Thinking Creatively About Education 2.0

We are persistently inundated with talk of what ‘dangers’ face students. To alleviate these risks, administrators typically attempt to make students ’safe’ by reducing the likelihood of them coming into contact with known dangers. In Canada, this has recently meant that students in Abbotsford have to (once again) get ready for random drug searches, where dogs will be brought into schools to sniff out contraband. In the UK, GPS is being rolled out to students in a trial project to cut down on ‘roudiness’. The money quote from the transport manager who is behind the GPS scheme:

I have to say in north east Wales we don’t really see trouble and misbehaviour, but in the afternoon some of the pupils can be jolly and minor anti-social behaviour can occur, or from time to time something more serious. (Source)

In the examples of the Canada and the UK, it is the potential of a danger that is leading administrators to strip away expectations of privacy that students might dream of. What are the consequences of such actions?

Overzealous parents will say that “this will keep Johnny safe, so it’s OK.” This is the kind of parental statement that we’re familiar with, and is brought out whenever a new security measure is brought out. We routinely hear that schools are dangerous, children are vulnerable, and we need to secure our students in their learning environments. I can appreciate the desire to shield one’s child, but it must be recognized that stripping away students’ privacy has very long-term, very real, social consequences.

While Johnny might be ’secured’ from the dangers of marijuana in high school as a result of random drug searches, what does teaching students that they cannot expect privacy do to legal interpretations of ‘reasonable expectations of privacy?’ What happens in twenty years when, having ‘taught’ students that they have no reasonable expectation of privacy (even, in some cases, in their own home as is seen in cyber-bullying literature), a jury is asked to decide on a case involving reasonable expectations of privacy? When you grow up with an understanding that you shouldn’t enjoy rights to privacy, it can be incredibly challenging to sympathize with a case that hangs on whether or not something should be seen as ‘private’.

Would a contemporary parent want to be subject to random drug searches? Would they feel like it was legitimate for the local government to monitor their movements using GPS whenever they use public transit? I would presume that the answer to both these questions would, generally, be ‘no’.

Some efforts to shield children/students from harm makes sense, but those efforts need to be thought of in a larger framework. Educators pride themselves on having lasting impacts on students; does the current generation of educators and administrators want to be known as the generation that put reasonable expectations of privacy on the ropes?

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Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica has recently published an article that asks: “when every student has a laptop, why run computer labs?” The gist of the argument is that since freshmen/women are increasingly arriving on campus with their own computers, it makes sense to find alternate ways of licensing/streaming software and close computer labs. This will have major savings, which is important in even tougher economic times for universities. I’ve sat in a fair number of meetings/talks where this issue came up and (as someone who ran more than half a dozen of these ‘dino labs’) each time I disagreed with the idea that school labs should be closed.

Here is the problem with first year ownership (and other years, as well): their owners can’t be trusted to secure and maintain their own computers. They can’t be trusted to keep their machines in good working order, or even know what good working order looks like. They can’t be expected to absorb external tech costs so that they can bring their notebooks to class. Unless your university has a standing rule that all incoming students must purchase a notebook and the university is willing to support the technical problems with those notebooks without increasing total cost of ownership to the students, the school should not close its computer labs.

Labs contain standard software sets, should retain a common drive image that is reset after every use, and are well maintained (in theory). Lab techs make sure that all computers are operational, and are on call to assist instructors/students with computer difficulties. As soon as you just provide empty desks with power jacks, the number of possible problems that a student could be having increases exponentially. When I know that every computer in the lab is the same, that I’ve been the one that set up each one, I have a real idea of what kinds of problems I might be looking at. Introduce dozes of different brands and computer types into the equation, and a 5 minute fix could turn into an “I just can’t help you”. This latter response is not one that a student should ever hear when they are adhering to school rules.

This might sound as though I’m being a bit snobby, but it’s grounded in a lot of years of experience. It’s also not meant to say that students (or faculty, or staff….) aren’t good to their computers, just that it isn’t their job to keep computers running, and IT staff can’t be (reasonably) expected to start serving thousands of students’ personal computers.

Should computer labs continue? Yes. The question is how should they be realized; maybe the ‘lab’ becomes notebooks that are handed out at the beginning of a class, with students being given the option to use their own computer in the stead of a university provided one for a lab (a notebook that is minimally supported by campus IT). Given that libraries are increasingly providing computers on loan, this seems like a reasonable solution that would take advantage of already-in-place infrastructure – economies of scale could be drawn on to facilitate a new model of computer labs, but without removing computer labs from the equation entirely.

