In part two of the Convergence Culture Consortium's white paper, Sticky and Spreadable--Two Paradigms, Jenkins and colleagues contrast the media paradigm of "sticky" with their new paradigm of "spreadable." Jenkins et al. critique the prevailing notions of sticky websites (such as Amazon.com) creating an entire community of obedient consumers who willingly distribute viral messages intact to new potential consumers. They point out that most (though not all) of these efforts have failed to "capture" consumers at websites or use them to disseminate their marketing messages for them. Furthermore, a "sticky" website attracts and holds consumers with a pre-set, if interactive, path through the site (think, for example, of the "recommendations" feature on Amazon, which attempts to direct customers to material tailored to their interests via tracking of purchases and Amazon searches). This fails to make use of an emergent feature of participatory cultures: the increasingly blurry distinction between consumers and producers of media. Interestingly, contrasting definitions of terms such as "viral," "memes," and even "sticky" and "spreadable" exist among various media scholars. Jenkins and colleagues then advance the notion of spreadability as an alternative paradigm to the prevailing notions of viral media, andone that takes advantage of the new affordances of participatory media and social tools. (The most notable example is Malcolm Gladwell, whose notions have been taken up by Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick.) Our efforts here are to join the ongoing conversation about how these terms mean, though here we take up the terms as conceptualized by Jenkins et al. and consider the implications for education.

We have seen emerge alongside the emergence of the "stickiness" model of media a similar approach to educational practices, most significantly with the push toward standardized curricula intended to be widely disseminated and faithfully adhered to. This approach to development and dissemination of scripted instructional materials exemplifies what we call "Distributed Instructional Routines" (DIRs).

The Rise of Distributed Instructional Routines

Jenkins et al. point out that the notion of viral media emerged amid rising anxieties over the wholesale transformation of media, publishing, and advertising, arguing that "stickiness reflects anxiety about attracting and holding viewer interest in a world where consumers have to actively seek out the content they desire." Notions like memes and viruses offered a coherent pseudo-scientific vision of control when the media economy entered a state of flux.

Likewise, it seems that the massive push toward distributed instructional routines (especially by the USDOE's What Works Clearninghouse ) and test-based accountability (especially in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2000) emerged after the 1990's, a relatively tumultuous decade for education characterized by competing efforts to improve education. At the beginning of the decade, political forces began advancing the narrative of failing public schools and dismal American performance on international comparisons. This paved the way for the wholesale use of market-oriented notions of competition to improve schools and unprecedented privatization of schooling, and a sweeping new view of centralized reforms of educational practice.

What Works Clearinghouse and NCLB (and the scholarly imprimatur of "scientifically-based research" [SBR]) provided a coherent approach that promised a means of "controlling" education through concrete steps for increasing student performance. Unfortunately, the false simplicity of this pseudo-science has only served to further mystify the act of teaching and learning. Proponents promised that dutiful enactment of approved texts and routines would eventually raise tests scores and improve leaning more broadly. Quite to the contrary, it seems to us that these practices and the policies behind them only limited the ability of students, parents, teachers, and policy makers to understand the complex factors that shape education and classroom learning (e.g., Figlio & Rouse, 2006¹, Lee, 2006²; Neal & Schanzenbach, 2007³).

In particular, NCLB ignored decades of experimental "scientifically-based research" (i.e., controlled randomized experiments) on the negative consequences of extrinsic rewards on motivation and learning and embraced market-oriented models of competition for improving education. Researchers and policy makers continue to debate the evidence of improved achievement on targeted tests. But so far, but there is mounting evidence that any gains on targeted tests have come at the expense of deep and lasting learning. While we appreciate the conflicting evidence over the consequences of incentives (e.g., Hickey, 2003⁴), we also think that the complete disregard for one of the most experimentally-driven bodies of educational research is one salient example of the subjective science behind these reforms.

Unfortunately, the confusion spawned by these pseudo-scientific visions of educational reform is not going to be readily resolved. This is because the distribution of validated instructional routines in the context of punishments and rewards based on achievement test scores provides a too-simple and too-coherent vision. Importantly, it is certainly consistent with the prevailing folk psychology view of learning held by much of the public, policy makers, and a distinct subset of educational researchers (as described by Carl Bereiter in Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age).

But these notions of centralized practice and test-based reform are simultaneously too encompassing and too limiting; they really do need to be reined in. They distort the power relations between knowledge communities and learners at a time when educators need instead to appreciate how technology is increasingly empowering students to create and circulate new meaning. While the compulsory nature of education will always lead to some degree of centralized control, the current pseudo-scientific approaches mislead more than they clarify.

