SLOW ED TECH

The uptake of new digital tools often seems to be driven by enthusiasm for new technologies or by fears about being left behind. Slow Ed Tech in this 2014 think-piece denotes taking time for a) mindful decisions that focus on learning and the development of capacities for learning and b) thickening human interactions. Two Slow Ed Tech initiatives are described. The first is a set of guidelines (composed by Peter in 2001 during the dot.com era) about specific situations and specific ways in which specific educational technologies are of significant pedagogical benefit (Taylor 2007). The other initiative, dating from 2013, involves online Collaborative Explorations for moderate-sized open online collaborative learning (as initiated by Peter and Jeremy in collaboration with Felicia Sullivan; Taylor et al. 2013). Reflection on both initiatives points to the deeper source of challenges for Slow EdTech, namely, the political, economic and cultural context in which U.S. education is embedded.

Guidelines about specific situations and specific ways in which specific educational technologies are of significant pedagogical benefit

I (Peter) learned to program computers as a student and young researcher in the days of IBM punchcards, and moved readily into using computers to design activities for my college students in the early 1980s. I had not, however, articulated well my philosophy of computers and technology in education until I joined a College of Education in the late 1990s and began to teach trainee and in-service teachers. In my first semester, the course project in “Thinking, Learning and Computers” was to “design an activity for a class, organization, or your own personal development [that] concerned the current or future consequences of using computers to aid your thinking, learning, communication and action in classrooms, organizations, and social interactions.” One student, an in-service teacher, chose to make his project simply a demonstration of a new tool (PowerPoint) he had enjoyed learning at an all-day professional development workshop a year earlier. During the question period, I asked about the kinds of lessons he used the tool for. His answer: “Oh, I don't use PowerPoint in my teaching. I do not have enough time to prepare the slides.”

I do not recall if I asked whether the PowerPoint professional development workshop included a module on planning to make time to prepare effective visual aids and rewrite lessons to incorporate them. I suspect that neither the workshop nor the student's report addressed a concern I had raised for the class via the words of the computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum. When asked if, one day, computers could be designed to take the place of teachers, Weizenbaum replied: “Yes, computers could do that, but why would you want them to?” This was a genuine not rhetorical question, one to which teachers—and teachers of teachers—needed to have a considered response if educational technology is to be a sound investment of their time and resources. In that spirit, a few years later, when I had to teach “Computers, Technology, and Education” for two semesters, I looked for considered guidelines in publications, syllabi, and national standards for technology education (ISTE 2000). The prevailing standards, however, detailed the software tools and skills that student teachers should master, taking as given, as did the available texts and syllabi, that computers and other new technologies needed to be brought into education. Dissatisfied with that emphasis, I formulated the text and guidelines that follow (Taylor 2007; for illustrations from science education at that time, see cases linked to Taylor 2002).

Overall guidelines

Professional development for educators should not simply assume that computers and other new technologies are good for education and then try to maximize the software tools we master in the time available. Instead, in learning about computers and technology in education, two objectives for the thoughtful and responsive educator are to:
(a) Make educationally justified and sustainable choices of when and how to integrate technologies,.
(b) Plan to learn through ongoing professional development how to use the technologies each of us decides to adopt or adapt.
In this spirit, our efforts should be addressed at becoming acquainted with specific computer-based or digital tools and the ideas behind them, evaluating their effectiveness, and developing guidelines about specific situations and specific ways in which specific technologies can be of significant educational benefit.

It is important to acknowledge the context in which educators are developing their capacity to use technology effectively in education. Although the information potentially available on the Internet has rapidly expanded, knowledge can, as the poet T. S. Eliot observed, be lost in information. We need to provide tools for ourselves and for students that genuinely enhance learning and knowledge. Among other things this means—as always in education—addressing the diversity of students' intelligences, backgrounds, and interests. In this multi-faceted endeavor, teachers trying to keep up with best practices will find many unevaluated claims, unrealistic expectations, and technologies imposed from above, as well as controversy, uncertainty, and rapid change. In the area of educational technology, therefore—even more so than in others areas of education—teachers need, in addition to objectives a) and b) above, to:
(c) Develop learning communities in which we help each other to learn about learning and think about change.
(d) Understand and respond to the push for teachers to use educational technology.
(e) Examine the wider social changes surrounding computer use technology.
In summary, professional development in the area of technology in education should enable educators to better fulfill the needs of our schools, communities, or organizations; address the information explosion; adapt to social changes; and collaborate with others to these ends.

