This is Chapter 6, The Blur, from The Consumerization of Learning.

     In the last few cities of our ongoing Digital Curriculum Discussions, there have been more varied forms of schools from private and public sectors than ever before. And they collaborate. It is heartwarming and demonstrates that the “competition” is really not what is often touted. All teachers and administrators join forces to corral and control technology.

It is easy to see in this camaraderie that the future of education is already here: a blur of options. This blur is really not hugely ideologically different than a vast array of consumer options like those for housing and home goods. You can “hotel” or Airbnb in a brief relationship with a place already fully furnished, you can rent a furnished apartment or house for long periods and decorate it yourself, you can rent an unfurnished place and then pick out all your options, you can purchase a place, you can build a place, and you can invest only and not live there at all. The blur in the housing industry is not going to go away. It has, in fact, with Airbnb, just grown another dimension to itself.

Where there used to be a two-valued system with public versus private education options, there is now a wide range of options and interdependencies. It is actually forming into somewhat of a scale that can go infinitely in both directions – from as old-school as a one-room 1800s schoolhouse with chalkboards, to the 1950s ideals with foot- ball teams, wooden flip-top desks, long hallways, PA systems, and paper report cards, and on  up to a fully personalized and online education for “unschoolers” and home-schoolers with skyped-in pro teachers, and now even an option that liter- ally echoes the one-room schoolhouse only highly tech-equipped.

Further illustration of this new “scale” and co-existing newly option-oriented market include:

  • Charter schools are actually public out- growths but sometimes run by enterprising private groups.
  • Private academies serve to augment with study skills public sector school students in the evenings and weekends.
  • Homeschoolers enroll students in state-run or district-run fully online schools with virtual “pop-up” teachers and live as-needed human interface for questions
  • Public schools providing access to online free courses by resource sites, such as Khan Academy, Udemy, and others.
  • Unschoolers who take state tests to gain a diploma.
  • Commercially available apps and subscription websites providing high value resources that by their nature can walk a student through all needed lessons in a gaming orientation so engaging that the student barely knows they are learning. Reports to parents can be ported over to schools for easy placement in the correct grade or study group.

Mature markets always have a multiplicity of “fits” rather than a one-dimensional answer.

The “blur” is the new game-field of education. It has left the predictable structure and function of institutions as we have known them. Left the sort of planned village of Hershey’s age that resulted in employees trying to kill him much the same as the fights anyone today can see between teachers and students on YouTube that, while not quite so violent, are growing in number. The blur proves that like the Berlin Wall in Germany reuniting a people, the proverbial wall of isolationism for educational structure has fallen, and a more free- form game of learning is returning.

As a teacher or learner, your future is a life of maneuvering between the blur of options. The real leaders will actively work at prediction of new, forthcoming options, through natural ideas spawned because of the blur and increasing technological capabilities.

Inside the blur, the persistence of a certain type of teacher-sourced and channeled learning as place-specific, with one-to-many-classes and age-batches and grading and so much more that is considered fact, is all being challenged. Challenges will not abate, and the smart individual or institution will adapt to master the best service model(s) for their desired constituencies.

What to focus on is the inherent value proposition of your specific teaching and your specific school, without it necessarily being something that is delivered face-to-face. That inherent value has to be something that is either a human ability or hands-on project – not one that can be surren- dered to highly designed software and technology that can individualize in a mobile and highly available way. Institutions will need to focus on the skillful weaving of the face-to-face with the technical distributions of knowledge, so that each individual is getting a totally engaging encounter and the product of real knowledge.

Presence, Optional

A requirement for physical attendance with a high rate of motion going to and fro has made for an exhausting century, and we are tired. We’re burning up oil and the air, and we miss having families.

With the advent of mobile communications technology, email, and more, we are once again in regular communication with family and experiencing close connection even when we live half a world away. For the last twenty years, people have been finding that distance is a conquerable phenomenon with technology, that physical presence is more optional. It’s not hard to keep up a relationship, to share and laugh and learn and strive, using video chat. Remote workers and dis- tance learning have ballooned nationally precisely because people want quality of life.

The rise in homeschooling and unschooling and the potential of consumerized learning is more than just people pulling their kids out of the old construct because of familial, moral, religious, or achievement purposes. They are doing it from dissatisfaction and because it’s not necessary to have an institutional location for learning. An NCES survey showed that, “In the 2011–12 school year, 91 percent of homeschooled students had parents who said that  a  concern  about the environment of other schools was an important reason for homeschooling their child, which was a higher percentage than other reasons listed.”

The construct of schools in our culture has also assumed that socialization is nec- essary, but historically, prior to schools creating a focus on socialization in an effort to create social homogeneity and control larger populations of students, no such ideas were part of culture for hundreds of years. Today, socialization is totally trumped when parents realize that they and their children have lost a certain quality and quantity of life. That, with individualized instruction, their child gets the best deal available of all alternatives, including private schools. And they get to see the child more, perhaps even go through life experiencing being a family for more than a few minutes a day.

 

 

1 J. Michael Smith, “ Homeschooling Strengthens Families and Commu- nities,” The Washington Times, April 19, 2004. https://www.hslda.org/docs/ news/washingtontimes/200404190.asp

Reference Material:

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2015/08/25/ homeschooling-in-boston/2/

“The sobering evidence of social science,” The Washington Post,  George

F. Will, July 6th, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ the-sobering-evidence-of-social-science/2016/07/06/4a3831f8-42dd-11e6- bc99-7d269f8719b1_story.html