Spreadable Educational Practices as a Viable Alternative

In contrast to DIRs, we are advocating the notion of spreadable educational practices (SEPs). We take up the concept of spreadability that Jenkins et al. use to describe how the properties of the media environment, texts, audiences, and business models work together to enable easy and widespread circulation of mutually meaningful content within a networked culture.

The notion of spreadability leads media scholars to ask about the aspects of the media environment that support the spread of media across different communities. They ask about the ways consumers create value for themselves, the properties of content that lead to spread, and how companies can benefit from spread. If we translate this notion to educational practices, spreadability might describe how properties of students, teachers, content, and accountability work together to enable circulation of mutually meaningful practices in a networked educational culture. For us, the notion of spread raises four questions about educational practices:

• What aspects of the academic learning environment (i.e., in-school and about-school) support the spread of practices across different educational communities?
• How do students and teachers create value for themselves and for their schools through their spread of practices?
• What properties of practices make them more likely to be spread?
• How do teachers and schools benefit from the spread of their practices?

This new idea of spreadable educational practices (SEP) allows us to avoid the conventional metaphors of implementation and fidelity. These notions overestimate the power of publishers and tests and underestimate the potential power of teachers and students. They emphasize replicability of scripted practices, resulting in ineffective efforts to disseminate new educational practices across multiple hybrid spaces. We believe that spreadability offers a more viable and more effective means of supporting widespread transformation of educational practices. We believe that doing so will better support the goals of current educational reforms (raising achievement on external tests) while leading to many other improved outcomes, and avoiding the negative side-effects associated with current reforms.

A focus on SEP recognizes several hybrid spaces in which practices are expected to spread. In the hybrid space of the classroom, students can play an active role in spreading educational practices. As we show in our example below, spreadable practice allow students with particular expertise to take on a more expert role in the classroom community. At a broader level in the hybrid spaces of professional development, individual teachers are expected to take on natural leadership roles as affinity groups emerge in networks around particular practices and particular communities. Acknowledging the agentic role of students and teachers in these particular contexts forces teachers to pay closer attention to student motivations, and forces publishers to pay closer attention to teachers' motivations. It also forces researchers and innovators to examine how practices spread (or not) across these different communities, and examine some remarkably complex and potentially conflicting motivations.

Jenkins appropriates the argument made by marketing anthropologist Grant McCracken that "consumers" might be better characterized as "multipliers" to acknowledge the potential for messages to reach new unanticipated audiences and be enlisted in new unanticipated contexts of use. The notion of multiplier invites the question of whether a media campaign "does actually give the 'multipliers' something they can, er, multiply...."⁵. Did the message actually get multiplied or is it just sitting there? Transforming media consumers into multipliers also forces marketers to recognize that the spread of their message is ultimately beyond their control, and highlights that marketers depend on multipliers to complete their work for them. This directs their focus to a very different place, and forces them to accept a vast range of risks regarding the way their messages might be transformed (including ways that undermine their marketing efforts). Jenkins extends the notions of "lead users" from media studies to this notion of multipliers. In addition to finding and fixing flaws and finding new markets, lead users take these messages to new places and new uses that the designers could not have envisioned.

Likewise, the notion of spreadable educational practices invites the question of whether an instructional routine actually contains anything for teachers and students to spread, and whether they actually do so; it forces instructional designers to recognize that the spread of their practices is and should be beyond their control, and that they must depend on teachers and students to complete their work for them. We see the notion of lead users as essential in the overlapping hybrid spaces of individual classrooms, communities of classrooms, and networks of teachers and innovators we envision. In our continued efforts with the Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture, these leaders will help find and fix flaws and transform the strategies in the Guide for others. Some refinements will be relatively tangential and specific to subgroups of learners; other refinements will be essential and general. Rather than subjects in an evaluation of DIRs, we see lead users as advocates for practices that they find socially and personally meaningful. They filter out the irrelevant aspects, highlight the relevant, and identify new audiences who will continue to contribute to the transformation and spread of those practices.

For example, one of the lead users of the Teachers' Strategy Guide: Reading in a Participatory Culture (TSG) is Becky Rupert, an English Language Arts teacher at Aurora Alternative High School. In her enactment of the curriculum, Becky found some strategies that she could readily pull from the TSG and appropriate for use in the other classes she taught. In other words, she engaged in spreading educational practices from one space to another. However, other strategies were clearly designed specifically with and for the model text, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. The key principles of the TSG (that reading in a participatory culture allows for development of a community of readers and that reading in a participatory culture calls for creative appropriation of source materials for new purposes and new contexts) mark a significant shift in thinking about the teaching of reading (and other literacies). In the initial curriculum, these principles are bound to Moby-Dick as a primary text. As an example of the design-based research methods underlying our work, the "local" theorizing we are engaging in by interrogating the notion of spreadable educational practices is taking place in the context of our efforts to rework many of the activities to allow for greater spread of the educational practices.

