Year: 2020 (Page 1 of 2)

False Economies

We assign value to proxies. Initially, this is always for the sake of convenience. It is far easier to exchange the value of a cow than to exchange the physical cow itself. In a similar vein, it is far easier to use the proxy of grades and certifications to simulate learning to express accomplishment. As time goes on, however, these value proxies become increasingly separated from the realities that they are supposed to represent and create their own economies that operate under a self-contained logic of exchange. When you divorce currency from what it is supposed to represent, transactions become its highest expression of vitality. The purpose of those transactions becomes increasingly irrelevant to the act of the transaction itself. Growth itself becomes the highest calling and what the transactions themselves represent becomes mere ciphers or inputs to the system, subject to speculation and manipulation.

So what is real in this world? Is the true purpose of this transactional activity acquisition or human augmentation? These are not the same thing. If you are struggling for survival in a world of scarce resources, acquisition can easily turn into a matter of physical survival. Even in the prosperous parts of the world, the memory of this is well within living memory. Indeed, countries like the United States still struggle with issues of food security even today.

However, the problems are often ones of distribution and equity rather than true scarcity in many societies around the world. Looking at just food supply, it is clear that we produce enough food to feed every person in the world (arguably overfeed them). This is clearly illustrated that there is still localized hunger even in countries such the United States that produce over 4000 calories per day per person.

I argued last week that our chief scarcity in the world was one of imagination but economies depend on scarcity to sustain their logic. This is particularly true where the good is intangible and difficult to measure objectively like educational achievement (“I’ll take a ¼ pound of European Economic History 322, please.”) Scarcity is a truism. There must always be more consumers to chase goods than there are goods to chase or prices will collapse. Sure, at a certain level having a surplus of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial console games is a localized catastrophe but this can never be allowed to happen to globalized requirements such as food and energy. We can’t bury those mistakes in the New Mexico desert.

Acquisitional thinking leads to all kinds of distortions. For instance, economists have been worried about leveling or declining populations for decades now because there are no recorded examples in history of economies in demographically-declining populations growing. The theory is that a steady stream of consumers and producers is necessary to maintain the acquisitional paradigm that drives measures like GDP. As discussed in my blog from last week , however, this kind of thinking is merely a paradigm that assigns worth to the fiction of money based on its power to acquire tangible (and sometimes intangible) products. However strongly based this is on the flow of human history, it is still a paradigm that drives behavior and behavior shapes reality. 

In The Ministry for the Future, Bryan Alexander’s book club reading, Kim Stanley Robinson seems to be suggesting that economics has become more of a religion than offering any sort of explanatory value. “Macroeconomics had thus long ago entered a zone of confusion, either early in the century or perhaps from the moment of its birth, and now was revealed for the pseudoscience it had always been.” (Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future (p. 344). Orbit. Kindle Edition). The central thesis underlying the book is that since this is all a fiction anyway, the trick to creating sustainable economic systems is to change the goals of the incentive structures that drive it.

This is an intriguing proposition when viewed through the lens of systems theory. Systems reinforce behaviors that are internally logical (like rent-seeking, grade-seeking, and success metrics, to cite just a few examples). All of these things trickle down to individual behavior and are, in turn, reinforced by the behavior of individuals operating within the system. These kinds of interactions create strong circular behavioral patterns that sustain the systemic paradigm. 

As Robinson describes in The Ministry for the Future, however, current economic incentives are incredibly destructive to the sustainability of the natural systems of human growth (of the individual, not the population kind) and planetary ecology. He envisions the reorientation of systemic acquisitional impulses toward something that is actually scarce: the future of the planetary ecosystem. Robinson does not discard the growth paradigm, he merely reorients it toward the goal of augmenting the planet rather than depleting it. This is perhaps the most interesting idea in the book.

As I alluded to earlier, there are other economies that have become divorced from their original purposes. In my own world of education, the acquisition paradigm has filtered into systems of learning across a wide range of activities. Chris Newfield points out that, “Academia’s senior managers have helped two generations of policymakers to overvalue the private benefits of higher education, which has given an artificial, unmerited advantage to the forces of privatization over those of the public good.” (Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake, Johns Hopkins University Press) In this formulation, a focus on individual economic gain is the private good. This demonstrates an abdication to the acquisition paradigm. College is there to turn students into employees. Certification becomes more important than actual achievement. The basis for certification is grades and/or high stakes testing to make sure you “earned” the certification because that is closely tied to individual economic gain. Individual economic acquisition is the point of the system.

Like global economics, these goals are also divorced from their intent. Employers complain that students emerge from this certification process lacking the key thinking skills that they expect from college graduates. Students are just going through the motions. And this is where Robinson’s book  and higher education intersect (despite his book’s lack of discussion of the issue): it is the products of our acquisitional educational systems that construct the disciplinary silos and blinders that impede paradigmatic change. If you are interested in economics, why are you studying biology or ecology? It’s not going to help you get a job at a hedge fund or even a university appointment. Yet, it is precisely these kinds of nonconformist ideas that we need to solve the world’s challenges today. As Newfield writes: 

Today’s problems—climate change, overgrown financialization, and continuous warfare, to name three—require interdisciplinary expertise, hybrid methods, and continuous creativity on the part of the whole population. Universities are the only social institutions devoted to helping the rising generation master coherent parts of the vastness of human knowledge and acquire personal capabilities that will renew themselves throughout their lives. (Newfield, 2018)

In order to meet the planetary challenges of climate change, we are going to need thinkers that are able to move between ideas and disciplines effortlessly. In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson seems to throw ideas against the wall with wild abandon just to see what will stick. This is also central to the concept of “emergent design” advocated for by Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown in their 2018 books Design Unbound (MIT Press, 2018). We need economies of the mind that are geared toward augmenting us as individuals, not enriching us by some false paradigm of economy. This is the only way we will save our species. 

We will never get there if the vast majority of our thinkers are products of systems of certification that emphasize certification over true learning. Universities store vast quantities of collective information but all too often these are segmented and never intersect into creating holistic knowledge paradigms. There are strong systemic forces (tenure, publications, grades, majors, funding, programs, etc.) that work against that. As a first order of business, we need to figure out how to more equitably distribute information if we hope to create the knowledge that can save our children. Before we can do that we need to take a hard look at the transactions that inhibit its growth. Without that, we will never augment human intellect and without a massive augmentation of human intellect we will never be able to think our way out of our current crises.

 

The Scarcity Paradigm

It often amazes me how often humans skate past the real issue and fail to address the actual substance that they are trying to address. I see this in my world of education when the focus of activity often becomes the proposed solution to a challenge rather than removing the challenge from its context and examining it in its raw form. In education, this challenge is actually quite simple at its root: it is about creating learning for humans. And yet we get lost in mazes of accreditation, grades, class scheduling, learning modalities, enrollment, and so on. The same thing can be said for many aspects of climate change. At its root creating a sustainable future is about how we power the niceties of human civilization without destroying the planet. It is about energy. Both education and climate change are also deeply intertwingled with the problem of how to create a just polity.

All three of these areas are subject to scarcity paradigms often rooted in Industrial Age economics. There are only so many resources to teach students effectively. There is a finite amount of energy available to power our societies. Human societies have always suffered from a misallocation of justice that favors the rich and powerful. It’s in our nature. And they all miss the point.

