Over the past few weeks, as part of a writing project, I’ve been trying to reconcile some ideas about teaching and learning that I’d formulated a few years ago, with some of the shifts that have been happening since — mostly with regard to web 2.0 and especially with the rich new conversations that have been occurring about this new information landscape — and through that landscape.
I’ve been trying to factor it all down to my customary three bullet points, and I think I’m nearly there — though it’s going to take more than one slide with up to three bullet points each. This diagram is my attempt to bring it together in front of my own eyes. It seems to me that putting it out here is a fitting thing to do on this first day of 2008.
This is the third version of the diagram based on gracious suggestions already received! |
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| Click to see enlarged First Version | Click to see enlarged Second Version | Click to see enlarged Third Version |
I started writing a long explanation, but then came to realize that it may be more useful to just put it out there and ask some of you to respond in any constructive way that seems appropriate.
This is not meant to be definitive in any way, just a conversation starter. The issues are nowhere near this simple and the barriers are never this clear. The overlap between the pedagogies of school 1.0 and school 2.0 are important in critical. But breaking it all apart and putting labels on it seems like a useful way to better understand it all.
Your constructive criticisms are welcome.
Added Later:
There is certainly a lot of School 2.0 happening inside of today’s schools. It’s happening as a result of visionary, inventive, and courageous administrators and teachers. There will also remain a good deal of School 1.0. The lecture won’t die.
Dave:
In looking through the diagram, I am getting the urge to turn it sideways an put the student at the top and make School 1.0 and School 2.0 on the same plane, yet at different spots on a timeline or continuum. The other small piece of information I would offer is that in the diagram you have in the bubble leading from “Information Environment” to the “School 2.0” and it states, “Networked, Digital, Cheap and Scarce.” I would change that to “Networked, Digital, Cheap and Plentiful.” I know that it may not be plentiful now, but one of the the most intriguing things of 2007 was the amount of new educational content that was available on the Internet. This will continue to grow as time moves forward.
Well, I wonder about the possibility for exaggeration in the dichotomy you’ve set up between School 1.0 and School 2.0. I can imagine teachers who work hard at preventing passivity, work hard at not catering to packaged curricula arguing with your characterization here. Just my .02.
Good eye, Kyle. I’d intended it to say, “Networked, Digital, Cheap and abundant.” The change has been made in the original image.
Dr. Bad Ass also makes a valid point that exaggerated generalizations are going to be unfair to a lot of people. My guess is that without those many teachers who “work hard at preventing passivity, (and) not catering to packaged curricula,” School 2.0 simply isn’t going to happen.
Good graphic organizer. I suggest putting the student at the center of both schools with frame around each labelled school 1.0 school 2.0. I’d also make the arrows all point to the students in school 1.0 because they are the passive receivers. I’d then make the arrows in school 2.0 two arrows because the students interact in their learning. That kind of messes up your three points. Maybe your three points could be the three levels of each school: Content and world view level, description of the student level, and pedagogy/teacher role level. I hope that helps.
BTW: I am looking forward to attending your Digital Citizenship conference in Columbia, Missouri in February.
David,
A great graphic illustration to put it into perspective. It speaks volumes. I only had one comment that was already addressed.
I am hoping one day to meet you as I have read your books and learned much from what you have had to say. Now I am putting it into practice and modeling in my district.
Can the shift in education drive a change into very different kinds of schools. Those who do not use pre-packaged curricula will be able to move on. Maybe the current way some schools are “managed” can change.
I wonder if the future was ever predictable. Imagine you were a parent (born 1855). Your early life is dominated by The War and our national unity seriously in doubt. You marry in 1875 and have your first child in 1880. Could you have predicted flight, the automobile, a sense of national unity surrounding a war with Spain, the phonograph, and residential electricity?
How would you have prepared your child for that world?
I think we have an over developed sense that our times are the most revolutionary times and that adapting to the changes of the past must have been easy.
“The future ain’t what it used to be” – Yogi Berra
Mike,
I get that question a lot (I wonder if the future was ever predictable?). I think that you are right, that things have always changed. But I do not believe, other than in times of calamity, that change has ever been so much a part of the character of our times. The world has changed dramatically in the 50 some years that I’ve been around. The difference is that we didn’t know it back in the ’50s and ’60s. We had every reason to believe that the mills and factories that employed so many of my classmates would always be there. We had every reason to believe that big desks, file cabinets, adding machines, and typewriters would always be part of the office work space.
The difference is that we know, right now, that the work culture and life styles can and almost definately will continue to change dramatically over the life times that we are preparing our children for.
I think that this has profound implications for teaching and learning. It’s why it is so wrong for us to be teaching our children to be dependent on classrooms for learning — because they will need to be able to learn anytime and anywhere in their futures.
Great chart. I’m wondering about the comments like “Read, Listen, Remember” and “Access, evaluate, work etc . . . ” They seem to just float there. Can they be “locked” in more? I like version 2 better than version one, except that in version one, these comments seem more pronounced.
