Category: Web 2.0

I’ve been listening to the podcast of Dave Snowden’s presentation at the Future of Education 2007 conference (on my new RCA mp3 player), and it’s given me a new perspective on the down side of all this social networking activity. Here’s some of his key points, with my comments.

• The quality of academic work used to be based on the nature of published papers, but this has now been devalued because scholars work on publishing many small papers in the plethora of new journals, ignoring any kind of depth. They now specialize is small areas, with little or no linking to other fields — few generalists exist, instead we have collections of experts. The explicit detail involved inhibits the birth of new ideas.

  I have recently concluded a research project with lots of sources, and was astonished at the sheer number of journals (a few are listed here) dedicated to online learning. Many of the articles were little studies based on very small research samples, so they contained findings that I thought were of somewhat limited use. Thousands of papers were able to cite thousands of such specialized other papers. I got a real illusory, house-of-cards feeling doing my reading, along with a suspicion that any idiot can get published in this field.

• Virtual worlds (such as Second Life or multi-user games like World of Warcraft) contain a representation of learning rather than real learning, as they are based on a representation of real life. People spend more time playing with the system (adjusting their avatars) then actually doing innovative work. The communication is fundamentally deficient because it relies only on visual representation and text, while true social interaction relies on all the senses. Research indicates that the brain was designed not to process information, but to process patterns. Scent, touch and peripheral vision are crucial to this patterning.

  This makes me wonder about online learning in general. I began to realize that some of my colleagues’ resistance to teaching online may be a deep understanding that since these elements are lacking in that environment, online teaching and learning are less “real” to them. I’ve seen real learning take place online, of course (I would hardly continue doing this if I hadn’t!) but I now wonder if what I’m doing is creating only representations of college classes.

• Social computing has good uses and areas of great concern. Blogs increase communication, but also increase the intimacy of communication: they are personal and emotional. As people read each others’ blogs, they form communities of similar people, filtering out others, and use common tags to make communication easier, creating a tribal system. Wikis are useful for creating stockpiles of information, but validation is a serious problem. The initial enthusiasm and freedom of such collections and editing possibilities can give rise to fanaticism and reactionism (such as Conservapedia) and acts of vandalism (spamming). The tyranny of crowds becomes the validating mechanism: if a huge group believes something, however wrong, it is seen to be true. At a small scale, with a small user group, this is not that significant. But as scale increases and we become reliant on the information (as many have with Wikipedia), validation becomes a significant issue.

  I had been thinking that Wikipedia was as good or better as other sources because so many people were involved, and people who really cared did the entries. I still see the possibility for diffusion of bias through participation, total objectivity being impossible. But the persistence of irrational thinking in our society today being encouraged by such sources of “information” is indeed downright frightening to consider. In the past decade, I have witnessed amazing acts of irrationality on the part of our government and the people in this country, that this issue concerns me now more than it used to. When I was younger, I was a great deal more of a cultural relativist than I am now. Perhaps it takes a while for an open, tolerant, educated person to see certain points of view as damaging, or even evil.

• Issues of cognitive development of users need consideration, since the ages for brain plasticity are between 2-3 years old (language development) and puberty (social inhibition development). The tribal groupings necessary for survival in primitive cultures can be literally short-circuited by lack of appropriate real-life social contact. In a university setting, the rote learning of particular skills is still needed, and self-directed learning is not necessarily appropriate.

  This helps me understand why children and young adults should not spend too much time in the virtual world, and why my few efforts at guiding the learning of those without any background information have been futile. Perhaps the skill is not, as I’ve been thinking, learning how to learn. Is this connected to all the trivial cell phone and twitter communications? Communication is so easy, and yet people have nothing to say. It never occurred to me that such humanist ideas were connected to today’s issues of the web and learning. My thanks to Dave Snowden.