Flexknowlogy

As several other bloggers have pointed out (Michael B. Horn & Clayton Christensen, Guide to Online Schools), there is a clear and surprising disparity between the two US presidential candidates volubility on the matter of online education. While Barack Obama has been “mum” on the subject of online education or virtual schools, John McCain has explicitly stated his support for online education and virtual schools for k-12, and has even gone as far as promising federal funding for online learning programs.

My take on this is fairly mundane. First, I think that the online learning thing was not Mr. McCain’s idea; rather, he likely had a savvy adviser who laid out the potential benefits of online K-12 education, and online learning’s growing attraction to students and parents alike. Nonetheless, he has taken a position that may rankle those who favor the traditional means of obtaining that coveted piece of paper, whereas Mr. Obama has not.

Secondly, as has been suggested by at least two Obama supporters on their my.barackobama.com-hosted blogs, Mr. Obama would probably prefer to focus on investing federal funds in existing “real” schools. This is akin to a comment purportedly made by our current university President, who said, “I don’t want online learning to flourish because it takes revenue away from the brick-and-mortar.” Someone needs to let these folks that online learning is more cost-effective than brick-and-mortar, especially if built right. At the same time, I will disclaim the disparity by suggesting that Mr. Obama, once fully informed, is likely to counterprove some of his supporters by coming out in support of online learning and virtual schools when challenged on the issue. In the big game of presidential election politics, this is not a campaign-breaking issue.

But since Mr. McCain has beaten Mr. Obama to the punch, let my proffer my opinion on his suggestions:

1. “…$500 million in current federal funds to build new virtual schools and support the development of online course offerings for students.”
2. “…$250 million through a competitive grant program to support states that commit to expanding Online education opportunities.”
3. “…$250 million for digital passport scholarships to help students pay for Online tutors or enroll in virtual schools. Low-income students will be eligible to receive up to $4,000 to enroll in an online course, SAT/ACT prep course, credit recovery or tutoring services offered by a virtual provider.”

Total: $1 billion. For a fiscal conservative who is adamant about reducing government spending, that’s a lot of money, right? As they say, a million here, a million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. I had to put this in perspective: While the US annual spending on K-12 education is around $536 billion, only about $43 billion comes from federal funding. Adding in Mr. McCain’s proposed $1 billion would become just under 3% of the current annual federal expenditures for K-12. Because the US Constitution leaves education funding primarily in state hands, I think Mr. McCain is right to offer 25% of that billion as grants to states, and another 25% directly to students. This reminds me of Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class, which suggests that the monolithic nature of K-12 public education will make the sort of necessary disruptive innovations difficult at first, and that the first stage of the disruption will likely happen through outside server providers. In fact, Mr. Christensen uses nearly identical key language that Mr. McCain uses: “tutoring services offered by a virtual provider”.

I’ve been itching to write a post on “edupunk” since Jim Groom first added the term to our edtech lexicon. The term “edupunk” is both provocative and deeper than it seems, and so it deserves the benefit of a close analysis. My problems with “edupunk” have been:

1. I have a hard enough time converting faculty to use edtech as it is; a label like “edupunk” will only further alienate those faculty. And as john Krutsch suggested, “cliques suck, especially when you are on the outside”.
2. “edupunk” presumes a politik that Mr. Downes has already claimed as “progressive”, but that is too exclusive for me. (I am not “a progressive” [but it’s amusing how vilifying that statement sounds–”liberal” was far more neutral, though admittedly it had gained some negative connotations in the last several decades. Ergh, I digress.]), and implies a knee-jerk or overgeneralized anti-establishment/anti-corporate mentality that I am not willing to fully accept.

There might be other reasons for my distaste. I may be taking the term in an altogether too personal context, for as a youth I was pretty active in the punk music scene, but I wasn’t ever on the inside of punk. You see, my friends who were into the cookie-cutter punk politico dug a lot of my libertarian ideals, but didn’t understand my capitalism, and my Brave New World “elitist” interpretation that conservative/traditionalism is served by (if not necessitates) punk-type counter-culture just as punk-type counter-culture is served by conservative/traditionalism. Even if we had a utopia (by anybody’s definition), we would always need an other, and some other’s are more harmless than others. Also, punk itself is not so punk as it would like to think it is–as I suggested, it’s often cookie-cutter, it’s often whiny or anti-corporate, and not because of strong ideals as much as it is because of failure or missed opportunities to exploit the corporate system for it’s own benefit. Most “punk” bands will “sell-out” if they get the chance. Sell-outs are sell-outs, and “true punk” treats them as such, maintaining a superficial fraternity with the black-white-black-sheep punk bands through artificial sub-labels like “pop punk”.

