Not the filling of a pail

Sugata Mitra is not without his critics. Donald Clark has a blog post casting doubt on Mitra’s “utopian vision”. Beginning by noting the prevalence of disused or vandalised “Hole-in-the-Wall” sites,

Mitra2 Donald Clark

Source: Donald Clark Plan B Blog

Clark goes on to discuss the issue of sustainability; concerns with funding; weaknesses in the underlying research, the fallacy that schools are obsolete; the necessity for adult mediation; the low level of learning actually involved; and the real possibility of social isolation and exclusion in the self-organised environment.
Other criticisms of Mitra and his theories are even more extensive and merit a level of review not possible here. That said, perhaps the best of those I have read come from Torn Halves on The Digital Counter-Revolution blog. Anyone who titles a post “Is Sir Ken Robinson a Luddite?” is worth a look. There are several on Mitra – what follows is by no means a complete list:

Second Thoughts: Teachers

All my teachers to date have been real, not virtual. It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that they were all inspirational, but I would be equally dishonest if I claimed that my behaviour in class was always exemplary. The best teachers, in convent school and later diocesan boarding school, I remember with fondness even now: Ms. Watson who taught us English; Mr. Fahy who taught us Irish and History; and Mr. Glennon who patiently labored to teach us Maths, and in his spare time how to program in BASIC on an Apple II.

Denis Glennon

Denis Glennon
Source: The Longford Leader

I suspect that Mr Glennon was a little ahead of his time in 1982 – and certainly ahead of Mr. Mitra’s – in introducing a computer into a 4th year classroom. It was W.B. Yeats who, echoing Plutarch, noted that “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” For better or worse Mr Glennon is one of the reasons I went on to study electronic engineering.

From White to Walls

The concept of “Visitors” and “Residents”, posited by David White while at the University of Oxford, seems to me a better way of looking at how we engage with the web. An introduction by White to the Visitor and Residents paradigm is available in video form:

The abstraction is detailed in a First Monday* paper and opens with a critique of Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.
In addition to using “tool” and “place/space” metaphors to represent engagement with online technology, White explains the Visitors and Residents typology as a continuum rather than a binary choice. Instead of placing each of us at a particular point on that continuum White suggests that our interaction with the web might mean alternately assuming the role of Resident and Visitor depending on context e.g. private vs public life.

Before I move on briefly to Sugata Mitra and his “Hole in the Wall” and “School in the Cloud” projects I might add a closing thought or two on Marc Prensky.

In the introduction to his book of essays, From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom, Prensky states that “students are stuck … with a curriculum that is highly outdated.” I cannot entirely agree with this blanket dismissal of the past. Ask my brother, a lecturer in the Department of Early and Medieval Irish at UCC, if he wishes Latin were still part of the secondary syllabus. The answer would assuredly be in the affirmative.
Prensky goes on to list the essays in his book – I despair of some of the titles – including one called “The True 21st Century Literacy is Programming”. I must demur. As a former programmer I see development environments advancing to the point at which anyone with a modicum of understanding can input the most general of parameters and output perfectly functional (if not necessarily efficient) code. The true 21st Century literacy will be literacy itself. Not just the narrow ability to read and write but, as Aristotle said, “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” I fear, to quote G.M. Trevalyan, that education “has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”

From his 2007 TED Talk, Kids can teach themselves, through his 2010 Talk, The child-driven education, and culminating in his 2013 Build a School in the Cloud, where he discusses Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLEs), Sugata Mitra’s themes are easily understood.

However I find the notion of a teacher as being surplus to requirements somewhat contradicted by the level of their involvement in classrooms such as this where Mitra’s methods have been adopted.

*First Monday is an open-access peer-reviewed journal for articles about the Internet, hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A small aquatic bird of the family anatidae

The PBS interview with Marc Prensky regarding his “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” concept reminded me that no discussion of technology can truly be said to be complete without mention of Douglas Adams. “The Salmon of Doubt”, published posthumously, included his set of rules describing human reactions to technologies:

The Salmon of Doubt

Source: Wikipedia

“1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

In the PBS interview Prensky makes several throwaway remarks about the future which go unchallenged: we might have less privacy but that we’ll grow accustomed to it; we’ll lose some things, like “flowery writing”, but we’ll gain others; Google search is wonderful but “the next thing that comes along will be even better”. Prensky’s Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants classification has been much criticized. Several of those criticisms, ranging from mild to severe, are referenced in The Digital Natives / Digital Immigrants Distinction Is Dead, Or At Least Dying. Mark Bullen’s blog, Next Gen Skeptic, points to several studies that contradict Prensky with hard research concluding that the next generation’s use of digital technologies is more complex than characterised and certainly not homogeneous. The argument that there is as much variation within the digital native or net generation as there is between generations is noted in an article in The Economist, The net generation, unplugged, which makes telling points about superficiality in respect of student familiarity with digital tools and the nature of online youth activism.

