If you play with an idea long enough, you begin to recognize sides to it that weren’t obvious at first. This post is about an evolution in my thinking about classroom change, design, technology, culture and institutional resistance. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single blog post, so I expect there will be gaping holes here, but I hope to at least come out with something that smells like it isn’t half-baked – which it is. I’ve been mulling over some new ideas for a while now and didn’t know how to approach writing about them, but Clarence’s post about new ideas, and Francine’s ‘Blogjects‘ post prompted me to go ahead and put this out in its still embryonic state.
The phrase “technology in the classroom” has been tossed around since computers made an appearance in schools in the 1980′s. There is an assumption in that phrase that we should use technology to help us do what schools were designed to do. It assumes that the classroom is a place, and that people and tools are in it. Consider what happens if we play with the language for a second and flip the thing upside down and say “classroom in the technology”.
Revolutionary thinking turns the power structure upside down. I’ve been thinking about a statement on the Classroom Change Wiki, “The classroom is not a place”. This is a radical idea.
This brings me around to a new source of ideas that I’ve bumped into recently, starting with Bruce Sterling’s Viridian Design Movement. He’s doing some far-out thinking about design, which I’ve been trying to apply to classrooms at a conceptual level. I just ordered his book, Shaping Things because it seems to have inspired some interesting ideas about an Internet of Things on Julian Bleecker’s blog. Julian described this as
a world in which Things that co-occupy physical space are…assumed to have the ability to disseminate, record, and perhaps even put in context what happens in that space and circulate such within the network will change the patterns of use, the kinds of social practice that obtain, and the imaginary about that space.
It occurs to me that if we stop thinking about classrooms as places, and instead consider them things – things that blog – or ‘blogjects‘ then we will inevitably begin to recognize new possibilities for working with them, rather than “inhabiting” them. According to Bleecker
blogjects in the near-future will participate in the whole meaning-making apparatus that is now the social web, and that is becoming the “Internet of Things.” The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects is that they participate in the exchange of ideas. Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations.
Finally, if you set aside any idealistic considerations and think about how the Iraqi insurgency has complicated the US invasion of Iraq, you begin to recognize how the power of dispersed networks can undermine a traditionally organized power structure. Perhaps this is what is going to happen with schools as a result of an Internet of Classrooms.
10 Comments
“The classroom is not a place” – How about – “The classroom is everyplace.” – just a thought.
Another great post Doug.
Ubiquitous learning. It’s a concept. Is that a new thing?
This is exactly the powerful harnessing of technology that classrooms need to do. This is one further move down the evolutionary line of what learning is and what the places look like where this happens. It is a fairly long haul (500+ pages), but Yochai Benkler’s new book “The Wealth of Networks” is worth spending the time with if you haven’t already. Look also for George Siemens’ work on connectivism. He has a short whitepaper that serves as an opening to this theory. These ideas have begun to make a vast difference in my practice as I begin to think in terms of information nodes. Who do we trust as nodes? How do we build that trust, those relationships? How do we capitalize on this power to make learning different?
The way things are, classrooms are a place. Technology, properly utilized, has the potential of expanding classrooms into hubs. They’re still the physical location from which the larger virtual classroom (of both cyberspace and imagination) can be reached.
Doug you quote Julian Bleecker in saying :
When you think of the ANT (actor network theory) concept of objects who are not literal objects per se but recognize the ‘conversant” aspect of objects while treating individuals in the same way–as conversationalists, while collapsing the hierarchical difference between human and object, you get a social network of ‘actors in interaction”. The network is created BY the conversations.
When you apply this concept to a classroom as you are doing in this post, you move away from child-centered, teacher centered pedagogies to learning ‘systems’; each part contributing to the whole experience. When you break down the artificial classroom walls as place, as I believe you are trying to do, you get a living system of learners where learning is not located in physical space but in conceptual space (not ignoring the classroom which becomes an object in the system).
Though Siemens Connectivist theory is interesting at first glance, I tend to find his theorizing much too individual centered and techno-centric when what a real social constructivist approach should/could be is one where the social system made up of people, tools and processes and various things is not just peripheral (things outside an individual), but integral (inseperable) in conceptualizing learning.
Perhaps we could call these “Internets of learning” (Doug your “classroom in the technology”), on the trails of Julian Bleecker and where students can be thought of as “blogjects” (blog + subjects) collectors and disseminators or data, information and conversations.
Francine
Francine, thanks for your input here. As I said, I’m out of my theoretical depth with this, but your introduction of actor network theory into the discussion does seem to explain what I’m thinking about. I’m trying to get away from cognitivist conceptualizations of learning that focus on “in the head” – “with these tools” kinds of analyses and understand a networked classroom, like you say, as a conceptual space. Now I really do want to read Latour’s book, if only so I can connect these ideas and make something possibly useful out of them.
