Year: 2022 (Page 3 of 3)

Originally published on April 6, 2021 at: https://shapingedu.asu.edu/blog/systems-tool-paradox-part-ii-breaking-closed-loop-both-ends

Part I – The Perils of Letting Systems and Tools Dictate Practice

Yesterday, we discussed how tools and systems become entangled in closed loops that tend to preserve systemic preferences about teaching and learning, even when they no longer meet the needs of the vast majority of learners. The problem with both systems and tools is that we usually accept them uncritically and attempt to adapt practice to be more learner-centric. However, as I discuss in my recent book, Learn at Your Own Risk (ATBOSH, 2020), there are hard limits to how much you can adjust practice and how effective those adjustments will be on learners accustomed to the existing paradigms. To address this challenge we need to attack the problem from both ends and analyze both systems and tools to look for opportunities to create new and more productive learning paradigms.

It is hard to untangle the impact of tools and systems on each other. At the systemic level we need to envision what a post-pandemic, antifragile system of instruction should look like. My own interests on this level center around rethinking how tools have the potential to reshape what we consider to be a “class,” how it’s delivered, and how the current structure has impeded holistic, interdisciplinary approaches to learning that will be critical in preparing our students to address the global challenges of climate change and automation.

Parallel to our exploration of systemic-level change, we must also understand how our tools drive the systems that they are a part of, and vice versa. We’ll explore how tools drive instruction in more depth in a series of upcoming hackathons to expand the Teaching Toolset Triangle Project. The goal of this project is to provide a mechanism for both faculty and administrators to explore creative uses of the tools we use to facilitate learning. The Toolset Triangle is designed to allow us to hack paradigms and use our collective knowledge and experience to demand tools that fulfill the ends of individualized, empowered learning.

Tool vendors, from learning space design to learning management systems to textbooks, are all driven by catering to the preferences of the markets they support. If those markets demand tools based on archaic paradigms, that is what those providers will provide. A few years ago I worked at an architectural firm trying to help them design learning spaces for the future. However, what quickly became apparent was that the kinds of questions I insisted on asking made their clients uncomfortable. Instead of educating their clients, the firm decided the better strategy, from a business perspective, was to give the clients what they wanted. What the clients wanted was largely driven by industrial models and so even the most “innovative” learning spaces never really questioned those paradigms.

This is a serious problem. As was pointed out in yesterday’s blog, the tools drive the systems but, more importantly, are themselves driven by the logic of systems and the practices that they seek to rationalize. The logic of education is not driven by the needs of the learner. The logic of education is driven by the educational systems that have evolved since the 19th Century.

If you challenge higher education to explain the ends we are seeking for our students, it is virtually impossible to come up with a consensus. That is because reality often has little to do with aspiration and that is in large part because that aspiration is so ill-defined. What does it mean to learn? How do we measure that? We almost never confront that question honestly. As Diana Laurillard says in Teaching as a Design Science: “We cannot challenge the technology to serve the needs of education until we know what we want from it. We have to articulate what it means to teach well, what the principles of designing good teaching are, and how these will enable learners to learn. Until then, we risk continuing to be technology-led.” (p. 4) At the tool level, therefore, we need to re-establish the primacy of the task – learning – when it comes to designing ecosystems of tools that are meant to support learning. This is what the Teaching Toolset Triangle Project seeks to do.

When the blackboard entered the scene in the mid-1800s, there really weren’t many other learning tools outside of pen and paper. The Digital Age has seen a vast proliferation of tools and we’re about to be hit with a second wave of opportunities through the gradual adoption of XR technologies. Having gone through the first wave as an administrator, I saw that time and time again tools were adopted in a completely haphazard manner and that the vast majority had little or no impact on pedagogical outcomes as a result. That was largely because tools were adopted without understanding their pedagogical impact. Often, technology was purchased by technology groups or the IT department without any clear purpose in mind, much less working from any kind of deep understanding of how learning works.

One of the lessons of Remote Teaching is that this needs to change. All too often I saw faculty struggling with technology that was designed for corporate meetings, not effective classroom instruction. As we return to physical environments, we need to mindfully reintegrate in-person instruction with some of the affordances of digital instruction we discovered when we were physically separated from our students. This summer the Toolset Triangle will host a series of hackathons centered on three tool groups (physical, virtual, and XR) where participants will hack them to explore how they could reshape our pedagogy and how our pedagogy can shape the tools we demand to facilitate learning. The goal is to produce a handbook describing uses for tools as well as tools we should be demanding based on the hackathons.