We assume that some of the practices that spread broadly will eventually fade. This does not mean, however, that the practice was a failure. Practices may wane for institutional reasons: Consider that as more and more of the public become active Wikipedians, interest in Wikipedia exercises like the ones we are promoting should wane. As long as the practice spread and developed a community of advocates and supporters, an important success has taken places.

Indeed, as new tools and technologies are rapidly transforming when, why, and how we communicate, circulate ideas, connect with others, and produce new materials independently and in collaboration with others, there is a value in examining which elements of an educational practice wither and which are appropriated for the new contexts and tools that await us just past the limits of our vision. While a practice that supports activities within Wikipedia will certainly fade as wiki editing becomes more common outside of the context of formal education, on a basic level, the mindsets and skillsets that allow for wider collaboration within this type of community not only remain in our social memory but remain valuable for whatever values and practices emerge from the widespread adoption of such a tool.

The ultimate goal of education, after all, is to arm all members of our society with the ability to transform their environments as they see fit. Gee writes that "humans at their best are always open to rethinking, to imagining newer and better, more just and more beautiful words and worlds. That is why good teaching is ultimately a moral act." This is why, too, good teaching--and by extension, good educational research--requires deconstruction and deep examination of educational practices--and, through this examination, an ongoing discovery of what would best serve the moral imperative of teaching toward a more just and more beautiful society.

As will be explored in the next post, the spread of practices is akin to giving a gift. It leaves behind a social connection and a sense of obligation that has very real value in the sharing of other practices. This means that a spread practice that has disappeared is not "dead" because it left behind valuable social connections. The ideas that survive are those which are most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. But the process of sharing that makes this range of spread possible has inestimable consequences for transforming education.

It is worthwhile to contrast the waning of SEP within a particular classroom or community of teachers with what happens when a teacher or school finds it impossible to implemented a set of DIRs as instructed (or do so without seeing the promised gains in achievement). Such failures are indeed "failures." Rather than leaving behind any social connection, obligation, or affinity group, such failures are likely to leave behind a host of unproductive emotions, such as lack of trust in the originating agency, lack of self-confidence in students and teachers, and the desire to cover up or make excuses. Perhaps more to the point, we assume that most conventional classroom instructional routines do not spread--and were never intended to. Rather, the refinement of traditional textbooks are organized around static instructional routines that promise to eventually impact achievement. With recent consolidation in the publishing and testing industry, the tests and the texts (and the test prep) are increasingly developed by a single company. As such, it is increasingly possible for such DIRs to actually raise achievement. From the very narrow view that any routines that raise achievement are valuable, such routines indeed appear "sticky." But the routines themselves, from a viewpoint of participatory culture, are essentially dead. Hence: If it doesn't spread, it's dead.

Examples of Spreadable Educational Practices

Spreadable educational practices presumably can arise from many places. Given the current confused policy context and the existing legal constraints, significant large-scale efforts will likely be called for. This raises some interesting dilemmas about the centralized support of spreadable practices. The more important point is that the practices will get repositioned as the spread across students, classrooms, and schools.

As practices spread they get remade literally via sampling or remixing, or figuratively via insertion into ongoing school practices. We will be focusing on two sets of practices that we are currently using and seem like ideal candidates for spread. One is the Teachers' Strategy Guide that Jenna and her colleagues at Project New Media Literacies have developed. The second set are the social media exercises that Howard Rheingold and Sam Rose have assembled and are sharing at Social Media Classroom. We are implementing both sets of practices and new participatory assessments in multiple classrooms across a range of learning contexts.

Consistent with Jenkins' observations about the spread of media practices, we have observed that the spread of these educational practices has not blunted the original goals behind the practices. Rather it allowed the practices to be enacted in communities that would otherwise not have access. Instead of teachers implementing activities that students complete, we might look at teachers and students as examples of McCracken's "multipliers" to reflect the way that individuals expand the potential meanings that get attached to a brand by using it in a range of unpredicted contexts. For example, the several simple Wikipedia exercises that Rose and Rheingold posted to SocialMediaClassroom wisely suggested that users start with something they are intimately familiar with (e.g., one's hometown). But that was just one of several suggestions of starting points. In the case of Dan's graduate level Learning Sciences course, it made more sense (and was more immediately productive) to have students begin with specific aspects of educational research that they were knowledgeable about (e.g., e-assessment, computer-based testing, educational video gaming, art education, etc.). The exercise as offered on SocialMediaClassroom was sufficiently open so that students and professor were able to benefit from the more detailed insights of one student, Burair Kolthari who was an experienced Wikipedian having worked on a detailed scientific entry in a previous job.

