how Jim Gee and I soothe our guilty consciences

In the video below of a presentation to the Education Writers Association 2010 Annual Conference, Jim Gee says this about how to introduce innovative ideas into education:

There's a choice of strategies here.... One strategy is: Let's take our innovations to the center of the school system and spread them as fast and quickly as we can. People believe that this current school system as it is will just co-opt those innovations and make them ... just better ways to do the old thing. Another strategy is: Let's make these innovative learning and assessment tools and put them at the margins, in places that will tolerate innovation, and then show it works. Now if you think about it, in technology outside of schools, going to the margins first and then to the center--that's always been the way innovation happens. The only place we've ever tried to keep putting the new thing right in the center at once is in schooling, and it's never worked. What i would love to see is that we hive of some of the (Race to the Top) money for a national center that would trial these new assessments, show they work in places that tolerate innovation, and then spread them there, just the way you would want if we have to keep coal and oil--let's at least have something trying out new forms of energy, so that we're ready for these markets but also we can prove they work. if we don't do that, we're just gonna get a better mousetrap.

I absolutely agree with the sentiments in the quote above, except for the BP oil spill. Let's say there's some innovative energy research going on in the margins, ready to prove it works and to take over where coal and oil left off. That's fantastic, and it doesn't do a single goddamned thing to help the birds, the fish, the sea mammals, the tourist industry, the ecosystem, the fisheries, and the human residents of the Gulf Coast. Those are simply casualties, not a single thing we can do to help them now no matter what awesome innovative fuel source we finally embrace, no matter how much more quickly we may embrace a cleaner fuel source as a result. Even if tomorrow's birds are safe from Big Oil, today's birds are drowning right in front of us.

Working at the margins of education is a fantastic way to innovate and offer useful evidence that innovations work. I fully support this approach--but not at the expense of the kids who exist at the center of our education system today. Yes, the school system can and does and maybe always will co-opt any innovation we try to introduce. But that doesn't excuse us from trying anyway. That doesn't give us license to give up on today's children, even if it keeps tomorrow's children safe.

And of course this isn't what Jim Gee wants to do, anyway. But the Jim Gees of the world who urge us to work at the margin live in symbiosis with the Jenna McWilliamses of the world who believe we must also work from the center, where--ironically--the most marginalized kids in education commonly reside. I can't innovate as much as I'd like from the center, maybe I can't help tomorrow's marginalized kids as much as I'd like either.  And Jim Gee can't help today's marginalized kids as much as he'd probably like from the edges. So we need each other, if for nothing else than to assuage our guilty consciences for being unable to do more of what we know must be done.

I should probably also note that Jim Gee is one of my absolute all-time heroes, so I hope he's not mad at me for this post.

This video also stars Daniel Schwartz, who I believe is one of the smartest guys thinking about assessment and learning these days. I had the great luck to attend an assessment working group with him and a big crew of assessment-focused researchers, and I was amazed and blown away by just about everything he said.

In a recent publication, Choice-Based Assessments in a Digital Age (.pdf), Schwartz and his co-author Dylan Arena make this argument:

Educational assessment is a normative endeavor: The ideal assessment both reflects and reinforces educational goals that society deems valuable. A fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act independently in the world—which is to say, to make good choices. It follows that an ideal assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so.

I can't remember when I've agreed more emphatically with the introductory sentence of a scholarly article about education.

Here's the video, which is well worth a watch.

blogging as a pedagogical tool: some initial ideas and a request

I'm hoping to crowdsource some brainstorming about the pedagogical potential of blogging on learning. Lately, in my work with Dan Hickey's 21st Century Assessment Project, I've been thinking tons about how integrating blogging in the formal English / Language Arts classroom might build a rich new media environment for ELA students. I've started a provisional list below but am hoping that others (most importantly for me, people who have worked with blogs in their classrooms) can offer ideas for additions to this list.

First of all, it's worth noting that my approach to the value of blogging for teaching and learning in Language Arts is deeply informed by the work of a number of teacher-researchers from several fields. Most notable among these are Paul Allison, whose chapter "Be a Blogger: Social Networking in the Classroom" (in Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom, by Anne Herrington, Kevin Hodgson, and Charles Moran) offers a glimpse into the day-to-day workings of a blogging-focused ELA curriculum; and Sam Rose and Howard Rheingold, who have devised (and made publicly available) an enormous set of resources for teaching in and through new media platforms.

My approach is also informed by my personal experience as a blogger--really, to be fair, as someone who is willing to squeeze out nearly anything in order to make time for posting. By even my most generous estimate, I spend far too much of my time blogging--unless you account for the formative value of blogging for someone like me. I am convinced that the intellectual and identity work required for me to maintain this space has led directly to my growing prowess as a researcher, reader, and writer. You cannot convince me otherwise; so do not even bother trying.

My experiences and the reading I've done about the value of blogging for learning informs everything that comes next.

Characteristics of blogging that support new media literacy

Reaching a wide(r) reader base
It's important to note that blogs differ in purpose from many seemingly similar writing platforms. It's obvious to most that a blog is different from a personal journal, in that while many of us may hope to have our journals read by a larger public some day, blogs are actually intended to support wider readership. The majority of blogs are public (meaning anybody can view them) and taggable, and they come up as legitimate sites in web searches.

Blogs also differ from forums, chat rooms, instant message programs, and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Of all of these spaces, blogs are generally the most polished, the most text-based, and the most supportive of extended engagement with a single idea.

Shifting from intended audience to intended public
This idea is ripped from Howard Rheingold, who (tapping into some Habermas) writes that

[m]oving from a private to a public voice can help students turn their self-expression into a form of public participation. Public voice is learnable, a matter of consciously engaging with an active public rather than broadcasting to a passive audience.

The move here is away from the "please read what I wrote" approach to "please act on the ideas I've written down here." The regular practice required for building and maintaining a blog's readership helps to crystallize this shift and helps writers to see there is a broad, if constantly shifting, group of people whose interests align with the broad, if constantly shifting, ideas of a blog. Though the intended public is largely invisible (we have generally only met a fraction of our blog's readers), consistent practice in finding, drawing in, and engaging this target public makes them less transparent.

