Distributed digital identity

Ever since I read George Dvorsky's 20 crucial terms every 21st Century Futurist should know I have been thinking about one particular term he featured. His mention of the Substrate-Autonomous Person got me thinking about what possible applications should could have for education in the future. Here's a quote from the article:

In the future, people won't be confined to their meatspace bodies. This is what futurist and transhumanist Natasha Vita-More describes as the "Substrate-Autonomous Person." Eventually, she says, people will be able to form identities in numerous substrates, such as using a "platform diverse body" (a future body that is wearable/usable in the physical/material world — but also exists in computational environments and virtual systems) to route their identity across the biosphere, cybersphere, and virtual environments.

"This person would form identities," she told me. "But they would consider their personhood, or sense of identity, to be associated with the environment rather than one exclusive body." Depending on the platform, the substrate-autonomous person would upload and download into a form or shape (body) that conforms to the environment. So, for a biospheric environment, the person would use a biological body, for the Metaverse, a person would use an avatar, and for virtual reality, the person would use a digital form.

Yes, a futuristic, transhumanist concept this may be, but in an age where we are increasingly projecting our identities across vast spaces and to huge potential audiences, we need to take note of the nuances of this kind of thinking. Autonomy connotes personal choice. Each of us will have the capability to inhabit as many virtual worlds and adopt as many personas as we wish, and yet we each remain one person. Selfies and simple avatars are merely the beginning of this digital identity transformation. Along with the idea of the quantified self, the concept of distributed digital identity has the potential to be transformational and liberating. It could also be calamitous for our sense of community, society, and for the mental health of many. The advances being made in bio-engineering and genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology - our transhumanist futures - can play out in many ways. We have yet to see what specific contributions any of these might make to our educational futures. 

Once, where traditional education was the only option, learners had to be co-present with their teachers. The along came various forms of distance education, where learner and teacher were separated by geographical distance and conversation was mediated through technology. Blended forms of traditional and remote education followed. We now find ourselves in a transitionary phase where we are just beginning to come to terms with the ways technology might mediate our virtual, social and cognitive presence in synchronous and asynchronous spaces. The recent rapid advances in connecting infrastructures, processing speed and mobile, wearable interfaces could lead to a bewildering array of future pedagogical possibilities. Some of these might enhance and enrich our future learning experiences, but some may be accompanied by serious risks we have not even started to consider. 

When we are liberated from our physical and temporal constraints, everything becomes possible, but not everything is always desirable. 

Photo by Freya Bigg


Flipping the teacher by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Flipping the teacher

If I'd suggested flipping the teacher while I was still at school, I would have been in serious trouble. Given my reputation though, it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary.

I once spread a rumour at primary school that my tyrant of a head teacher had died (wishful thinking), and when he came back from sick leave, I wasn't the most popular child in the school. Having said that, many of the kids began to believe in the resurrection of the dead.

Once, during a chemistry lesson in secondary school, I was larking around and accidentally burnt a big hole in my teacher's pretty floral dress with concentrated acid.

He was furious.

I got into a fair few scrapes and a lot of mischief, but suggesting that we 'flip the teacher' would have been the last straw.

Today, the idea of flipping the classroom is a familiar one. Flipping teachers may not be so familiar. Don't panic though - I'm not advocating violence, nor am I suggesting children use obscene gestures. Flipping teachers is about swapping roles. I have already written about this in previous posts. The idea that teachers should become students so that their students can act as teachers may still be contentious and problematic, but I believe that as we see more flipped classroom approaches, the argument for also flipping the role of the teacher will become more compelling, and eventually more acceptable.

A little history: Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann developed the term 'flipped classroom' by considering the time spent by teachers with their students in classroom. They wished to maximise this time, and developed a number of strategies that involved instruction taking place outside the walls of the classroom. Inside, with the teacher present, students were able to explore their learning in more depth and detail, capitalising on 'face time' with the expert. The work of Harvard University professor Eric Mazur supports this approach, because, as he says - instruction is easier than assimilation, and advocated coaching rather than lecturing as early as the 1990s. This is not new of course. For centuries, innovative teachers have been trying to find other more effective methods of pedagogy that can take the place of lecturing and instruction.

If we are at all serious about promoting student centred learning, then we should at least reconsider the roles teachers traditionally play at the centre of the process, and begin to discover how we can help the student replace them. This does not mean that teachers relinquish their responsibilities or shirk their obligations. What it does mean is that teachers should seriously consider new forms of pedagogy where students are placed at the centre of the learning process, and have to spend some time 'teaching'. We learn by teaching. If you have to teach or present something for an audience, you will make damn sure you go away and learn it thoroughly so you don't make an absolute ass of yourself. This is the same principle we see when we flip the teacher.

Here are just five ways you can flip the teacher:

1. Ask students to peer-teach. This form of paragogy ensures that all students need to know something about the topic before they teach it, and can also learn from each other during the process. Even better, get them to teach you something you don't already know about.
2. Give your students a problem to solve. Ask them to come back later to show how they solved the problem, and get them to defend their solution. If they all have different solutions, the fun can start.
3. Students create a self-directed project that encapsulates the principles or facts of the topic they are learning. It can be in the form of a video, or presentation, or role play, or even a blues song (be creative). Just as long as they 'perform' their work in front of an audience.
4. Act as a student, and ask your students awkward questions about what they have learnt. Challenge them to explain clearly what they know. This approach ensures that they must think more critically and reflectively about what they have learnt, and that they need to justify their decisions.
5. The age old seminar is a great flipping method. Ensure that each student has time to study a specific aspect of the course, and prepares teaching materials. They then get to present their work in front of you and their peer group, and are also tasked to encourage discussion by preparing some key questions.

I gratefully acknowledge Max Brown for giving me permission to use his most excellent cartoon that depicts flipping the teacher.

Graphic by Max Brown


Flipping the teacher by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The big switch

Most teachers by now will be aware of the concept of the flipped classroom. Instruction takes place outside the classroom and discussion follows in the classroom. Assimilation of knowledge is supposedly a more viable proposition, because it is done in the presence of an expert, and the general delivery of content occurs outside the formal learning environment. Flipped classrooms generally take advantage of technology for off campus learning while maximising the presence of the teacher for discursive and iterative activities.

