Edu-flash Mobs, why not?
So, I indulged in a tripartite sin of multitasking yesterday morning. I was listening to Will Richardson interview Clay Shirky on uStream while paying attention to the accompanying chat while helping my daughter figure out what she wanted to do outside. Of course, I did all three badly. Shirky said something something about people learning stuff differently. My daughter was not encouraged by my absent-minded suggestions that she “bike it off.” And I engaged in a short uChat back and foth with Clay Burrell about face to face communication. I think at one point I used the word Burgermeister.
I always like reading Beyond School–not because I agree with his ideas (I usually don’t) but his ideas are ones I want to believe in. He is of the semi-anarchist anti-coercicion school of teaching which I find very appealing. I’ve always had dreams of an utopia wherin all grades were banished, students were there because they wanted to be, and we learned what we wanted based on what interested us. Kindof like I learn now. Although I thihnk my Utopia had me traveling with my students across Europe as well.
Burrell suggested that we don’t need buildings and when I asked him about face to face communication, he responded that “We get together f2f when we want, where we want. “flash ed-mobs.” And again, logically, that’s crazy talk. We’ll have 100s of thousands of students wandering around with their iPhones looking for an eduMob to drop into. Can you imagine anything else more designed to strike terror in the hearts of adults (although that may be a vote in the positive column for the idea).
Still, doesn’t it sound fun? You could just go to the library and text out “All y’all up for a little creative writing come on down” and then scores of hirsute teens would or wouldn’t show up. Kids would get points for every mob they attended (or not! too much like grades…maybe any certification we’d be interested in would be solely attached to actual work they created. A portfolio). The teacher might get paid according to his/her draw and the evaluation of his customers.
Sometimes drawing lines outside of the box creates ideas that are more helpful than being logical. What if I had 2 weeks in my essay fundamentals class where we didn’t meet at all. We all wrote wherever, whenever and met up or didn’t by checking in on a chat or other social network. Still impossible…but closer. Would the absence of coercion make up drive more learning or would it allow more slacking? That’s always the question, no?
July 12th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
This one was fun to read first thing in the morning
You weren’t the only one multi-tasking, of course. Everybody in the chat room was. So we have to take those with a grain of salt.
But regarding f2f, homeschoolers and unschoolers are most instructive in answering this one, because it’s always the first objection traditionalists trot out to try to refute the idea that schools aren’t necessary for learning: “What about socializing?”
I was kidding about edu-flash mobs, but not about this: socializing at schools is unnatural and in many ways both bizarre and potentially damaging.
Bizarre, because the age-grouping deprives kids of models, relationships, and influences from or with youngsters older than them – I say that arbitrary bit of “normal” is perversely wrong and laughably unnecessary.
Damaging, because in real social situations, we have the option of leaving unsafe places. In schools, victims of bullying have no such choice, and have to endure the forced f2f with bullies (individuals or, more usually, gangs of them) on buses, in hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms. If they try to leave – again, the normal social response to unsafe situations – they’re punished.
From that perspective, schools themselves are crazy talk. (I’m not even adding the obvious: Studies show students ask less than one question per day in schools, so most of this “social” time is actually mute time.)
Think of the time wasted in the commute, too, and of the horrible conditions for writing and learning anything in most classrooms. From the standpoint of learning to write better, the commute time eats into it the time that could be spent more productively, and the classroom crowd atmosphere into the mental space that would make concentrating easier.
It is all closer, as you say. In fact, with the rise of virtual schools in the US (google the NYTimes for an article last week about this), it’s already here, for many.
July 15th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Thanks for commenting. I’ve appreciated hearing your ideas on your blog for a long time and it was great to hear from you.
It was funny as you talked about f2f and some of the downsides to it (bullying, age-grouping, commutes); I kept going back to your first statement and even with the attached emoticon it was hard to tell if it was an irony emoticon or a wry smile of agreement. Was it a good thing to read my post in the morning or wasn’t it?
Which is why I’m not too worried about the demise of schools. I find education to be a primarily human endeavor. I love technology and what it can help my kids do, but my bread butter is still the discussion, the group work, the f2f work. I need a place for that to happen. I’ll stipulate all over the place for diversity of learning sites, for multi-age grouping, for more vital school communities, for tearing down schooliness in all of its nefarious forms. But a school? A third place where humans can get together and learn together, create bonds and shared understanding? When I throw up a paragraph from Letter from a Birmingham Jail and let kids stretch, pull, caress, and hammer at it, I wonder how I could do that in any other way? How else could we learn?
I guess I’m trying to understand the Burrell vision? Is it a world in which there were no schools but a huge network of kids and adults who learned and grouped together at will? Do we take over the public parks? Meet on street corners and people’s rec rooms? Do we just create big boxes everywhere and let them be filled (sort of like brick and mortar wikis–Have you read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? You’ve got mad whuffie.) How much faith do you have in our inner desire to learn vs. inertia and our tendency to goof off? Has there ever been a society which has created a system of voluntary, universal education? Or is it more that the unreachable ideal of education as non-coercive, self-directed enterprise is the star by which we should guide our ships. Have you heard of the Big Picture schools?
That I can get behind.