Systems are reshaped slowly even in times of crisis. Remote teaching has provided us with an opportunity to engage in new conversations. ShapingEDU facilitates conversations. Conversations form the basis for learning. Systemic change is a product of scaled learning. Join us in the conversation and move the world.

Originally Published on April 5, 2021 at: https://shapingedu.asu.edu/blog/system-tool-paradox-part-i-perils-letting-systems-and-tools-dictate-practice

All too often we let our systems dictate the tools that we have to facilitate learning in our students. If our goal is individualized, learner-centric instruction, then tools driven by systemic logic will often fail to meet the needs of the learners we are trying to serve. Those tools all too often tend to be driven by the logic of the systems that created them. Tools and systems become self-reinforcing loops and the result is practice that is driven by tools and systems instead of its effectiveness in reaching the learner. Our systems and tools came under immense strain last year under the pressures of Remote Teaching. It provided a unique opportunity to assess how these two factors impact how we teach and perhaps to imagine how flawed systems and tools can be reimagined to design better learning futures for our students.

The blackboard, which emerged in the 19th Century, both drove and evolved in parallel with modern forms of classroom lecture. Industrial Age pedagogy was characterized by the scaling of the distribution of knowledge, with efficiency of exchange being its primary systemic goal. Before the blackboard the teacher usually interacted on a much more individualized level with the student. The blackboard enabled the scaling of classrooms to a size that increasingly depersonalized instruction and made possible the growth of higher education itself into what we would recognize as its modern form.

Eventually, the blackboard facilitated the creation of an economic logic biased toward ever larger classes and a pedagogical bias toward expository content delivery, aka, the lecture. Norms begat culture and we now have several generations of professors (and their students) who have been inculcated in this cultural practice. Supporting tools have sprung up around this paradigm such as mass, high stakes testing and a textbook industry based on access to a captive audience, creating an ecosystem of tools that serve the system more than they serve the learner.

The impact of the blackboard, however, was far from bad. It represented a technological leap over speech alone. Initially, it was a technology developed by faculty that allowed teachers of the new sciences established by The Enlightenment to more effectively work and communicate with their students. As such, it was a powerful tool that also enabled high-level communication and problem-solving by the instructor and any students the professor chose to allow access to the board. It made the best use of the technology available to teaching in the 19th and for much of the 20th century.

In short, the blackboard was perfectly sufficient for teaching those whose destiny was to reach the higher levels of society through their university education. This, of course, included all of the professors who subsequently used the tool to continue the chain by passing down knowledge and pedagogical strategies to the next generations of teachers in their classrooms. Norms emerged in this system to create powerful self-reinforcing loops that this is what education looked like and what it should always look like. You either had to adapt to the norms or be left behind. If you wanted to be part of the club, you adapted to the norms.

Following World War II, however, the demands on higher education started to shift as the economy demanded that more and more of the workforce receive a college education. Teaching learners to be the equivalent of a college professor in this environment no longer made sense to the vast majority of the new students. As Diana Laurillard pointed out in her 2012 book, Teaching as a Design Science:

Until quite recently,it was the prevailing view, especially in universities, that teaching is about imparting knowledge. Sadly, “imparting knowledge” has usually been only a partially successful teaching activity, as every essay and examination paper testifies. While higher education was an elitist enterprise, and exams were designed to select the best minds, it was possible to make this failure the responsibility of the student. This has changed. Higher education has become less elitist, and has taken on the task of educating a much larger proportion of the population to degree level…. – Laurillard, Diana. Teaching as a Design Science (p. 11). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

However, despite this paradigmatic shift in the ends of education and those who should receive its benefits, the tools that facilitated it only evolved incrementally. Blackboard and lecture instruction were augmented by overhead transparencies and automated assessment methods such as multiple choice testing. Students still had to master the intricacies of decoding a professor’s scribbled notes on an evermore distant board as the classroom grew larger and larger. Furthermore, they became widgets in a system driven by limitations of 19th-Century technological paradigms (the punch card – which eventually begat the Scantron – was invented for the 1890 census and the first commercial overhead projectors were demonstrated in 1866).

With the introduction of digital projectors around the turn of the 21st-century, the possibility of more interactive instruction became possible. However, the vast majority of professors merely used this new technology to amalgamate the overhead projector and the blackboard into one tool. The practical advantages of a slide deck projected to the class lay in overcoming the handwriting of a professor and providing a media container for their transparencies. It made existing practice easier. However, this shift in tools was easily accommodated into the existing paradigm. There was no real pressure at most institutions to change that.