But what happens when we flip the roles as well? What happens when the students become teachers and the teacher becomes a learner? Some might baulk at the idea. After all, teachers are paid to teach, and students are there to learn, right? Yet it is not as clear cut as the binary might suggest. If you subscribe to a kind of pedagogy where you believe that facilitating learning is more effective than direct instruction, you will probably recognise the potential. Pedagogy is (or really should be) about creating spaces and opportunities that are conducive to good learning. That often means teachers stepping out of the way, and students taking the lead in their learning.

Encouraging students to go away, and learn something deeply enough to be able to teach it, is something we have been doing in Higher Education for years. We call them seminars. They are student led, and each learner is assigned a specific area to study, understand and then present to their peer group. This is a version of teaching, and we all learn by teaching. But we can take this a step further. What would happen if all the other students were given the licence to challenge, argue and criticise what the student is presenting? What would happen if the lecturer took the role of an awkward student? This would clearly become a more challenging prospect for the student educator. What might they need to do to prepare for this? How would they need to learn the content?

The answer is that students would need to prepare much more fastidiously. They would need to be critical in their preparation, logical and organised in their development of content, and they would need to anticipate what kind of challenges and awkward questions they might encounter during their presentation. They would need to be scrupulous in their referencing and source provenance, to avoid accusations of plagiarism and loss of credibility. In short, students would need to learn more deeply, widely and critically, to prepare for their role as 'teacher' within the classroom. After the presentation, they might also need to sit down and reflect on what they themselves had learnt through the experience.

There is a particular trope that recurs in Hollywood fantasy films. The plot involves the swapping of minds between bodies. Freaky Friday (both versions) is one example where mother and daughter change places, literally inhabiting each other's bodies. Another variation is Big, where Tom Hanks' character is a young boy who suddenly becomes grown up and occupies an adult body, with hilarious consequences. The list goes on: Faceoff, All of Me, 13 Going On 30, The Hot Chick - all deal with the same issue of switching roles/bodies, and having to perform in very unfamiliar territory. Invariably, the characters involved in the body swapping learn something profound about themselves, their relationships with others and the world around them. Yes, it is pure fantasy, but what if we could take this principle, and apply it to education? Might the participants also learn something profound about themselves and their studies?

Switching roles can be a very powerful pedagogical approach, but it carries its own risks. Sometimes students may feel shocked or intimidated, or even offended by the sharp turns a discussion of this kind can take. Those facilitating such approaches should be aware of these issues, invigilate for emotional upset, and manage the environment appropriately. Teachers may even feel it prudent to model the approach before letting their students loose. Students will need to be aware and adhere to the agreed ground rules. There should be no ad hominem attacks, challenges should be valid and appropriate, and all participants should feel free to argue about, and defend their academic, theoretical and conceptual stances. If managed effectively, flipping roles can promote useful debate, encourage deeper learning, and help students to develop more critical and evaluative approaches to creating content. Ultimately, it should also encourage critical and reflective practice that leads to reflexivity. Most importantly, it will teach students that they should always ask questions, always be prepared to defend their own decisions, and always, always refuse to accept anything at face value.

Check out the big switch and see if it works for your students.

Related post: Bear pit pedagogy

Photo by Rizwan Mehmood


The big switch by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Interview with Terry Anderson

Professor Terry Anderson, who is based at Athabasca University in Canada, is one of the famous figures of contemporary education, and his list of achievements is lengthy.

He is one of the pioneers of online and distance learning, and currently serves as the editor of the influential online open access journal International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL).

His work around the study of social and cognitive presence in distance learning contexts has been cited many times, and his research has led to a number of high profile keynote speech invitations around the globe.

We are delighted that Terry will be delivering a keynote speech at this year's European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) Conference in Zagreb in June. I managed to grab some of his time to ask him a few questions about his work.

Steve: Thank you for agreeing to take the time out of your busy schedule for this interview, Terry. My first question is how did you start? When did you first become involved with research into distance education and online learning?

Terry: I was first attracted to distance education as a student. I lived as a “back to the land” farmer, woodworker and later a teacher, on a farm in Northern Alberta in Canada. I used distance education courses to complete a Masters degree and soon was involved in distance education delivery for a local community college. Providing access was then and still remains my biggest motivation. Now of course access means time and place shifting for distance education students who mostly live in large cities. However, education is too important to be left to those who can attend expensive campuses. I later was the first director of Contact North, a multi-institutional delivery network in Northern Ontario. As I got deeper into distance education administration, I realized how little I knew about research and the historical and theoretical background of our discipline. Thus, I eventually enrolled in a PhD program studying with Randy Garrison and I guess I’ve been at distance education research, publication and practice ever since.

Steve: Your work has been an inspiration to others in education, but what inspires you the most about your own work?

Terry: I love the freedom of being an academic and the opportunity and challenge to being a teacher. Being an Academic has allowed me to travel widely, to meet some very interesting people and to set my own research agenda. Being a graduate school teacher allows me to interact with some very dedicated students and play a small part in helping them undertake important projects. In the meantime, like most professors, I like to talk (sometimes too much!) with students and share my ideas.

Steve: What is the most interesting educational innovation you are currently aware of?

Terry: Of course the proliferation of web 2.0 tools or user generated content tools are very exciting and I think promise to greatly enhance distance teaching and learning. Education always has been more than information dissemination or publishing, but now we have the tools, at low costs and globally available to make participatory learning possible. I’m especially interested in social media that can be used to go beyond the often institutional centric LMS systems. However, I’m not so thrilled about moving directly to commercial systems like Facebook or LinkedIn, due to privacy and ownership concerns. Thus my colleague Jon Dron and I have been building an Elgg-based open access social media system at Athabasca University that offers much more student control, ownership and persistence to create learning “beyond the course”.

Steve: You wrote a book recently with Olaf Zawacki-Richter - what are the main themes of this volume?

Terry: The book, Online Distance Education - Towards a Research Agenda will be published by the time of the EDEN conference. Olaf had the idea to create a summary reference for the major research issues that we struggle with, research and write about in distance education. He had done a fairly extensive study that extracted the 15 major research themes from the major international, peer reviewed journals in distance education. Using Google Scholar and our own networks, we identified and invited the “grandest of the grand gurus” who have researched and published in each of these areas and invited them to summarize that issue, identify theories and practices related to that issue and suggest further research. We were pleased at the response and after a few rounds of editing, more rounds of editorial and peer review by our publisher, we had 15 chapters and over 400 pages of what we think is very high quality text. We also wanted to find an open access publisher. Thus, the complete book and individual chapters will be available in paper format (for a fee) and in PDF format (for free). The book is part of the Athabasca University Press Issues in Distance Education series and available here.

