Brian Lamb’s latest post over at Abject Learning is clear-eyed, thoughtful, and more than a little poignant. Extraordinary, really.
All I can say to the first two bullet points is “right on.”
I’m going to be mulling over that third bullet point for a long time. It’s early here and I can’t vouch for the coherence of my response, but I want to try, so bear with me please. (I’m hoping to recover some bold bloggery over this holiday break and get back in this conversation–and Brian’s post is nothing if not inspiring in that regard.)
My first thought, maybe my most urgent thought, is that we must teach our students and our colleagues (and ourselves!) to be technology strategists. That kind of education ought to be one of our institutions’ top priorities. The range of options, the dizzying implications, the come-and-go services, the question (as Col. Tom Parker used to ask) “how much does it cost if it’s free?”: these are questions that education should address from an early age in the specific context of networked computing. There’s more to being a technology strategist than just being a savvy user. All digital citizens should be digital strategists. That’s going to take some significant curricular and attitudinal change–though I think we can take important steps in that direction without bringing all the current machinery of education to a screeching halt.
A bubble may well burst in 2008, but I feel the Web 2.0/3.0/x.0 landscape will continue to expand in all the ways Brian has described. There’s no going back. I understand the feeling of panic that can engender. I’d argue that that feeling is not different in kind from the feeling of having to mature and take one’s place in a very complex civilization that may well be eating itself, but which (as always with our species) holds enormous promise and often great joy and splendor.
I am no techno-utopian and am not always optimistic about the scalability of benign self-organization, but I do believe in the power of allegory, or at least extended analogy, and I see the emerging situation Brian’s outlined as no different from the basic questions that should always engage us with regard to schooling. I think we’ll look back on the last century or more of higher education as a time when we got sleepy and forgetful about the difficulties of creating and sustaining real school. I think the open web and its successors, with all their mess, peril, and promise, may force us to wake up. That’s my hope.
It’s the alternative that frightens me.
Alternative, indeed. Great post, Gardner. I so relate to the panic. I am taking a deep breath.
Absolutely Gardner!
It is all about imagining those tools and examining their intersections with teaching and learning. The bubble is neither here nor there when you don;t care about the profit margin in terms of dollars. It is the possibilities the bubble has made clear at little or no expense to those willing to experiment that remains remarkable about the journey thus far. And with a number of those tools, whose communities remain strong and the possibilities rich, we are still far ahead of paying too much money for subpar possibility that all of the LMSs proffer as paltry alternatives.
Awesome post, much like Brian’s. I love you guys!
Pingback: Ruminate » Blog Archive » Open Source, Tech Bubbles, and EdTech
I’m focusing on the part of your article that says “we must teach our students, our our colleagues (and ourselves)”. I’m focusing on what it takes to move from a mentality of teaching, to one of learning, where the Intenet, and place based ideas, are a vast network of knowledge and relationships that can help anyone solve problems, or create new products and services.
If the traditional distribution channel for teaching and learning is colleges to prepare teachers and public and private 9am to 3pm schools to teach students, I feel the Internet and non-school learning and mentoring centers represent alternate strategies for teaching and learning. In my own case, a tutor/mentor program, that engages adults from many backgrounds and youth from inner city neighborhoods, is such a non school distribution point.
The challenge to maximizing the learning opportunitiy in such locations is finding people who understand the ideas you and your peers write about, and who can help volunteers and students adopt these ideas into their own learning. If colleges are not traning people to facilitate this type of learning, who is, other than the informal network of blog writers?