We're
constantly being told that the internet has had, is having, and will continue
to have a far-reaching, perhaps even drastic, effect on how we live our lives.
It's supposed to change the ways we work and the ways we rest, the ways we communicate
with others, and perhaps even the ways we communicate with ourselves. Often, it's
easy to get the impression that our lives have been divided
into two distinct periods separated by an unbridgeable chasm - before internet
and since internet. Though many of us probably don't yearn for what went before,
that chasm is thought to be so large that even if we wanted to, there'd be no
way for us to go back. With all these significant effects on our lives, it should
come as no surprise that the internet is also supposed to have a dramatic influence
on education. I suppose that I'm not exposing any secrets when I write that I'm
convinced, at one and the same time, that such a statement is both true and false.
For those who are convinced that the internet's effect
on education is, and will continue to be, enormous, there's still a great deal
of debate around precisely what aspects of the internet are causing that effect.
A decade ago the buzzword was "access to information", and particularly
to information that wasn't traditionally available in the classroom. Suddenly
pupils, who until the internet were apparently empty repositories, waiting patiently
for their teachers to fill them with digestible information, became active consumers
of that same information, even to the point at which many questioned whether there
was still a need for the teacher as an intermediary between the pupil and the
desired information. At around the same time, though in a perhaps somewhat less
pronounced fashion, the ease with which pupils could produce their own web sites
created the promise of the pupil as a producer of information and not just as
its recipient. Alongside these major changes, a number of other,
somewhat lesser, effects were also predicted.
A decade later, there
can be little doubt that the internet has been quite thoroughly integrated into
the classroom, though precisely how is still an open question. Many teachers (and
via them, their pupils as well) relate to it primarily as a search tool. This
allows some teachers to claim that their pupils have truly become adept information
consumers, while others will claim that although their pupils seem to do a great
deal of searching, they don't seem to find anything of value. Some teachers claim
that they've moved a large part of their coursework to the web, while others respond
that all that's really happened is that homework assignments and workpages that
were previously printed on paper and distributed by hand are now accessed via
the computer, making it little more than an incredibly expensive mimeograph machine.
In cases such as this it would seem that only rarely do we encounter any content
or use that can be categorized as distinctly internet-related.
It
may have been difficult, in this particular scenario, to point to ways in which
the internet was actually having a substantial influence on the ways in which
pupils learned, but nobody seemed to be complaining. On the one hand schools could
claim that they were adapting to the use of new technologies, while on the other
hand the actual changes that teachers were called upon to make in how they taught
their pupils were minimal. And then along came Web 2.0, and a
new generation of evangelists sprang up to once again promise us that the
internet would change the face of education.
How
is this new generation of internet-based tools going to affect that change? The
claims made are incredibly similar to those made about the web in its pre 2.0
version: pupils' sources aren't limited to those offered to them by their teachers
in the classroom, they can become information producers - connecting into a vast
learning network that not only supplies them with information, but to which they
also contribute. Today, of course, the emphasis isn't on building (or using) traditional
HTML based web sites, or commercially marketed content management
systems. In order to really become a part of this interconnected learning
community, teachers and pupils have to use the right tools: blogs, wikis, RSS,
podcasts, and of course they should also be tuned into a tagging network so that
they can both contribute to, and drink from, the collective pool. Part of the
lure of this approach seems to be that it's possible to "get it" - suddenly,
in some sort of epiphanic conversion a lightbulb lights
up above your head (or maybe you accept the blog as your savior) - and then,
once you've become part of the club and learned the new language and exchanged
your old, outdated, tools for new ones, you can continue doing pretty much what
you did before.
In this "new" understanding
of what learning is, one of the key concepts is inter-connectedness. Suddenly,
kids are no longer expected to sit quietly at their desks, separated from their
peers, working on assignments that aren't related to the real world. Perhaps what's
strangest about this description (other than the fact that it actually quite accurately
reflects what many of the Web 2.0 in education crowd are saying) is that only
a very few seem to be raising their voices to tell us that there's nothing
new here. But it's not only a question of not telling us something new, but
also of our becoming convinced by our own hype. The creation of a vast network
of inter-connected teachers and learners may sound like the basis for a wonderful
and desirable learning environment, but there's no real reason to assume that,
in and of itself, all this inter-connectivity either generates or distributes
knowledge. It can just as easily (if not even more easily) also be the basis for
the realization of the Garbage In - Garbage Out
principle on a gigantic scale.
At least a decade
ago, Avigail Oren at the School of Education of Tel Aviv University, one of the
earliest experimenters with the possibilities of integrating the internet into
education in Israel, asked "How do we change
the surfing process into a weaving one?". Although there may have been technological
answers to what Avigail asked, at its root it was an educational question. At
what was a very early stage in the integration of the internet into the learning
process she was well aware of the fact that when schools mimicked the way the
society at large was beginning to use the World Wide Web, the result wasn't necessarily
what we would refer to as learning. And weaving, both before and since Web 2.0,
still seems a better metaphor. A key goal of education is the development of the
distinct, individual, voice of each pupil. Much too much of the blogging craze
in education leads to haphazard postings, to writing that gets neither edited
nor read, to a collection of links that aren't held together by any organizing
principle. We're told that rather than writing for their teachers' eyes only,
pupils are now writing for the world, but the
ultimate impression is that they're simply doing their assignments, enjoying,
for the time being, a novelty which will sadly soon wear off. Though there's now
perhaps "production" rather than only consumption here, it's basically
still web surfing, a pleasant activity quite detached from any real attempt to
find one's place in the world. Our educational objectives have to look well beyond
only that. When we observe a tapestry we seek out the distinctive hand of the
weaver. In the individual weaving of information into knowledge that is education,
each pupil takes perhaps more or less the same materials, but hopefully does something
distinctive, individual with them. Various tools can certainly help them do this,
can influence part of the outcome, but it's the developing of the personal eye
and the ability to observe that's truly important.
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