Artichoke

What would Zorro do?

Sitting in the hairdressers' chair on the last Friday of summer

I refuse the black mask and flat-brimmed hat

but allow myself to be reverse wrapped in Zorro’s black cape -

the many mirrored reflections of my fellow caped crusaders reproach me,

forcing me to wonder what the masked avenger would make of it all.

 

Perhaps El Zorro would fall into a slough of despond,

despairing at the absence of waving swords and cracking bullwhips,

or perhaps he would get excited by the technologies of the future,

and (after carving a “Z” in the wall) gallop off into the night

to find an adult education class in

“how to use chemicals, heat and aluminium foil”.

 

I don’t know about my caped companions but I’m betting

El Zorro would choose night classes over self imposed exile in the marshlands,

I can imagine him swashbuckling through the glass doors of the salon,

loudly proclaiming that he has come to join the fight

against the (newly imagined) injustices of the 21^st century -

age, desire, ambition.

“The Master Switch”, digital citizenship, and WWIC

There has been a not so subtle shift in what is promoted as pedagogically worthy in NZ ICTPD cluster schools in the past 12 months – a shift from helping students adopt cyber-safe practice online to helping students become responsible cyber-citizens.

It seems that what you do when no one is watching becomes more significant when we live in a time where everyone is – watching that is.

Identifying the classroom practices that are suitable for learning about any kind of citizenship is a big and somewhat fraught territory for educators – there is that immediate tension between declarative and functioning knowledge – between teaching for active and passive citizenship

“While educators have always talked about active citizenship and critical thought, classroom practices have emphasized passive acquisition and character development. Teachers' philosophical assumptions that enable them to train future citizens to become passive spectators are discussed.” In Teaching for Passive Citizenship: A Critique of Philosophical Assumptions. Shermis and Barth Theory and Research in Social Education, v10 n4 p17-37 Win 1982

If our goal is for students to become successful active citizens in the digital domain – then as educators we are looking to;

• Increase capability of students to build knowledge and skills of their roles, rights and responsibilities, when participating and contributing as digital citizens.
• Increase capability of students to take actions as digital citizens to change their communities for the better.

How would we know if students had met these goals?

Perhaps as success criteria - evidence will show that:

Schools have implemented a programme of professional learning for successful digital citizenship based on feedback on the learning needs, interests and abilities of their students and the pedagogical content knowledge of their teachers to meet these needs.

• Schools are carefully and diagnostically assessing the declarative and functioning knowledge of their students as digital citizens to determine what they need to “learn next’.
• Schools are carefully and diagnostically assessing the pedagogical content knowledge of teachers to teach the declarative and functioning knowledge needed to meet the identified learning needs of their students around digital citizenship.
• Facilitators are providing the specific pedagogical content knowledge identified as being needed by teachers for them to move their student’s declarative and functioning knowledge of successful digital citizenship.
• Teachers are being observed when teaching students the declarative and functioning knowledge they need to “learn next” to become successful digital citizens and take part in feedback and feedforward conversations afterwards.
• Students are building knowledge and skills of their roles, rights and responsibilities, when participating and contributing as digital citizens.
• Students are taking actions as digital citizens to change their communities for the better.

• Schools are carefully and diagnostically assessing the impact of these declarative and functioning learning experiences on valued student learning outcomes and using these assessments to advise the future professional learning needs of teachers.   

And if that doesn’t daunt you then the culture in which we are charged with creating active digital citizens might …

For what makes the “creating active digital citizens” initiative more complicated is that we are charged with doing this in contemporary democratic countries - countries where sociologists note an increasing public “apathy” “cynicism” and “mistrust” towards political systems and those holding political authority – we are living in an age of the politically disengaged citizen.