Steve: Your interest in online research is well known. What are the major challenges with this approach?

Terry: I almost hate to say it but one of our biggest challenges in distance education research, is distance between the researchers! Unlike most research centres, even those at Open Universities, at Athabasca our faculty work from home offices and we may never meet our graduate students face-to-face. I suppose we could be better at it, but the lack of researchers and funding to employ full time assistants who can take time from their busy lives and employment is a continuing challenge. Beyond that much of what happens in distance education is cloaked behind passwords and in private studies, thus a researcher has to find ways to assess teaching and learning - and sitting in the back of the classroom and conducting face-to-face observations, measurements and interviews is challenging. Finally in my own work, I try to combine research with active innovation. Despite the promise of change in many of our distance education mission statements, like all institutions of formal education, we have trouble adapting and innovating in times of rapid social and technological change.

Steve: What would be the three most important things an educator would need to know today?

Terry: I think like any professional, distance educators need to know how to effectively use the tools of their trade. This is challenging for distance educators specifically and educators generally because the types, variety and capacity of these tools are under going very rapid change. Thus, ongoing levels of media and specifically network literacy are critically important. Second,to follow from Marshall McLuhan the Medium is the Pedagogy (first coined by Cousin (2005). New tools give rise to new ways to teach and learn and these are guided by our understanding of teaching and learning pedagogy. Thus, educators need to experiment with new pedagogies and see how older approaches to teaching can be adopted to take advantage of the affordances of new media. Finally, getting our heads around new organizational models including the role of for-profit companies, efforts to massif or expand current models to scale and efforts by neo-liberal forces to commercialize and profitize public education present real challenge for us.

Steve: Massive Open Online Courses are currently a major focus of attention for academic, corporates and even governments, and indeed have been covered extensively by the media recently. What are your views on MOOCs?

Terry: I generally support the efforts to scale education, as we have always done in distance education. I think that students, by and large, have been denied much of a “digital dividend” that they deserve. At least in North American tuition rates, costs of text books and shortages of affordable learning options have increased in most schools- despite massive decrease in costs of production, dissemination and interaction. I have theorized (see my Interaction Equivalency Theory) that we can effectively substitute student-content interaction for student-teacher interaction and that is what is being done in many xMOOCs as video replaces real time lectures and tutorials. However, I also realize that “teaching presence” can be very valuable and in some cases may be indispensable. The trouble is, it is expensive and doesn’t scale well. Still though, more efforts are needed to dramatically reduce the costs of education are necessary if we are to meet the current need and the increasing demands for life-long learning on a global scale. We haven’t done a good job of helping students become self motivated and aware of their own learning style and needs and thus many have trouble learning in these type of more self directed educational modalities, but I think the promise is great enough to keep pursuing the model.

Steve: If you had to give away all your technologies, but just keep back one for personal use, what would it be?

Terry: I’m pretty addicted to my spell checker, but I think access and capacity to read and write to the global web is a very profound and critically important tool set for students, teachers and citizens - including myself!

Steve: What, in your opinion, will be the future of education?

Terry: I think that education, as a separate and formal activity that takes place in dedicated buildings will be only one small component of embedded learning that is both used for formal and informal education. In a few years we will likely smile when we think of terms like ‘e-learning’ or ‘online learning’ as being as antiquated as talking about ‘blackboard or ball point pen enhanced learning’. I hope that students will get a chance to enjoy at least once in their lives the opportunity to immerse in a face-to-face learning community, but throughout their lives they will be studying, learning with and without others as they increase their vocational, recreational, aesthetic and personal skills and knowledge. Our challenge as educators is to NOT make this a life long sentence to hard labour, but rather an enjoyable and fulfilling activity for students.

Steve: Everyone is looking forward to hearing you speak in Zagreb at the Annual EDEN Conference in June. Please give us a preview of what you will be speaking about in your keynote.

Terry: A keynote speaker rarely misses an opportunity to flog their latest book to a captive audience - even when they are giving them away as open access! Thus Olaf Zawacki Richter and I will be highlighting insights from and challenges for distance education research. In addition (if Olaf allows me the time) I’d like to talk about a second new book Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media that Jon Dron and I will be publishing this spring. This book introduces the ways that human aggregations of groups, networks and sets can be used and the power that collective computation provides to each.

Steve: Terry, thank you very much.

Reference
Cousin, G. (2005). Learning from cyberspace. In R. Land and S. Bayne (Eds.), Education in cyberspace, pp. 117-129. London: Routledge Falmer

The EDEN Annual Conference will take place between 10-13 June in Zagreb, Croatia. For further details, please visit the EDEN Conference website.

Photo courtesy of Terry Anderson/Athabasca University


Interview with Terry Anderson by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Education, schooling and the digital age

Education and schooling are not the same thing. Schooling is where structures are imposed upon learners to make the process more manageable. Behaviour is synchronised, curricula are standardised, and criterion referenced assessment is imposed to quantify achievement. Education is where learning is personalised and unique to the individual. Learning doesn't require the impositions of schooling. Learning can survive without curriculum, synchronisation, assessment and all the other strictures imposed upon school students. All it needs is enthusiasm and opportunity.

Learning that is personalised and lifelong is almost always self-organised, self regulated and naturally has no course termination date. There is a particular joy in this kind of learning, because it relies on personal enthusiasm rather than the achievement of some particular standardised benchmark.

If teachers are to be present, then they should be pedagogues not directors and managers. Pedagogy in the best sense of the word is where knowledgeable others such as teachers and experts provide the guidance and support for good learning to be optimised. This is what schools in the idealistic sense should be modelled upon.

Teaching to the test must be replaced by learning as a quest. 

A paradigm shift is happening in the world of education, and it is tearing away at the fabric of traditional schooling. The rigid structures of the past are increasingly anachronistic in the fast paced world of mobile phones, the Web and pervasive computing. Students no longer passively absorb content, because they own personal digital devices, and they can use these to produce, organise, repurpose and share their own content.

Co-production of knowledge is emerging as a new model for learning in the digital age. Students become teachers and teachers become students. This kind of power sharing will need to become increasingly common if schools are going to remain relevant. The blurring of these boundaries epitomises digital age learning, as does the growing autonomy students are attaining as they learn for themselves. It is not the end of the school system, but it is a wake-up call for schools to begin adapting to the needs of this generation as we emerge into a technologically rich society where personalised devices are common place. Students are not longer satisfied with schooling - one size does not fit all. It does not even fit individuals.

