Richard Fouchaux February 2013
Ursula Franklin, in her famous 1989 Massey Series lecture, noted the changing role of technology and important ways it was changing the role of technologists, distribution of labour, and the balance of power, while in her view shrinking the public sphere.
The situation in the classroom at the interface between the biosphere and the bitsphere is but one facet of the situation in the workplace within the same realm. In fact, often even the designation of workplace is no longer appropriate. Not only do new technologies, new ways of doing things, eliminate specific tasks and workplaces… but the remaining work is frequently done asynchronously in terms of both time and space (Franklin , 1992:172).
Franklin's distinction between what she identified as prescriptive approaches1 versus holistic2 ones led to a concern that not working together in the same space causes “opportunities for social interactions, for social learning and community building [to] disappear.” (Franklin, 1992:172). Freire anticipated reformers “using science and technology as unquestionable powerful instruments for their purposes” [to] “…transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; […] Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal” (1972), and so disrupting class becomes a venture undertaken by “heavyweight teams” (Horn, 2009) wielding “power tools” (Christensen et al., 2008). A neoliberal market model of education is paired with a neoconservative social model that work together to “change people’s understanding of themselves as members of collective groups” (Apple, 2009), a course at odds with public education’s heritage of citizenship-, character-, and democracy-building. In models often touted as providing greater choice, “students are viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driven forces” (Giroux, 2012). An aggressive and well-funded movement is under way that “supports marketisation through its clear preference for incentive systems in which people are motivated by personal, not collective, gain rather than by the encouragement of social altruism. Yet, the tradition of social altruism and collective sensibilities has roots just as deep in our nations, and its expression needs to be expanded, not contracted.” (Apple, 2004; Apple, 2009)3.
Still others suggest “it would be useful to look beyond old barriers that have separated citizenship education and global education and to form a new global citizenship education” (Davies, Evans, and Reid, 2005). Neither Apple or Franklin in any of the works cited alludes to what I believe can only be described as a new literacy for the 21st century: fluency in coding and code.
At Occupy Wall St. the techies “[built] websites, put out messages, manage[d] the ebb and flow of information about the occupation on the Internet.” (Judd, 2011) A year later “TechOps,” as the New York contingent of web-developing occupiers call themselves, built and maintained the website for the Sept. 17 anniversary events. They put together a whole host of other underlying technical infrastructure… TechOps-built database software sits behind a system to match people who needed a place to stay during the demonstrations with people who had space to offer [...and built...] what has become a broad suite of web tools built specifically for Occupy activists. Using their own flavor of WordPress’ multi-site functionality, TechOps can facilitate sites like S17NYC.org and allow individual movement groups to maintain their own web presences themselves.” Those who code may have a special understanding of the saying “free as in beer, but not free as in speech” (Judd, 2012).
WikiLeaks “[blew] a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets” (Jenkins, 2010). The fight for freedom and democracy has become the fight for Internet freedom and democracy. According to Dominic Basulto, writing about the January 2013 suicide of 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz, society is becoming ready to embrace the “hacktivist hero — the technologist who uses his or her coding and programming skills to make the world a better place.” Aaron wished to “challenge the status quo of corporate welfare copyright laws that restricted the free flow of information” so he hacked into JSTOR and 'liberated' millions of documents (Hartmann and Sacks, 2013). The outpouring of sympathy for his suicide is in stark contrast to calls for Julian Assange's execution (Bass, 2011). Basulto thinks that's because Swartz was able to “exist both inside and outside the system,” and goes as far as to suggest “…the power of coders and programmers is beginning to catch up to that of lobbyists and politicians” (Basulto, 2013). The Washington Post also reported, on the day Swartz hanged himself, that an online petition had appeared to “[ask the] White House to make DDoS attacks a form of protest” (Kelly, 2013). Regardless of issues of politics and criminality it is impossible to ignore the importance of code literacy and Internet savvy in our global society's future. In their public education and outreach flyer, “What is Free Software?” (FSF, 2006) the Free Software Foundation gives a brief history and makes the following points:
“Free software is software that respects our freedom. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others.