Covid broke many Tools. New Practice had to be developed. Systems had to adapt.
How deep is the viral disruption going to be long term on shaping Practice and the Tools it demands?

The pandemic broke those tools and forced professors to try to replicate what they had been doing in a physical classroom using some sort of video conferencing solution and whatever other tools they could quickly master. Suddenly, the logic of the space changed. Both individuals and institutions struggled with the implications of what this new space taught us.

While the pandemic itself was not a Black Swan event, Remote Teaching was. Those that recognized the systemic nature of what was happening to their instruction used this as an opportunity to take a sober look at what was working in their pedagogy and what wasn’t. Those that didn’t and tried to stick to the lecture-driven approach that was familiar to them quickly discovered that students checked out far more obviously online and that many of the strategies that professors had developed to break down the dehumanizing effects of a lecture-based classroom didn’t work in these unfamiliar learning environments.

Under the pressures of Remote Teaching we quickly discovered that the systemic environments created through our relationships with the blackboard and its derivatives blinded us to a huge range of tools as well as pedagogical strategies. A comprehensive rethinking of how we adapt the systems of education designed to educate the elite to the needs of much broader audiences with vastly different priorities was long overdue. We have also rarely considered how tools and systems drive each other. I know from my own experience that purchasing decisions were rarely driven by any comprehensive analysis of the pedagogical implications of a given tool, and that’s if the instructional side was even consulted at all.

The foolishness of this approach was exposed when infected by the implications of an invisible virus. Badly designed tools cracked under the strain. Systems were forced to expedient adaptations. Poor decisions, past and present, were amplified. Students and faculty were often left adrift with little idea of how to respond to these events. Many students took one look at this reality and checked out of school entirely. We learn from failure. It’s time to begin that journey back. Tomorrow, I will describe how ShapingEDU is responding to this challenge through a pair of innovation projects that will take place over the coming months.

Part II – Breaking the Closed Loop at Both Ends

Originally Published on March 9, 2021 at: https://shapingedu.asu.edu/blog/going-small-lessons-remote-instruction

One of the underappreciated side effects of the Covid pandemic has been to make everything small. Over the last year I have become much more focused on the individual stories of my students as I try to shepherd them through classes, often under very difficult circumstances. My students have lost relatives, become sick themselves, and had to deal with a host of technical issues related to remote instruction. Digital tools have provided me with an unexpected boon as they allowed me to become much more aware of their struggles and given me new opportunities to reach out to them. This ease of connection is not something I want to lose when things go back to “normal.”

Under the old paradigm students often disappeared from my class, never to be seen again. I teach at an urban community college and many of my students are clinging to the edges of higher education as best they can. Even under the best of circumstances, they are buffeted by individual crises that have nothing to do with a global pandemic. They may have shaky job situations, visa issues, or responsibilities to extended families that can suddenly rise up and overwhelm their learning journeys.The difference now is that I have a much better awareness of what’s going on in their lives and can creatively bend the course to adjust to their circumstances without compromising outcomes.

We should look to the positives and consider what lessons we can take forward into post-pandemic instruction. For instance, it is easier to interact with students one-on-one than in environments where they shuffle in and out of your classroom according to the clock, not their learning needs. During the pandemic it has been far easier to adjust class meeting times to allow for groups with similar interests to learn together and for me to tailor my facilitation around their interests. I can meet with students with almost zero friction simply by firing up a Zoom meeting. I am not subject to the vagaries of room scheduling. I detail many of these digital affordances in my book Learn at Your Own Risk.

All too often we are forced by the needs of mass education to process learners through the system like we would a car through an assembly plant. The pandemic shut down our assembly plants but it did not shut down our garages. Instead of viewing the student as a widget on an assembly line, digital time and space gives us new tools to view each student as a custom project we’re working on in our garages. Zoom can be used to broadcast to dozens of students or it can be used as a platform for small groups and individualized interactions.

By fully leveraging the communication tools I have at my disposal, something I’m not forced to do under normal circumstances, I can fine tune the funnel of information and feedback much more effectively around the needs of the individual learner. Remote learning showed us that four principles are key to individualized learning in the “new normal.”

