After the convention a couple weeks ago in Anaheim, I keep thinking about this issue of adoption. Having endured the presentation I’d nominate for “Most Annoying” on the subject of Digital Natives, I keep thinking it’s more about Digital Ignorants. The major point of the Native/Immigrant debate is that the Natives “learn differently” from the Immigrants but the assertion is based on — as nearly as I can tell — a foundation of behavioral clues and use of technological affordance.

Extending the argument, those who grew up with VCRs understand movies differently because their clocks don’t blink. While it may be true that those with the remote in their hands tend to stop, back, repeat, and slow mo more often than those without, I’d have to submit that the reason they do that is because (a) they can and (b) it occurs to them. Having a blinking clock is merely an artifact of prioritization. If it bothers you enough, you fix it. The underlying appreciation of the medium is based less on affordance than exposure to and knowledge of the vernacular.

The reality, of course, is probably more complex, but I would maintain that this notion is not that much different than looking at the difference between “pedagogy” and “andragogy.” I’ve long maintained that the distinction is arbitrary, artificial, and more an indictment of the shameful ways we treat kids in school than it is any kind of actual distinction in the way people learn. Compare the list of the characteristics of “adult learners” to what are alleged to be the characteristics of “digital natives” and the parallels become obvious.

The problem is, of course, that when we actually face the world of the Digital Ignorant — whatever age they are — we tend to see what we expect to see. The kid using the cell phone to text his gf with “<3 u - xx" isn't being any more technologically savvy than the study hall note passer of 40 years ago. He just has more tools at his disposal. The odds are good that he's still struggling with his history class and bored out of his skull learning English grammar. The adult that prints out email is, more often than not, translating to a "more convenient" (read: more familiar) medium. Is that really so different than having your inbox forwarding to your cell phone?

What *is* different is that the rich stew of available resources is being used by kids to learn a whole lot of stuff that just appalls parents and sends paroxysms of dread thru entire school districts. It's as if the kids all have access to the "secret notebook" and they're using it to learn things that adults can't learn or don't know. This activity is -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- characterized by these cognitive and behavioural tags:

1. Involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities
3. Most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their personal life
4. Problem-centered rather than content-oriented

Those who looked up the andragogy link above will recognize these characteristics of adult learners as provided by Knowles but have to admit that they bear a striking resembance to the characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. The only thing different is a statement of the kinds of technology that the Natives are using.

But this fails to address the issue of why the “kids” are using it and the “adults” aren’t. Well, perhaps that perception isn’t really very accurate either as evidenced by a recent Harris Poll that finds that 80% of adults are going online and many of them are using the same technology as the “Natives.”

Could the reality be nothing more complex than an application of classic adoption? The early adopters — in this case kids who have more time on their hands than adults and fewer options available for socialization — are using the tools and toys provided by their parents in ways that many find as offensive and dangerous as drinking cadged beers behind the 7-11 and smoking cigarettes behind the barn was a decade or three ago.

The next time you’re tempted to drop a tab of “Digital Native” or label yourself “Digital Immigrant” ask this question:

Do I eat microwave popcorn differently than my kids?

Posted in Distance Education, Observations | 4 Comments »

For the last 17 weeks I’ve been teaching in Kentucky. The commute was pretty easy … just down stairs. And the course was one of those terrifyingly exciting experiences that comes along every so often when you teach. The reason I’ve not written much here is that I wrote so much over on the Phaedrus blog! For the first 12 weeks, I wrote something every day (on average) seven days a week.

We started with my traditional greeting message Good Morning, Mr. Phelps. Over the course of the first week’s effort, the students were asked to subscribe to a listserver, start a blog, get an office in TappedIn, set up an aggregator, and establish an Instant Messenger link. Once established we started using the tools to talk about issues like Education and Distance and Learning. All things considered it was a great ride and I hope that the students really did find it to be as stimulating as they said they did.