“Usually… we don’t actually buy ownership of the software. Instead, we receive a license to use the software, and this license binds us with many fine-print rules about what we can and can’t do. […]
“What if there were a worldwide group of talented ethical programmers voluntarily committed to the idea of writing and sharing software with each other and with anyone else who agreed to share alike? […] The free software movement was started in 1984 by Richard M. Stallman, when he launched a project called GNU, … that would respect the freedoms of those using it. Then in 1985, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit with the mission of advocating and educating on behalf of computer users around the world. […] Stallman and the FSF developed a specific legal document called the GNU General Public License (GPL)… Instead of restricting what we can do with software the GPL encourages us to learn and share, so it is called a “copyleft” license. […]
“It takes knowledge to make this technology work. People who hoard this knowledge, punishing and threatening others who try to obtain and share it, are not doing so in order to preserve it, despite what they may claim. Instead, they are preserving power for themselves at the expense of others’ freedom. […]
“…which software to use is a political choice for all of us, not just the people who program and sell it. We can click our freedoms away by signaling OK in the Microsoft or Macintosh window after squinting through their thirty pages of restrictions, or we can click CANCEL, and see instead if there is a piece of free software that does what we need.
“We should click CANCEL when we can because that’s the more ethical choice. This means we’ll have to learn a new program, and sometimes the free program might not work as well. The ethical choice is not always the easy choice.” -FSF, 2006
Neither is the pedagogical choice always the easiest. It seems clear there are very high stakes at play in education reform. Teaching not just end-user skills as competencies, as the corporate-supervised P21 and C21 [Appendix E] have advocated, but programming as a literacy, is a political and ethical choice that asks the same fundamental questions about the role of education: Who benefits? Who doesn't? How is that decided?
It was understood in the early days of the digital revolution, as it is now, that the availability of digital networks, advances in hardware and software, existence of “free, libre, open” source software, foreshadowed fundamental structural change at the organizational and societal levels (McLuhan, 1964) (Franklin, 1992) (Reid, 2005) (Apple, 2008) (Cross et al., 2012). The ethnographer must be attentive to the process of achieving change that technology brings, not only to the impacts, otherwise we merely entrench the disconnect between technology and its social context. Descriptions of technological change in organizations that don't include “the problems or perceived pressures which lead organizations to change in the first place” (Thomas, 1992:443) can not be thick. We must expand the meaning of process to include “embedded interests that shape thinking about what problems can or should be solved by technology and what solutions fit prevailing patterns of thinking. […] to understand what technology is or does to organizations, we ;must pay greater attention to what technology means to organizational members” (pg. 443). Three key dimensions to the process of choice are:
Freire in 1972, Franklin, in 1989, were perhaps just a bit too early to fully anticipate the complex socio-politico-economic forces that would result in Twitter, a commercial start-up, helping to empower the Arab Spring; they'd perhaps see no benevolence there, only the inevitable advance of the market on the back of democratic yearnings. Apple’s 2009 essay describes in full the motives and methods we see manifesting in high-stakes testing and redistribution of public resources to private concerns that are part of many ed “reform” efforts.
I believe there’s a need for further research into the roles of social networking within emerging communities of practice, but also its influence on communities of practices’ emerging. Evidence abounds that new directions in schooling can be transformative. In their design experiments Brown and Campione (1994, 1996; Brown, 1992) found growing esteem and regard for diverse expertise and the notion of community.
“…more important social goals had also been achieved by the design. Students came to value the expertise of other students; not just content expertise, but sometimes expertise in using computers or in keeping the group working effectively toward their goal. It became clear that students worked together better when they appreciated others' contributions. This is how the idea of diverse expertise took hold, with its emphasis on respect and listening to others” (Collins, Joseph, Bielaczyc, 2004:24).
Both Freire and Franklin asked an essential question Henry Giroux sums up eloquently in 2013: “…how do power, politics and knowledge connect in creating the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, subjectivities, and social relations in both the school and the classroom?” (in Tristan, 2013). Giroux concurs with Apple and explains a resulting “deskilling” of teachers he sees taking place.
“At the current moment, it is fair to say that the dominant mode of power shaping what counts as knowledge takes its cue from what can be called neoliberalism or what can be called unfettered free-market capitalism. …Free market fundamentalists now wage a full-fledged attack on the social contract, the welfare state, any notion of the common good, and those public spheres not yet defined by commercial interests. …Since the 1980s, right wing and conservative educational theorists have both attacked colleges of education and called for alternative routes to teacher certification. …According to conservatives, the great sin teachers colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice—and by “theory,” they mean critical pedagogy and other theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledge, practices, and modes of governance within wider historical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. …the insistence on banishing theory from teacher education programs, if not classrooms in general, while promoting narrowly defined skills and practices is a precursor to positioning teachers as a subaltern class that believes the only purpose of education is to train students to compete successfully in a global economy.” (Tristan, 2013).
