A great (and humbling) aspect of blogging is that, quite often, if you don’t say it someone else will. Gary Stager’s criticism of Web 2.0 and education is well-intended and appears to grow organically from a sound seed, but it is mostly wrong. I don’t usually find hand-wringing about educators and technology that interesting because they so often conflate K-12 and higher education tech issues in all the wrong ways and because they miss the bigger picture. Dealing with firewalls, filters and privacy are quite different at a University than a high school. Laptop initiatives are often horribly bungled administratively and even wrong-headed to begin with, but that doesn’t have much to do with the value of computing technology for education. In this case, the Education 2.0 and Teaching 2.0 memes contain a great amount of diversity (and abstraction), trying to talk cogently about them as a monolith, much less equating them with educators using Web 2.0 tools is to go off the tracks.
Fortunately, Stephen Downes and a number of others have already said pretty much everything I would have and then some. I hope Stager follows up on his comment at OLDaily and addresses Stephen’s substantive post.
Howdy!
How would you go about discussing higher ed challenges cogently and in the right ways?
Concerned about higher ed changes,
Miguel Guhlin
Around the Corner-mGuhlin.net
http://mguhlin.net
I think such discussions are already happening– at your blog among many others, for example. What I don’t think is useful is the kind of inane, abstracted strawmen that pieces like Stager’s create as foils in service of scoring their rhetorical points (and I will note that I find a lot of Stager’s writing quite interesting). The reason this particular case is so egregious is because of its fundamental confusion– and rather uncharitable assumptions– about the conversations *educators* are having regarding Web 2.0 and social networking applications and environments in the classroom. Web app vendors and companies might not be thinking about education, but the educators using the apps are having real, vital discussions that are far more often about Illich, learning community, construction of self, identity and control and many other important and meaningful issues than they are blindly following the hype cycle.
Anytime a discussion casts educators and technology and learners as monoliths it has gone off the rails. Anytime a discussions posits our current regression from a golden age when there were real ideas and revolutionary approaches, it has become useless.