Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch. 8

This particular chapter dwelt with using online social tools to increase collaboration, often from Shirky's perspective towards some kind of social action, but as I noted in the previous chapter, schools currently do not do social engagement well (poverty engagement, meaning helping the poor, doing food drives, etc, they do better and more often). Schools also manage collaboration in a limited notion only, at least in my city.

For the most part, collaboration is limited to students taking the same course, from the same teacher, at the same time. Increasingly, out-of-school collaboration has come under fire as homework policies become revised to take into account the extra demands on student life outside of school as well as changes to assessment policies that seek to limit the amount of work done for assessment outside of the direct observation of the teacher. Furthermore, programs of choice and increased suburban cachement areas also means that students are physically tending to live farther and farther apart, inhibiting again their ability to get together.

The rise of various content management systems would superficially seem to be capable of reversing this trend, as their data capture techniques allow for chronicling user activities. However, again, we see these systems being set up to reinforce the District ->School -> Teacher-> Class file structure, with very little cross-over. Only recently have some teachers in my district started experimenting in Desire2Learn using the 'cohort' function, a tool with some potential to allow cross-class collaboration under the same teacher.

Ideally though, any online education system would give students the freedom to collaborate with any other student who wanted to collaborate with them at any given time without the current restrictions of School-> Teacher-> Class. Once students are given their unique user identifier linked to their demographic data, we have all their key School->Teacher->Class data on hand and should be able to track them across the system fairly easily. If our assessment activities are linked explicitly to outcomes from the Programs of Studies, it would not only help establish a context for student work common across all schools and classrooms, but also help foster a standard for collaboration among teachers from different schools as well.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.7

This chapter was mostly on how the use of online social tools can aid in the organization and execution of collective action. It's somewhat hard to interpret or envision how these tools might function within an educational or school-based setting since, upon reflection, schools actually do a pretty good job of limiting student-based collective action. We do individual and group work often and in a variety of ways, but maybe it's time we start thinking about students and the bigger picture?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.6

"Collective Action and Institutional Challenges"

This chapter looks at the speed with which resistance and confrontation to the sexual abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese manifested, organized, and became international. Shirky points out that organizers were able to do this because the cost of spreading information, as well as the cost of assembling like-minded people had fallen dramatically by 2002, to the extent that geographical boundaries no longer represented a significant barrier.

I guess sometimes we assume that all of the students present in a classroom represent a "like-mind" even though we know that each student wears multiple identities. We also know that different students bring different attitudes to school in regards to learning, particular subjects, the school itself, and even towards the nature of work expected from them by their teachers, parents, and peers. It is really difficult to consider a group of 30-40 students, brought together by geography and a timetable, to represent a "like-mind," even though much of current pedagogy appeals to teachers to develop such consensus as a precursor to inquiry activities, and related teamwork.

Shirky's comment that the Roman Catholic Church in Boston had forbidden lay organizations (that is groups of Catholics not necessarily led by priests) from organizing across parish lines resonated with my as school boundaries are always hot button topics. As Shirky said, organizations like the Church, and from my perspective schools, were developed at a time when geography represented a significant barrier to organizing institutions. Students could only walk or ride a bus so far. In the United States, policies regarding busing have become tied up in the ongoing conflicts about integration, segregation, and freedom of movement.

However, even putting aside the question of boundaries for physical school attendance, why must students be limited to work only with students and teachers co-present with them in a particular classroom, at a particular time, in a particular place? Surely different web 2.0 tools could allow students to collaborate with other students taking the same subject but at different times within the same school, or even the same district? Most online Learning Management Systems give teachers and students the ability to notify and message each other as they log into the system; couldn't students access any teacher teaching a particular subject matter for help? Most schools in my district have a dedicated tutorial period where different teachers rotate through fielding questions from students in particular subject areas (ie. each chemistry teachr shows up once a week to offer assistance for all chemistry courses). Why not extend this online? Would opening up the system to allow for collaboration across schools really be that difficult?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch.5

It finally happened. I came across something in Chapter 5, where Shirky gets down to discussing some of the details of how collaboration occurs, that diminished my enthusiasm for mass collaboration and social networking as potential frameworks for organizing classrooms around. In his explanation of the frequency of user contributions to websites like Wikipedia, Shirky mentioned that they tend to follow a power law distribution (you can read a similar essay Shirky wrote on the subject here). In making edits to Wikipedia, there was a tremendous imbalance between the volume of contributions between most users and a few users. This is fine for a voluntary organization like Wikipedia, where user-members can float to their comfort level. A classroom however presents a different sort of environment in so far as we have different expectations.

Teachers are accustomed to rewarding student performance with grades. Most mass collaboration software allows for the tracking of contributions, so it is easy enough for teachers to see who has done what, and issue a grade based on frequency. Similarly, teachers could also develop criteria for contributions (ideally this would be done jointly with the participating students) so that students would understand how the value of a contribution might be judged. On the one hand, my concern is that setting any kind of parameter on what constitutes a "good" contribution is going to undermine the collaborative spirit of the venture. If we set minimum and maximum contribution thresholds, I worry that students will feel coerced into making contributions, while others might be disincentivized to make as many contributions as they would have otherwise made.

Further, and more to the point, there is a prevailing notion of fairness that teachers try to honour in the classroom, that the inherent inequality of a power level distribution makes problematic. Effective mass collaboration appears to require a few self-selected individuals to do the majority of the work willingly, allowing the rest of the users to enjoy the benefits of this labour. The classroom environment is not typically set up to reward this kind of altruism, and views it's opposite, as a kind of freeloading parasitism to be discouraged, if not punished outright. Dealing with this view will require a fundamental rethink of classroom values.