Specific guidelines

With respect to the first objective—Make educationally justified and sustainable choices of when and how to integrate technologies—consider each of the following guidelines (arranged in order starting from most important) for using computers or digital technologies as tools in learning and teaching:

1. To extend thinking 2. To facilitate group interaction

Guidelines 1a-d apply here as well. Note that pre-programmed software tends to inhibit exploration of pathways and questions that deviate from what the designers anticipated (but see Snyder 1994). 3. To enhance communication of knowledge

Guidelines 1a-d also apply. For example, PowerPoint eliminates the time it used to take to write material on a chalkboard, but chalk or whiteboards are better for making connections during class and acknowledging students' contributions.

4. To organize a personal workstation or “virtual office” Alternatives to common practices
We also need guidelines to counter certain pressures common around the use of technology in education.

5. To resist pressures to comply with expectations, standards, or expenditures that promote technology use without providing sound pedagogical guidelines. 6. To not use computers to occupy some students' attention while focusing as a teacher on other students.

Reflection

With respect to getting students to address these guidelines and articulate their own pedagogical rationale for using computers, the second semester of my “Computers, Technology, and Education” course was more successful than the first. This shift may have been due to the hype and attendant anxieties about the need for computers in education having quietened after the Internet dot.com bubble burst in 2000. It may have also been due to my orienting students at the outset of the course by summarizing the contrast between “COMPUTERS in education” and “computers in EDUCATION” (Table 1).

Yet “more successful” is relative; my efforts ran against most students' expectations for the course. According to the official description, the course would introduce students not only to educational software but also to the pedagogical issues raised by the use of computers, including possible changes in the ways that teachers teach and their students learn. However, students had been told by their Teacher

Table 1. Two contrasting emphases in using computers in teaching
EMPHASIS ON COMPUTERS in education computers in EDUCATION
First... Get technical skills Explore pedagogical need and possibilities
Then... Build lessons and other practices using computers Develop technical competency when needed (using especially peer assistance)
Emphasis taught by... People who are keen on technology—often not classroom teachers People who love to teach students
Emphasis driven by... Hi-tech industry, administrators, availability of funds, bandwagon, fear of being left behind Small counter-current to the mainstream
Success is claimed when... Technology is used and flash is added Teaching/learning something that could not have happened without the technology
Response to the other emphasis Students find it more fun to use technology. Technology use adds flash to lessons. There's immediate gratification for teacher in mastering a tool. Once taken up, we can build on this basis and get better in education. "Yes, you can do it with technology, but why is that worthwhile?" Usage of new tool declines after the first flush of enthusiasm/first flash. Time and support for further Professional Development is rare.
The major challenges Use skills in actual classroom situations with equipment available.
Support those with the other emphasis		 Establish plans and connections and Professional Development practices for ongoing learning
Respond to pressures from those with the other emphasis

Education advisors that this would be a hands-on course allowing them to get competent using a range of educational software. The available literature, syllabi, and national standards, as already mentioned, reinforced those expectations. The College soon appointed a tenure-track faculty member who complied with those expectations; my teaching assignments since have not included technology in education courses for teachers.

Following the burst of the dot.com bubble, discussion of “pedagogy before technology” became more common (e.g., Ascough 2002; see also Barrell 2001). “Technologically-mediated learning environments” became emphasized in an expansive view of the “learning sciences” (Sawyer 2006). The national technology education standards, especially for teachers, now highlight “student learning and creativity” over “technological literacy” (compare ISTE 2008 with ISTE 2000). Nevertheless, looking at how MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—burst on the scene around 2012, we may question how far the pendulum swung away from a “COMPUTERS in education” emphasis. The key pedagogical model of MOOCs was to package lessons, preferably taught by well-known or engaging lecturers, and to make those packages available to potentially large audiences using the internet. Understandings gained about how people actually learn well and how that can be fostered or inhibited by educational technologies were eclipsed by the all-too-familiar if-you-make-the-technology-people-will-use-it attitude. And, in the minds of university administrations, if there were money and prestige to be gained, they'd better funnel resources to MOOCs and not risk being left behind. Indeed, whether in the realm of MOOCs, or with digital textbooks, social media, podcasts, and so on, the guidelines from 2001 still seem relevant for anyone interested in critical thinking and discussion about the use and usefulness of technology, especially digital technologies, for teaching and learning. The guidelines assumed a face-to-face classroom setting, but, as the next section indicates, they can inform learning situations where students or participants come together across the Internet.

Collaborative Explorations for moderate-sized open online collaborative learning

Connectivist or “c-MOOCs” seek to foster interaction and building of online communities (Morrison 2013), thus departing from the packaging and delivery model of the original MOOCs. Early in 2013 we (Taylor, Sullivan and Szteiter) joined two c-MOOCs on the topic of learning with technology: the University of Edinburgh/Coursera E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC and the MIT Media Lab/P2PU (Peer-to-Peer University) Learning Creative Learning MOOC. To the extent that our level of interest and other commitments allowed us to keep up with the assigned projects, we used—or stretched—the projects to explore running smaller learning communities within the crowded and sometimes disorienting spaces and interactions of c-MOOCs. Learning from failed prototypes that employed google+ hangouts (Taylor 2013), we invented online Collaborative Explorations (CEs) and have continued them almost each month since (Critical and Creative Thinking Graduate Program [CCT] 2013).

