But in the process of building this exhibit, I also realized that it could be so much more than just a virtual gallery - it could become a learning environment, a place that anyone interested in education in Kenya could visit and explore. So, the initial virtual gallery idea quickly morphed into “unfinished …” - a project to build a virtual Kenyan classroom, a typical classroom in a typical rural school in Kenya.

Of course, some will say that I didn’t have to use Second Life, that a blog entry, a Flickr set, or a PowerPoint presentation (or maybe all of them combined) would have been just as effective. That’s why, before I began, I asked myself: What can I do in Second Life that I cannot do on the world wide web? Why do I need a multiuser virtual environment?

I wanted the visitors to be able to experience, even if only virtually, what it is like to stand in a typical rural Kenyan classroom. I can’t do that on my blog, but in Second Life I can create that classroom. I can try to re-create that environment. Of course, as a visitor to my classroom exhibit in Second Life, you won’t feel the fine Kenyan dust on the floor - the kind of dust that penetrates into everything in Kenya. You won’t be able to interact with Kenyan students or look through their notebooks. I cannot create tactile experiences in Second Life. What I can do, however, is create a visual experience that is very close to what I saw in Kenya. I can create a replica of a typical classroom and then use it as the setting for tours, presentations, or conversations about education in Kenya. I can create a virtual environment that provides a meaningful context for discussions about education in developing nations.

That environment wouldn’t be complete without photographs of children and school life that I took while in Kenya. You will find them scattered around the exhibit. You will see photographs of children and classrooms leaning against a virtual fence or the classroom wall.

Again, an argument could be made that all those pictures could have been shared on Flickr. True. I did share them on flickr, but as soon as I uploaded them I realized that they didn’t fully represent my experiences, that individual photographs, when placed against the white backdrop of a flickr photo page, lose their richness and become just another snapshot. In Second Life, however, I can create an environment for them, a context that will help the visitor see them as part of a larger story.

When building this virtual space, I tried to make the environment as reminiscent of the actual schools in Kenya as possible. Many of the textures I used for walls or corrugated iron panels were extracted from my own photographs of Kenyan schools and imported into Second Life. Before I built the desks for the virtual classroom, I scrutinized the pictures I took of student desks in Kenyan classrooms. Before building the classroom itself, I carefully analyzed my pictures of rural schools in Kenya.

Why “unfinished …”?

I chose this title because when I first walked into a classroom in rural Kenya, everything around me seemed … unfinished - the bare walls and gaping holes instead of windows all contributed to that impression. It seemed that the classrooms were still under construction. Of course, the sad truth is that the classrooms I visited were all finished - there simply isn’t enough money at many of the schools in Kenya to put in windows or buy new desks. There simply isn’t enough money to put plaster on the walls, buy bulletin boards, or put up posters.

Not every classroom in Kenya looks like the one I created in Second Life. Some schools are better equipped than others. Some classrooms have windows and plaster on walls instead of bare bricks. Some have new desks. Many have electricity. The classroom I built in Second Life, however, is not atypical of rural classrooms in Kenya. It represents rural schools and the country itself quite well. In Kenya, many things, including roads, schools, buildings, and public services, seem … unfinished.

The work that Teachers Without Borders - Canada has begun in Kenya is also unfinished. We had initiated great projects, worked with many teachers, and established valuable contacts with ministry officials and other NGOs. We look at these accomplishments as work in progress and an opportunity to continue to move towards our goals. One of those goals - and my goal for this virtual exhibit - is to raise awareness of some of the challenges faced by teachers, students, and administrators in developing nations.

I hope that you will take the time to walk through the exhibit and experience school life in a rural Kenyan classroom. The following link will take you into Second Life, to the island of jokaydia where the project is hosted: (SLurl to the Virtual Kenya Exhibit).

Virtual Kenya Project Machinima
(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

Interested in a Tour?

If you like what you see and would like to bring your students or colleagues into this space, or learn more about education in Kenya or the work of Teachers Without Borders - Canada, please feel free to contact me. I’ve given a number of tours already and would be happy to chat about the space or help you build a lesson around this virtual exhibit.

- John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938.

“Can a Student Get Up and Leave?”

In September 2006, I found myself, along with a group of inspiring educators on Waiheke Island, just north of Auckland, New Zealand. One morning, after a breakfast on a sun-drenched patio of the Hekerua Lodge, we started discussing what is now often referred to as School 2.0. We talked about the use of cell phones and video games. We talked about giving every student the freedom to learn with any tool or technology that he or she is most comfortable with.

