Digital Learning Environment Blogs

Get the RSS feed

|

Elizabeth Helfant Archives

The Physics of Participation and the Skill of Unlearning
by Elizabeth Helfant

Last weekend, I read a post on Will Richardson’s blog that pointed me to a video of Clay Shirky’s speech at the Web2.0 Expo that occurred in April. The video is well worth the 15 minutes.

In the event that you don’t have time to watch, there are a few nuggets you simply must consider. As you read these first two nuggets, try changing the word media to education.

“This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption…..But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.”

"Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing."

Shirky, entertainingly points out that in the past, media was about consumption. In today’s world, Shirky explains that media is now threefold – consume, produce, and share. Shirky goes on to explain that this sharing, the sharing that produced wikipedia, is actually a “cognitive surplus” – an intellectual currency that is formed from a once passive audience that  is now  in possession of social software that provides for, encourages, and even demands participation and interaction. He surmises:

 “The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.”

In some ways, Shirky offers better educational advice for me than Dan Pink who has recently gotten some negative reviews within my own personal network. Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” is, in my mind, the release or the channeling of the right brained thoughts all of us have. It is not that right brainers are now going to rule the world but that our collective, social, right brained ideas now have a venue in which to mature. Plenty of us left-brainers actually have really good right-brained acumen. I’d argue that Einstien, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and all those associated with the development of the modern theory of the atom were very left brained but their right brained acumen allowed them to think outside of the box and reinvent the world of physics much like technology is reinventing social participation.

In his book Here Comes Everybody, (of course I went out and bought the book), Shirky builds his case for “the Power or Organizing without Organizations” or the Physics of Participation with a few key concepts. “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” (p.17) He explains that communications media in the past was a one-to-one proposition and broadcast media was a one-to many proposition. (Don’t forget to consider changing the word media to education – you can just see the 20^th century teacher imparting wisdom to a captive audience be it an individual student or a class.) Shirky discusses the way social software tools can be used in various levels of communication and sharing; simple sharing, cooperation, collaborative production, and collective action. He states that “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” (p.105) For today’s students, the communications tools include cell phones, IM, skype, and social network sites and, while these tools may not be boring to them, they are certainly second nature and very powerful.

What does all of that mean for education. Education like media needs to acknowledge that it isn’t a one to many learning economy. It is a many to many learning environment of sharing that properly harnessed can see students take sharing to the highest level of collaborative action and that can engage students in global collaboration and digital citizenship. It means that education like media needs to shift from the one dimensional consumption model to to its own three part system that includes accessing knowledge (consumption), collaborating to construct meaning (producing), and transforming the meaning into a shared product (sharing).

The accessing knowledge phase now includes getting information from social networks, from experts that are readily accessible via technologies like ustream and skype and from a wide variety of sources in a wide variety of mediums; blogs, podcasts, documentaries, databases, and good old fashioned texts. The producing phase is increasingly collaborative and the playing field has changed such that teacher is no longer the team’s general manager but should assume a role that more closely resembles that of player-manager. The sharing phase in today’s world includes a plethora of opportunities for learners to publish books or videos, to post presentations and podcasts, and to host conferences and seminars.

So, what might this look like in the school setting?  I offer  three examples.

For our last Teaching and Learning Committee Meeting, we elected to discuss the questions: "How can educators and students effectively bridge out of school technology practices with in school 1:1 laptop learning?"and "What is the change in education that makes laptops (and other emerging technologies) such critical learning tools?” We invited some of our students and gave them the lead voice and we included students from Hawaii and Scotland. We also invited technology specialists Alec Couros from Canada, ClayBurell from Seoul, and Susan Morgan from Virginia. We invited others using twitter and ustreamed the event. Students and teachers discussed learning on an even playing field and the conversation was many to many.  

On May 6^th the advanced chemistry class will hold a Global Climate Change summit. The class was given the freedom to choose topics to research and students were encouraged to contact and interact with experts like the director of the NOAA/Mauna Loa Observatory in Hilo, HI. Their experts and members of the MICDS community have been invited to the event which will be ustreamed as it occurs. This is an example of a class learning together and taking sharing to a level that approaches collective action.

Lastly, we are offering a new course that is also being offered at ten other high schools and four colleges next year. (More on the course can be found here.) The course will allow participants to collaborate with each other. It will be an interdisciplinary course that will focus on three strands:

History of the Sudan region including religious, cultural, and geopolitical factors that have contributed to the conflict today

Literary works about the conflict that provide a human element and push students to examine cultural perspectives

Understanding and creating documentaries.

The class will get footage from a photographer who is currently in the Sudan/Chad area but who has not been heard from in 2+ months and whose safety is not assured because of the political unrest of the region. Students and teachers are challenged with developing an understanding of a culture and a conflict and to articulate that to a wider audience by creating a documentary. (The teachers involved in this course have never used Final Cut and have not had courses in the history of the sudan making the  playing field truly level.) The ultimate goal would be to inspire in all involved an awareness of the complicated significance of culture and conflicts of culture. Wouldn’t it be grand if the course could get participants to really view the world through the lens of another culture rather than judging it against our own? The ability to connect with others across the globe and to interact with experts makes achieving this goal more likely. However, it won’t really be the technology that will allow us to meet this lofty goal. The technology will merely be a facilitator. It is the change in attitudes, learning process, and curriculum that will allow for powerful change.  It will be understanding that education like media is no longer a one dimensional student consumption model but has become a three dimensional model in which accessing, creating and sharing meaning supersedes knowledge acquisition for a final exam.

Shirky ends his book with this sentiment:

“I’m old enough to know a lot of things just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that complicated things like software and encyclopedias have to be created by professionals. In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because they have stopped being true….Meanwhile, my students, many of whom are fifteen years younger than I am, don’t have to unlearn those things, because they never had to learn them in the first place.”

Faculty are finding themselves in a position of needing to unlearn in order to become active participants in this new learning landscape. Much like physicists in a pre-atomic bomb era resisted the new right-brained ideas of some of their counterparts, there are those in the educational world who don’t yet get this new Physics of Participation. Unlearning is difficult but today’s students are going to increasingly demand it from us. Alvin Toffler wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write; but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

How can I teach a faculty to unlearn so they can understand?

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.