All of these themes and more were discussed in this video interview I did for Northland Polytechnic in Whangarei, New Zealand recently. The interviewer was Vasi Doncheva, who until recently was Flexible Learning Manager at NorthTec.

 

Photo by Steve Wheeler


Innovative practice by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Taking up residence

David White, who is at Oxford University, is probably best known for his theory of Digital Residents and Visitors. Along with Alison Le Cornu, White published an article in 2011 that countered the Digital Natives and Immigrants ideas of Marc Prensky. Prensky's Natives and Immigrants was a popular theory within the education world a decade ago, but upon close examination it turned out to be fraught with difficulties and flaws. We discovered that Natives and Immigrants didn't actually exist - and that the theory was based largely upon speculation and anecdote. It was simply a myth.

Unfortunately, the genie was now out of the bottle, and people believe what they want to believe. The legacy of this theory is that many teachers continue to trot out the same old line that students are 'natives' whilst they, being older and less familiar with technology, are 'immigrants.' It has become a convenient excuse for many, who then feel free to dismiss their own involvement in the use of new media, whilst simultaneously overestimating the abilities of their students. The media and press also persist in using the term with alacrity, even though several academics, researchers and thought leaders (including Prensky himself) have repeatedly warned us about its lack of veracity or misinterpretation.

White's argument of Residents and Visitors is therefore a very welcome and timely alternative perspective. His argument is that the use of digital technologies is not about when you were born, but about what tools you decide to use most often. Those who habituate into the use of Twitter for example, become adept at using it, and adopt the role of residents within that digital environment. They may not be such regular users of Facebook, so are more likely to be visitors rather than residents within that particular social media environment. In essence, it's about context and use, not about age, says White.

My view is that ultimately, although we may be residents in some spaces, we are also temporary residents - or tenants - because we don't know how long our familiar spaces might exist before something else comes along and replaces them. Such is the volatile nature of the Web. However, we can often become touristic in our use of many other social media, because there are so many to choose from, and we will never have enough time to become resident in all of them. This is why networked learning, and communities of practice are so important. Everyone knows something, but nobody knows everything.

Residents and Visitors is a simple yet very effective idea, and is a much better way to explain the digital phenomenon. Now David White has recorded a short series of videos in which he expands upon his concept of Residents and Visitors. It's easy to follow and has been professionally produced. I believe this video series will become a significant resource that helps us to define our new and emerging identities and make sense of how we relate to each other within digital environments. Below is the first in the series of the Residents and Visitors videos.

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Photo by Tawheed Manzoor


Taking up residence by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Innovative practice

I love to visit innovative schools to talk to children and teachers about how they use technology, and Taupaki School fits that description. The school is located in a beautiful rural setting north of Auckland, and is a 'full primary' school, teaching children from year 1 up to year 8 (5-13 years old). The prevailing pedagogy of the school is constructionism - children learning through making. Teachers encourage children to bring their own devices into the classroom, and I noticed that many of the students had at least two devices - a school laptop and their own iPad - to work with. I thought at the time that we are now no longer in a one laptop per child situation - now it is more likely to be 2 (or more) devices for each child. I was impressed by some of the year 8 children who were very keen to show me what they were learning using a variety of technologies and applications.

Boston and his Minecraft Project

Boston and his friends were learning using Minecraft on school laptops. Boston's project involved recreating a Second World War battlefield, complete with bunkers and escape routes. He had worked on this for many hours, rendering the scenes and creating the buildings and backgrounds. He told me he had learnt a lot of history through the project and that he had needed to do a lot of in-depth research into the war to maintain accuracy. He said he now understood a lot more about what had caused it and who the major players were. Some of Boston's friends were re-creating their school in Minecraft, building by building, exactly to scale. They had to go out and measure the entire school campus, including the grounds to ensure that the proportions of their virtual school were correct. They were writing up their project in their online journals when I spoke to them, reflecting on what they had learnt about ratios, distances and dimensions.

Zoe, Megan (pictured above) and their friends, also in year 8, were working hard on creating an augmented reality art gallery. They were using iPad apps to create and then capture context aware images, that connected them directly to sites displaying to their own photos. They showed me how they planned to merge their own photos with the pictures they had made of animals, to create a new type of synthetic art. They were also busy writing up their experiences and what they had learnt, to share with their teachers, friends and parents. Some of the other girls said they got very excited when they received comments back the writing in their reflective diaries. They also had a class blog that is part of the global Quadblogging Project. I asked them what they were learning, and was told that they made sure their sentences were spelt correctly and that they are grammatically accurate, because they knew there were people out there who were reading their stories.

Creating Minecraft scenes 

Finally, Zavier, a student in year 8 who previously experienced difficulty engaging in his lessons, proudly showed me the work he was now doing learning mathematics. He was also keeping a reflective diary on his progress which could be shared with his parents for their comments. Zavier was working his way steadily through online maths tests, learning how to calculate formulas and algebraic functions by watching YouTube videos and then applying this knowledge to the maths problems on his laptop. I asked him if he used the online resources outside of school. Yes, was his reply, because he enjoyed learning through this method, and could always carry his work around with him on his laptop.

Making interactive bags

Over in another part of the school, the soft materials technology teachers were hard at work showing students how to use conductive thread and light emitting diodes (LEDs) to create bags and clothing that lit up or made sounds when they were activated. One teacher told me that the use of technology, embedded into the curriculum, had been instrumental in engaging students in all subjects, and that they were motivated to go further. Elsewhere in the school, 3D Printers were being used to produce some fascinating objects and robots that could negotiate their way around barriers were being designed. Makey Makey and Arduino tools were also in evidence, providing the children with endless hours of inventive fun and learning. I was highly impressed by the diverse array of technology being used in innovative ways to promote good learning.

I'm very grateful to Taupaki School Principal Stephen Lethbridge and Chair of the Board of Trustees Paula Hogg for inviting me to spend the day discovering how this very innovative school is helping to make education exciting and relevant in the digital age.

All photos by Steve Wheeler


Innovative practice by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Networked pedagogy

New theories for the networked, digital age, emerging cultures of learning and a hyper-connected and networked society. Differentials between academic practices, and the variety of roles we adopt within communities of practice and learning. Flipped classes, Massive Open Online Courses and Mind Technologies. The impact of traditional education on contemporary pedagogical practices. Chaos and uncertainty versus knowing and order, and the educational impact of rhizomatic approaches to learning. The future of education and the potential impact of new and emerging technologies.