1. Digital tools, applied strategically, will not lose their potency when we go back to in-person instruction. We should continue to leverage tools such as videoconferencing to connect with our students. They give us connections to our students that were underused prior to the pandemic. It’s one thing if you are working on a residential campus where most of your students are within walking distance of your office. It’s a totally different scenario connecting to our students on commuter campuses where no one lives and any trip to campus is just that: a trip. The pandemic has shown us that digital tools can help bridge that connection gap. Furthermore, asynchronous resources like recorded videos and repositories of written materials allow us to move a lot of instruction away from scarce times when student and teacher are in the same place at the same time, making for a far more efficient instructional structure.

2. Class size really matters and systems need to be adapted to create more antifragile learning environments. Due to the pandemic I was fortunate to have had class sizes capped at 18. This circumstance was created by CDC guidelines, not pedagogical decisions, but it allowed me to more effectively connect with small groups of students. Institutions looking to develop Communities of Practice need to consider these limits very seriously even after safety no longer requires them. While there are issues of economic viability that must of course be considered, the advantages, particularly when dealing with more challenged students, cannot be overstated. When I was responsible for 32 students per section last summer, my ability to keep up with struggling students was significantly compromised. There needs to be more study of the connection between student success and class sizes, but limited data suggests that remote classes taught constructively should be limited to no more than 23 students. Other systemic changes that should be considered are more fluid, blended learning modalities where instruction can seamlessly shift between in-person and online according to the needs of the learner.

3. Schools must prioritize ensuring students have access to the digital tools and environments they need to succeed. I am convinced that much of the drop in enrollment in community colleges was because of technical barriers faced by students. Digital communication tools require connections at both ends. That means students must have access to computing resources as well as broadband internet access. We have discovered that these are not a given. The big mistake that many colleges made was not adapting their campuses around digital access and informal interaction under safe circumstances. For instance, computer labs could have had their computers distributed throughout multiple rooms to allow for safe usage by students who needed either wi-fi access or computers themselves to do their work. Most classroom functionality can be replicated online. Infrastructure, however, represents a hard stop for far too many of our students. I am convinced that many students assessed their resources and refused to sign up for classes..

4. Physical environments need to prioritize informal learning. Students need to know that services are available for them when they come to campus. Instruction can be moved into digital realms but connection often can’t. Sometimes that means meeting rooms for small groups or faculty with small groups. Sometimes that means support personnel such as librarians, counselors, designers, or tutors. Sometimes that means technical resources as mentioned in the previous point. Either way, what we have learned from the pandemic is that individuals, particularly in a commuter college setting, really need the college to provide these resources and, as these resources became scarce during the pandemic, students will struggle if forced to compensate for the lack of them on their own.

Remote learning demonstrated the power of going small with our students. Our industrial educational systems have long emphasized the opposite as we sought to increase the reach of our institutions while holding the line on costs. Even institutions based on large, lecture-hall instruction can develop strategies for “going small.” Creating hybrid modalities that synthesize large group content delivery with individualized instruction along the lines of what Britain’s Open University pioneered, while leveraging digital affordances to overcome time and space limitations, could become a powerful combination of tools in the digital age.

It is my hope that one key element that we will take away from remote teaching a sense of possibility contained in going small. We have had a glimpse of what can be accomplished with our existing tools to bring instruction home to the individual. Our ShapingEDU projects are designed to bring the power of our own community of practice to bear on overcoming the barriers to individualized learning. The Student Voices Project is focused on assessing the needs of individuals in the educational process. The Universal Broadband initiative seeks to ensure all students have equal access to a distributed educational network. Our Black Swan Project is working toward creating antifragile systems of learning so that the burden of crises such as the pandemic does not fall upon the shoulders of struggling learners. Finally, our Teaching Toolset Triangle Project is actively exploring the suite of tools, both digital and analog, that we must fully leverage in order to execute effective learner-centric, distributed instruction to our diverse communities of learners.

All of these projects have one common element: bringing all of our tools and creative energies to bear on preparing all of our students for a lifetime almost certainly shaped by crisis. The pandemic has shown us what is possible. It’s time to get creative in how we integrate what we have learned with the best of the old to create new and better cultures of learning. It’s a cultural shift that was long overdue even before circumstances forced us to confront it.

Originally Published January 5, 2021 at https://shapingedu.asu.edu/blog/technosymbiosis

Do we shape technology or does technology shape us? At its root this question has driven much of my work over the last 30+ years. I will freely admit that I am a control freak when it comes to technology. I’m not willing to accept any technology that gets in the way of what I’m trying to do and I’m always looking for ways in which technology gives me new opportunities to explore doing new things. I have never been willing to accept technology as a set of shackles.

