NEWSBYWILLIAM FARREN

In my previous post, I introduced an idea for a different type of online class, one which is only possible because of available technology. Many people have, rightfully so, questioned technology's ability to seriously impact education. It is often over-hyped, oversold and overpriced, yet I still hold the belief that under the right circumstances, it can help learners (and their communities) reach new places. For me, the challenge will be to do more than simply move the traditional classroom model online, throwing in some Web 2.0 tools for good measure. It will rest on how to best combine current technologies with pedagogical approaches that lead to significance, flow, self-direction, group action, sharing, joy... and produce the type of learning that will help us tackle the distributed, complex problems of our day.

Technology has never quite lived up to its potential as a teaching/learning tool because critics have spent too much time analyzing the wrong thing. We've thrown billions of dollars of hardware and software into the classroom, analyzing it under a microscope without doing much looking at the pedagogy it's supposed to support. In a recent blog comment (post worth reading!), Ira Socol astutely points out, "It is the job of education to alter itself to prove itself of value to the world which now exists."

What would happen if education altered itself to take advantage of the mature, ubiquitous tools that let anyone become a mass publisher? Or that allow for the simple group forming that makes people and their ideas findable, that simplify sharing and collaboration, and that disrupt long-held power structures? What would happen if educational programs stopped viewing socializing and play as hostile to learning, but instead, in the words of a recent report (p. 35), "positioned [themselves] to step in and support moments when youth are motivated to move from friendship-driven to more interest-driven forms of new media use"?

A traditional class, with its small group of students, insulated from the outside world, fails to capitalize on what's happening beyond its borders. Bill Joy, Sun Microsystem's founder, points out that most good ideas and talent are not in your institution but outside of it. It would seem to make sense then to try to establish connections with those on the outside.

Today's technology has made it easy to create and join networks. This has drastically changed important quantitative variables involved in learning. When a networked class member connects to another networked class member, they do not simply add another person to their network--they add another person's network to their network. Interconnections grow geometrically. The possibility of finding just the right person for a collaboration, or to answer a question, increases dramatically. More people connected to more information and the minds that are producing it, improves the possibilities of getting better feedback, attaining quicker results, and connecting people to new ideas. All this connective growth has increased variety, catering to the long tail. Using social media, students can now join formal and informal affinity groups and take online classes that in the past, either didn't exist, or were prohibitively expensive for their schools to offer. The quantity of information available today due to the fact that anyone can become a mass publisher is greater than at any time in our history. Those using networks and social tools like Delicious.com, Facebook and TweetDeck, are figuring out how to take advantage of ever-increasing amounts of information, finding needles in the ever-deepening haystacks.

While networked learning has allowed us to access larger quantities of information and increased variety for learners, maybe even more importantly, it has the potential to improve the quality of ideas. In his must-read book, Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky points out that, "... most good ideas came from people who were bridging 'structural holes', which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Shirky follows with a quote from researcher Ronald Burt, author of "The Social Origins of Good Ideas", who writes:

People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

If we look at how schools are structured today with their often strict adherence to hierarchies and disciplines, it would seem there are plenty of opportunities for bridging structural holes.

As potential agents of change, schools spend too much time in the future, preparing their students for that fateful moment when they enter the "real world".  Insulated classes, island teachers and outdated policies end up disengaging students from the very real (and current!) world just outside their classroom window. Millions of hearts and minds ready to engage with all types of issues sit idly, battling the clock. Here, technology has the potential to be a real game-changer. Not only does it put students in touch with important issues, it allows them to do something about them. Social media has changed power structures in unprecedented ways. With the ability to easily connect with others (often surreptitiously), take pictures, record video, mass publish, and share information with little or no interference from superiors, people today are taking on governments, corporations, mass media--and winning. Maybe it's time for students to be challenged to do more with their networked technology than simply check grades and hand in work.

Many of today's most pressing challenges like climate change, fisheries depletion, virulent disease, invasive species... are complex, distributed, messy, extend beyond borders, and will require cooperation and collaboration in order to solve. The traditional school model where a few people at the top provide scarce knowledge to passive individuals at the bottom in order to make them more competitive on the global stage, no longer seems to make as much sense. (If it ever did.) We're only going to get better at this when we realize that information is no longer scarce, that people actually do like sharing and helping, and that force and competition will not solve all problems. The tools to effect serious change are on our desks, in our pockets and in our schools. However, they'll never live up to their potential as tools for change while the pedagogy they're supposed to support goes unanalyzed.