Hey, Dave,
My only concrete suggestion is that you link to a larger graphic–even with new glasses my old eyes have a hard time making out the finer points 🙂
From what I _can_ make out, it is a tidy comparison between the old and the new, and I agree it’s important to remember that, as you append, some of the 1.0 will (and to my mind, _must_) carry over to the new ways. If there’s one thing I have learned in my own years of teaching and learning, it’s that there is actually some good in pretty much any approach to those processes, as long as none is relied upon solely to the exclusion of other valuable tools/strategies. That’s what I continue to appreciate in your own untiring efforts to clarify–you so clearly see the big picture, and you acknowledge that it’s not a simple one.
Bureaucratic approaches that characterize the recent history of legislation and administration seem to be ones that endeavor to simplify and reduce to formula, rather than embracing the whole: “Let’s measure learning with standardized testing, allocate funding according to how well students can be trained to fill in those little circles with number 2 pencils.” I wonder if there can be methods of evaluating “new schools” learning that can find acceptance by the purse-string holders, of if that’s something that will continue to elude our grasp, simply due to the nature of “new learning.”
Anyway, thanks for the “conversation starter!”
Dave:
I really like the turning of the graphic. It makes much more sense to me in that perspective. Here’s the other point that I was not very eloquent with yesterday is that you have three connections between School 1.0 and School 2.0. I would like to propose that those three connections be used to identify.
1) Communications Literacy (The ability to read, write and speak)
2) Computational Literacy (The ability to add, subract, multiply and divide.)
3) Social Literacy (The ability to interact with others and behave in a socially acceptable way.)
I think these are important, because they are the connective tissue between School 1.0 and School 2.0.
Just a thought!
Dave,
I can’t believe you did this. I have been thinking over our Christmas Break how I could share what 2.0 is with my staff and how it relates to 1.0. After reading some articles by Jamie Mackenzie, I had decided to use a grapic organizer…and here you are with one! I’d like to use yours as a conversation starter and maybe add some links, showing examples.
I love this mind tool. I was studying it and was thinking that the students’ frame of reference for School 2 could be more “information interactive”.
On the ‘World View’ I was a little scared of ‘unpredictable future”! I was thinking more of open and closed. ‘Defined or Open’. I see the rhythm of your analogy but, perhaps there is room to add that the ‘unpredictable’ is geared toward ‘Potential Future”.
I do see the relationship of 1 and 2 in the information environment and would consider the School 1 information more ‘completed.’ This is what it is, but in School 2, there is continuum and newness. Not sure how that would fit.
I love how much better just turning it on it’s side makes. That and having it all point to the student gave the ideas a new perspective. The graphic is a great conversation starter!
“Access, evaluate, work, publish, respond” on the 2.0 side. What about “create”?
My area is mathematics education. I am looking for sites and tools that would support learners in creation of their own mathematical entities. Web 2.0 is all about creating user-generated content. When we are dealing with math, it usually means something different: namely, re-presenting textbook (old) content in some new media. For example, students could create a wiki page with videos and podcasts about fractions, which are novel representations, but the math contents would be absolutely old, in fact taken from a textbook, or from an online encyclopedia taken from a textbook.
I think it is important to talk about learners’ power to generate content – simply put, to create – while discussing Anything 2.0. I also think it’s important to distinguish between re-creating old content in new representations, such as making a multi-player 3d shoot-them-up game for times tables drills, and genuinely inviting learners to create some new content collaboratively.
MariaD, thanks for your comment. I agree with you wholeheartedly, that learning to be creative and to be creative learners is the soul of learning 2.0. In my mind, it is embedded in the model, though not as obviously as I suppose it should be.
When I say publish, I mean the sort of thing that you seem to be talking about, taking what you’ve accessed, evaluated, and mixing and remixing that information in creative new ways to re-present the ideas — or better yet, to creatively present new ideas.
But if we think about the accessing and evaluating, I think that there could (should) be a great deal of creativity happening there. It isn’t a matter of just using an index or table of contents any more. It’s creatively figuring out how to get the best and most appropriate information out of a global, networked, digital, and overwhelming information environment — that seems constantly in motion. Employing content, even text, can sometimes be mathematical in nature.
Again, creativity probably should be more explicit in the model.
Thank you for your answer. The right part of the diagram reminds me a little of the very top of Bloom’s taxonomy: tasks that require creativity, and that can be powerfully supported by social mechanisms, including web 2.0 tools. I am struggling with the word “creativity” though; making your own entities does not always stress creativity, and some creative tasks don’t center on making your own entities. Also, “creativity” has been somewhat marginalized away from “serious work” and “serious study.” People don’t seem to apply the term as much to building bridges or to creating (!) new operating systems. Maybe I should go ahead and make peace with the word, but meanwhile I am including this disclaimer. When I say “create” I mean “make, build, construct.”
