My Daughter Zoe Read A Book

For an eight-year-old this should not be a revelation. As a parent, steeped in the love and lore of reading, it is a relief. Mind you, she can do plenty of other things. Last week she found, signed up for (after asking permission) and downloaded Disney’s online Pirates of the Caribbean game – and played it incessantly for the next three days until she mastered it. But, until recently, she has showed little interest in actually reading something. You can imagine my delight (and relief) as she proudly stated “I’m on chapter twenty-four, Dad!”

This penchant to prefer the digital can disturb people. A year ago I fretted over my mother’s admonition that Zoe “should be outside playing and getting dirty.” To defend myself, I said, “But, you should have seen her the other day.” I went on to explain how I had watched her on the cell phone, sitting at her computer, talking to her BFF Katy. Amazed, I listened as she patiently helped Katy navigate her first visit to the Webkinz site walking her though successive screens and areas until they were both in the same chat room together. “Do you know what sort of communication skills, mental maps and abstract cognition that takes?” I asked my mother. With a certainty only a mother can project, she stated flatly, “She should be outside.”

If you are a parent – or a grandparent – you know the feeling. What is it with today’s kids?

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This spring, citing a growing epidemic of students surfing gossip sites and shopping online during class, the Law School at the University of Chicago eliminated Internet access in most of its classrooms. In his explanation Dean Saul Levmore commented that students “don’t realize the value of what they’re being distracted from…our overarching goal is to have a terrific and interesting classroom experience – that is too important to allow diversions.”

As an educational technology advocate, I was dismayed. We work so hard to get technology into the classroom – and the classroom online – that this seemed like a huge retrenchment. And, even more vexing, it seemed to be for a very good reason. Who challenges the contention that updating MySpace or buying shoes is a legitimate class time activity? But taking the Internet away? It smacks of the “no calculators in the math class” from years ago. What is it with today’s faculty? Couldn’t they just be more interesting?

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The Internet is a powerful transformer – and a powerful distracter – as these scenarios underscore. Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson in their new book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, point out that we cannot respond to these problems in the ways we always have – and, like at the UofC Law School, are now. We must embrace disruption to discover the new order of learning. Instead of one (the same) message to every student – we must enable custom messages that engage every student individually. Solving this koan is at the heart of transforming, some would say saving, our educational enterprise.

So what do we do differently? As Christensen, Horn and Johnson find, simply “cramming” technology into the traditional classroom and the traditional teaching model does not work well. Furthermore, it is too simple – and wrong – to say faculty just need to be more interesting. Like my Zoe shunning books for interactive digital worlds – professors need strategies (and technologies) that attract and enable them to engage students.

So how do we do this? John Seeley Brown, in his paper “New Learning Environments for the 21st Century,” provides an excellent counterpoint to the conundrum of making the too, too attractive Internet freely available in the classroom. He describes an innovative classroom experiment in the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts called Backchannel.

In this classroom every student has access to the Internet – but each computer is linked to individual, large-screen monitors that ring the room. Using a broad mix of social software, every student, and the presenter, can see, and interact with and respond to what each other is doing. While, as Brown notes, the social constraints make idle surfing far less likely – more importantly the paradigm of the lecture is transformed into a collaborative, exploratory studio-like environment. In this room, where faculty model true practice of their discipline – and students are immersed in authentic work – certainly Dean Levmore’s goal of a “terrific and interesting experience” is also being met.

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As so we struggle. Increasingly the evidence indicates the inevitably of tsunamic change. At every turn our instincts, honed and perfected in a world that will soon cease to exist, keep us focused on sustaining our current models. Technology always grows at a pace faster than our ability to use it. The answer cannot be avoiding technology because it is distracting – or charging faculty to be “more interesting.” The challenge is to embrace the chaos wherein lie the new instructional models – the new concepts of the “classroom” as a studio (concrete or virtual) for collaboration – that enable students and faculty to engage as co-learners and even co-creators transforming knowledge into knowing – together.

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As for Zoe – she has asked to go to the library this weekend. Oh, and to the Nintendo store. What is it with these kids?

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This first appeared in the WCET Frontiers Newsletter, June 2008(http://www.wcet.info/2.0/index.php?q=node/844 )