Arrival City vs. The Fraser Institute's School Rankings

This weekend I read Chapter 4 of Arrival City, but since it dealt primarily with push factors in rural to urban migration, I didn't find to much to think about in terms of an educational context. However, the publication of the Fraser Institute's annual rankings of Alberta schools was published on Sunday. The report takes over 600 schools and ranks them according to government exam results. It's a fairly contentious issue, especially as the rankings also publish information on the percentage of ESL students and special needs students at the school, as well as the average family income. Predictably, schools with higher percentage of ESL and special needs students and lower family incomes tend to rank lowest. The inclusion of this data makes it easy to consider comparing schools of similar composition, but still presumes that making predictions about future government exam performances based on past performances is a valid exercise.

Arrival City helps to highlight the dangers of this thinking. In an editorial that went along with the published rankings, a representative of the Fraser Institute mused that the bottom ten schools in the rankings tended to be chronically under-performing, and perhaps educational chains from the United States ought to be allowed to operate within the province to "fix" these schools.

Without commenting on the fitness of the government exams for comparisons, or whether private groups ought to be allowed to run schools in Alberta, whether or not these schools are "failing" their students cannot be assessed strictly by exam results. A notion of failure here carries with it an idea that the students who fail these exams are doomed to remain among the poor communities of the neighbourhood. If the neighbourhoods these schools are located in are functioning as "arrival cities" as author Doug Saunders might suppose, then we need to see what percentage of students writing government exams at the Grade 3 level remain within the neighbourhood to write them again and again at the Grade 6 and 9 level. If significant numbers of students are transferring out to other schools in different neighbourhoods altogether (with potentially better exam results) we might presume that the school, and by the extension the neighbourhood, is doing a good job giving those students the tools they need to integrate into the larger society. The continued existence of low exam scores at these schools might be better explained by the neighbourhood's attractiveness to the same demographic looking to integrate successfully into the city at large. In other words, the school's success at educating and enabling a particular kind of student to leave, encourages more of the same kinds of students to come to the school.

By contrast, an under-performing school that retains a large proportion of its students might be more fairly judged to be under-performing and in need of more considered reform.

My Issue With Alfie Kohn

I happened to meet a friend of mine earlier today who home schools her child. We were with a third parent and my friend mentioned the ideas of education writer Alfie Kohn. My friend was surprised to hear that Kohn's writings inform a lot of the work that I do for my large urban school board.

Granted, Kohn's ideas about progressive, constructivist education focusing on the transitioning away from such standard practices as homework and rewards are controversial, but while I find some of his ideas worth pursuing, I enjoy far more that Alfie Kohn ought to let us have a meaningful discussion about education reform.

Thus, my issue with Alfie Kohn isn't actually with him or his ideas, but rather how we go about implementing new ideas like his.

Take for example his idea that competition is counter-productive to student learning. Much of his early writing is devoted to demonstrating how deeply competition is embedded in the structure of education, particularly in the awarding of grades. In Kohn's view, grades are used primarily to rank students relative to each other, based in part on the premise that particular jobs or university seats are naturally and deservedly scarce, going only to the best and the brightest (I'd like to imagine for a second a system that allowed anyone who wanted to train to be a doctor or lawyer to try and become one). His subsequent work investigates the negative effects that grades and other forms of external rewards have on student motivation. His arrival at a constructivist position is the result of shifting the focus from external to internal student motivation.

As controversial as his ideas are, I rarely find teachers willing to state that he is wrong, or that the education system ought to function differently from what he suggests. Rather, most teachers will suggest his ideas are "impractical" and that a modern education system could not possibly function effectively as he described.

I like this argument because it puts teachers in a position to accept his premises if a practical manner of implementing them could be found. However, this is precisely where the problems tend to occur.

The first problem happens to be that regardless of whether collaboration may be the natural and most desirous state of student learning as Kohn would have it, or whether things are indeed competitive, the fact of the matter is that there now exists students whom the education system has conditioned to be competitive and expect external rewards. The few instances I have experienced, or been made of aware, where teachers have tried to create a more Kohn-esque learning environment have often reported resistance from students, leading to complaints from parents. In retrospect, I think it is fair to expect students to complain if it appears that the so-called "rules of school" are being changed in mid-stream, especially if these are the students currently reaping the rewards.

This isn't to say that students can't or won't adapt. We have much evidence that suggests they can, even in non-constructivist situations. Students adapt to different or new learning expectations every time they change schools. In fact, students often appear to expect to have to change. Thus, more thought needs to be put into how and when such reforms are implemented. In my experience, these initiatives are often the result of individual teachers experimenting in their own classrooms with the support of the school admin, but ultimately fail when they cannot achieve a critical mass in their own building.

This is the crux of any educational reform? How do you achieve the critical mass necessary to insure the reform's survival and success? Is it better to implement gradual, incremental change, starting at the school's entry level grade? Does a school need to provide dual streams when embarking on a building-wide reform, meaning a traditional and non-traditional stream? Would the one undermine the other?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.4

I think this is perhaps one of the most famous chapters from Here Comes Everybody where Shirky talks about the imminent failure of traditional print media. He claims this comes from a lack of awareness of newspaper editors of their role as mere gatekeepers and failing to realize that their value was undermined once anyone could publish to the internet.

It's the idea that prompted me to pick up his book, because I'm trying desperately to consider how teachers might be functioning in a similar manner. Certainly educators in charge of curriculum act as gatekeepers when they determine what points of knowledge are required for students to learn, and classroom teachers perform similar roles when they choose which media students will use to become aware of these points.

So, the problem becomes trying to identify what the role of the teacher ought to become, and how schools and classrooms might be organized, once students can be trusted to find their own appropriate media to reach the desired learning outcomes. In my view, it is even worth wondering to what extent students should be involved in determining what particular knowledge outcomes might relevant to the courses they study.