When people come to me asking about photographic equipment, for instance, my main piece of advice is not whether to buy Canon or Nikon but to ask themselves how they can make the camera invisible. Photography is not about equipment. It is about how to freeze what your mind and eye perceive. The camera, printing process, etc. are just mediating steps.

I make the same argument about teaching and that is core to the arguments in my book, Learn at Your Own Risk. Teaching is about the relationship between the student and the world around him or her. Technology is just a mediator of communication and thought in teaching in the same way that it is a mediator of light and thought in photography. You can break down any technologically mediated task in exactly the same way. Technology augments us. It should not constrain or replace us.

I like to think that I am unaffected by the conforming impacts of technology, that I am a free actor in this equation. However, I cannot escape the cultural and organizational systems that have been shaped by technology. This ranges from annoyances of misshapen and poorly-thought out technologies to which I have to conform, to subtle shaping of cultures. I recently read an article that suggested that Gen Xers (my generation) were better suited to pandemic isolation because our formative technologies tended to be isolating. We spent weekends playing solo video games and making mix tapes instead of engaging in social activities so we’re used to being introverts. While I might quibble with the scholarly underpinnings of this piece, it does raise some interesting points about our cultural and, by extension, generational relationships with technology.

As a systems thinker I have always found the concept of cultural paradigms quite persuasive. We are pattern shapers by biological design. It’s part of what gave us an evolutionary edge. Those that could perceive patterns in the wild survived because they perceived threats and opportunities (aka, food) where others missed them. This extends to today under the guises of norms, etiquette, and other forms of socially-constructed “proper” behavior. If you offended the king your life could be snuffed out just as easily as by the tiger you overlooked in the brush. Unlike the tiger, however, the threat of the king represents a socially-constructed pattern.

Over the last 150 years the patterns we perceive have become increasingly mediated by technology of our own construction and this has, in turn, been layered over socially-constructed paradigms. At the same time, however, that technology has also subtly undermined those paradigms. Businessmen (and most were men) replaced kings and queens as the arbiters of society due to the technologies of industrial accumulation fueled by the technologies of steam, electricity, and the shop floor.

Digital technology has often been perceived as subverting those structures. However, the paradigm of the shop floor persists in many different ways. In a series of blogs I wrote for Bryan Alexander’s book club exploring Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future I looked at how paradigms of scarcity and acquisition have subverted the logic of technology, economics, our planetary ecology, and education. The conclusion: it’s not technology but rather the systems in which it resides that are responsible for most of our dysfunction.

I consider myself a constructivist. What that means is that I believe that most of the reality that we live in is socially constructed. We have gone from nature defining human patterns to humans defining human patterns. I think one of the reasons that I am this way is because of technology itself. I was an early computer user in my teenage years. As such I perceived how computers could be used to construct new realities (indeed, with early command line systems you were basically required to do so yourself). If you can reprogram digital paradigms, why can’t you reprogram human paradigms?

Over the years I learned a lot of hard lessons about how humans are a lot more wedded to their social paradigms than computers are to theirs. Digital tools can therefore be adapted to human paradigms much more readily than the reverse. For better or worse they are more frequently used to augment systems instead of augmenting humans. Technology can be used to augment climate change (such as through fracking and subterranean imaging). Alternatively, it can be used to combat climate change through data and tools that can be used to make renewable energy efficient or through imaging tools to help us perceive the scope of the problem. Which of those we choose depends largely on whether we maintain our technologically-shaped acquisitional paradigm.

What does all of this have to do with education and The Winter Games? I have found that with all paradigms we need to strip them down to their basic functions. In prehistoric times, if  your function was to hunt, then you constructed your paradigm accordingly and developed the necessary technologies to support that. Those who did this well developed a healthy symbiotic relationship with their technologies. Those who did not, perished. This has not changed.

We therefore have two challenges. First, we have to make a paradigmatic choice about the very nature of education. Is it a vehicle for producing industrial widgets measured by grades and certification or is it a vehicle for augmenting human capacity and, by extension, the societies (and paradigms) under which those humans operate? Once we have decided on a paradigm, it’s time to strip down to the basic tasks that support those paradigms. Only then can you match the appropriate technology to your needs. On January 6, we will hack this paradigm at the Winter Games during my hackathon “Learn at Your Own Risk.” (Spoiler alert: I’m thoroughly in the augmentation paradigm.)

