The ICT-grade correlation

Despite the inroads that have been made so far, Education and Info-comm Tech (ICT) are still rather uncomfortable with each other. On one extreme, a school district willy-nilly hands out iPads to each kid as a substitute for text books, but is embarrassed when the delighted recipients break board-approved security settings and play games on them instead. Obviously iPads are not books and if you have to cripple an iPad so badly so that it can only function as a book, you might as well just stick to books. Or be prepared to discover that kids are smarter than you (give them credit for).

On the other extreme are schools that believe ICT is nice to wave around as a publicity thing, but don't actually maximize its potential because old suspicions still prevail. This is especially apparent when school authorities strongly advise the kids to cut themselves off social media a month ahead of the final exams in order to concentrate on studying from books. Such pronouncements ultimately undermine the value ICT has for learning, and so once again we have a might-as-well-not situation.

The suspicion of ICT stems from the initial (wrong) assumption that the increased use of ICT will result in a commensurate increase in 'A' grades. When the number of 'A' grades doesn't rise, it is considered sufficient proof that ICT is not as effective a learning tool as 'they' claimed after all. Suspicion confirmed.

It is indeed true that ICT use does not increase 'A' grades, but it is a seriously flawed assumption that the two share a direct correlation. If we're chasing 'A' grades we expect to find evidence that ICT has an effect on learning. No evidence will be forthcoming because ICT has NO effect on learning.

Shocked? Does this mean that ICT is of no use, then? Obviously not, because in not seeing what you want to see, you are also not seeing what there is to be seen. ICT may have no e-ffect on learning, but it does a-ffect learning. ICT use does not make people smart in the way that a crippled iPad does not make people book smart. ICT affects the way people learn, if you use the array of tools available to encourage self-directed, collaborative learning. ICT use changes the learning game from solo play to co-op play, and co-op play gives learners the ability to learn better, faster and more meaningfully than solo play.

So if people using ICT correctly become smarter faster, then why does it not translate into a bumper crop of 'A' grades? Because when they return to the exam hall, they're cut off from their learning networks and they're forced to play solo once again. How they are tested is not reflective of the kind of learners they have become.

I don't foresee the end of the solo exam format anytime soon. So schools must ask themselves: given the cheap availability and potential of ICT to build strong, affective learning networks throughout the entire learning organization, is our primary goal to produce kids who know how to get things done by working together and managing a broad, diverse range of networked knowledge curated according to individual interests and tastes; or kids who are divided by their ability and lack thereof to score 'A' grades within a narrow band of knowledge that has no contextual application outside the exam hall?

New wine into old wineskin

As we grapple with ideas of how to encourage self-directed learning and foster collaborative learning, two unrelated studies are revealing that the necessary trigger mechanism still eluding us is a combination of biology and psychology.

Biology encodes in us human beings a natural tendency to collaborate. We are social animals (some more so than others, it seems) and our success as a species is directly related to our heightened abilities to organize ourselves and work together for our common good. Compassion for the less able (to contribute) is also hard-wired within us, so by right there should be no difficulty in creating social networks of mutual assistance and partnership from within the microcosm of the classroom.

And yet in my discussion with the 'expert' and in the classroom experience I had yesterday; the expert said that the classroom as it exists today is not ready for such a pedagogical paradigm shift, and the debacle that ensued in the classroom confirmed it (yes, I was trying out another experiment which again failed miserably).

So something else is happening in the classroom that is subverting our natural biological impulses. I believe I've identified what it is: the psychological side-effect of our current teaching-and-learning model itself. Though Haidt is not specifically writing about classroom practices, we can scale down his national politico-economic analysis and see how it operates in small communities (of say 20-40 kids).

In the experiment he draws his conclusions from, there is a machine that rewards the subjects for their effort. In short, the subjects are more likely to equalize their rewards (i.e., act in a more egalitarian manner towards each other) if the mechanism rewarded collaborative effort. Even if the rewards between two subjects were unequal, as long as it was obvious that without working together neither would have been rewarded, the subjects were more likely to even out the reward between themselves.

But the willingness to share the reward significantly diminishes when 1) the two subjects start out with an unequal distribution of reward even before any effort is made, and 2) when individual effort determines the reward allocation (i.e., work harder, get more; work less, get less).

This is all starting to sound familiar. The motivation for being in the classroom for practically all our students is a reflection of condition 1. What each student brings to class in terms of economic wealth and cultural capital is a lunchbox that isn't meant to be shared with others, but a personal advantage to capitalize on and get ahead of the pack.

The idea of working for what we deserve is condition 2. The end-of-year exam is seen purely as the result of individual effort. We promise the kids who work the hardest and sacrifice themselves the most the 'A' grade; sucks to be everybody else.

Although we encourage collaboration in Project Work, we all know the exercise is problematic because it, likewise, is graded competitively as an end-of-process exam. So although we say the process is more important, we still end up assessing the product anyway.

We failed to see this scenario when we went on course a couple of weeks ago. We collaborated nicely and had some fun working with our group members, and we thought it would be the same when we tried it out in class. Nope. We collaborated because we knew we could gain something from each other, and we didn't have to take an end-of-course exam. The kids, however, do.

As one of the ICT guys on campus, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. We're working towards two opposing ends and our job is to make East and West meet in the middle. We desperately need to figure out how to turn our flat world into a globe. What have we gotten ourselves into now?