Blogs as (genuine) conversations
When I taught college composition lo these many years ago, I always tried to argue to my students that all writing is a conversation--that when we write, we take up ideas that were presented by other writers before us and try to present something new that might be of interest to people who care about the kinds of things we write about.

The argument always felt hollow to me. After all, college students are typically only eavesdroppers. Only a handful of people will ever read what they've written, and often the students don't really care all that much about the assigned writing topics anyway. Add to that the artificial motivator of the ever-elusive 'A' and you have a recipe for calamity.

But blogs--now blogs are authentic communication spaces. They really are. Anybody can get almost anybody to read a blogpost and, if the post is engaging enough, to comment on the post for all eternity to see. This very fact ups the ante some: Getting the spelling of someone's name suddenly matters an awful lot. Making a concise, well supported argument has real, potential consequences: A strong enough argument gets people to sit up and notice. A strong enough argument gets people to act.

A move toward increasingly public spheres of participation
An increasingly participatory culture calls for participation that's ethical, reasoned, and publicly accessible. After all, the widespread takeup of the spirit of participatory culture requires that we all act in ways that keep the barriers to participation low, the potential for contribution high, and the mentorship possibilities readily available to most or all participants. This can only happen to the extent that all or most of us are willing to operate, to express and circulate our ideas and creative works, in public online and offline spaces. Since so much discourse will increasingly happen in public spaces, it only makes sense that we use the ELA domain to prepare students for engagement in those public spaces.


Blogs as spaces for fostering both traditional and new media literacies
For language arts teachers, blogging presents a fairly obvious avenue for preparing learners for engagement in public spheres of communication, since blogs align nicely with the traditional purposes of the ELA classroom. As a group of readers engage in deep analysis of their own and others' blogs, they have to think about issues like tone, style, genre, punctuation, word choice, and organization.

The extra toy prize is that students also get to learn about the characteristics of online writing, including what danah boyd identifies as the four properties of online communication (persistence, searchability, replicability, and scalability) and three dynamics (invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring of public and private). As my colleague Michelle Honeyford put it, "they hit all the standards and get to learn about online participation for free."


Confronting the ethics challenge
Nobody's arguing that we should sign every sixth grader up with a Blogger account. That would just be silly. Media scholar Henry Jenkins is fond of saying that the role of educators and parents is not to look over kids' shoulders but to watch their backs, and scaffolding learners toward participation in increasingly public spheres allows us to do just that. Lots of teachers (including the famously brilliant Becky Rupert at Bloomington's Aurora Alternative High School) start their students out by having them post to a private space (she uses Ning) but having them analyze writing from more public spaces. This way, they have a kind of new media sandbox to try out and engage with the norms of online communication before actually being held to the higher ethical standard, with deeper potential repercussions (both positive and negative).


That's all I have for now, though I would love to hear from you on the list above. What have I missed? What am I ignoring? What struggles are linked to bringing blogs into the classroom, and what challenges have you encountered if you've tried to do so?

I hope for this to be a multipart post that will include thoughts on the following categories:

• Affordances of blogging as a new media writing technology
• Challenges to integrating blogs into the ELA classroom
• Resources (including lesson plans, other writing on this topic, etc.)
• Assessment guidelines for working with blogs

If you have thoughts on any of the above, I'd love to hear from you. If you have any trouble posting comments (I don't know why, but some of you have) please email me at jennamcjenna(at)gmail(dot)com.

how to think like a good {fill in the blank}

"The message of Wikipedia," writes Michael Wesch, "is not 'trust authority' but 'explore authority.' Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in."

This comes from Wesch's January 2009 Academic Commons article, "From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments." The piece is part of an issue dedicated to exactly this problem: How do we teach and learn in a cultural moment where even the very definition of "knowledge," "teaching," and "learning," and even of "information" is being called into question?

Wesch focuses in on the brick-and-mortar university, arguing that despite growing recognition among higher-ed faculty and administration that university teaching and learning desperately needs to shift away from its authoritarian roots, a series of physical, social, and cognitive structures stymie this effort at nearly every turn. The physical deterrents are, Wesch argues, the easiest to recognize, and they

are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.

This is a message that very few faculty could agree with, and in fact some may use the room to launch spirited attacks against it. But the content of such talks are overshadowed by the ongoing hour-to-hour and day-to-day practice of sitting and listening to authority for information and then regurgitating that information on exams.

These are a key feature of the social structures that work against change in higher education: The ongoing pressure to standardize curriculum and use (easily quantified) standardized assessments for accountability purposes. Wesch writes:

When I speak frankly with professors all over the world, I find that, like me, they often find themselves jury-rigging old assessment tools to serve the new needs brought into focus by a world of infinite information. Content is no longer king, but many of our tools have been habitually used to measure content recall. For example, I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.

This is, perhaps, one of the most significant dangers inherent in re-mediating assessment: The risk of re-mediating the wrong aspects of current assessment strategies. Rewriting a multiple-choice test is surely not the answer, but it's often, and understandably, what innovative and new media-friendly educators do. The results of this effort may not be satisfactory, after all, but they're better than nothing. And short of overhauling an entire course, it's often a useful stopgap measure.

And what of overhauling an entire course? Wesch, recognizing that "our courses have to be about something," argues for a shift away from "subjects" (English, History, Science) and toward "subjectivities"--ways of approaching and thinking about content. One simple way of thinking about this shift is by thinking about the difference between learning the steps of the scientific method and developing the mindsets embraced by a profession that embraces the scientific method as a useful approach to experimentation.

The "subjectivities" approach is, in fact, the favored approach of many graduate programs. My sister, who is beginning law school this fall, is immersed in a cognitive apprenticeship designed to make her think, act, and speak like a lawyer. As a new doctoral student in Indiana University's Learning Sciences program, I'm undertaking the same apprenticeship. A series of courses, including IU's Professional Seminar in the Learning Sciences and Theory and Method in the Learning Sciences, are intended to equip new grad students with the Learning Sciences mindset.

This approaches, however, gives rise to a key question: If the "subjectivities" approach is intended to is intended to help learners think, act, and speak like a {fill in the blank}, then who decides how a {fill in the blank} is supposed to think, act, and speak?

