Scenarios for the future of education (post-election edition)

Our assignment this week is to look carefully at Facer and Sandford's 2010 article on the next 25 years in education.

Facer, K., & Sandford, R. (2010). The next 25 years?: Future scenarios and future directions for education and technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 74–93.

The authors present "three complex future worlds and, within each world, two alternative educational futures" (p. 82) and Kristin has asked us to choose one of the six scenarios that is "viable" and to create a couple of our own. I've done some of this scenarios work before and was excited for the chance to dive into our task. But I got dark pretty quickly.

I chose the following as my viable world:

World 3: only connectA world organized around a collective understanding of interdependence between people, between individuals and machines, between individuals and ecosystems, in which the concepts of ‘identity’, benefit and action are understood as profoundly social. (p. 83)

I didn't chose this world because it seems most likely. By far that goes to "World 1: trust yourself," in which "there is no support for collective responses to social problems" and which certainly seems like the safest bet from extrapolation of current conditions. No, I think World 3 it's the only one "viable" in the sense of "supportive of continued human flourishing." Within that world, I chose Scenario 1:

‘Integrated experience’ – an education system embedded indistinguishably in society, economy and community, in which learners learn through ongoing participation

This seems in many ways like the oldest form of learning: lifelong, lifewide, informal, as needed. And to the extent that school-based learning is reforming for the better, I believe it is taking on the shape of integrated learning through ongoing participation. This is certainly true in my own field of theological education, where experiments like the Ministry Resident Program and Wisdom Year are attempting to address some of the deficiencies of the schooling model.

As for my own scenarios, I thought I'd lay them out in a fourth world, basically a more drastic version of "World 2: loyalty points." I have altered the World 2 scenarios accordingly

World 4: what remains
The threat of environmental ruin and the consequences of a dismantled social safety net diminish the importance of the nation state and send most people scrambling for their material sustenance to the few institutions left standing, mostly wealthy multinational corporations and family foundations.

Scenario 1: 'Neo-meritocracy' – The early childhood education system is a series of trials determined to identify those who represent the best "bets" for the precious investment of continuing education, i.e., access to excess food, increased shelter and security, electricity, digital tutoring and eventually apprenticeship in the professions that keep what remains of society afloat. Everyone else learns on the job the skills they need for manual labor in the institutions' agricultural operations in exchange for a meager subsistence.

Scenario 2: 'Neo-feudalism' – Those born to the wealthy elite are the de facto recipients of the education efforts, with consequently diminished success.

OK, so maybe this is a more realistic scenario for 50 years out. ;) What can I say, it's a cautionary tale. Ask me again in four years and on a day when I haven't been reading both "The machine stops" (also assigned for the course) and Ready Player One.

"New" literacies: A glossary

I'm using my class project to get acquainted with a family of literatures within which my advisor, Lalitha Vasudevan, and one of the labs I participate in, MASCLab, live and work. To put (too) fine a point on it, my goal for this project is to understand how I've been misusing the critical terminology of my advisor's fields. To put it another way ...

Research question: How can a (new) literacies perspective reframe or clarify the emerging scholarly conversation about digital media instruction for students engaged in professional ministerial training?

To keep myself organized as I begin to dip my toes into these waters, I'm starting a glossary of terms. I'll edit and clarify as my thinking changes and improves. For now, this is all coming from Vasudevan, L. (2010). Education remix: New media, literacies, and the emerging digital geographies. Digital Culture & Education, 2:1, 62-82.

literacies: See literacy practices. More coming, I'm sure, but even this equivalency is really important. I think this is significantly related to what James Gee in 1999 called the "social turn" that took place in literacy studies in the '80s. Point being (again, if I'm following): all of us engage in literacy practices and they are inherently socio-cultural.

New Literacy Studies: The body of literature that emerged from the social turn. Among the happenings are Brian Street's 1995 observation that literacies are multiple and that schools typically choose to privilege some over others. But multiple literacies are not to be confused with

multiliteracies: These "signal[] the multiple resources and communicative forms that inform the design of texts." Yes, quotation marks because I don't really get it yet. But I get that some of these resources and forms are digital. Thus...

new literacy studies: Note lack of capital letters. This is a generic label that has been applied to the work of folks studying how technology, as a set of such resources, changes that process of designing and enacting texts.

Digital literacies: See new literacy studies, I think, but sounds like we can say it in a more concrete and specialized way: the study of literacy practices using digital tools and/or within digital spaces. You'll notice what this isn't, which is of course how everyone, including me, tends to defines it ...