All of these topics and more were covered during a podcast interview I did for Michael Coghlan as a part of his series for TAFE on e-learning thought leaders. I speak in particular about my own personal pedagogical approach and how my own teaching and learning methods have been developed and influenced over the last few years in a technological rich environment. I had the pleasure of meeting Michael face to face a week or so later when I keynoted the Future of Higher Education conference in Sydney, and we were able to continue our conversation. Here is the link to the interview which lasts approximately 30 minutes.

Image by Calvinius on Wikimedia Commons


Networked pedagogy by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Web and us

1989 was a defining year for humankind. It was the year the world began to connect. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee originally proposed the World Wide Web that year, nobody really knew just how influential it would be. In just 25 short years, the Web has transformed the lives of billions of people across the planet. It has created just as many problems as it has resolved, but most would agree that the benefits significantly outweigh the challenges.

The last 25 years have been an astonishing period of change. The development of the Web has been more rapid and pervasive than anyone could have predicted. From a personal perspective, the Web has changed forever the way I live and work. I believe the Web has also had a profound influence on the way I think. I believe it has also made me more creative. The way I now represent knowledge is based not solely upon the books and journals I used to heavily rely upon, but also on instantaneous conversations and discussions through social media, the immediacy of content on blogs and videos, constant connections with family, friends and colleagues wherever I find myself in the world, and timely updates about the things I am interested in, all available on my personal devices. I can also create my own content with relative ease, and receive rich feedback from my online networked community of peers. This is a valuable part of my professional practice, and I don't know what I would do without it. Even shopping online has become an educational experience. You never know what you will learn or what new ideas you will encounter each and every time you venture onto the Web.

All of the above activities were inconceivable prior to 1989. The Web has changed the way I think, because I now expect to be able to do all this, and rely on my connections to perform my various professional roles. I can research a subject any time of the day or night, without needing to go anywhere further than to my laptop or smart phone. The worldwide conversations continue 24 hours each day, as time zones come alive and people connect into the shared global space that is the Web. We are a networked society now, and there is no going back.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee now heads up the World Wide Web Consortium, which was established to develop the standards of the Web. Sir Tim maintains his earliest vision and ethos of the Web which was to share knowledge freely across the globe, and on his Twitter site states 'Let the Web serve humanity.' His major concern now is that freedom of speech on the Web is being eroded and has called for a global bill of rights to protect users. From an educational perspective, the Web must be protected. Knowledge is being democratised, and is being shared more freely than ever before, and we should jealously protect this. One of the major shifts in this paradigm is that everyone and anyone can now create and share content on a global stage to a potentially worldwide audience. If that were taken away, the world would be a poorer place.

Another major shift is that those who once held a monopoly on knowledge are now seeing their control slipping from their grasp as people everywhere take up the challenge to create knowledge in as many forms as imagination allows. Anyone who believes in democracy must view the Web as a means to achieve it at a global level. The Web gives us all a voice.

There are already examples. The people's encylopaedia - Wikipedia - is now the largest in the world, and continues to grow, eclipsing previous megaliths such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The publishing world, the music and film industries, even large corporates, all must sit up and take notice of people power, because the Web facilitates this, and in doing so provides a very powerful alternative for creation, repurposing, organisation and distribution of new content.

So happy birthday to the Web, and may the next 25 years be even more astounding, game breaking and revolutionary.

Photo by Luc Viatour on Wikimedia Commons


The Web and us by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning first, technology second

I know it's been said many times before, but it's worth saying again. Learning should always come before technology.

Let me elaborate. Many teachers welcome the idea of bringing new technology into the classroom. They see it as a means to engage learners, and as a way of making connections between school curricula and familiar territory. Ideas range from games based learning, to the use of social media and networking, to simpler approaches such as the use of digital cameras in art or data logging in science. In mathematics, I have seen interactive whiteboards used very effectively to teach number bonds and floor robots can be used successfully to teach geometry and algorithms. Blogging can be used to engage children in creative writing, while making videos is excellent for problem solving and collaborative work. There is nothing wrong with any of these approaches, provided they don't get in the way of good pedagogy.

But that is the problem. Sometimes, the technology does get in the way of learning and teaching.

Let me give you an example:

Many schools, colleges and universities have by now implemented a managed learning environment (MLE) sometimes referred to as a virtual learning environment (VLE) or Learning Management System (LMS). In fact, many institutions are in their second, or even third iteration of their centralised delivery system. Such tools are in fact large and complex networked systems, and are very expensive to buy if they are proprietary, and very time and labour intense if they are open source. They are complicated to install, take a lot of time and effort to populate with content, and the user interfaces often leave a lot to be desired.

Teaching staff don't like MLEs because a whole new set of skills are needed, and it takes time to generate content and maintain the system. Students don't like them because they are impersonal, not easy to navigate, and are a pale comparison of their weapons of choice - social networking services such as Facebook. The main problem with most MLEs is that they are so complex to use, students often spend more time and cognitive energy working out how to get to the content, than they do actually learning. The technology, designed to make learning easier, actually ends up making it more difficult. It gets in the way of learning instead of facilitating it.

Design issues are not the only problems.

You need to ask yourself why your school is purchasing one iPad for every child, or why you are buying an e-portfolio licence for every student in your university. Is it because everyone else seems to be doing it? Is it because you have been promised astounding, ground breaking results by the sales team? Is it because you are afraid of being left behind in the 'digital revolution'? Or is it because you have actually sat down and worked out what problems technology will solve, and how pedagogy will be enhanced by its introduction? Are your staff on board with this idea? Is your school community ready to adopt new practices or will they resist? Many organisations open up a large can of worms if they don't think through their digital strategy before buying into new technology.

If you forget everything else, remember this: Don't let technology get in the way of good teaching and learning. If you believe technology can be used to engage students, to enhance or extend learning, or to enrich the life of your community of practice, then go for it. However, if you can't see any way technology can do any of these things, then close the catalogue. Leave the store. Walk away. There is nothing for you to see here.

'Pedagogy is the driver, technology is the accelerator' - Michael Fullan

Photo from Tulane Public Relations on Wikimedia Commons


Learning first, technology second by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Vygotsky, Piaget and YouTube

The world is changing, and it's largely due to the proliferation of new technology. Learning in particular is being democratised because of technology. Where once, experts had a monopoly on knowledge and expertise, now anyone it seems can access content that will teach them via the social web. This is known as autodidacticism - teaching yourself.