Here are some little, particular examples of what I like to see as “building and making entities together” in math:
– making your own operations (e.g. 2#3 means (2+3)*3) and discussing their properties, such as commutativity, with other learners, sorting operation collections by properties, predicting properties ahead of trials
– each learner making up a function machine and then exploring whether pairs of machines from pairs of learners can form compositions of functions, and if so, what are the new domains and ranges, etc.
– learners constructing and posing their own problems about a particular topic, and as a group evaluating problems for complexity, interest, elegance and helpfulness in understanding the topic
I was sorting various learning or gaming computer environments according to a holistic, and hard to define, rubric I privately dubbed “user power over the environment.” I tried to formulate more measurable axis for the rubric. I found the curious thing: that power to create entities in the environment is a stubbornly separate axis and would not perfectly correspond to other descriptors, such as complexity of learner behavior.
MariaD, could you explain what you mean by entities?
I wrote up my “taxonomy” of computer worlds along that “user power” axis, and presented it a few times at conferences and workshops, but I still struggle with definitions involved. Specifically, I struggle with defining different kinds of entities (objects, concepts and representations) and distinguishing between different kinds of creation. I am still at the level of working with particular examples, rather than being able to formulate generalities.
For example, anyone interacting with a drill software by typing an answer into the box for 1+2=__ has created an entity of sorts (the answer). So, answering closed-ended questions could be consider the first level of being able to make something in an environment, and the first kind of entities. At this level, “entities” are answers to closed-ended questions.
The next level can be compared to a construction set, where learners create something out of pre-made blocks, with software or mentors largely scripting the process and “railroading” outcomes. For example, various function explorers allow input in one form (table, graph, equation parameters) and output in another. Another example is software that allows learners to construct “function machines” out of particular blocks, such as “add three” or “divide by two.” At this level, “entities” are highly scaffolded and restricted objects of the nature pre-determined by the environment.
On the third level are open-ended environments that allow creation of wider varieties of non-scaffolded objects, like Logo, Geometer’s Sketchpad, or Second Life.
Sometimes I use an analogy about art. The first level of making something is paint-by-numbers. The second level is a coloring book with some stickers; you can choose colors and sticker placement. The third level is creating original artwork.
I’ll chime in with MariaD and support her making a distinction between creating a product and creativity. As for “entities”, I think this is a way to ask for student work that goes beyond information gathering and presenting. “Entities” that are concrete experiences, not reports, for example. You might also call them projects, products, or artifacts.
There is a vast difference between being creative and creating something. You can write a creative report about a bridge, or you can make a creative video about careers in programming, or build a creative website with links to math sites about functions – those are examples of being creative. But building a real bridge or writing a program or making a function machine (Maria’s good example) is constructing something and provides a different educational experience. Both should be present in a well-rounded learning environment. However, it seems when we talk about Web 2.0, we often focus on the information gathering, sharing and presenting aspects. But I think “publishing” is too weak a word to stand in for both constructing AND presenting.
Point taken, MariaD and Sylvia. When I think of accessing, evaluating, working, and publishing, in today’s information environment, I see a lot of inventiveness in learning to do it well.
But you are correct, that in a model for contemporary education, creativity should be an explicit part.
Thanks!
Dave
I tend to think we are moving into a School 3.0 realm that fosters true student-centered learning. I appreciate your diagram but feel the student is removed from the pedagogy. The student should be in control of his/her own learning and not have to wait for school/teachers to construct an environment for learning to happen.
My 2 cents worth….Happy new year!
That’s the part that troubles me as well, Julie. Most of the diagram is about the conditions and shifts in conditions that impact on school 1 to 2. But it is the pedagogy that really needs to be cracked open, and especially new relationships between student and teacher, student and curriculum, student and content, student and leadership — classroom and home, school and community, etc.
Dave,
I agree with Julie, it’s not quite right yet. I see school 2.0, like web 2.0, as a two-way interaction. The 2.0 student actively interacts with, publishes, and revises his or her creations. What about making the arrows in School 2.0 two-way arrows, with a point on each end. That way the student is not just receiving the learning from the pedagogy, information environment, world view, and student frame of reference, but is interacting with it.
You see, that’s the problem with this diagram that I’m not quite ready to address yet — what’s happening inside of that pedagogy cloud. I’m thinking of a different activity for that.
More later!
Dave,
By putting diagrams like this on the Internet, you might never stop getting comments for changes, improvements, etc. 😉 Any chance on this diagram becoming CreativeCommons-tagged so others can use, and expand upon things from their point?
One thing I see missing that I think is important in any school, 1.0 or any version thereafter, is the involvement of parents and to a lesser extent, the community. In Goochland County (Virginia), where we have mandated that teachers maintain weblogs about classroom activities, we have seen a dramatic shift in parental involvement, in terms of being aware of what’s going on, with amazing detail.
I think we live in a time when parents want to become involved and have a voice in their child’s education. But our current societal structure (blame capitalism, if you like) hasn’t added anymore hours in the day.
I think an important part of School 2.0 should include the role that technology can play in bettering the parental/community involvement that was recognized as important, years ago.