Within the contexts of their respective paradigms all three of these resource scarcity statements are true. However, where the true scarcity lies is in our ability to imagine how our paradigms of learning, energy, and power are shaping our perceptions of what is possible in each of these areas. Donella Meadows calls this “the power to transcend paradigms” and, among all of the leverage points of her 1999 article, this is the hardest to achieve and the one most likely to be resisted because people cling to their paradigms fiercely. This is because those paradigms form the bedrock of what they use to make sense of the world. 

It would be simpler if humans would recognize paradigms as existing within a universe of paradigmatic possibilities and for that to form their basis for understanding the world. But this requires a level of perspective that few, even the educated, have. One of the reasons for this is that education today is based on constructing disciplinary paradigms and so, as you become more educated, you become more indoctrinated in a particular set of rules. These have their utility as a set of tools to organize thought (a critical function) but if all that’s in your toolbox is a box of hammers everything looks like a nail to you, no matter how beautiful or sophisticated those hammers may be.

The thread of running up against paradigmatic walls runs through many of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books. This is particularly true of the book we are reading as part of Bryan Alexander’s book club, The Ministry for the Future. Robinson goes so far as to employ as a narrative device his chapter structure to explode paradigms, writing them from the perspective of everything from the protagonist to a carbon molecule (something I should try in my own writing). 

I find a lot of parallels between Robinson’s thinking and my own work in education. Those that argue that change is impractical in both arenas tend to do so from a position of scarcity and sacrifice. Robinson argues persistently through his book that this is a false choice, as do I. There is plenty of energy and economic power to reshape how we approach the problems of climate change. Likewise, there are plenty of opportunities to communicate learning to our students as well. We are just blinded by our paradigmatic blinders from considering possibilities beyond those dictated by the dominant approaches to economics and the systemic structures it creates.

If you think in terms of energy, we have plenty to sustain our needs outside of a fossil fuel paradigm that is both rooted in scarcity and the source of climate change. If you think in terms of learning, we have plenty to sustain our needs out of the Industrial schooling paradigm that creates scarcities often based on artificial structures and inefficiencies. Likewise opportunity in achievement need not be a scarce resource. It just needs to be liberated from its inequalities. We need to shed these scarcity paradigms if we hope to create sustainable futures for our children, whether we’re talking about their minds, their life chances, or their planet. 

The challenge is moving up to a higher level of abstraction from the paradigms that currently shackle our thinking. All of the paradigms of scarcity have at their roots the industrial economic paradigm. If you accept that, all politics, learning, and energy needs revolve around managing scarcity. When I asserted that this shouldn’t necessarily be the case in one of the discussions about the book, I was challenged in my assertions. Steve Foerster argued, “But scarcity of resources is real. I don’t see economics as inherently about acquisition, or inherently including assumptions either way about the propriety of using natural resources. It’s simply the social science studying how humans deal with that scarcity.” He is not wrong. However, I would counter this by arguing that economics is limited in arguing about resources in a way that misses huge opportunities. It is easy to look beyond industrial economics to see how humans have constantly redefined resources and scarcity.

To cite just one example, I argued in another recent blog about the book that we have reshaped scarcity in information resources in a fundamental way by digitizing it. Robinson argues that we can and should do the same when it comes to economics and scarcity of all kinds. His protagonist repeatedly finds herself in paradigmatic arguments with those invested in the existing paradigms. “Experts” on the subject who have been fully educated in “this is the way things are” outlook on the world are the central villains in the book. To be more precise, the villain is often not the person but the blinders under which they operate. The Ministry for the Future is fundamentally a book about the dangers of disciplinary blinders and the compartmentalization of thinking. Siloed thinking is fundamentally out of alignment with the realities of the Digital Age.

A central theme of my own work has been to look at the possibilities of a Digital Age paradigm and apply them to a whole range of issues that face us as societies and as a species. This is what I argued in “Rain” and this is what I apply to teaching and learning in the pandemic (and beyond) in my new book Learn at Your Own Risk. It is the central argument of my forthcoming book, Discovering Digital Humanity as well. 

Robinson also argues that there are plenty of resources to create a sustainable existence on our planet. What both of our work has in common is that I think we are both frustrated by the extent that efforts to address both wicked problems (and I would extend that to the political sphere) are bounded by paradigmatic and, by extension, rhetorical straightjackets. This is not about capitalism vs. socialism. Both of those are bound by economic resource arguments. They just differ on how those resources should be distributed throughout society. This is also not about who deserves access to education, or, more appropriately, access to learning. It is about creating ecosystems of learning (and learning to learn beyond paradigms) that make human beings capable of imagining the new paradigms fundamental to our collective futures, whether we are talking about the future of democracy or the larger future of humans as a species on this planet.

The true scarcity is one of imagination, not energy or knowledge. Yet, this seems to offer a major challenge to our traditional dichotomies of have and have-not. At their roots both of these concepts are products of paradigms of industrial economics and everything that flows from it. Economics reached its maturity during the Industrial Age, indeed it is hard to separate the two. It drives our politics and educational systems. Until we transcend Industrial Age thinking in all of these, we will miss the opportunities of both the Digital Age and the post-Fossil Fuel Age, the latter failure spelling the potential doom of humanity itself.

 

Invisible

“For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.” ― Henri Cartier-Bresson

I have been asked a couple of times over the last couple of weeks the dreaded question that every photographer gets asked with great regularity: “I want to be a better photographer. What camera should I buy?” This question tends to provoke me into much deeper reflection that I don’t think my interrogators are looking for. I don’t say, “Get the Nikon” or “Get the Canon.” I ask them to reflect on what “being a better photographer entails.” However, this week that question provoked me into deeper reflection and led me to identify a common thread that unites all of my work: the struggle to release a creative vision.

At its root this is not a technology question. It is at root a search for human expression. However, we often seek technological crutches to replace the much harder work of meditation, communication, and practice required of any creative endeavor. I wonder how many pianists are asked, “I want to be a better musician. What piano should I buy?” For this is exactly the same question. One that I often hear is, “I want to be a better teacher. What technology should I use?” But these days I’m almost never asked, “I want to be a better writer. What kind of word processor/typewriter/pencil should I use?”

These questions are all the same. All are about technology and how it augments our abilities. With more mature technologies, like the piano or most writing tools, I think people instinctively recognize that the differentiator between a Steinway and a Bosendorfer can only be exploited by an expert. With less mature technologies like cameras, teaching technologies, and computers this question has, until recently, been more about limits than possibilities.

I used to have to sit down deliberately before some kind of box to write (and I’ve always written on a computer). Taking pictures involved complex chemical processes and carrying around heavy equipment. I can’t tell you how many times I missed capturing jaw-dropping images because I simply didn’t have a camera with me at the time. In addition to this, there were significant technical hurdles involved in creating this way. Typing commands on a command line to get to your word processor and a sometimes complex series of commands once you got there or the interactions between shutter speed, aperture, and film speed required a level of expertise that overwhelmed many. It is not surprising therefore that people have learned to think that technology is the differentiator between good output and bad output. Today, these kinds of concerns have largely vanished. The real differentiator has always been the capacity of our imaginations to create. In today’s technology environment, having technology get in the way of our humanity is no longer acceptable.