Second Thoughts: Language … again

In looking at Prenksy’s website I see that he refers to himself as a “Practial Visionary”, “World Influencer” and “Thought Leader”. Immediately I thought of this:

Shing & Berners-Lee

Source: Karen Twomey (via Twitter)

The inclination to excessive self-promotion online is pervasive. And unnecessary. Let the work speak for itself. Or at a minimum consign the more narcissistic twaddle to the back cover of the next book. Mind you I suspect it has been ever thus and the internet simply acts as amplifier and repeater.
Perhaps I am misconstruing biography as braggadocio. There I defer to the aforementioned Mr Adams: “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”

The Night Watch

In watching Kevin Kelly’s TED Talk, The next 5,000 days of the web, a number of uncharitable thoughts came to mind.

The first is that, even for late 2007, much of what Kelly has to say is not that earth-shattering nor even that instructive. Almost as if he is explaining something out loud to himself that those who follow technology, even tangentially, had pretty much come to understand – the “Internet of Things” was, after all, coined by Kevin Ashton at Proctor & Gamble back in 1999. As Kelly finishes with “One machine; the web is its OS; all screens look into the One; no bits live outside the web; let the One read it; the One is us”, I am silently mouthing “The Matrix”, only to subsequently discover from Kelly’s bio that his 1994 book “Out Of Control” had been required reading for the 1999 film’s actors. Mea culpa. Fortunately the Wachowski brothers (at least before “reloading”) were still able to fashion a stylish, thought-provoking view of a simulated reality in a dystopian future.

Kelly casually notes that the price of total personalization is total transparency. It is a theme he returns to in a 2011 L.A. Times interview, and one I find disquieting. It is hardly a giant leap from there to Mae Holland’s insistence in “The Circle” that “privacy is theft”. In that same L.A. Times interview Kelly also, glibly I feel, dismisses creative professionals and proclaims that “we are all creators”.

Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen
Source: The Guardian

Like Walpole I am a believer in serendipity, and on the day I watched the Kelly TED Talk, the Guardian published an interview with Andrew Keen about his latest polemic “The Internet Is Not The Answer”. A Tech Weekly podcast of an Aleks Krotoski interview with Keen is also online. The contrarian in me identifies with Keen. In brief he believes the internet has become largely about money and monopolies. Keen, a self-confessed content snob who was critical of user-generated media in “The Cult Of The Amateur”, expresses grave concern for the impact of the “culture of free” on creative professionals. In decrying the increasingly anti-social nature of social media he mentions the Twitter shaming of Justine Sacco, the subject of an excellent New York Times article.

Kevin Kelly’s notion of handheld devices as merely windows into the “One” machine reminded me of this:

The Night Watch

Source: Ken Sweeney (via Twitter)

Depressing, but fortunately technology also provides the antidote with this superb BBC piece about the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum, including the installation of “The Night Watch”:

Second Thoughts: Language

I found Kelly’s TED Talk a tad too self-referential. Not unwarranted perhaps for the former executive editor of “Wired” magazine, but then I read that he graduated to “Senior Maverick” upon relinquishing the editorial post, a title that like “Digital Prophet” and “Thought Leader” has neither meaning nor value; I hope it was at least bestowed by others. I recollect a former boss publicly styling himself as “Pragmatic Visionary”; I saw scant evidence of either but I confess I may not have looked hard enough.
Technology is replete with such puffery and eschews the “simple, honest, direct language” that George Carlin speaks of in:

when describing how two-syllable “Shell-shock” (World War I) morphed into eight-syllable “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (Vietnam) by way of “Battle Fatigue” (World War II) and “Operational Exhaustion” (Korea). Thus, as Carlin bemoans, is pain buried beneath jargon and humanity lost to sterility.