Participatory Learning - Join Us from Plearn on Vimeo.

After 15 years of working in schools and observing and reflecting on the practice, I’d like to attempt something different. I’m curious to know if it’s possible to get fifty people (and possibly an institution or three) on this wired planet to take just one foot out of the mainstream of education and participate in a course that operates under a very different educational paradigm than the one they’re used to. I’d like to know if learners are willing to put their own creative desires and curiosities ahead of doing what’s educationally safe. Is the dissonance between how people learn on their own today and how they are taught in schools jarring enough to make them want to try something new? Can the Internet’s currently evolved state and the culture of sharing, collaboration and participation that it has fueled, lead to a new educational paradigm where independent educational contractors (IECs), working in more decentralized environments, are able to offer a variety of courses serving the long tail of educational consumers in a way that more hierarchical institutions cannot?

In order to try to answer these questions, I’ve quit my job as a classroom teacher for next school year and built an online space–-a class (ParticipatoryLearning.net)–-based on the principles of participatory learning, among others.

The definition of participatory learning which I find most useful, is the one which was offered for the Digital Media and Learning Competition:

Participatory Learning includes the ways in which new technologies enable learners (of any age) to contribute in diverse ways to individual and shared learning goals. Through games, wikis, blogs, virtual environments, social network sites, cell phones, mobile devices, and other digital platforms, learners can participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together. Participatory learners come together to aggregate their ideas and experiences in a way that makes the whole ultimately greater than the sum of the parts.

Here's the pitch:

Join international educator Bill Farren for two semesters as he travels through four different South American countries, connecting students to real people, real communities and real issues. The journey will begin in Peru. From there, the class will vote on what country they will visit next. Participatory Learners (Plearners) will be able to track their teacher who will be acting as their “reporter/guide in the field” via global positioning satellite. Through a request system, Plearners will be able to assemble information such as pictures, video footage, interviews, etc. for their learning use and for the creation of various learning objects including collaborative projects. Students will decide what projects (challenges) to tackle, and working with a variety of other people, get on with the business of changing the world today.  Freedom of choice and expression will be an important part of this course. Students will be encouraged to extend their expressive abilities using a variety of tools and genres.

This class seeks to do more than simply take the classroom model and move it online. It seeks to challenge the status quo in various ways:

• Students will be active managers of their learning; with some guidance, they will manage what to learn, how to learn, who to pay attention to, how to learn from peers, how to assess their learning, and when needed, learn to redirect their efforts
• It will be democratic, bottom up.
• The class will self-organize, catering to the long tail. It will form itself, and it will largely run itself. We will investigate "the power of organizing without organizations". (Clay Shirky)
• Authority will be earned. It will be turned on its head.
• Outcomes will not be prescribed. We do not know how things will turn out. We may have to change direction as we see fit.
• Failure will not be punished. It will be treated as information.
• It will be open, inviting interested others to look in, collaborate, participate, assist... (There will be mechanisms for private communication between class members, as needed).
• It will not be graded. Assessment will come in various non-graded forms from teacher/guide, peers, visitors, and most importantly, self-reflection. The space will become a deep, rich electronic portfolio for each class member. Additionally, students will be provided with a formal, networked, electronic portfolio that they can manage as they see fit. They will decide what goes into their portfolio, who gets to see it, and when it's available for viewing. This holistic approach seeks to, “transform accountability driven by testing into richer conversations around inquiry into learning” ¹ (more)
• It will be multidisciplinary, anchored around various themes.

In their book, Disrupting Class, authors Christensen, Johnson and Horn state that innovation and change often happen when individual actors work outside of the regulated sectors, offering goods and services through independent commercial channels, eventually getting noticed by the regulatory systems once enough people, through their own choice, opt out of the dominant offering. The authors mention that change rarely happens from within institutions, being that those institutions are more likely to hammer down the sharp edges of innovation to fit their current way of thinking, in the process, sustaining the approach it has always used.

