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The Unfinished Project:
Exploration, Learning and NetworksPart One: The Educational Field
We live today in the age of networks. Having grown from
nothing just fifteen years ago, the network has become one of
the principal influences in our lives. We trust the network; we
depend on the network; we use the network to make ourselves
more effective. This state of affairs did not develop gradually;
rather, we have passed through a series of unpredicted and
non-linear shifts in the fabric of culture.
The first of these shifts was coincident with the birth of the
Web itself, back in the mid-1990s. From its earliest days the
Web was alluring because it represented all things to all
people: it could serve as both resource and repository for
anything that might interest us, a platform for whatever we
might choose to say. The truth of those earliest days is that
we didn’t really know what we wanted to say; the stereotype
of the page where one went on long and lovingly about one’s
pussy carries an echo of that search for meaning. The lights
were on, but nobody was home.
Drawing the curtain on this more-or-less vapid era of the
Web, the second shift began with the collapse of the dot-com
bubble in the early 2000s. The undergrowth cleared away,
people could once again focus on the why of the Web. This
was when the Web came into its own as an interactive
medium. The Web could have been an interactive medium
from day one – the technology hadn’t changed one bit – but it
took time for people to map out the evolving relationship
between user and experience. The Web, we realized, is not a
page to read, but rather, a space for exploration, connection
and sharing.
This is when things start to get interesting, when ideas like
Wikipedia begin to emerge. Wikipedia is not a technology, at
least, it’s not a specific technology. Wikis have been around
since 1995, nearly as old as the Web itself. Databases are
older than the Web, too. So what is new about Wikipedia?
Simply this: the idea of sharing. Wikipedia invites us all to
share from our expertise, for the benefit of one another. It is
an agreement to share what we know to collectively improve
our capability. If you strip away all of the technology, and all
of the hype – both positive and negative –from Wikipedia,
what you’re left with is this agreement to share. In the decade
since Wikipedia’s launch we’ve learned to share across a
broad range of domains. This sharing supported by
technology is a new thing, and dramatically increases the
allure of the network. What was merely very interesting back
in 1995 became almost overpowering in the years since the
turn of the millennium. It has consistently become harder
and harder to imagine a life without the network, because the
network provides so much usefulness, and so much utility.
The final shift occurred in 2007, as Facebook introduced F8,
its plug-in architecture which opened its design – and its data
– to outside developers. Facebook exploded from a few
million users to over four hundred million: the third largest
nation in the world. Social networks are significant because
they harness and amplify our innate human desire and
capability to connect with one another. We constantly look to
our social networks – that is, our real-world networks – to
remind us who we are, where we are, and what we’re doing.
These social network provide our ontological grounding.
When translated into cyberspace, these social networks can
become almost impossibly potent – which is why, when
they’re used to bully or harass someone, they can lead to such
disastrous results. It becomes almost too easy, and we
become almost too powerful.
A lot of what we’ll see in this decade is an assessment of what
we choose to do with our new-found abilities. We can use
these social networks to transmit pornographic pictures of
one another back and forth at such frequency and density that
we simply numb ourselves into a kind of fleshy hypnosis.
That is one possible direction for the future. Or, we could
decide that we want something different for ourselves,
something altogether more substantial and meaningful. But
in order to get that sort of clarity, we need to be very clear on
what we want – both direction and outcome. At this point we
are simply playing around – with a loaded weapon – hoping
that it doesn’t accidentally go off.
Of course it does; someone sets up a Facebook page to
memorialize a murdered eight year-old, but leaves the door
open to all comers (believing, unrealistically, that others will
share their desire to mourn together), only to see the
overflowing sewage of the Internet spill bile and hatred and
psychopathology onto a Web page. This happens again and
again; it happened several times in one week in February. We
are not learning the lesson we are meant to learn. We are
missing something. Partly this is because it is all so new, but
partly it is because we do not know what our own intentions
are. Without that, without a stated goal, we can not winnow
the wheat from the chaff. We will forget to close the windows
and lock the doors. We will amuse ourselves to death.
I mention this because, as educators, it is up to all of us to act
as forces for the positive moral good of the culture as a whole.
