The Consumerization of Learning

Chapter 8
Culture Clash

There are many factors in our culture supporting a deeper digital transition. Some of these factors are unavoidable and have already been discussed. Others are real clash points, overlooked by educators as they strive to manage the shift to digital education. We’ll examine some of these potential pitfalls in the following paragraphs. Some of what I’ll point out here is generational, where older people have been brought up with a different way of learning than is potential now. The digitally integrated generation of Millennials is typically expecting that their children have increasingly sophisticated digital experiences.

Hoarding Is Out, Sharing Is In

Old-schoolers have used the control of data for power in the past, and some of that does still go on, but new-schoolers share everything. In the past, almost exclusively, managers got to be man- agers because they knew more, having accrued more practical knowledge and having greater skill, and not just because they were in place longer. As the information age came about, managers often achieved their place or held their place because they were at the center of a web of information and used it to their advantage. Each of their direct reports gave them information that was not necessarily shared with others. Whole industries have relied on information being fairly non-liquid and the secrecy or hoarding of it to be power. To know something someone else didn’t was power.

Today, except for certain financial and national security interests, it is socially unacceptable to leave everyone in the dark. To lead effectively is to be a consummate sharer-of-plans, to give every- one a “vision statement” and constantly update it,and keep everyone in the loop. Today’s staff in almost any organization will quit if they don’t know what’s going on because they like the feeling of being part of something larger, not just a cog in the great machine. At least on the sur- face, this factor of sharing information makes the management “acceptable.” As one example of this culturally, after the two World Wars, Germany’s Reichstag Dome in Berlin was built generally in form a lot like all American State Capitol building domes but made of glass to signify a new transparency to government. This is what people want – a free and open view.

People, and especially teachers, can no longer gain credibility merely by knowing more. That is old school. Data is findable everywhere in the open ocean of the Internet. Therefore, the usual credibility traded on for higher salaries and greater position by teachers, the “cred” of knowing more, is a nearly dead currency. It is even considered with disdain by many youth. It can barely be traded on socially, and long-term workers in every other field learned that the hard way during the recession, when masses of people were laid off only to be replaced by much younger workers or no workers at all.

The “cred” today is the exact opposite of previous generations. Instead of hoarding, they want to be the first to share and share it with as many people as they can.

How you share it matters too. Is there entertainment value? What platform was used?   The implications for this across our culture are immense. It is a veritable reversal in our politics and culture, because the new generations are sharing way more than information – they are sharing emotion. What’s interesting is that new generations appear to be applying emotion into a larger domain, the Internet. Emotion is used to be understood only internally to ourselves or shared intimately with spouses or family or best friends.

While there are still issues of isolated individuals, the preponderance have moved into an always-on and always-connected humankind membership. It is a first in history, and it is a gross understatement to say that a regimented uniformity to education can survive in this culture of sharing. I would go so far as to say that it wouldn’t survive, because society’s expo- sure to far more ideas and each other is reaching an entirely different realm.

This is also part of the answer to how a teacher uses what they know. It is still valuable, but it’s in how you share it technologically and provide room for emotion.

The Social Media Substitution

In the past, family units were depicted as having communal time of discussion. Many times this was shown as a gathering around the dinner table, a tableau that seems increasingly rare.

The new reality is meals on the run, in front of the television, the computer screen, or worse, in our cars. In restaurants, you can observe whole families temporarily absorbed into their smartphones rather than talking to each other every instant.  In many instances they are individually enjoying a wider social discourse while also being with their families. They are not so “individual” as before. The facts of the meteoric rise in online community, particularly among the young, are also proof enough that the Westernized development of individualism had potentially hindered a basic instinct that is now pushing its way to the front. It could be argued that the weakening of the family unit through an idealized enforced separation into individual husband-wife-children units of family physically “cubicle-ized” into individual dwellings instead of tribes or villages has begotten an urgency amongst people for substitution.

This is not a position as to the long-term survival value of that substitution. I am simply noting the fact that youth are filling the void of family and inclusion with something, anything, to be their “group.” They’ve of course been doing this forever and it’s strengthened with the advent of the Internet. The positive thing about new online communities is that they could create a sort of culture of positivity that may be lacking in homes. It is true that in many areas the sense of com- munity created by a school environment has successfully bonded children with teacher out- siders. This has given children a new place for belonging outside the family. Sometimes this relationship outside the family could be considered important. In times past it was considered that modern education had a function, if left unsaid, to bond the individual as a citizen to a larger collective – to create an allegiance beyond family. Schools have helped build this broaden belongingness with such things as the rites of attendance (schools, sports teams, clubs, and military) and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which echo religious rites.