As a writer, photographer, teacher, former musician, and technologist dating back over 40 years, my life has been characterized by a struggle with technology. Actually, this is not entirely true. My struggle in all but the last of these things has always been with myself. However, I do struggle with technology in my efforts to get it to serve my creative impulses. I have had images ruined (or lost) due to technology failures. I have had moments of literary inspiration come and go because I didn’t have to hand a means to record them. And, of course, I long ago gave up trying to master an instrument (piano and trumpet) because I was unwilling to put in the long hours of monotonous practice in order to achieve the standards of performance I demanded of myself. And, as a teacher and technologist, I have always struggled against badly-designed technological systems in my efforts to reach my students and, furthermore, to give them the instruments of creation. However, at the end of the day, these struggles have paled in comparison with the struggle to teach effectively.

No technology, however, has ever intrinsically made me better at any of these tasks. That’s my job. The best of them become invisible and get out of the way of what I’m trying to create, whether it’s a book, a photograph or inquisitive minds. What technology has enabled me to do over the course of my career is to enhance the places where I can create and to capture the moment when it occurs (as I am doing right now at 430 am on an iPad using Google Docs). These technologies also make it increasingly easy to translate what’s going on in my head into something that I can share with others. Now, if I have an idea when I’m out walking, I can whip out my iPhone and dictate that idea onto Google Docs (my latest choice), come home, and copy that onto my WordPress blog and within a matter of hours, the idea that came to me as I was walking down a path can be shared with the world.

Technology should reduce friction between your imagination and the world. Creating is the hard part. It requires observation, meditation, and practice. Sometimes practice requires the mastering of a technology like a piano but the most important part of practice, which you can only get to once you’ve mastered your instrument, is learning to listen to the music in your head. 

The brilliant thing about technology these days is that it is possible to have tools at hand that allows us to get past the technical quicker to concentrate on the task of imagination. The problem is that we often fail to see that that is the task in front of us. Hence the question: “What kind of camera should I get to make me a better photographer?” The answer is simple. Get the one that gives you the most flexibility and is one that you will have at hand when the moment or the inspiration strikes you.

For a large percentage of people that camera is the one attached to your phone. These days my most used camera is the one on my iPhone because it is always with me on my walk when I see the beautiful sunrise, cloud pattern, or interesting trees. This image was taken with my iPhone and processed using Snapseed in the phone as I was walking. Forty years ago, this would have required an SLR, the right film, and hours spent processing and printing in a darkroom. I did this in a matter of minutes and, furthermore, it was shared via social media to those who might be inspired by it in some way. This last step was impossible outside of a gallery in the 1980s.

As I said before, this blog was largely written on my iPad right after falling out of bed. This sentence is being written on my computer a couple of minutes later. It will be on my website and on social media within a matter of hours. I could just as easily have dictated these sentences into my phone as I walk the pathway beside the bayou pictured above. 

Writing is hard. As someone who does a lot of it, I struggle at times with the creative impulse to translate thoughts into words on the page. Often the words come to me as I am walking (there is a clear biological connection between brain activity and exercise) and not when I’m sedentary in front of a large screen. I enjoy photographing the natural and built world. You never know when the light will change or you turn a corner and see the perfect composition. Having the technology necessary to capture that at hand is the key factor in whether I capture the image or not. Executing it comes as a result of years of practice and reflection, not as a result of whatever piece of technology I have in my hand. Preferably, that technology does get in the way of creation or, even worse, ruins what I’m trying to do through complexity.

Teaching, as I discuss in my latest book, is also a struggle to get past technology. Thriving during the pandemic and meeting my students where they can learn is much like trying to record the perfect turn of phrase or color of sky. However, it involves applying an array of tools to the problem because at the end of the day, everything else we’ve been talking about is communication. Teaching requires that I use all of the mechanisms at my disposal to reach my students in a mindful way.

Like photography, writing, and music, learning is a process of conversation. Sometimes the best tool to facilitate this conversation is sitting down across a table with your students and talking it out. Sometimes the best tool for conveying ideas is recording your thoughts and posting them where the students can access them when they are ready to learn. Sometimes the best strategy is to be able to sit around a virtual table and to play through a learning exercise. To effectively augment teaching requires an array of technologies but it’s as much of a mistake to rely on technology to replace the human in the classroom as it is to try to replace the human in the photography process. As with photography and writing the trick is to mindfully select the sets of tools that bridge the gap between inspiration and understanding.

So, how do I answer the question of what technology (teaching, computing, photography, etc.) should I use? The answer is the same in all cases: choose the technology that becomes invisible when you want to be human. It’s humans that teach and learn. It’s humans that recognize and capture the beauty of the world. It’s humans who connect ideas and tell stories about them. All technology imposes limits. At a fundamental level narrative is shaped by language, whether that language is one of brushstrokes or keystrokes.

So, let’s create, teach, laugh, connect, inspire, and learn and build technologies that help us to do those things (for that is itself a creative process called design). Pick a camera that you will have with you when the moment happens. Pick a writing instrument that is where you are when the ideas flow. Pick teaching technologies that facilitate learning and connecting humans with ideas first and foremost. Keep playing until you find the set of technologies that allow you to be the most human. As one of my favorite thinkers on technology, Doug Engelbart, wrote in 1962, “We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully coexist with powerful concepts, streamlined technology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” If you use technology to augment your humanity and then get out of the way, you can’t go far wrong.



Mental Gears Solid

A Reflection on Digital Economics

I am a political scientist by training. I’ve always thought that term to be a bit of an oxymoron (my degrees are actually in “government”). Like all social science, the idea that you can easily quantify and explain what is fundamentally human behavior is quixotic. Indeed, that’s why I have always found the field so fascinating and at the same time infuriating. It is the exploration of the unknowable human mind that has been the common thread through my lifelong intellectual journey.

My senior thesis as an undergraduate was about how the German government engaged in an attempt to reconstruct the cultural paradigms of its neighbors across the Iron Curtain, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the 1990s I went on to examine the resurgence of nationalism in spite of the lessons of a century of devastation caused by this popular delusion. My latest work on technology is also rooted in an understanding of human nature. Learn at Your Own Risk, which comes out this week, is an exploration of how teaching can be rethought under a new digital paradigm and Discovering Digital Humanity (coming in 2021) is an exploration of how our paradigms of innovation and storytelling are potentially impacted by technological shifts. I like to call it a “relationship manual” for our relationship with technology.

The one thread through all of this is my attempt to understand how groups of humans respond to challenges, whether they are created by the systems they themselves set up or by much larger forces such as industrial and technological change or the global environmental challenges that have emerged as a result of a combination of those two factors. This is echoed in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future, which I am reading as part of Bryan Alexander’s book club.

Like Robinson, I have always played with the notion of systems as mental constructs. They are an outgrowth of the human need to organize the world into understandable patterns. I have always questioned the reality of these patterns, approaching them from a fundamentally constructivist perspective. For instance, in grad school I studied under one of the leading proponents of the Realist theory of international relations, which holds that power and balances of power are what dictate international behavior. For my semester paper for him I argued that Realism did lead to World War I but only because all of the major players believed that was how the world worked, and therefore reacted accordingly to their perceptions in the shifts of the power balances of Europe in 1914 (he liked it).

Robinson likes pointing out that our acceptance of modern economics and finance is in large part responsible for our slide into long-term climate chaos. He is right. Classical economics and its modern derivatives (as well as its revolutionary challenges in Communism) are all products of Industrial Age thinking. This kind of thinking brings with it the fundamental notion of the nation and world as factories and humans as being fundamentally in service to the shop floor. This thinking probably reached its apogee during World War II as countries such as the US and USSR became massive production floors for converting resources into tanks, planes, ships, fuel, food, and guns. The technology of that era required this kind of thinking. It was a massive effort to produce the fleets and armies necessary to defeat Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany and those powers lost the war in large part because they did not have the resources to keep up with “factories” of the Allies.