Cultural values are transmitted by educators; and while
parents may be a bigger influence, teachers have their role to
play. Parents are simply overwhelmed by all of this novelty –
the Web wasn’t around when they were children, and social
networks weren’t around even five years ago. So, right at this
moment in time, educators get to be the adult cultural
vanguard, the vital mentoring center.
If we had to do this ourselves, alone, as individuals – or even
as individual institutions – the project would almost certainly
fail. After all, how could we hope to balance all of the
seductions ‘out there’ against the sense which needs to be
taught ‘in here’? We would simply be overwhelmed – our
current condition. Fortunately, we are as well connected, at
least in potential, as any of our students. We have access to
better resources. And we have more experience, which allows
us to put those resources to work. In short, we are far better
placed to make use of social media than our charges, even if
they seem native to the medium while we profess to be
immigrants.
One thing that has changed, because of the second shift, the
trend toward sharing, is that educational resources are
available now as never before. Wikipedia led the way, but it is
just small island in a much large sea of content, provided by
individuals and organizations throughout the world. iTunes
University, YouTube University, the numberless podcasts and
blogs that have sprung up from experts on every subject from
macroeconomics to the history of Mesoamerica – all of it
searchable by Google, all of it instantaneously accessible –
every one of these points to the fact that we have clearly
entered a new era, where we are surrounded by and saturated
with an ‘educational field’ of sorts. Whatever you need to
know, you’re soaking in it.
This educational field is brand-new. No one has made
systematic use of it, no teacher, no institution, no
administration. But that doesn’t lessen its impact. We all
consult Wikipedia when we have some trivial question to
answer; that behavior is the archetype for where education is
headed in the 21st century – real-time answers on-demand,
drawn from the educational field.
Paired with the educational field is the ability for educators to
establish strong social connections – not just with other
educators, but laterally, through the student to the parents,
through the parents to the community, and so on, so that the
educator becomes ineluctably embedded in a web of
relationships which define, shape and determine the
pedagogical relationship. Educators have barely begun to
make use of the social networking tools on offer; just to have a
teacher ‘friend’ a student in Facebook is, to some eyes, a cause
for concern – what could possibly be served by that
relationship, one which subverts the neat hierarchy of the 19th century classroom?
The relationship is the essence of the classroom, that which
remains when all the other trivia of pedagogy are stripped
away. The relationship between the teacher and the student
is at the core of the magical moment when knowledge is
transmitted between the generations. We now have the
greatest tool ever created by the hand of man to reinforce and
strengthen that relationship. And we need to use it, or else we
will all sink beneath a rising tide of noise and filth and
distraction.
But how?
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Part Two: The Unfinished Project
The roots of today’s talk lie in a public conversation I had with
Dr. Evan Arthur, who manages the Digital Education
Revolution Group within the Department of Education,
Employment and Workplace Relations. As part of this
conversation, I asked him about educational styles, and, in
particular, Constructivism. As conceived by Jean Piaget and
his successors across the 20th century, Constructivism states
that the child learns through play – or rather, through
repeated interactions with the world. Schema are created by
the child, put to the test, where they either succeed or fail.
Failed schema are revised and re-tested, while successful
schema are incorporated into ever-more-comprehensive
schema. Through many years of research we know that we
learn the physics of the real world through a constant process
of experimentation. Every time a toddler dumps a cup of
juice all over himself, he’s actually conducting an
investigation into the nature of the real.
The basic tenets of Constructivism are not in dispute,
although many educators have consistently resisted the
underlying idea of Constructivism – that it is the child who
determines the direction of learning. This conflicts directly
with the top-down teacher-to-student model of education
which we are all intimate familiar with, which has determined
the nature of pedagogy and even the architecture of our
classrooms. This is the grand battle between play and work;
between ludic exploration and the hard grind of assimilating
the skills that situate us within an ever-more-complex culture.
At the moment, this trench warfare has frozen us in a
stalemate located, for the most part, between year two and
year three. In the first two years education has a strong ludic
component, and students are encouraged to explore. But in
year three the process becomes routinized, formalized and
very strict. Certainly, eight-year-olds are better able to
understand restrictions than six-year-olds. They’re better at
following the rules, at colouring within the lines. But it seems
as though we’ve taken advantage of the fact that an older child
is a more compliant one. It is true that as we advance in
years, our ludic nature becomes tempered by an adult’s
sensibility. But humans retain the urge to play throughout
their lives – to a greater degree than any other species we
know of. It could very well be that our ability to learn is
intimately tied to our desire to play.
