The symbiosis between education reform and the integration of technology into learning is profound: technology requires the rich learning environments envisioned by reformers; reform demands the power of technology to put people at the center of their own learning. Systemic adoption of reform will take a critical mass of educators, who must await the realization of the promises of technology to transcend isolation and join in collaborative professional growth.
We who are concerned about the future and direction of education face a scalability problem: reform requires these educators to rise to the level of performance typically encountered in master teachers. This realization can invoke a sensation of paralysis. The resulting inertia mirrors the way that fear of technology prevents many of our peers from having the experiences which would enable them to embrace, then direct, the potentials that technology-savvy educators rhapsodize about.
While observable models of the new practices and paradigms are still in the discovery stage, an example from the arts may illuminate the types of changes that will be required, as well as the unexpected means by which large-scale transformation can occur. To extrapolate these lessons, we need to examine one of the cultural high points of the industrial revolution, the emergence of the symphony orchestra, and compare it with the 20th-century equivalent of classical music: jazz. Please bear with me for a couple paragraphs . . .
These two beautiful forms of music each have evolved in vastly different environments. In each, practitioners dedicate their lives to achieve levels of performance unimaginable by the general population, with the sole possible exception of sports heroes. For each form, audiences need to be cultivated, as well, placing limits on the general acceptance of the practice. Some important philosophical and historical differences can serve to underscore the implications for learning, however.
In what most people consider as "classical" music, the names of great soloists come to mind. Perlman, Heifitz, Stern, Midori evoke the violin. It's a safe bet no one reading these words can name any third violinist in any orchestra who is not a neighbor or relative. Neither can most people name any jazz artist, but all perform at a level of mastery that would place them in the soloist ranks of any orchestra, if they worked in that musical genre. The most reliable testimony we have about the relative difficulty of genres comes from Wynton Marsalis, who described classical music as "the mountain" and, having scaled it, said he found it to be far less demanding than honing the jazz facets of his talent. If every musician you hear on any jazz record has attained a soloist level of mastery, a question remains: how is this possible? Let's look at the roots.
Before the industrial revolution, chamber music was the norm, with small groups of musicians working collaboratively (without a conductor) to bring to life scores that often required more extensive elaboration and improvisation than is commonly realized. Figured bass, for example, demanded that the keyboardist "realize," or create, the harmony at the moment of performance, in response to the often contrapuntal lines of melodies between the other instruments.
The requirements of the industrial revolution to develop large-scale organizations that functioned with machinelike precision (like post offices and factories) also found expression in the growth of the symphony orchestra. Groups now grew from little over a dozen musicians, the chamber orchestra size, to over 100. Blending tone quality in groups of such size required elimination of individuality to create an identical, "desired" sound for each instrument section, so that each player melded, becoming part of the "instrument" played by the conductor: the orchestra itself. Much like the factory manager, all decisions flowed from this ultimate authority. The score and the conductor started to become more important than the musicians.
Conservatories, needing to turn out sufficient numbers of highly skilled players, sometimes emphasized the qualities that would prepare their graduates for orchestral careers. The occasional "gifted" student of course would be noticed and nurtured as a soloist, but most frequently these gifts were in evidence in childhood, long before entry into the conservatory model of professional development.
Most teachers have experienced the pedagogical equivalent of the conservatory model in learning their craft. More about that later.
The roots of jazz are decidedly antithetical to the industrial, conservatory model. Building on thousands of years of African improvisational practice, integrated into the cultural life of the community, jazz emerged in New Orleans at a time when the ideal of an individual expressing personal truths in context of a collaborative group was well established. The entire point was for each player to make personal statements, either through taking turns soloing or making conversational comments in response to the current soloist. Mastery was achieved though mentorship, with apprentices listening to live music at the foot of the bandstand, spending long hours in "the woodshed" practicing in pursuit of an original "voice" far away from audience ears, and finally internalizing the literature of compositions and solos from a legacy of innovators sufficiently to make original contributions in performance. There were no conservatories or schools that supported this process. Rather, it was an entire community of musicians, working in the now legendary settings that ranged from bars and brothels to concert halls and Carnegie Hall, from bus tours of the South to the radio studios of Europe and world tours, all the while eluding in America the respect that flowed so easily outside our borders (but that's another story).