The mental paradigm generated by Industrial Age technological constructs persisted into the Cold War and beyond. It has made a resurgence lately in Trumpism, Hindu nationalism, Brexit, and other nationalist morbidities. What the leaders of these “new nationalist” movements have failed to recognize is that the technological world has shifted out from underneath them. The shop floor has spread across the globe and been miniaturized. Increasingly, the resources necessary for what used to require massive factories and technological infrastructure are becoming lightweight and portable. Tasks can be stripped away from tools. Instead of “we need to build a railroad” the question becomes “we need to get from Houston to Austin.” Digital Age technological affordances allow us to strip down our thinking to its essential roots.

We have systemically failed to realize this and instead continue to operate on the same basis as the Soviets did in meeting the German onslaught in 1941: bigger and more massive will win the war. He who has the most resources wins. The latter part of the 20th Century increasingly put this to the lie. When Vietnam showed it could defeat the greatest power of the century (albeit at great cost) it should have been a wakeup call. When the Soviet Bloc fell, not to NATO tanks but to “people power,” that should have been a wakeup call. When national power was measured by the size of its factory floor and its ability to harness (and control) the resources necessary to power that shop floor, the economics of the Industrial Age makes sense, regardless of whether you frame it in capitalist or socialist terms. However, as the end of the Cold War and beyond proved, economic notions based on scale and resources have become increasingly irrelevant in an age where size and scale no longer matter.

The Digital Age no longer requires economies of scale to have an outsized impact on the world. The problem is that we still don’t seem to understand its impact on the economics or the politics of our time. You no longer need a massive factory to build T-34s (or T-90s) when now you can build a drone with off-the-shelf interchangeable parts that can take out a tank (or even an aircraft carrier) remotely. It says something when ISIS, a semi-nationalist organization with almost no resource base, was in the process of building jet drones during its brief existence on the world stage. Our economic theory, however, clings to the notion that you still need Industrial Age economies of scale to meet the tasks of the 21st Century. From teaching to transportation to defense to all manner of production, this is no longer the case in more and more areas of our societies.

Our paradigms just haven’t shifted accordingly. Economics is one such paradigm and it’s time for economists (and all manner of social scientists) to recognize that their paradigms are as constructed as all of the rest of ours are. Education, production, climate change, and democracy are all human challenges. Human challenges are met by shifting systems of thinking, not means of production or access to resources. The first step in constructing a more sustainable, human-centered future is recognizing that these systems increasingly reside in our collective minds, not in the real world. Overcoming our collective mental gears is where we will find the means to address all of these challenges.

Technology should allow us to see the world of the possible, not chain us to the shop floor. Economics should reflect this and become a “science” of the possible and not a science fundamentally based on scarcity. Scarcity leads to rationing and inequality. Some things should never be rationed. Human potential is at the top of that list. Human potential cannot be achieved in bankrupt societies on a broken planet. Shifting that paradigm should be at the top of every social scientist’s agenda.

Rain: A Meditation on Information

It is possible to drown in a rainstorm. Understanding where the water is going is key to surviving the deluge. If the deluge gets strong enough, understanding the nature of the water itself becomes essential for understanding where it is going. Water is information. Information is water. We are living through an unprecedented deluge of information and yet find ourselves dying of thirst even as we drown in the flood. Human ingenuity is the source of this flood of information. However, it is only through human ingenuity that we can create tools to navigate, manage, and thrive in systems of flood, whether we are talking about the fluid or data variety. Up to now I have seen precious little discussion of our ability to understand and process the floods we are facing. And yet this is key to the survival of civilization.

As part of Bryan Alexander’s book club, we are reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future, a book about human response to climate change. The book starts, somewhat implausibly, with information death as an Indian city dies in a massive heatwave that gradually reduces the informational options of its inhabitants until they die in the toxic, boiling sludge of the sole remaining source of moderation, the local lake. Power goes, cooling fails, water sources ultimately dry out. The humans improvise until there is nothing left to improvise with and then they die. At the other end of the spectrum is the headquarters of The Ministry, Zürich, Switzerland, which is characterized by almost constant rain, metaphorical information rain as well as the real stuff. The problem there is discerning what is happening out of the deluge of political, economic, and scientific rain that seems to constantly pummel the humans who are trying to navigate the planet through a burgeoning series of crises that humanity has created.

2020 has seen an unprecedented storm of consequential information and, like the Ministry, we struggle to make sense of it, much less act on that sensemaking. From trying to understand the source, flow, and consequences of Covid-19 to analyzing the outcome of an election in the US to understanding our educational systems in a time of crisis, the rain has been constant but ever-changing in its intensity and nature as it flows throughout human society. All of these crises have one thing in common: Whether we are talking about pandemic, climate change, democracy, or education, our problems boil down to our capacity (or incapacity) to understand and manage the rain of information. From the earliest days of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia, successful human societies have harnessed technology to channel the flow of water into richness. To do this, they also harnessed the power of information. We have the same responsibility now.

This week seemed to mark an odd confluence of information for me. It became clear that the fundamental problem uniting all of these crises is a lack of understanding of the informational floods with which we are confronted. Starting with the fastest-moving of them: the pandemic, we have struggled to even understand where it was raining. I have been thinking, on a personal level, that it would be really cool to have an AR set that could actually see the virus particles in the air and on the surfaces around us. We do not have the technology to achieve that level of seeing yet but we do have powerful data tools that can show us that information on a more macro level. However, even those tools have often proven inadequate in the face of poor data inputs. Even with sophisticated mapping tools, testing and tracing inputs have struggled to keep up with the speed of the contagion. Understanding the intensity of the rain is a key first step to any response. Unfortunately, in this instance, we have seen far too many societies deny the oncoming storm, refuse to see it, and even go so far as to conclude that if we ignore it, it will go by as a mild sprinkle. Those societies have developed informational problems as the nature of the flooding has gone unreported until masses start to drown. The tools we have developed to measure the rain, while technological achievements, are filled with bad information about the nature of the flows we confront.

Climate change lies on the other end of the spectrum. We’ve had time, albeit less and less of it as the years of inaction stretch into decades. Here the rain threatens to assume a physical form as the planet struggles to adjust to the anthropocene. However, even as the data accumulates from a wide range of data collection, we still struggle to “see” what it all means. In this context, we lack the tools necessary to understand clear pathways. We can see the rain and even get a sense of its intensity. However, we have a poor map of the landscape; how the rain might flow once it hits us; and what needs protecting the most. Like the pandemic, those on high ground seek to deny the oncoming storm because they are unwilling to make the sacrifices that will protect those most in danger. This is a central theme to Robinson’s book.

In the United States, we are rife with conspiracy theories whose informational waves lap over the gamut of issues from the pandemic to climate change to the health of our democracy. In this case and at this level the data is painfully obvious to anyone willing to confront it. On an individual level, we know what we need to do to protect ourselves from the pandemic: wear masks, socially distance, avoid creating crowded indoor spaces, and aggressively vaccinate when a vaccine becomes available. Even in the face of this immediate threat we are faced with a deluge of informational noise and nonsense, and so the virus spreads.