If we are prepared to swallow this bitter pill, and acknowledge
that play is an essential part of the learning process, we have
no choice but to follow this idea wherever it leads us. Which
leads me back to my conversation with Evan Arthur. I asked
him about the necessity of play, and he framed his response
by talking about “The Unfinished Constructivist Project”. It is
a revolution trapped in mid-stride, a revelation that,
somehow, hasn’t penetrated all the way through our culture.
We still insist that instruction is the preferred mechanism for
education, when we have ample evidence to suggest this
simply isn’t true. Let me be clear: instruction is not the same
thing as guidance. I am not suggesting that children simply
do as they please. The more freedom they have, the more
need they have for a strong, stabilizing force to guide them as
they explore. This may be the significant (if mostly hidden)
objection to the Constructivist project: it is simply too
expensive. The human resources required to give each child
their own mentor as they work their way through the corpus
of human knowledge would simply overwhelm any current
educational model, with the exception of homeschooling. I
don’t know what the student-teacher ratio would need to be in
a fully realized Constructivist educational system, but I doubt
that twenty-to-one would be sufficient. That’s the level
needed to maintain a semblance of order, more a
peacekeeping force than an army of mentors.
There have been occasional attempts to create a fully
Constructivist educational system, but these, like the
manifold utopian communities which have been founded,
flourish briefly, then fade or fracture, and do not survive the
test of time. The level of dedication and involvement required
from both educator/mentors and parents is simply too big an
ask. This is the sort of thing that a hunter-gatherer culture
has no trouble with: the entire world is the classroom, the
child explores it, and an adult is always there to offer an
explanation or story to round out the child’s knowledge. We
live in an industrial culture (at least, our classrooms do),
where there is strict differentiation between ‘education’ and
the other activities in life, where adults are ‘educators’ or they
are not, where everything is highly formal, almost ritualized.
(Consider the highly regulated timings of the school day –
equal parts order from chaos, and ritual.) There could never
be enough support within such a framework to sustain a
Constructivist model. This is why we have the present
stalemate; we know the right thing to do, but, heretofore, we
have lacked the resources to actualize this knowledge.
That has now changed.
The educational field must be recognized as the key element
which will power the unfinished Constructivist revolution.
The educational field does not recognize the boundaries of the
classroom, the institution, or even the nation. It is simply
pervasive, ubiquitous and available as needed. Within that
field, both students and educator/mentors can find all of the
resources needed to make the Constructivist project a
continuing success. There need be no rupture between years
two and three, no transformation of educational style from
inward- to outward-directed. Instead, there can and should
be a continual deepening of the child’s exploration of the
corpus of knowledge, under the guidance of a network of
mentors who share the burden. We already have most of the
resources in place to assure that the child can have a
continuous and continually strengthening relationship with
knowledge: Wikipedia, while not perfect, points toward the
kinds of knowledge sharing systems which will become both
commonplace and easily created throughout the 21st century.
Sharing needs to become a foundational component in a
modern educational system. Every time a teacher finds a
resource to aid a student in their exploration, that should be
noted and shared broadly. As students find things on their
own – and they will be far better at it than most educators –
these, too, should be shared. We should be creating a great,
linked trail behind us as we learn, so that others, when
exploring, will have paths to guide them – should they choose
to follow. We have systems that can do this, but we have not
applied these systems to education – in large part because
this is not how we conceive of education. Or rather, this is not
how we conceive of education in the classroom. I do a fair bit
of corporate consulting, and this sort of ‘knowledge capture’
and ‘knowledge management’ is becoming essential to the
operation of a 21st century business. Many businesses are
creating their own, ad-hoc systems to share knowledge
resources among their staff, as they understand how
important this is for professional development.
This is a new battle line opened up in the war between the
unfinished constructivist project and the older, more formal
methods of education. The corporate world doesn’t have time
for methodologies which have become obsolete. Employees
must be constantly up-to-date. Professionals – particularly
doctors and lawyers – must remain continuously wellinformed
about developments in their respective fields.