Frank Mort’s paper in The Making of the Consumer – (Competing Domains – Democratic subjects and consuming subjects in Britain and the United States since 1945) frightened me – for Mort explores how “political culture” is increasingly being subsumed by “consumer culture”

“Since the late 1980’s sample profiles of the British population have been monitored for their main leisure patterns. What came out top in survey after survey was a list of contemporary pleasures that were principally made available through market based forms of provision; personal shopping, eating out, DIY, and video watching.  Right at the bottom of the list came politics; going to a political meeting ranked on par with a visit to the circus as one of the British public’s least likely things to do!” p225

“According to Bauman, politics is now seen only as a nuisance, a barrier to real life, which lies elsewhere, in the world of personal freedoms, the market, human relationships and so on”  p226

Ironically at the same time that we have lost interest in the politics of democracy – it seems that citizens in a consumer culture expect to be consulted on most everything else in the content service industry

For example, we expect to be consulted on whether it is OK for “British computer-industry millionaire Clive Sinclair to marry a younger woman and on the proposed changes to the Starbucks logo (refer to that fabulous post about "Why wasn’t I consulted (WWIC)" in The Web is a Customer Service Medium by Paul Ford and  to Logoland by Schumpeter in the Economist 

 “Why wasn't I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.” Paul Ford

Reading Mort makes me wonder if in preparing students to be active digital citizens we are preparing them for a role that has already been subsumed by consumer culture in a contemporary democracy like New Zealand in 2011. Perhaps we should instead encourage and prepare students to broaden the scope of their existing activity as Ford's digital consultants.

A clear first step is to teach ourselves and our students about “the Cycle” – the history of the information business – the open and closed ages of radio film and telephone – so masterfully explained by the glorious Tim Wu  in his wonderful and wonderfilled book The Master Switch – The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. 

[note to self: Add The Master Switch – The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  to “must read and discuss” booklist for teachers charged with implementing information communication technology in school this year]

 “History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system.  It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, though it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past century’s transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television, or film. Wu 2010 P6

History also shows that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity’s assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again. “ Wu 2010 p6

Then we might better understand that “choice, freedom and openness” is not a given in the information business.

And then by broadening the focus of what we want to be consulted about we might become more alert to asking “WWIC” when personal communication devices (we find it hard to live without) are increasingly presented to us as closed platform devices – designed to operate on only certain carriers, certain wires, or certain airwaves.

If we neglect to ask WWIC about products and policies that are designed to centralise control by others – we allow public and private power arrangements that compromise net neutrality – and our future digital communication may not be open and personal any more.

It is a big read book - Wu’s arguments take time to process – he ties together many different personalities, products and policies – but “The Master Switch” is also a great read - it is time well spent – Wu takes the understanding I had taken previously from Larry Cuban’s Oversold and Underused Computers in the Classroom   and Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New – Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century to new places and new spaces.  

Reading Wu meant that for the first time I understood the vulnerabilities facing Google when its corporate design means “it owns no connections and no content”

“He who controls the wires or airwaves can potentially destroy Google for it is only via these means the Google reaches its customers. …..... Nor is this matter of infrastructure the firm’s only weakness. A concerted boycott among content owners – website operators or other sources – could achieve the same choking effect.  Under long established protocols, any website can tell Google that it doesn’t want to be indexed. In theory Wikipedia, The New York Times, CNN , and dozens of others could begin telling Google , “Thanks , but no thanks.” Or conceivably strike an exclusive deal with one of Google’s rivals.” P284  

But most of all if you take the time to read “The Master Switch” you will better appreciate that the whole Google versus Apple debate - all that is contested in the information communication empires of the 21st century  - has happened many times before. And no outcome is certain.

An aside:     

WWIC also makes me want to re-imagine schools as customer service mediums hell bent on selling education.

Paul Ford suggests that to be successful as a customer service medium we should

Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don’t just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you’ll sell things.  Paul Ford

So how should we change schools to make them a successful customer service?

On table-sharking as "real" problem solving

When Stanley was a puppy he loved to “table-shark” stuff that wasn’t his. And after sharking he would race recklessly around the house often spilling out into the garden to avoid his outraged pursuers. 

He is a much larger Labrador now. Visitors often imagine they have stumbled over an elephant seal when they spot him snorfing on a rocky outcrop in the back garden.  Regardless of his girth Stanley still loves to bounce around with stuff that isn’t his. And it doesn’t have to be edible stuff.  An incautiously placed iPhone, a Firefly DVD, a discarded Danger Mouse sweatshirt, all capture his attention to the same degree as the pile of grated cheese, freshly baked foccacia, and the charred BBQ sausage.

His problem solving strategies have been refined over the years and he can shift from a seemingly   comatose Labrador to a verticalised and surface hoovering Labrador in microseconds. 

In turn we have refined the problem solving strategies we use to Stanley-proof our possessions. From impossibly high surfaces to a panopticon-like kitchen design we have upped the expertise needed to successfully table shark.  

