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.

Arrival City, Ch.3

My favourite part in Chapter 3 occurs when Saunders describes the Arrival City neighbourhoods as being "richer than they appear" in that accounting practices can only measure the resources that exist within the neighbourhood, but fail to account for family members that have moved out though still maintain economic ties to the neighbourhood. Saunders writes:

"This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city's immigrant districts are poorer or more disparate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need - a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. Rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks, and urban-planned redevelopments."

In reflecting on previous chapters, I have suggested that perhaps school districts need to take flexible approaches to school development. The perception of a particular school's identity and social role cannot be seen as static. In this chapter, it would appear that Saunders might suggest that school districts should dialogue with current and former inhabitants of the neighbourhood about the kinds of programs that ought to be offered.

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.2

Having just read Chapter 2 of Doug Saunders' book on rural-urban migration, I am drawn to his focus that successful transitions to the urban environment is dependent on the success of relationships being created in these neighbourhoods. This intrigues me since, as an educator, I find that those of us interested in the 21st Century Classroom, tend to talk about the new emphasis of schooling as being on the development of relationships between students, especially between students of different backgrounds. Elsewhere on this blog I have suggested that the function modern K-12 institutions is to be more socialization than knowledge transfer, and it would seem that this is in keeping with the needs of these "Arrival" districts.

One of the immediate concerns that I have though is in regards to the quality of the physical school building. There is a tendency of school districts to believe in promoting universal values and attempting to insure a minimum of standards (in this case health and engineering ones) for all students. Creating a building along these lines in shantytowns is a very jarring idea, and one that would almost force the legitimization of these neighbourhoods. On the otherhand, I am not certain that the creation of a school as transient and immediate as the surroundings would necessarily be a bad thing. I'm not sure, either way.

The one problem that I keep thinking about, especially within the context of Calgary, is that immigration to "arrival" neighbourhoods, seem to promise eventual social mobility, but what about non-arrival neighbourhoods that appear to be stagnating? What is to be done here? Is the key to find ways to make them more attractive to urban newcomers? Is gentrification a different form of what Saunders is talking about, a kind of internal urban migration?

Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, Ch. 2

I've finally gotten around to reading Clay Shirky's 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, despite having already read several of his articles (particularly on the collapse of print-based for-pay journalism) and watched a few of his talks. My takeaway from this chapter is Ronald Coase's discussion of transaction costs in the formation of management structures, dating back to 1937. Part of my hope by the end of Shirky's book is to have a better understanding of how to conceptualize the management structures inherent in the delivery of information found in our schools. While it's pretty easy to draw up District hierarchies running from the superintendent on down, I am suspicious that the route information needs to take in order for students to gain knowledge is not the same as that required to keep the lights on in the buildings.