Those in management need real-time knowledge streams in
order recognize and solve problems as they emerge. This is
all much more ludic than formal, much more self-directed
than guided, much more juvenile than adult – even though
these are all among the most adult of all activities. This
disjunction, this desynchronization between the needs of the
world-at-large and the delivery capabilities of an ever-moreobsolete
educational system is the final indictment of thingsas-
they-are. Things will change; either education will become
entirely corporatized, or educators will wholly embrace the
unfinished Constructivist project. Either way the outcome
will be the same.
Fortunately, the educational field has something else to offer
educators beyond the near-infinite supply of educational
resources. It is a network of individuals. It is a social
network, connected together via bonds of familiarity and
affinity. The student is embedded in a network with his
mentors; the mentors are connected to other students, and to
other mentors; everyone is connected to the parents, and the
community. In this sense, the formal space of the ‘classroom’
collapses, undone by the pressure provided by the social
network, which has effectively caused the classroom walls to
implode. The outside world wants to connect to what
happens within the crucible of the classroom, or, more
specifically, with the magical moment of knowledge
transference within the student’s mind. This is what we
should be building our social networks to support. At
present, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are dull,
unsophisticated tools, capable of connecting together, but
completely inadequate when it comes to shaping that
connection around a task – such as mentoring, or exploring
knowledge. A second generation of social networks is already
reaching release. These tools display a more sophisticated
edge, and will help to support the kinds of connections we
need within the educational field.
None of this, as wonderful as it might sound (and I admit that
it may also seem pretty frightening) is happening in a
vacuum. There are larger changes afoot within Australia, and
no vision for the future of education in Australia could ignore
them. We must find a way to harmonize those changes with
the larger, more fundamental changes overtaking the entire
educational system.
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Part Three: The National Curriculum
Underlying fear of a Constructivist educational project is that
it would simply give children an excuse to avoid the tough
work of education. There is a persistent belief that children
will simply load up on educational ‘candy’, without eating
their all-so-essential ‘vegetables’, that is, the basic skills which
form the foundation for future learning. Were children left
entirely to their own devices, there might be some danger of
this – though, now that we live in the educational field, even
that possibility seems increasingly remote. Children do not
live in isolation: they are surrounded by adults who want
them to grow into successful adults. In prehistoric times,
adults simply had to be adults around children for the
transference of life-skills to take place. Children copied,
imitated, and aped adults – and still do. This learning-bymimesis
is still a principle factor in the education of the child,
though it is not one which is often highlighted by the
educational system. Industrial culture has separated the
adult from the child, putting one into the office, the other into
the school. That separation, and the specialization which is
the hallmark of the Industrial Age, broke the natural and
persistent mentorship of parenting into discrete units: this
much in the home, this much in the school. If we do not trust
children to consume a nourishing diet of knowledge, it is
because we do not trust ourselves to prepare it for them. The
separation by function led to a situation where no one is
responsible for the whole thread of the life. Parents look to
teachers. Teachers look to parents. Everyone, everywhere,
looks to authority for responsible solutions.
There is no authority anywhere. Either we do this ourselves,
or it will not happen. We have to look to ourselves, build the
networks between ourselves, reach out and connect from
ourselves, if we expect to be able to resist a culture which
wants to turn the entire human world into candy. This is not
going to be easy; if it were, it would have happened by itself.
Nor is it instantaneous. Nothing like this happens overnight.
Furthermore, it requires great persistence. In the ideal
situation, it begins at birth and continues on seamlessly until
death. In that sense, this connected educational field mirrors
and is a reflection of our human social networks, the ones we
form from our first moments of awareness. But unlike that
more ad-hoc network, this one has a specific intent: to bring
the child into knowledge.
Knowledge, of course, is very big, very vague, mostly
undefined. Meanwhile, there are specific skills and bodies of
knowledge which we have nominated as important: the ability
to read and write; to add and subtract, multiply and divide; a
basic understanding of the physical and living worlds; the
story of the nation and its peoples. These have very recently
been crystallized in a ‘National Curriculum’, which seeks to
standardize the pedagogical outcomes across Australia for all
students in years 1 through 10. Parents and educators have
already begun to argue about the inclusion or exclusion of
elements within that curriculum. I was taught phonics over
forty years ago, but apparently it’s still a matter of some
debate. The teaching of history is always going to be
contentious, because the story we tell ourselves about who we
are is necessarily political. So the adults will argue it out –
year after year, decade after decade – while the educators and
students face this monolithic block of text which seems to be
the complete antithesis of the Constructivist project. And,
looked at one way, the National Curriculum is exactly the type
of top-down, teacher-to-student, sit-down-and-shut-up sort
of educational mandate which is no longer effective in the
business world.