Jim Gee offers a fascinating critique of "learning to think like a lawyer" in his book Social Linguistics and Literacies. He argues that success in law school is slanted toward people who think, act, and speak like white, middle-class men, explaining that:

[t]o write a competent brief the student has to be able to read the text being briefed in much the same way as the professor does.... Students are not taught these reading skills—the ones necessary to be able to write briefs—directly. Briefs are not, for instance, turned in to the professor; they are written for the students' own use in class.... One of the basic assumptions of law school is that if students are not told overtly what to do and how to proceed, this will spur them on essentially to teach themselves. Minnis argues that this assumption does not, however, work equally well for everyone. Many students from minority or otherwise non-mainstream backgrounds fail in law school.

(A female friend who recently completed law school agrees with this argument, and struggled mightily with the inequities inherent in her program and inside the field of law in general. I've written about her experience here.)

This issue is certainly not limited to law school; it's a thorny problem in every program designed to help students think like a {fill in the blank.} I understand that this is an issue that IU's Learning Sciences program has grappled with recently, and I imagine this is the reason that the Professional Seminar in the Learning Sciences, previously a required course, has now been made optional.

What do I know, right? I haven't even started my first semester in the program yet. But it seems to me that if this issue is worth grappling with (and I believe it is), it's worth grappling with alongside of the program's apprentices. I'm for making the course mandatory and then using it to expose, discuss, and clarify the very issues that led to the faculty's decision.

Here we can take a page out of the Wikipedia lesson book. There's no point in simply trusting authority when the social revolution supports not just questioning, not just opposing, but actually exploring authority. After all, thinking like a good {Learning Scientist} is about much more than embracing a set of approaches to teaching, learning, and knowledge; it's also about questioning, contesting and exploring the very foundation of the field itself.

applying the abundance model to the classroom

In a recent Wired article called "Tech is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity," Chris Anderson considers the difference between a scarcity management model and an abundance model. His point is linked to management of technology resources; he writes that

[i]f you're controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating. There are real costs associated with those half-hour chunks of network time, and the penalty for failing to reach tens of millions of viewers with them is calculated in red ink and lost careers. No wonder TV executives fall back on sitcom formulas and celebrities—they're safe bets in an expensive game.

But if you're tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low. Nobody gets fired when your YouTube video is viewed only by your mom.

Anderson's point is that when resources--in this case, willing content producers with cheap production tools--are abundant, we need to rethink how we structure, market, and make money off of content.

The point, though linked to media marketing models, might easily be applied to the domain of education. The following graphic accompanies Anderson's piece:




Clearly, the abundance model as presented here aligns with the spirit of participatory culture, at its heart an egalitarian, anti-hierarchical movement wherein cultural decisions become crowdsourced. Here's where many school policies confuse scarcity and abundance: They block participatory media (including YouTube, many social networking sites, and sometimes Google and Wikipedia) and evaluate students based on their ability to repeat back to the teacher (or testmaker) the big ideas of the class. Knowledge, in this case, is treated as a scarce resource, when in a participatory culture knowledge is almost the most abundant thing we have.

What would it look like to apply an abundance model to the classroom? What new roles can and should teachers and students play in an egalitarian classrom in which "everything is permitted unless it is forbidden"? What's the difference, practically speaking, between a "command and control" classroom and a class without that type of control?

Important questions to chew on. More soon.

the sleeping alone review of books: Teaching the New Writing

Summary: Awesomeness reigns at the house of NWP

I'm only giving you the first three paragraphs, and then you have to read the rest at the real live journal that published it online. brb turning into pile of graduate student joy confetti




ok back


the link is here. The journal is THEN (the name stands for [t]echnology, [h]umanities, [e]ducation and [n]arrative). The review begins below.



The National Writing Project is perhaps the most enduring teacher development network in the country. Started in 1974 as the Bay Area Writing Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley, the project quickly grew, both in funding and popularity, and today the NWP has nearly 200 sites nationwide.

Many have argued that a significant reason for the ongoing success of this program is its decision to host NWP sites at local universities. According to NWP supporters, this pairing allows for stability, ongoing professional development opportunities, and a higher degree of buy-in from faculty at local schools and at the university. One wonders if this model limits access to NWP involvement to the teachers who work in and around colleges; these are the teachers who already have the most access to research and university resources, and traditionally underserved rural or geographically isolated teachers and their students are, prevented access to this resource.

Still, it's hard to argue with success, and the NWP is nothing if not successful. The pairing of K-12 teachers with higher ed faculty makes for an interesting and fruitful partnership, as evidenced by the NWP's new book, Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom.

The editors of the book represent ... [to read the rest of this review, go to http://thenjournal.org.]

the harrison bergeron approach to education: how university rankings stunt the social revolution

I've been thinking some lately about the odd and confusing practice of comparing undergraduate and graduate programs at American colleges and universities and producing a set of rankings that show how the programs stack up against each other.

One of the most widely cited set of rankings comes from U.S. News and World Report, which offers rankings in dozens of categories, for both undergraduate and graduate-level programs. Here, the magazine offers its altruistic rationale behind producing these rankings:

A college education is one of the most important—and one of the most costly—investments that prospective students will ever make. For this reason, the editors of U.S. News believe that students and their families should have as much information as possible about the comparative merits of the educational programs at America's colleges and universities. The data we gather on America's colleges—and the rankings of the schools that arise from these data—serve as an objective guide by which students and their parents can compare the academic quality of schools. When consumers purchase a car or a computer, this sort of information is readily available. We think it's even more important that comparative data help people make informed decisions about an education that at some private universities is now approaching a total cost of more than $200,000 including tuition, room, board, required fees, books, transportation, and other personal expenses.

(To access the entire rankings, developed and produced selflessly by U.S. News and World Report, you need to pay. Click here to purchase the Premium Online Edition, which is the only way to get complete rankings, for $14.95.)

The 2009 rankings, released in April, are in the news lately because of questions related to how the magazine gathers data from colleges. As Carl Bialik points out in a recent post at the Wall Street Journal, concerns over how Clemson University set about increasing its rank point to deeper questions about the influence of rankings numbers on university operations. Clemson President James F. Barker reportedly shot for cracking the top 20 (it was ranked 38th nationally in 2001) by targeting all of the ranking indicators used by U.S. News. Bialik writes:

While the truth about Clemson’s approach to the rankings remains elusive, the episode does call into question the utility of a ranking that schools can seek to manipulate. “Colleges have been ‘rank-steering,’ — driving under the influence of the rankings,” Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy and a critic of rankings, told the Associated Press. “We’ve seen over the years a shifting of resources to influence ranks.”

