UBIQUITOUS LEARNING A N I N T E R N AT I O N A L
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How a Behavioral Socialization Approach to Learning Reduces Intellectual Development to Performance and Outcomes: A Rationale for Teachers, Parents, and Learners to Utilize Ubiquitous Browser-based Web2.0 Platforms for Pedagogy Christopher Deason, Margaret Jean Campbell and Rebecca Blanton
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UBIQUITOUS LEARNING: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL http://ijq.cgpublisher.com/ First published in 2012 in Champaign, Illinois, USA by Common Ground Publishing LLC www.CommonGroundPublishing.com ISSN: 1835-9795 © 2012 (individual papers), the author(s) © 2012 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the applicable copyright legislation, no part of this work may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact <cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com>. UBIQUITOUS LEARNING: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL is peer-reviewed, supported by rigorous processes of criterion-referenced article ranking and qualitative commentary, ensuring that only intellectual work of the greatest substance and highest significance is published. Typeset in Common Ground Markup Language using CGPublisher multichannel typesetting system http://www.commongroundpublishing.com/software/
How a Behavioral Socialization Approach to Learning Reduces Intellectual Development to Performance and Outcomes: A Rationale for Teachers, Parents, and Learners to Utilize Ubiquitous Browser-based Web2.0 Platforms for Pedagogy Christopher Deason, Full Sail University, Florida, USA Margaret Jean Campbell, Full Sail University and University of Southern California, USA Rebecca Blanton, Harvard University, USA Abstract: Public schools and compensatory schooling are often in direct conflict with students, families, and the communities they serve as the State and school system ritualistically imposes its institutional needs and values such as social conformity, silence, and rigid standardized test performance criteria regardless of the needs and values of students, families, and communities. The following manuscript interrogates how a behavioral socialization approach to learning reduces intellectual development to behaviorist learning outcomes and performances. Key historical figures and events that shaped a behavioral socialization approach to education are explored. The manuscript provides a rationale for teachers, parents, and learners to use ubiquitous Browser-based Web 2.0 technologies for studentcentered and interactive learning, which is in stark contrast to where people were limited to the passive reception of educational content. Keywords: Outcomes based Education, Behaviorist Perspective, Ubiquitous Web2.0 Technology
Behavioral Socialization and Social Control by the State
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HE FERTILE SOIL needed for the growth of scientifically measured behaviorism such as standardized testing in education requires an analysis of key thinkers and scientists during the Renaissance Enlightenment, Colonial Expansion, the Gilded Age, and the 20th Century. Although not an exhaustive analysis by any means, the following examples will illustrate how ideas and theories might be abused and misused to the benefit of special interest groups and federal policy makers to maximize their hegemony over the minds and behaviors of the masses. For example, Benedict de Spinoza’s views were widely read and ultimately influenced the political elite’s views of education within Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His views on education and indoctrination are complex, but ultimately lean towards indoctrination as a method of controlling the masses (Puolimatka 2001). Spinoza (1670, Chapter XX) wrote, “If men’s minds were as easily controlled as their tongues, every king would sit safely on his throne, and government by compulsion would cease; for every subject would shape his life according to the intentions of his rulers, and would esteem a thing true or false, good or evil, just or unjust, in obedience
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to their dictates” (257). Spinoza infers that humans have innate free will, and therefore must be socially controlled through indoctrination rather than violence (Puolimatka 2001). Immanuel Kant taught Physical Geography throughout his scholarly career. He later compiled his lecture notes and those of his students. A quote from Immanuel Kant’s (2003) lecture from his 1764 notes stated, “In the hot countries the human being matures in all aspects earlier, but does not, however, reach the perfection of those in the temperate zones. Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meager talent. The Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples. Similarly, Linneaus (1767) established the five human race taxonomy: (i) the Americanus, (ii) the Asiaticus, (iii) the Africanus, (iv) the Europeanus, and (v) the Monstrosus, based upon geographic origin and skin color. Each race possessed innate physiognomic characteristics. For example, Linnneaus characterized the Europeanus as white-skinned, of gentle character, inventive mind, and bellicose. The landed elite, government officials, and educational policy makers consumed broadly from both Kant and Linneaus. Charles Darwin wrote The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, a work that chronicled his theory of evolution. This work discusses the lineage of man, rather than a fall from grace from God. A quote from that work reads, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla” (201). Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, the father of modern psychometrics, put forth the idea of Eugenics arguing that heredity was a conscious decision that required interventions, in order to avoid over-breeding by less fit members of society and the under-breeding of the more fit ones. In Galton’s (1883) view inferior humans were allowed to survive and reproduce at levels faster than the more superior humans. Galton assumed that if corrections were not soon taken, genetic cleanliness and human evolution could be stifled. Darwin read his cousin’s works with interest, and devoted entire sections of Descent of Man to discussions of Galton’s theories. It’s important to note that neither Galton nor Darwin advocated or developed any prescriptive eugenic policies such as those undertaken by the Nazis during World War II. In fact, Darwin was a staunch abolitionist. However, both Darwin’s and Galton’s ideas were widely disseminated by those who soon created the prescriptive plans for human classifications based on educational psychology-based statistical analysis and racial hygiene policies of the twentieth century. Psychology was pseudoscience; grounded in philosophical paradigms and usually subordinated to university philosophy departments, prior to being a true science. During the 1800s, after Charles Bell, Johannes Müeller, and other scientists had established the discreteness of the sensory and motor nerves, what was called the response mechanism was studied in earnest, primarily using decapitated animals (Carmichael 1926). It came to be accepted that knowledge of the nervous system was essential for understanding the mind. Müeller’s experiments, which used pressure and electricity to produce visual artifacts, resulted in the conclusion that ideas in the mind are a result of an excitation to the eye or brain and what the mind produces is limited by the organs of sense (Carmichael 1926). Wundt studied at the University of Berlin, where Müeller, a vitalist who thought that life could not be completely reduced
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to physical and chemical processes, had established the first Institute for Experimental Physiology. In Berlin, Wundt abandoned his pursuit of a medical career and chose instead to work in experimental physiology. Wundt subsequently became a laboratory assistant to the physicist Helmholtz who had rejected Müeller’s vitalism in favor of materialism and mechanism, maintaining that only physio-chemical forces were active within organisms (Smith 1991). William Wundt transformed psychology and later pedagogy into a social science in which humans could only be understood by studying their physiological reactions to stimulus. With his graduate students at the University of Leipzig, Wundt established, beginning in 1875, a community of investigators working in a scientific laboratory to test psychological hypotheses using animal and human subjects—essentially establishing a science of the mind (Benjamin 2000). The influence of the students who performed psychological experiments in support of mechanism under Wundt’s direction was wide and deep in American education. There is a direct line from Wundt’s laboratory to the administrations of eighteen psychology departments in American universities during a time when there were fewer than fifty psychology departments worldwide (Benjamin 2000). Charles Spearman, who developed the first theory of intelligence, and the controversial general intelligence factor (g factor) studied under Wundt. Both James McKeen Cattell, the first United States psychology professor and founder of The Psychological Corporation, and America’s famous pedagogue G. Stanley Hall also studied with Wundt. Human psychology gained wide recognition throughout colleges of education within the United States. Wundt and his students believed that human psychology constructs were valid only if they were quantifiable and measurable using physiological stimulus-response factors. To Wundt, humans were devoid of spirit and intrinsic self-determinism. To Wundt, humans were tabula rasa requiring raw experiential stimuli data to create a physiological response, rather than the teaching of mental skills and methods of knowing that learners could use throughout their lives regardless of their later career choices.