All of which means its probably best that we avoid viewing up
the National Curriculum as a validation, encouraging us to
continue on with things as they are. Instead, it should be
used as mandate for change. There are several significant
dimensions to this mandate.
First, putting everyone onto the same page, pedagogically,
opens up an opportunity for sharing which transcends
anything before possible. Teachers and students from all over
Australia can contribute to or borrow from a wealth of
resources shared by those who have passed before them
through the National Curriculum. Every teacher and every
student should think of themselves as part of a broader
collective of learners and mentors, all working through the
same basic materials. In this sense, the National Curriculum
isn’t a document so much as it is the architecture of a
network. It is the way all things educational are connected
together. It is the wiring underneath all of the pedagogy,
providing both a scaffolding and a switchboard for the
learning moment.
Is it possible to conceive of a library organized along the lines
of the National Curriculum? Certainly a librarian would have
no problem configuring a physical library to meet the needs of
the curriculum. It’s even easier to organize similar sorts of
resources in cyberspace. Not only is it easy, there’s now a
mandate to do so. We know what sorts of resources we’ll
need, going forward. Nothing should be stopping us from
creating collective resources – similar to an Australian
Wikipedia, and perhaps drawing from it – which will serve
the pedagogical requirements of the National Curriculum.
We should be doing this now.
Second, we need to think of the National Curriculum as an
opportunity to identify all of the experts in all of the areas
covered by the curriculum, and, once they’ve been identified,
we must create a strong social network, with them inside,
giving them pride of place as ‘nodes of expertise’. Knowledge
is not enough; it must be paired with mentors who have been
able to put that knowledge into practice with excellence. The
National Curriculum is the perfect excuse to bring these
experts together, to make them all connected and accessible
to everyone throughout the nation who could benefit from
their wisdom.
Here, once again, it is best to think of the National
Curriculum not as a document but as a network – a way to
connect things, and people, together. The great strength of
the National Curriculum is, as Dr. Evan Arthur put it, that it is
a ‘greenfields’. Literally anything is possible. We can go in
any direction we choose. Inertia would have us do things as
we’ve always done them, even as the centrifugal forces of
culture beyond the classroom point in a different direction.
Inertia can not be a guiding force. It must be resisted, at
every turn, not in the pursuit of some educational utopia or
false revolution, but rather because we have come to realize
that the network is the educational system.
Moving from where we are to where need to be seems like a
momentous transition. But the Web saw repeated
momentous transitions in its first fifteen years and we
managed all of those successfully. We can absorb huge
amounts of change and novelty so long as the frame which
supports us is strong and consistent. That’s the essence of the
parent-child relationship: so long as the child feels it is being
cared for, it can endure almost anything. This means that we
shouldn’t run around freaking out. The sky is not falling. The
world is not ending. If anything, we are growing closer
together, more connected, becoming more important to one
another. It may feel a bit too close from time to time, as we
learn how to keep a healthy distance in these new
relationships, but that closeness supports us all. It can keep
children from falling through the net of opportunity. It can
see us advance into a culture where every child has the full
benefit of an excellent education, without respect to income
or circumstance.
That is the promise. We have the network. We live in the
educational field. We now have the National Curriculum to
wire it all together. But can we marry the demands of the
National Curriculum with the ludic call of Constructivism?
Can we create a world where literally we play into learning?
This is more than video games that have math drills
embedded into them. It’s about capturing the interests of a
child and using that as a springboard for the investigation of
their world, their nation, their home. That can only happen if
mentors are deeply involved and embedded in the child’s life
from its earliest years.
I don’t have any easy answers here. There is no magic wand
to wave over this whole uncoordinated mess to make it all
cohere. No one knows what’s expected of them anymore –
educators least of all. Are we parents? Are we ‘friends’?
Where do we stand? I know this: we stand most securely
when we stand connected.
Mark Pesce - Words.
CHU - Images.
Steve 'Fly Agaric'' - Mixing