Conversely, we found it made sense to start with one's own school in our work at Aurora Alternative High School. These students elected to start by editing their school's entry on the local Bloomingpedia wiki in response to the statement published on the entry that the school is "considered by some...to be a school for 'bad' kids." The students deleted the "Stereotypes/Misconceptions" sub-heading and replaced it with a sub-heading titled "School Accomplishments" in which they identified the school's active participation in community service. When the class shifted their attention to editing the Moby-Dick entry on Wikipedia, Becky discovered that several of her students already had experience editing Wikipedia--the school's IP address was temporarily banned from editing Wikipedia due to vandalism. (This too, demonstrates the importance of recognizing the role of students in negotiating spreadable educational practices.) The ban expired in time for the entire class to make substantial edits and extensions to the Moby-Dick entry in Wikipedia. Ironically, one of the students who sheepishly admitted to the previous vandalism provided valuable insights beyond what was included in the original exercise, such as using Wikipedia's sandbox feature to negotiate group edits.

In both classes, the original intent of the exercise was accomplished. In both cases, the simple spreadable exercise worked to create a communal trajectory of increasingly successful participation in the creation of new knowledge. By contributing to Wikipedia, each student became a more central participant in the community of Wikipedia users. The students, teacher, and professor who had never edited Wikipedia gained valuable insights about how editing is carried out, and how the new knowledge there is negotiated with others who are invested in particular entries. The more experienced Wikipedians learned how and when their experience was useful to other members of their own learning community. Most importantly, a shared sense of experience and collective insights were stretched across both learning communities. But this new communal knowledge was far more than just individuals knowing where to turn to for help. These two classrooms established what Jim Gee (2003) labels "affinity groups" specific to these shared Wikipedia practices. Such groups are essential for creating and sharing new knowledge. If one of the students in the Learning Sciences group found that an overly narrow or biased editor was subjectively and persistently editing the entry about a particular educational controversy, he or she could, for example, enlist classmates to help overcome those biased entries and add additional appeals to the more authoritative editors who could eventually lock down the entry. Likewise, the students at Aurora were disappointed when some of their edits were overturned. If the students felt sufficiently justified and motivated, the class could have banded together to keep the new edits in place.

Important Caveats and Clarifications

As in the first post, we use this activity to reiterate important points about our underlying theories of learning and assessment. First, our focus on communal learning does not deny that individual students in these two classes learned useful new skills that might for example also be learned in a more detailed and procedural instructional routine that could have been centrally defined, validated, and distributed. Indeed, we are confident that some of the students in each class did not develop sufficient skills to pass some sort of standardized test that schools or states may impose (once they accept that students need to know more about Wikipedia than that it can't be trusted). We have some confidence that those individuals would know where to turn to for help if they needed it (either from their classmates or from Wikipedia itself). We have even more confidence that a distributed instructional routine and a standardized test for this "21st Century skill" would have left students with specific skills, but without a sense of the broader Wikipedia community or a sense of membership in a new knowledge community that includes one's peers--and, more broadly, without a sense of the deep investment and engagement possible on Wikipedia and similar collaborative knowledge-building sites.

Second, we do not mean to imply that assessment is not useful for supporting the sharing and refinement of spreadable educational practices. Quite to the contrary, the inclusion of participatory classroom assessments appear crucial to helping teachers enact, refine, and share spreadable practices. The Wikipedia exercise was extended by Becky and her students through reflecting on how the activities fostered key "formalisms" (i.e., concepts, tools, etc.). Rather than evaluating individual understanding, the reflection was designed to foster further communal discourse about the enduring aspects of the activity. This is an example of what we term "re-mediating" assessment. Traditional classroom assessments designed to evaluate individual understanding have the insidious effect of shutting down the very discourse necessary to build such understanding. Even in the most informal ungraded formative assessments, students whose knowledge is tentative and fragile are understandably reluctant to contributed to a conversation or activity designed to reveal that weakness. Instead, our rubrics encourage students to critique the structure of the activity and the classroom enactment of that activity. In doing so, all students are provided with a safe context to "try out" the relevant discourse by enlisting whatever they know about the relevant formalism to make their point. Doing so creates an ideal opportunity to learn to enlist that formalism more accurately and more consequentially.

