R/evolution

I have just been watching another fascinating video, Information R/evolution by Prof Michael Wesch from Kansas State University in which he tells another fast moving and engaging story about the revolution or evolution of information management that is taking place. It is a worthy follow up to his spectacularly popular The machine is Us/ing Us. With thousands of fast moving images it tells a frantic story of how the old fixed information in shelves, books, catalogue cards is being replaced by indexed searchable online resources of a much greater quantity. It is well worth viewing.

A lot of people viewing it, like members of Classroom 2.0, are the in-group with new technologies, and we tend to smugly nod and say, yes, it is a revolution and it is transforming the world, and for the better. And we can all think of colleagues we feel a degree of pity for who don't get it, who are largely oblivious or dismissive of the changes that are taking place, and the impact on education.

But like most revolutions, the outcome is not clear. I suspect that the direction of the revolution will depend a lot on how schools react to the challenges and opportunities. The trouble is, the technology is evolving faster than our ability to come to terms with it.

There are two big pot-holes on the road to technological progress in schooling. The first is that it is often easy to learn how to use a tool but darn hard to work out how to use it effectively and appropriately. Take searching. It is very easy to conduct powerful searches but there is a wide and deep range of skills needed to be able to search wisely and skillfully. That's where smart teachers come in. The second pot-hole is that it is not much good just teaching the old stuff in new ways (to paraphrase Mark Prensky). For example, if students have access to a mountain of information, it is not adding much value to their learning if they are sent off to find the information that used to be in their old text book. Much better to learn how to genuinely investigate, then evaluate information buried in the information mountain. Better still if that investigation is a collaborative task using some Web 2.0 tools. If there has been a revolution in information then maybe there needs to be a revolution in teaching goals and methods.

But from what I can see, most school systems are tentative, ill-informed and more than a little paranoid about the new learning environment. We hear denunciations of the use of information from Wikipedia and other informal information sources that are quite detached from the reality of what smart people are doing in the wider society. But it is a tradition of education systems that they tend to be very resistant to change.

So I think it is up to well informed people like members of Classroom 2.0 to not wait for evolutionary change, but to support the information revolution become a teaching and learning revolution.