Stanley is an expert problem solver with “many powerful domain specific problem solving techniques at his “paw and nose tips”.  Furthermore these problem solving techniques have been refined through solving the many opportunities we have presented through our incautious placement of sought after items on accessible surfaces.  [I note that my experiences with Stanley mean my definition of “accessible” is under constant revision]

As his table sharking expertise has built so the distinction between “real problem” and “routine exercise” has blurred.  Pulling on a tablecloth and nosing up shutters, once innovative solutions to real problems are now in truth routine exercises for Stan.

This distinction between the “real” activity and the “routine” activity is frequently misunderstood in schools where we are encouraged to provide students with the real over the routine – with “challenging, open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured problems”.

However there is a problem with this pedagogical prompt.  As Stanley’s experience reveals - the distinction between “real” and “routine” does not lie in the activity itself.  The distinction lies in the domain specific knowledge of the learner –  a routine problem for one person can be a challenging, open-ended, ill-defined and ill-structured problem for another and vice versa.

Real and routine is an “in the eye of the beholder thing”.

If learning results from an interaction between student (a) and learning activity (b), and one persons real activity is another person’s routine activity it makes no sense to isolate the activity from the student by labelling it real or routine.  In doing so we privilege activity over individual and this may not be a good thing if it means we ignore the intersect. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that labelling activities can limit both teaching and learning – when we eschew learning experiences labelled as routine for learning experiences labelled as “real” (and rich and authentic) we neglect the nuance that should capture our attention  in the interaction between the learning activity (b) and the learner (a).

I am thinking about what happens when we privilege the activity over the individual (by labelling it as real/or routine).

How is the labelled activity perceived by students?

How is the labelled activity perceived by teachers?

How do these perceptions (of teachers and students) interact?

What are the outcomes of this interaction?

How is the labelled activity approached by students?

How is the labelled activity approached by teachers?

How do these approaches (of teachers and students) interact?

What are the outcomes of this interaction?

It helps me to think about this in the context of student writing – in the NZ Curriculum – the genres - descriptive, explanatory, information report, narrative, persuasive, procedural and recount – have identified surface and deep features.  Showing audience awareness and purpose through deliberate choice of content, language and writing style for different genres is a literacy challenge for our students.

We have commonly labelled student writing as “real” when it is done online in a blog that is accessible anytime from anywhere by any one and “routine” when it is done in an exercise book where access is individual and invited.  But I am not sure that we know how a student perceives the writing activity when it is done in an exercise book or online or how the teacher perceives the activity? What are the similarities and differences in perception between what is labelled real and routine – what are the similarities and differences student and teacher perception?   

If we label student writing as “real” when it is done online in a blog and “routine” when it is done in an exercise book, then how does the student approach the labelled activities? How does the teacher approach the labelled activities? Just what are the similarities and differences in approach to an activity labelled “real” or “routine”?

When students lived experience blurs the real with the routine – as it does and will - and students find writing (and commenting) online “routine” – how will students and teachers respond to the mislabelling of an activity (a school requirement to write posts on a student blog) as real when to students writing online for an audience may be a routine exercise?   

How will teaching and learning be influenced if as teachers we continue to believe we can label activities as “real” or “routine”?

I wonder if we will we hang onto the pretence of the label “real” long after it has become “routine” in the eye of students?  I suspect so - the edu_twitter stream is choked with tweets from teachers touting for comments so as to make their students’ blog writing for an audience experience appear “real” in a Potemkin Village kind of way. 

It is more fun to imagine that we will we look for a new “real” for student writing  – perhaps will we simply reframe genre to include learning how to write for Wikipedia as has been happening for a while at the University of East Anglia

Wikipedia - banned by some academics as a source for student essays - has been made compulsory reading (and writing) for a new course at the University of East Anglia.

Students are assessed on editing and writing articles on Middle East politics for the online encyclopaedia, which is open to contributions from anyone.

Or maybe to keep it “real” we will we embrace retro writing – and prepare students for a “World Made By Hand” like future - where preparedness for re-engineering available resources will ensure that students can continue writing and showing audience awareness and purpose albeit that this involves scratching text onto home-made parchment with nibs crafted from found materials using pigments extracted from the bark of native trees.