Back to school - so what role for social learning?

US National Archives Lady Bird Johnson Visiting a Classroom for Project Head Start 1966

 

In between teaching classes, interesting posts about Ed-Tech float past me on the web and sometimes something hits a nerve. At the moment I am teaching in a school that has been going through a two year process of improvement and professional development, so I get to reflect a bit on things when I read.

I feel like I have been priviledged to observe and learn from this process as a contract member of staff. One of the key issues for example that we have identified recently as a problem for the school is the danger of breeding passive learners. We see too many kids come in from Primary, hitting adolescence and struggling to engage in school. This is not a new problem and it is not just our problem at all. So, I have tried to reflect on how we work around this, how we can try to tackle it when it comes to technology.

I recently read an article on this topic via InformED - arguing that social learning not more social media was what schools need. In the article from Open Colleges it suggests that a certain ideal of individualism is growing as a trend in society in general and has slowly worked its way into our education systems. This is not a new argument. In fact it is also one put forward in comparative education debates. The unshakable emphasis on child-centered learning within Western education projects often set in developing world contexts, tends often to foster ostensibly more 'Western' forms of education which often may not be as successful in those contexts.

The link between individual or private benefits to education vs societal ones has also been more sharply brought into focus with recent editorials from the Economist. In 'America's New Aristocracy' and 'An Hereditary Meritocracy' the writers argue that increasingly this is damaging social mobility in America. As the importance of intellectual capital grows in the knowledge economy, priviledge has also become increasingly heritable. The children of the rich are now more than ever increasingly well-suited and more likely to be earning more. There is also an interesting commentary on these articles in Hacker News.

The article however by Saga Briggs, titled 'Social Learning Is More Than Just Social Media: Crafting An Effective Strategy' reflects simply on the notion that education in America in her view is becoming 'more índividualistic'.

Saga is clear in tracing this issue back to Western philosphocial roots, refering to Rousseau and Locke and quoting Hargreaves' 'Sociological Critique of Individualism in Education', in which he suggests that:

“The child-centered movement in education stemming from the work of Dewey, buttressed by a psychology grounded in Freud or (more often) in Piaget, is merely one floriferous branch of a sturdier tree.”

She goes further to point out the scale of the problem from the point of policy-making refering to some evidence from the USA, which shows that a clear majority of those interviewed in 49 in-depth interviews with Americans from New England and southern California agreed on three points:

1. The purpose of education is to serve individuals.
2. Individuals and families are responsible for educational outcomes, in the form of both successes and failures.
3. Learning occurs through individual interactions with teachers.

It then goes on to explain what it refers to as the 'individualist fallacy' that is ubiquitous in many Ed-tech and online learning spaces. This it opposes to the ideals of social learning refering to Bandura's work, and develops an argument around 'building a culture of service'.

The article then goes on to mention how we need to focus on designing social learning with technology, instead of designing more ways to use social media in education. The point may seem subtle but it is key. The writer, Saga Briggs suggests a number of outcomes that she attributes to 'social learning':

- Confidence Through Collaboration
- Connecting the Disconnected
- Motivating the Aimless
- Accelerating Action

My gut reaction is at first to agree, in part at least.

Wired Freedom by Cofano, 2005 Dedicated to the people of UAE - CC 2.0 BY.NC.ND

The answer to X is... more and better X 

 

Einstein put this fairly succinctly - insanity, he said: "is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". For me the only fault in this well-argued piece is the fact that all the examples given in the article for the outcomes of social learning simply refer us to how more social learning can occur with technology. I think that more social learning full stop is a good idea, whether is involves technology or not.

My take-away here seems to be the suggestion that we use more technology to solve the problems being created by..... technology? Accepting Saga's point made from the beginning that we should point the finger first at the 'índividualistic fallacy' that is driving education technology in the wrong direction, she is suggesting we should not blame the technology itself. Schools may lag behind technology, but it is not simply up to them to adapt to the technology - designers need to create useful things that we actually need for learning.

So is it true that individualism has worked its way into our schools and technology is to blame? Isn't it more true to say that we are pressuring schools and teachers to do this anyway, and the technology is just a part of that wider process? To what extent has the 'individualistic fallacy' worked its way into schools in the UK via technology? This is all very debatable and depends on the context and how the technolgy is being used.

