooms. We build systems that limit access to content, to people, and to ideas, then we call them "learning management systems." We take the largest single network of information and ideas that ever existed on the planet and the MAIN focus of the Education establishment is how to limit students' ability to use it.

I was one of the first members of the Classroom 2.0 community but I found I was less interested in how to use blogs in education than how to use blogs in learning. I don't see a lot of concern for the learning side except as a kind of lip service. While some teachers are concerned about learning, the Educational establishment is *not*. It's concerned about teaching and how to justify itself in the face of increasingly cynical criticism about students who complete the process without learning anything.

Of course, the reality is that students ARE learning a lot.

• They learn that they need to sit down, shut up, and speak when spoken to.
• They learn that the schedule matters more than the content.
• They learn that grades are important but knowledge isn't.
• They learn that somebody will tell them what they need to know and the key skill is keeping track of it long enough to pass the test.
• They've learned that "behind the barn/the alley behind the drugstore/the MacDonalds parking lot" has become MySpace and is much safer for them to engage in the kinds of behaviors that would get them in trouble because the schools are locked out.
• They've learned that they can learn anything they need to know pretty easily and that it has very little in common with that the teacher is doing at the front of the room.

Of course, all of this infuriates teachers and parents, but that *is* the role of youth, after all. Parents and teachers forget that they held the same beliefs and learned the same lessons "back in the day."

So, my apology is this.

I'm sorry and I don't mean to offend anybody. I probably will -- probably already have -- but I don't buy it. I'm not even gonna rent it for the weekend. The emperor has no clothes and I'm less interested in clothing the emperor than I am in discussing what we might do to replace him.

After all, he was stupid enough to buy the suit to begin with so what makes him qualified to keep the position?

[David Truss]

Nathan,
I find myself compelled to share:
1. Square peg round hole:
http://eduspaces.net/dtruss/weblog/142909.html
yes it is one of my own posts, but I wrote very little of it... mostly a collection of ideas about how schools don't fit students
2. How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci:
http://wanderingink.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/how-to-prevent-another-leonardo-da-vinci/
a 15 year old student's view of the perils of the current educational system.

You owe no apologies for your keen observations. I think your perspective is more valuable than many because of your experience 'outside' of education. That statement itself is flawed as if to suggest learning stops when you leave school, but I think you can understand my point.

I wish you could write this outside of this network so that it could be shared and seen by a greater audience than those 'by the fireside'.

[Ian Carmichael]

Yes, Skip, and the nightmare continues with the search for a way to engineer definable, measurable, controllable creativity into the genome.

[Skip Zilla]

I'm recurringly terrified by a nightmarish, SF-like vision:
a managerial class of educational technologists narrowly driven by a systematized, universalized, behaviorized training agenda overseen by imperial governors will dehumanize our gifted, but troubled species by crowding out all vestiges of independent learning and skeptical curiosity.. Pharmaceuticals and genetic interventions will be used extensively, too, to keep hives of humans emotionally quiescent and predictably upbeat. There will be no talk of knowing one another or loving one another; instead, the demonic application of a combination of advanced technologies will spare us the insecurities we've had to bridge by embracing one another and dreaming in common.

[Laura Gibbs]

Two Thumbs Up. Five Stars. I AGREE!!!!!!

As a kind of "punishment" for being too disruptive in the classroom when I was a professor at the University of Oklahoma, I was banished to teach online back in 2002... and I feel like Brer Rabbit having been thrown into the briar patch because, like you, I was "born and bred in the briar patch" (i.e. I was a geek - database programmer - before I made my ill-fated foray into academia) and I am SOOOOOOOO happy teaching online, here in my scholastic briar patch, for exactly the reasons you describe.

In the classroom, I felt isolated from my students - we were physically present, but the set of assumptions that they and I were stuck with in the classroom, the physical limitations, the long tradition of dishonesty and fakery, prevented us from really challenging ourselves and accomplishing much of anything.

Then... ONLINE... oh my gosh: teaching online has been the answer to all my teacherly hopes and dreams. I still have lots of room for improvement, but I am definitely accomplishing to a large degree what I aspire to do as an educator: turning the education process over to the students. They publish and share everything online. They become their own reading and writing community. They explore the astounding resources of the Internet, and contribute to those resources with the projects they publish in my classes.

THANK YOU for writing this post which I could agree with from start to finish. I doubt I could have any hallway encounter with a colleague at my school where I would resonate as much as with this post. Whoo-hoo!

I'm posting in my ning blog a kind of online diary for the semester - I'm guessing that each of the points you raised here will come up in one way or another for me during the semester... and if I am at a loss for something to blog about one day, I can return here to your post and get some ideas for important topics that definitely inform my teaching.

HAPPY THOUGHTS. THANK YOU, NATHAN. :-)

[Ian Carmichael]

Yep, that's the go. Listening to the radio last night to a social justice worker. His key comment for me was "I don't want to be right, I want to make a difference."

[Sue Palmer]

WOW- Yeah-- I live this everyday. The objective is graduation, not learning. Some of us try every day to accomplish both.

I practiced law for awhile before returning to teaching. In law school we learned how to think, analyze,research, and find the info we needed. Because law is always changing, we did not learn the law, per se, but how to find it and use it to solve problems. Now, as a teacher, my goal is to help my students learn strategies to help them succeed in and beyond my classroom, and more importantly, to encourage them to believe that they can! I do everything I can to make that happen, but in many cases I am fighting them and the system.

No need to apologize. I think you nailed it. But for me, the next question would be.. what can I (we) do to change it?


Sue P

[Nathan Lowell]

Learning is always happening. The only question is "what are they learning?"

The challenge for education is to make what we want them to learn into something they want to learn.

I wonder if we hid the educational content as "cheat codes" on a hidden website if we wouldn't have more luck getting kids interested in it.

"Cheat codes for the game of Life."

Milton-Bradley probably sue me for saying that...

[Ian Carmichael]

Sounds fair to me - certainly describes much school, the challenge to me is to get education and learning happening in it as well.