It’s been 39 years since I entered the Digital Age with my Apple ][+. I have sought to understand why the rest of culture didn’t follow suit ever since. There are many evils that have resulted from the abuse of technology to support paradigms of inequity. Instead of becoming our partners, machines have instead been transformed into our overlords. When only the elite has the ability to symbiotically interact with the technological system vast swathes of human potential are wasted. In prehistoric times, technological and paradigmatic inefficiency was rewarded by extinction. It is hard to conceive of all of humanity meeting that same fate (aside from the odd Vogon bypass mishap) but it is possible. Education is our best opportunity to avoid this fate, but it will fail if we let our systems dictate our technological fates instead use technology to reshape those systems into more sustainable paradigms shaped by healthy and equitable technosymbioses.

(Image Source: https://bit.ly/2FLydlv)

Originally Published September 22, 2020 at https://shapingedu.asu.edu/blog/making-our-learning-networks-antifragile

In 2020, we have seen a pandemic of cascading network failures throughout education. Systemically, Covid has attacked our networked brains as decisively as it has attacked our physical ones. Teachers struggling to reach students who are disconnected on many levels is not a new phenomenon. However, exposing that struggle to the hurdles of “remote learning” has served to accentuate the real barriers to learning: equitable access to the neural network of learning conversations that are central to every educational project.

We clearly need much more antifragile conversational networks in education. What we have here is clearly a failure to communicate. That’s not a new kind of challenge. In 1962, Paul Baran proposed a communications network characterized by “redundancy of connectivity.” He wrote:

We shall consider in some detail the synthesis of a system where the form of the disturbance or “noise” is the simultaneous destruction of many geographically separated installations. The system in particular is to be a very high-speed digital data transmission network composed of unreliable links, but which exhibits many arbitrarily desired levels of system reliability or survivability.

Six years later, Baran’s work formed a part of the conceptualization of the ARPAnet and led to the widespread controversy over whether the reason the network was designed as a distributed packet-switching network was to resist nuclear attacks. Whatever the underlying rationale, the idea of a distributed network created precisely the kind of opportunities to link together ideas envisioned by Bob Taylor at ARPA as he was assembling the project:

Three things at IPTO [The Information Processing Techniques Office] struck Taylor. First, every one of the universities and research centers that had a contract with ARPA wanted the latest computers with the most capabilities…. Second, on his travels to talk to young researchers, Taylor discovered that those in one place were intensely interested in learning about the research happening at other places. He realized that it would make sense to connect them electronically so they could share more easily. Third, Taylor was struck by the fact that there were three terminals in his Pentagon office, each with its own passwords and commands, connected to different computer centers ARPA was funding…. His need for three terminals, he said, “led to an epiphany.” All three of these problems could be solved by building a data network to connect research centers, that is, if he could implement Licklider’s dream of an Intergalactic Computer Network. 
–Isaacson, Walter. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Thus, the idea of a distributed network became fused with the idea of a “data network to connect research centers” and the idea of “robust connectivity” became irrevocably tied with connecting ideas. Thinking about networks as a data problem was not an entirely new idea and can be dated to the roots of Claude Shannon’s work on signal-to-noise issues in the 1930s and 40s (but that’s a longer story which you can start exploring here).

In education, we are fundamentally dealing with the problem of signal-to-noise as we attempt to communicate with our students. There are many levels where this occurs even in a traditional classroom setting. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard colleagues complain about students not getting a concept or even listening to simple directions that are repeatedly explained to them in class. There is the famous bon mot that “lecture represents the transmission of the professor’s notes to the student’s notes without passing through the brains of either.” I have spent decades trying to overcome signal-to-noise problems at all levels in my classes.

The Covid Pandemic has had a Black Swan-like impact on the signal-to-noise ratio of how we communicate with our students. Coupled with what I refer to as Haymes’s Law, which states “To make something digital is to make transparent all of its flaws,” the crisis revealed many cracks in our educational communications networks. Everyday signal-to-noise issues that we took for granted and managed in a myriad of different ways in-person became glaringly obvious when migrated to videoconferencing solutions and Learning Management Systems. The ability of the network of education to distribute itself was suddenly compromised by the inability of its operators (the teachers) to effectively use these tools to reach their students. As I point out in my forthcoming book Learn at Your Own Risk, it’s a lot to expect of teachers to perform in a different media than the classroom stage to which they’ve become accustomed. The results of “remote learning” over the last six months have ranged from the comic to the tragic. In either case, communication of essential information was compromised as effectively as a nuclear attack on the system nodes.