This information pollution extends to the climate change threat, as we are constantly presented with false choices between prosperity and responsible stewardship of the planet upon which we depend for our very existences. Again, humans are presented with a vast deluge of information but few tools to contextualize it and translate it into individual or community action. Into this environment we also see those living on the high ground trying to protect their privilege by muddying the waters with informational sludge, such the oil companies’ decades-long disinformation campaign on the connection between the burning of fossil fuels and the threats to our existence.

These same strategies are being employed to throw sludge into the very machinery of our democracy as cries of “voter fraud” have echoed through our polity in the wake of the recent US presidential election. Compared to tracking millions of invisible viral containers (COVID-19 leaves a notoriously inaccurate paper trail) or the complex interactions of billions of interconnected environmental systems, tracking 160 million votes is child’s play. While inexplicably not perfect, our data systems are well up to the challenges of accurately counting votes in 2020, more so than in any election since the founding of the US Republic. The Cybersecurity and Instructure Security Agency issued an unequivocal statement, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” Yet, in this case millions question the reality of the data in front of them.

Finally, our world of education, I asked a question of Kelvin Bentley on Bryan’s Future Trends Forum. Dr. Bentley proposed that we do a better job of data acquisition and analysis from our institutions of higher education in the United States. I asked him how we could do that in the absence of standard measurements (like the spread of a virus), context (like the collapse of global ecologies), or a clear paper trail (like US elections). Furthermore, even assuming that we have these kinds of informational inputs (which is entirely possible), how would we be able to actually see the landscape that this informational deluge would unleash without proper tools to analyze the data (which we could build)? We all agreed that the system we were trying to understand was lacking in all aspects for managing information flows. Without these fundamentals of information, we lack the ability to manage the educational storm confronting our society. Unfortunately, fixing this system is a basic leverage point for developing the capacity to understand the other storms confronting us. Universities form the linchpin for developing responses to all of our challenges, from the pandemic response to climate change to democratic reform. It is trust in our institutions of education to provide informational tools that are an essential prerequisite for action that allows systemic responses to be crafted. And yet, even on this fundamental level, we are content to drown or die of thirst in a deformed informational ecosystem.

For all of these scenarios are the same. We are facing a deluge of information in face of local, societal, and global challenges. We are only beginning to grasp at the requirements that will save us from the flood of the Nile waters. The ancient Egyptians developed calendars as a critical tool in their civilizational toolsets. Without calendars they would not have known when the river would rise, when to plant their crops, and how to channel the deluge. We can’t even agree on what day it is. Humanity is in desperate need of Digital Age calendars and other informational tools to sort the deluge of data. Informational tools are essential to crafting responses understandable to all so that we can take collective action to combat the challenges confronting our, now-global, civilization. Universities should lead through example by transforming educational practice into one characterized by transparency and the application of powerful informational tools as a means to demonstrate how we can tackle the other storms of society.

This much is clear: Information complexity is the real flood of the 21st Century. It’s time to make tools that allow us to see it, learn from it, and thrive. For, like water, complexity holds within it vast potential. However, also like water, it can overwhelm and drown us. Digital Age calendars that can absorb this data and translate it into something instantly understandable are the keys to making sure we aren’t overwhelmed by flood and pollution.

 

Digital Age Democracy and the 2020 Election

Presidential elections are at their root reflections of the state of democracy in the United States.  This was certainly true in 2020. Some were shocked that 70 million people would vote for President Trump, given his statements and actions that have openly thrown into doubt US democratic institutions. However,in many ways he was speaking a truth we didn’t want seen. The Digital Age is characterized by the amplification of voices, all voices. However, our political system amplifies only certain kinds of minorities, based on where they live, not who they are. The jarring disconnect between narrative and political outcomes is perhaps the most significant outcome of this political season. The scary thing is that few people perceive what is happening and even fewer are reacting to it. Analog thinking has created some profound blind spots and discordances. We have a profound civic responsibility as digital educators to constantly analyze and provoke discussions as we struggle to reshape our societal narratives to meet the new realities.

Like previous waves in the expansion of mass communications, the Digital Age is profoundly reshaping our narrative flows. We have seen the impact of this as Trump supporters desperately seek narratives that show him winning the election. Narrative flows, however, behave very differently in digital information environments. While the traditional strategy of conservative minorities has been to limit information flows, dating back to the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, their latest strategy has been to flood the zone. Instead of trying to hide the protestors being attacked by the police, as happened in the 60s, influencers try to provide an overwhelming number of alternative narratives to explain the same events. Claude Shannon would have instantly perceived this as noise overwhelming communication.

To cite just one example. look no further than the dueling narratives from this summer of racial equity protests. One side amplified the relatively rare outbreaks of violence and property damage and virtually ignored the vast numbers of peaceful protests. They did this by circulating a flood of anecdotal stories of property owners defending their property over the depredations of an angry mob. Stories were carefully segmented to overlook or focus on agitators depending on the narrative outcomes that were sought. Digital media and the vast flood of information it has released made this kind of segmentation possible.

The problem is one of seeing. If information consumers see information through a set of narrow prisms they begin to develop a conceptual narrative around seemingly disconnected bits of information. The sheer volume of information being fired around right now is unprecedented in human history. We simply don’t have the systemic and cognitive lenses with which to process it. While digital tools such as the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) can help us get some perspective on these events, the more traditional analog filters like television (which fewer and fewer use for their informational consumption needs) are ill-equipped to capture the cacophony that the Digital Age has revealed about our society. The problem is that a lot of older Americans still depend on analog media sources and/or treat digital information sources as if they were analog. Despite surges in younger voters, this group still represents a decisive element on the American political scene.

On the flip side, ease of access to the information ecosphere has generated an unprecedented level of societal transparency. The last several decades has seen an explosion of new groups emerging onto the political scene as the Internet has revealed the struggles of groups that society conveniently chose to ignore or that it had decided were “taken care of” but weren’t. Analog outlets like closed-loop narratives like “African-Americans won their rights in the 60s and are now happy Americans.” The events of this summer clearly put that to the lie. Other groups, particularly LGBTQ groups, have successfully leveraged digital technologies to tell their stories in opposition to analog narratives that previously ignored them altogether. There are many other groups, representing a vast diaspora of hidden narratives, who have done the same. I do not think we would be having those debates without digital narratives.

The Digital Age moves fast and there is no question that brakes need to be applied to political forces in any good system of government. Constant reflection is needed as we feel our way through this unfamiliar landscape. However, we continue to see the impact of analog thinking at all levels of our political structures. Observers were struck by the fact that both the Republicans and Democrats poured vast sums into state legislative races with almost zero effect. Money is often reflective of analog strategies and this failure is reflective of the reality that both parties, particularly at the local level, are pretty clueless about the kinds of efforts that establish narratives in the Digital Age. (Hint: It’s not TV). 

Many in the political establishment do not have any clear idea how digital narrative works. They tend to look at campaigns as linear operations with a beginning, middle, and end. In between there are certain levers that are pushed and your success or failure is entirely tied up in what you are saying, not how you are presenting what you are saying. Post-election, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized this approach by saying in a New York Times interview that, “if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders.” 

In one of the local bright spots on the local level for the Democrats, Joe Biden squeaked out a narrow win in Georgia and both Democratic Senate candidates forced runoffs against their Republican opponents. These outcomes were not the result of singular efforts but rather a comprehensive 10-year strategy by Stacey Abrams that took a more holistic approach to winning strategies. In an interview with Politico she put it bluntly: 

“When you’re trying to not only harness demographic changes but leverage low-propensity voters, you cannot simply hope that they’ll hear the message. You have to treat them as persuasion voters…. Only the message is not trying to persuade them to share Democratic values. Your message is to persuade them that voting can actually yield change.”