It is hoped that if this approach works, many other independent educational contractors will be motivated to hang out their own e-shingles. Students of all stripes and ages will have a much larger selection of courses and learning formats to choose from. Classes offered by experts, many in unique circumstances, connected to interested others, unshackled from obtuse regulations, could provide an incredibly rich, eclectic and tailored experience in ways that today’s institutions simply could never match.

Teachers with various specialties and interests, using a similar approach, could create some interesting learning opportunities by, for example, spending a semester:

• In a cloud forest, helping add to the EOL
• Traveling throughout the rivers of Europe, connecting students with local history and art
• On a sailboat studying themes related to oceanography, climate change, marine biology, meteorology...
• On a container ship learning about globalization, trade, economics...
• On an Amish farm, reflecting on appropriate use of technology

The possibilities are limitless. It seems like the TFA crowd and Peace Corps types might be attracted to this type of work, improving educational opportunities for all (including teachers!).

Will this type of learning obviate the need for schools or classrooms? Absolutely not. There are many times when people want and need to be in each other's presence. Often, that's the optimal situation. However, being together is not always feasible. What these technologies offer us today is the ability to find and then interact with people that we may never have had the opportunity to connect with otherwise. They offer us the ability to get information, create information, experience places, and work and learn with others in ways that previously were impossible. They lower costs. They make failure cheap and worthwhile. Clay Shirky reminds us that things get interesting when the technology gets boring. Today, nobody cares that you have a blog or use Facebook. It's time for things to get interesting.

I invite you to visit ParticipatoryLearning.net. In the spirit of learning from others, I ask that if you have ideas on how to increase the likelihood that a project of this type succeeds, please send them my way. I’d also kindly ask that if you find this approach good for education, to help spread the message via your own networks.

Thanks for reading.

¹ from Making Common Cause: Electronic Portfolios, Learning, and the Power of Communication, Cambridge, Cambridge and Yancey

[A big welcome to William Farren with this first guest-post. Bill has long struck me as one of the most original and piercing critics of education around. You can see his "Did You Ever Wonder?" video in the left sidebar, below, for a taste. Bill writes at the radically sane Education for Well-Being. - Clay]

Not long ago, I finished reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about the high price of cheap food and the disconnected thinking that produces it. It made me think that the way we produce food today--that is, ignoring nature's logic in the quest for efficiency--is very similar to the way we produce "educated" citizens. Ignoring millions of years of evolutionary design has resulted in some interesting (if not disconcerting) similarities between the two camps. Both industrial schooling and industrial agriculture seem to have developed pathological ways of looking at pathology.

Whether in the field, the feed lot, or the classroom, issues of low productivity and dysfunction are commonly attributed to the individual, rarely the larger system that controls it. When a farmer curses a corn plant's inability to repel a particular pest, he does so without reflecting on the fact that the plant has been taken out of its natural environment and placed into a man-made monoculture--a hotbed of disease. Plants grown in isolation lose the defenses and nutrients that neighboring species once freely provided.  In homogeneous rows designed for the convenience of machinery, a plant's exquisite defense systems become ineffective. "Corrective measures" in the form of herbicides and pesticides end up coating the plants and sterilizing the soil.

Pigs are faulted for biting other pigs' tails as a result of being weaned prematurely and packed together tightly. Animals living in stressful conditions, denied the expression of their once useful behaviors, lose the will to protect themselves in the face of danger. As a consequence, when infection sets in on a chewed tail, pigs are put down. (It's not profitable to nurse them back to health.)   Forward thinking hog farmers, in an attempt to stamp out this "vice", noticed that by docking the pigs' tails they could produce a sensitive nub that would force even the most demoralized pig to fight back.

Cows, ruminants which have evolved to eat grasses and fibrous vegetable matter, are today mostly fed a diet of government-subsidized corn. Here again, we ignore nature's design. Not having evolved for such a diet, cattle end up living in a state of permanent illness, propped up and kept in the system by a permanent cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is only too happy to fill in when nature is ignored.

