Dangerously Irrelevant

As an untenured professor at a major research university, of necessity I
spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ‘writing’ and ‘publication.’ I’ve
blogged about some of this before. I’m essentially caught between two
worlds: the dynamic, interactive, freewheeling, rough-and-tumble, unmoderated cosmos of Web
2.0 and the slower-moving, calmer, peer-reviewed realm of traditional academic
publishing. It’s often a difficult tension, particularly for those of us who are
using these new communication and collaboration tools but whose tenure decisions
are being made by peers that are not active technology users. Recently several
higher education organizations have explicitly noted the strain and advocated
for some reconsiderations of what it means to write, to publish, and to reach an
audience.

• MLA Task
  Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion: Departments
  and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new
  media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for
  evaluating these forms of scholarship. (p. 5)
• 2007 Horizon
  Report: Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync
  with new forms of scholarship. The trends toward digital expressions of
  scholarship and more interdisciplinary and collaborative work continue to move
  away from the standards of traditional peer-reviewed paper publication. New
  forms of peer review are emerging, but existing academic practices of
  specialization and long-honored notions of academic status are persistent
  barriers to the adoption of new approaches. Given the pace of change, the
  academy will grow more out of step with how scholarship is actually conducted
  until constraints imposed by traditional tenure and promotion processes are
  eased. (p. 4) 

George
Siemens has noted that

The central filtering agent is no longer the teacher or institution. It’s
the learner. Think about what that means to our education system as we know it
today. It changes everything . . . . [A]s educators, we are not grasping (or prepared
for) the depth of the change that is occurring under our feet. If it’s happened
(breaking apart the center) in every other industry – movies, music, software,
business – what makes us think that our educational structures are immune? And
what does it mean to us? What should we be doing now to prepare our
institutions? Ourselves? Our learners?

He also notes that

Information validity is increasingly determined by the views of many individuals, not the select domain of a few [e.g., Amazon book reviews or Digg or Technorati rankings] . . . . [E]xpert-bases systems have value, but their value diminishes simply
because no single person can keep up with today’s information. A
network, however, can.

Of course this has major implications for the academic concept of peer review (which is under fire on some fronts). I wonder when the egg is going to crack in academia. Two years? Five? Ten? And how do we retain our hedgehog concepts of research and scholarship while simultaneously adapting to the realities of a new era?

FYI, I highly recommend the Horizon Report, which
highlights six technologies that will have major impacts on higher education in
the next one to five years.

As a follow-up to my earlier posts about ubiquitous wireless Internet access and the need for a rural Internet initiative, here’s some news from Vermont. In a recent address to the state called the Vermont Way Forward, Governor Jim Douglas proposed that a statewide wireless initiative be in place by 2010. Here are some excerpts:

The critical infrastructure for the future of Vermont will not much
look like a car, a culvert or a bend in the road. It will look like this [he was holding up a cell phone]. In my hand there is wireless mobility, complete access and clear
connections. In my hand is fairness and equity for all of Vermont. In
my hand is both freedom and unity.

Broadband Internet and wireless cellular are no longer mere
conveniences afforded to urbanites or the well-heeled; they are a
fundamental part of modern life for all Vermonters, as essential as
electricity and good roads.

The advantages of a state-of-the-art telecommunications platform extend
well beyond the economic value of the Vermont Way Forward. A true
"e-state" enhances our public safety network, extends the reach of
health care, and improves the education of young Vermonters.

I propose that by 2010, Vermont be the nation’s first true "e-state" –
the first state to provide universal cellular and broadband coverage
everywhere and anywhere within its borders.

When I talk about us needing more leaders, not managers; when I talk about us needing folks who are proactive rather than reactive; when I talk about us needing people who are future-oriented rather than compliance-oriented, this is what I’m talking about.

You can read a quick summary or the full text of Governor Douglas’ speech. Go Vermont!