And yet according to one very respected psychologist - Lev Vygotsky - learning on your own is not as powerful or extensive as learning alongside a 'knowledgeable other' person. According to his Zone of Proximal Development theory (ZPD), whether that person be a teacher, peer or parent, children learn more extensively within a social context. The same can be applied to adults, who can build on their existing knowledge through interaction with others.

ZPD theory ran counter to other developmental theories of the time. Jean Piaget, for example, famously claimed that children were solo-scientists, exploring the world and constructing meaning for themselves. They would need to progress through a strictly defined set of cognitive stages before they were ready to learn at the next level, he said. Vygotsky's tack on learning was invariably laced with rich social contexts, and laden with cultural nuances, and he didn't hold to the stage development theory as strictly as Piaget. Vygotsky also subscribed to the notion that we construct our own meaning, but what you can learn on your own, he believed, was limited when compared to what you could learn with someone else in close proximity, supporting and encouraging you. Jerome Bruner took this notion a little further and talked about the scaffolding of learners - proving close support for them as they developed their skills, knowledge and expertise, and then, when they became more independent, the scaffolding could be faded and eventually removed.

Today, the bold claim is that anyone can learn anything they wish, because social media channels can provide that scaffolding. Choose any subject, whether it be baking a sponge cake, playing blues guitar, or animal husbandry, and you will find dozens of YouTube videos that will teach you. The content is out there. All you need to do is provide the commitment for hours of practice and application. In Vygotskiian terms, the knowledgeable other (the social context) is replaced by the technology. Behind the technology he would argue, are the experts. They create the content and present it to you on YouTube, and the ZPD is still there. In effect, the technology is now mediating the social interaction between learner and knowledgeable other person. In Piagetian terms it could be argued that in fact the learner is still a solo explorer, discovering for himself that he can indeed, with a lot of practice and a great deal of trial and error, eventually bake the perfect sponge cake, emulate Eric Clapton's finest blues riffs, or run a sheep farm in the hills of Cumbria.

For Vygotsky, the technology is the ZPD - mediating the social. Behind the video is the social support, the scaffolding. For Piaget, the technology is simply another tool that enables self discovery. The learner is still a solo explorer, discovering for themselves through trial and error, what is possible.

Which is the correct perspective? It's open to discussion, but whatever way we look at it, tools such as YouTube are opening up unprecedented and very rich learning opportunities for anyone who has access to the Web. Informal learning will never be the same again.

Photo by Anne Roberts


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The drama of Facebook

The world's largest and most successful social network, Facebook - celebrated its tenth anniversary in February 2014. In its short lifetime it has become the most popular virtual meeting place for millions of friends, family, and long-lost acquaintances worldwide. Boasting a growing membership that is currently well in excess of 1.2 billion users, and valued as the third richest company in the U.S., Facebook is a social phenomenon that cannot be ignored. The diverse behaviours witnessed on the site are just one of the many features that provoke great interest from psychologists and social anthropologists, and many studies have already been conducted into Facebook's impact of relationships, social movements, self concept and personal, digital identity. One social anthropologist in particular might have had a great deal to say about the Facebook effect.

Erving Goffman is well known for work on psychiatric asylums, social rituals and stigma. Perhaps his best known work is embodied in his Drama model of social interaction. Developing his theory, Goffman's thinking was probably influenced by symbolic interactionists such as George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, and sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons. In his Dramaturgical Model of human interaction Goffman argued that each of us 'manage our impression' when we find ourselves in the presence of others. Using the drama metaphor, he proposed that each of us has a 'front stage', where we are at our most guarded, and present ourselves according to prevailing cultural norms, values and expectations. It is a kind of 'performance' where we conceal unpleasant or undesirable aspects of our personae, whilst emphasising desirable and more attractive attributes to our 'audience' of others. This is also the region within which we adopt roles and present specific mannerisms, follow scripts and project a controlled appearance that may be further enhanced with props and costumes. Conversely, the 'back stage' region is where we are less guarded and more relaxed, and reveal a more natural representation of ourselves. This is usually a more honest persona, where we 'let our hair down' and step out of the character we may have adopted in front stage, formal roles. The back stage is a space seemingly devoid of an audience, and an area where the individual might feel able to relax into a more authentic, less contrived persona.

Facebook users may feel that they are at home and relaxed when they are online, and 'among friends'. Maybe it is perceived by them as a back stage area where they can relax after a hard day at the office. Never the less, they are performing a role, and are unwittingly engaging with an audience of others. Because Facebook is generally a public space that can be manipulated and 'controlled' by privacy settings, many Facebook users may indeed be in a more private space with their 'friends'. Many however are largely ignorant of the privacy controls and unknowingly leave themselves open to observation from 'outsiders'. They thus fail to manage their impression effectively in this front stage region, because they assume that they are located within a back stage region devoid of an audience. This may be one explanation why people appear to be less guarded on social media, and feel free to say things they would never dream of saying in a real-life public space. The incongruence - in Goffman's terms - of someone adopting a back stage, relaxed role, whilst unknowingly existing a front stage area, can have disastrous consequences upon their self concept, or their reputation.

Friends and others who may have access to the user's personal artefacts, such as text information, conversations, pictures and videos, have the ability to publish these more widely that the user might be comfortable with. Their content, devised for a back-stage context is suddenly thrust into the limelight of a front stage region. Images of users that were intended solely for private use might be reposted to wider circles of 'friends of friends' without the subject's permission, and then the horrified individual has to request that that image be removed. They find themselves thrust into a front stage position against their will, and are then at the mercy of the person who posted the image. Indeed, many relationships have been damaged or fractured because of such actions. Worse, some of the more vulnerable users who have become victims of cyber-bullying and blackmail have tragically taken their own lives. Those who fall foul of the trap of thinking they are acting in a private, back stage space, also discover the dangers of unguarded moments, when they are dismissed from their jobs or their reputation is tarnished.

For many, the drama of Facebook is very real.

Photo by Tim Green


The drama of Facebook by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Maker culture

The recent Higher Education version of the Horizon Report highlights some interesting predicted trends for technology adoption. One that caught my eye is focused on the culture of user generated content - otherwise referred to as the creator society. Here's what Horizon says about this culture:

"The shift continues towards becoming a creator society. Today, society is increasingly mobile and continues to demonstrate evidence that creation is gaining traction over consumption. The Maker movement, user-generated videos, self-published eBooks, personalized domains, and other platforms have all seen steep increases in recent years. Higher education is now in a position to shift its curricular focus to ensure learning environments align with the engagement of creator-students and foster the critical thinking skills needed to fuel a creator society. Courses and degree plans across all disciplines at institutions are in the process of changing to reflect the importance of media creation, design, and entrepreneurship."

