(2010-09-20) Lanier Educational Technology

Jaron Lanier is skeptical about lots of Educational Technology. At school, Standardized Test-ing rules. Outside school, something similar happens. Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations. They are prompted to create databases about themselves and then trust algorithms to assemble streams of songs and movies and stories for their consumption (Consumer). Shared Curation is possibly the lowest level of Creativity, but it's something. The key is for parents and teachers to nudge them through curation.

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. The availability of online snippets has only made more visible the vapidity of most school paper assignments. ("What appears to be a crisis is often just the end of an illusion.")

Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship (Constructionism). Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.

Stowe Boyd thinks Jaron's arguing against Connectivism, and disagrees. I agree that there's an element of that in the essay, and agree with Stowe's thinking. I think the essay is rather muddled because it's treating a bunch of different things as the same thing, and criticizing them all.

Semi-related: Euan Semple on the foolishness of schools banning FaceBook. Yes learning what people had for breakfast - but also learning news, learning what works, learning what books are best to read, learning where to find the right bit of information... It is particularly ironic when schools ban Facebook as they are the very ones who should be teaching effective use of this technology - not keeping their pupils stuck in some industrial, factory model of learning (Factory Schooling).