Teacher Course on New Media Galore

My friend monika hardy is pushing me these days to create a teacher course around my ideas on media, literacy, education, learning, emergence and a whole lot more. I don’t know how to get started since I’ve never done such a thing before. So I might just as well start here. I think this material fits in nicely with the book I’m trying to write which might pay dividends later on.

The current state of teaching is such that we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing. This is not without consequence. In fact, due to our being lost in education we’ve actually turned education into a zombie industry.

The main symptoms of our attitudes and actions in education – which typify any zombie industry – are these:

• We underestimate the true costs of our current attitudes and actions.
• We overestimate the true value of our current attitudes and actions.

We underestimate the true costs as in social costs, personal costs, lost and missed opportunities, … . We overestimate the value of our teaching methods, what students actually learn, our education system and institutions, our core assumptions, … .

We shouldn’t expect that we will be able to carry on behaving as we have for much longer, something will have to give. But what does this have to do with new media abundance? A lot, it turns out.

I believe that accepting we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing is the hardest but also the most important step we can take at this hour. Umair Haque says that our “world [or society] is a function of what we do.” Marshal McLuhan in his wonderful book The Gutenberg Galaxy says that “media makes people.”

If we accept that children beyond 7 or 8 years old who haven’t learned a mother tongue will never be able able to speak a language then we must also accept that media – of which language is one – determines who we are. That means that our ancestors 500 years ago were very different people from who we are today because their media were very different.

In fact, today’s new media abundance really is just one step in a centuries old media revolution. Our period and our new media is only a interlude in this historical process. The future will hold more interludes with their own new media. Learning due to new media is an ongoing process across the centuries.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about our new media is how it has changed our understanding of literacy. Puritans in our time insist that literacy is being able to read and write and that we shouldn’t try to make it into something else. But what is reading other than turning the meaningless symbols of our alphabets into ideas? And what is writing other than turning ideas into the meaningless symbols of our alphabets?

Our understanding of literacy is inherently linked to our dominant media. Literacy is being able to read in terms of books, newspapers, advertisements and television. New media comes with a more general understanding of literacy. Today literacy has come to mean being educated.

Being educated in the new media means something very different than being able to read and write when media consists of books, newspapers, radio and television. In books and newspapers the audience has no choice but to passively read the visual cues as alphabetic symbols on paper. There is no room for participation and no expectation to participate either. Radio and television are auditory but there is again no comment button.

New media is centered around participation. Being literate in new media means not just being able to participate, but also being able to create chances for others to participate. Participation unavoidably forces us to reconsider our assumptions about human capabilities and especially learning. It turns out that our assumptions that determine the classroom experiences we create are not at all in line with how people learn.

In his lecture Science Education in the 21th Century: Using the Tools of Science to Teach Science Nobel laureate Carl Wieman gives an overview of what recent research in education has taught us about teaching. There are too many interesting points in this lecture to sum here, but the ones that struck me the most are these:

• We typically reach our maximum cognitive load after having heard 7 new terms and 4 new ideas.
• The brain is much more like a muscle than previously thought and requires strenuous extended use for learning.
• Students need to do three things in order to learn: make connections, participate in activities related to the topic, reflect on one’s own knowledge and skills.

Is it a coincidence that the activities promoted by new media are exactly these: making new connections, taking up an active role in the online community and reflecting on one’s own place in the world? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It does mean people constantly learn online.

My tentative conclusion is that the era where passive students learned from visual cues without much participation and without having the right to reflect, comment and object is over. This is the direct cause of why we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing. The teacher course I’m thinking of would pave the road for teachers to come to this conclusion.

I would love to get some feedback on how to proceed, on what you think, and what you would like to see. Thanks.