Musicians of every instrument and voice rose to the highest standard simply because it is one of the most rewarding experiences in life to play at that level. Each wave of new musicians embraced what had come before, rebelled against limitations, and went on to raise the bar for the next group to come. The fact that the level of skill and intricacy of practice left audiences behind at times has contributed to the difficulty in attracting large audiences: this phenomenon is the same for "classical" music as for jazz, which both command less than 10 percent of the music-buying public.
In our case, these lessons center on providing teachers with the contexts and experiences required to place themselves at the center of their own growth. We know that inquiry-driven projects engage learners more fully and result in deeper learning than traditional, preordained, curriculum-directed methods. We know that students of today will be called upon to perform tasks that will require deft use of technology. Making meaning from immense sources of data, crafting communications into convincing forms according to audience (text, multimedia, or network-based hypertext), and knowing how to conduct "just-in-time" research in a high-speed, global, digital environment are some talents that are easy to imagine having great value to successful people before very long. This is as different from most current learning environments as Miles Davis is from Lawrence Welk.
The time it takes for emergent technologies to be embraced within the workplace is continually decreasing. People may remember that "the year of the network" has been prematurely proclaimed annually since the introduction of the 80286 IBM AT in 1984; meanwhile, from 1992 to 1994 the Internet went from jargon of the computer science department to the front page of most media. Yet the lag between technologies that are incorporated into use within our business/cultural environments and those that are used in schools as tools for learning seems to increase. How can teachers model what they themselves haven't learned? When will teachers get the time to learn these skills? The existing models ("train the trainer," after-school workshop, in-service day, seminar, workshop series, regional and national conferences) are inadequate to meet the challenge of upgrading the skills of 2.2 million teachers seeking to educate themselves to be fully qualified "cybercitizens." These are the challenges facing the new "conservatories" we need to build.
Nurturing the efforts of teachers who desire to undertake self-directed professional development is a grand challenge. We already know that traditional delivery systems come up short when the measure is whether the topics of workshops, in-service sessions, and conferences have resulted in substantive change to everyday practice. We also know that extended face-to-face mentorship is difficult to schedule and prohibitively costly to pay for.
What we haven't tried yet is a blending of face-to-face meetings, to discuss agendas that have been thoughtfully discussed online for weeks in preparation for the meeting, followed by action teams supporting one another in implementing decisions taken on options devised during the meeting. Some permutation of this Preparation Gathering Acting Reflecting process is likely to hold a key to discovering a paradigm for large numbers of people to work collaboratively in small groups, and make important advances in what can be achieved in their local situations.
When people embrace the concept of lifelong learning, will it signify increased enrollments in adult schools, or will networking technologies liberate the location of learning, extending it to any time and place where people who would know something interact with someone who can mentor the desired skills?
The promise of online professional development is emerging from concept to reality, propelled by such questions. Already we see the beginnings of an international revolution, motivated by the vision of free-flowing knowledge, people taking responsibility for their own learning, and grand-scale collaborations that embrace the innovations of networking, enabling us to exchange new types of communications and experiences to build human and informational resources that address common problems in a spirit of community. Let's examine these fledgling efforts, from a point of view of what will soon be possible for large numbers of people.
Anyone who's been around the Internet for a while is rightfully reluctant to predict how it will unfold or when the next breakthrough will come. No one predicted the rapidity of growth in numbers of users and power of the applications that we now experience; it is safe to say, however, that whatever is being tested will soon be at hand. Another safe prediction is that at some point in the not too distant future, access will recede as the most challenging problem, much the same as TV became ubiquitous once the broadcast/sponsor model was understood in relationship to modern marketing.
What this means to you and me and our mutual interest in lifelong learning is that soon after access to advanced networking becomes commonplace, learning will be liberated from locality, and anyone so motivated will be able to take responsibility for placing themselves at the center of their own learning. Just as jazz musicians had to do.
Are we prepared to face this challenge as professionals? Not yet! No one has successfully modeled the skills or relationships required to organize the grand-scale collaborations that will be needed to make this fly. But many of us are fully engaged in discovery of the laws of aerodynamics for this new kind of flight.
