Day: 30 March 2006

Keep computers out of the classroom?

I look for situations where someone I like and trust has a radically different view from me on any particular subject. Because I think I can learn from it.

Here’s a recent example. Michael Schrage, someone I’ve never met, but whose works I have enjoyed reading, wrote recently in the Financial Times: The “edutainers” merit a failing grade. Now this is a guy who wrote Serious Play, a researcher in innovation at MIT, someone who has been active at all levels of education for a quarter of a century.

So I take notice. He says “What better way to breed cognitively spoilt children than sparkly tools that cater to their impatience and short attention spans?” He goes on to say “Classroom computing offers less of a bold vision than a cowardly cheat by technocrats counting on technical innovation to shield themselves from hard questions about what schools should be.”

I believe he makes three important points.

  • One, misguided early adoption could have resulted in painful write-offs: a timing issue
  • Two,  most educational software has nothing to do with cultivating character: a process issue
  • Three, technology could be used as a medium to redefine relationships between schools and communities creatively

I agree with all three points. I also agree with him that we shouldn’t make the hyperactive short-attention-span problem worse.

I infer from his article that he does not believe in Taylorist assembly-line cookie cutter approaches to  education, and that we should celebrate the rich diversity present in student humanity. My words, not his. And I agree wholeheartedly.
But despite all these agreements, I believe there is room for computers in the classroom and in the school. For the social aspect of education, for cooking-pot approaches to learning. Blogs and wikis. Networks of networks. Letting our children do things we wouldn’t have dreamt of. Let them have their magic and wonder, and let us do everything we can to protect them from hypnos and mesmer.
I guess what I’m trying to say, Michael, is I agree with pretty much everything you say about this subject bar the use of social software. In fact I think it is imperative that social software is used to reconnect the child to the teacher and the school and the community. It’s not about gadgets and glitz. It’s about connectedness and belonging and sharing and bonding. That’s what we need in schools so that learning can take place.

Four Pillars: Time for a recap

We have a Foundation.

The Foundation covers tin and wire and connectedness and storage; it deals with the bits and bytes; it is independent of vendor or device, agnostic on platforms and driven by community standards. Any device any connect mechanism any form of information anywhere anytime. All recorded and archived and searchable and retrievable.

On top of this Foundation are Four Pillars. Syndication, which pushes out information, subscribed to and personalised as needed. Search, which pulls in information, collaboratively flitered and preferenced and heuristically-improved as needed. [In both these cases information is acquired on a non-deterministic relevance and ranking basis, with training and learning being the basis of improving accuracy]. Fulfilment, which is the transaction process of discovering inventory and price for an interest, identifying the buyer and seller uniquely, exchanging value and proceeding with the logistics. Fulfilment is fulfilment for a book, a bed, a bond or a body. And Collaboration/Conversation, which is the “markets are conversations” Cluetrain glue that binds all this together.

The Four Pillars underpin the new world of information. You create, publish, receive information that you never had before. Social information, cooking-pot information. You visualise it in ways you could never do before. You move it and share it and enrich it and aggregate it and disaggregate it using tools you could never have conceived before. And you do all this with presence and location and attention and mobility. You teach it and learn it and shape it and train it. You cleanse it and repair it and fuse it and melt it. The it is information. Yes, this is a blog about information -)

And the you doing everything is not me nor my generation. All we are doing is preparing for Generation M and learning from them.

Utopia, yes. But all it needs is common sense in avoiding visible pitfalls in vendor-lock-in, in “industry” standards, in DRM and in IPR. The elephants in the room.

This needs all of us, the market participants, to work differently. Take into account the impact of opensource, understand that we have to move from geographic utility to virtual global utility, from generic utility to ever-changing vertical utility. Work out what problems are unique to us and solve them, and use the community to solve community problems. Refactor our attitude before our code. See what all this means to us as vendors, as software builders, as “IT departments”, as telcos, as regulators, even as “consultants”.