Culture

I heard some people were really surprised to discover Malcolm McLaren genius beyond Sex Pistols.

If only we could open our eyes more often. Maybe then we could learn to appreciate good people before they are gone.

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Society that minimizes the chances for genius is probably a doomed one.

Determinancy and algorithmic behavior are expected of educational system. But when everything is planned there is very little place for future. Future is not something predicted, planned and awaited. Rather it consists of unexpected events. Genius is unexpected.

Although genius seldom receives a favor of mass, today society disposes of very effective tools against it. And no matter how paradoxical it can seem, education is at the top among these tools. Educations teaching so many pointless things ends up with people who prefer dullness. People who prefer dwelling in a special kind of slumber, lulled with TV ads, antidepressants, stock chart statistics and supermarkets.

They try to find a peace of mind (it is by the way instructive to think of reasons peace of mind became so demanded), and stopping to think at all is the shortest path there.

As long as chairs are comfortable they can stop caring about destination point of the train of life. Indeed, as long as competitive salary each month appears on the account one holds in some respected bank, he is welcome to stop thinking.

But if one day respected bank will collapse and staff reduction will appear instead of salary, there will be no time to learn to think.

And there will be no Superman, no Angel A, nobody to rescue the life.

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And first example is the importance of personal space. Some time ago I have written about laptops as personal spaces. Continuing that thoughts I can say the fact that laptop is a personal space becomes important in the light of difficulties teachers face in new environments. You can find details in google or reading articles

• Observations, Reflections, & Research of a Laptop Classroom
• Getting Attention in the Laptop Classroom
• Putting Technology in Its Place
• Or, if you prefer scientific literature, McGrail, E. (2007). Laptop Technology and Pedagogy in the English Language Arts Classroom. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. 15 (1), pp. 59-85. Chesapeake, VA: AACE [pdf]

Beyond technical difficulties such as lack of physical space, risk of damaging expensive laptops, furniture issues etc. we will notice somewhat unexpected at first glance effects as social isolation. I believe the reasons here are rather pedagogical than technological. That is because current practices are largely an attempt to fuse traditional educational methods that imply certain degree of impersonalization with new tech that contradicts it. Furthermore, if teaching is aimed only at transmission of information from teacher to student, things like laptops or iPhones would interfere. And it is understandable that traditional pedagogy looks at technology only in instrumental sense. Many articles arguing statement “technology is just a tool” for education could be cited here (just google that), somewhat interesting debates are at idebate.org.

I don’t want to dig into this question now, because in many respects it is a question of definitions: tool, technology, education and so on. More interesting for me is the fact that introduction of technologies reveals important aspects of education, aspects that remained in the shade. I’ll talk about impersonalization.

Impersonalization that was all over the world for long years had engendered its opposite: the passion to personalize everything – to achieve self-actualization wherever it is possible: in music, clothing, food, hair, furniture, cars, tattoos, religion, fitness, open source operating systems, pets, biographies and on and on. Doesn’t it sound naturally that we will have a desire to be educated in a special (extraordinary) way?

I think we will see some kind of customizable digital teachers quite soon. And actually not only teachers will be under personalization, classroom will be too. We will have laptops will classrooms built-in. Why shouldn’t we? This world around is already pushing and squeezing and wrinkling and draining us in any case – why should we bear it in classroom?

It is easy – just tune some knobs – choose the color of walls you like, choose the classmates you wish to communicate with, choose the teacher to instruct you, choose the right time to learn, choose, arrange, make decisions. Getting yourself in the right mood is very important.

But will it improve the quality of education? Possibly yes, for some of us. But in general I don’t think we should rely on technology till there are people involved in education.

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Todays education is following the path of automation. Abundance of computers, ebooks, digital classrooms, tests etc. is good for automation. However I would argue its value for education.

It is the question of quality vs. quantity. We prefer quantity. Because it can be calculated, compared, digitized, stored, retrieved, analyzed and so on. Numbers are our frame of reference. And it is efficient in many areas. But let us not reduce everything to numbers.

With successful test results as the ultimate goal of education the role of teacher gradually devaluates to the level of pipeline operator. Pipeline operators are good, ceteris paribus, but noone of them is directly responsible for the outcome.

How would you like a school where nobody is responsible for the education?

And the majority of schools we have today are like that. It maybe hard to recognize this fact through the veil of worries and “challenges”, ecology, future, financial crisis and other cliches designed exactly for the purpose of blinding everybody. At the same time if we would ask ourselves “who was the person responsible for my education?”, what will we answer?

Einstein once said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. I suspect mankind is now trying to make education exactly that simpler, with tests.