Third, we do not mean to imply that more formal classroom assessments are never appropriate. Building on our prior assessment development collaboration, Becky knew that it was important to have the students apply their new insights about editing Wikipedia to a somewhat more formal context. In an insight that we are particularly excited about, she decided to have students use a Google doc to collectively write a position paper about the contested use of Wikipedia in school. Because Becky had introduced the formalisms associated with editing Wikipedia when she introduced the activity, and then provided additional guidance and scaffolding when students discussed the activities during the reflection, her students were well prepared for what might have been an otherwise daunting assignment.

Fourth, we do not mean to imply that externally developed measures of "21st Century Skills" are never of value. We do worry that the numerous corporate and government efforts to standardize and measure these new literacy skills will undermine nascent efforts like ours. But the sorts of standardized external measures that these efforts are creating are just the sort of thing that we feel will provide the most convincing evidence in support of the value of the kinds of practices we are promoting. We are confident that at the end of the school year, Becky's students would excel on any externally developed tests designed to measure aggregated knowledge and skills associated with Wikipedia, including its trustworthiness and the methods for editing entries. We are so confident that we are currently assembling examples of such items as they get produced and will begin pilot testing them this year. We are confident that Becky's students will outperform other students like themselves who have not completed these new exercises. We are also confident that the aggregated skills and knowledge (e.g.,., the average score) would be equal to or greater than those of similar students who had spent a similar amount of time completing a distributed instructional routine--even if that routine was developed by the same agency or company that developed the test.

Finally, our focus on 21st Century practices in no way rejects traditional literacies. Quite to the contrary, one of the reasons we are so impressed by the Wikipedia exercises is how the public and persistent nature of the actual editing process forces students to deeply and consequentially read the relevant texts. Certainly reading a Wikipedia entry with an eye toward opportunities to edit and extend it is far more consequential than reading it for information for use in a class assignment. More significantly, these students read primary and secondary sources much more carefully when searching for new and relevant insights to use when editing Wikipedia . In the case of Moby-Dick, the several classroom sessions where Becky's students were working through nuances of selected chapters was both more engaging and more productive than the kinds of activities that most high students might complete around this text. Likewise, reading class assignments in a graduate level Learning Sciences course with an eye towards further refining a Wikipedia entry is more consequential and more engaging than reading them in order to pass an exam or even write a term paper. This reality provides an important form of shared accountability. This is important for classroom practices, because it counters the concern that these sort of open-ended activities will make difficult to assess the understanding that students take away from self-selected texts or passages. Of course, for scholarly purposes during this transitional period of practice, it may well be useful to assess the understanding of texts that each student takes away from the activity. Indeed, this is one of the many empirical studies we are aiming to carry out in our study of spreadable educational practices. But our goal would be to provide confidence that such laborious and potentially corrosive assessments are actually unnecessary.

Distributed Instructional Routines vs. Spreadable Educational Practices

Jenkins et al. close their second post by juxtaposing the assumptions of sticky websites against those of spreadable media sources. Sites such as eBay and Amazon have been quite successful at capturing audiences who come back again and again, even when they are not buying (as raters, reviewers, observers, etc.), though untold dollars and hours have been invested in replicating this success elsewhere, generally with little success. Usefully, they close their post by identifying nine core distinctions between Stickiness and Spreadability. We close our post by appropriating those same distinctions to contrast disseminated instructional routines and spreadable educational practices, using the following table.

NEXT: in part three we will explore how the distinction that Jenkins et al. make between the a gift economy and commodity culture. We consider how the former can support the spread of useful educational practices, while the latter does not work in schools.

References:

Figlio, D. N., & Rouse, C. E. (2006). Do accountability and voucher threats improve low-performing schools? Journal of Public Economics, 90(1-2), 239-255.

Lee, J. (2006). Tracking achievement gaps and assessing the impact of NCLB on the gaps: an In-depth look into national and state reading and math outcome trends. Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.

Neal, D. A., & Schanzenbach, D. (2007). Left behind by design: Proficiency counts and test-based accountability. NBER Working Paper.

Hickey, D. T. (2003). Engaged participation versus marginal nonparticipation: A stridently sociocultural approach to acheivement motivation. The Elementary School Journal, 103(4), 401.

McCracken, Grant (2005). "'Consumers' or 'Multipliers': A New Language for Marketing?," This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, November 10, 2005. http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2005/11/consumers_or_mu.htmlRetrieved 3/10/09.