We euphemistically laud “character” education but allow it to foster narrow policy that actually “…encourages students to acquire specific values, behaviours, and interpersonal skills rather than conceptual or situational knowledge,” says Sue Winton, who concludes that character education as interpreted in the southern Ontario board she studied closely supports “…citizenship education that adopts an assimilationist conception of social cohesion and/or social initiation as its purpose(s)” (Winton, 2007). Narrow versions of character education have dominated the field and are too often accepted uncritically (Kohn, 1997) (Glass, 2005). Laura Servage is similarly troubled by the well-named scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) “movement” (her quotes) in higher education she finds “inextricably tied to the entrenchment of neo-liberalization” (Servage, 2009). If “critical thinking” is to be a genuine outcome of 21st century pedagogy definitions and policies need to be as “thick” as the situations we design to nurture it. I'm reminded that beginning in grade school I learned musicianship, not to become a professional musician but ultimately to better love and enjoy music. Forces outside pedagogy may influence the relative importance of such newly embraced subjects as entrepreneurship, which should initially be approached with similar generality.
Freire in 1972, Franklin, in 1989, were perhaps just a bit too early to fully anticipate the complex socio-politico-economic forces that would result in Twitter, a commercial start-up, helping to empower the Arab Spring; they'd perhaps see no benevolence there, only the inevitable advance of the market on the back of democratic yearnings. Apple’s 2009 essay describes in full the motives and methods we see manifesting in high-stakes testing and redistribution of public resources to private concerns that are part of many ed “reform” efforts.
I believe there’s a need for further research into the roles of social networking within emerging communities of practice, but also its influence on communities of practices’ emerging. Evidence abounds that new directions in schooling can be transformative. In their design experiments Brown and Campione (1994, 1996; Brown, 1992) found growing esteem and regard for diverse expertise and the notion of community.
“…more important social goals had also been achieved by the design. Students came to value the expertise of other students; not just content expertise, but sometimes expertise in using computers or in keeping the group working effectively toward their goal. It became clear that students worked together better when they appreciated others' contributions. This is how the idea of diverse expertise took hold, with its emphasis on respect and listening to others” (Collins, Joseph, Bielaczyc, 2004:24).
Both Freire and Franklin asked an essential question Henry Giroux sums up eloquently in 2013: “…how do power, politics and knowledge connect in creating the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, subjectivities, and social relations in both the school and the classroom?” (in Tristan, 2013). Giroux concurs with Apple and explains a resulting “deskilling” of teachers he sees taking place.
“At the current moment, it is fair to say that the dominant mode of power shaping what counts as knowledge takes its cue from what can be called neoliberalism or what can be called unfettered free-market capitalism. …Free market fundamentalists now wage a full-fledged attack on the social contract, the welfare state, any notion of the common good, and those public spheres not yet defined by commercial interests. …Since the 1980s, right wing and conservative educational theorists have both attacked colleges of education and called for alternative routes to teacher certification. …According to conservatives, the great sin teachers colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice—and by “theory,” they mean critical pedagogy and other theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledge, practices, and modes of governance within wider historical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. …the insistence on banishing theory from teacher education programs, if not classrooms in general, while promoting narrowly defined skills and practices is a precursor to positioning teachers as a subaltern class that believes the only purpose of education is to train students to compete successfully in a global economy.” (Tristan, 2013).
We euphemistically laud “character” education but allow it to foster narrow policy that actually “…encourages students to acquire specific values, behaviours, and interpersonal skills rather than conceptual or situational knowledge,” says Sue Winton, who concludes that character education as interpreted in the southern Ontario board she studied closely supports “…citizenship education that adopts an assimilationist conception of social cohesion and/or social initiation as its purpose(s)” (Winton, 2007). Narrow versions of character education have dominated the field and are too often accepted uncritically (Kohn, 1997) (Glass, 2005). Laura Servage is similarly troubled by the well-named scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) “movement” (her quotes) in higher education she finds “inextricably tied to the entrenchment of neo-liberalization” (Servage, 2009). If “critical thinking” is to be a genuine outcome of 21st century pedagogy definitions and policies need to be as “thick” as the situations we design to nurture it. I'm reminded that beginning in grade school I learned musicianship, not to become a professional musician but ultimately to better love and enjoy music. Forces outside pedagogy may influence the relative importance of such newly embraced subjects as entrepreneurship, which should initially be approached with similar generality.
Christenesen et al. (2008), of Harvard Business School, include this representation of how the different aspects of a wicked problem interact, how many simultaneous actors and scripts may be at play, and suggests strategies—”proven in business”—to deal with such a problem (Fig. 24). They rightly note that education discourse in the USA today falls in the lower left quadrant, where fiat, threats and coercion are the recommended strategies for change, and we see that notion realized in the types of reforms being advocated by corporate reformers such as Michele Rhee1, and adopted by the US Department of Education under Arne Duncan.
