Reading your post just sort of highlighted for me how I see lots of teachers ‘in search of something better’ when really the tools that are out there are actually pretty decent but, guess what, they cost money. So are these teachers really “looking for alternatives that might be better” or are they really just trying to get something for nothing?

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.

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.

I’ve seen many people that don’t talk emerge into the class conversation because of amazing contribution in the backchannel. There is a time and place for this (aka attention) — but if the focus is on the material — then it is focusing. I teach my students how to focus on the material and we talk about being a “professional student” in our classroom spaces. If they go way off on a tangent – they aren’t paying attention and the backchannel moderator (I always appoint one AND a google jockey) is to pull it back to the topic at hand.

Done right, a backchannel is a great addition. Done wrong, it is just another distraction.