Borderland

To those who visited Tell the Raven and left comments for my students, thanks. We were on spring break last week, and the kids were jazzed when they came back and heard that people from far away read their stories and left them comments.

Miguel’s comment about the folks who have “NO CLUE” interested me because that sentiment runs as a theme through many of the blogs written by educational technology specialists. Miguel, in a separate blog entry, 3 Factors of Interactive Communications, also posted a link to an interesting article about technology diffusion that analyzed competing views of technology as an agent of educational change. The analytical framework he wrote about describes technology adopters as belonging to either the instrumentalist camp or the determinist camp. Instrumentalists say that Education Reform is made possible by new technology, while determinists see Change as a process that is driven by new technologies. Dichotomous categorization schemes construct an either/or reality that simplifies complex social questions. I don’t know how useful they are for developing deep understanding of current conditions, but I have fun playing with them sometimes. In this case I wandered into a contradiction in my own thinking that made me question some of my assumptions about determinism.

The subject of internet technology and education reform (ie. blogs, wikis, podcasting, videoblogs, games, Wikipedia, Google,…) is frequently coupled with the observation that many teachers don’t seem to recognize the wave of Change that is rushing toward us, traditional classrooms are becoming obsolete, new forms of communication are requiring new definitions of literacy, etc…and the question: How are we going to get them to see it? Because, according to the edublog evangelists, seeing it is a mark of progressive visionary practice that will prepare kids for the future.

Like Miguel, my sympathy is with the ‘possibility’ folks. At first I saw determinism as a dark and narrow channel, but then I realized that my discomfort with blog evangelism is that it seems to rely on a deterministic view of technology. Science fiction has filled our imaginations with both miracles and nightmares, after all. My experience suggests that there is a basic difficulty with the proposition that the culture of schooling will be constructively affected by the read/write web, a proposition based on a vision of liberatory pedagogies emerging from technology applications. An instrumentalist view, on the other hand, does not necessarily imply a constructive outcome since the people who are making choices for the ends to which technology will be applied don’t necessarily share my expressivist ideals.

For example, there has been very little outside interest in my students’ site among members of my school community. I think there have been maybe 3 comments posted to the site by adult relatives of my students. A few cousins and siblings have left comments as well. In an effort to promote what we are doing to the school community, I made a bulletin board featuring student writing announcing that it’s all online. This generated one comment, and the comment wasn’t even online. An adult volunteer in another classroom read our bulletin board and told the principal that he enjoyed the students’ work. Our online presence is all but invisible to the people who we are closest to. We are like subway musicians, playing for ourselves in public.

When I told a few other teachers at a staff meeting that there were free websites available from my web host, they brightened up. When I told them that they had to know a little bit about building web pages, they deflated immediately. The learning curve is too steep. The conceptual leap is too vast for them. Meanwhile, my students tell me that they are writers. They are also thinkers. They are inventors. They are powerful. They supportively leave comments on each others’ work, and many are slowly learning to employ conventions of print without my help. The project is working for me and the kids, but I see that it isn’t necessarily for everyone. The rest of my colleagues use computers for management, for drill and practice, for spell-checking and neatness, for games, for Google.

So whose web will it be? Will we drive or be driven? The question about the impact that Web2.0 will have on classrooms is ultimately limited by the vision of those who are running the show. Miguel mentioned 3 factors that influence technology diffusion: a critical mass of users, regular use, and innovation by individual adopters. In my immediate experience, these conditions suggest that read/write web technologies are a long way from mainstream classroom integration. Teachers are overloaded with a barrage of demands that limit their openness to new self-selected challenges. As long as accountability, standards, and measurement dominate the conversational and curricular agenda then those are the purposes to which technology will be directed.

I made a presentation about blogs to a group of teachers last summer. After I talked for probably too long, a woman raised her hand and asked, “Why would anyone want to do this?” I didn’t know what else to say. You either see it, or you don’t. We lack consensus – not only for technology – but for our vision of schooling.