Setting aside questions of the rankings' influence on university operations and on recruiting (both for prospective students and prospective faculty), and setting aside too the question of how accurate any numbers collected from university officials themselves could possibly be when the stakes are so high, one wonders how these rankings limit schools' ability to embrace what appear to be key tenets emerging out of the social revolution. A key feature of some of the most vibrant, energetic, and active online communities is what Clay Shirky labels the "failure for free" model. As I explained in a previous post on the open source movement, the open source software (OSS) movement embraces this tenet:

It's not, after all, that most open source projects present a legitimate threat to the corporate status quo; that's not what scares companies like Microsoft. What scares Microsoft is the fact that OSS can afford a thousand GNOME Bulgarias on the way to its Linux. Microsoft certainly can't afford that rate of failure, but the OSS movement can, because, as Shirky explains,

open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.

Anyone who's worked for a company of reasonable size understands the push to keep the risk of failure low. "More people," Shirky writes, "will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea." The higher up the organizational chart you go, the harder the push will be for safe choices. Innovation, it seems, is both a product of and oppositional to the social contract.

The U.S. News rankings, and the methodology behind them, runs completely anathema to the notion of innovation. Indeed, a full 25 percent of the ranking system is based on what U.S. News calls "peer assessment," which comes from "the top academics we consult--presidents, provosts, and deans of admissions" and, ostensibly, at least, allows these consultants

to account for intangibles such as faculty dedication to teaching. Each individual is asked to rate peer schools' academic programs on a scale from 1 (marginal) to 5 (distinguished). Those who don't know enough about a school to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know." Synovate, an opinion-research firm based near Chicago, in spring 2008 collected the data; of the 4,272 people who were sent questionnaires, 46 percent responded.

Who becomes "distinguished" in the ivory-tower world of academia? Those who play by the long-established rules of tradition, polity, and networking, of course. The people who most want to effect change at the institutional level are often the most outraged, the most unwilling to play by the rules established by administrators and rankings systems, and therefore the least likely to make it into the top echelons of academia. Indeed, failure is rarely free in the high-stakes world of academics; it's safer to say no to "a radical but promising idea" than to say yes to any number of boring but safe ideas.

So what do you do if you are, say, a prospective doctoral student who wants to tear wide the gates of academic institutions? What do you do if you want to go as far in your chosen field as your little legs will carry you, leaving a swath of destruction in your wake? What do you do if you want to bring the social revolution to the ivory tower, instead of waiting for the ivory tower to come to the social revolution?

You rely on the U.S. News rankings, of course. It's what I did when I made decisions about which schools to apply to (the University of Wisconsin-Madison [ranked 7th overall in graduate education programs, first in Curriculum & Instruction, first in Educational Psychology] the University of Texas-Austin [tied at 7th overall, 10th in Curriculum & Instruction], the University of Washington [12th overall, 9th in Curriculum & Instruction], the University of Michigan [14th overall, 7th in Curriculum & Instruction, and 3rd in Educational Psychology] the University of Indiana [19th overall, out of the top 10 in individual categories], and Arizona State University [24th overall, out of the top 10 in individual categories]). Interestingly, though, the decision to turn down offers from schools ranked higher than Indiana (go hoosiers) wasn't all that difficult. I knew that I belonged at IU (go hoosiers) almost before I visited, and a recruitment weekend sealed the deal.

But I had an inside track to information about IU (go hoosiers) via my work with Dan Hickey and Michelle Honeyford. I also happen to be a highly resourceful learner with a relatively clear sense of what I want to study, and with whom, and why. Other learners--especially undergraduates--aren't necessarily in such a cushy position. They are likely to rely heavily on rankings in making decisions about where to apply and which offer to accept. This not only serves to reify the arbitrary and esoteric rankings system (highest ranked schools get highest ranked students), but also serves to stunt the social revolution in an institution that needs revolution, and desperately.

In this matter, it's turtles all the way down. High-stakes standardized testing practices and teacher evaluations based on achievement on these tests limits innovation--from teachers as well as from students--at the secondary and, increasingly, the elementary level. But the world that surrounds schools is increasingly ruled by those who know how to innovate, how to say yes to a radical but promising idea, how to work within a "failure for free" model. If schools can't learn how to embrace the increasingly valued and valuable mindsets afforded by participatory practices, it's failing to prepare its student body for the world at large. The rankings system is just another set of hobbles added on to a system of clamps, tethers, and chains already set up to fail the very people it purports to serve.

sadhappy, anxiouscalm: on career transitions

Today is the first day of my last month at my day job. For almost two years, I've been a team member of Project New Media Literacies, an educational research project based at MIT. It would be a lie for me to say that every minute was exciting, fun, and exhilarating; anyone who's done this kind of work knows that it's often exhausting, frustrating, and stressful.

That's because to do educational research well, you have to care, and you have to care deeply. And this means facing some difficult realities: That the institution of education is deeply flawed in some important and fundamental ways; that educational innovations are often stymied by policy issues and bureaucratic red tape; that most of the time, educational research--even at its most valuable--has a minimal impact on education as a whole.

My work at NML has focused largely on the formal classroom setting, the educational environment that--because of its compulsory nature--offers the greatest opportunity for closing the participation gap that limit some learners' ability to engage with participatory culture in a meaningful way. I've had the chance to talk with some of the most amazing, dedicated teachers I've ever had the good fortune to meet, and I've gotten to sit in on some of their classes. I've seen the everyday miracles they pull off, often thanklessly, without acknowledgement from students, parents, or administrators. Some of these teachers have explained to me what they'd like to do, if they didn't have to deal with state-mandated standardized tests and the policies and curricula intended to boost student scores on these tests. I've heard teachers explain which ideals they've had to give up on, how they've become more cynical or realistic about the impact they can have.

So we're back to burnout, exhaustion, and stress: This is the story of the educator who cares.

