Harbinger

Thanks to Anonymous for sparking this week's post. Anonymous is Jean, my sister-in-law who is a middle-school teacher in NJ.

Jean responded to my question: What affect has new media had on your work and learning? Her answer was visceral - like the affect of new media is at the core of her everyday experience as a teacher. Indeed, the new media affect seems to help describe her relationships with her students - each of them standing on an opposite side of the digital divide. The students owning their personal learning tools, and she owning the responsibility for their learning of the curriculum adults deem important for them to learn.

Jean's posting is a very insightful depiction of life on the front lines in an institution that is being over taken by the everyday experience of those who are relied upon for its reproduction. What will become of institution of education if those responsible for maintaining it - Jean and her students - can no longer achieve what they are there to by the means ascribed? And even more frightening, what will happen to Jean's mission to foster student's learning and development if the institution of education fails to keep pace with their everyday reality and needs?

Real learning for Jean's students is fun, so education should also be fun. Students want 'edutainment'. The educational experience should look and feel like the way they learn. It should be engaging, it should take their interests seriously - it should put them in control of the learning process and allow them to cut and paste, and borrow from others, to build on what they and others know in order to create something new and then to share it with the world - not just put it on the refrigerator, but put it on line to get feedback, not just from parents and teachers but from peers or experts in China, Ireland, or on the other end of NJ.

Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to depict a new media utopia where everyone learns from everyone all the time. Indeed what happens if teachers like Jean are not supported in their efforts to keep pace with her student's needs? The kids won't wait! So who will guide and encourage them to look deeper at the assumptions, social structures, ideology underlying the tools they engage; what happens if no one is there to help them approach their learning with rigor and 'discipline'? Indeed, what becomes of those kids who, like their teachers, lack access to these tools in the fist place. Will they also lack access to the political, economic, and social world their generational cohorts will most certainly create?

Rather than promoting new media for all, I am pointing to the power of new media tools, and perhaps more importantly their ability to disrupt the power structures in society and our institutions. Some individuals like Jean's students now own the tools of production. Yes, the tools Jean's students use for learning will be the very same tools (albeit more enhanced) they will own and demand to use when they arrive in the workplace in the next 5 to 10 years.

So Jean's experience in the institution of school may be a harbinger of things to come for those of us who work and learn in the institutions of adult life. Her students will soon be our employees, clients, patients, vendors, cohorts, and colleagues and we will look to them to help uphold our rules, standard practices, and procedures. I argue, they will not stand with us on common ground. They will see their work and learning, their responsibilities to work, the role work plays in their everyday experience, what it means, and how to engage in it quite differently than many of us of an older generation do.

In writing her post, Jean was afraid her experiences were not real world enough to be share on my blog, but my fear is that her experience is all too real. Jean may be like the canary in the coal mine - our early warning system that something is terribly out of balance in our ecosystem.

My question is: are you and the institutions where you live and work any more prepared for the new and disruptive ways Jean's students approach and engage their world than Jean?

Thank you Jean for providing this week's grist for the mill.