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Is New Media Incompatable with Schooling?: An Interview with Rich Halverson (Part One)

This week, I want to use my blog to call attention to a provocative recent book, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. The authors of the book are Allen Collins, formerly co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Center for Technology in Education, and Rich Halverson, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is co-founder of the Games, Learning and Society group.

I have gotten to know Halverson through the Games, Learning, and Society conference, where I will be speaking this summer, so I was curious to look at this book when it came out. Given its authors, it's no surprise that the book is well informed about contemporary debates surrounding new media and education, and like the best books that have come out in the past year or so (including those by Sonia Livingstone and S. Craig Watkins, which I have profiled here), it strives to balance between the inflated hopes of early digital advocates and the inflated fears of those who would lock technology out of the classroom.

The authors offer sage new proposals for how we might deal with the apparent tensions and incompatabilities between education as it has been conducted in this country and the new media landscape as it is lived beyond the schoolhouse gates. But the real surprise and strength of the book is the ways they are able to situate the contemporary moment of media transition in relation to the several hundred year history of American education. In doing so, we avoid the breathless sense of the "unprecidented" or "Inevitable" consequences of new media and we also avoid the sense that things have always been this way and are thus not subject to change. They show how American education's processes, policies, and structures shifted over time in response to, for example, the industrial revolution and thus give us a context for imagining the gradual yet decisive transformation of schooling which will grow out of our current moment.

I was lucky enough to get Richard Halverson to agree to an interview about the book, which I will be running over the next two installments. Much of the interview focuses on the historical insights and how they contribute to putting the present into a greater perspective.

My father used to have the expression, "never let schooling get in the way of your education." You make a similar distinction across the book. In what ways is schooling getting in the way of more informal kinds of learning today and why?

Your dad's expression was really the state of the art once upon a time! The rise of institutional schooling in the 20th century- from preK to lifelong learning - can be seen as an effort to permanently weld schooling to learning. Beginning in the early 1900s, schools rooted in formal learning environments expanded to incorporate most areas informal learning as well (consider widely available classes on knitting, oenophilia and game design). On the other side, if you didn't go to a class from a recognized institution, if you didn't have some sort of certificate/credit statement of completing, then by the mid 20th century people came to question the legitimacy of your learning. This double-movement of expansion and legitimation came to define learning in terms of schooling.

Virtual Forum Theater and the New Media Literacies Skills

Virtual Forum Theater (VFT) is a computer-based learning experience that allows face- to-face, computer, and multimedia-based drama. VFT has three parts: VFT the toolset, VFT the creative activity, and VFT the performance. The VFT toolset is a multimedia tool for the creation of dramatic plays using audio, and images that enables participatory and collaborative digital playmaking through the Internet. The VFT activity or process is the collaborative process of creating a digital play, and consists of much more than the VFT toolset, including dramatic exercises involving group bonding, social awareness and Improv skills. A VFT performance refers to the activity of watching and responding to a previously created digital play. In practice, the distinctions between these parts of VFT become blurred; many times a performance becomes a creative activity.

VFT integrates image, audio and text and was conceived as a tool for collaborative creations and remix with basic educational goals of improving argumentation skills and expressive fluency in disenfranchised children and youth in developing countries such as Brazil. I developed, tested, deployed and researched it in the context of my PhD on education, technology and drama at Tufts University.

VFT Screenshot

Schools and Facebook: Moving Too Fast or Not Fast Enough?

Last year, when I purchased my iPhone, I braced myself for the 4-hour online tutorial to learn how to navigate the device.  However, just as I was sitting down to begin the tutorial, my 8 year-old son told me not to waste my time.  He could teach me in 20 minutes, he stated boldly.  All he needed was a little time to "play" with the phone.  Sure enough, he proved to be a better and more entertaining teacher than the online tutorial and I fast learned the basics of iPhone use.  He continues to be my iPhone navigator, updating the phone, looking for "cool" apps to add and explaining the phone to me in clear, easy to understand language. Technology has flipped our roles.  It used to be that parents and teachers taught children.  Now, the reverse is true and the quicker we can grasp this concept, the better equipped we will all be to live in the 21st century.  President Obama knows this.  He has retooled government's approach to communication.  Each week, he uploads his weekly address to YouTube, the White House web site invites viewer interaction and he even found a way to hold onto his BlackBerry.  And, the President has enlisted a chief technology officer to rewire the government's whole technology apparatus.      