Horizon stresses that this is a mid-range trend that may take between 3 to 5 years to establish any significant changes in higher education. This may be an optimistic prediction, given the resistance with which change is met by many traditional universities. It is clear that some universities, as always, will be at the vanguard of any significant changes, whereas many others will drag their collective feet. Those who forge collectively ahead will change their courses to accommodate student use of technologies to create their own content, and change their assessment methods too. We can expect for example to see some of the more visionary professors encouraging their students to create and edit Wikipedia pages for course credits, or publish their own articles and books through open publishing for Kindle or other e-book platforms. Some may even decide to publish their own personal research through similar outputs. Those who involve themselves in constructing and building tangible objects to support their own learning are engaged in a process Seymour Papert called Constructionism - or learning through making. It is powerful because it is often situated in real contexts, and is therefore authentic and experiential. These activities are already being adopted by the innovators within the higher education sector, but how long will it take for these practices to become widespread, or even common places practices in universities? What will it take to break the strangle hold pay-per-read publishers have over government research funding regimes? 

I wrote in a recent blog post that I and some of my colleagues are already encouraging students to produce assignments that are non-traditional - that is, based upon digital media, rather than submitted as paper based essays. Those students who have decided to submit their work for assessment using a digital alternative have been unequivocal in their positivity. They feel liberated to express themselves in new ways, feel that digital assignments are more representative of the culture they are most familiar with, and argue that it provides them with greater scope to address all of the assessment criteria and course materials. It has taken some time to convince administrators that students can submit their assignments as blogs or videos, and that it is neither feasible nor reasonable to ask for these to be 'printed out' in paper format. The struggle against bureaucracy will no doubt continue, and may be one of the most difficult and trenchant barriers to overcome. Regardless of this, I believe that the onward march of user generated content, the maker culture, the creator society, is now unstoppable. It is only a matter of time when it becomes acceptable practice for all universities. Whether it takes 3 years or 30 is up for grabs.

Photo from Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University on Wikimedia Commons


Maker culture by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Wikipedia: A Marxist perspective

Most people by now know that Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopaedia. For those who don't, it's a free digital knowledge repository that holds over 30 million articles in more than 280 languages. With over 500 million unique views each month, it continues to grow. This is largely because literally anyone can freely create pages and edit its content, and the architecture of Wikipedia is such that no content can ever be truly lost, because the previous version of any page can be rolled back if required. It is the go to site for many students now, and regardless of the negative views of some academics and teachers, it is an undeniable phenomenon. Much of the activity on Wikipedia can be explained from a Marxist perspective. To understand this we first need to know how Karl Marx was influenced in his thinking.

Arguably one of the biggest influences in the development of Marx's theory was the German realist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

The Hegelian dialectic (formulated from earlier work by Immanuel Kant) was the basis for Marx's theory of class struggle. Hegel based his theory of the dialectical process (sometimes referred to as 'triadic' learning in an educational context) on a progression of four key principles. The first, is that everything is finite and transient, and therefore negotiable; the second is that everything has opposing perspectives and can be contradicted; the third is that eventually one perspective (or argument) will overwhelm the opposing perspective leading to a crisis (thesis versus antithesis), and finally, the fourth is that resolution (of a kind) emerges - not necessarily through consensus - and that the resultant change does not occur in cycles, but as an ever-rising spiral, so that progress can be made (synthesis).

Wikipedia is premised on user generated content, a chaotic and unpredictable collaborative phenomenon that has many risks and challenges, but the ultimate goal is the democratisation of knowledge. What is seen on Wikipedia is not so much a class struggle to gain control over the means of production, but more a struggle between editors and contributors (knowledge owners) to produce a synthesis of content from disparate and possibly conflicting sources. This in turn forms a new knowledge product through shared and occasionally conflicting negotiation of meaning. A number of factors have to be considered, including accuracy and relevance, as well as provenance and acknowledgements of sources, before Wikipedia content finds stability. The dialectical process holds that we learn through argument, and this is evidenced on Wikipedia through discursive social processes that include editing and reiteration, inclusionism and deletionism. Content is usually accepted by consensus, sometimes after a period of editorial storming. Ultimately, the wisdom of crowds described by James Surowiecki (and based on the seminal work of Francis Galton) is seen as the social process that drives this kind of generation, negotiation and dissemination of knowledge in the digital age.

As with all social and collaborative enterprises division of labour is clearly evident in Wikipedia pages. Marx was aware of the problems of divisions of labour and argued that many were indicative of social control over the masses. There are originators of concepts, developers, those who specialise in creating and appropriating images and other media (see the Wikimedia Commons database that sits behind many Wikipedia pages), and then there are those who design templates, or those who patrol sites, checking for accuracy and provenance, and those who police the legal and procedural aspects of the site. This kind of division of labour may not appear to indicate a social stratification of the Wikipedian community. Look closer however, and a power differential is revealed. Those who appoint themselves as editors of the wiki pages and check content, ultimately have power over that content, and thus over the generators of that content.

Ultimately, Wikipedia exemplifies the movement away from those who own the means of production of knowledge - toward a community based on cooperative ownership of the means of production. It is clear that the publishers of other encyclopaedias and large knowledge repositories have been served notice. They no longer hold a monopoly on the means of production, but are being forced to cede more and more control to the people. Similarly to the gradual erosion of the power of the music and film industries, emerging democratic web movements are loosening the stranglehold of the publishing cultural hegemony while strengthening and extending democratic, free and open online resources, so that anyone can now learn just about anything, at their own pace, and in their own space and time.

Photo by Twose


Wikipedia: A Marxist perspective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Deep learning

"If you can imagine it, you can invent it" - unknown

I recall Nicky Hockley's keynote for the Reform Symposium 2013. She argued that the future is found in the present, and that many of the top science fiction films feature technology that already is in existence. She showed several images of recent movies such as Ellysium, I, Robot and Avatar to emphasise her point. Technology of the future is already here - we just haven't seen it released on the general public yet. The blockbuster science fiction movie Minority Report featured gestural computing, targeted advertising through biometric data scanning and augmented reality technologies. All of these were possible at the time the movie was being produced, and have been for some time. The director and production team consulted with researchers who showed them the possibilities. It won't be long before costs of such devices come down, and they become pervasive. Gestural computing for example, has been with us for a few years in the guise of games consoles such as the 360 Kinnect system manufactured by Microsoft.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Star Trek was just emerging as a popular new TV science fiction series. Kirk and Spock could walk up to a door and it would automatically open for them, and they could talk into personal, handheld communicators, and others could hold conversations with them. These technologies are now common place in the Western Industrial World, and we don't think twice about them. Other Star Trek technologies are also becoming common, including medical scanners (tricorder), video conferencing, touch screen tablets and even 3D printers (replicators). One technology that caught my eye was the universal translator. With it, Captain Picard and his crew could talk to any alien in real time, and could be understood perfectly. Along with faster-than-light travel and teleportation, it seemed like the only impossible dream remaining. Until now.

