It's sometimes hard to believe that just a dozen years ago or so, the web as we know it was just a blip on the cultural radar. Sure, the date we usually assign to the birth of the commercial web is 1991, but consider that in 1995 there were fewer than 20,000 websites. (To put this in perspective, our best estimate today is that there are somewhere between 45-50 billion.) Certainly, the web hadn't begun to make much of an impact on education. There had been a few brave attempts to use other aspects of the internet for education in meaningful ways, of course (my own initiation into the field was with the venerable Arab-Israeli Conflict simulation, back when it used the old text-based Confer system) but by and large, the web was still largely uncharted territory.
Now, just a decade later, the very concept of "online learning" has become so thoroughly ingrained in K-16 culture that we sometimes don’t reflect as much as we should on what online learning MEANS. Or, more precisely, what online learning COULD mean.v
When you think about it for a moment, “online learning” is actually quite a problematic phrase. It’s easy to forget that the operative word is “learning,” not “online,” which in this case serves as a modifier. Our attention is drawn not to the noun, but to the adjective. Alas, the online portion hasn’t yet impacted the way we approach learning much. We could just as easily say: "Learning, but, you know, online."
Even more problematic is that when we say "online learning," we almost always actually mean "online TEACHING." It's a small distinction, but an important one. Almost all of our efforts have been focused on how to put fairly standard teaching activities online--rather than on how students might learn better or differently, given the endless possibilities created by the web. And because our focus has, up to now, largely been devoted to moving traditional schooling to the domain of our web browsers, we've managed to avoid substantial investigation into a far more promising area of potential innovation.
What we need is for "online" to genuinely modify "learning," and in a much more powerful way than we’ve previously considered. I don't mean to downplay the very wonderful work that's being done right now by groups using Blackboard and Learningspace to bring opportunity, access, and, yes, efficiency to our K-16 institutions. Online classrooms can be powerful tools, and the work that's being done in this area is rewarding and important. I simply mean to say that we're just now beginning to scratch the surface of what's possible. We’re just now beginning to think less in terms of "schooling," and more in terms of "learning."
In particular, I'm excited by the prospects of how technology might be used to help us make a major pedagogical leap, so that we're not just thinking in terms of "what is to be taught," nor even in terms of "what is to be learned." Instead, I hope to find us thinking about questions like, "How can we set up innovative environments which maximize the likelihood that students are likely to learn something valuable--perhaps even something we as teachers haven't worked through in advance ourselves?"
That's a scary and revolutionary thought--because while we can usually control what we teach, we really have only a very general, probabilistic influence over what our students actually learn. What I'm proposing is that we embrace, rather than fight, this fundamental truth.
This would represent a major pedagogical and ideological shift. Among other things, it would require us to take a leap of faith: to take our students, regardless of age, seriously as learners. We'd be allowing them to explore, and to experiment, and to be creators of knowledge, not just consumers. For all our talk about constructivism and inquiry-based education, we don't really allow young people to experiment much. We're far too busy asking them to recite what we already know, or in our better moments, to pretend to uncover something we’ve intentionally buried.
Part of the web’s potential in education lies in our ability to construct environments where teachers can provoke inquiry, but limit consequence. That is to say: let’s take advantage of the fact that activity on the web can be, in a weird and important way, both real and unreal. I'm reminded of a colleague's declaration that no high school science teacher, at least not one in her right mind, has ever allowed a student to conduct a real chemistry experiment. (Think about that for a moment. Sure, they use lab equipment, but we're asking students to follow established procedures with clearly articulated outcomes. That’s probably a good idea, unless you want that kid at the back table to blow something up, or to supplement his income on the black market—because it’s the “real world” and we want to limit consequences.) In civics classes, sure, we hold discussions and debates--until a student experiments with an idea we find vaguely uncomfortable. As adults we have a moral and legal obligation to ensure that the real-life consequences of our students' learning opportunities aren't too risky. But the strength of thoughtfully constructed online environments--simulation games, virtual worlds with special physics engines, social action networks—lies in the fact that if we're wise, we can create opportunities for experimentation without undue risk. We can, in other words, create opportunities for real surprise.
A significant challenge, however, is that taking our students seriously actually means taking ourselves less seriously. It requires us not to pretend that we have all the answers. We have be prepared to admit that on any given day, we may not know what students are going to learn—only that there’s a strong possibility it will be of value. It requires us, in fact, to take an ironist approach to what we do know: that what passes for privileged knowledge is thoughtful but contestable; and that an important test of our skills as teachers is how well our students are able to join us in learning.