It may be that some edtech’ers feel the same way about educators who toe the corporate line, and thus find “edupunk” a great metaphor for their societal angst. While I have plenty of of my own societal angst, it rarely fits under any the de facto “edupunk” political posturing. At the same time, I’ve found that I can sit down with edtech’ers on the other side of the political fence and agree a lot on issues of educational strategies and philosophies for technological adoption, which makes Ken Carroll’s suggestion the more useful and bridge-building: “I would not recommend that we politicize learning 2.0″. Let politics stump us when it can; I’m here to make teaching and learning better and easier.

But at the same time, the DIY, question-authority aspect of edupunk is not only attractive to me, it resonates with my daily activities–to an extent. Martin Weller nailed the middle path (my emphasis):

it’s not about being an edupunk, but rather preserving some area of what you do where you can do edupunk kinda stuff … universities and educators need to have edupunk time - a period when you can explore stuff away from the mass of concerns that arise.

Martin suggests 10% of your day for edupunk time, i.e. innovation, experimentation, DIY, whatever. I wouldn’t do it for less than 33.33333%.

Writing is fun. Writing is fundamental. If you don’t write, you don’t know what you think. Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter

In the spirit of knowing what I think as Zeldman so aptly puts it, and adequately preparing myself at what is essentially the starting line of this blog: My intention for this ‘blog is to lay out, as frequently as time allows, commentary on (and hopefully arguments for or against) new and emerging theories and practices related to the field of educational technology. I am keenly interested in how humans learn best, and how technology can improve that learning by increasing efficiency and enhancing pleasure.

My intention is to challenge assumptions–both yours and mine, to force myself towards objectivity as much as is possible, and to entertain as many sides of an issue as possible. This does not mean my explorations will attend to all sides of an issue, only that, through my own thinking and our engagement in dialogue, many sides of an issue can be explored or examined. That’s the point of the Internet, no?

Having said that, though it may not enhance my reputation, it certainly can’t hurt to be above-board and describe some of the philosophical nodes from which I tend to operate. I do this more for my own benefit than for the benefit of any of my readers; following a discussion with a pair of much-respected colleagues that ended up getting close to the heat, I asked myself, “What are the beliefs that underpin your approach to analyzing and implementing teaching practices?”

I believe in scientific realism, and tend to favor arguments that are backed up by empirical evidence.

I believe in the powerful utility of logic, and have little respect for arguments that don’t at least try to adhere to the fundamentals of logic, that is, valid arguments consisting of sound premises that lead us to conclusions, though those conclusions may not always be tidy.

These are the tools which I employ (though perhaps crudely at times) to evaluate teaching theories and practices.

I am not afraid to state that I try to live my life guided by a philosophy of moral objectivism. I have no use for any sort of dogmatic relativism which allows serious dialogue to discombobulate into a failure to attach meaning to language. Which leads us to the fact that I am generally conservative in my mindset–a concept which I find frustrates or confuses some of my colleagues who may unfortunately think that conservatism = closed-minded-ness, resistance to progress, or religious fanaticism. In their true form I abhor all of these. On the contrary, while at its core conservatism means favoring gradual change over radical change, recognizing the value of “how we’ve done things” for the measurable fruits we currently enjoy, my orientation towards scientific realism provides me with ample reason to continually reassess my beliefs and correct my practices based on new evidence.

So in a nutshell, I believe that there is objective truth, and I believe we can get at it through analytical, science-based approaches. This relates to teaching because every time we teach we are practicing a skill that is guided by our theories and shaped by our philosophies, whether we know it or not. Many of us do not know what directs our teaching, but that does not make it directionless.

When I think about my students, I put myself in their shoes. I think of the time I as a student am investing. I think of the money I am investing. I critically assess the value of the teaching and the learning. To horribly mangle in paraphrase Harold Bloom I’ve concluded, “Life is Too Short for Bad Classes.” (Which must be allowed to explain, in part, my habitual absenteeism in high school and college!)

And so I scrutinize new “engaging” approaches to teaching and learning as much as I scrutinize the old “boring” approaches. I scrutinize the time wasted on technology usage as much as I scrutinize the time wasted on flat lecture. I see no point in discarding the old if the new hasn’t proven itself better.

There you have it. Now that that exposition’s off my chest I feel much more comfortable tackling some of the hot ed tech topics that make my mind swirl. Every day I walk into the office and find myself echoing Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey who finally enters the mysterious black monolith and gasps, “…Oh my God, it’s full of stars!”