OPLS blog

I’m currently reading Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. It’s an historical narrative on the emergence of existing notions of childhood - rooted in the development of movable type and the printing press - and its demise (according to Postman) - rooted in the development of mass communication media, specifically television. What I’m enjoying most is its ability to make me stop and think.

No more so than Postman’s reference to the teachings and work of Harold Innis. Innis stressed that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of effects: they alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with) and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop). In other words, new communications technologies not only change our habits, but also our habits of mind.

I’ve been struggling with what this means for us today (Innis was writing in the 1930s and Postman’s book was published in 1982). For me, social media has certainly changed what I think about. I now spend more time considering the possibilities of teachers and students connecting with one another across the world and the development of substantive relationships between them. I spend more time thinking about how learning can more easily be shared, communicated and even delivered online. Increasingly, I think about these things in public places, such as this blog, on collaborative wikis, and commenting on other blogs. And I think about the fact that I can now do all of this on online social networks that have sprung up around these areas of interest.

So, just as Galileo’s telescope changed our whole understanding of scope and scale, as well as the Aristotelian geocentric view of the world that the earth was the centre of the universe, so too has social media begun to make us change the way we think about a whole raft of issues related to teaching and learning.

One such example is assessment. There is a growing school of thought, led by Stephen Heppell and others, which proposes that we need to think more creatively about how we assess students, because existing assessment design has become far too notational and linear. They suggest alternatives to the 1500-word essay, such as a 10-minute video uploaded to YouTube, managing an online forum for a week, or two 10-minute podcasts.

Equally, the ability to capture evidence of learning much more easily, through mobile digital technologies, is having a profound impact on the nature of assessment. Just one example is the ability to video a student’s musical performance (using a mobile phone or digital camera), upload it to something like Viddler, and tag the timeline with examples of where the student shows good technique, interpretation etc. What’s great is that the student can self-assess first, then invite comments from peers (two stars and a wish?) and finally submit it for more formal assessment.

So we’re thinking about different things, with different tools and in different places. As educators, we going to need to respond.