This is very un-modern in the context of the Internet – it is an old social pattern that is still running in institutions that engineer and contrive all sorts of family dynamic substitutions. The fact that students are reputedly leaving Facebook in droves precisely because teachers and adults are getting onto it shows that any emotional sup- port substitution desired is not the one that can be delivered by institutions through teachers.

The school-as-social-engineer has been disproven as an equity enabler since the 1960s3, when major studies revealed that it is really the outside cul- tural setting that matters the most in educational achievement and student drive. Social media now has the capacity to form an individual custom-created support for students, a substitution that is already working on a massive scale.

Consumerized learning on top of that allows a self-navigation that may or may not break with the culture surrounding that student. We can hope that it would do so, because it may be just the thing

to help break cycles of ignorance and poverty. Being non-systematized may actually provide a reduced friction with local culture for some students. When coming from greatly disadvantaged areas, a student with self-selected social media supports and custom consumerized learning paths that are not over-exposed to a wider class (which could possibly ridicule) and awareness of being behind, may actually find greater achievement than anything that could otherwise be done by normal institutions. This is both because the student is not overly exposed to negative influences and because the student is self-navigating, and therefore, learning to rule out negativity and seek heightened achievement as an individual.

The reality is that the purposes of creating a collective do not necessitate some of the functions schools have taken unto themselves. Not anymore. The Internet and technology make it entirely possible for students to lean on digital substitutes that could, in fact, be more effective.

Make Way for a Multi-Generational Society

We aren’t necessarily causing people of different generations to learn together, but that is in fact the way it was done for all of history until the last hundred or so years. Now, however, we have come far enough along in history to have a sense of what is more natural for humanity, just as a new trend of multi-generational living is on the upsurge nationally.

The word school derives from “Middle English scole, from Old English scōl, from Latin schola, from Greek scholē, meaning leisure, discussion, lecture, school; perhaps akin to  Greek echein to hold.”4

School is something that seems to follow from our universal tendency to gather together. It has

always been natural for us to form groups like the small associations called families, tribes, and villages. Historically, individuals of multiple ages learned to live and work together. Typically, the older individuals were teaching and leading the young. Right now we artificially “socialize” kids by age, completely missing a great quantity of learning that could be happening as students observe behaviors towards different stimuli by other students and adults who are of different ages.

Take, for example, the reactions seen of kids when a fire truck drives by a school yard. The older child looks bored at a fire truck going down the road, the middle school student jumps and shouts “Fire, fire, fire!” and the kindergartener shrinks back towards the safety of an adult at the loud siren noise. There are many things learned by each of the children about each other by the mere mixing of ages. Respect, security, and different levels of care come about through this interaction and are doubtlessly irreplaceable. This type of socialization is common in small private schools but utterly missing in most public schools. Older children, unused to being around pre-school and grade-school-aged children, may be less caring or competent as parents. They have been batch-manufactured with others of like ages and become somewhat alien to multi-generational cooperation.

Search “multi-generational” learning online and another aspect comes into view: lacking an under- standing of how the different generations learn is having profound effects on corporations who run into difficulties with training and developing cross-generational collaborations.

Yet today, the U.S. is in a dramatic boom of multi-generational domestic arrangements, with the economic down-turn forcing multiple-families and multiple generations to live together, the aging boomer population coming back to live with their children, and many Millennials not leaving home for lack of work or too much student debt. This new reality is on the heels of several generations where such mixing wasn’t happening nearly as much. The new reality of living multi-generationally is not being mirrored in the educational environments uniformly but talk of bringing it back has begun.

Since society is experiencing multi-generational living, a school can better match consumer reality by itself becoming “consumerized” in the respect of being openly adapted to all ages – helping to match multi-generational realities.

Mapping the Genome of Learning

If you were a programmer, you would want to break down learning into its “requirements” for programming out a sequence of code to deliver to the screen user their learning as individualized to their user preference as possible.

Individualized learning can happen with software programming when there is a map of requirements and the student is evaluated by age, ability, or professional observation for where they fit in that map. These factors of what to teach and to whom allow a program to zero in with precision. That determination has been the skill of teaching, except with an aim towards the required proficiency level. It’s this final point – what constitutes proficiency – that is the stickler.

Professional educators have long been in a world without an autonomous standard of achievement. College transcripts from one to another are often fraught with imbalance, lost credit hours, and worse, no recognition of some courses. Students leaving high school end up in remedial courses, at their cost, and some never get over that hump to start getting credits towards degrees.

