Last month I spoke at Reboot and at MicroLearning on the theme of schools, the read-write web and the challenges involved. I have been struck by how many of the issues on my mind then are alive and well in the minds of others — as the last few weeks have shown. I'm on the way to the Pyrenees now and net-connectivity will probably be very restricted. So I'll post my slides here now, en route, but I hope to write more on education and the web once I'm back.
The slides for Reboot are here; a slim, summary version of those for MicroLearning here. (In both cases, these are edited: I'm a novice to conference-speaking and would go about things differently if there's a next time.)
Some quick background to the slides and some narrative … 10 or so years ago, the web was first linked to by schools with the accompanying
perception that it was an "inert" body of information, designed to be pulled in
and pushed out to pupils. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee's vision was always of the
web as read-write. Now, the read-write web has arrived in accessible form
(before, you had to be quite a geek to make it read and write):
Will Richardson's 7 "points". Meanwhile, the digital tail is growing longer not
shorter and in schools this is very marked: cue Douglas Adams and Prensky (with an
added measure of Susan Greenfield). The read-write web has profound
implications for social practices and institutions, teaching and schools not
excepted: it alters the balance of 'control and order', putting much more
emphasis on the innovative, collaborative and creative; it affects our sense of
what knowledge is and how it is arrived at; it affects our sense of what we (teachers) do
and it probably therefore also affects our sense of how we stand vis-à-vis
students. This all needs our attention.
The web will also remind us of something we did know but had half-forgotten: that what is said to be "true" is often only provisional in nature. To this end, we must acquire much better critical skills as users and readers of the web (eg, use of Wikipedia requires that students and staff understand how to read it as a document that is revised and worked on by many hands) ...
Teachers have their work cut out, to be sure, but the web is enormously enriching, a source of endless discovery: the invisible, or visible, walls of schools have been rendered porous and the outside world is now with us — inside the walled garden. This is liberating, as well as challenging. Habits of teenagers, of the digital, always-on generation, mean that much we had all taken for granted is shifting: from the way entertainment is generated and consumed to social and communal practices generally (cue humorous interlude: panic-stricken notes about MySpace, amusing t-shirts, the Onion's parody of MySpace's "security" measures), things are on the move. The risks are there (eg, slide 14: naive assumptions as to "ownership" of one's own data are commonplace) and schools, staff, parents and pupils, finding themselves in this new order, sometimes resort to, or are the victims of, unthinking attempts to impose controls which either will not work or will deny the young access to the very tools which are shaping the economic and social world they will live in as adults. An educated, informed and collaborative approach is needed (as befits the new kind of authority a teacher has in a connected world where his/her word is heard amongst the many other voices students can now tune into). A measure of how much things are altering is that our sense of identity is altering as we find ourselves, even within a school, belonging simultaneously to many different communities, leaving us with much to come to terms with. ('Our' = staff, pupils.)
Caterina Fake gave a wonderful account earlier this year of the origins in story of Flickr. I've found the idea of story immensely powerful when trying to help pupils understand how they might view with some coherence such new, apparently disparate patterns of behaviour, learning and belonging.
Given all this, Will Richardson's conclusions are really too modest: the implications of what's afoot seem to me more far-reaching still.
MicroLearning: the pressure of events off-stage necessitated some doubling up, but I shifted the focus more on to microformats — the idea of small things loosely joined, seen not only from the perspective of a school or teacher but also from the point of view of teenage practice.
Technorati tags: reboot8, Reboot 8.0, microlearning, MicroLearning, schools