Tests that are same for everybody, for each “unique child”. Tests thats value for the life a student will live decades after are more than vague. There is fraud here.

Nature evidently will take the command — few will win and other will loose, history repeating. We are being told a chronic fairytale about perfect world, where human rights will not be owned be organizations of human rights protection, where freedom and equality won’t be political tools. Perfect world that is only a several bucks away, a several votes away, a several lives away.

People who make decisions, who have power, speak to us about the future we are together dreaming of, about education that will lead us to that future, education that will teach our children to be humans.

And this is paid education. And they are forcing test infected implementation of the dream. And they justify it by the means of revenues and employments.

Are we moving too fast to see that all these mottos are expressed in dollars?

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And now I am sitting at my desk blocked up with write-only pieces of paper, phone numbers without names, pens, wires, books on machine intelligence, and trying to put my own drop into this ocean.

Writers bend over backwards to capture stranger’s attention for a few moments. And me too.

Some of us work in schools and share everyday experience, some hated school years ago and now want to make change for their children, some are fluent in digital media and push the hot topics, some develop technologies that make them speak, some just love kids, some make money out of everything and education too, some are official representatives who’s work is to write posts, some are mad, some try remember every forgotten thing, some want power for the ego, some are true experts in their fields who have time, some believe that we can save our future. All we do write something categorized under “education”.

But some of us do not write. Do not speak on public. Do not share anything with anybody. Do not save the planet. Do not go 2.0, 3.0, or X.0. Do not rethink anything aloud. Do not shift paradigms over the coffee. Do not lead.

Nobody knows about them. Nobody cares about them. But they got this game.

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This video is 2 years old. But if you go today to an average school you will quite probably hear the same story. The schools that are different are very rare. The people who are to implement innovative educational ideas are very rare.

And very often it is the question of money. What for should one go do his best at local school when she will have barely nothing in return? The teacher’s profession was years ago a synonym of respect. Now it has changed. Passionate teachers run away from schools.

“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself” Chinese proverb.

New generations will tear down the walls if nobody will be around to open the doors.

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“What I feel for this movie isn’t just admiration, it’s mad love.”
                     Peter Travers. Rolling Stone magazine.

“This film picked every emotion out of me…. It truly is a fantastic film!”
                     Tara, Manchester, UK, in comments to Times article

“I was absolutely blown away by the movie.”
                     ram, Hyderabad, India, in comments to NY Times article

How dangerous and poisoning are such glossy fairytales. Movie industry is a giant business of trickery. Who thinks about it between coke and pop-corn? Who thinks about those children who weren’t chosen after casting? Who thinks about their feelings? About their faces when yesterday’s friends with whom they’ve shared reality and dreams returned to the Mumbai as the proud of nation? I think about their cries, the bitterness inside, the unfairness, “if only they had chosen me”. From the other hand, maybe they have no idea of success at all. But producers had for sure. They act only when they are sure of the success. And it is scary.

You go to the cinema to relax, to get some inspiration, to meet friends, to see something worth seeing. You don’t think about producers, who smoke jewelery cigar you are not dreaming of, who do their job providing you with inspirations on a regular basis. You have been tricked too. Everything is calculated in advance there. You are target audience: a few bucks added to proceeds. Almost everything about you is already anticipated, predicted, estimated and optimized. The movie was made for Oscars. Exactly 8 Oscars. It was made to afford an opportunity for producers, directors, actors to put a label on themselves “a director of Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire”, to raise the stacks, the royalties for upcoming movies. Maybe for an upcoming Centurion also produced by Christian Colson. Many people have no idea of this trickery. That is sad.

Mumbai heroes. Poor children. They have been at US. At Hollywood. At Oscars. At Disneyland. They have returned. They have got a new homes. What a lovely people sit in Indian government. They didn’t know that children live near sewers. What a pity. Now they are living a dream. Of course: “they brought laurels to the country”. For so many years Bollywood was struggling to complete with big brother (since 1913). And now recognition is finally obtained. Who’s to remember that Columbus was heading to India? That America has something indian in its roots. Maybe Slumdog children are? How long will it take for them to recognize that this dream is a bullshit? How soon we will see ads starring them? What do you think will be the first product to advertise? Noodles? Or Snickers? Or Coke? Oh Lord!