Some of the posts that started the biggest discussions:

• On the Classroom where I discussed the purpose of the classroom and why “as good as the classroom” isn’t really good enough. Given that my students were mostly classroom teachers, this went better than I thought it might.
• Learner Centered was a response to the question, “Why are we doing all this stuff outside of Blackboard?”
• On Distance Education was the wrap up post on the week devoted to looking at definitions and parameters of distance ed.
• A recurring theme in this course was Thinking Like a Learner. One of the goals was to get the students to understand that being a student and being a learner are two separate things. I’m perhaps being arbitrary in designating students as those individuals who care about grades and learners as those who care about knowledge. As a distinction, the class rapidly got on board with it.
• It didn’t take long for us to get into trying to deal with Reconciling Teaching and Learning. We were quite careful to examine Teaching (as separate from Education) and Learning. If we, as teachers, recognize that the students’ goal is not our goal, then we can begin to deal with creating educational experiences that provide for common ground.
• It took us three weeks of foundational work before we actually got into learning about My Basic Toolbox. We worked together to deal with some of the issues of tools.
• Why Powerpoint is Evil was one of the more intriguing posts of the semester because it elicited an invitation to do a guest spot at a middle school in Texas. The students had been given a copy of my post and had some questions. It was a wonderful experience for me and I understand from the teacher-in-the-room that the students got a lot out of it, too.
• Fostering Engagement came as part of the design and development portion of the course wherein I explained how I was demonstrating engagement in the course and practicing what I preached.
• Another post that elicited outside interest was ZPD where I laid out Vygotsky’s idea of Zone of Proximal Development. While my grad students found this a fascinating idea, the 8th graders in Texas asked me to come back to talk to them about that idea as well. What a blast! Using the idea of ZPD as an example of the principle in that they didn’t know it existed before they read my post, and after learning a bit about it, they were fascinated to learn about the principle, Vygotsky, cognitive apprenticeship, and that learning is something that learners do that’s really quite independent of what teachers do.
• That topic lead naturally into the role of The Teacher where I described a model of teacher as being neither “sage” nor “guide” but rather “bridge.”
• Ironically, one of the ideas that kept cropping up was Learning, Technology, and Age. I got rather tired of hearing about how this class of mostly thirty-somethings were “too old” to assimilate the lessons of technology easily. As a card carrying member of AARP, I had some words for them.
• There were a lot more posts, but I think these are pretty much the ones that I’m happiest with.

So, that’s where I’ve been for the last four months. I’m back now,

Posted in Distance Education, Education, Online Community | 1 Comment »

One of the catch phrases of distance ed is “anywhere, any time.”

The internet changes that. I’m starting a stint as adjunct faculty at Morehead State teaching a graduate course on the principles of distance ed and one of the issues I’m wrestling with is how to deal with the reality of time. The first challenge is to get hardcore classroom people to understand that, in a distance education course, the course meets now — at any particular now the student may percieve — and that has profound effects on the relationship between teacher and student. While synchronous communications modes require the participants to share a “now” regardless of time zone, but the majority of communications are asynchronous which creates some tension between teacher-time and student-time.

I think the answer has to do with a modification of the power-structure in a course, but it’s clear that online education is not “anywhere, any time” so much as “everywhere, all the time.”

Posted in Distance Education | 3 Comments »

“The Internet changes everything.” We think we know what that means but I’ve come to believe that we’ve overlooked an important characteristic of everything.

We’re becoming more and more aware of the effect of the internet on geography. The meta-verse erases space. Online, everybody is the same distance from anybody else. The corollary of that has been slipping by us. If the meta-verse erases space, it must also erase time. For those who spend many hours each day onlne, I don’t mean that kind of time. Einstein gave us the models for non-Euclidean space-time and we’ve projected the web into space without paying attention to the effect on time.

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Posted in Distance Education, Education, Observations | 1 Comment »

Teachers don’t like to go to school.

This probably seems self evident. I suspect this is because they know what goes on in school and are less interested in subjecting themselves to the same kinds of activities that they subject their students to. This is probably doubly true of online classes.

And I’m also being quite righteously “tongue-in-cheek” here.

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Posted in Distance Education, Education, Online Community | 3 Comments »