Reducing Intellectual Development to Behaviorist Performances & Outcomes John Dewey (1902), often called the Father of American Education, puts forth that the modification of method and curriculum of education was based on the changes in modes of industry and commerce. Dewey (1902) was in favor of common schools that were feeders into the industry labor pools of mass production. The idea of human resources and human capital within the wheels of mechanized industrialization and factory work emerged. Osgood (1997) claimed that the common school, which all children attended, had a purpose to weave a common political and social ideology into children’s minds—children required social training for the industrial workforce. Behavioral socialization, rather than self-determination and individualism, was the new goal of American Education. Gatto (2005) validated Dewey’s view when he stated, “American public schools teach by their methodology that people are machines. Bells ring, circuits open and close, energy flows or is constricted, qualities are reduced to a numbering system, a plan is followed of which the machine parts know nothing” (89). John Dewey spent a year studying under G. Stanley Hall, one of Wundt’s students in Leipzig. Dewey attributed the removal of references to metaphysical entities and autonomous influences from discussions about the mind to the discovery of neural connections and response mechanisms (Carmichael 1926). Dewey’s mechanistic and stimulus-response meth-
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odologies are directly descended from Wundt’s psychology laboratories (Woodward 1982). Dewey felt that schools were the testing ground for this new pedagogy nested within the new views of this scientifically determinant psychology. Dewey (1902) felt that schools should teach socialization and adaptations to specific behaviors required of society to homogenize the child rather than to promote individualism and self-determination. One can explore Dewey’s construct of the reflex arc to understand more about his views of the human mind in relation to learning as a stimulus–response system containing isolatable and independent events (Dewey 1896). Widespread standardized testing in the United States had its beginnings in the efforts of powerful and charismatic psychologists to establish paths to high incomes for graduate students in their university departments (Catell 1923). In the 1920s, industry’s wild enthusiasm for Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Cult of Efficiency not only determined the types of employment available to United States workers, but also influenced public school system administrative practices, choices of curriculum, and the assignment of people into one of three categories: those most satisfied with other people, with physical objects, or with words and figures (Catell 1923; Gatto 2000). McBride (1973) claimed that schools, using early 20th century human categorization ideas, often set too high of standards for very low performing children, while setting lower standards for the children that need more challenges. Mediocrity is the result. He sums the situation up with the title of his book Damn the school system–Full speed ahead. In addition, Schlafly (1985) asks that educators, parents, and teachers reflect upon the impact of the Hatch Amendment, also known as the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPPA) passed in 1978, and provides protections for children against classroom therapy including testing and psychological assessments without written consent from the parent. Why does the Department of Education (DOE) neglect to enforce the policies set forth in the Hatch amendment? Schlafly (1985) claims that thirteen hundred concerned parents spoke up in March 1984 to force the implementation of the Hatch Amendment’s policies, yet children, teachers, schools, and entire communities continue to be exposed to the abuses from standardized testing policies in every state within the United States. Even more disturbing, why do school districts relentlessly test, diagnose, and categorize more than ever following the Hatch Amendment? School administrations rarely, if ever, publicize or discuss policies with parents concerning standardized testing, psychological evaluations, and other quantitative psychometric evaluations. Dr. Alexander Inglis from Harvard University was widely read by early twentieth century pedagogues and extremely influential in outlining the principles of secondary education in the United States. Inglis (1918) claimed that secondary educators working with twelve-yearold to eighteen-year-old youth should diagnose the nature of the child to make adjustments to their physical, mental abilities, such as motivation, and their personal character in an attempt to classify the child and sort them into their proper social roles. Teaching should be propaedeutic (Inglis 1918). Propaedeutic, although rarely used in spoken or written English lexicon today, infers offering learners only enough knowledge, skills, and insight to allow learners to manage and labor within the existing social and economic infrastructure set forth by majority industry leaders. Innovation, creative thinking, philosophical insights, and the like are discouraged given a propaedeutic goal for public education. In addition, Inglis (1918) considered hygiene of the race as a large consideration for learning outcomes. Inglis was extremely influential to both scholarly and school management pedagogues of his time. Inglis’s National Education Association (NEA) Commission of 1918 argued that secondary
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education was essential for all youth, and made the following specific recommendation: that all boys and girls should be schooled full-time until the age of eighteen. Conant (1960) from Harvard University was an avid reader of Alexander Inglis’s work and educational research concerning secondary education. Conant (1960, 103) prophesied that by the year 2059 historians will regard the American high school experiment “…as it was perfected by the end of the twentieth century, not only as one of the finest products of democracy, but as a continuing insurance for the preservation of the vitality of a society of free men.” Ironically, Conant (1960) warned how Hitler and his intellectual entourage centralized the educational system, purged it, and unified the child, the parent, and the State through various forms of government indoctrination. The Department of Education within the United States continues to support centralizing, and unifying the child, parent, and the State using federal policies and procedures outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and continues this support with ongoing policies that force all states within the United States to adopt standardized tests as measures of teacher and learner performance. During the early development of standardized testing, it was recognized that true-false questioning restricts student thinking to two alternatives, that essay questions offer broad opportunities for response, and that best-answer (i.e., multiple choice) tests are a mechanical device that can be used to direct individual thinking toward predetermined and useful socially pragmatic conclusions (Waples 1927). For an educational psychologist during the development of our modern school systems, the best-answer test could be used to bring thinking to a focus desired by the teacher, because thinking in different directions and freely associating is often wasteful and inefficient (Waples 1927). Teachers were advised that these best-answer tests did not need to be reviewed or graded, because the tests had served their purpose once student thinking had been directed toward desired ends (Waples 1927). The military-industrial-governmental complex and powerful special interest groups benefit from training children to think, not in terms of infinite possibilities and associations, but in terms of limited and constrained possibilities of which one of them is the best and the only rewarded answer. The device of limiting choice, built into our standardized testing, is a process of systematically eliminating gradations of thought from our cognitive processes, effectively introducing edges or boundaries into thought—posterizing thought—putting walls up to limit the wild associative excursions of a potentially too creative, anti-social intellect.