I played the devil’s advocate and argued that we cannot have classrooms filled with individuals who learn in any way they please. What about students who need structure?, I asked. What about those with ADHD? How can such an environment be conducive to learning? Is it responsible to give nine-year-olds, for example, the freedom to play video games? Isn’t it my responsibility as a teacher to engage learners in learning? If we’re at school, then those video games or cellphones are likely to be disruptive, aren’t they? A classroom is a community, I argued, we need rules.

Sean, Leigh, and Alex argued that in our existing classrooms, teachers often present themselves as authoritarian guides and experts, often limiting the use of tools, such as games or cellphones, that have the potential to help our students learn. Today’s classrooms, in other words, are too restrictive and the role of the teacher is based on control, regardless of how passionate and engaging that teacher is.

It was at precisely that moment that Stephen asked,

“In your classroom, can a student get up and leave?”

Of course, he knew the answer. I did too. We all did.

The recent discussion about School 2.0 reminded me of Stephen’s question. The point here is that in a traditional classroom, the student cannot leave, at least not without facing pretty grim consequences. Whenever I think of School 2.0, I think of what it would feel like to know that every one of my students, regardless of their age, had the freedom to get up and leave. No consequences.

“A Positive and Constructive Development of Purposes”

I enjoy reading the School 2.0 manifestos. They offer a glimpse into a world where teachers are free to be passionate and engaging, where students really want to learn, and where the restrictive policies of our current world do not exist. Initially, I also wanted to add my thoughts to the School 2.0 Wiki. I decided not to because manifestos alone are not going to help me transform my professional practice so that it is better suited to help today’s young learners. I have a lot of respect for all the educators who posted their thoughts, but I also know that this approach is not going to work for me.

I prefer to avoid slogans. They are often mere reactionary measures aimed against the status quo. Overtime, they tend to lose substance. I’m afraid the slogans of School 2.0 will only reinforce yet another “ism” or be perceived as yet another panacea for our contemporary educational woes. Many educators will become convinced of its supposed innate value, but most will be unable to explain how to effectively use this new “2.0″ approach in the classroom. Instead, we will continue to hear and read simplistic slogans that trivialize the complexity and challenge of teaching in our new electronically reconfigured environment. Remember what happens to Old Major’s beautiful utopian ideals that he explains with such passion and conviction at the beginning of Orwell’s Animal Farm? Yes, they become reduced to “Four legs good, two legs bad” - a slogan repeated mindlessly by the dim-witted sheep on the farm. It reminds me of a time not long ago when, walking down a hallway at an educational conference, I overheard one attendee instruct her colleague: “Well, you really need a wiki for your class!” Is this what our complex and challenging times are being reduced to? A wiki for every classroom?

John Dewey reminds us in his preface to Experience and Education that:

any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.

and

the problems are not even recognized, to say nothing of being solved, when it is assumed that it suffices to reject the ideas and practices of the old education and then go to the opposite extreme (Dewey, 1998).

I’m not really interested in stating how my classroom today should be different from the classroom where I was taught twenty-five years ago. I liked that classroom. I liked many of my teachers. They were strict and told me to ask for permission every time I wanted to leave my seat, even if it was only to sharpen my pencil. At the same time, they taught me many valuable and important skills that I used later on to pursue my goals in life. They did not have wikis, or podcasts, or blogs and yet they still managed to help me get to where I wanted to be. The teachers I liked, respected, and learned from possessed one important skill: they knew how to talk to me as an individual.

So, I am not interested in defining myself in contrast to School 1.0. What I’m really interested in is what I am going to do tomorrow, in class. What are the needs that I’m facing - my own and those of my students. Here and now. What are the problems? Finally, what are the possibilities? It’s nice to talk about passion, participation, openness, and inquiry, for example, but what if you’re told to teach Macbeth to a group of thirty sixteen-year-olds? What do all these slogans mean then, in practice? What, in other words, am I going to do to make myself relevant in the lives of my students? How can I assist them in learning more and getting closer to where they want to go? We need some tangible ideas and modes of practice based on a solid understanding of how and why our students want to access learning. So, let’s not proceed by “reaction against what has been current in education” and adopt instead “a positive and constructive development of purposes, methods, and subject-matter on the foundation of a theory of experience and its educational potentialities” (Dewey, 1998).