Before the Wright brothers, the physics of aviation were not understood, largely because there was neither the context to pursue nor the need to achieve full understanding. Within the factory model of education, there is a similar lack of relevance for the new models for teaching and learning that a technology-rich environment will require. Rather than risking exploration of a paradigm that is at best embryonic, it is no surprise that the schools of education responsible for preparing new teachers, as well as the staff developers responsible for informing existing professionals, perpetuate the old model.
In the past, it seemed acceptable to produce "cookie cutter" teachers, who would be provided with an adequate curriculum to produce adequate results for many people. It was also OK to let nature provide a statistically small number of "master teachers"; these days, reform relies on each teacher coming closer to the behaviors previously found only in our most gifted educators. Clearly we can't mass produce master teachers from the factory production models; we can, however, grow them one at a time, and in far greater numbers than anyone imagined.
So the question awaits us: how do we move from familiar models to construct new modes that will deliver us to unexplored environments for learning?
The answer is simple: by experiencing for ourselves that which we desire for our students.
I said simple, not easy. Perhaps a flight of imagination to the future can illuminate the dimensions of our playing field.
In this situation, it helps to adopt Duke Ellington's method: one writes arrangements for who's in the band. In other words, I have to identify the strengths of the people I'm working with and showcase these strengths, rather than trying to get them to play what in my imagination would seem to be good music. This means delving into some deep individualization.
In this mixed bag of attitudes and experiences, I'm working to get my students as prepared as possible to take responsibility for their learning for the rest of their lives. In this context, pleasing their teachers is like pleasing the boss; it's part of getting the job done, but the experience of doing the work adds skills that students will take with them to the next job, and the next, and the next. Getting the students to own their process, while getting the teachers to get out of the way by pointing the way instead of leading the way, is a delicate zenlike balance. If I had to do it all by myself, I'd go mad. Thank goodness I've got my friends and family. They may not be who you'd think.
Some of my best friends are robots, or should I more properly say "knowbots." Long ago, my e-mail traffic hit the thousands per week, far beyond my ability to keep, track, or remember the source or present residence of that gem of an insight I recall from last year's messages. Fortunately, the advent of interactive relational databases, linked with content analyzers that track items I've found to be useful, provides a way for me to retrieve messages, references, and Internet sites from any number of flexible means of searching. The psychological researchers who teamed with artificial intelligence systems developers and neural network designers devised a means of profiling my "habits of thought," using my reflections on materials I'd found useful in particular contexts.
Of course they didn't just do this for me. Much as the handwriting recognition from the original Personal Digital Assistants could be taught to interpret an individual's handwriting (this was a big deal before speech recognition became widespread), anyone who uses these "relevance tools" for a year or so provides enough reference points for these "knowbots" to be able to predict your taste in videos, Broadway shows, or restaurants. As usual, the commercial application creates the cash flow that motivates invention.
But the true power of these tools came when we applied them to the informal groups we'd always tended to form on the Internet. It used to be that people self-selected the virtual neighborhoods they'd hang out in, by means of the listservs they'd subscribe to, the newsgroups they'd read, and the WWW sites they'd visit. If a group got out of hand with flaming or off-topic threads, a lack of stimulating discussion, or domination by a handful of people in love with the sight of their own words, the answer was easy: unsubscribe! Like nomads, people would gravitate to fertile fields, following the stimulation of working community. (This behavior can be traced back to the early days of jam sessions at Mintons' in Harlem, at the birth of the bebop revolution.)
The "knowbots" of course could handle cross-referencing the commonalities of interest between people willing to share their "relevance hotlists" and could index the threads of e-mail and newsgroup postings; they could also evaluate WWW sites and generate filtered lists of resources (informational as well as human) that we would likely find interesting. These folks form my "ad hoc families" of interest.
The result is incredible. When I'm facing a problem or challenge, I can still post a question to my current favorite discussion groups, but the posting sets into motion a search of the archives that the people following these discussions have found useful over the past years.
Any answers that people provide as replies come with links to these materials, and it's as though I've got the personal libraries of the best minds available for me to apply to the situation. I now have a way to respond to the individual needs of both the teachers I work with and their students. As they build up "history" with the system through their own explorations, our collective knowledge base grows deeper and wider.
