These are questions/comments that I jotted down as I was reading. No particular order, no particular significance, but might give us some stuff to talk about today. You should bring your own.What if the title of the book had been reversed?
Rethinking Technology in the Age of Education? What would that book have been about? Would they have advocated for the use of technology in the same way?
On page 4 the authors wrote, "While the imperatives of the industrial-age learning technologies can be thought of as uniformity, didacticism, and teacher control, the knowledge-age learning technologies have their own imperatives of customization, interaction, and user-control. Knowledge-age technologies emphasize access to allow people to pursue their own interests and goals." Okay, but I have two concerns: Where is the cognitive developmental outlook on this? To what extent can ALL children (and adults) self-regulate and monitor (metacog.) their own thinking about thinking and what they need? I'm not suggesting schools are doing a terribly good job right now of helping students develop metacognitive skills, but at least there are some cases where it will happen over time and with good teachers. What happens when it's all home schooling and technology-facilitated "passion groups," or whatever Jim Gee calls them? My second question: What does it mean for society if public schools are replaced by networks of people learning toward their own interests, while excluding the stuff that simply doesn't seem relevant? Chaos? Am I being hysterical?
What's their take on the role of teachers? What do they think teachers do now? What would they like them to do in the future? When they make comments like, "Kurt Squire found that games like
Civilization inspired kids to check out library books on ancient cultures," are they suggesting that it's just the game? What about the environment in which the game existed? The discussions, the teacher encouragement, the well-placed and well-timed questions by teachers that might provoke additional thinking? Where do these things go when we're all off pursuing our own interests?
What about "schooling for democratic citizenship" as a frame? I'm struck by how little discussion there is of that in this book, or am I naive in thinking that public schools are still a significant aspect of preparing people to exist in a democratic culture? Is that aspect taken care of by homes, churches, clubs, etc., while schools just help (and apparently not very well) with the skill building?
The authors' primary frame for schooling seems to be one of "social efficiency," or learning to prepare people for future work. It's a framework I don't like very much and, I think, in need of a strong communitarian critique. In fact, public schooling is a public good (and a necessary one at that) that demands preparation for public (very broadly defined) existence. Part of that, certainly, involves working as a means to achieve individual ends. But those ends also feed into, again, the life of a larger public.
Are kids' (people's) interests in mashing-up, connecting on-line, playing games, and tweeting a compelling enough reason to suggest we need to turn to more technology in order to move toward an "interest-driven" education system?
Reading this book, I found myself thinking about Ivan Illich's
Deschooling Society. I still wonder if having people follow their own interests with similar-minded people is a way to resolve some of the inequities built into schooling. Do the "edu credit cards" (which I see as the analogue to technology) really set people free?
They seem particularly interested in home schooling, though they comment on the likelihood that home schooling will never exceed 20% of the population (!!!) given the economic realities of both (where there are both) parents having to work. I admit to having strong misgivings about home schooling, but do we really hope and think that "turning education over to the parents and the individual transfers responsibility for learning onto to the family" (p. 110). This just feels naive to me. I really find their thinking about apprenticeship to be overly-romantic
I really like their discussion of performance-based assessments and it's one of the reasons I'm so interested in educational gaming. But, what do you think of their suggestions about credentialing?
Page 117: "One curriculum design that we favor is using technology to help students focus their learning around their goals and interests…Traditional academic skills, such as reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, and geography, would be woven into each curriculum." H-O-W???????????????
Is there any way in which to reimagine schools as hubs that link different pursuits? In other words, public schools maintain their (theoretically) unifying, equalizing, democratizing role while enabling students—via technologies (interests) old and new—to engage in personally meaningful pursuits that have individual and public benefits?
What would Neil Postman think?!?!? What's the narrative that lies behind Collins and Halverson's proposals?