“To Make Learning Available”

In order to adopt Stephen’s proposed approach, which is “to make learning available, in whatever form is desired and appropriate, to assist students as they do what they choose to do,” we need to start thinking about ourselves, our presence in our schools and our classrooms. What if our students had the freedom to get up and leave? Would openness, participation, and inquiry keep them in our classrooms? Would a wiki or a podcast? Only if it was their own wiki or their own podcast.

That’s why, I believe that education today needs a renewed approach to professional development and a closer look at how we can address “the powers and purposes” of our students. Twenty-five years ago, my teachers knew how to help me succeed. Based on what the world was like back then, they had developed their own practice. Based on what the world is like now, I need to develop my own. I’m not going to fantasize about schools without classrooms, schedules, or carefully compartmentalized subjects. I would love to see that in my lifetime, but I’m choosing to be realistic. Chances are, those things will remain firmly entrenched in our societies for a very long time. What I need now is an understanding of what I need to do tomorrow to ensure that my students can access learning in whatever form and whatever way they find most relevant.

“Passion-Based Conversations”

When I wrote about passion-based learning, I wanted to show that teachers need to redefine themselves as individuals and not automatons that focus on outcomes and expectations. I am passionate about human rights. I spend a lot of my own time reading about human rights and human rights abuses around the world. What I do in my classroom, how I do it, and who I am as a teacher is based to a large extent on my passion for social justice.

So what?

Well, if I have a student in my class who is passionate about Medieval Europe, for example, he will not be too happy in my classroom. My ability to sustain a conversation with him about that topic would be rather limited. But what’s stopping me from helping him connect with a teacher and a classroom in Leeds where the topics he cares about are studied and where the teacher is just as passionate about Medieval Europe as I am about human rights? What’s stopping that teacher in Leeds from telling some of her students “Get in touch with this teacher in Ontario. You can have a great conversation about Darfur”? What’s stopping us? Most teachers would say: assessment and evaluation, state-defined curriculum expectations, reporting, etc.. But let’s keep in mind that just because some of our students are building their own networks by communicating with experts from around the world does not mean that in our classrooms we cannot assist them in becoming stronger writers, or help them improve their reading comprehension or research skills. We can still have meaningful conversations about their work. These students can even use their own networks and their conversations with content experts located elsewhere to immeasurably enrich their own classrooms.

We need to start offering what James Shimabukuro calls “flexible schedules and virtual learning opportunities that defy time and space constraints.” These opportunities “will be defined by function, purpose, and membership rather than temporal, physical, or geographical boundaries.” They will allow us to become advisers “skilled in working with students and motivating them to discover the learning styles and goals that are best suited to their interests.” In other words, we need to give students the freedom to access learning. Then, we need to listen and assist.

So, what do I do tomorrow, in my classroom, to assist my students? I think we all need to learn how to have conversations with people who want to learn. How do we effectively assist students in learning and not thrust that learning upon them? I admit that this may sound simplistic to those of us who have been using web 2.0 technologies in our classrooms for some time, but I think we still need to address the fact that many of us are really not engaged in conversations with our students. Many of us are proud of the fact that we create blogging communities, use wikis, or help students connect with their peers from around the world. We are proud that our students seem engaged by these environments. Let’s not forget, however, that quite often the students participate because participate they must - they are at school, after all, in somebody’s class.

We need to learn how to sustain conversations that are initiated by the students themselves, not conversations that emerge from the official Ministry documents or our own interests and beliefs. I think that passion-based learning will help, but I also know that there is much more that I can do. It seems to me that this new approach will require that we revisit Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Perhaps we could refine the notion of “instructional conversation” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991) where the teacher is involved in “assisted performance.” This approach is not perfect but I think it gives us a good place to start: “To truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991).

And yet, I really don’t see that passion around me. My colleagues seem to be concerned with outcomes and expectations, not the passion that they can awaken in their students. Many K-12 students also seem to be going through the motions and “playing school.” Yes - I know - there are teachers who engage students by giving them opportunities to make podcasts or use their blogs to connect with peers from all around the globe. I’m one of those teachers. However, I think it’s time to acknowledge that just because students make podcasts or contribute to blogs does not mean that they have become passionate about the topic they’re researching. If a teacher says, “I’d like you to create a podcast to share your work,” students will do it. In fact, they will even show a lot of enthusiasm because the project takes them out of their seats and often even out of their classroom. Are they really working on something that they are passionate about? Rarely.