Both AOC and Abrams represent a more digital narrative kind of democratic narrative. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Discovering Digital Humanity, digital approaches are by their very nature holistic in nature. They are shaped, not directed, and are not bounded linearly into a beginning-middle-end structure. Digital narratives are more like a rainstorm than a river. The nature of information in a digital environment is one of free and fast flows that are largely uncontrollable by a traditional campaign. Voters (and potential voters) are the ground upon which this digital rain falls. The challenge of the campaign is to humanize the information and to make it relevant to the voter in question. In the words of Abrams they have to be convinced “voting can actually yield change” and if it doesn’t the results are hard to hide in a digital world of transparency.

In 2016 the lauded digital strategies that helped bring Donald Trump to office, and to a large extent buoyed his efforts in the face of incredible political headwinds this year, were based on the opposite approach. They were all about using digital channels to accelerate analog information flows. To audiences used to analog flows, anecdotal stories of voter fraud were amplified and divorced from context because they did not perceive the larger picture of what was perhaps the most transparent election in US history. That is because that audience is used to “channels” of information in the traditional sense of television and those channels carried with them the veneer of legitimacy either because they were endorsed by personalities or carried by trusted friends.

Abrams, in particular, recognizes that this political transition is a long game. We will be fighting false narratives for a long time to come. Culturally, however, those who have traditionally been disenfranchised by dominant industrial narratives are far more likely to accept digital counter-narratives. The danger for some more traditional politicians in both parties (and this is seen in some of the recriminations being thrown around the Democratic Party right now) is that they will continue to operate as if they control the narrative rather than shaping narratives organically grown by digital information flows and that these disconnects will become glaringly obvious. The consequences of these kinds of narrative disconnections may be seen in alternative expressions of political mobilization, such as the Black Lives Matter movement on the one side and the MAGA movement on the other. These kinds of movements, for better or worse, are already reshaping the political parties as establishments in both major parties resist the waves of narrative characterized by Trumpism on one side and Abramism on the other.

Where does this leave us? My good friend Bryan Alexander quoted Gramsci in a recent post that caused me to reflect deeply on our present moment: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci was referring to deeper societal forces but I think it’s also reflective of the impact that digital narratives are having on our systems of government. My hope is that this will lead to an evolution of our political systems into the digital age. However, we are running up against structural, countermajoritarian features of American democracy that are going to test the antifragility of American democracy (that is a topic for a future blog). Leadership that is reflective of this moment in history is desperately needed on both sides of the political divide. Let us hope we can find storytellers and translators capable of being midwives to the new realities the Digital Age is demanding of our polity. If we don’t, we risk succumbing to “morbid symptoms.”

Adventure Camp

It’s a scary world out there right now. Pandemics, politics, and economics form their own kind of “PPE” for which we have to all gird ourselves with a different kind of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) than those who are fighting Covid. Like those heroes, we have to face our fears and slay often unseen and ephemeral monsters. And like them our greatest enemy is ourselves and the systems human societies have created. To face this enemy we need a group of diverse heroes, each with a small piece of the map forward in their possession. That is exactly what came together last week at Learning[Hu]man, a summer camp unlike any I’ve ever been to before (or was it?).

The subject of monsters and adventuring seemed to come up again and again this week. This is ironic because the first time I was exposed to Dungeons and Dragons was at a summer camp in West Texas in 1978. That was, ironically, also the first time I was confronted by the real monsters our society struggles with even today. One day a counselor intervened to stop a group of locals from the neighboring town who were harassing some teenage female campers. That counselor happened to be black. That night a long line of cars and trucks streamed into the camp to send a message. We called the sheriff. He was with them. A hundred scared teenagers spent the night in the camp mess hall. Fortunately, the counselor they were seeking had returned to Austin and the night passed without further incident.

I have been reflecting back on that night a lot lately. The last six months have felt a lot like being confined to a mess hall while a messy world swirls around outside the door and the forces of reaction make forays into the camp of civilization. Unfortunately, in our case, the monsters aren’t going home. There are too many and they live among us.

ShapingEDU has always been a community shaped by optimism. Optimism, not for technology, but for the human creativity it unleashes. This week that community resembled nothing more than an adventuring party assembling for perhaps our greatest challenges. If there was a consistent theme that emerged it was that the human challenges far outweighed the technology ones. It became clear that it was time to strap on our magic swords and dust off our spell books to slay the human prejudices that perpetuate inequities in both our society and within the very educational institutions that we have devoted our lives to.

Like every adventure party I’ve ever been a part of there was the initial meeting of the minds, usually over a beer at Lev Gonick’s (aka Mike Callahan’s) virtual tavern. New networks were formed and maps were laid out. Bryan Alexander quickly asked us to imagine what kind of monsters we might face and taught us how to challenge them. The campfires on Digital Equity, Social, and Racial Justice and Digital Education and Tribal Rights showed us some of the real monsters of inequity and access that lock out whole groups of potential wizards whose voices are stifled before they learn their first spell, depriving us of an army of creative forces. My own session took us questing and showed how we could see all kinds of stories as a form of hero’s quest and, perhaps most importantly, that others are likely to perceive those quests quite differently. Our scouting parties reimagined quests from a History class, to preparing our faculty for Covid Fall, to reimagining a Liberal Arts graduate program. You can see their work here.

Conversketch Illustration of Digital Narratives Session

One of the key things I took away from my early years with Dungeons and Dragons was an understanding of the essential nature of good systems design. As Dungeon Master (DM) it was your job to craft a system that channeled the quest. DMs forget at their peril that the system has to work for the world to make sense. On Friday night Ruben Puentedura turned us into Dungeon Masters by asking us to create systems to overcome the plague of black swans raining down upon our kingdoms. His parties were given a choice of ten alternate future university spells and then assigned a second. He then tested our systems by throwing an unexpected swan into our midst. This generated creative explosions that forced us to pull together strands from our week of preparing and training. Common strands that ran through virtually all of the responses were the strengths to be found through diversity and community augmented by the magic of our technology and imaginations. We quickly saw through how these could guide us through the whitest of waters.

At every step along the way this week it was clear that the demons that we face, collectively and individually, are distinctly human. Nature, whether in the form of disease or climate, merely acts as a catalyst for exposing the cracks in our systems, from poverty to educational access to a lack of inclusion. It’s funny how our societies resemble a bad (pre-CGI) science fiction film in which all the aliens and monsters are really humans in disguise.

Taking on these systemic and conceptual demons requires a hard look in the mirror and the ability to try on different faces. Technology provides the mirror and the masks. It can be used to hide but it can also be used as a powerful “seeing” spell. Digital technology is at its root about being able to see, whether that be in the form of crunching vast swathes of complex data in order to see patterns in the spread of disease or rethinking systemic paradigms through realistic simulations that force different lenses upon us.  This week at Learning[Hu]man was fundamentally about seeing the world as it is and what it can be. It showed that as a group we have powerful magic including spells such as “Light,” “Network,” and “Show” that are critical in understanding the nature of the systemic monsters we face. At the end of the day, our community recognizes that the power of our magic is to give that magic to others.

