Can school be a dangerous ursine technology?

When you work in the educational wilderness – every edu_blog comment is a source of new thinking.  This one is well worth a Sunday evening trip into the woods with Yogi …

“Really the IT in schools stuff is a dodo. Reached its limits in the late or mid 80s and amazing teachers have been continuing to do amazing things ever since at huge cost--cos school is a technology--a way of doing things. And it's a big hairy scary bear of a technology and any new kid on the block better conform/align with the way the bear wants to do things or it gets gobbled.
You see what is possible with kids and all this stuff when you look outside schools. Nuff said.
Cj comment on “How does technology use us”

cj’s comment collects the "pin up poster bird for extinction" the dodo, a hairy bear and "being gobbled" all in one comment box. Got to admire the eclecticism here.

So what does it mean when cj claims school is a big hairy scary bear of a technology? Been a while since I’ve sought insight from that Hanna Barbera character "The deeper you go in the woods, the more nuts you find!" Yogi Bear

I can start like this

If 48 teaspoons can equal a cup, and  2.54 cm equals an inch,
If Eyeore can equal Marvin the Paranoid Android, and  September 11th can equal Pear Harbour,
If Star Wars can equal The Bible, and Botulinum toxin equal a Trojan horse
If the Irish potato blight can equal anti-Semitism, and Migratory patterns of geese can equal agile processes in project management
If Inquiry learning, discovery learning, problem based learning, experiential learning, constructivist learning, generative learning, cognitive apprenticeship, discovery learning, situated learning and knowledge building can be pedagogical equivalents involving student centred exploration within a given edu_landscape.

Then there must be a way in which I can think about school as an ursine technology.

Perhaps the analogy - thinking about schools as a ursine technology  – is based on a relational factor of “pushing at the limits”

With a cast of zoo animals and hundreds of furry lemurs on the film's namesake island, the animators had to push the limits of technology to render an eye-catching yet believable effect. Every hair on every animal represented a line of computer code, for a countless number of algorithms that had to be compressed and rendered overnight to create the images in just one scene. Madagascar: A hairy technology challenge played out on screen

Have not been into too many schools recently that push at the limits, so

Perhaps the analogy - thinking about schools as an ursine technology  – is based on a relational factor of  “stickability”

Scaling tall buildings may have been easier if Spiderman's suit was covered in thousands of tiny hairs, new research suggests.  A team from Germany and Switzerland found that a type of jumping spider can climb smooth surfaces because thousands of tiny hairs act like molecular velcro.

Have never been much attracted to the notion of school reunions so I am going to struggle with arguments about stickability and schools, so

Perhaps the analogy – thinking about schools as an ursine technology – is based on a relational factor of gendered hirsutism – schools as centres of wisdom or schools as bearded lady freak shows

Male pogonotrophy (the growing of facial hair; beardedness) is often culturally associated with wisdom and virility.  Excessive hairiness (especially facially) is known as hirsutism, and is usually an indication of normal hormonal variation. In contemporary western culture, almost all women shave, tweeze or otherwise depilate facial hair which does appear, as there is considerable social stigma associated with facial hair in women. Wikipedia

Have never bought into that whole boys learn differently from girls bit, so

Perhaps the analogy – thinking about schools as an ursine technology – is based on the relational factor of scariness of the bear and the need for separation

Ever since grizzly bears killed and ate Tim Treadwell and Amie Huguenard last October, speculation has been rife about why this happened. Critics often blame Treadwell's unusually close association with bears and apparent neglect of normal safety precautions. Some of these same factors also are blamed for the recent death and consumption of Russian naturalist Vitaly Nikolayenko. He, like Treadwell, spent years interacting with coastal grizzlies, getting to know them personally and making extensive film records of their behavior. Separation is Critical to Minimizing Danger from Bears, other Animals

Since I have walked the talk of alternative schooling in my past, I am prepared to concede that separation is critical to minimising danger from both bears and schools.   I might be onto something. 

Perhaps cj is making an analogy that alerts us to the dangers of getting too close to school.  The perils of being captured by, and making too many “authentic” connections with  that technological process we call school.  Perhaps embracing schools like embracing grizzlies will kill something - kill our belief in, and acknowledgement of, learning that might happen without the mediation of an institution.

How then should we imagine the collision of technologies? - the collision of hairy scary school with ICT

And what if anything can we salvage from the pile up that results when the technologies of ICT and institutionalised learning smash into each other? Or are we in 2006, too late to prevent the extinction of the IT in schools stuff?

Comments

[botts]

where i live, the only bears are either of the koala variety or they are to be found in zoos.

so, is it perhaps worthwhile to look at the idea of school as zoo. a place where students are locked up each day in order to entertain those who demand their enclosure, and to provide 'worthwhile' employment for the keepers of knowledge who are encouraged, again by those who demand the enclosure of the student, to spout out of date information, using out of date technology, in a manner which is out of date for a captured audience who recognise the out datedness of the experience but are ultimately powerless to do anything about it.

because, of course we all know that like bears, students in the wild may find useful information which may lead to them eating someone who gets too close.

and yet i continue to be amazed at the effectiveness of the process of school, in as much as students continue to attend school, accepting the second rate education that they are given, rather than massing as one, like the proverbial flock of geese, and telling the possessors of power to faff off until such time as the system is fixed or at least improved to a point at which it would be unrecognisable from here.

/rant

botts

[Artichoke]

Ahh Botts, you take the ursine argument to another level of /rant – I must agree -

It is all very well for cj to claim an alignment between “hairy beariness” and schools but your comment alerts me to ask - what about those places in the world that don’t have bears at all?

To understand the ursine analogy at a deep level they either have to feign bears – that pretence you allude to where in Australia you rename a relative of the kangaroo and wombat a bear (aka koala bear Phasclarctos cinereus) or you rely on some institutionalized melancholy import in a zoological park to give hairy bearness some meaning.

Just can just sense we are never going to get it in New Zealand where we struggle to claim any native mammals bigger than the short tailed bat.

[Artichoke]

A solution may be to play the short video of The Exciters performing the song “Tell Him” at a zoo, that I stumbled across on Tell him bear post on Improbable Research Blog

Feel quite cheered with the new insight offered about the intersection of bears and technology