So, what interests me is how educators can help young people (or anyone, for that matter) find and pursue their passion?

It certainly isn’t a new question. Good educators have always been able to ignite that spark in their students. Today, however, we tend to think that using online tools that appeal to young people will automatically ensure their engagement. Genuine passion cannot be ignited with a podcast or a blog. Instead, we need to give our students the freedom to learn and engage with ideas that they find relevant and important. I think it begins with stepping out of what Will today referred to as the “Comfort Zone of Content.” It begins, it seems to me, when the teacher becomes a learner and replaces the static curriculum documents with inquiry, conversation, knowledge-building, and personal networks.

In order to make my students passionate about their classroom work, I need to accept the fact that not everyone will become passionate about the course content that I have so meticulously prepared. Not everyone cares about Macbeth, World War II, or Animal Farm. I can spend inordinate amounts of time trying to make that content appeal to my students. I can try to make it interesting. Will they enjoy making a podcast on the life of William Shakespeare? Of course they will. Will they enjoy putting their own thoughts on Lady Macbeth on their own blog where they can receive comments and exchange views with other classmates? Yes, they will. The very nature of these activities makes them appealing. The very fact that they allow students to get out of their seats and traditional roles will make students enthusiastic and engaged. But what happens after the marks have been assigned? What happens after they graduate or move on to take yet another carefully compartmentalized course on literature or European history? Will they continue to produce podcasts? Will they continue to post blog entries?

Maybe I’m oversimplifying things here but, let’s face it, if all the theory and technology that we have at our disposal amount, in practical terms, to having students record an mp3 file, blog for a couple of weeks, or connect with other students to exchange ideas about a fictional character or their home province, then sooner or later these new tools and approaches will acquire the status of mere classroom work. They will become as uninviting as “chalk and talk” is today. It seems to me that we are often focusing on technology for the sake of focusing on technology. Are we helping students find ideas that they are passionate about? Is producing a podcast with my classmates going to make me care about whatever it is that we’re working on? It will certainly engage me. The novelty will be appealing. But not for long.

If I am really serious about helping my students find ideas and topics they are passionate about, I need to forget about my course content and step outside that “comfort zone of content.” What I have prepared, what I deem pedagogically sound, may be wonderful but, to my students, it will always be mere course content, something one learns in order to “do well” - a hoop that every student needs to jump through and certainly not something that one wants to come back to and keep exploring.

As an educator, I need to step outside my “comfort zone of content” by sharing my own self: things that I myself am passionate about. I need to stop peddling content and show that I am a learner too.

So, in April, when we begin our unit on The Diary of Anne Frank, I am going to start by explaining my own personal reasons for choosing that book. Instead of inundating my students with biographies, historical facts, and supplemental readings, I will tell them my own story and explain why I am passionate about this topic.

• I will tell them how and why I became passionate about the Holocaust, nuclear proliferation, human rights, and social justice.
• I will tell them that it has a lot to do with my background and a month-long trip to Japan where my wife and I decided to travel to Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.
• I will tell them and show them what we saw.
• I will share notes from my journal and the books I bought at the museums.
• I will tell them that my grandfather fought in the Polish resistance during World War II.
• I will tell them that, after the war, the communist regime didn’t always make his life easy.
• I will show them Soviet-approved history textbooks that I studied from in grade six, in a Polish classroom.
• I will explain what I had to unlearn.
• I will tell them about the promise that I made to myself to teach young people about the atrocities of war and the importance of protecting human rights.
• I will tell them that my contribution to our class will be in the form of one text, The Diary of Anne Frank, and that I encourage them to bring in and create their own texts.
• I will ask them to look for a topic that they care about.
• I will show them my texts (print and electronic) on human rights that I’ve collected over the years.
• I will show them my RSS feeds and Google Alerts.
• I will show them my delicious bookmarks.
• I will show them my flickr account.
• I will show them a resource that I’m creating for teachers and students to help them learn more about human rights.
• I will show them the various tools that I will use to expand my own knowledge.
• I will show them that knowledge is an active process.
• I will show them my network.
• I will tell them that I am not an expert and that there are many things that I still need to learn.
• I will tell them that we can create an environment where learning can be deeply personal.
• I will invite them to create their own texts and build their own networks.
• I will encourage them to find experts and make them part of their networks.
• I will tell them that our texts will be interconnected not just because they will all be online but because those who are passionate about their ideas understand the importance of sharing their thoughts and discoveries.
• I will tell my students that I hope to learn from and with them.