Digital literacy: The instrumentalist (mis)use of precise terminology that simultaneously reduces and expands the use of "digital literacies" above to basically mean "have a baseline competency using technology." This is roughly equivalent to the way people use terms like "technology literacy" (I heard this a lot in engineering school, usually in the context of lament about how people don't really understand science [yeah...]) and "financial literacy" (balancing a checkbook, being able to explain the cause of the Financial Crisis, etc.—basically what you achieve when you read How to Speak Money, which you should do because, of course, whether or not "financial literacy" is a stupid term, it is terrifyingly important and rare).

For what it's worth, I think I'm a little closer to describing the ways in which the work I've been doing has been supporting the development of digital literacies among faith leaders (as Lalitha and her colleagues conceive them). In fact, that's been the vast majority of it. That people (including me) sometimes narrow that to "digital literacy" in the instrumentalist sense is due to the fact that

How do we construct (religious) texts that convey (religious) meaning in digital geographies (error: undefined). This question matters a lot both to how we teach church leaders to use technology and, I believe, how we teach them everything else.

P. S. Digital geographies: Basically, the hybrid spaces we all move in and out of all the time. See, for example, Keith Anderson's Digital Cathedral.

Online and offline religious practices

Last week in class I presented a short critique of Heidi Campbell's "Understanding the Relationship between Religion Online and Offline in a Networked Society." My assignment this week was to answer one of the questions posed by my classmates.

Q: Can you elaborate more on how online religion practice can help with the religion practice as a whole?

Q: Do you think people generally act differently on different platforms, especially in the way they express their religions?

A: One of the traits of "networked religion" that Campbell observed, "convergent practice," speaks in particular to the first question. I hope a brief discussion of this trait "in action" can also serve as an illustration that offers an answer to the first question.

By convergent practice, Campbell means that traditional rituals and interactions get "adapted" to online culture, and often "blended" with each other to form a sort of remix that is influenced by the original context(s) of the practice, the new online context, and the particular focus of the person(s) doing the adapting.

An example of this phenomenon might be the Prayers of the People project. This project was inspired by a (very) old ritual, the offering of a variety of types of prayer "for the church and for the world" during a particular moment in the church service. A group of monks in Cambridge, MA is trying to help their network of friends, supporters, and spiritual explorers bring that prayerful mentality into their everyday lives via a shared social media prayer practice.

Participants in this project can sign up to receive a daily email prompting them to pray according to the "type" of prayer they have designed for the day (thanksgiving, praise, penitence, etc.). The Brothers always give an example, as well as a "call to action" that invites participants to share their prayer on social media using the #prayersof hashtag.

That hashtag, of course, allows the Brothers to "curate" these prayers and share especially powerful ones with their community—people who are participating in this project and people who aren't.

God of forgiveness, we're sorry for those times our church hasn't been a model of your love. #prayersof #penitence https://t.co/oQFbogr4qi

— Anglican Diocese TO (@anglicandioTO) October 25, 2016

Against that backdrop, I think we can see an outline of an answer to this question.

On the one hand, clearly the affordances of a particular platform help to shape the prayers people offer, and probably also how they interact with the prayers of others.

For instance, if a prayer I'm sharing can be captured in some sense visually, I'm more likely to share it on Instagram:

Others seem to fit in better on Twitter:

God of compassion look upon those whose ❤️ are 💔 in the hopeless corners of the 🌍🌏🌎. Be our love, our vision. #gc78 #prayersof #intercession

— VILE 🐺HOWL-iver (@kmoliver) June 29, 2015

Being able to add video greatly expands the conception of what it might mean to pray as an online practice. For instance, here it helps to incorporate the (again ancient) idea that embodiment is important to prayer—that prayer is more than just words.



On the other hand, there is "nothing new under the sun," and I think we see in these practices something utterly ordinary and perfectly consistent with the ways people have practiced religion for millennia.

People of faith want to bring their beliefs into conversation with their everyday lives—their hopes and dreams, their regrets, the challenges they face, the people and places that bring them joy. They want to gives some kind of "voice" to that intersection. And they often want to share it with their faith community and with the world.

In this (phenomenological?) sense, I don't think people are acting differently at all. But they are (to get back to that second question) using digital social practices to deepen their experience of faith and of both virtual and physical community.

