The biggest untold story we keep getting told

“This may be the biggest untold story of technology: when used properly, technology can amplify the human element in education.”

Bill Gates, addressing the Association of Community College Trustees, October 2, 2013

I was surprised to read this little epigram in last winter’s issue of On Campus. You see, although Mr. Gates presents this as a fresh insight gleaned from all his educational research, it reminds me a lot of another story.  This was the tale of a couple of smart young professionals who brought together business know-how and philanthropic resources to unleash the potential of technology to transform education. At the heart of their vision was the thesis that properly applied, technology would accentuate the humanistic dimensions of education, empowering the teacher to spend more time with students and less on administration and drill.
 
The year was 1958; those people were my parents.
 
Their firm was called the Center for Programmed Instruction, and they would be the first to admit that the plans for their “teaching machines” never quite came to fruition.  Later I heard the same narrative during the educational software boom of the nineties, told with great enthusiasm.  Yet somehow CD-ROMs never really had that much impact on my classroom.  Now online learning is cast as the hero of the same fable.  Which got me thinking; is it likely Bill Gates hasn’t heard the same tall tales? And if he has, why is he touting them as an “untold story"?

 The simplest answer is that he presents these opinions as original because what seems news seems worth trying, and he wants us to try educational technology as a panacea for our educational problems – again – because it serves the interest of people like, well, Bill Gates.  Diane Ravitch came at this from a different angle when she commented in the Huffington Post (5/2/14) on his support for the new common core standards: “all testing must be done online, so the new standards represent a bonanza for the testing industry, the hardware industry, and the software industry.”

His politely humanistic vision of technology goes on to claim that “the smart use of technology does not replace faculty – it redeploys them, to the benefit of the students.” I know that in other contexts Mr. Gates has asserted that teachers will be “redeployed” as learning coaches and superstar lecturers, and I hope that he is sincere.  But then why is he not spending all his bottomless resources on training and rewarding teachers like that?    

I completely agree that appropriately used, technology can amplify the human element in education.  I just don’t think Big Bill is putting his money behind the “appropriately” part, and I wish he would shoot straight with us about his priorities.  Somehow, I can’t get it out of my head that this is the same guy who claims that his operating system never crashes. 

Online learning: revenge of the otaku

In my last post I some shot my mouth off about the inexorable advent of online learning.  When I think of the kinds of students who will succeed at the school work of the future one word keeps surfacing in my brain: otaku.

I first heard the term about ten years ago, during a presentation by a Japanese media professional on hot cultural trends in her home country.  Otaku, as she defined the term, is a slang expression for young people who spend most of their time in their bedrooms, communicate mostly via the Internet, and are devoted to what Matt Fraction calls “deep nerd” culture: comics, animation, science fiction films, etc.  Although I’ve heard the term used in a derogatory way many times since then, in this initial context it was presented as something popular, stylish, desirable.  As the speaker put it, “In Japan right now if you want to get a date and you don’t have thick glasses, you may as well forget it.”

At the time, my response was to think of otaku as both laughable and pitiable.  Today, I’d like to offer a different perspective.

Who does well with online learning?  I know some people who do.  A lot of them are private tutors, folks used to living by their wits and finding their own way intellectually.  These are people who finish their MOOCS, who get paid to work with students over Skype, and write their own software for their calculators.  They approach learning as an entrepreneurial act, where free actors come together to negotiate a shifting terrain of opportunity and risk.  And, at a time when the seminar based and experiential models of learning I was trained in seem to be declining in their relevance, they are successful.  As a Turkish-born colleague put it, “In Turkey there were just so few resources in education.  Here the opportunities to learn are all around you for free - if you have the initiative to use them.”

Add to initiative the capacity to work in physical isolation, on tasks that require tremendous attention spans and the capacity to consult with others over technology.  Add also strong, focused areas of interest, however esoteric or impractical they might seem in the short run, and it seems to me that the successful learner of the future will be a bit of an otaku.

This is not a utopian vision; as somebody who has spent a lot of time talking to his action figures himself, I can tell you that the life of the otaku is not always the most conducive to good health and intimate relationships.  More disturbing from a strictly educational standpoint is the prospect of students wandering around over the intellectual map unguided; there will be lots of time wasted and blind spots indulged, since, as Robert Greenberg notes, “the problem with autodidacts is that they have such terrible teachers." Still, perhaps the roles of role instructors can evolve to address some of these concerns and turn some of these experiences to the good.  Models of blended learning and flipped classrooms are intriguing, but we don’t have to get that fancy to make a difference.  Hopefully when kids like my son- who at six already is pretty good at channeling his inner otaku- has watched too many videos about Lego Star Wars I can encourage him to return to the real world to play, even if it is with Star Wars Legos. And I can’t help but be intrigued by his ongoing negotiations with the other players of a game called Hay Day, where he runs a small farm and market stand.

I hope that negotiating these relationships will help him manage coworkers, that the time he fritters away learning online about architecture only to move on to astrophysics shows him that there is a diversity of knowledge out there, that the frustrations of trying to get his Angry Birds video to stream correctly will show him that good things come to those who wait.  And if not –well, maybe I’ll still save a few bucks by attending his online chess tournaments instead of driving to all those soccer games.

Online learning: it is what it is
4/22/2014

I'm eager to join the online education revolution -or perhaps I should say, the online education "revolution." It’s not that I think MOOCs are so great; I just slogged through weeks of an EdX course put on by my alma mater Harvard, sampling the hottest MOOC personalities they could front, and boy, did it suck.  Watching tweedy intellectuals try to comport themselves gracefully on film and reading inane comments on message boards just made me want to get back to my Game of Thrones fan site.

So why am I so bullish on online learning resources?  Because they will have a major role in education in this country, especially for the working class.  They will do this because they are cheap enough to motivate lawmakers, sexy enough to win over the public, and potentially profitable enough to get backing from wealthy elites.  There are concise summaries of the evidence for all of these assertions in last winter’s edition of AFT’s Magazine, On Campus.

Of course, there are also a lot of people on the other side of this issue; hardworking educators like yours truly who have found, again and again and again, that in the living experience of education human contact is the key, especially for disadvantaged students.  Online resources have their place, we allow, but only as part of a rich tapestry of resources that must be augmented, not pared down.  Folks like us appeal to common ideals, to common sense, to common decency.

We appeal in vain, not because people are evil but because education suffers from what Bill Bowen calls "the cost disease." Over the last several decades, most industries have seen huge gains in efficiency, but not education.  Human contact is expensive, more and more expensive, and that's why tuitions at my old school site have gone up about 7% a year for the last dozen years.  It’s also the reason why college costs have risen so quickly.  In the long run, the choice for many educational institutions will be to cut costs drastically or close their doors, and most of them will choose the former.  Online learning offers them a financially and politically palatable way to do that.

There will still be schools where people walk through leafy quads and hang out with their teachers.  They will simply be available to a smaller and smaller proportion of students.  These institutions, which were always elite, will become downright aristocratic again, reversing the changes in college admissions that were introduced in the 1960s at places like Harvard.  For the rest of us there will be online courses, and it is time to roll up our sleeves and prepare to capitalize on whatever opportunities we can find or create.  Tune in next time for some speculations about what skills will be of use not only to the students of this brave new world, but to the instructors, families and institutions that support them.