What reformers such as Rhee, who profits directly from the reforms she’s been given license to impose, and Duncan, who seems to have read more Christensen than Arne Duncan2 since his Harvard days, also demonstrate is that, just as Rittel might predict, such solutions, based mainly in the experiences of one small faction among stakeholders, can only create more problems3. Christensen et al. inadvertently establish the case for holistically building consensus, a process that everyone agrees takes considerably more patience and commitment. “Failing to recognize the “wicked dynamics” in problems, we persist in applying inappropriate methods and tools to them” (Conklin, 2010).
Twenty-first Century Teaching is a wicked problem. Technology is often touted as a great equalizer, but we’ve all seen how total dependence on it can ruin your whole day if it fails, and we all know it’s not often equitably distributed (). Giving technology centre stage, claiming it’s a panacea, ignores the social complexity, of learning environments. Jeff Conklin (2006) defines social complexity as “the number and diversity of players who are involved in a project.” Social complexity leads to fragmentation, his word for the lower left quadrant where no one agrees on where they are, how they got there, or where to go next. Conklin goes on to describe a 1980’s study at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) that looked into how people solve problems, an experiment in which the exercise was to design an elevator control system for an office building.
In the figure (Fig. 25) the green line shows how a typical designer was actually observed to operate while solving the problem and the red line shows the traditional, top down, prescriptive approach sometimes described as a “waterfall” approach.
Each peak in the green line can be understood as heading “back to the drawing board,” yet each return to the drawing board carries all the experience of the previous attempts. By contrast the Christensen/business school strategy of breaking out the power tools (the book’s euphemism for threats, fiat and coercion) is an admission of failure to understand the problem that is doomed to never find a solution. The only cure for fragmentation is coherence. Coherence is a fundamental quality of communities of practice: shared understanding and shared commitment (Conklin, 2010; Smith, 2003, 2009).
Christensen et al. are quite right when they tout the virtues of a shared language, and I still believe educators should learn the meanings of their entire vocabulary, not just “power tools.” But they fail to evolve past that point. The Ethiopian alphabet has over 200 characters, but it’s an entirely phonetic system. I memorized their forms and names at age 11 and discovered that if I said them quickly enough so that they flowed together it sounded as if I was speaking Amharic—yet I understood not one word. Shared understanding and shared commitment are exponentially more advanced than mere word recognition. There seems to be a faint understanding of this in the Christensen /Harvard Business School model, indicated by use of the term Culture Tools, but the list of tools disappoints, and the apparent relative importance of democracy is downright alarming.
But even more alarming are the ways we traditionally approach wicked problems.
Conklin, through the CogNexus Institute, markets a strategy branded Dialog Mapping1, described as “a powerful approach for addressing the problem of fragmentation, as it allows a diverse group of people to generate coherence around wicked problems.” Coherence is not the solution—remember wicked problems have none—but it is the precursor of dialog and the prerequisite of progress towards shared commitment. Teachers can change the world of their classrooms to reflect 21st-century realities by rethinking rules around cellphones, opening up planning to parents and students, venturing into digital realms of social media where many (not yet all) of their students live, but they can not do it alone. Governments must abandon and forswear top down “power tool” usage and fiat, hand over the keys and let the educators drive. Educators must remember the journey is long with no “stopping rule” and therefor not expect to do all the driving, all the time. Business and curriculum designers must surely make time for entrepreneurship, as C21 and P21 have both identified, but also musicianship and sportsmanship, not because there's an economic or financial need, or to create pro athletes and rock stars, but because it's part of character, citizenship and a well-rounded education. Indeed, there may be many other “ships” the next generation might wish to sail, which we can not foresee. Blame and finger pointing are sure signs of failure—dead ends. Success begins with dialog, inspires compassion, and brings about commitment (Rittel & Webber, 1973) (Wenger, 1999) (Wenger, 2003) (Raduntz, 2005) (Conklin, 2010).
In the meantime, some high profile entrepreneurs, musicians and sports stars see clearly that reading and writing code—not merely using software created by others—can assure creativity and innovation gestate. Bill Gates, founder and Chairman of Microsoft says “Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.” will.i.am, musician and entrepreneur with The Black Eyed Peas put it, “Here we are, 2013, we ALL depend on technology to communicate, to bank, and none of us know how to read and write code. It's important for these kids, right now, starting at 8 years old, to read and write code.” Chris Bosh, NBA All-star who plays with Miami Heat has this take: “Coding is very important when you think about the future, where everything is going. With more phones and tablets and computers being made, and more people having access to every thing and information being shared, I think its very important to be able to learn the language of coding and programming.” (Code.org, 2013).