Schooling as Conflict, Experimental Practice, Sorting Mechanism, and Crisis Feinberg and Soltis (1998) discuss how schools and how schooling can be in direct conflict with student and family as the State and school system ritualistically try to impose institutional needs and values such as conformity, silence, and rigid performance criteria regardless of the needs and values of students and families. Eggermont (2001) posits that schooling is a type of experimental practice, subversive poetics, creative tension, and transformative action that naturally lead to resistance. Fichte (1922) wrote, “If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will” (21). Resistance in this case refers to family and learner resistance to compensatory schooling, which often involves behavioral socialization processes like sorting learners based on quantifiable artificial intelligence markers including grades and standardized test scores. Teaching, when
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used to control human behaviors, uses rituals such as synchronic movements, grades, class ranks, and silence that dictate the flow of power from teacher to student. Resistance is the natural result. Linné (2001) reports that teaching uses a discursive focal lens that ranks teaching first and learning second. Gatto (2005) states, “the school crisis is inherently linked to the ills of our greater society. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent: nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life, a community has no future and no past, perpetuating a caste system. Schools do not teach anything except how to follow orders” (21). Lionni (1993) posits that the word education is etymologically related to the Latin word eductus, which means to bring forth or lead out. However, current American educational trends view teaching as filling a vessel assessed with stimulus response instruments for passing standardized quantitative outcome measures. American educator Hofstadter (1962) writes that traditional teaching institutions suppress and confine intellect. Dewey (1902) states, “…subject matter furnishes the end, and it determines its method. The child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being to be deepened; It is his to receive, to accept. His part is filled when he is ductile and docile” (8). Ravitch (1985) writes that post World War II federal education policies became a re-occurring manufactured crisis created by political parties used for campaigns and social crusades. Education became a hostage for ideological and political disputes.
Manufactured Crisis: A Nation Supposedly at Risk The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s A Nation at Risk (The National Commission 1984) posited the failings of the American education system during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Berliner and Biddle (2001) refer to A Nation at Risk as a government manufactured crisis that lacks substantive statistical evidence based on flawed methodology. From the perspective Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell, the United States educational system was failing to meet the national need for a competitive workforce based on aggregated correlative SAT data. Fast-forward seven years to 1990. Ansary (2007) reported that in 1990, Admiral James Watkins, the Secretary of Energy, commissioned the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to re-visit the original Nation at Risk data. The research team divided the original SAT test scores into subgroups, and based upon their data analysis, they discovered contradictory data to the Nation at Risk report (The National Commission 1984). The data from the manuscript became known as the Sandia Report. The original Nation at Risk findings had reported only the combined aggregate correlative data, which illustrated a negative trend in aggregate SAT scores across the nation (The National Commission 1984). Miller (1991) reported selected data findings from the Sandia Report in Education Week. Ansary (2007) stated that while the overall average scores declined, the subgroups of students increased or stayed the same. In statistics this statistical phenomena is known as Simpson’s paradox (Simpson 1951). Simpson’s paradox sometimes occurs when analyzing aggregated continuous correlative data like SAT scores. A positive trend appears for two separate groups and a negative trend appears when the data are combined. Therefore, the original data released by Terrell Bell that prompted the Nation at Risk report is highly suspect. Bracey (2007) reports that the three authors of the Sandia Report, who presented their findings to David Kearns, Deputy Secretary of Education under George Bush Sr., who allegedly responded to these
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findings by stating, “You bury this or I’ll bury you.” Unlike the Nation at Risk report, the Sandia Report critique received almost no widespread media attention other than Miller’s (1991) article in Education Week.
