This weekend, I participated in the first HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference, which proved to be an illuminating experience. The conference had a visionary focus, which led to some great discussions and panels. A theme that came up again and again was the future of learning (as the MacArthur Foundation was a key sponsor, and Connie Yowell was in attendance, certainly not surprising).
In a panel entitled “Funding the Digital Future”, Yowell talked about MacArthur’s view on digital learning, and how digital learning will ultimately be a long-tail endeavor. Granted, the long tail gets paid a lot of lip service, but as I processed the applicability to youth education, it was really striking. If you think a little bit differently about education, you can see some very interesting opportunities.
There are lots of different methodological approaches to education, and I won’t even act like I know a lot about them them. In most models, the instructor is the “center” of the model. As instructors have a limited quantity of time and patience, this is inherently an inefficient model. Indeed, questions go unanswered, children get “left behind” – but there aren’t a ton of other ways to go about it, and this model enforces the pseudo-egalitarian principles of our society.
This is a classic short-tail (anti-long-tail?) model. The problem with turning education into a long tail model, however, is confounding. In the long-model of education, the learners must also be teachers. As you’ve probably noticed, as you progressed through school, you were more likely to engage in group projects. As we get older, the educational system develops some faith in our teaching ability. Groups represent this long-tail teaching/learning model, but these are still constructed, controlled experiments.
With technology, however, we can always work in groups. In fact, it is natural to work socially, in groups. Think about the role of instant messenger as children work together on math homework. Kids have adopted and internalized uses of these technologies to make the learning process more efficient – ad hoc networks of peer-teachers emerge. The only problem here is that we’d generally call this cheating, so lets think reevaluate this assumption for a second.
The assignments coming from teachers are built on short-tail models. That is, everyone gets the same questions, they work on them alone, and they turn them in. Teacher has limited time for grading and answering questions, so we’ve got to use this model. So lets think outside of the box for a second. What if each student in the class got individual assignments, and they were encouraged to work on the homework collaboratively via instant messenger. This solves the cheating problem, and it encourages peer-to-peer learning and teaching. Of course, we’d need a system to assist the teacher in grading and evaluation (as grading is not simply the right/wrong evaluation, but also recognizing patterns to understand what the children learned or didn’t learn), but we’re thinking about the “future” of learning here.
The future of our knowledge economy is built on collaboration. If we are always in touch, then we are always able to work together. Why then do our schools not work to optimize collaboration skills? In this collaboration economy, the most successful participants will be the ones who combine knowledge and critical thinking skills with an ability to extend their knowledge via the network. Under our current scheme, the student who can sit alone in the library studying for hours may get the best grades, but they may be missing a critical skill for operationalizing their ability.
If we’re going to enable the long-tail of education by turning students into peer-teachers, then we’ll need to do two things. First, we must update our system of goals and expectations. It is not enough to simply say “let’s let them use technology”, as technology alone is never the single answer. Second, we’ve got to create structures or “architectures for participation”, in which the natural tendencies for collaboration are rewarded and evaluated. Is this games-based learning? Is it virtual collaboration? Is it telepresence or remote instruction? As we move towards the future or learning, we’ll see all of that and more.
The most important thing, however, is that we must update our expectations and evaluation criteria. They kids are already using these collaborative technologies – they’ve been doing it for years, and they’ll do it on the job and throughout their lives. Let’s reward them for this natural tendency.
Please feel free to contribute your thoughts to this thread…I’d particularly like to hear creative ideas for how we can use technology in long-tail learning situations.
Tags: cognition, conference, HASTAC, lecture, social networks
heh. computer-supported collaborative learning dissertation coming soon… simply can’t seem to squeeze it all in this text box! :)
My mother was an 8th grade math teacher of gifted kids for years. She always let her students work in groups on math problems because of exactly the things you discuss here. Students who already ‘got it’ were not bored as they could help teach the students who had not ‘gotten it’ yet. Students who had not ‘gotten it’ were often more receptive to help from their peers than from the teacher. The only problem is that this model makes for a noisy classroom. This did not bother my mother because she knew real learning was going on. But many, if not most, of todays teachers are terrified of ‘losing control’ of their classes. We have to start in teacher education programs to instruct our teachers how to be comfortable with chaos if within that chaos learning is happening. I teach college students information literacy classes and I struggle with this issue in my own classes. But this semester they are doing their final project in groups — I have already seen more engagement than ever before.
G’day Fred,
You might be interested in what Lisa Herrod is trying with her class at the Sydney Institute of TAFE. She describes her plan on her usability blog at Sitepoint
Basically, she gives them autonomy and independence with their own tumblelog but then allows sharing and discussion via mashing their feeds together in Jaiku
Very cool idea! I’m interested to see how it pans out
Obviously, things are much different with adult education, but when I was teaching 12-16 year olds, I definitely found this model of collaboration to be the best method of helping the students learn. Like Rosalind’s mother, I found it made for a very noisy classroom, but you have to learn to let go of that
Kids would share their knowledge with each other freely. It’s good for their self-esteem, their socialisation and their communication. It also makes teaching much easier and faster ;)
Of course it’s multifaceted, but one aspect of it: (at a college level, though the basic model transfers)
Phase 1:
Orientation should begin with the student’s digital identity being mashed with an institution designed tagging taxonomy.
The student self tags and probably imports their Facebook tags as well.
The institution then recommends groups that have either a) have close matching group tags or b) have members with matching tags.
Orientation becomes a process of guided, individually customized introductions to people (through digital identity, then, importantly, real world) and groups.
These can be affinity groups, learning groups, activity groups, etc.
Phase 2:
The student’s activities are primarily managed online and placed in an aggregation interface.
(Think Facebook news feed, Basecamp RSS feed, right down to Twitter, piled into something like http://www.dandelife.com. Students add to their their activity record with reflective blogs.)
Phase 3:
These feeds leave searchable tags and a trail or digital “foot prints”. This gets aggregated and filtered by the institution’s software for the purpose of recommendation – sounding just like Amazon: People like you who took class Y and joined group B liked group x.
Students can drill down into recommendations to see the individuals whose “foot prints” they are following. They can make friends via digital identity, ask questions, recruit as mentor
(mentors get credit for teaching), etc.
Navigation is possible by individual at any time slice, i.e. freshman can see what cool seniors did as freshmen (think Facebook social time-line) or group, taxonomy, folksonomy or taskonomy.
School then, becomes guided, individualized, collaborative, bottom up and long-tailed.
Phase 4:
Data piles grow, recommendations become better, including classes first, then topic info streams (and open source curriculum bits).
Harvard shares recommendations methods and footprint tracks with Bainbridge Community College types and high schools. It all goes open source.
Oh and a fun side benefit: All this digital makes for much better assessment and a transparent quantitative grading system for grades that actually matter.
Thanks for the comments everyone. Some very interesting ideas there.
What I hope we can come to is a time where collaboration is actually taught, not simply a skill that appears exogenous of the curricula.
Sure, the ‘smart kids’ can figure out how to collaborate, just as they can teach themselves math or whatever. Collaboration is a very important academic skill, one that can’t be taught solely with books, it must be fostered.