This week I read an article that documented the recent partnership between futurist Ray Kurzweil and Google's Larry Page. It seems they have teamed up to investigate how the Search Engine giant's massive server fleet and computational power can be harnessed to emulate a virtual human brain. They are calling it Deep Learning - a form of machine intelligence - and the project is already at an advanced stage of development. As the 'machine' is programmed, and supplied with vast amounts of connections at multiple layers of processing, and is exposed to massive amounts of stimulus material, it begins to 'think' and 'perceive' for itself. It has learnt to determine shapes and identify specific objects from among billions of images. Here's an excerpt from an article by Robert Hof in Forbes which documents the outcome of the collaboration between Google and Kurzweil:

In October [2013], Microsoft chief research officer Rick Rashid wowed attendees at a lecture in China with a demonstration of speech software that transcribed his spoken words into English text with an error rate of 7 percent, translated them into Chinese-language text, and then simulated his own voice uttering them in Mandarin. That same month, a team of three graduate students and two professors won a contest held by Merck to identify molecules that could lead to new drugs. The group used deep learning to zero in on the molecules most likely to bind to their targets.

The implications of this for education, business, commerce and a whole host of other sectors of society is ... immense. If we are all suddenly able to converse naturally, and in real time in any language, the world is going to change, and change radically. What will become of language teaching? Will we need it any more? Will translation services become redundant? Or will we still see people paying to learn foreign languages? What will happen to the social and cultural divides that currently separate us across the globe? Will they remain, or will they dissipate over time as we begin to come to terms with this new technology? Will such a universal translation tool become available to all, or will the social gulfs be amplified because of a new digital divide?

Photo by Richard Greenhill and Hugo Elias on Wikimedia Commons


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Tools for conviviality? Illich and social media

He was known as an anarchist philosopher and an intellectual maverick. A former Roman Catholic priest, he was arguably one of the most outspoken and prescient of all the 20th century's critical theorists, and his work is increasingly influential and relevant in an age where technology has pervaded every aspect of our lives. Ivan Illich hoped for a time when the transmission model of education, or 'funnels', would be replaced by 'educational webs' - his notion of what we now recognise as social networks. I wrote a post about the contrast between educational funnels and webs in 2011. At the start of the 1970s Illich wrote:

The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. (from Deschooling Society, 1971)

In the context of the technology of his day, he saw networked computers and telephone systems being used to encourage and promote exchanges of ideas, knowledge and expertise. Illich was not a big fan of traditional education, at least not in the form he observed. He advocated a form of participatory education that democratised knowledge and privileged learning over teaching. He saw technology as one means of transformation for education.

What would Illich have made of the social web? It is unclear, because he died in 2002, just as Web 2.0 was emerging. Yet reading his work, one gets the impression that he would have welcomed it heartily and would have been one of its strongest advocates for education.

Ivan Illich envisioned a community (or network) of learners that was self-sufficient. Here is his vision for how it might be achieved:

"The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity." 

Well now it has, and we are seeing this vision realised by millions every day. In so many ways, the social web mirrors Illich's ideas for 'information exchanges', and 'peer matching' services, especially where facilitated through mobile, internet enabled personal devices. Never before has so much knowledge been generated and shared globally on such a scale as we see today on the Web. Video, audio, text and status updates are being uploaded to the web every second of every day, by hundreds of thousands of users.

Illich saw people as naturally itinerant in their learning, roaming where they wished, encountering knowledge serendipitously and interacting with each other in an informal manner to learn reciprocally. This was a long way away from the oppressive state controlled education systems he railed so strongly against.  Deschooling society, in Illich's own terms, was not about doing away with education, but of discarding the moribund rituals and restrictive practices that epitomised formalised schooling. These ideals were captured in quite pragmatic architectural and city planning terms by Alexander et al (1977) when they conceived of a society where community leaders could...

"...work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups travelling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city's "curriculum"; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their "school" paying as they go with standard vouchers, raised by community tax. Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network."

Such a society would of course be a radical departure from the centralised services with which we are familiar in today's inner cities. However, informal learning does exist in the form of collectives, adult education classes, informal exchanges, and even the emerging fixer and maker cultures. Illich saw informal learning, especially that which was situated and authentic, as being more meaningful that education that was being imposed upon learners from above:

"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting."

In his later work entitled Tools for Conviviality (1973) Illich began to expose some of the societal trends and excavated the role technology played in shaping work. He saw the people as being inherently creative, but like so many other neo-marxist philosophers (see for example the work of Harry Braverman on deskilling the workforce, 1974), he was also aware of the dangers of automation and blind obedience to technology. The role of the artisan has greater significance than that of the unthinking operator:

"People need new tools to work with, rather than tools that work for them." (p. 10)

Social media, especially those that enable users to create and share content, fall into the category of tools that are worked by us. They tap into the essence of our individual creativity, providing us with blank canvases upon which we can express our ideas and share our thoughts. It is likely that Illich would have welcomed the notion of user generated content, and would have applauded the role of social media in challenging and undermining the megalithic capitalist industries of our time. He would no doubt also have warned us about the danger of enslaving ourselves to social networking tools, and would have expressed cynicism over the blatent advertising cultures that surround them. In the final analysis, however, many of Illich's visions are materialising in the digital age, and I believe he would have been gratified to see them come to fruition.

Endnote: This short essay is of course mostly speculative, but an appreciation of the finer nuances of Illich's writings indicate to us that he would certainly not have rejected the role social media can play in advancing and enriching education. To what extent social media and other technologies might be able to play a role in the transformation of the centralised, state funded education system remains to be seen.

References
Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S. and Silverstein, M. (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review.
Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society. Penguin: Harmondsworth.
Illich, I. (1973) Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row.

Photo by Ian Britton on Freefoto


Tools for conviviality? Illich and social media by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.