Big Hairy Questions

In his presentation to us on Thursday, Dean Shareski asked us three Big Hairy Questions:

1.) If your entire class can be captured and delivered online, why should anyone come?
2.) What changes with ubiquitous access?
3.) What are we going to ask on our tests, with all students having Google in their pockets? Are they going to be better questions than we ask today?

I'd like to offer a few thoughts in response to these questions.

In response to the first question, while it is entirely possible to capture a class and deliver it online, the interactivity of the experience is diminished. This showed for me with the discussion with Dean himself, while Skype is a useful medium for many things, there is no substitute for face-to-face experience. Additionally, it is important for teachers to be able to see and directly interact with students in real time.

It's true that if your class is largely composed of lectures, you could deliver it online with fairly minimal loss. But then again, if your class in 2013 is mostly lectures, you could stay at home and catch up on Game of Thrones (the new season begins in April, can't wait) and your students wouldn't miss much for watching an empty room for an hour. This is not the 19th century and very few people have the ability to actually get a substantial amount out of a straight lecture. This is not a good or a bad thing directly, it is simply a fact. We live in a digital, interactive world. Class needs to be interactive.

What about question two? What changes with ubiquitous access? I think we need to have a stricter definition of ubiquitous access here. If it means access to technology, we're not there yet, even though it must seem so for people who teach in primarily middle-class or wealthy districts. It isn't yet realistic for school divisions to provide every student with a device (the closest are experiments in mandating devices for particular grade groups) and a large number of students don't possess devices of their own. In fact, I'd argue that it's not appropriate for young children to have their own personal devices in any case.

But were we to achieve it, what would change? I think there would have to be a very serious effort to shape a classroom culture where appropriate technology use is encouraged and inappropriate use discouraged- not just by teachers but by students themselves. I think it also requires, though, a sense of proportion in classroom management- the student who traditionally zoned out by sitting with their head down might be playing Candy Crush today. It's not a positive behaviour, but if they're not being disruptive, is it really any worse? And could it be a symptom of insufficiently engaging instruction on the part of the teacher more than any fault of the student?

It would become more and more difficult to convince students of the benefit of learning a lot of the 'by hand' skills, such as handwriting (print or cursive), mental mathematics and learning any sort of content by memory. We've become essentially a 'flashdrive' rather than a 'hard drive' culture- we keep most of our memory in external sources. Memory is much like a muscle, the failure to use it can result in a loss of ability. It's worth remembering that in traditional Muslim societies, imams memorize the entire Quran by heart and that illiterate hunter-gatherers in Papua New Guinea can memorize and distinguish between thousands of different plant types. Memory is a powerful thing. Convincing students of its value will be harder and harder in the future, though. It already is.

The third question ties into the memory question somewhat. In some subjects, it is completely appropriate to occasionally mandate that all devices be off and students rely on their memory and learned skills. In mathematics, it is imperative that students have an idea of how to do things in their head, if for no other reason, than to recognize an input error when they use a calculator in future life. Memorization gets a bad rap in our culture, but it's necessary for some things. 

Another element is the ability to take data and make meaningful context out of it. In a history test, should I decide to have one, I might not be overly concerned about whether students have memorized dates and places, but I want them to be able to create a context or a narrative for historical events. If we are doing a unit on human rights and social development, I'm not particularly worried if they've memorized which countries have the death penalty and which countries have not, I'm far more interested in their ability to integrate knowledge into a worldview. It is certainly possible, of course, to plagarize if students have access to technology. But teachers have a pretty good sense of what students 'sound' like in their writing after a few months, and if they are suspicious, they can always Google material from a test and see what comes up.

The third and final question in this vein is about the necessity of tests at all. I think tests are useful in some contexts- especially in subjects like math, but product-based learning is a far more substantial means of achieving engagement than tests. Most students who do well on tests are only demonstrating strategic compliance at best. Tests are not engaging. I'm not saying we should never have tests, but I'm saying that they should not be the mainstay of assessment in any subject today.

It's certainly a lot of material to think about, and I'll keep it in mind as I move on into active practice. For now, however, I'll huddle desperately for warmth and go read some other people's blogs.

Kris