Standardized Testing as a Reaction to the Manufactured Crisis Most states within the United States spend billions of dollars per year of taxpayer’s money administering formative and summative standardized-based assessments due to America’s manufactured education crisis. Vu (2008) reports that since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), annual state spending on standardized tests rose from $423 million to almost $1.1 billion in 2008 (a 160% increase compared to a 19.22% increase in inflation over the same period), according to the Pew Center on the States. CTB/McGraw-Hill, Educational Testing Service, Harcourt Assessment, Pearson Educational Measurement and Riverside Publishing are the primary creators of these tests. Vu (2008) puts forth that testing is now a $1.1 billion industry. Lionni (1993) posits that intellectual curiosity is stifled by the perpetuation of behaviorist paradigms still quite apparent in American school systems. Philosophy, history, art, ethics, and the humanities in general are debased in the current American public education system (Lionni 1993). Public schools stay focused on physiological events such as standardized testing, and shy away from fuzzy hypothetical constructs like the mind. As a result schools deemphasize autonomous influences, self-determination (Deci & Ryan 1985) and individualism. Why should public schools suppress individualism by homogenizing learning via standardized performance-based and learning outcomes-based testing measurement? Gatto (2010) answers this question by exploring key historical events and figures. He states that between 1896 and 1920 industry giants subsidized university chairs, researchers, school administrators, and spent more money on compulsory education than the government. Gatto’s (2010) excerpt from Occasional Letter Number One from John D. Rockefeller’s General Board of Education in 1906 is telling regarding why industrialists, corporations, and the Department of Education all have a vested interest in training the young mind to deemphasize human autonomy, self-determination, creativity and independence while promoting measureable performances and programmed outcomes. In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions of intellectual and moral education fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers of men of learning. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
Enter the Change Agents Iserbyt (1999) offers readers a compelling chronological paper trail in her book The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America regarding the federal policies that create educational crises, and offer radical reforms to fix these crises. The goal she states is total State control of knowledge, values, and careers. Iserbyt worked as the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office
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of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), United States Department of Education (DOE) during the first term of United States President Ronald Reagan. Iserbyt was also a school board director. She was fired from the OERI in 1982 for her whistle blowing activities exposing OERI programs that she claims were manufactured to create community crisis and dependence upon the DOE’s oversight of public schools. Iserbyt (1999) states that reforms simply set the stage for the next crisis and provides the pretext for the next move forward. Both Iserbyt (1999) and Gatto (2010) claim that the Hegelian Dialectic is a powerful technology used by the State and key special interests groups to control educational policy by manufacturing events that the government or special interest group must then fix, thereby making the population more dependent on outside agencies and less dependent on their own communities, self-determination, family values, religious beliefs, and individual intellectual faculties. Iserbyt (1999) states that she was trained to be a change agent whose goal was to increase the dependence of public schools on federal programs, institute standardized testing across the United States, and usher in new and controversial educational programs involving health education, drug and alcohol education, sex education, death education, critical thinking education, and various values clarification programs. Iserbyt (1999) criticizes programs such as whole language, mastery learning, and various forms of what she calls Skinnerian operant conditioning methods, which she believes creates learning problems such as Attention Deficit Disorder. Rothbard (1999) states, “…the idea that the compulsory school should not simply teach the subjects, but should educate the whole child, is obviously an attempt to arrogate to the State all functions of home. Unquestionably, the effect is to foster dependence of the individual on the group and on the State” (55). Richman (1994) discusses compulsory public school attendance as a type of macro level creation to homogenize and nationalize the minds of its citizens; welfare, television, and video games are nothing in comparison to twelve years of compulsory public school indoctrination by the State. In addition, Richman (1994) claims that the school contributes to the weakening of family as a subtle or not so subtle rival to family values. The United States’ compensatory public school system is comparable to Gutek’s (1995) description of Sparta’s Fascist compulsory education system, whose school system taught little more than allegiance and servitude to the Spartan State. Iserbyt claims that Dr. Ronald G. Havelock’s (1973) Change Agent Manual was prescribed for her to follow when implementing new DOE supported education policies in various communities all over the United States. Iserbyt (1999) claims she attended one of