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.