Schools need to do the same.  Students are fast growing disenchanted with the snail's pace of change going on in classrooms regarding teaching with technology. Thankfully, some teachers have grabbed the mantle and are taking steps to meet students where they are in the online world.  One talented teacher cooked up an entire 20th century China project on Facebook.  Students adopted the personalities of Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong and Chang Kai-shek and created and updated Facebook pages and profiles, replete with photos and wall postings.  In the words of the teacher:  "This project changed the classroom.  Students were so motivated and put far more hours into their research than they would have done with a traditional project."  The best part about this project was the organic way it developed in the hands of a teacher who listens to her students.  As the class brainstormed the beginning stages of the unit, one of the students simply suggested that the class create Facebook pages for the three leaders and be required to chat, post and debate online.  Instead of balking at this potentially outlandish idea, this teacher jumped at the opportunity.  This is exactly the kind of collaborative learning that the 21st century demands, but it does mean surrendering a bit of curricular control to the students.  For many teachers, letting students "run" the show poses a challenge to the traditional "sage on the stage" model, even in the most progressive of teaching environments.  The time has come to turn the reins over to the students. 

Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH

Last July I attended to the SCRATCH@MIT conference that took place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. People from all over the world met during three days to share their experiences as players, users, teachers, developers, researchers, and fans of this new programming language and online community created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group. It was very interesting to see how a worldwide community that usually interacts on the internet can meet in a geographical location to participate in hands-on workshops, listen to diverse presentations, and discuss about what are children and youth learning when they create and play with SCRATCH.

Before I tell you more about how the NML social skills and cultural competencies can be situated in SCRATCH, let me explain more clearly what SCRATCH is. First of all, it is a programming language made for helping children and youth create and design interactive projects and learn how to program with out having to deal with complicated syntax. Instead of writing code using many symbols and parenthesis --as you do when programming in C++, java, or python-- you can just snap and drag visual blocks in SCRATCH as if you were playing with LEGO and create projects such as games, maps and animations. Therefore, programming becomes more playful and fun with SCRATCH and allows kids and teens to think creatively and solve design problems. (The program works in Mac and Windows, is in many languages, and can be download it from: http://scratch.mit.edu/download)

Second, SCRATCH is an online community where all the members publish, remix, and share their projects, discuss and learn about their experiences in forums, and build networks of friends and collaborators. In other words, the SCRATCH online community is an "affinity space" like the ones described by James Paul Gee, in which people learn (informally) through participation. The community has grown very fast and after one year of being online has reached 149,286 registered members and nowadays displays 200,273 projects --the 15% of these projects are remixes of other ones.

As we can see, both at the community and the programming levels SCRATCH can be connected with the research and frameworks that Project NML is developing. SCRATCH is a technology of communication that is allowing children and youth to think creatively, to actively participate, communicate, and to informally learn. The presentation "Situating the NML skills in SCRATCH," (download the slides in pdf format) showed how the new social skills and cultural competencies can be learned while participating in the online community and while creating projects with the programming language. For instance, the "play" skill is learned while you build, debug, or tinker a SCRATCH project; the "appropriation" skill is learned when you remix a project that has been made by another user or when you sample images or sounds in your designs; and the "networking" skill is learned when you make friends in the online community, comment on their projects, and exchange ideas and critiques. In addition, the presentation showcased two NML learning activities that use SCRATCH as the basic tool to create a fan video (Manny Manny) and community interactive maps (Lawrence maps).

Academic Resources from Howard Rheingold

As an academic advisor to Project NML, one of the things I do is try to keep my finger on the pulse of the research happening in the areas of media and literacy studies.

When I stumbled upon Howard Rheingold's syllabus for his graduate course on virtual communities and social media, I was excited. Many know Rheingold's work as the author of the book Smart Mobs, but he's also a terrific scholar and teacher at UC-Berkeley's School of Information. As he describes it, his course is directed toward graduate students, enabling them "to understand the kinds of analyses applied by different disciplines to questions about community, to apply methodologies of different disciplines to contemporary questions about media, technology, sociality, and society in a variety of settings, and to establish both theoretical and experiential foundations for making personal decisions and judgments regarding the relationship between mediated communication and human community."

I think his online resources are useful for anyone interested in this area, however, and I'd encourage folks to take a look at his resources for Participatory Media Literacies. It's absolutely incredible how many tools, sites, and sources of information are listed there. Truly a wealth of information! Thanks to Howard and his students for compiling it.