Well, it appears that Did You Know? has gone viral (again?). Both Karl Fisch and I have been getting boatloads of e-mails and phone calls lately from non-education folks. Apparently Did You Know? broke out of the worlds of education and the education blogosphere into corporate / government life.

According to FeedBurner, Dangerously Irrelevant has about 400 subscribers right now:

The chart below shows what the traffic has looked like lately for Gone Fischin’, my blog post with the modified versions of Did You Know?. As you can see, over the weekend the number of visitors to the page started climbing and then really took off the last two days. I still can’t believe that nearly 2,000 people visited the page yesterday.

I’ve had to make several changes to the post to be clear that the presentation is not mine but Karl’s. I thought I had given Karl clear attribution before, but folks were still missing it. It doesn’t help when the e-mails that are floating around are just a direct link to one of the versions without any accompanying explanatory text.

As I said to Karl last night (who continues to be quite humble about his presentation), this is really a tribute to the emotional power of what he put together. This is fun stuff and a good example of the power of the Web.

If we’re going to teach Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
literacy skills in schools, we need ways of determining whether or not those
skills have been learned by students. The Partnership for 21st Century
Skills notes that answering the question ‘How do we measure 21st
century learning?’ will be critical as we try to prepare students
who can be productive citizens in the new technology-suffused,
globally-interconnected economy.

Over in the United Kingdom, the British government’s Key Stage 3 ICT Literacy
Assessment for 12- and 13-year-old aims to assess higher-order thinking
skills in conjunction with ICT use. For example, as part of a task to draft and
publish a journalistic article, students must use search engines to collect and
analyze employment data, e-mail sources for permission to publish their
information, and present data in graphic and written formats using word
processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software, all within a simulated
computing environment. Student actions are tracked by the computer and assessed
for both technical and learning skills such as finding things out,
developing ideas, and exchanging and sharing information. If
you’re interested, you can download a
demonstration file and see for yourself.

Other interesting projects in the U.K. include Northern Ireland’s Council for
the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment A-Level Examination in the Moving
Image (students must create
and assess digital film clips), the Ultralab International Certificate in
Digital Creativity (students must defend their digitally-produced film,
artwork, and music to a panel of peers and professionals), and the eViva e-portfolio initiative (online
space where students can receive feedback on their research and communication,
data analysis, and presentation skills). If anyone in the U.K. is reading this
post and has experience with any of these assessments, I’d love to hear your
perspectives in the comments section.

Over here in the United States, ETS also is
attempting to create new assessments of 21st century learning skills. I had a
chance last fall to get a personal demonstration of the ETS ICT Literacy Assessment. Like the Key
Stage 3, ETS’ assessment is a scenario-based test. This is a completely new
paradigm for ETS, which the ETS representative said is challenging but also
exciting for its psychometricians to try and wrap their heads around. I
encourage you to visit the
demo site and see how the test works. It may not be ideal, but I think it’s
a lot further from your typical standardized test than one might expect. It’s an
interesting attempt to blend both the technology and information literacy skills
needed by future generations and at least offers some food for thought. Also
check out the News
and Research
links to find out more about the results from ETS’ pilot tests.

We will see the birth of many new 21st century
assessments in the years ahead. Like these early attempts, most of
these assessments will be performance-based and thus will avoid some of the
objections we hear about current standardized tests. Most, if not all, also will
utilize the multimedia, simulation, and tracking power of digital technologies
to create more authentic assessments of real-life tasks. It should be an
interesting journey.

Credits

Much of the information in this post, including some very close paraphrasing,
comes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills report, Assessment
of 21st Century Skills: The Current Landscape. If you’re interested in 21st
century learning skills, this report should be an important addition to your
reading list.