I leave NML equipped with a more complete understanding of the complexities and challenges of working in education. I leave knowing I did my best work but wishing I could have done more. I leave more confident in my own abilities but less confident in the possibility for real, lasting transformation of formal learning environments.

And yet I leave NML to begin doctoral study in education.

Despite, or maybe because of, my frustration, I have come to believe that schools are the most important institution America has for working toward social justice. This is where the participation gap is most obvious; this is where class biases--and the racism, sexism, and accompanying approaches to teaching and learning--are simultaneously most apparent and most insidious, and therefore most essential to confront.

I've been writing obsessively here at sleeping alone and starting out early about what I've started calling the social revolution. By this term I mean to suggest that we are immersed in fundamental changes to our society that are so rapid, so deep, and so transformative that we can't yet even say exactly what this revolution will yield; but we know that a new social order is emerging out of the emergent tools, technologies, and practices of a participatory culture.

In fact, as one of my colleagues pointed out, even NML has trouble defining "participatory culture." He argues that while we have little trouble explaining what participatory culture allows for, we struggle to explain what it actually is.

He may be right on this, and he may be wrong. It is true, however, that we don't yet know what valued social structures, practices, and dispositions will emerge out of the participatory practices enabled by new media. In fact, it may be that one of the features of a truly participatory culture is a constant destabilization--perpetual overthrow--of dominant values, mindsets, and skillsets. Christopher Kelty calls this a "constantly 'self-leveling' level playing field." Wouldn't that be scary and at the same time so very neat?

This is the struggle of our society, and one that John Dewey pointed to back at the end of the 19th century, when he proposed development of a laboratory school where educators could try out new approaches to teaching and learning. In setting forth a series of arguments about new ways to think about knowing and cognition, he conceded that

[i]t is... comparatively easy to lay down general propositions like the foregoing; easy to use them to criticize existing school conditions; easy by means of them to urge the necessity of something different. But art is long. The difficulty is in carrying such conceptions into effect—in seeing just what materials and methods, in what proportion and arrangement, are available and helpful at a given time.... There is no answer in advance to such questions as these. Tradition does not give it because tradition is founded upon a radically different psychology. Mere reasoning cannot give it because it is a question of fact. It is only by trying that such things can be found out. To refuse to try, to stick blindly to tradition, because the search for the truth involves experimentation in the region of the unknown, is to refuse the only step which can introduce rational conviction into education.

Beginning this fall, I'll be a graduate student in the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University. The transition makes me simultaneously sad and happy, anxious and calm. Bring it on, says hegemony. I can take you.

It's already been broughten, says revolutionist cat, playing hegemony off.

thank goodness the Boston Globe is shutting down

or I'd have to smack it down big-time for this editorial arguing that we shouldn't standardize and measure achievement on so-called 21st-century skills. The op-ed offers further proof--as if we needed it--that the Globe's editorial board has no idea how the playing field has been utterly transformed by participatory culture.

The impetus behind the op-ed is a move by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to put its money where its mouth is. The department recently awarded a $146 million contract to the designer of the MCAS, the standardized test mandated in the commonwealth of Massachusetts by No Child Left Behind, and part of that money is earmarked for integration of 21st-century skills assessment. This is a problem, as the Globe's editorial board will point out momentarily.

But first, it uses state MCAS scores as proof of public school rigor. As it explains,

Massachusetts stands apart in public education precisely because it created high academic standards, developed an objective measure of student performance and progress through the MCAS test, and required a passing grade in order to graduate. Students, as a result, rank at or near the top of standardized testing not just nationally but on tough international achievement tests in math and science. Any retreat from this strategy would be a profound mistake.

So to summarize: Massachusetts students are among the top in the nation because their achievement on standardized tests prepares them to...score well on standardized tests. It's like the iconic example of circular reasoning: The MCAS is useful because it prepares them for future learning. How do you know? Because Massachusetts students do well on other standardized tests. What prepares them to do well on those tests? Doing well on standardized tests, of course.

Given the Globe's wholehearted genuflection at the altar of bubble tests, one wonders why this editorial might oppose integrating assessment of 21st-century skills in addition to traditional subjects. It turns out their concern is less about whether we should measure 21st century skills than it is about how doing so on the MCAS will affect test scores in general. As the editorial points out,

[s]tate education officials have done a generally poor job of defining 21st-century skills - which can include interdisciplinary thinking and media literacy - or explaining how to test them statewide.

The problem for the Globe, it turns out, is that if we develop mediocre assessment strategies it'll ruin the MCAS for all of us. Because 21st-century skills can only be measured subjectively, the Globe argues, an "objective" test like the MCAS is an inappropriate place to assess achievement. Instead,

MCAS testers should concentrate on accurately measuring math ability and reading comprehension, which surely correlate with a student's success in the workplace.

Let's leave, just for now, the outrageous assumption that a standardized test could conceivably be considered "objective." Let's leave the assumption that a standardized test could "accurately" measure student ability in anything other than the ability to engage in the weird and peculiar game of test-taking. Which leaves just one last question:

In what world can anybody make the argument that achievement in math and reading without the accompanying facility with 21st-century proficiencies prepares any learning for any workplace worth the energy of applying for employment in the first place?

It's such a weird argument to make, that literacy practices like reading, writing, and doing math can be somehow isolated from the 21st-century contexts that make them meaningful. It's like asking someone if she knows how to tie her shoe, then making her
prove it by writing a detailed step-by-step description of how to do it. It's like asking someone to prove he can build a fire: But is the fire for warmth, for signaling for help, or for burning the whole house down?

Same with math: Knowing how to "do" fractions doesn't mean a learner is equipped to, say, resize a .jpg for a blogpost.

Arguing that we should keep 21st-century skills out of standardized tests in order to keep the tests objective is as lame as the argument that standardized tests are objective in the first place. Neither one makes any logical sense. Neither one gets you anywhere.

Awesomeness: Project New Media Literacies' spring conference: Learning in a Participatory Culture

There was awesomeness going on at MIT this weekend, as my colleagues and I at Project New Media Literacies put on a conference called Learning in a Participatory Culture.

If you've never planned a conference before, I can't say I recommend the experience--though when one goes well, as this conference did, the stress and exhaustion that pile on top of you in the lead-up suddenly turn into a fair trade-off. All day, my coworkers and I got to be surrounded by the smartest educators and educational researchers ever, and we got to hear them say all kinds of insanely awesome things.

