Borderland

Education bloggers understand that the deployment of new publishing tools in classrooms unhinges learning from the frame of the traditional classroom. When students change from recipients of information to active participants in knowledge exchange and construction, their roles as learners are redefined. The definition of classroom is opened for debate. Terms like social and networking are used to describe the change, but what do those words mean? There is a belief that the power dynamic between teacher and students is flattened, and that social networking technology in schools changes classrooms from being simply walls, desks, and students to something more dynamic.

I agree with Will Richardson, David Warlick, Leigh Blackall, and Stephen Downes, who have all posted recently on this issue, that the roles of teachers and learners change in what I’m going to call a new classroom environment, but it would be useful to understand the ethos behind this transformation.

A graphic from Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy, a paper that Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel presented at a recent AERA conference demonstrates the difference between two of various possible mindsets regarding traditional and new classrooms.

Mindset #2 represents the “emergent” mindset, and outlines an ethos among teachers and others who are knowledgeable about transformative learning from their engagement with what have become known as ‘new literacies’.

New language is an immediate problem for anyone who wants to talk about or understand what any of this means. We inherit metaphors from earlier technological eras and use them to name new technologies. Our language misleads us when we use it to describe something new. This is unfortunate because we are in a time of rapid technological change, and the use of archaisms to describe innovative change limits our ability to understand new conditions. We stay locked into old habits of mind as a result. An example would be the use of the term horseless-carriages to describe automobiles. Carriages? Nobody uses that term now. Even the word automobile implies something (from auto- ’self’ + mobile- ‘mobile’) that moves by itself – that is, without a horse, and the word doesn’t quite do justice to all that cars and trucks have become. Other examples abound.

In his speech on the State of the World 2006, Bruce Sterling mentioned this problem as being consequential because we “freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today’s verbal descriptions” which prejudices people and “limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology.” In order to avoid doing that, Sterling advocates inventing language that accompanies change. Like the word spime, a word he uses to describe a coming thing he imagines that is trackable in space and time. It will become, according to Sterling, part of what he calls an Internet of Things.

Sterling’s observations about the importance of language are worthwhile for educators. Not only is our job about communication, but it’s also about vision. If we don’t want to limit our vision, we need to pay attention to language because struggles with definitions are rooted in political power. We are contending to have a voice in what is valuable about learning, about schools, about technology, about literacy, about curriculum. Those words, those things, demand our attention.

I’m thinking about Why Things Matter. Things change, and take on lives of their own. They’re invested with the intentions of all the people who find a purpose for them. Things have a life. And as Francine pointed out, they have an afterlife. For all the things that we can see or name, there are interest groups. Things might be said to acquire agendas from the people who employ them for various reasons. Even trash, a word for something that outlived its original agenda, has interest groups from the ranks of the ecologically minded. Politics is all about things. Francine also noted that things matter because they trace stories, and she asked, “Why aren’t we listening?”

This question of why we might want to listen to things raised an interesting point for me. We don’t need new technologies to understand that things are already enmeshed in networks. If you look around you see countless things that are the products of industry and available through market processes. The clothes you wear, for example, “talk” about who you are. They represent links in the form of choices that have been made in a social and economic web of desire and distribution. Every thing is implicated. Even natural objects, untouched by people are affected by ecological and political forces because humans have demonstrated the capacity for global influence.

As I was thinking about this I came across a book at the library, and then a website about an exhibition called “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” in which Bruno Latour explores the significance of our representations of things, and what it means for us to assemble and to form a deliberative corporate body. This is an expansive notion of politics, one that focuses our attention on the things around us, removing us from the center of the action.

I’m curious about what it might mean to look at the world by foregrounding objects rather than subjects. Making things public implies that we understand what makes a thing significant, and what a public is. These are important considerations for teachers who want to employ emergent information technologies. New literacies raise provocative questions. My thinking about this is exploratory at this point, and the notion of publicness is a matter of interest. I wonder, who – or what – is meant by we? And how is a public constructed?