“Of all Hollywood guys Billy Wilder undoubtedly has the most trenchant wit. I visited him during filming a movie about Lindbergh, who first flown over the Atlantic non-stop, “The Spirit of St. Louis”. Jimmy Stuart is standing at the wheel. Airplane model is swung against a storm, one kind of machines throw the snow, other make the wind. Billy Wilder talks: “Look! And that is called a movie! What are you seeing here? False Lindbergh, false airplane, false sky, false storm and false snow… And what it gives on the screen? It gives false Lindbergh, false airplane, false sky and false snowstorm!””
                     Translation from La Nuit Sera Calme by Romain Gary.

Sir Salman Rushdie about Danny Boyle:
“In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion.”
I think such movie would simply be banned in US.

What about kids with their uncritical perception of reality who will see the movie and believe all these cheap tricks?

Will they think that slumdog with a million is different from slumdog without one?

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Hacking Education event took place in NYC yesterday and got together leading thinkers (list of attendees) to have a conversation about the future of education. The discussion around this event was in the limelight on Twitter, tagged #hackedu.

Brief summary of event was written by @fredwilson who made this event happen.

Related posts included

• “How a Magazine Article Changed My Life” by @jaxn
• “A Better Way to Pay Students For Performance” by @plopquiz
• “Join in The Hack Education Conversation” by @frankfessenden.
• A Manifesto for EduChange on the Eve of Hacking Education, Hacking Education with #hackedu, Following the Brilliant Minds Behind Hacking Education by @edufire
• Rethinking Education Pt.14: Laptops And Digital Teachers by me
  

Notify me if I missed your post.

Full transcript of event will be available soon to grab our attention.

Now I want to share a few thoughts on the topic: what I have noticed during the Twitter discussion:

1. Ideas are not new. But there is still lack of awareness of the changes that happen in education and changes that have to be made.
2. Education is still considered in context of technology. 200 years ago it was industrial technology, today it is information technology — anyway it is the second nature. Education is still far away from the “first” nature. A few more decades and it will be too late.
3. The purposes are unclear. Education goes much deeper in us than we can imagine: as we talk about education we tend see only personal purposes, the purposes of education in terms of an individual human. But the challenge is to build global education system that will educate society — 7 billions of unique individual. What is the purpose of global education?

Something stops us from thinking globally on a regular basis. I hope events like Hacking Education will help to change this situation. The clock ticks on.

Leading photo by USV found at Union Square Ventures

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It is not about technology at all, don’t be surprised.

Let me share with you a dirty little secret about laptops: laptop is a personal space.

And to my mind it is even more important than all communicational and other capacities altogether.

What we do at schools is we deprive kids of their personal spaces. Similar rooms, similar desks, similar workbooks, similar dresses, similar questions, similar teachers with similar smiles on their similar faces. Generalization and impersonalization are everywhere. And of course it is not argued that all kids are unique.

Writing “Kilroy was here” on the desks or on the walls is not deviation, I’m sure it is very healthy and very natural under above conditions.

People need personal space. We are near 7 billions, and amount of space per human decreases every single day. We suffocate living in our cubicles, we see nature only on TV, we forgot what the personal space is, our personal space is defeated, it is pushed inside, producing psychopaths and successful politicians.

Of course we need laptops, something external and belonging to us, something we can identify ourselves with, something customizable, something that can be personalized – our personal space.

It is even more relevant in classrooms, where the pressure is so high.

We are alone. Take an “average human”. What about his society? 100, 1000, 10000, 50000? And 6,799,950,000 people don’t care. High pressure. I wish there would me more people living with words of Jimi Hendrix in mind: “You don’t care about me – I don’t care about that”.

Look at all who love total customization of everything. They need something to care about, so let us do not make them suffer, let us do not make them make Napoleons and Hitlers from their poor selves. Let us stop depriving ourselves of our personal spaces.

Kids are very good at learning. They will learn whatever we will teach them. They will learn to be alone while parents are still at work and teachers do not care after the lesson is over. We are so tired to make our lives better, we have no time for love when there is financial crisis on the TV.

So what about laptops? Laptop is a sign. Everything in the world is interconnected. The system precedes its elements.

And I won’t be surprised if we will come to realize that in average “digital teacher” would be preferred — one who lives inside laptop and is always over control and is always at hand, that can be customized, personalized, you can choose her voice, colour of her eyes, whether she will be fat or fit, asian or brown sugar, then tune some additional expert parameters or use defaults if you have no time today.

And that digital Mrs.Dewey would be better for education than Mrs.Jones who has 3 own kids alone at home 9 hours a day. And it will be fair for the kids whom we care about so much. Digital teachers will have strong competitive advantage.

We have started with laptops at classrooms and customizable textbooks publishing (that is called open source publishing). Customizable open source teachers will be our next step.

Don’t be surprised.

Leading photo by Wah-ppshhh

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