Ronald Havelock’s workshops entitled Innovations in Education. It was sponsored by the University of Michigan and funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). This training taught teachers and administrators how to sneak in controversial methods of teaching and innovative programs. These controversial, innovative programs included controversial health education programs, sex education, drug and alcohol education, death education, suicide education, alternative life style education, and politically correct thinking training. Iserbyt (1999) claims Change Agent training was only one out of hundreds of complex and high cost United States Department of Education trainings. She states that she and many so called change agents were sent everywhere, even overseas, to further the cause of internationalist socialist objectives so necessary to usher in global workforce training to serve the world’s corporations. Much of Iserbyt’s (1999) book contains quotes from United States Government documents detailing what she found to be the real purposes of American education:
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I. To use the schools to change America from a free, individual nation to a socialist, global “State,” just one of many socialist states which will be subservient to the United Nations Charter, not the United States Constitution. II. To brainwash our children, starting at birth, to reject individualism in favor of Collectivism. III. To reject high academic standards in favor of egalitarianism. IV. To reject truth and absolutes in favor of tolerance, situational ethics, and consensus. V. To reject American values in favor of internationalist values such as Globalism and Socialism. VI. To reject freedom to choose one’s career in favor of school-to-work programs. VII. To take part in the limited learning for lifelong labor coordinated through United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Iserbyt (1999) claims the goal these behavior modifications is to decrease individualism and self-reliance in an attempt to create a world government globalist revolution that bypasses civil liberties found within the United States Constitution, that is acceptable to citizens, and able to be implemented without firing a shot. Objectives to reach this goal include the gradual elimination of strong personal opinions like religious, moral, and ethical convictions, constitutional knowledge, intellectualism, and self-determination (Deci & Ryan 1985). Iserbyt believes these objectives will enable the brainwashing of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training to achieve a new global corporate-based feudalism. Iserbyt (1999) claims that mastery learning, performance-based education, and standardized outcome-based education are irrefutably the current incarnation of Skinner’s (1961) Programmed Instruction; this method of instruction links children to machine-like algorithms of managed behaviors that includes the reliance of schools on standardized testing to fix the manufactured education crisis in the United States.
Opportunities for Change in Education using Ubiquitous Technology Lieberman (1993) explains that social work and teaching are very labor-intensive jobs that will benefit from heavy investitures in technology just like other industrial sectors such as the military receive for their work. In addition browser-based software can bypass the constraints of public schools and mandated standardized tests. Both learners and parents can informally educate themselves, or use these technologies to augment and extend formal schooling institutions. Learners today have access to free eBooks and eLearning opportunities via browser-based learning portals like the Khan Academy, Sophia, Skillshare, and Udacity. Udacity is a digital university with the mission to democratize education. Udacity was founded by three roboticists David Stavens, Mike Sokolsky, and Sebastian Thrun, who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for free. A few weeks later, more than 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in Udacity’s first classes offered.
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Consider Steve Hargadon’s Classroom 2.0 Ning network. This is a social network for those interested in Web 2.0, Social Media, and Participative Technologies in the classroom. In addition to social networking, all 21st Century learners, parents, teachers, and American citizens in general can contribute to human knowledge and experiences by contributing content to Ustream live streaming, Wikipedia, Blip.TV, Viddler, YouTube, Vimeo, SchoolTube, TeacherTube, Vimeo, and other diverse synchronous and asynchronous content sharing portals. Social media and video sharing is now the norm for our nation’s youth. Learning management systems like Schoology, Blackboard, Angel, Moodle, Edmodo, Docebo, eFront, Dokeos, ATutor®, Sakai, Canvas Open LMS by Instructure, and Udutu™ offer large pedagogical potentials to both teacher and learner. Udutu offers the world’s first LMS designed to run on popular Social Networks such as Facebook. Mobile devices put information and skills directly into the hands of young learners. Personal learning technologies that offer RSS-type aggregation such as Twitter, blog, and podcast feeds deliver content and skills directly to young learners. Virtual learning environments like Second Life leverages synchronous spaces for discussions, content development, and skill building. Browser-based collaborative software such as the Google Doc Suite of tools (i.e., word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, slideshow builder, form creator, site creator, and data visualization) offer learners free methods of collaborating, designing, and developing diverse products.