I think there is every reason to believe the opposite in fact could be true and that those driving forward the 'individualistic fallacy' will find that schools are used to dealing with this pressure from outside. If you look at current debates in the UK around the hollowing out of the NHS by private business and the clashes between communities and academy trusts administering their schools - questions appear to be looming on the horizon. In short, my point is that this is probably a wider issue than just a couple of Ed-Tech companies driving sales or a misplaced use of social media in schools.

How can we celebrate the ability of schools to resist this trend? Schools are a place to go if you want to better understand the tensions created by the 'individualistic fallacy' in societies. In schools by and large we do not inculcate youth to measure themselves by Facebook, and all over the world we still teach them as groups and not as individuals. Schools frankly have not changed a great deal in a long time in some senses, while the orgnanisation of learning on the other hand certainly has.

In schools we still get to play out the dilemmas posed by our values (democratic or otherwise) - our roles as citizens and in short we replicate a vision for society. So our students in the UK learn to recognise how their opinions are being shaped by the media, how the world is also driven by power and influence, and they seek to learn values that will hold them together and support their success. They do this together in class and online. This does not require that they first quantify themselves into isolated 'personalities' in a void on social media, or that we denigrate or hollow out values of collaboration, self-reliance and respect in the process. Any attack on this process it is an attack on the ability of schools to transfer knowledge and values to the next generation which is a key role and function for them in society.

The danger of this resistence might be that in the process we are failing to adapt - we are engaging students with too few of the tools they need to succeed in the future, which risks being vastly different to how we live today.

Internet Archive "The dancing mouse : a study in animal behavior" (1907)

It's not individualism - It's behaviouralism, silly.

 

The article features a leading image which states that 'Learning Is Not Purely Behavioural, It is a Process That Takes Plance In A Social Context' - I assume that this point is one that someone wished to hold up and place on classroom wall somewhere at some interjecture. Saga Briggs however seems to be suggesting that we are slipping back into a kind of 1950's retro-comeback for behaviouralism, referencing the work of Skinner in the article.

Behaviouralist thinking is not so much in evidence in schools these days, but we do all seem unwittingly have become the lab rats of behavioural science more broadly. If you accept for example the ideas of the writer of a new book called 'Social Physics' by Alex Pentland at MIT which suggests that in a 'data-driven' society we need to build a predictive, computational theory of human behavior in order to engineer better social systems.

What is more true for schools is that in this new 'data age' we do have to compete in practice with the diversity of sources for student motivation, the demands for greater efficiency and the scientific analysis of behaviour and outcomes. It is true that we spend plenty of time thinking about how to engineer better learning. This is also necessary because we need to keep up with how learning is changing in its social and cognitive aspects.

We often will fail to reach students with old methods of teaching, when students are moving towards new ways of learning. The idea of a fixed zone of proximal development has dramatically shifted in a context for learning that is blended between the online and real world. There is another dimension to my social learning that develops when my classroom and my friends are in locations all over the planet, when I could ask any question to an expert for help via twitter / google in seconds.

Similarly, we mold machines to adapt to the brain and to learn alongside us, tailoring learning to our personal needs and strengths. This is a challenge, and a gap between learning in schools and the reality outside of schools. If schools are filled with inflexible systems for delivery that ignore the sources of intrinsic motivation and challenge, then individuals struggle to find their own spirit to be part of a society that cares and that deals with shared responsabilities. We breed passivity and students will not engage.

The counter-argument is possibly in fact that we need more individualism, more characters - but not the kind of atomistic individualism that society everywhere is pushing on us from the outside. Some might suggest we need to teach different ideas about individuality and independance, and support students to learn different values in the process. We certainly need to avoid simply forcing people to fit their own ways of learning into our tiny boxes, as this will not resolve the problem. This is really just another way of selling damaged goods, offering people a broken choice between either becoming disengaged drones or entrepreneurial selves in order to adapt to the society of the future. So the solution should be to adapt to be inclusive of more diverse solutions which do allow schools to find their own ways of crossing this gap.

Police Dog - State Library of New South Wales

Are we even listening ?