As part and parcel of the pure awesomeness of the day, I scored two key personal / professional victories: First, I slam-dunked an opening presentation on design and development of Project NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide, garnering not one, not two, but three separate thumbs-ups from the people I most hoped to impress: My sensei Dan Hickey, my boss Henry Jenkins, and my close, close friend, colleague, and fellow Fireside Moonbat Katie Clinton. I only wish Katie had received more recognition for her contribution to the project--somehow, I've been given her share of the credit and I want to find a way to put it back where it belongs.

I've included a QuickTime version of my presentation below, though it admittedly loses something without the audio. I'll see what I can do about adding the audio in once we have it processed from the day.



A second key victory was in getting a back channel going, via a #NML09 hashtag on Twitter, for the day. We had set up a TweetGrid and the hashtag going into the conference but had no specific plans for supporting and integrating the technology, but before I gave my opening presentation I offered up a quick tutorial on how to Tweet using hashtags and my colleagues and I spent the day monitoring and engaging in a rapidfire Twitter conversation that extended participation in really nice ways. As the man Henry Jenkins himself said to me midway through the day, the fact that we didn't need to plan for or organize participation in social media but that it worked anyway when the tools and the energies were in place proves something important about the nature of participatory culture.

This is the artifact of my tutorial:

Finally, I want to shout out to all the participants who made the conference such a roaring success. Energy, enthusiasm, and engagement were high from beginning to end. I don't have the words to articulate what an amazing experience it was.

Reading with mouse in hand

I was recently notified that I'm not appropriately sensitive to how difficult the act of writing is for some people. This notification came as my friend and colleague Katie Clinton was finishing up co-authorship of a paper with two of our colleagues for an upcoming conference. I was in the process of complaining that my normal flood of email to the three of them was garnering little response.

"Why is everybody ignoring me?" I whined.

"For some people," she explained patiently, "being in writing mode takes all of their energy, and they don't have the headspace to think about other things. It's hard for you to get it because it comes so easy to you."

Fine, yes, Katie's right: Writing comes easily to me. But it's more that--writing comes easily to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean they spend literally all of their free time posting to their blog (unlike some people I know). In fact, there are entire groups of people--I include myself in this group--for whom "writing" is inseparable from the everyday activity of making meaning of the world. This is a break from traditional notions of writing as separate, as requiring a separate focus, a separate head-space. Something else--something extra and much more complex--is going on here.

I'd like to introduce the concept of "reading with mouse in hand," a notion developed by my colleague and friend Katie Clinton. It emerged through a collision of the work we've done for Project New Media Literacies on curriculum for high school ELA classrooms and our thinking about Spreadable Educational Practices (here and here) in collaboration with my sensei Dan Hickey and my mentor and partner in crime Michelle Honeyford. This work has been heavily influenced by media scholar Henry Jenkins and tech guru Clay Shirky, and we've recently been circulating the video below of Shirky talking about the revolution in and via social media (originally posted at WarrenEllis.com). It's 15 minutes long and worth every penny:




Today's youth, as Shirky explains, understand that a product that ships without a mouse ships broken. They exist in a world where writing is one practice among a host of generative activities that are inseparable from media consumption.

This is not, in some important ways, fundamentally different from the act of "reading with a pencil in hand," a common practice among professional writers and voracious readers. The difference, though, is in what happens to the generative activity linked to reading: In the video example below (featuring Wyn Kelley, Melville Scholar and Senior Lecturer in Literature at MIT, and edited by Debora Lui, an alumnus of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program), annotation and ornamentation are introduced as a means of filtering information, possibly for future publication or, at the least, generative work. These activities adhere to a traditional "filter, then publish" format of information transmission.

In contrast, reading with mouse in hand adheres more closely to the "publish, then filter" approach defined by Shirky. In a "publish, then filter" world, everything goes live, most of it open for public consumption and appraisal, and it's now our job as readers of all of that generative work to sift through it and figure out what matters to us or to our interests and work.




A few months back, I attended a talk by literacy theorist Deb Brandt, who made a compelling argument that we're in a second stage of mass literacy. In the first stage, she argued, reading literacy was key--and it was during this stage that the assumption of reading literacy as a basic human right was established. This second stage, according to Brandt, is characterized by writing as a more common practice than reading.

"[People are] reading to write," she explained, "and they're learning to write by writing to people who write."

Not only that, Brandt argued, but what we write is increasingly available for co-opting by corporate interests. "Your language is for hire," she said, "and that's...weird."

I suppose so. On the other hand, instead of "weird," we might say "complex in ways we hadn't anticipated." As physicist Philip Anderson says, "more is different."

As a blogger, I write more now than I ever have, even when I was a graduate student in a creative writing program. These days, I'm up to thousands of words a week just on my blog, and that's in addition to the writing I do for my day job, in emails, internal and public documents, and reports to colleagues and collaborators. What's more, I always read with my mouse in hand, which is to say that I read with an audience--a public--in mind. As what Howard Rheingold calls an "intelligent filter," I am conscious of my role as a sifter of information, a synthesizer of news items, a writer for an audience, however limited.

What happens when "writing comes easily to me" and "I always got good grades on my papers" become "I know how to act on what I consume" and "My blog gets hundreds (or thousands) of visitors a week (or day)"?

We can--and should--start thinking about ways to address the concern Brandt and others have raised that education institutions have not figured out how to accommodate the shift toward a generative literacy. Shirky writes that "the future belongs to those who take the present for granted." It's a nice sound bite, and as such, perhaps somewhat more sweeping than it is strictly true. But the deeper truth that Shirky points to--that a revolution is underway, and that no amount of nostalgia can turn back the tide of social change--is a deep, important truth that once accepted will change, dramatically and forever, the terms and frame of the conversation.

the sleeping alone review of books: Opening Up Education

Good book on the open education movement: Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge (2008, Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar, eds.). You can purchase the book through the MIT Press, though an electronic version is available for download under a Creative Commons license here.

What makes this book so useful is that it offers up a framework, from inside of the world of open education, for analyzing--and, if I may be so bold, at times criticizing--the early fruits of its own movement.