Conclusions Conformity, homogenized mediocrity, standardized testing, socialization of the child, and the quantification of human learning is currently the norm in United States schools. Gatto (2005, 67) wrote, “…whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, that is, a person that loves what they are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.” The educator’s job is to promote intellectual curiosity, the questioning of authority, and provide content and methods that develop self-determination, creativity, individualism, and an innovative spirit. Gatto (2008) developed the Bartleby Project to invite all students in American school systems to peacefully and responsibly refuse to participate in standardized testing or preparations for standardized testing. The Bartelby Project can be found at the following URL: http://bartlebyproject.com/ Friedman (2005) proposes that many technologies, but none as significant as the Internet and the World Wide Web, have flattened our world. Christensen, Horn, and Johnson (2008) describe how disruptive innovations like informal learning, social networking, free webbased instructional content, and the like offer modular based design at little cost to the institution, teacher, and learner. Bonk (2009) claims that Internet-based learning opportunities offers teachers, learners, and parents a huge mix of technologies and resources for enhancing, extending, and transforming learning. Humans love to connect, share, collaborate, and engage in goals with one another. Wikipedia illustrates how humans create and share without the stimulus of economic motivators. Robinson and Aronica (2009) posit that learners need opportunities and guidance to think differently, be creative, find their tribe, and locate elements that stoke the fires of passionate
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learning. Browser-based production tools and Web-based content repositories like YouTube now offer both teacher and parent opportunities to promote self-directed, learner centered, and creative learning. We all learn informally from one another thanks to Browser-based technology (Bonk 2009). Bonk (2009, 22) states, “Learning is now becoming global, collaborative, rapid, mobile, ubiquitous, authentic, free, and open.” The mental processes that the mechanistic psychologists and behavioral engineers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tried to dissect, differentiate, and control human intellect are not subject to a simple set of behaviorderived rules. The free associative nature of the World Wide Web and ubiquitous Browserbased Web2.0 platforms are external manifestations of the ungoverned and potentially antisocial, individual, and self-determined human potential that behaviorist education systems were meant to destroy. Bower, Hedberg, & Kuswara (2010) states, “that the open, collaborative and contribution-based nature of the Web2.0 paradigm and it’s associated tools hold great promise for the future of education–it appears that there is finally accord between the design of technology and the student-centered, interactive approaches by contemporary educational theory” (178). Teachers and parents can now alter America’s current behavioral socialization approach to schooling, which currently reduces intellectual development to quantifiable performances and outcomes, and instead utilize informal learning opportunities available via Web2.0 Browser-based software applications, and various media repositories found on the World Wide Web to spark intellectual curiosity and guide self-directed learning.
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CHRISTOPHER DEASON, MARGARET JEAN CAMPBELL, REBECCA BLANTON
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UBIQUITOUS LEARNING: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
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About the Authors Dr. Christopher Deason Dr. Christopher Deason is a designer of educational media, instructional designer, program evaluator, mixed methodology researcher, and lecturer. He received his Doctor of education in educational instructional technology from Texas Tech University. Dr. Deason is currently a course director in the Education Media Design and Technology MS program at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida. Margaret Jean Campbell My research focuses on the failure of sophisticated experiments and understandings about the physiological aspects of learning to actually improve learning for students in American K-12 educational institutions. My background includes more than 15 years teaching and coaching young people, undergraduate studies in the social sciences, and graduate studies in education media design and the technologies to produce media. I am currently in the MAT program at the University of Southern California, and continue to develop topics for research and publication under the supervision of course directors at Full Sail University. Rebecca Blanton Sixteen years of experience in academia within the discipline of interdisciplinary neurosciences and with a focus on pediatric neurosciences using brain imaging, physiological, and behavioral methodologies to enhance and understand the lives of children and adolescents. This includes studies of neurodevelopment and behavioral studies investigating conflict resolution with children and parents.
Editors Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Editorial Advisory Board Michel Bauwens, Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, Thailand Nick Burbules, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Faye L. Lesht, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Robert E. McGrath, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Michael Peters, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA Al Weiss, Pacific University, USA
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