I’m Not Waiting for Superman – Killing the Sacred Education Cow
Posted by brooks in New Media, Screencasting, Social Media on Sep 27th, 2010 | 3 commentsBecause we are increasingly producing and sharing media, we have to relearn what that word can mean. The simple sense of media is the middle layer in any communication, whether it is as ancient as the alphabet or as recent as mobile phones. On top of this straightforward and relatively neutral definition is another notion inherited from the patterns of media consumption over the last several decades, that media refers to a collection of businesses, from newspapers and magazines to radio and television, that have particular ways of producing material and particular ways of making money. And as long as we use media to refer just to those businesses, and to that material, the word will be an anachronism, a bad fit for what’s happening today.
The term education is an anachronism. Please do not misunderstand me, our public systems of education have been hugely successful. They helped create the cognitive surplus that is radically reshaping how we interact, learn and work with each other. However, today our public eduction system is redundant, backwards and calcified. It has become the ancien régime to the revolutionary learning systems and communities that have developed online (e.g. web search, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc). The traditional education has become too slow, too static and, frankly, too inequitable to meet the needs of our ever evolving society. It is built on top of an archaic understanding of our social construct that does not reflect current social behaviors (where and how people learn), learning platforms (the ongoing silicon revolution), and cultural shifts (the integration of the network and social graph). The result is extraordinarily high costs with extremely low returns.
We need to redefine education within the context of the cognitive surplus that exists today. How are people learning today? What systems do they use? How do they work together. If we don’t focus on those questions and instead attempt to patch the ancien régime we’ll continue to fail. It’s that simple. Waiting for Superman won’t work, but we might be surprised by those things surrounding our every day lives that will.
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3 Responses to “ “I’m Not Waiting for Superman – Killing the Sacred Education Cow”
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Does age (and thus intellect/social development), as a demographic of the average student, play a role in the practicality of this? It seems that the civic value derived from many of the examples of cognitive surplus are often beyond the motivators of today’s youth. I certainly am not speaking in totality as there are many examples to the contrary. However, in the absence of today’s educational fundamentals, where do those values get created and nurtured that make contributing to the cognitive surplus originate? At home, I suppose?
I like the concept of teaching being a many:many activity, so I like the potential of this and look forward to exploring it more…
On a completely different note, do you have ideas/suggestions/hopes for how the reform against the ancien regime transpires w/o a “bloody” revolution?
[Tony] – Thanks for taking the time to add some thoughtful commentary.
Does age play a role in the practicality of this. Perhaps some, but in my view much less than we are likely to assume. Our cultural bias leads us to make many assumptions about the limited capacity of children to contribute and participate. There’s plenty of anecdotal as well as hard research that blows these assumptions out of the water.
Civic value – This is a phrase loaded with subjective value, but even so, Shirky does a nice job of explaining how the silly / inane and civically virtuous are equally important parts of the same movement. See his discussion on lol catz in Cognitive Surplus for more details.
A bloodless revolution – I’m not sure if that’s possible, but it certainly seems like there are huge opportunities to build hybrid models. Focusing our dollars on Brick and Mortar k-5 then shifting to online mentorships. Old ideas such as apprenticeships may become much more of a reality. Research Universities and graduate programs may certainly exist in hybrid format, but the reality is the notion of a classical 4 year education has already gone by the wayside and is actually something which can easily be learned informally online. There’s going to be blood – there always is with serious social upheaval and transformation, but it’s up to us to help everyone understand how much opportunity there is for all of us.
I watched one of Alan November’s keynotes in which he shared the idea that you start a semester saying “here are 3 really hard concepts, which are key to your success in the course. Please come tomorrow having researched them on wikipedia — or wherever else– and be ready to teach us your understanding of these 3 concepts.”
It leverages existing resources, challenges students to learn and teach others, and positions the teacher as a guide.