 

My worry here is in fact when faced with this gap, we fail to listen. None of the arguments above are in any sense new or original. Most of this has been said before and the same arguments seem destined to be repeated until something gives.  

There is a gap between what people are asking for and the kinds of solutions offered to schools by Ed-Tech companies. Governments seem to make policy on education without designing it in the interests of any kind of social movement for change, without clear inspiration behind them from teachers and students and senior leaders of education. At least in the UK we have allowed schools to make large investments in a very broad and diverse range of technology in partnership with large corporations. But I personally do not see much consulation with the end-users, and that is a problem.

An interesting post that dealt with this recently at the same time was this one from Jeff Dunn which contains a neat visualisation of a survey of 100 North American and European teachers into major trends currently being used or contemplated by teachers and education experts. It shows quite clearly that many teachers are not particularly interested at this point in hearing about interactive whiteboards, digital games or mobile learning. This is most likely to be because most have been using interactive whiteboards for years, digital educational games are not necessarily new, and mobile learning is out of the question in schools where students are not allowed to use mobile devices.

The striking thing for me is what it is that teachers agree they are most interested in:

- Web-based tools for Educational Purposes
- Online Educational Resources
- Digital Literacy

I would hazard a bet that most of those teachers chose these answers because they reflect their real needs, areas they perceive as important for their practice as teachers. I would also hazard a bet that these choices also reflect a demand for better and more accessible forms of social learning with technology. Not more gadgets.

In fact I think that there is plenty of evidence to say that social and emotional learning is one of the key 'technologies' that teachers can leverage in order to help students to cope with an increasing sense of isolation as they venture into the social void of disembodied online independent life-long learners. At least this is one of the core strategies that Edutopia, a charitable foundation in the USA dealing with Ed-Tech has set out for its future work.

Finally making a similar point but in a different way, Jackie Gernstein Ed.D in her recent blog post places this same discussion into the context of psychology with reference to Maslows hierarchy of needs - discussing ways to link these with technology. Her diagram of this below also simply suggests that most of all we need to stop and think about what we are designing technology for and how it is being used. She suggests that:

"When technology is integrated intentionally with foresight and with intention of addressing specific growth-oriented goals, it increases the potential to help students learn, develop, and grow in unique ways"

Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND
  Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs by Jackie Gernstein Ed.D -

UN Data Revolution - Part 3

This will be my final post on the UN report 'A World That Counts' which seeks to locate the UN's role in the wake of the data revolution. In previous posts I have outlined some concerns with the report, it's articulation of notions about citizen engagement, ideas about development and also the role for private companies in this picture. 

Several interconnected but useful commentaries have surfaced in recent months which I have read with interest in regards to the report. So looking back at the report here are some which I think I would mention. 

Morten Jerven - The problem with the data revolution in four Venn diagrams

Morten Jerven writes in this article for the Guardian that we also should be critical of the limited view presented by the report in terms of it being a roadmap for action. Jerven presents a series of venn diagrams to explain why. He makes four key points in regards to the report:

1. Not everything that counts can be counted
2. Data is not the same as statistics
3. More data does not mean better decisions
4. There are other methods to knowing than through counting

He asks us to consider how much we should invest in numbers and what type of metrics we should invest in?
He warns against against hubris. As he puts it, the act of counting itself does not guarantee objectivity or always make us wiser.

Michael Hobbes - Stop Trying to Save the World

 

A second and wider critique of the entire development agenda comes from Michael Hobbes at the New Republic in this article. He suggests we should clearer about what doesn’t work or has shown less success so far, this is a new area with an open field of possibilities. There is no need to replicate poor ideas. 

His article makes for very engaging reading and the implications are too deep to try to expand in this blog post. He points out that he prefers to suggest that it is not that development is broken, but the problem is that our expectations of it are.

The critique of the report might be that it sketches out a landscape, but does not go far enough to move away from the status quo. It attempt to fire up the imagination, by seizing enough of what matters to bring forward discussions about ‘for who’ and ‘for what’. But it does not look critically enough at what needs to change in the established regimes of how international development is conceived of in its ideas about how to harness the data revolution.  