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Just an FYI to anyone who is in post-secondary education at a graduate level or higher: you really should think about adding the FemaleScienceProfessor to your feed list. Even if you’re not in science (and I’m not!), her insights are brilliant, often funny, and typically insightful. She renders academia transparent, all while maintaining semi-anonymity *grin*

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In many ways, I think that I was incredibly lucky to be “free” of public education when I was. I’ve been blogging for almost a decade now (wow…no clue that it had been that long!), and deeply immersed in digital environments for the lion’s share of my life. I am one of the people that has thrown myself into all kinds of stupid situations (e.g. blogging things I shouldn’t have, making comments in online forums, etc) before they were popularly recognized as being stupid. I learn by doing, and as a result I’ve learned an awful lot. *grin*

Were I in my teenage years now, however, I wonder what learning experiences I would have thrown myself into, and what thoughts and expressions I would have had to mask – what wouldn’t I have been willing to sign my name to, for fear of the repercussions? Save for a few cases, I tend to associate my name with what I write because I think that when you say things, especially controversial things, associating your own name with the actions demonstrates a level of engagement and responsibility that is important for serious discourse. In the US, however, were I to blog about relationships, my experiences in high school classrooms, and some of the flat out conflicts that I had with public school administrations, I could be punished, even if I was expressing myself out of class, or school property. The statement that American schools are making: shut up, don’t express yourself, or there will be problems.

What happens when you create an ‘educational space’, where speaking of the politics of education might have you ejected from that space altogether? What happens when students ‘realize’ that they need to be quiet, get their education, and not think about how that educational space is their own? In effect: what happens when you establish a 19th century educating environment, in a time where distance, asynchronous education is increasingly seen as central to the educating process?How can you impose the past, on the present, without depleting the school’s potential for authentic intellectual transformation?

For Canadian educators, are there parallels in Canadian public institutions? Do students in Canada face chilling speech, as their American counterparts do?

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In a classroom, I’ve always seen the role of the ‘teacher’ or ‘professor’ as one of facilitation – the aim of these individuals is to invoke imagination, creativity, and to guide the direction of discourse so that it remains in line with the theme of the day/lesson. This isn’t to mean that they are simply there to let a classroom talk – depending on their situation a significant degree of lecturing can take place. This lecturing, however, needs to be sensitized so that those who are involved in the learning process are both able to interject, feel as though interjection is permissible, and are encouraged to think for themselves so that interjections can be, well, interesting!

An issue arises, however, when an esteemed teacher/educator enters a room with the understanding that they know more than the combined students that they are standing/sitting before. A real danger is that, in expressing their positions both emphatically and without substantive reasoning, that the students in the class are forced into a role of ‘learning from the master’ – they are not encouraged to interject, to question, or to play. When speaking with absolute authority, the instructor can enforce biases within the student body by ‘teaching’ that statements are as good as explanations – they can undermine the communicative possibilities of the classroom through the dissuasion that conversation and rational discourse belongs in the classroom itself. This is particularly troubling in higher education, where classrooms are expected to transform into spaces of collaborative learning; in injecting authoritarian force into this space the space itself is warped, if the principles of the learning environment aren’t actually undermined in their entirety.

What is especially troubling is that students are realizing, though the tools that they use in the course of their daily live, that engagement is central to being, that being social is a core facet of Being-with-others. Classrooms that remove the ’social’ from the learning experience only reveal the academy as archaic and problematic – it becomes a place of ‘old’ learning, and given that progress is (however problematically) associated with goodness it suggests that academic learning is ‘bad’, or at least ‘outmoded’. Moreover, students aren’t stupid – when forced into a space of ‘learning’ that lacks the characteristics of a discursive learning environment they instrumentalize their being there, and in so doing recognize the classroom as a place of work, rather than one of personal development and education. Educators need to realize, and integrate into their teaching, the same professional courtesies to their students as they (ought to) give to one another, and facilitate learning environments where discourse is possible and permitted, and thus avoid blanket statements backed up by solely by authority and devoid of reasoning (as we all know, arguments from authority are logical fallacies anyways…). Failure to encourage and welcome discourse risks transforming educations into the same kinds of ideologues as the politicians they are so found of ridiculing, something that few educators would (publicly?) welcome.