Below, I summarize and review one chapter from the book, followed by a critique of MIT's OpenCourseWare, one of the flagship projects of the Hewlett Foundation's Open Educational Resource Initiative; if you want, you can skip the review and jump down to the meaty stuff down near the bottom.


The Review
The book is divided into three sections: Technology, content, and knowledge. As the authors explain, this division is intended "largely as a convenient and easily understood framework. Naturally, the three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, their natural interrelationships become evident from the very beginning."

I want to skip ahead to the very last chapter of the book, "What's Next for Open Knowledge?" by Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings. The authors point out that the vision of open education--"dramatically expanded educational access, more widely effective teaching models and materials, and ongoing, systematic improvement in teaching and learning as educators generate and share new pedagogical knowledge and know-how"--is more than just a vision. In fact, many educational institutions have embraced and joined in on a shift toward open educational resources (OER's), and have assisted in the building of what Huber and Hutchings label, borrowing from their own earlier work, "teaching commons: an emergent conceptual space for exchange and community among faculty, students, administrators, and all others committed to learning as an essential activity of life in contemporary democratic society."

How, then, the authors ask, do we continue to expand and preserve the ethos of open education and the teaching commons? "It is well and good," they write, "to make as many educational resources as possible accessible to as many teachers and learners as possible. But, to borrow a line from the movie Field of Dreams, if we build it, will they come?"

Promise, Tool, BargainThe Field of Dreams question is one echoed by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, only for him, the question aligns with entrepreneurial impulses to build and market the next killer app. The question, then, is something closer to "What can we build to make people come?"

Shirky's answer is simple: "Promise, tool, bargain." These three elements, properly aligned, he argues, will lead to success of a group relying on a social tool; improperly fused, they lead to failure. (For an example of how this does or does not work, take a look at my blogpost on the promise, tool, and bargain of Facebook here.)
Given that there are really only three things to worry about, then, why do so many new groups or movements fail? Two reasons, according to Shirky:

First, because getting each of these elements right is actually quite challenging, while getting all of them right is essential. Second, as with groups themselves, the complexity comes not just from the elements but from their interactions.

The application of promise, tool, and bargain of open education: Promise
Though Huber and Hutchings use different language, choosing to focus their efforts on two distinct categories--"Knowledge that Matters" and "Inviting and Maintaining Openness"--they are essentially considering the categories Shirky identifies. (Know that aligning Huber and Hutchings with Shirky is a somewhat arbitrary move; I might just as well have said that Shirky essentially considers the categories identified by Huber and Hutchings.) The promise, Shirky writes, is the "why"--why a person would want to join a group or use a tool. For Huber and Hutchins, the "why" is more aptly described as "knowledge that matters"; in considering this point, they explore the promise of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL), a program that

seeks to support the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning that: fosters significant, long-lasting learning for all students; enhances the practice and profession of teaching, and; brings to faculty members' work as teachers the recognition and reward afforded to other forms of scholarly work.

To Huber and Hutchings, "knowledge that matters" is collaboration and sharing of scholarship and research around contributing to the improvement of teaching and learning both within individual classrooms and on a larger scale. This knowledge is built and shared around situated approach to teaching, a presumption that context matters. "In short," the authors write, the momentum that the scholarship of teaching and learning has established over the past decade clearly points to the value of pedagogical knowledgte that is deeply contextual and closely tied ot the particulars of classroom settings.

We might say, then, that the promise of joining a program like CASTL--the "why"--is that it offers teachers the opportunity to draw on a bunch of lesson plans, assessment strategies, and so on to the immediate benefit of their own teaching practices, and at the same time offers a feedback loop whereby teachers can share classroom successes with other teachers. They give back to the community of educators and in so doing have an opportunity to influence teaching beyond their local environment.

Tool: the "how"The tool, Shirky explains, is the "how," and in open education this becomes a question of how to develop resources that invite and maintain openness without standardizing or allowing for decreased quality of the content. As Huber and Hutchings explain,

Where traditional views of educational reform tend to assume a small number of approaches that can be "scaled up" and widely adopted, open knowledge (and, more broadly, open education) offers a different path to improvement, eschewing the "fat head" for the "long tail" (to use Chris Anderson's now well-traveled metaphor) in which many approaches find smaller groups of adopters and champions.

Often, the authors write, the "how" is ensured in development of tools that allow for "close-to-the-classrom knowledge" to be captured in ways that will travel to other settings." The authors offer the exampe of the KEEP Toolkit, which they argue provides a useful model that combines user-friendly features with readable and usable templates.

The bargain: What we expect from one anotherThe bargain, Shirky writes, is where things get tricky, "in part because it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one the users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can't be completely determined in advance." The bargain is the--ideally shared--agreement between users about community expectations.

For Huber and Hutchings, the bargain of open educational resources is, put simply, openness. Openness, in this case, means both access and the spirit of collaboration and community. As they explain,

The "stuff" of open knowledge for teaching and learning is on the rise, happily, both in supply and in the variety of materials and representations of teaching and learning.... But having good stuff is not enough. Those committed to this work must also push for policies and practices to ensure that what is open stays open in the fullest, most vital way. This means maintaining access, certainly, but it also means creating a culture in which people want that access, both as contributors to and users of knowledge in the teaching commons.

First, they write, it's essential to allow the commons to remain open for teachers across disciplines who want to contribute to collaborative knowledge-building, even if they contribute only infrequently. This, however, gives rise to a second concern: Questions about who can (and can't) contribute. "Open education," they write, "does not necessarily mean 'free.'"

Additionally, the bargain in education is not simply between users and makers of educational content; increasingly, teachers and learners are being held accountable by outside stakeholders. (Most significantly, we see this in the phenomenon of testing the souls right out of our young learners.) Huber and Hutchings express concern

about how to maintain a space for educational experimentation and exchange in a period that seems headed for increasingly bottom-line forms of accountability, with its concomitant calls for institutions to make evidence of student learning outcomes available to the public.... At one level, the value of evidence is something that any responsible educator would share. Faculty care about their students, and they want to know that the resources they find in the teaching commons will serve those students well. The danger comes when high stakes constrict people's ability or willingness to explore new pedagogical ideas.