Another associated point to consider is how the report attempts to bend towards a rights based view of how data governs our lives. There is a tendency for those within ICT4D to seek technical solutions rather than to follow the doxa, and often these efforts tend not to be based in rights based language. This seems most often to express a desire to bypass voice, to find a way around the existing channels of arbitration and consensus in the public space – think niche, think geek. This is a difficulty for the report in that is seeks to adopt the language of human rights, but it does this in a limited way as it has to stretch the terms used around some very broad and fuzzy concepts.

The point that Martin raises is that for aid to work as assistance for functioning democracies, governments and civil societies, it needs to be self-limiting – consciously eschewing big ideas and paying constant heed to local conditions. He also takes his cue from many of the debates around behavioural economics that have been pushed forward by the research of the J-Poverty Lab and others and have sought to challenge a lot of conventional thinking about development.  

 

Jed Miller's blog post - Will the Data Revolution Be Well-Advised?

Jed gives a more or less balanced appraisal of the report in his blog post saying that it is strongest where it seeks to ensure inclusion in the data revolution. From his persepctive the two oversights are its underestimation of the role of civil society and its over-reliance on the notion that citizens equipped with accurate, usable data can be successful independent agents of social change. He points out that it suggests:

"an idealized, if not unexamined, vision of a super-citizen with the ability to leap over entrenched political, economic and bureaucratic barriers using crowdsourced data, or hashtag campaigns or data APIs"

Tiago Peixoto  - Evidence of Social Accountability Initiatives

 

Tiago Peixoto in his blog post highlights an interesting paper on evidece around social accountability inititatives which chimes quite well with the above mentioned posts. The paper by Jonathan Fox suggests a necessary distinction between tactical and strategic approaches to the promotion of citizen voice to contribute to improved public sector performance.

Fox suggests that tactical interventions tend rely on optimistic assumptions about the power of information alone both to motivate collective action and to influence public sector performance.

In contrast, strategic interventions are multi-pronged and encourage enabling environments for collective action and also bolster state capacity to actually respond to citizen voice. Not simply focusing on the supply of information or data, but also on the demand and the capacity to act effectively around this.

There is also a neat diagram to demonstrate what this 'Sandwich Strategy' looks like:

Tim Davies - Unpacking open data: power, politics and the influence of infrastructures

 

Tim Davies gives a concise and beautifully illustrated talk (thanks to the amazing Willow Brough) addressing some of the questions around the "anticipated civic impacts" of open data. He looks at how changing regimes around data can reconfigure power and politics, and the limits of current practice. He then attempts to re-imagine the open data project, "not merely as one of placing datasets online, but as one that can positively reshape the knowledge infrastructures of civic life". 

Matt Stempek - Why Use Private Data For Public Good

 

Matt Stempek wrote an article for the Harvard Business Reveiw in July of 2014 titled "Sharing Data Is a Form of Corporate Philanthropy". In it he focuses on just two key areas that are proving to be game-changers for data - responsive cities and academic research. 

In regards to my critique of the UN Global Pulse's adoption of the WEF's vision of data as a 'resource' for economic progress the UN Global Pulse in fact also did hold a meeting in 2014 to discuss this very issue which is detailed here. The same topic is picked up by Tim Davies in his blog post here.

In the light of of these critiques I think a key question that surfaces is that of citizen engagement in this process. Either we find ourselves overselling or underselling citizen engagement as a factor in these discussions. In the spirit of this discussion I would put forward a few questions that spring to mind, or at least a few myths that present themselves as in need of busting one way of the other. These might be summarised like this:

Some Myths About Citizen Engagement

 

1. Engagement is too expensive

2. Citizens aren’t up to it

3. Engagement only works for easy issues

4. Citizen Power is a floodgate we should avoid at all times

5. Citizens don’t want to be involved they just want good services

Like all good myths they are not true in the strict sense of the word. But there is also a grain of truth in each of them which explains their durability for policy makers and government bodies as blind yardsticks. There has also been far too much talk around citizen engagement as some kind of one dimensional derivative of other things. It is like saying that all you need to do to make this particular tune rock is to turn the volume right up. It looks like it might work, but usually doesn’t.

It would be great to see a potential list of 'Myths about Private Sector Engagement' too..Maybe something to think about, or at least to bear in mind for 2015.