Even more amazing is how quickly we can get results. Most of the time, we gather for project-oriented collaborations of two to four weeks. With focused questions, that's all the time it takes to get a discussion moving, have people suggest approaches, try them out, and refine a solution to apply back in "real life." Some of these projects can take on a life of their own and renew themselves over several cycles, but mostly it's working at Netspeed.
Face-to-face is still important for anchoring our knowing on a personal basis the people who form such an important part of our mental and emotional "virtual" landscape. It has been reported for years that when folks who've only known each other via their e-mail postings finally meet, face-to-face, it's as though they'd known each other for years. Yes, their appearance, sound of their voice, mannerisms are all a surprise, but the "who" that's there at a deep level is already understood, often at a deep level. Videoconferencing has not replaced the importance of these first meetings, but subsequent encounters over the network are unexplainably more effective than one would expect, for folks who've been working online and have already met at least once.
We discuss the obstacles we encounter. Are they based in faulty understanding of the essential nature of the questions we're posing? Are they the result of a lack of tools, or a required redesign of tools we're using?
We develop new approaches based on student performance. Provided with a vast base of experience, from the many classes working in similar directions, our reflections on the approaches we've chosen yields a rich source for insights into the effectiveness of the practices we're implementing. This shared space for reflection is something teachers have never before had.
We work with tool developers to extend the capabilities afforded us by the technology. Since good tools get used, and use generates income, the mechanics of the market have led to productive relationships between effective technology users and technology designers. By finding out what works to grow the mastery of creating effective learning environments, we are helping people teach like "master teachers" and rewarding them accordingly.
With visions of cybercash finding its way to reward excellent teachers, I realize this must still be a dream . . . back to reality!
Over the past year, informal discussions among many people who've been tirelessly exploring the possibilities of networking to assist learning resulted in the creation of the Online Internet Institute. The discussion actually began with a conversation I had with Bonnie Bracey about how bebop had propagated itself despite problems created by World War II, a recording ban, and the sheer difficulty presented in trying to master a new language as it was being invented. It was the opportunity for players to interact with the innovators, as they toured across the country, that passed the flame from community to community. We wondered if a similar "summer tour" by Internet-using education innovators could do the same thing for large numbers of teachers. Our dream soon moved from face-to-face conversation to online collaborative dreaming via e-mail, and attracted some of the leaders of the telecommunications in education movement (on an e-mail list provided by Research for Better Schools, called "sweetblues," naturally).
Rather than being yet another "project" for people to join, our intent is to create a place or "virtual infrastructure" where people can go to get their work done. This "caravanserai" supports people in designing learning experiences that take advantage of the full potentials of the Internet and its successors. Housed on an Internet Server loaned to the project by BBN, our infrastructure includes both traditional WWW pages, as well as other innovative capabilities provided by our partners. Initially conceived as a summer project to prepare teachers to return to their classrooms fully equipped to transform their learning environments, the project has garnered sufficient support from the National Science Foundation to evolve to a year-round activity.
You can get a more comprehensive picture of the project, the personalities who are shaping its growth, and the initial results of several hundred educators who "walked the talk" this summer by visiting the OII home page at http://prism.prs.k12.nj.us/WWW/OII/OIIhome.html.
As you'd expect with any pilot effort, there have been ups and downs, both of which have provided insights. The New Mexico participants faced tough connectivity challenges and dispersal over a wide geographic area. They responded by creating "OII-New Mexico Style," a permutation on our model's week-long face-to-face sessions as a precursor to online collaborations. Instead, New Mexico style brought people together for three days at a hotel, where the daytime sessions continued into the night with technically advanced people traveling from hotel room to hotel room configuring computer systems and modems and testing them by dialing out through the hotel switchboard! Then, people returned to their corners of the Land of Enchantment and worked online for a month.
At the end of this time, another two-day face-to-face was held in another part of the state, and the depth of questions markedly increased, as did the collegiality among people who now related to one another through both virtual and "real" social interactions. Another set of sessions (this time it was Integrating the Internet into the Curriculum) provided focus for both the face-to-face and the month of online follow-up.
