I seem to be trapped in an educational landscape where just mentioning that you are using Web2.0 and participatory media in classrooms to enhance student learning outcomes, home – school partnerships etc etc causes enough sharp intake of admiring breath to create a susurration of approval from all “those that know Web2.0”. I truth I work in a landscape where the approval stakes are so high that even “those that don’t know Web2.0” can find themselves sucking in an approving breath in sympathy and symphony.
To question our educative practice in integrating ICTs (Web2.0 or not) to enhance learning outcomes is met with incredulity ... and I want to explore this idea further
Why should educators care when what is celebrated as “openness” is really something quite different, surely a focus on improving learning outcomes is both necessary and sufficient ... right?
The recent judgement ordering “Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom all its records of who has watched what videos. What clip, under what name, and from what IP address.” should be enough to alert educators that focussing on the enhanced learning outcomes when integrating ICTs into classroom programmes is not enough.
Lucychili sent me the video link to Jonathan Zittrain as Artichokean mindfood a while back and I am currently following up on Zittrain by reading his book “The Future of the Internet” and how to stop it:
I like the way Zittrain opens with a historical example distinguishing generative technology of the early PC platform with the pre-programmed, locked down, tethered and controlled technology in the iPhone.
Zittrain’s criteria for generative platforms versus locked down or tethered appliances certainly helps me shortcut to what bothers me about the way the discussion over Web2.0 is unfolding in the professional learning opportunities available to New Zealand educators –
I can see an immediate application for Zittrain’s thinking about the point of difference between generative and locked down technologies in my own work with technologies in schools AND I can see this thinking can be used to look at the way we bring educators together for professional learning through organised for profit conferences versus some kind of adhoc (un)conference experience.
It is that “freedom from and freedom to” argument that Margaret Atwood plays with so effectively in The Handmaid’s Tale – where allowing the world to tilt the balance towards “freedom from” has dystopian consequences for women ... and it is the ease with which these societal changes are introduced under the guise of “freedom from” that makes The Handmaid's Tale such a chilling read
“There is more than one kind of freedom… freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it” Chapter 5 pg 24, In The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
Zittrain suggests that tethered technologies (offering the user a “freedom from” experience ) differ from generative ( offering a “freedom to” experience) and that generative have usually been associated with ....
- no CEO,
- no master business plan,
- no paying subscribers,
- no investment in content, and
- no financial interest in accumulating subscribers.
Which leads me to ask two questions
1. Are the technology initiatives I currently use in education examples of a generative (freedom to) or a controlled (freedom from) technologies?
Quite a lot of controlled or freedom from stuff emerges from the analysis ... all of which leads me to another question ... the one Postman raises and referred to in the previous post: On selling the key to the internet to people who didn’t even know it was locked
2. What does it matter if I am using controlled technologies rather than generative ones if I am integrating ICts to enhance student learning outcomes ...?
An interview with Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool – helped me see this better (from a Bruce Sterling link at Viridian Design via Teemu Arina’s great blog post on Mobile Wands ) .
So what is Alan Liu trying to say here, not particularly clearly? Basically he's saying that in the guise of empowering users through all this participatory fooforaw, Web 2.0 is actually a ploy to return the Internet's technical power to the specialized geek clique that originally built Web 1.0. They stole our revolution, now we're stealing it back. And selling it to Yahoo.
"I am highly skeptical of the 'Web 2.0' hype.
There are two reasons for this. One goes back to the issue of history (...). 'Web 2.0' is all about a generation-change in the history of the Web, but from a perspective that is looking at what is happening right now, as opposed to what was happening during the previous generational change (the '1980s'). It's not clear that we can really describe a generation change of this magnitude and complexity while we are in the midst of the change itself, except to say that 'something' is happening that a future generation may decide is qualitatively different. After all, when people speak of Web 2.0, they are actually referring to a swarm of many kinds of new technologies and developments that are not all necessarily proceeding in the same direction (for example, toward decentralization, open content creation and editing, Web-as-service, AJAX, etc.)."
"It's not at all certain, for example, that open content platforms in the style of blogs, wikis, and content management systems align with a philosophy of decentralized or distributed control, since many such database- or XML-driven technologies require a priesthood of backend and middleware coders to create the underlying systems and templates for the new 'open' communications. Just how many people in the world, for example, can make one of the current generation of open-source content-management systems (which often start out as blog engines) do anything that isn't on the model of 'post'-and-'category' or chronological posting? Even the more trivial exercise of re-skinning such systems (with a fresh template) requires a level of CSS knowledge that is not natural to the user base."
Alan Liu has even more to complain about:
"My second reason for being skeptical about 'Web. 2.0'– at least the hype about it – is more important. I think that people who make a big deal out of Web 2.0 are trying to take a shortcut to get out of needing to understand the real generation changes that are happening in the background and that underlie any change in the Web. Those changes occur in social, economic, political, and cultural institutions.
"Web 2.0 is just a high-tech set of waldo gloves or remote-manipulators that tries to tap into the underlying social and cultural changes, but really requires the complement of disciplined sociological, communicational, cognitive, visual, textual, and other kinds of study that can get us closer to the actual phenomena. (...) I don't think there are many developers of Web 2.0 technologies who have done the hard social and cultural studies to help them think about what they are developing. They make a neat system or interface that only taps into some aspects of the social scene. Then, if there are a lot of hits or users, their system is said to be a paradigm. But it's hit or miss. There is no assurance that such technologies are the real, best, coolest, or even most useful 'face,' 'book,' or 'space' of people – only that they are the face, book, or space allowed to surface through a particular lash-up of technologies."
Liu seems to make the same argument that Postman does .... and makes me want to ask
3. What will embracing a technology that is increasingly monitored and controlled from a central source do to learning?
All of which makes me hungry to read my latest and as yet unopened Amazon purchase .... Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion ...
“There is no simpler or clearer statement of the radical change that digital technologies will bring, nor any book that better prepares one for thinking about the next steps.”
–Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School and Author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
It is a book that promises to help me understand the social and political consequences of what we do as educators when we introduce digital technologies to classrooms and do not focus our attention and that of our students on anything more than the immediate learning outcome.
Does it matter in school if “Web 2.0 is just a high-tech set of waldo gloves ....” ? ... The short answer is that it probably does.
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