(2017-07-01) Dixon Where Have All The Powerful Ideas Gone

Bruce Dixon: Where Have all the Powerful Ideas Gone?

Listening to our colleague Gary Stager’s ISTE session on the 50th anniversary of Logo, I was reminded of just how painfully incremental our adoption of computers in schools has been. I mean, half a century is a long time, far too long a time for us to still be waiting to see what computers can make possible for learners.

I mean STEM and all of its relatives, robotics, Maker, coding are now in full flight, and there were some excellent resources on show at the conference. But again, far too many were providing scripts for teachers and instructions for students, or had dumbed down the coding required so that it more closely resembled a draughts set, rather than any real programming (EduTech). Our kids, and our teachers are capable of more than that

Yes we are finally starting to reach a critical mass in terms of computer density in our schools. Millions of kids now have a computer in school, but their use and the power of the “device” they use is not about exploring powerful ideas, but rather about sustaining the Status Quo.

The low-bar loop is then completed when critics reasonably observe that not much has changed

These ‘regularities’ (Best Practices, Legibility) of school, the legacy assessment practices, the artificial subject barriers, the rigid scheduling are a dead weight to developing powerful ideas which are now possible for every child who is ubiquitously connected to our abundant world.

The “regularities” of that culture—patterns, rules, and procedures that are mostly unseen and assumed—tend to undermine the basic purposes of educating our youth.