Gardner Campbell’s ideas are worth noting:

We need to teach students how to make connections. We also need to teach them about other connectors. Great minds, in short … if you want to learn how to make connections, get very very close to someone who’s an ace at it.

This reminds me of what Prensky calls “legacy content” - students need to learn about great minds and the ideas they produced and not just what’s online. They also need good teachers, people who are experienced “connectors” - people who will help students discover that Copernicus, for example, connects to the geocentrism of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy but also to the heliocentric view of the universe and to the notion of immanence, subjectivism, intellectual freedom, the Renaissance, and religion in general. Good teachers can lead students from a focus on heliocentrism and planetary mechanics towards a discovery of more interconnected nodes and help them realize that Copernicus had a profound impact on religion and philosophy. Students need to see how the nodes develop into a network and how the network moves us away from pure science and towards ideas that seemingly have very little to do with planetary mechanics. They need to realize that this kind of content (”great minds” or “great books”) is not a set collection of facts. True knowledge begins when young people realize that Copernicus is not just a page in the encyclopedia but that he connects to other pages, to other people, other events, other nodes. Only then can they actively begin to connect these nodes, interact with them, and thus create their own network of correspondences. This is how they learn to create their own trajectories of understanding.

This is also how our students can become nodes themselves:

People are nodes. How can I connect? How can I be a connector? How can I be a connection? How can I put myself in a context where the chances of being or doing all those things goes up? Strategies for connection preparation. Fishing in well-stocked streams.

I like the term “connection preparation.” How can I prepare my students? I think I have to ensure that they are comfortable with expressive writing (for a good overview of how to accomplish this task, see this article by Joan Vinall-Cox). I think I also need to make sure that they are comfortable using tools that can help them navigate the networks around them and organize their personal knowledge. I also believe that they need to be able to interact with these networks and to contribute to them. Finally, they need the freedom to explore and connect, to co-construct, to learn through discovery. They need to know that the journey takes precedence over the final result.

Will writes:

The Web and these technologies have transformed the way I learn, provided me with many teachers who push my thinking, given me the potential to direct my own education as it is. Why don’t more educators make it a part of their own practice?
[...]
What we need to be is connectors who can teach our kids how to connect to information and to sources, how to use that information effectively, and how to manage and build upon the learning that comes with it. That’s a much different role than “science teacher” or “math teacher.” Now I’m not saying that subject matter expertise is irrelevant and that there aren’t core concepts that discipline specific teachers shouldn’t teach. But they should be taught it a much wider context, not in the fishbowl this is our traditional classroom.

There’s no question that Will is right. We need to be “connectors,” as he puts it, because if we fail in this task, our students will be overwhelmed by chaos. They won’t know how to look for patterns and connections in that chaos. If we teach our students to function effectively within communities of practice, if we teach them how to look for patterns and make connections then they will begin to see the surrounding chaos as a teaching organism. They will see in it a living entity. They will begin to understand the principles of Connectivism.

In his essay on Connectivism, George Siemens says that “learning is a process of connecting” and that the ability to perceive and nurture connections between ideas and concepts is a crucial skill. And yet, as Will rightly points out, this is not something that the world of education has embraced.

I don’t think that anytime in the near future I will be able to say that I teach Connectivism, but I know that I have made some progress. My personal knowledge is really a network of correspondences and connections. I learn by interacting with a huge network of individuals and learning objects (some are available online, some offline). I read and comment on a variety of what George Siemens calls “nodes”or “information sources.” The inspiration for this entry, for example, came from a node I can refer to as “weblogg-ed.com.” I am now connecting this node to my own thoughts and experiences. So, I began interacting with a network when I opened up my Bloglines account, found a node of particular interest, and am now building a connection. Learning is no longer an internal, solitary activity happening inside an individual learner - it is also a process of creating knowledge. This connection would not exist without the nodes created by Will Richardson and George Siemens. It would not exist without a personal network of nodes that I created with my Bloglines subscriptions. It cannot exist unless it is reified in this very entry where it becomes another node in an ever-growing network. My learning is therefore dependent on my ability to perceive some sort of connection or pattern in the available chaos. “The value of ‘pattern recognition,’” to quote George Siemens again, “and connecting our own ’small worlds of knowledge’ are apparent in the exponential impact provided to our personal learning.”