Case Study: MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW)
Promise, tool, bargain. It's a difficult combination to get right, even when you have financial backing, institutional support, and a critical mass of contributors, as MIT's OpenCourseWare project proves. Let me be clear: OCW is a success, at least in most important senses of the word. But in its efforts to succeed, it has had to sacrifice some of the most important tenets of the open education movement.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll once again make clear that I am employed at MIT, though I am not affiliated with the Hewlett Foundation, the group that funds the OCW project, and not in any way connected to OpenCourseWare.

The project is awesomely ambitious. As the OCW site explains,

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines.

And that's the modest explanation. In a February 2007 report on Open Educational Resource projects funded by the Hewlett Foundation, Atkins, Brown, and Hammond exclaim:

This world-changing project emerged from MIT faculty and administrators who asked themselves the following question: "How is the Internet going to be used in education and what is our university going to do about it?"

The answer from the MIT faculty was this: "Use it to provide free access to the primary materials for virtually all our courses. We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.”

Fantastic premise, right? And MIT, backed by Hewlett, is putting its money where its mouth is, investing resources into the continued and ongoing development of OCW. The result is a fabulous early stab at an open education resource, one that really does offer high-quality content to the general public--absolutely free.

It turns out, though, that while OpenCourseWare is strong on promise ("You can access course content from some of the greatest minds of this generation!") and bargain ("...and it's all free!"), it's still a little light on tool ("...but genius is not included."). As I mentioned in a previous post, I read voraciously and omnivorously in my capacity as the primary blogger for sleeping alone and starting out early. One place I never, look, though, is on paid-content news sources like the Wall Street Journal. Another place I never look is OpenCourseWare. Why? It kinda...well, first, the download process is confusing, and once you successfully figure it out, you're rewarded with a file folder that looks a lot like this:




Assuming you eventually manage to extract the relevant content, all you really get is a pile of .pdfs, a syllabus, and some course notes. The brilliance, the spark, the certain something that makes a class a mind-blowing experience...that's not available for download.

And, of course, there's the cost involved: Approximately $25,000 per uploaded course, according to the Hewlett report. Add it up: 1,800 courses means $45 million. (Just FYI, that's enough to cover four years of public college for more than 6,800 students, according to stats from the College Board.)

OpenCourseWare is an admirable, but so far unsustainable, model for opening up education--especially since OCW seems to prohibit free appropriation and remixing of course materials. As the site explains under the FAQ category of intellectual property,

The intellectual property policies created for MIT OpenCourseWare are clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly materials used in education. Faculty retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OpenCourseWare, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship. MIT retains ownership only when significant use has been made of the Institute's resources. If student course work is placed on the MIT OpenCourseWare site, then copyright in the work remains with the student.

These are meaty issues for Hewlett, OCW, and the open education movement to keep working on. As goes OpenCourseWare, after all, so goes the movement.

A couple-three things about standardized reading assessments

If you follow education news, you may already have seen E.D. Hirsch, Jr.,'s March 22 Op-Ed column in the New York Times. The piece, "Reading Test Dummies," makes exactly the kind of argument Hirsch's fans are by now used to: That standardized tests assessing reading skills have merit, when used appropriately. "These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests," Hirsch writes,

are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.

Fair enough so far, right? And Hirsch goes you one further by explaining that "[f]or a student with a basic ability to decode print, a reading-comprehension test is not chiefly a test of formal techniques but a test of background knowledge." Not only that, but

Our current reading tests are especially unfair to disadvantaged students. The test passages may be random, but they aren’t knowledge-neutral. A child who knows about hiking in the Appalachians will have a better chance of getting the passage right; a child who doesn’t, won’t. Yet where outside of school is a disadvantaged student to pick up the implicit knowledge that is being probed on the reading tests?

If you know Hirsch, you know where this is going: Toward an argument for standardizing curriculum content, then aligning test materials to curriculum standards, because

[b]etter-defined standards in history, science, literature and the arts combined with knowledge-based reading tests would encourage the schools to conceive the whole course of study as a reading curriculum — exactly what a good knowledge-based curriculum should be. Schools would also begin to use classroom time more productively, which is important for all students and critically so for disadvantaged ones.

Hirsch ends with this zinger: "We do not need to abandon either the principle of accountability or the fill-in-the-bubble format. Rather we need to move from teaching to the test to tests that are worth teaching to."

For the sake of expediency, let's ignore for now the fact that "teaching to the test" and "tests that are worth teaching to" are in effect the same thing. (You can put lipstick, a bubble skirt, and high heels on a pig, but....) Let's leave aside the deeper, more concerning question: Who gets to decide what those standards are, and what evidence is there that setting these standards across subject-areas would benefit disadvantaged students any more than any previous "curriculum reform" has?

In fact, no, let's not leave that question aside--not for now, not ever. Hirsch argues for curriculum standards, presumably along the lines of the Core Knowledge he promotes in his nonprofit organization. (When I say "core knowledge," you think "western canon." Core: Western. Knowledge: Canon.) It is only in this way, he believes, that we can preserve the knowledge upon which our culture was built. In fact, this is where conservative educational thinkers show their rhetorical skill: Their arguments, as Michael Apple points out, are linked to a nostalgia for the past, for a time when the questions about what to teach and how to teach it were less thorny and easier to answer--when white men ruled and everyone else got in line or fell out. Apple points to conservatives like Hirsch, Dianne Ravitch, and William Bennett,

all of whom seem to believe that progressivism is now in the dominant position in educational policy and practice and has destroyed a valued past. All of them believe that only by tightening control over curriculum and teaching (and students, of course), restoring ‘our’ lost traditions, making education more disciplined and competitive as they are certain it was in the past—only then can we have effective schools. (p. 6)

The questions about what to teach and how to teach it get increasingly difficult as participatory technologies, and the social skills and cultural competencies linked to success at using these technologies, become increasingly valuable and valued. As culture shifts toward this participatory model, it becomes increasingly clear that memorizing a canon of information is less important than having the skills to know when and how tap into that canon. The entire body of world thought is, as always, distributed across a vast set of networks; but until very recently, it was difficult or impossible for people outside of academic institutions to access very much of those networks.

(For more responses to Hirsch's op-ed, you can read letters to the editor at the New York Times Letters page.)