By Maristela Petrovic-Dzerdz, EDC Instructional Designer
On Feb. 19, a couple hundred of us attended Digital Learning Reimagined, the inaugural Chang School Talks conference at Ryerson University. It was advertised as an event geared towards exchanging “ideas and strategies to address the transformational changes occurring in academia and the workplace” as well as engaging in “professionally rewarding discussions with thought leaders about relevant approaches and skill sets needed in today’s digital environment.”
Six (plus one introductory) speakers were lined up back-to-back to present in 15-minute TED Talk-like fashion. You could feel the excitement in the room full of people expecting to be enlightened (at least I did). However, the conference didn’t start on a good note for me since the very speaker who was supposed to ignite the session – the eloquent 13-year old representing “Generation Z” (clearly printed on his white shirt) – brought my biggest fear to the surface: that we might, while trying to “reinvent education,” accidentally “das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten” or “throw the baby out with the bath water.”
The Generation Z representative told us about “their” digital world that “we” (of generations X and Y) apparently don’t understand because they live and breathe technology (all of which, by the way, generations X, Y and those before them invented). As a mother of two “Zs” I am used to hearing this every day – everything older than 10 years is pretty much obsolete, and “What, they had photos and fridges in the 70s?” So this attitude was to be expected and kind-of-funny for a specimen coming from Generation X. But then, it wasn’t funny anymore. The Z started talking about skills still taught in school that are oh-so-obsolete. “What is handwriting useful for? Can you come up with one example?” asked Z. He might have gone even further and asked about cursive writing. Or why not calligraphy? Maybe that would speak even louder to obsolesce of all the current education and make the audience roar with laughter?
Dear Z, have you heard of any of the following: iMac, iTunes, iPhone or iPad? You know, the highly successful and popular inventions you probably use every day, created by a company whose CEO has largely been credited for all aspects of their beautiful design, including the beautiful typography? You see, Steve Jobs said that taking a calligraphy course at college was probably one of the most important things he has done in his life. In his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, he passionately talked about this and other things he learned but didn’t know would have any practical application in his life, though they eventually did. He applied the ancient art and skills of calligraphy in the design of products that hundreds of millions of people around the world admire, while changing the way we see and appreciate technology in everyday life. In terms of handwriting only, there is ample research in psychology and neuroscience that shows the importance of handwriting on the development and functioning of human brains.
In the same speech, Steve Jobs also talked about connecting the dots, something I was not able to do during this event, no matter how attentive I was. When it was over, I still wasn’t sure what the event was about – Understanding human psychology in order to understand how people learn? Anticipating changes brought by technology in order prepare students for the future? Creating education that is cheaper but more effective? Packing up education so it doesn’t look like learning and is more easily swallowed?
I have been attending many conferences and talks on these topics. Most of what we heard this time has been heard of numerous times. There was a repeat of some slides shown so many times before, like the one representing the neural activity of a student during a seven-day period, taken from the 2010 IEEE article A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment Electrodermal Activity. I have been guilty of showing the same slide three years ago during my own presentation when I wanted to point out that students’ brains are not very active during live lectures. I am guilty of wanting to make a point at the time. I apologize. Since then, my take on this has evolved.
Firstly, I have read the whole article. The now almost legendary Figure 9 in the article shows “Long-term in situ EDA recordings” for the period of seven days of only one 19-year-old male, instructed to wear a device during daily activities. We don’t know anything about this single person, we don’t know what he studied and we don’t know what was happening during that “class” time. We don’t even know if it was a live lecture. We can’t base our conclusions on this one student and an environment we know nothing about. That is not science.
Secondly, even if it was a live lecture, we have to be honest here – there is a difference between cooking a meal and learning about the ingredients. I am not a good cook, so if you asked me to cook beef bourguignon, I would first need to learn about the ingredients and then about the process of cooking the dish, so taking a class led by an experienced chef might be the best and most efficient way (otherwise everyone would be highly educated because we have abundance of books in libraries and information readily available on the Internet – yet, this is not the case). When we go to class, we often look for directions without yet knowing what we are going to encounter on our learning path. We go to get a list of ingredients and pointers for cooking. Then we go grocery shopping and eventually go home where the real cooking starts. Maybe that is the reason our brains are not always cooking right there during the class – we are not there yet, we don’t have knowledge and skills to even begin cooking. We desperately need someone to give us those pointers and more importantly to ignite our curiosity so that we can proceed on our own and hopefully, with some experience, build our own recipes. That is why we will always need teachers and why libraries and the Internet will never be enough for majority of us mortals to reach higher levels of any complex knowledge and skills in any field.
This event left me even more convinced that we are still in the process of just creating the dots in education. We are doing something new but we are not sure what the impact will be. While we hope for the best, we need to make sure not to discard what has been good and effective in education so far, as we are “reimagining” it. Not to drop any precious dots. Not to nurture generations that will find themselves without any skills if the power goes off. As we are doing this we have to use our best judgment and focus on evidence-based strategies because education impacts the future and the stakes are high. And we have to be aware that we might not yet be able to start connecting those dots because, as Steve Jobs put it: ”You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Read part two of this blog post here.