In praise of the narrative and active modes in theories of non-essentialist identity-making

The article by Orsatti and Riemer strongly resonated with my experiences in a field of education that is very concerned with identity formation. Indeed, religious educators have largely shifted in their language to embrace the word formation (a word the authors use repeatedly) rather than education, in response to some of the same concerns Orsatti and Riemer name.

I was particularly taken by two aspects of the non-essentialist framework they develop, and I believe they both will resonate with my colleagues as we continue to study religious expression and formation in online spaces.

First, I am grateful for the emphasis on a narrative modality of identity-making (and elsewhere "active[] co-creat[ion]" [9] of identities). Two of the philosophers Orsatti and Riemer cite, Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur, are very important to contemporary religious thought. Their non-essentialist process in which individuals narrate their lives "against the canvass of the social world and ... shared stories" (6)—and along the way "selectively appropriate" the themes of shared stories for personal meaning—this is at the core of what so many of my colleagues do each week.

We convene spaces for telling the stories of the faith community (in the neighborhood as much as in history) not just to preserve those stories but to encourage members of the community to claim them as their own, to incorporate them as one among many identities shaping their daily lives.

Speaking of daily lives, I also appreciated the authors' deployment of a "practical theoretical lens" (8) to conceive an active modality of identity-making. I agree that our identities are being made not just in our conscious decisions of how we present ourselves* but by the unconscious ways we go about the practicalities of our daily lives. What we do each day—and not just when we confront some big life-changing crisis—really matters.

In religious education as in so many other fields, I believe the literature on social communication will improve when we get over the dualistic model of real selves authentically expressed or inauthentically disguised (see Table 2 in the article) and realize that identity is a much more fluid, experimental, and experiential thing. We do our thing and realize later on what it means, how it's making us who we are. I believe Orsatti and Riemer are correct in their assessment that identity is formed, and an increasingly coherent self is experienced, "in the trenches" of the active mode.

There's an old Latin expression that is important to many members of my faith tradition: lex orandi, lex credendi. Literally it means "the rule of prayer is the rule of belief," but what it's getting at is that what a person prays will shape what they come to believe. Many of us have extended this notion to the world of action. We believe that what we do—day in and day out—shapes who we become.

That more general insight seems quite consistent with how Orsatti and Riemer conceive identity. I look forward to spending more time with their multimodal framework.

---

* Incidentally, the focus on self-presentation as the primary example of reflective identity-making, while understandable in light of what the literature tends to fixate on, was a little frustrating to me. Surely we have other good models. In professional development, for example, it's common to engage in "forward-looking ... goal setting" (9) as a result of reflection upon a particular blind spot or felt need. We often see identity being made online in this way, and the "strategic" nature is about much more than people wanting to be seen in a certain way.

Think of all those #whole30 posts. Do those folks want to be seen as healthy, attractive go-getters shaping their own fitness destiny? Sure. But they're also posting as a means of holding themselves accountable. In fact, I think that's primarily what they're doing, and those of us who haven't eaten a vegetable in days tend to project onto them our suspicions of their inauthenticity ("they're only showing the good parts of their lives," etc.).

As helpful as this article was to me, I definitely plan to follow Orsatti and Riemer as they follow through more broadly on their promise to investigate these phenomena in IS social media research. I think we desperately need other examples of the reflective mode at work—and especially more generous ways of interpreting this identity-making process.

Brief ramble about the apparent challenges of characterizing life online

I think it's telling that the First Monday exchange we read for this week (1, 2, 3) took place in 2009, back when smartphones were much less ubiquitous* in the U.S. than they are today:

It's telling because, even still in 2009, I think the prevailing image of Facebook use was of someone sitting at a desktop or laptop computer primarily focused on a browser window. However, in the second quarter of 2016, 1.03 billion of Facebook's 1.13 billion daily active users and 1.57 billion of its 1.71 billion monthly active users accessed the site via mobile at least some of the time. 

Even if the general public doesn't have these stats at their finger tips, I think it's safe to say that the average Facebook user in the popular imagination is now popping in and out of the app via mobile rather than cooped up in a dorm room spending hours at a time on the service. 

Indeed, I believe the informal, non-scientific audiences that received Karpinski's study with such a gush of enthusiasm** were picturing Facebook use as potentially replacing study time: "The kids these days are on the computer instead of at their study group." Today, such popular interpretation would almost certainly be about the interruption of study time, in situ, via mobile: "The kids these days are on their smartphones while they're at their study group."