This week we assembled a diverse group of adventuring parties, ready to ride forth and tame the systemic dragons. For in a final irony, it is clear that the systems themselves are a technology. They are dragons to be ridden, not swans to be slain. Our systems need to have a technological and conceptual “Light” spell thrown upon them to reveal them as Ourselves, to be reconstructed as only we can imagine them to be.

The Hybrid Plus Strategy

As we move into an uncertain fall semester, a central question needs to be how we maintain a student centered approach to teaching and learning in the face of social distancing, whatever form that might take. In a recent survey 75% of students expressed dissatisfaction with the experiments undertaken in Spring 2020 collectively and aptly entitled “remote learning.” The students in this survey found “remote learning” unsurprisingly found the experience isolating and unsatisfying. The learning outcomes of the experience are also likely to be problematic as early indicators seem to be showing. For many, instructors and students alike, the experience was a frustrating one for entirely predictable reasons. We did the best we could. However, any good designer will tell you to learn from the flaws of your experience and iterate moving forward.

I have developed a strategy called Hybrid Plus to try to recapture some of what was lost in the transition. Hybrid Plus starts from a fundamentally student-centric position but recognizes the administrative challenges in what my friend Bryan Alexander calls the “toggle term.” The assumption under this scenario is an academic term characterized by unpredictability where institutions may be forced to shut down physical facilities unexpectedly due to localized outbreaks of the virus and/or a more nationalized shutdown. The Hybrid Plus strategy also assumes that no magical solutions such as an early or widely-distributed vaccine will emerge (a Dragon King event). It hopes for the best under such circumstances but plans for the worst.

Hybrid Plus is a holistic approach to teaching and learning that is designed specifically to address the problems of student connectedness coupled with the uncertainties of an environment characterized by the pandemic. At the same time, it recognizes that there are real administrative challenges in facing a “toggle term” effectively. The strategy has three elements:

  1. Create Student-Centered Instruction: First, faculty must thoroughly self-assess their classes and ask themselves the following questions. I discuss these in detail here.
    1. Which parts of instruction are best achieved asynchronously?
    2. How can I maximize the impact of limited synchronous interactions with my students?
    3. How can I structure assessments to be more authentic and meaningful and away from turning assessment into a game?
  2. Tailor toolsets around maximizing the impact of connectivity to our students. We need to assess the tools available to faculty and students with an eye toward facilitating teaching and learning. The goal here is to identify and rectify deficiencies before the semester starts. I have developed a rubric and survey to assist faculty and institutions identify and apply optimized toolsets for the types of teaching and learning they are trying to achieve. I will be holding an interactive session on this topic on June 11 as part of Arizona State University’s ShapingEDU initiative. Some key commonalities that should always be observed in this environment are:
    1. Technical barriers of all types must be minimized to the greatest extent possible. For instance, videoconferencing systems should be lightweight, system agnostic, have a dial-in option, and work robustly on mobile devices. Access to technology should not limit access to learning to the greatest extent possible.
    2. Whenever possible technology should prioritize student-driven functionality over other concerns. For instance, one of the issues that many students face is how to engage in informal learning with other students. Informal learning is critical to student success. Students should be encouraged to use, and be provided with, synchronous platforms for meeting with other students. One of the biggest victims of isolation from campuses is isolation from other students outside of class. A student-driven video conferencing solution coupled with an asynchronous, student-driven, chat and meetup functionality is key to developing communities of practice among students.
  3. Create flexible scheduling systems around physical environments to provide as much in-person, human interaction as circumstances permit. We should discard, for the most part, the synchronous in-person model for instruction and instead create flexible scheduling arrangements that allow teachers and students to come together on an ad hoc basis that complements their online experiences. These groups should be anticipated to be small in accordance with CDC and other health officials’ guidelines. However, the importance of this kind of human contact should not be underestimated. The challenge for administrators is to create the kind of flexible scheduling system and to communicate the availability of different kinds of facilities to faculty on an as-needed basis. This is a particularly important element to those courses requiring hands-on instruction such as many workforce programs as well as many academic courses requiring labs for experimentation. However, this kind of interaction is important to all kinds of classes. Attention to support services that would benefit from a physical presence should also be given.

Planning around these three elements will give institutions the most flexibility in meeting unexpected circumstances, while preserving the integrity of the teaching and learning process and, most importantly, engaging students to the greatest extent possible. If this crisis has taught us anything, it is that we can no longer afford to treat students like widgets being processed through the systems of learning. Covid-19 has blown apart the factory walls and the parts have been scattered to the wind.

Technology can provide a key linkage to building a new kind of learning environment. However, learning for many students will be crippled if those technological solutions are not paired with systemic adaptations. Teachers must adapt their systems of engagement with the communities of learning that they are responsible for. Students must be encouraged to adapt their systems of interaction with each other as well as their learning (learning to learn is part of any learning process). Institutions must facilitate constructive engagement at all levels and must therefore adapt institutional practices around maximizing systems of interaction in an environment without walls. We may have to let go of some already outdated systems to achieve that. However, the pandemic may provide a catalyst for an overdue reimagining of our learning ecosystems. There is great opportunity for innovation here.

Optimizing Instruction for Hybrid Plus

Transitioning to remote teaching has, to put it mildly, been a chaotic and uneven process. Those of us who look deeply into what we are doing in the classroom quickly recognized the shortcomings of teaching the same way via video conferencing. Of course, teaching is but a means to an end. The real question is how you preserve learning under these circumstances. The Hybrid Plus modality requires a deep re-evaluation of how we teach and learn and a recognition that adapting those practices to the shifting strictures of technology is essential to maintaining engagement and success in a particularly fragmented learning environment.

As I redesign my course for the summer and beyond I am applying design principles to the new sets of constraints and opportunities that emerged from the process. One way to approach this is to break down teaching into three elements that apply to virtually all classes: asynchronous elements, synchronous elements, and assessment strategies (which may be done both synchronously and asynchronously). Deconstructing classes into these three categories helps us understand how the different pieces will respond to the limitations of remote teaching best and which areas of student engagement are challenged the most by the shift in modalities.

Asynchronous Elements

Which parts of instruction are best delivered asynchronously? Most content distribution would fall under this category. While teaching Socratically is not possible asynchronously, its loss is partially compensated for through persistence and replay-ability of online content. Prerecorded videos are a good substitute for the scaffolding our lectures provide. They should be short so that the content is related in chewable bits (under 10 minutes is ideal). Obviously, written material can be used to supplement this. However, I encourage teachers to remember that the web of 2020 is a profoundly visual medium and this offers many kinds of opportunities to mix and match different forms of communication. Longer bits of faculty-generated content should be broken up and supplemented with visual media wherever possible. Finally, it’s important that content in a disconnected medium such as remote learning make narrative sense. It’s particularly important to recognize the narrative journey your students are on and to pay particular attention to highlighting the relevance of any particular piece of content or content module to the overall story.

 

Synchronous Elements

Synchronous interaction in a world of social distancing is a precious commodity. Therefore, it is essential to think carefully about maximizing the impact of synchronous interactions both between teacher and student(s) as well as among the students. The disinterest and distraction we observe in a physical environment is amplified in remote contexts. Instructor-led class meetings should be centered on an active project and should be designed for small (12 or less) groups of students. I plan to schedule periodic working sessions with the design groups in my class. The only will be the only instructor-led synchronous group activity. They will be incentivized, not mandatory in nature. In these sessions the groups will be working on specific activities directly tied to the completion of their projects.