Our education systems, seeking efficiency through standardization and conformity end up creating students who, just like their agricultural counterparts, are no longer well-adapted to their environment. Michael Pollan reminds us that, "Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over." Like corn planted in a monoculture, removed from the diversity that protects it, or cattle fed an unnatural diet of corn, students today are fed a standardized diet of procedures and reproducible facts. This educational monoculture does nothing to nourish minds that have evolved to seek diversity, novelty and stimulation.

Those numbed by disconnected ideas unrelated to their needs are soon labeled attention-deficient, unmotivated, substandard. Stimulants, antidepressants and impulse inhibitors are used to conform the human mind to a deformed system the same way herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics are used in agriculture's great disconnect. Like the corn-fed cow raised on an unnatural diet of corn, constantly anemic and never well but kept alive through the use of drugs, students raised on disconnected facts, numbing routines, and endless testing often find themselves on the receiving end of a medical prescription. Those who don't have the stomach for such unsatisfying fare, who prefer not to be chemically altered, who'd rather have a more free-range existence, are eventually "counseled out". Simply put: they have not met the required production quotas of a system designed for scalable throughput.

In standardized environments, students with a high tolerance for monotony and the ability to repress their curious gene are deemed the fittest of the bunch.  Strangely, curiosity, a trait nature has selected for and which has served us well, seems to be selected against in schools.  Blue ribbon students grow their grade point averages en route to graduation and a chance to compete in the "real world". Their farm analogues, purposed for industry, have been selected to tolerate crowding, pesticides, sameness--but most importantly--to be high yielding. The corn farmer with the most bushels per acre is acclaimed for his skill at converting petrochemicals into grain. The feedlot operator's profits depend on how efficiently he can turn grain into meat. The highest ranked schools floss in the knowledge that they can efficiently convert standards and routines into high test scores.  Along the way, little thought is given to the soil that is depleted in the field, to the groundwater being spoiled by the feedlot, or to the creativity and innovation being extinguished in the classroom.  How productive is all this productivity?

It seems that despite (or maybe because of) our fetish with productivity, many of humanity's most pressing issues seem to be getting worse. The unnatural selection playing out in schools creates what every educational institution's mission statement pledges against: the creation of uncritical, passive, challenge-averse individuals, unwilling and unable to tackle the challenges of the 21st-century. It's simple to blame the students for being unproductive or unmotivated, for lacking curiosity. Indeed, they often are seen as the problem, especially by those who've designed the system. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, however, reminds us that "the seed of poverty is in the institutions we have made, not in the person." With more effort and an inward gaze we'd see the deeper connections. We'd see students acting rationally in environments that ignore their evolutionary history. We'd understand that avoiding challenges and dropping out are simply logical responses to a system that discourages risk-taking and too often treats curiosity as a challenge to authority.

In their quest for efficiency and value, consumers have failed to notice the creation of false economies.  We are now using more energy (in the form of oil and gas) to produce a calorie of food than we ever have in our history. What nature used to do for free through biodiversity and solar power, now requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. In the bargain, our industrial agriculture is destroying our two most important environments: our bodies and our planet. Cheap food has led to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. Meat marinated in medicine and the effects it has on people (never mind the animals) never seems to make it into the cost-benefit analysis. Polluted air, toxic water and soil depletion are not billed at the supermarket register. Taxpayers, subsidizing the food that malnourishes them, complain little. Taxpayers, supporting educational systems that miseducate them, complain little. What's the true cost of an educational system which "through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over", causes mind and spirit to atrophy, suffocating students' natural desire to know? Maybe the biggest loss comes from the creation of generation after generation who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and a heist.

Michael Pollan writes, "Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Education today requires the same relationship. Educational policies seem to display a meager understanding about the importance of curiosity, awareness, or how we fit into larger systems. Education's checkout scanner--tuition and taxes--provide only a partial accounting of its true costs. Similar to industrial farming, industrial education produces no bargains while diminishing itself in the process. The price of producing a "successful" student may be higher than we think.

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William Farren: Interested in making education an instrument of well-being. Believes that schools, as the most important shapers of mental models, need to seriously retool in an effort to address the problems caused by dysfunctional economic models, biophobia, “nature-deficit disorder” and an immense lack of planetary situational awareness.

Keeps asking himself, "How is preparing students to enter a system that is at war with itself, preparing them for the future?"

Image by Plearn