Code literacy is something that’s fun and beneficial to pursue, which you can leverage within many learning environments to help create the kinds of authentic situations—situated opportunities for discovery and knowledge construction—project- and inquiry-based learning models are touted for. As I've shown here, using code snippets to create Web applications is an area rife with opportunities for informal learning, knowledge sharing and “reciprocal teaching” (Collins, Joseph, Bielaczyc, 2004). Making any script print “Hello World!” for the first time can be exciting, and anything one does to get beyond that requires exercising logic. We don't teach music in schools in order that every student become a professional musician. The learning sciences may never be defined in the way pure and applied sciences are because “simply observing learning and cognition as they naturally occur in the world is not adequate given that learning scientists frequently …bring agendas to their work, seeking to produce specific results such as engaging students in the making of science, creating online communities for professional development, or creating history classrooms that confront students preexisting beliefs about race, gender, or class” (Barab & Squire, 2004). Activities that spark an interest and help young people self-identify talents have great value (Brown & Campione, 1996) (Barab & Squire, 2004).
As a poem might woo a lover, a protest song might inspire a movement, or 5 simple symbols describing energy as the product of mass and the square of a universal constant1 might alter the entire course of human history, Web applications are at once complex multi- and meta-modal artifacts, and simple human stories, with all the potential for individual, social, and cultural disruption and/or cohesion—or trivial, mundane repetition—we find in any of the Arts and Sciences. We apply the Web to the solution of problems and the creation of meaning, to communicate ideas and values, the building blocks of, and so Web apps will become a literary canon; the study of certain literacies will enhance both their scientific relevance and their design. Their sociological significance will present from within, due to the inherently transformational quality of pedagogy, and will continue to manifest in surprising ways, often suddenly. It is a bull that must be taken by the horns. Situated pedagogies "…allow interventions in the multiple facets of exclusion according to the specific forms that discrimination adopts for each group and in each educational context…" (Rodriguez-Romero, 2008).
Cognitive apprenticeship believes technology can improve upon the traditional apprenticeship model (Ghefaili, 2003). Using the CA framework's own vocabulary, informal learning is one heuristic strategy humans typically employ. In any situation, however little or much we apply our efforts we naturally both learn and teach. If we all agree that “learning how to learn,” “critical thinking skills” and “collaboration” are desirable 21st century competencies, then informal learning belongs in children's classrooms, and in pre-service and professional development programs. Understanding how Internet systems work at the system level and how applications are coded are desirable 21st century literacies. Experts are readily available, but informed amateurs will accomplish more when they can speak each others languages.
The Internet is rife with learning objects, case studies, experts, and tools. All those responsible for the design of thick learning situations should bring them together (Conole et al., 2008:footnotes 1-2). But, just as Conklin and the IBIS school have demonstrated, Robyn Smyth articulates again: “The potential of these technologies to significantly enhance learning, community and society will be unlikely to be realised without effective policy supporting new holistic approaches to considering and adopting affordances.” (Smyth, 2009).
A newer paradigm for elearning is emerging that is not teacher-in-a-box or talking-PowerPoint, and not do-it-yourself. It's learner to learner, learning situation to all. Concept-mapping and dialogue-mapping paradigms are generally a better fit for visualizing and organizing complex, asynchronous—fragmented—situations (Ghefaili, 2003) (Conklin, 2006) (Conole et al., 2008) (Conklin, 2010). There is research showing mind-mapping, with and without software, as effective strategy in designing, planning, executing and assessing programs and the activities they encompass (Conole, 2007 (Conole et al., 2008) (Smyth, 2009) (Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, 2011). Open University UK and Tufts University have made notable contributions to the software side that hold great potential, but the techniques for applying them need to be developed and shared collaboratively within communities of practice in order to kindle effective adoption.
Communities of practice improve through the strength of the individuals who compose them, and their commitment to constructing community knowledge (Wenger, 2003) (Wenger, 2006a) (Silvers, 2012b). Henry Giroux offers some big ideas: “Education as a democratic project always presupposes a vision of the future in its introduction to, preparation for, and legitimation of particular forms of social life. It is utopian in its goal of expanding and deepening the ideological and material conditions that make a democracy possible. As a moral and political practice, education produces the modes of literacy, critique, sense of social responsibility, and civic courage necessary to imbue young people with the knowledge and skills needed to enable them to be engaged critical citizens willing to fight for a sustainable and just society.” “…we need a language that is both critical and hopeful, …of critique and possibility” (Giroux, 2012). We need language, with accompanying media literacies, to describe information, transport and transform it, all the while keeping its relevance visible.