Maximizing opportunities for individualized instruction should be prioritized in all synchronous class planning. There are logistical challenges in meeting with large numbers of students individually but mechanisms to target those struggling the most should be developed within the class structure. This summer I am partnering with a librarian who will be embedded in my class to complement my engagement efforts. Creating opportunities for individual interactions leverages the affordances of instructional methods that are divorced from the strictures of space and time. The most effective synchronous elements of my remote learning class were actually the one-on-one meetings where I checked in with my students, reviewed their work, and, most importantly, answered specific questions that they might have hesitated to ask in front of a larger group.

The most desirable, and hardest to achieve, synchronous interactions are student-initiated interactions. The existence of these indicates that the students are self-motivated to engage with the material socially. The problem is many of our online systems are not optimized for this kind of interaction. It is essential to encourage students to congregate on their own. Many institutions do not have student-driven videoconferencing platform or chat platform within the LMS. Although less-than-ideal, the only real alternative in those circumstances is to direct students to external tools such as Zoom, Slack, and Facetime/iMessage to give them the informal learning tools they will need. Institutions should prioritize giving their students this kind of functionality.

Assessment Strategies

Traditional assessments administered online are subject to compromise. Simply transferring in-person exams to an online environment invites gaming the exams (cheating). This is an unwinnable war. If for no other reason than the integrity of the class (and there are many others) reassessing your assessment strategy is a central part of this exercise. The online environment favors authentic assessments. If you think deeply about most in-person assessments, a large part of what they demonstrate is the student’s ability to take the test. The student’s mastery of the subject is often only a tertiary effect. Why do we test this way? In short, it’s what’s possible using the technology of pen and paper, which has characterized education in one way or another since Homer. New media opens up new possibilities in this area. Students can create meaningful artifacts to demonstrate their learning in a class that have a life far beyond the professor’s filing cabinet. Authentic assessment is more meaningful to students and therefore the incentive to cheat is lowered and, furthermore, their ability to cheat is compromised when they are creating something new. Finally, a properly structured act of creation is also an act of teaching. The best way to learn is to teach.

Poor assessment strategies are amplified online as courses quickly turn into a box-checking exercises with periodic assessments merely providing the more annoying box. Judgement from a distant instructor is also profoundly depersonalizing and disempowering, both of which are severely destructive to the learning process. Authentic, personalized assessment should therefore be central to any learning process. There are many ways this can be achieved. Students can record video submissions to assignments, create public blogs, or execute semester-long projects such as the Final Portfolio project in my class. The technology gives them new ways of expressing their understanding. Effective assessment strategies will leverage these possibilities.

Fundamentally, teaching in a Hybrid Plus world requires opening minds to the opportunities that the technology offers. Students and teachers alike will have to spend some time rediscovering what it means to learn. Not all things will be better in this environment, although I am confident that over time we will settle on a new normal that optimizes the best of both online and physical environments. Our sacrifices today may help chart a way into a new post-pandemic educational landscape that will be better than the pre-pandemic one. The world will never be the same. It is our responsibility to make sure that this change is for the better.

Digitally Shifting to Create Flexible Communities of Learning

One of the themes of my forthcoming book is how a lot of our difficulties are caused by what I call McLuhanesque mistakes, which is translating systems created in response to analog paradigms to a digital one without recognizing the anachronisms as well as opportunities created by that shift. As we go into a far more online educational environment, these anachronisms will proliferate. The analog logic of dividing courses and information into sections might be one area where we are missing opportunities in our new realities.

Sections are a legacy of the physical world. Classrooms support finite numbers of students. Schedules are driven by the logic of putting students in classrooms at specified regularized times every week. These constraints do not apply to online classes. While there is a legacy from these physical constraints in administrative convenience (and there might be funding implications in some systems), sections have mostly devolved into a measurement detail. Donella Meadows puts measurement at the lowest end of her leverage point model of systemic change. In other words, changing measurements are among the easiest systemic adjustments one can make. Rethinking how we measure units of learning, even on an experimental basis, could result in significant benefits to the overall learning experience of our students.

One of the first things that is will likely come up is the fact that most faculty are paid based on the number of sections that they teach. Rather than exercising crude expedient of adjusting the number of sections that a faculty member teaches, it would be much better to fine tune those adjustments based on students being taught. The limitations placed upon how I teach have far more to do with the size of my sections, which I have a little control over, than the number of sections I choose to teach. My pedagogical strategies have to adapt based on whether I have 15 students or 32. I get paid the same amount for either number. The students pay the same amount no matter which section they are in but it’s no question that the level of attention I’m able to give each student in the smaller class is much higher than in the larger one.

There is little to no reason to group students in this manner in an online environment. The space-time limitations that created the logic of sections simply don’t exist online. Instead of creating space and time-centered divisions, we need to think about building learner-centered networks. What would student-centered “sections” look like? I have previously argued that online classes could be identified as either totally asynchronous or requiring some level of synchronous interaction. As a starting point this would be a better way of identifying how the class would work to the student than a random section number and would furthermore set student expectations accordingly when they signed up for a particular course of instruction.

Personalizing instruction is also facilitated by a section-less system of learning. I try to tailor my instruction around the interests of a given student since that will provide a more meaningful instructional experience for him or her. Having a larger pool of students to choose from (through consolidating all of my sections) makes this far easier when it comes to group formation. Creating different ways to mix-and-match students while maintaining the ability to create working groups of learners would allow us to design more individualized pathways for learning.

This is not just a convenience factor. Creating systems based on student communities rather than sections would allow for a far more nuanced approach to creating learning centered on communities of practice and opens the doors to explorations of interdisciplinary approaches to learning. As DeAngelo points out, retention is greatly enhanced by students developing networks outside the traditional classroom. Sections divide learners arbitrarily. We need to be looking for network opportunities for them instead.

Sections also tend to wall off disciplines from one another. Allowing students to subscribe to a cohort of interdisciplinary instructors working together can reap huge benefits. For instance, I teach my government class as a design studio. Coordinating with English Composition, Design, and perhaps Student Success faculty, we could develop an integrated approach to a student’s (or preferably a learning community of students’) learning experience(s). Interdisciplinary approaches have been shown to lead to better outcomes.

Finally, as I argued in an earlier piece, focusing on smaller and shorter segments of learning, which getting rid of traditional sections would facilitate, makes our systems of learning much more antifragile. Small, focused learning communities are going to be much nimbler in the chaotic teaching/scheduling environments for the near- to medium-term future.

There are no doubt significant systemic hurdles around getting rid of the administrative convenience that sections offer. The current crisis, however, will not be sympathetic to those institutions that hold tightly to outdated shibboleths. Using sections as a tool for dividing up students and faculty largely for administrative convenience should be looked at carefully. There seems to be little logic pertaining to learning and retention that supports their continued existence. If anything, the opposite is true. In a digital world there is little administrative logic to continuing to use them either.

This logic extends beyond our current circumstances, however. As I argued in a previous piece that predates the pandemic, instruction will inevitably move toward a hybrid modality. With an online-focused hybrid schedule, physical environments will need to be scheduled on an ad hoc basis anyway so even when we return to a “new normal” sections can still start to be retired as a metric. Online communities of practice can be used to drive student sorting even in a hybrid model. The exigences of the pandemic are severely testing our institutions of higher learning. We can either collapse under the strain or use this tragedy as an opportunity to make learning better for our students. Developing strategies for phasing out traditional sections would allow us to focus on using quality to overcome adversity.

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