In addition to the desire by learners to have an outcome, a banner of achievement like a degree or diploma, taxpayers and governments want accountability. The accountability and outcomes conundrum is a heated one in the education sector for sure, but it is also highly unlikely it will ever go away. A demanding business community has heavily influenced the focus on outcomes, and the clash with this by educational institutions generally serves to make schools look irresponsible. The far more heated debate over the relatively new Common Core Standards as models and definitions of what proficiency looks like, those newest racks to which schools are pinned, are part of the stew of change by which both student and teachers are being measured. They may not be inherently bad as an idea, merely a new, more atomized version of requirements that on a macro level are similar to textbook adoptions that had previously been the province of School Boards. There were still standards, just localized and highly opinionated ones. Ultimately, the content may be substantially similar, but the change in methodology to these hundreds of briefly-worded Standards, things more akin to machine language like zeros and ones, has been fought with a vengeance. The simplicity, the black- and-white of these things, feels like learning is being put into a developer’s code assembly. The richness of human experience, the story, seems to be lost in the rendering of the Standards. Moreover, it seems like the ultimate invalidation of our thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. The enormous body of knowledge and potential is brought down to a numbers scale so we can “evaluate” each human.

We are meant to use these bits, the Standards, to dress and accessorize the full learning extravaganza around. What will be measured are still the Standards. Teachers and schools are told they have full choice around the attainment of those by students. Really? Teachers everywhere protest the Standards from a gut feeling that they and the learning have just been demoted into being more machine than human somehow – a string of code, a DNA.

It is possible, though, to take the view that through the new DNA-like Standards and soft- ware, teaching has been repositioned into better control through machines. Did the language of the teaching operation need this to adapt and allow for the transformation of education?

The Standards are a cultural response to a need for order and pave the way for consumerized learning. They could perhaps be called the “Genome of Learning.”

Culturally, we have always had a predilection to measurement and crave grades and diplomas and signs of achievement. We need to have some means of knowing that something did occur. Standards put the “what” into what will be tested. With new software technology, new means of analytics can include more non-evaluative means of demonstration, such as time observed, quantity of practice, and other methods of confirming a student has done the thing for which they are now considered complete. Things like samples of writing can be machine analyzed for spelling and grammatical error without reference to the piece as “good” or not. For example, a simple paragraph describing what the student saw on a field trip, allowing for some who are learning to write to be autodidactic, while at other times the software will need real human teachers to determine how “good” and perhaps on-point the writing was. Machines could give a “pass” on simple essays without teacher review, for example, allowing faster feedback and a gain in student self-confidence while also giving a grade or mark. And, of course, there is the popular philosophy of “failing forward” with game-based learning. There are also industry memory-enhancing games, essentially tests, commercially available from Luminosity, Neuronation, and others.

Building on smaller signs of achievement that are machine-intelligence enabled can allow for much greater individual personalization between students and teachers. A teacher may see only a “final” piece and can discuss its relevancy and “voice” rather than grammar and spelling errors. Constructs of sentences and the flow of thoughts one from another can be thoroughly evaluated, which is a way of using computing to draw the teacher and learner into a higher-level conversation about the work. As software technology advances, the specificity of data pre-collected on individuals as they learn in formative assessments will give us a gentler means of testing and perhaps, like games, a welcome experience.

Learning with the new “DNA” of Standards leveraged in digital curriculum has the promise to become a self-directed continuous journey filled with potential enthusiasms, camaraderie, and competitiveness, all while being usefully measured. Education’s long clash with accountability has a much brighter future.

1 Jason Bittel, “Therapy by Internet May Be More Effective Than You’d Think,” Slate, Aug. 1, 2013, http://www.slate.com blogs/future_ tense/2013/08/01therapy_by_internet_may_be_more_effective_than_ you_d_think.html

2 Zeynep Tufekci, “Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships,” The Atlantic, Apr 25, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2012/04 social-medias-small-positive-role-in-human- relationships/256346/

3 George F. Will, “The Sobering Evidence of Social Science,” The Washington Post, July 6th, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ opinions/the-sobering-evidence-of-social-science/2016/07/06/4a3831f8- 42dd-11e6-bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html

4    Merriam-Websters.    http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/school

Reference Material:

“Do you know your neighbors?” PEW Research Center, June 18, 2010, http:// www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/do-you-know-your-neighbors/

National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts, https://nces.ed.gov/ fastfacts/display.asp?id=91

J. Michael Smith, HSLDA President, “Homeschooling Strengthens Fam- ilies and Communities,” April 19, 2004, https://www.hslda.org/docs/news/ washingtontimes/200404190.asp