Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

My friend and posse-mate Dean Shareski is at FETC 2009. I don’t get to attend all the cool conferences that Dean does – hey, someone’s got to stay home and actually teach the students – but I sometimes get a vicarious feeling for the zeitgeist of the proceedings by reading Dean’s blog entries and his updates on Twitter. Here’s some of his tweeted observations from FETC:

I’ve had some of these same thoughts myself. To me, there seems to be a problem when terms that might have had some very specific meanings become trendy and overused. The words escape the confines of their intended meaning like a river overflowing its banks onto a flood plain. They are used in all contexts whether appropriate or not then become so dilute that they lose any meaning.

I think that “21st century” has officially overflowed its semantic banks and, as a result of conspicuous overuse, has lost almost all meaning. This is too bad because I think the meaning that it carried was a good and important one, but we attention has been diverted from its core meaning by the name that it has been given – “libel by label” as McLuhan called it. In an email to Alec Couros last year, I responded to his call for ideas regarding a critique he received on his article Safety and Social Networking. Part of my response, which Alec included in his response to the critique, was an attempt to define what was meant by 21st century (which along with authentic, another term he labelled as edspeak):

[21st century learning] denotes a practice or belief in sharp contradiction to some of those of the 19th and 20th century. Much of the practice of education as it occurs in public schools today is based on the goals of 19th century society, namely the instruction necessary to participate in a society based on an industrial economy. … We need schools that prepare students for this century.

I’ll sheepishly admit to no small amount of hubris in my claim that the teaching practices that we have thought of as being 21st century are contrary to those of the past couple of hundred years. I wonder if the best teaching practices that we strive for now were not unheard of 100 years ago. Are our students now so different from students in the past? I’ve come to believe that the answer to both questions is “No.” We do face challenges that would not have been foreseeable by our predecessors, but people at any age in history could make that claim. Didn’t the launch of Sputnik precipitate an educational crisis and need for reform? I wonder if teachers and other educators of the time became anxious about the need for space age learning, space age teaching and space age schools. If they did, those terms did not age gracefully although what was learned about learning and pedagogy continue to be used.

Another problem I see with prefixing everything educational with “21st century” or “e”, or tagging with the thankfully no longer ubiquitous “2.0″ suffix, is that it misdirects people’s attention by making them think that the technology is the key. I haven’t been immune from this. I am highly susceptible to BSOS – bright shiny object syndrome. I have to be honest and admit that I love shiny new toys and gadgets, especially the kind that contain microprocessors, far more than I should. When I talk to colleagues about some of these ideas for improving teaching, I describe it in terms of the tools that can be used instead of the goal. If the person I’m talking to doesn’t also have BSOS, they will disengage from the conversation with their eyes glazing over as they do.

But I know that what is important is the learning and teaching, not the technology. Technologies will continue to be developed, attract our interest and then fade away. After all the bright shiny objects have lost some of their polish, what is left that is still important? I’ve been wondering about this, especially since reading Clarence Fisher’s blog post The Death of Big Ideas or: Who Wants to Get Fired?

I’ve noticed this on my own blog as much as in other places in the edusphere. Most of the posts we are writing and most of the things we are doing now is refining how we use The Tools. But once you’ve got ‘em, you’ve got ‘em.

Is it time for us to move along?

Clarence also has a suggestion about where we go from here:

It’s time for us to start thinking through bigger ideas. Blogs are not new anymore. Neither is Voicethread or flickr or wikis. But what about curriculum design, and power and democracy in classrooms? What about questioning who gets to organize learning experiences and perform evaluation? What about setting kids loose to solve community problems? These are things that are more of a direct challenge to the way that education is more traditionally organized.

Radical stuff, bordering on being edupunk. I haven’t decided how I feel about all of Clarence’s ideas but I do notice that the questions he’s asking and the topics he wants to explore have nothing to do with technology.