Other resources

• Partnership for 21st Century
  Skills
  • Framework
    for 21st Century Learning
  • Assess21
  • Publications
• Calls to action
  • Are
    They Really Ready to Work? [Partnership for 21st Century Skills]
  • Tough Choices or Tough Times (executive
    summary or full
    report) [New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce]
  • Rising Above the Gathering Storm (executive summary or full report) [The National
    Academies]

This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.

Susan
Funk, in her spiritedly
assertive comment to my
recent post on Kelly Christopherson, said, “Hey! I want some feedback on my
recent blog post!” So here goes…

Susan, I think this notion of the economy of
attention is getting more and more (dare I say it?) … attention.
See, for example, this excellent
set of resources on the topic as well as Davenport & Beck’s book, The
Attention Economy. I agree with your ‘I want some commercial-free spaces
in my life’  perspective but your post also caused my mind to wander in a
completely different direction.

In the attention economy, everyone is competing for ears, eyeballs, and
brainwaves. Because there is way too much information for us to pay attention
to, advertisers and marketers are doing everything they can to
get us to pay attention to their messages. But as Malcolm Gladwell notes, “word
of mouth” from those we trust still carries the most weight when it comes to
our decision-making.

So who do we listen to? To whom do we give permission to
“market” products and ideas to ourselves? Well, technology both expands and
limits our attention. On the expansive side, our ‘trust
circle’ now may be comprised not only of family, friends, and close
colleagues (those with whom we have ‘strong ties’) but also bloggers; trusted
web sites and media channels; political, charitable, and/or ideological
organizations with whom we affiliate; etc. (those with whom we have ‘weak
ties’). E-mail listservs, RSS feeds, and other subscription mechanisms allow
us to hear from and monitor more information channels than ever before.

Of course technology also allows us to be much more selective about who we
listen to. We no longer are dependent on a few print, radio, and/or television
broadcast channels for information. We now can choose from an
often-overwhelming choice of print and online newspapers; AM, FM, and
satellite radio stations; network, cable, and satellite television stations;
text-based and streaming media web sites; blogs; podcasts; text and instant
messaging; interactive videogames; and other information streams. Of necessity
we use Internet bookmarks, iPods, Tivo, RSS aggregators, and the like to filter
out what we want to see, hear, and read. Cocooned with our personal media
players (and sound-isolating headphones), e-book readers, PDAs, cell phones,
computers, and home theaters, we rarely have to come in contact with any persons
or ideas we wish to avoid.

Some call this personalization; others call it isolation. The challenge of
all of this wonderful individualization is trying to still forge a sense of
common culture, to create common bonds that tie us together as a society, as a
local community, as national citizens. When we voluntarily narrowcast ourselves by
only hearing or watching media that we like, by only reading certain ideological
or political perspectives, by only visiting web sites or blogs that resonate
with us, where do we hear the common messages that bring us together as a
people?

I think the answer is public schools. It’s definitely not broadcast
television or radio: even the most-watched TV shows now garner only a fraction
of the viewers they used to. Workplaces and houses of worship are too disparate
and divergent. The Internet is too scattered and newspaper readership is way
down. What’s left besides our public elementary and secondary institutions?

Yet we are now seeing the same surfeit of choice in public schools as we see
in other societal arenas. Complementing the traditional choice of private
schools, we now have magnet schools, charter schools, alternative schools,
privatized schools, schools-within-a-school, virtual schools, and homeschooling.
In Utah, lawmakers just passed a law providing tuition
vouchers for every student in the state who wants to attend private
school.

I’m not an advocate of hegemonic groupthink (particularly from the
government), nor do I tend to be an alarmist, but I do think there’s an
important place for public schools regarding socialization of our youth,
instillation of community and national norms, and creation of a people with
common bonds. But I’m afraid we’re losing this quickly, and we need to start
talking about what it means for us as a society.

I’ve often been told that I’m a good teacher, which of course I appreciate greatly. But I’ve decided I need to do more anti-teaching a la Mike Wesch (you probably know him from this).

How about you? Anyone know of some good anti-teaching going on out there?