How does all this affect my teaching methodology? My classroom has transformed itself from a place where knowledge was pre-packaged for students to a place where they are now given a responsibility of creating it, where they have to participate in existing networks (class blogosphere, for example), nurture their own (Furl or del.icio.us accounts, blogs), and look for connections. Their participation leads them to formulate their thoughts and ideas, to find connections between their own views and the nodes they find around them. Once a connection is made in the form of a blog entry for example, the students have created their own knowledge - they’ve made a contribution to their own understanding and the network itself. Once they start building, they become engaged and empowered; they understand the value of community (or a network) and their own place and role in it.

It is at that point that I become a teacher of Connectivism, engaged in the task of teaching my students to recognize and formulate connections and patterns. I make them aware of the transformative potential of participating in and learning from networks. It is their history or trajectory of participation that becomes the true goal of education.

I know that blogging will continue to form a significant part of the course. I will incorporate blogs “as key, task driven, elements” of my curriculum. I will once again use blogs to create a community of writers. This year, however, I want my students to engage in more research. This has led to some thoughts about the tools they can use to make their work sharable, visible, and interactive.

First of all, I would like to get students to use TagCloud to create a visual representation of student work (from both individual blogs and as a community). This would be a great introduction to tags and also a wonderful way to show students that writing can be “visible” in a fun, interactive way. I also want my class to use this application to see patterns and trends in their own writing (individual tagclouds) and in collective work produced by all of its members (community tagcloud). I’m hoping that this tool will emphasize the interconnectedness of their work and make it really “visible” to them. (Amazing things happened last year when we looked at some visualizations of writing: here and here).

I’m also thinking of using Furl or another social bookmarking application. What I like about Furl is that it would allow me to comment on individual bookmarks saved by my students and, of course, allow them to construct repositories of materials to be used in projects or their blogs. One of the strengths of this application (and social bookmarking in general) is that the collected information can be easily shared with one’s peers. I want my students to use this tool to not just collect valuable resources but also categorize them and annotate them (using the comments field) before adding to the database. I want them to read/skim the electronic resources they find and then categorize and annotate them based on that first reading of the text. What I am hoping to see is Furl collections driven by genuine interest in a given topic and sharing of resources among students researching similar topics. (Shadows, which I discovered this morning, could also be interesting in getting students to write and exchange comments about online resources).

In short, I am interested in exploring students’ TagClouds, Shadow Pages, or Furl databases as evidence of learning. They can all demonstrate individual engagement with the studied material while being firmly entrenched in and continuously expanded upon by a community of learners.

I still need to think long and hard about the place that these tools will occupy in my classroom. I know that they will have to be, much like blogging itself, driven by student interest. I don’t think I am going to force my students to use these tools. When tools of this sort are embedded well pedagogically into the curriculum, students use them because using them seems natural.

As Canadian composer Murray Shafer has suggested, with our eyes we are always at the edge of the world looking in, while with our ears, the world comes to us and we are always at the centre of it.

The basic difference between the two modes [of listening] is that oral listening tends to be global and comprehensive, while literate listening is specialized and selective … the first is cosmo-centric and spatial, the latter is linear, temporal, and logocentric.

The fact is that, as Western people, we have become gradually deaf through no fault of our own, through the rewiring of our nervous system by literacy.

His ideas remind me of Marshall McLuhan and his thoughts about the acoustic environment produced by the electronic media. McLuhan once wrote that “knowing itself is being recast and retrieved in acoustic form,” and I find that a lot of what I see in my classroom confirms both de Kerckhove and McLuhan’s thoughts on the acoustic nature of the electronic universe.

In a traditional classroom, the students are always at the edge, looking in. The teacher is the source of all knowledge and education consists of getting glimpses into the world of knowledge. But the electronic environment of knowledge-building changes that dynamic and allows the learner to see the surrounding world as an environment to be absorbed or - as de Kerckhove and McLuhan suggest - listened to. This kind of environment also puts the learner - the participant - in the centre.

This is what the “digital natives” (as Marc Prensky calls them) are very comfortable with - the way they perceive reality is based on “oral listening.”