But this was not the only problem that emerged in the robustness of our networks. Many of us quickly discovered that, to quote William Gibson, “the future is not evenly distributed.” Added to the usual attention-deficit issue that many teachers confront in their classrooms was the fact that all nodes of our learning networks were clearly not equal. The barriers to entry were suddenly magnified when schools and colleges, particularly those with a mission to equitably serve underserved communities, discovered that students were suffering from significant technology and connectivity issues in being able to even access the learning conversations. Effective communication depends on both the sender and receiver being operable. When students can’t connect effectively to the conversation, it might as well not even be happening.

This year two of the ShapingEDU Innovators in Residence projects are focused on precisely these two aspects of this system. The response to Black Swan events should be to design what Nicholas Taleb (the originator of the concept) refers to as “antifragile” systems that thrive when confronted by unexpected shocks. Ruben Puentedura’s project is all about gaming out what those responses might look like across a broad range of activities that educational institutions are seeking to preserve during times of crisis.

However, without the kind of distributed and redundant network that Baran’s piece described way back in 1962, those responses become exponentially harder. Covid has made it clear that a central equity issue in American education is uneven access to the learning conversations going on. If we can’t give our students a “redundancy of connectivity” then the project of education will fail. ShapingEDU’s Universal Broadband Project therefore forms an indispensable foundation for developing antifragile systems of learning. It’s not a network if only the protected nodes are sending.

I have put considerable thought into my own course’s response to pandemic disruption. I teach Government to a community college audience and so from the very beginning I assumed a level of connectivity issues and structured my assignments and interactions accordingly. For instance, I assumed that many of my students would lack robust or reliable broadband access and so I immediately rejected all videoconferencing systems that required either high performance machines or significant connectivity to operate. I wanted students to be able to be an active participant in class even if the only reliable access they had to live sessions was using a voice telephone line. This necessarily limited their ability to see screen shares and other events but I also recorded the sessions for later review. I also gave serious consideration to the live performance aspects of class, looked for opportunities to convey information asynchronously that was more effective than live presentations, and was always sensitive that my students might have to seek out opportunities to connect at times outside of “normal” class time.

I was able, with considerable effort, to make my class relatively antifragile. However, there are still compromises in the conversation that cannot be overcome without a more distributed technical and connectivity infrastructure, which is why the work of the Universal Broadband Project is so essential. Moreover, I am a seasoned technology veteran with two decades of active exploration of the interactions between teaching, learning, and technology and almost 40 years of experience trying to bend computing technology to my will. The same is definitely not the case with the vast majority of the instructional community out there. There is clearly a need for some frank discussions about the present and future of that very human part of the network as well.

If the intersection of the two Innovation projects teaches us anything, it’s that making systems of learning antifragile is not a technology project, it is fundamentally a human project. We are not proposing high-tech here. We are proposing basic tech here. But that has to be coupled with the larger ShapingEDU mission of Humanizing Education to create truly “redundant connectivity” to enable humans to connect into conversations of learning (and this includes media literacy). The pandemic has served to remind us that that the network is people. It’s time to make it antifragile.

Originally Published on June 15, 2020 at https://shapingedu.asu.edu/blog/importance-thinking-technology-legos

In my recent ShapingEDU LIVE workshop (view the recording) I discussed the importance of mixing and matching toolsets to facilitate pedagogical outcomes. As I was constructing the presentation I couldn’t help but think back to when I was a child. One of my favorite toys was my ever-increasing pile of Legos. In those days (and I’m going to show my age here) Legos were far more generic than they became in the 80s. While newer “sets” came in ever more customized forms, the majority of my tools were the basic 1X1, 2X2, 3X2, 4X2, 6X2, and 8X2 bricks. There were also the flat ones in similar size as well as various kinds of bases to build upon. The “radical” departure from these were the sloped roof tiles and the specialized wheels. As a child (and still as an adult), I used to delight in assembling my collection into as many different forms as I could. I never ran out of combinations. I still do this today as I think about how to assemble and reassemble the technological and pedagogical Legos that I use to try to communicate skills and knowledge to my students (or help others to do the same).

Over the last three decades we have been accumulating Legos in our boxes of educational tools. For many decades we had only the most basic of sets. The instructor’s tools were pen, pencil, paper, the blackboard, and various kinds of chalk. After World War II we added overhead projectors, portable film and slide projectors, and eventually, the Scantron and the Xerox Machine. None of these materially changed the possibilities of the teaching environment from those enjoyed by Socrates.