From his post about the Internet of things, Space, Place and Things — New Rules of Tenancy Within the Internet of Things, (mentioned above), Bleecker said, “And what are the stakes? Assuming we care about changes in the rules of tenancy of place and are concerned about this kind of architecture, we may want to explicate these new rules so we can think through ways to create more habitable space.”
That sounds like as good a reason as any to think about this.
Glad to see you riffing on the Internet of Things– I posted to Ruminate in March about Sterling, the IOT and a very rousing keynote he gave on spimes, blogjects, arfids and more… the most concrete representation of a real conceptual shift I have seen.
I don’t think Siemens is as far off as Francine does– I think they are both saying the same things about the same idea, just from opposite pespectives. Siemens is speaking of the learner who is– as far as I can tell– assumed to be situated inside the inseparable learning network of his own creation. That independence (of time, place, and control) is key.
Chris, I didn’t mean to say George Siemens’ theory is off the mark. I agree it is a question of perspective, but a rather important one. If we put the individual at the center of our analysis or if we step back to see a system of interconnected parts, our valuation is different.
In a “connectivist system” according to GS, the individual inside the system is given priority, and hence he/she is portrayed as having the upper hand on agency. In a network view of learning, everything (object or subject) has a certain degree of agency/influence. In the latter, network constraints and affordances are given a voice in the system. (that is at the basis of ANT).
Not so in GS’s Connectivism. I read his paper a number of times and one of the main critique I had was how social, cultural, environmental contingencies are absent from the theoretical picture. No influence from the other parts of the network. Instead the learning territory is portrayed as a neutral field of opportunity to interact with and take from.
In Connectivism the individual is learning IN a network of resources; agency is seen as individual while cognition is distributed across the nodes in the network –sometimes off-loaded as GS calls it. In ANT, agency AND cognition are distributed and linked by conversations (or what Callon & Latour label translations).
Edwin Hutchin’s distributed cognition , also sees task oriented cooperative behavior as the result of distributed agency across tools and people. Hope I’ve managed to make the difference a bit clearer and not confuse anyone further.
Francine, that confirms what I read about ANT yesterday in the first Chapter of Actor Network Theory and after by John Law. The remaining question is whether your reading of connectivism correctly distinguishes it from actor network theory. From the Siemens article you linked to I find, “The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual,” which does seem to place the individual at the center of the analysis.
I’m not sure which is a more useful theory to consider here, but Law pointed out that from an ANT perspective, which he described as “a ruthless application of semiotics,” everything becomes “uncertain and reversible.” Bleecker mentioned in “Why Things Matter” that we need to pay attention to prepositions in the new Internet of Things, which I see as a consequence of the reversibility phenomena. Reversing the phrases “technology in the classroom”/”classroom in the technology” was the insight that lead me into this hall of mirrors.
I’m having fun with this.
I’m glad you are having fun with the reversibility of things. I tend to like these conceptual exercises which sometime reveal pretty interesting perspectives.
I too couldn’t help a satirical take on the subject. The entry is called Blog(re)jects or blogging litter!! in the Internet of life.
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[...] Doug has a reference to Francine, who comments: “For example, the “geotagger” on your blog sends back interesting information on user location, but…….so what? A cool piece of code, but with (to my knowledge) few applications for the blogger other than to satisfy curiosity. Don’t get me wrong, I too love these ‘gadgets’. Instead of seeing them as information tools, they are to me “inner circle” badges, blog branding, tag/links to and for the technorati.” [...]
[...] Pretty good description of what my son calls driven behavior. I often see myself take models and theories and pull them apart, see if I can apply them to various situations. I’ve been going back and forth with Doug@Borderlands and a bit with Chris who comments there too. A whole section here is devoted to commenting on sensemaking and deconstructing epistemologies and developping new conceptual territories. You would think that in PhD studies it would be a welcome attribute. Well, to a certain extent it is working to my disadvantage. The educational technology department in which I study has repeated numerous times model building was expected in an APPLIED PROGRAM, which seems to preclude theoretical dissertation work. What is happening to PhD programs these days? In psychology there are PsyD and PhDs: one is clinical (practice oriented) the other more theoretical/philosophical. I’m doing a PhD not an EdD! There is a great though older (1997) debate on the subject here. It seems the practice/theory divide is problematic at the conceptual level, and second as a determinant of what a program offers be it Ed.D or Ph.D. It is perhaps time to review the labels in light of what is really happening in various programs. [...]
[...] Doug over at Borderland made an excellent post about An Internet of Classrooms in which he discusses ‘classroom change, design, technology, culture and institutional resistance’. He starts off by saying that the phrase ‘technology in the classroom’ has been bandied about for the last 25 years or so. What about if we turn that around and think about ‘classroom in the technology’? It occurs to me that if we stop thinking about classrooms as places, and instead consider them things – things that blog – or ‘blogjects’ then we will inevitably begin to recognize new possibilities for working with them, rather than “inhabiting” them. [...]
[...] Doug Noon – An Internet of Classrooms (proposes the idea that the classroom is not a place to be inhabited, it is something else – both less and more at the same time…) [...]
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