That these studies would likely have been framed, executed, and received very differently today underscores the challenge of research and even intuitive understanding of what Kietzmann and colleagues rightly describe as both "ecology" and "jungle." The pace of change and the complexity of the system really matter. I think it's important that we bring realistic expectations to studies of online behavior and especially its effects. I also think we are wise to bear in mind the moral panic that seems to always accompany technological change in the social sphere (those of you in MSTU 4016 know what I mean).  

I'm not sure what conclusion(s) I have to offer here about the nature of online life or the effect of social media use on academic performance. I think both sets of authors are ultimately right that "setting the record straight" in some sort of comprehensive and definitive way is incredibly challenging. I wonder about the methodological limitations of any psychometric study within the broad systemic framework Kitezmann and colleagues lay out and would like to learn more about current thinking in this area. 

Perhaps most of all, I wonder how the research will keep up with the changes to the system, especially given the temptation toward rushed work that this First Monday exchange illustrates so vividly. 

*Note that this data is for all adults; it was presumably higher for college-age students throughout this time, but I couldn't easily find support of that.

** That gush, incidentally, certainly seems to be what brings out the rancor in Pasek, more, and Hargittai's critique.

Class Postscript: Two quick links

(1) We asked the question in class: "Who are these 46 million [?] people who aren't using the Internet?"

Here's a nice episode of On the Media about one of them.



(2) I mentioned a social network that sort of billed itself as "Instagram for writers," i.e., social blogging, but I couldn't remember the name. It was the place where, it seemed to me, everyone was leading and no one was following.

Its name is Biosgraphy, which maybe suggests why I couldn't remember it.



Tying things back to our reading about ICT design and the reader-to-leader framework: I think Biosgraphy failed and Medium succeeded in part because Biosgraphy had a higher barrier to entry with respect to reading. It isn't strictly required to log in to read on Biosgraphy, but it's a hell of a lot harder than on Medium.

Smart about "Cyberspace," less so "the American Dream"

I found "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" (hereafter "Cyberspace") to be very uneven in its understanding of the relationship between technology and society.

Particularly intriguing to me is the recurrent theme of diversity and how inevitable it seemed to be in 1994 that "diversity within a broad framework of shared values" would represent the Third Wave economy.

Clearly the authors have a very broad definition of diversity. Diversity here is the opposite of "mass culture -- of everyone watching the same sitcoms on television." It is represented in "the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests."

If the amount of time I spend listening to niche comedy and culture podcasts or following the rabid Hamilton fan community are any indication, then so far so good.

But our more culturally immediate conception of diversity (i.e., of race, of sexual orientation, of gender identity, of socioeconomic status, of geography both regionally and globally)—and particularly an awareness of how power, privilege, and access are unequally distributed across these spectra of difference—provides a lens into how the "Cyberspace" authors thinking goes off the rails. (Or at least into how the history went off the rails so enthusiastically laid by the authors' thinking.)

Drawing an explicit connection to Bruce, I think the authors fail to consistently consider how we "encode social relations into our technologies," particularly when we make them in the first place. Who makes the media and the technology matters for how it will be used and by whom.

The larger and more diverse (in the authors' generic sense) the media ecosystem, the more that access to financial and social capital, high levels of education, etc. seem to give some creators a major competitive advantage over others. Those advantages have the potential to simply reproduce existing inequalities.

Plus, if we do not have a very diverse (in our second sense) group of people making the media and especially the platforms, the biases of the makers we do have tend to become systematic biases. (For a good discussion of this phenomenon in the sharing economy, check out the "You Can’t Code Your Way Out of Racism" episode of Still Processing, which discusses Airbnb's recent announcement of new anti-discrimination policies.)

The authors' argument for the way toward a perhaps utopian Third Wave economy thought a lot about the fiscal and regulatory involved. But I don't see much evidence of a sophisticated social and cultural understanding. Obviously, this is something of an argument from silence, since socio-cultural diversities don't seem to be top of mind for our authors. But in some sense the point is that we're quite unlikely to get anything but silence on this issue.

Let me end with one last quotation:

Turning the economics of mass-production inside out, new information technologies are driving the financial costs of diversity -- both product and personal -- down toward zero, "demassifying" our institutions and our culture. Accelerating demassification creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom.

A fair summarize of the critique I'm trying to get at here is that I believe this statement is only true for those whose social standing afforded them such freedoms in the first place.