Computers started to intrude on the classroom in very experimental spaces starting in the 1960s and by the 1970s those who sought to connect education and technology such as Ted Nelson, Seymour Papert, and Alan Kay were already pushing the boundaries of what was possible with the technology of the time. However, decades later Kay was still bemoaning the lack of imagination being employed in their usage in the schools. Truth be told, the computing technology of the 80s, while an astronomical leap in ease-of-use over the 1970s, was not always for the faint of heart and if your primary concern was teaching, not computers, there was a lot of incentive to stay with the more mature technologies involving pen and paper, chalk (or marker) and slate (or laminated chipboard).

The result of this was a fairly widespread resistance to disrupting the teaching process with computing technology. There are many developed models of resistance to technological change and how we are far more likely to adapt technology to what we are doing (think about the transition from overhead projectors to PowerPoint) than to adapt what we are doing to new technological possibilities.

This conservatism extends all the way from the classroom level to the upper echelons of college administration. Even as teachers have resisted moving their classes online, many administrations haven’t really thought through the implications of truly digital campuses and the levels of flexibility that are opened up by disconnecting the business of instruction from the business of herding thousands of students through predetermined boxes (classrooms) that, in turn, dictate predetermined schedules, sections, credit hours, grades, transcripts, etc. These are all part-and-parcel of the systems of learning that we have constructed over the last 70-100 years. In fundamental ways these have not been, with rare exception, effectively overturned by the paradigmatic implications of the technological changes that have swept through the world since the 1990s.

Enter COVID-19 and institutions are suddenly faced with a world where all of those predetermined boxes have been swept away; students and professors alike are floating in seas of uncertainty; and the future and persistence of the “new normal” is unknown. Suddenly that box of technological Legos became the focus of a host of McGyvered activities as we struggled to overcome the “broken semester.” Some of us, even those like me who have been doing this for quite some time, discovered whole new opportunities in the technology as the system was forced to bend to survive. Others, I fear (the data is still out on outcomes) either through circumstance, requirement, or a failure of imagination, saw their pedagogical strategies shattered by the dislocation.

Now, as we plan the road forward the vestiges of the pre-digital educational systems are reasserting themselves. I fear that systems that are inflexibly designed will still break in the winds of a second or third wave of the disease. Educational journeys will be derailed or, in the cases of the most vulnerable, broken forever. How do we avoid these possible outcomes? We should look back at our box of Legos as I did as a child.

Building structures from basic pieces of tools and allowing our imaginations to roam freely hold the key to assembling, in the words of Nicholas Taleb, “antifragile” systems. Antifragile systems are organizational and bureaucratic structures that actually thrive on adversity. We fail to look critically at the blocks we have at our disposal because we don’t always see “technology” broadly enough or narrowly enough. When I say “broadly” I am referring to the fact that classrooms, furniture, and the buildings themselves can be thought of as technologies. Additionally, the human systems we use to organize ourselves, the aforementioned grades, sections, credit hours, etc., are also technologies because they formed the essential tools necessary to manage a 20th century college with thousands or tens of thousands of students.

But, like my Legos, combining them with toolsets we more commonly refer to as technology — such as videoconferencing, learning management systems, collaborative work systems such as the Google suite, etc., etc. — we can start to reimagine what a classroom is and, in turn, reimagine all of the things that flowed out of the assumption that it is limited to a physical space.

That is the purpose of the survey we have launched: to start to understand at least the toolsets related to teaching and learning. On top of these structures of learning we can then start to build nimble administrative systems that are adaptable to unexpected and rapid changes in circumstances, whether those are driven by unexpected pandemics, demographically-driven drops in enrollment, or automation.

We cannot begin these tasks until we understand our basic Lego bricks for what they are. At a fundamental level a classroom was never just a physical place, because that carries with it the assumption that students stop learning when they walk out of its doors. Nothing could be further from the truth. Students have always formed their own learning spaces and if you start to conceive of the Lego, or collection of Legos, that is the “classroom” as being fundamentally where the student is, then all sorts of interesting possibilities open up. If we build our Lego constructions around the minds of our students and then work our way up to the bureaucracy necessary to transmit knowledge and achievement at scale, it becomes far easier to discard those elements of the college experience that are most impacted by the dislocations of a pandemic world. We need to get out our Lego boxes and create novel constructions based on what’s possible, not what’s impossible. Improvisation is the only way through this. It’s high time we got started.

• Watch: ShapingEDU LIVE: The Teaching Toolset Triangle Project
• Read: Learning and Innovation Tools in a Time of Crisis