However, the fact that their ways of perceiving reality are more in tune with the digital world around them does not necessarily mean that they are more at home in the digital realm than their teachers. In fact, I find that the two categories of “digital immigrants” and “digital natives” do not accurately represent what is now happening in education. I applaud Tom Hoffman for rejecting this innacurate label of “digital immigrant.” I don’t think all of us (educators born before 1986) are “digital immigrants.” I also don’t think that our students are “digital natives.” There are sweeping generalizations at work here.

I don’t agree that having been educated in a literate, linear mode of thinking makes us “digital immigrants.” This kind of linear perception forms the basis of our civilization and I don’t think we can assume that its days are over (Prensky himself says that we must teach both “legacy” and “future” content). Put as much hypertext as you want into your sentence and it still remains, fundamentally, a sentence. I prefer to look at the digital world as a second layer or an additional dimension - something that we can use to enhance the way we communicate, to make it more effective, more participatory, more “digital.” I find that learning about World War II, for example, is more effective when one participates in a community of learners but, at the same time, I believe that my participation is going to be severely limited unless I spend some time on my own reading primary or secondary (print) sources. (George Siemens wrote a very interesting entry related to this not that long ago). In other words, I need my print literacy skills in order to participate in an online community of learners. Why, then, am I a “digital immigrant” - because I enter the electronic sphere with strong print literacy skills?

I need these skills to compose this post and I also need my digital skills to add hyperlinks and put it online. You, the reader, have to have the basic literacy skills to read and understand my thoughts here. I also need some degree of digital literacy to add hypertext to this entry, to weave a web of influences and correspondences. You can ignore the hypertext and just read the sentences or click on the links for a fuller, more engaging experience. You can then go on to comment on it somewhere else and thus keep contributing to the digital web (”Remix and feed forward” as Stephen Downes says).

So, being an effective educator and learner in this new electronic realm means having the ability to read, compose, and participate in this kind of multimedia palimpsest. From what I’ve seen so far, children at the elementary level are generally good navigators and readers but their “native” skills do not usually extend beyond that.

To say that our students are naturally proficient in the language of the digital world in which they grew up is not very accurate. A native speaker of English is not necessarily a great speaker or a gifted writer. He or she needs years of practice to use the language effectively. A thirteen-year-old student may be a “digital native” but what can she do with that skill other than listen or stand at the edge, looking in? In fact, we often talk about our students “surfing” the net which to me means one thing only - they are skimming, looking, watching, listening. The average thirteen-year-old is not actively participating in the digital world, she’s not learning (as Marc Prensky suggests) about bioethics or nanotechnology. I believe that the so-called “digital natives” are just as passive when confronted with the world wide web as we were, twenty or thirty years ago, in our elementary classrooms devoted to rote learning.

Yes, we have, as de Keckhove suggests, become deaf after centuries of linear literacy. But we have also now become very much awake, very open to the new realities of the electronic world around us. To say that we are immigrants is to say that we do not really belong, and who belongs more than an educator who is proficient in both, who can both teach a five-paragraph essay and create a community of learners?

Lawrence Lessig says that “creativity and innovation always builds on the past.” This is exactly what we’re doing when we introduce our children to the digital world. Our role as educators, to paraphrase Lessig, is to ensure that the past, the linear, visual mode of thinking give rise to but does not limit the creativity and the energy of emerging technologies. This can happen only if we recognize that we cannot impose the old upon the new just as we cannot create the new in a vacuum. It is our job to ensure that our students acquire the skills necessary to intelligently share their views, whether it’s in a wiki, an every-day conversation, or a traditional five-paragraph essay. We need to ensure, as Prensky suggests, that they learn both the “legacy” and “future” content. To do that, we need to acquire the skills of digital pioneers, we need to “remix and feed forward.”

The “digital natives” do indeed find the acoustic world, that world of “oral listening,” more natural but this does not mean that they do not need to be introduced into that world, that they do not need a facilitator who will help them master their voice, online or off.

We are pioneers. We bring the experience with us and we are constantly discovering new territories and adopting to them with efficiency and speed. We “Filter, repurpose, remix, feed forward” to use Stephen’s words again. We might be newcomers according to Prensky but we come with the tools we need to filter the old, remix with the new, and give our students the skills they need to participate and not just “surf.”

The study on functional literacy and life skills conducted in 2003 in seven countries, including Canada and the United States, shows no improvement in international literacy numbers since 1994 (except in Switzerland). The authors note that four out of every ten Canadian adults lack the basic reading, math, and problem solving skills they need to function in everyday life. In the United States, the ability to read prose actually fell slightly.