The third month, the face-to-face centered on HTML, enabling each person to share what they were creating, as well as get their students into WWW publishing. The fruits of this labor are now blossoming on their WWW site (which you can access from the OII home page, previously noted).
One of the lessons we've taken very seriously is that there is a hierarchy of needs reminiscent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Actualization. People with connectivity problems are not in a position to partake of the wonderful, etheric considerations of reform; they'd just like to be able to get their e-mail and visit some WWW sites! We have used this medium to pursue solutions to these problems at the state, regional, national, and local levels. You have to deal with the blues before you can get to jazz, after all.
Finding information confounds most Internet users. Janet Murray, a library media specialist and leader of the K12Net movement, took up the challenge, making it the central focus of her group in Oregon. Their results have been published on the WWW, on their page called "Searching the 'Net," which guides learners through the concept development and logical strategies required to bring back the information they're looking for from the vast resources of the Internet. You can see it at http://arlo.wilsonhs.pps.k12.or.us/search.html.
Many Internet-using teachers are faced with the challenge of trying to explain it all to their peers and students. In response to this challenge, Art Wolinsky and Susan Myers in New Jersey collaborated at a distance to create Team-Web's Movable Feast: a Downloadable, Customizable Internet Course. Just go to http://dune.srhs.k12.nj.us/www/contents.htm and get yourself a copy.
Celia Einhorn's group, Technology-Based Emergent Literacy, takes a different tack, using the Internet to find, share, and discuss the latest research on this vital topic. Her group is active and insightful, and the e-mail traffic from the group is archived as WWW pages, thanks to BBN Educational networks' installation of the HyperMail system on the BBN Internet Server they loaned to the project. You can view the discussions at http://oii.org/cgi/ubb/Ultimate.cgi
People need:
Others are still under development. Jason Ravitz, a graduate student interning at BBN this summer, developed code for a WWW page that collects evaluations of WWW education-related resources and can feed the information back to the page designer, as well as into a searchable, interactive database. Keep watching the OII home page as it becomes operational.
Other features await further development and experimentation. We've already had some success with CuSee-Me videoconferencing on the Internet, thanks to Yvonne Marie-Andres of the Global SchoolNet Foundation. Our initial coordination between Princeton, New Jersey, and the New Mexico face-to-face sessions were made possible when Yvonne provided us with a reflector site. We anticipate this method will become a mainstay for mentors who need to coordinate between groups.
In a global environment, the rules change. There's always somebody online who knows what you need to know, it just may not be when you're awake! Asynchronous communications introduced the "cobblers' elves" phenomenon in the early days of the Internet: post a question before you go to bed, and by the time you're at work the next morning, often the answer has magically appeared in your mailbox. We employ these asynchronous methods as well, which are much enhanced by the HyperMail capabilities described earlier. Viewed as WWW pages, e-mail messages are sortable by author, date, or thread, providing more flexibility than real-time IRC sessions or simple e-mail (it is electronic messaging's equivalent of multitrack recording).
How quickly can change proceed? Sometimes movement seems glacial. Perhaps the fulcrum of change is the role of the individual, and the interplay of those dynamics upon the systems in which we operate. In "classical" music, quality is often conferred by outside critics and impresarios; in jazz, credibility comes from peers, through a more informal process. Jazz musicians are intimately aware that their art form is not pure chaos, but is instead governed by rules, techniques, and traditions that are continually undergoing a process of reinterpretation and discovery. Ultimately, within these parameters, it is still peers who determine practice, and it is a community that regulates, rather than the score and the critics.
In the past century, little has changed in American classroom practice; the same timespan defines the worksong and modern jazz as "before" and "after." Perhaps if we in the world of education knew the "rules" at play in the classroom, in the same way that jazz musicians know the invisible architectures upon which their art depends, reform would have progressed at a similar revolutionary pace. The new "conservatories" that are forming online may provide a means to such transformations.
We will need time using this coordinated suite of capabilities to discover what works, or what changes would be needed to make things function more closely to what our human needs require. We're not about fitting our needs into technology; rather we see technology more like a nautilus shell, breaking through the walls as needed, as we spiral out to bigger and better things!
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Last modified May 1, 1996 (gls).