Typing Out Loud

New tools resemble old tools - not necessarily in design or purpose or function - but in how we use them. And how we use them is more often than not determined by our comfort with custom and our need to maintain predictable levels of control in our lives and our work. So we use word processors like typewriters, eschewing their unfamiliar and complicated attributes.

Some tools appear to be new, but in practice replicate the paradigms of the tools they were designed to replace. Antonio Dias de Figuereido, Professor of Informatics Engineering and Information Systems at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal put this forcefully in a 2003 call for chapters of a book he was editing, MANAGING LEARNING IN VIRTUAL SETTINGS: THE ROLE OF CONTEXT.

In spite of massive technological progresses, the practices of education have remained almost unchanged for the last two centuries. Inspired by the machine paradigm of the Industrial Society, education was viewed as an industrialized way of "delivering" knowledge. Now, as learning and education extend into cyberspace, and the dawn of the Knowledge Society is announced, we seem to be unable to break away from those outdated practices, into practices that value community, interaction, context, organic processes, variable geometry, complexity, flux, change, and many other attributes that radically distinguish our era from that of our industrial-age ancestors. Attempts to improve education at the distance through the use of technology, namely e-learning, suffer from the absence of sound educational paradigms that could, indeed, support genuine renewal.

Technology does not and should not drive education, but it always has and should continue to enable it. (Printing, for instance, allowed mass, public education to replace a system of apprentiship.) We are fortunate that our technologies and our pedagogical principles are in alignment, but despite the theories that stress interconnections and collaborations over exclusivity, we tend too often to choose or use tools in ways that manage rather than facilitate social actions and interactivity. It is, therefore, not surprising that we embrace learning technologies which, according to Oleg Liber, professor of e-Learning at the Bolton Institute of Higher Education, do not provide learners with tools to organize themselves, [they] do not easily permit group learning, [they] do not easily support group or problem-based learning and [they] do not easily integrate with the wider internet, instead crating a ‘learning ghetto.’ On the internet, people are meeting each other in chat rooms, running Weblogs, engaging in various eGroups, answering each others’ questions on ‘Ask’ websites, and sharing resources using peer-to-peer systems: none of these features is typically available in leading VLEs.
But they are available elsewhere.

William J. Mitchell, professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, begins chapter 2 of his 1995 book, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, like this:

My name is wjm@mit.edu (though I have many aliases), and I am an electronic flaneur.
I hang out on the network.
The keyboard is my cafe.

Of course, Mitchell doesn’t only hang out on the network; he teaches and consults and lectures and writes and attends conferences and symposiums and, even, cafes. But in 1995, evoking the urban denizen spirits of Baudelaire and Benjamin, he identifies another gathering place, vastly undeveloped and under populated at the time, but sufficiently stimulating to capture his attention: the virtual network. Mitchell’s hanging out probably made it easier for him to do things that he was already doing or even things that he already wanted to do, and his enthusiasm for the experience indicates a breezy assimilation of the notion that communities no longer depended upon propinquity.

But what’s evolved since 1995 is the sophistication, speed and ease of interaction and exchange, the demise of geographical dominion over those interactions/transactions, the pervasiveness of new communication tools and the mass digitalization of information - which, together, enable us to digitally represent, use, share and create scholarship, research, documents, data, experiences and ourselves (think avatars). Because of what passes through them, these gathering places are no longer simply places to hang out with like-minded colleagues - they have become sites of dynamic group social activity and practice that symbiotically connect and shape the experiences and core learning behaviors of a coming generation of students who are accustom to and comfortable with a style of communication that, even in 1995, was not possible. I suspect that the challenge to us today is to recognize the implicit value of the sites that networks make possible. Their authority rest upon core social impulses: to play, compete, share, collaborate and communicate. Our work is to develop ways to exploit them as potential learning pods.
The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring - Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society