Those who are interested in literacy probably won’t find this surprising. What is rather interesting about this article is that “U.S. IQ scores are always increasing and … that’s because computers, television and video games are improving our minds.” The article then goes on to say that we pick up “pattern-discerning skills” from the technology we use in our everyday lives and that this has an impact on our higher IQ scores. The article concludes by stating that a recent Statistics Canada and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study “recorded a relationship between literacy and access to computers: People who made sophisticated use of their computers scored higher, on average, for prose literacy.”

As soon as I saw the phrase “sophisticated use of computers” I thought of blogs, wikis, and online threaded discussion forums whose effects on my students’ literacy skills ( grades 7 and 8 ) have so far been rather encouraging.

I find that the use of these technologies in education has helped students become explorers who grow impatient and resteless when treated as passive vessels and seem motivated and empowered by their new role as knowledge-gatherers. The technology they use encourages highly literate modes of behaviour and I think it has a lot to do with what Vygotsky referred to as the “Zone of Proximal Development.” The technology allows teachers and students to co-construct communities. It is in these communities that students interact with and learn from their peers. The communities they participate in encourage them to reach their potential.

Will is right. Textbooks do not invite participation. To those of us who have moved our classroom into the digital realm, textbooks and print in general, seem outdated. They continue to enforce the transmission model of education. They symbolize neatly compartmentalized knowledge.

I want my students to compose their own textbooks and become content producers but, at the same time, I do not want them to lose respect for print. I do want them to see that there is room for engagement, that we want them to interact with text, that the best way of responding to and learning about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example, is to annotate passages, start peer discussion groups, leave digital marginalia in the margins of the electronic text of the play. Do we have the technology to accomplish these goals? Perhaps we’re not there yet. But we can digitize old respected content and use blogs as sites of negotiation and engagement with ideas, we can use wikis to annotate electronic texts and start discussions around specific passages. These technologies have provided us with the ability to interact with text. Digital technology has turned print into something we can play with, into knowledge that can be rewritten, rearranged, decompartmentalized.

This isn’t about forgetting the value of old texts. It’s about ensuring that they do not remain known to our students as merely “old texts” or “big books.” A copy of Hamlet that my students cannot interact with, cannot annotate and share online, is more likely to remain just an old dusty text, remote and irrelevant. I am confident that if we give them a chance to interact with texts, attach notes to specific lines, create discussions around ideas and link them to original passages, our students will discover the relevance of these old books in their lives, they will forge their own paths through these challenging texts and arrive at their own conclusions.

This will prepare our students to relate to new information structures and abandon our old visual bias. McLuhan, once again, helps to elucidate the changes that are happening around us:

Western (visual and sequential) man now discovers himself habitually relating to inforation structures which are simultaneous, discontinuous, and dynamic. He has been plunged into a new form of knowing, far from his customary experience tied to the printed page. In the same way that the sense of hearing apprehends details from all directions at once, within a 360-degree sphere, as it were, in a manner similar to a magnetic or electrical field; so knowing itself is being recast and retrieved in acoustic form. As such, by the next century it will destroy all existing forms of school structures. (Marshall McLuhan & Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village).

Gone are the days of learning solely in a classroom, lecture hall and library - there are so many resources available and it makes sense to build systems that can harness this in a way that keeps the learner in control.

His comment made me think of my own classroom and English/Language Arts classrooms around the world. While we (well, some of us) continue to offer our students new dialogic and collaborative learning opportunities, we are still tied to the old conception of text. Our content continues to consist of print. We read books. Quite often, we read BIG books. There are certainly “many resources available,” there are many new texts and many new ways of constructing texts that we have at our disposal. But old linear print persists and, with it, classrooms, libraries, and lecture halls. We cannot abandon the classics for the sake of online social networks and enhanced collaboration. At the same time, we cannot cling to the past and become digital luddites.

I impose texts upon my students and will continue to do so. I want them to experience the great works of literature. However, new technologies allow me to invite my students to co-construct the curriculum with me, to create their own “learning landscapes” which

really does put the learner at the centre of their learning and facilitates the making of connections to relevant resources, people and experiences then, in turn, the ability to form their own communities and groups to pass the information along.

Personal learning landscapes will dethrone teachers but they will not dethrone valuable content. They will allow students to interact with content (including old, dusty print) in personally relevant ways. They will empower students to build their own correspondences and networks. They will bring us closer to understanding that

Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other (Marsall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage).