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The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.

But the problems are not new. They are the same as those identified by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner nearly 40 years ago when they described the plight of “totally alienated students” involved in a cheating scandal

Texting, web-surfing, and iPods are just new versions of passing notes in class, reading novels under the desk, and surreptitiously listening to Walkmans.

Fortunately, they allow us to see the problem in a new way, and more clearly than ever, if we are willing to pay attention to what they are really saying.

Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.

Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.” Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.

We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies.

When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.

One of the difficulties I find in teaching this way is that each semester I start from scratch. Students need to learn how to learn this way, just as they learned the passivity of the lecture hall over years. By the same token, we need to learn how to teach this way. It does mean changing the role of the teacher. It does mean a shift in the relationship between knowledge, student, and professor. There are difficult institutional-ideological issues coming from all sides there. As such, we are not just talking about changing teaching or learning practices but about changing institutional cultures.

And won’t you concede that there’s some things that simply need to be communicated and digested, period? Is there really a better collaborative, social-network paradigm for learning noun endings in Russian or the multiplication tables, or for how best to craft a sentence, which takes the human touch of a creative, talented teacher? Some things just have to be, uh, “learned,” memorized, practiced with pencil and paper, pen and pad.

For that very reason of “envelopment,” we need to preserve a few spaces on campus in which the cloud is dispelled and students must engage in the “old dynamics of knowledge”–if only as an exercise in mental flexibility. Shouldn’t we be concerned about what is lost as things have “shifted”?

“I agree with some of what he says, but I don’t think I would offer the implicit absolution to students that he does. How are they failing their educations? … Wesch seems to believe that if students are disengaged from the learning process, it’s the fault of the professoriat.”

If we assume that students can access information either before class (via textbooks, for instance) or during class as needed (via laptops and other devices), then we need not spend class time transmitting information to our students. We can, instead, spend precious class time helping students make sense of that information, taking advantage of the fact that class time is the only time when we’re all together (face-to-face, at least) to interact with each other around that information. One method of doing so that scales up very well to a class with hundreds of students (to address David Carson’s concern) is what Mazur calls “peer instruction” facilitated by a classroom response system (”clickers”). The teacher poses a challenging and interesting multiple-choice question. (There are such questions as Michael points out with his anecdote about a student “overthinking” a multiple-choice exam question.) The students think about the question and submit their answers using their clickers. If the results generated by the classroom response system show that there’s disagreement about the question (which is likely to happen if the question is sufficiently challenging), then the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbors. After some time for this “peer instruction,” the students vote again with their clickers. Often, this second vote will show some convergence to the correct answer (provided the question has a single correct answer, which isn’t necessary). Either way, the stage is set for a productive classwide discussion of the question or a mini-lecture by the teacher.

I must admit that I enjoy teaching a large class of 400, many of whom enter the class for a requirement, because it gives me an opportunity to reach out to them with insights and transformative experiences that they are highly unlikely to stumble across in self-directed study. It also gives me a much more diverse group of people to work with and engage with in collaborative study, which can be much more powerful than simple self-directed study.

Are you right that “knowledge is made” in a “cloud of ubiquitous digital information”? Or, is this precisely one of anthropology’s significant contributions to the life of the mind, to a mindful life? Common sense cannot be trusted. Information, even in the highly evocative cloud-form, is *not* knowledge. Whatever knowledge is (i.e. as the philosopher’s ‘true justified belief ‘ or some even more exotic formulation), surely it is an actionable individual possession. The cloud is not knowledgeable, it is informational. And, I wonder how you might respond to a claim that our walls, the particular architectonics of the disciplines we work within, provide students with the conversational, narrative, cognitive, epistemological, methodological, ontological, the –ogical means for converting mere information into knowledge.

How many of the teachers we work with on a daily basis understand the foundational elements of connectivisim? VERY, VERY few in my estimation. Why don’t they understand? Because they have not EXPERIENCED connectivisim. It is not enough to show or be told. One must EXPERIENCE the power of networked learning to understand it and appreciate its potentials.

blended learning conference event which is K-12 Online.

participate and share the upcoming K-12 Online Conference which starts next week with our pre-conference keynote. The conference is free, it’s global, and the co-learners involved (that includes YOU as well as presenters and other participants) are all providing a rich context for experiential, connectivist learning.

if your local educational organization agrees, you can even earn professional development credit for your participation and time!

we are not limited in our access to expert teachers and co-learners if we want to learn

Ken challenges me by thoughtfully connecting his educational practice with learning theories which build on and powerfully extend those which I’ve studied in graduate school.

We can take, ourselves, an online blended course on a topic of interest so that we can personally EXPERIENCE and therefore appropriate / claim for ourselves / understand with depth some of the benefits as well as drawbacks of online learning contexts.

Blended learning, because it offers the possibility of appropriating best practices from BOTH face-to-face as well as online/virtual learning contexts, can provide greater opportunities for authentic learning and meaningful connections than any other educational modality.

MIT said it expects "potentially thousands of papers published by MIT faculty each year will be added to DSpace and made freely available on the web and accessible through search engines such as Google."

"In the quest for higher profits, publishers have lost sight of the values of the academy. This will allow authors to advance research and education by making their research available to the world."

This resolution changes that by creating a role in the publishing process for the faculty as a whole, not just as isolated individuals."

Academics and their institutions have sold out to economic interests in the name of preserving the only system trustworthy enough to produce authoritative information.

I believe it is fair to label as “apartheid” any artificial social construct that privileges an elite minority to the detriment of a majority. The artificial construct doing that in the world of knowledge is the toll-access system of traditional scholarly communication.

Despite all the digitizing and online publishing now extant, despite the proliferation of websites and web users, despite the largely up-to-date technological infrastructure within academia, it is still the case that most of the world’s most important knowledge remains out of reach of most of the world. Keep that simple fact central in your mind as I revisit the mission statements of universities and academic presses that purport to promote scholarship for the general benefit of humankind.

“The mission of a university press,” said Daniel Coit Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University in 1880, “is to assist the university in fulfilling its noble mission ‘to advance knowledge, and to diffuse it not merely among those who can attend the daily lectures—but far and wide.'" Universities and academic publishers are ostensibly dedicated to the very opposite of keeping people and knowledge apart. And yet, they do.

You really don’t need to go to the developing world to recognize that advanced knowledge is a big club with stiff entrance fees. Even middle class Americans will think twice before throwing down $30 for a scholarly article. How likely will this knowledge ever reach scholars in Mexico or India? And just how broadly can the editors of Subjectivity expect it to reach when subscribing costs $503/year?

Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists.

Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the “influence” of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; “impact factor” relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.

one of the great secrets of academic publishing

academia could care less about whether anything its scholars do actually makes a difference in the world, except for the occasional puff piece to show to contributors or alumni. Reaching out to the whole world is the stuff that convocation speeches and university mission statements are made of, but in the day-to-day world of academia, actually reaching the world with one’s refined knowledge is not rewarded. In fact, it is often punished. Generalists, such as those who are using blogging to actually talk to the public about their ideas, are threatened with lack of tenure or advancement if they waste their time in anything but publications oriented towards their disciplinary peers.

A university’s reward system requires its faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals serve the purpose of authenticating knowledge, but at the same time they also wall in that knowledge by making it available only to those willing to pay for it.

There is an assumption that if something is “published” (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available.

It may be “circulating” among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion).

Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.

scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals. And it's a shame that broader, open, multi-disciplinary review is considered inferior to one-time assessment by two or three experts. Can we really be sure that conventional peer-reviewed knowledge is as reliable as it pretends to be when its adherents resist transparency and the checks and balances of exposing this knowledge more broadly?

I call upon you to join me in a full divestment from intellectual apartheid.

Here's how each academic stakeholder can fight Intellectual Apartheid: Scholars: Publish your work in Open Access journals or arrange open access for publications in conventional journals. Use Creative Commons licensing (rather than signing away copyright) in order to preserve access to your own work Deposit your publications in institutional or disciplinary archives to ensure permanent open access and the broadest exposure to search engines. Refuse to peer-review manuscripts or serve in editorial capacities for any journal that does not accommodate open access. Cancel subscriptions to toll-access scholarship Wean yourself from using any research materials that an everyday person from a developing country wouldn't have full access to via the Internet

In training students, patrons, and faculty, teach them more about how and why to use open access resources rather than how to use expensive proprietary databases and services. Work with administrators to educate faculty about the benefits of open access publishing and rights management.

Administrators Create a university-wide mandate (as Harvard has done), requiring faculty to retain copyright of their scholarship and to license the non-exclusive depositing of that scholarship in the institutional archive. Update promotion and tenure policies to favor open access publications and to accommodate evolving scholarly genres (such as data sets, software, and scholarly tools that build the cyberinfrastructure). Require chairs and deans to educate faculty on evolving academic publishing models and to ready their conversion to using and publishing open access scholarship.

In Forsyth, the district uses radius servers for centralized network management. This device identifies the districts’ computers, allowing them access to the network according to their status. Laptops that don’t pass this test are put on the district’s virtual lan. This gives them online access while keeping the user behind the district’s firewall and within its Internet filters. It keeps these computers—and their users—away from the district’s network.

Murray’s Pennsylvania district scans each notebook before it can connect to the school server. Clean Server antivirus software is one of the tools it uses to avoid “malware” and worms. Also, the district’s scans point users to free patches and service packs that are needed to keep security up to date.

Compatibility seems to be less of an issue each day as more online applications become available.

schools can turn to the growing number of free online tools available to all.

Classroom management is another potential worry. If college professors feel like students sometime use their lectures as a quiet place to fool around or get other work done (see sidebar), then what chance do K–12 teachers have of getting—and keeping—25 students on task?Teachers in Pennsylvania use classroom management software (a small software download) to keep control. Murray says this program allows teachers to take complete control of each laptop if they want, pushing out their lesson to each screen, blocking all work with a single button, and even using the pcs as glorified personal response devices.

The last big hurdle to make this policy a reality in more districts is one that can’t be cleared with a simple software program. It is instilling the idea that teachers will no longer be the dominant information delivery for each class.

“How do you get teachers prepared to teach in a classroom where everyone is a teacher?

“Professional development is key. We have instructional technology specialists at every school. These folks are not the fix-it people but certified teachers [usually from that same building]. It’s a peer.”

“There’s an explosion of social activities” that computers enable, Murray says,  from talking with people worldwide to keeping in touch with like-minded groups through Twitter to having students take virtual field trips halfway around the world, or just down the street. Science students can do an online dissection with step-by-step analysis, or math problems where a simulation can help illustrate a difficult-to-grasp concept, he adds.

Teachers need to think about teaching in a different way,” he says. “If you’re doing that, a lot of these [problems] go away.”

Having kids bring in their own computers can help bring 1:1 a lot closer to reality, especially in poorer districts. Klingler says Forsyth can channel its existing computer stock to students without personal computers and help reduce tech disparity.

While his state’s Classrooms for the Future program brought 550 pcs into the district, the technology coordinator realizes he won’t have the funding needed to replace these machines in three or four years.

“The cell phone is their thing,” Walery says. “Communication is the main [goal]. They constantly text back and forth.”

Forsyth has even looked into using Sony Playstation handhelds in class, noting that they have a “decent Web browser.”“We want to support whatever kids bring in,” he adds.

“It’s much more likely in a few years all students will have their own smartphones,” he says.