The mechanics, including the tools and processes used for interaction, are detailed elsewhere, in the entry for Collaborative Explorations. Readers are encouraged to join a CE to experience it for themselves. In the meantime, the remainder of this think-piece presents our attempts to make sense of what happens in CEs with a view to encouraging others to explore the approach and weave it into their own
Table 2. Selected guidelines of online education as implemented in Collaborative Explorations
Principle of online education Implementation in CEs
1a. Use computers first and foremost to teach or learn things that are difficult to teach or learn with pedagogical approaches that are not based on computers. Bring in participants from a distance. Make rapid connections with informants or discussants outside the CE. Contribute to evolving guides to materials and resources.
1c. Model computer use on best practices for teaching/learning without computers. Participants become self-directed and collaborative learners—gaining tools, ideas, and support from other participants who they can trust (in part because the first session consists of extended Autobiographical Introductions with Connections and Extensions feedback); integrating what they learn with their own personal, pedagogical, and professional development.
2a. “Take away the toys” and 2b. Provide an explicit structure for small group interaction and peer coaching. Live sessions start with Freewriting to prepare one's thoughts and emphasize listening (with chat box in live sessions used only for turn-taking, not for side conversations). Participation in asynchronous interactions between live sessions guided by the Online Mindfulness tips to allow yourself a delimited amount of time per day to explore online offerings or sharings and to preserve an equal amount of time to gather your thoughts and integrate them with your interests and aspirations.
1b. Make sure that learning or knowledge-construction is happening. Each live session ends with writing to gather thoughts and sharing of one item to “chew on.” Work-in-Progress Presentations (5-7 minutes) in session 3 require participants to focus their inquiries and organize the results to date.

hosting and participating in online learning activities.

Ideas and questions about how to make sense of what happens in CEs

First, let us align the CE initiative with the guidelines presented in the previous section.

Second, let us convey provisional vocabulary and themes emerging from our conversations and reflections about the effect for learners of a MOOC model that does not involve large centralized providers.
Of course, it takes more than this appreciative quote to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of CEs. The terms and themes that follow are not intended to meet standards for data and evaluation; we see ourselves still in the exploratory phase (Wikipedia n.d.).

Re-engagement with oneself as an avid learner and inquirer in CEs, as in Project-based Learning (PBL), is made possible by the three-part combination of tools and processes, connections made among the diverse participants, and the participants' contributions to the topic of the given CE. The re-engagement, in turn, makes it more likely—or, at least, so is the hope—that participants carry this triad over into subsequent changes in:
  • Their own inquiries and teaching-learning interactions for life-long learning.
  • The ways that they support inquiries of others.
  • Other practices of critical intellectual exchange and cooperation.
  • Challenging the barriers to learning often associated with expertise, location, time, gender, race, class, or age.

    • In thinking about how CEs can provide opportunities for participants to re-engage with themselves as avid learners and inquirers, inspiration has been drawn from a number of sources:
  • Students in science-in-society graduate courses that use PBL: “This course provides a structure for me to learn about what really interests me” (pers. comm. 2009; see also Anon 2011.)
  • The 4Rs sequence of conditions: Build Respect for each others' diversity and our own diverse strands, which make it more likely for little Risks in which participants in the activities stretch beyond the customary and for little Revelations to affirm these Risks. The steady experience of these Revelations or insights leads to Re-engagement in the realms of our customary work.
  • Vivian Paley's writing about play, story-telling, and kindness among young school-children: In The Girl with the Brown Crayon (p. 47), Paley says to her assistant Nisha: “Isn't it a great feeling tying together all these stories?” Nisha: “Yes, but it doesn't feel as if I'm tying things up. No, it's more like opening up, or maybe even discovering things I've forgotten.” In The Boy on the Beach (p. 24), Paley writes, paraphrasing a 1924 essay by V. Woolf: “[T]he teacher must get in touch with the children by putting before them something they recognize, which therefore stimulates their imaginations and makes them willing to cooperate in the business of intimacy.” (To translate this into CEs: replace “children” by “participants” and read “intimacy” as exposing vulnerabilities, aspirations, unformed ideas to each other.) In the same book, a colleague writing to Paley remarks (p. 25): “When [children] solve one problem, they create another to act on. By proving they are necessary and useful in a story, they demonstrate that they have a reason to exist, to be here with others.”
  • Michael White's narrative practice in family therapy and community work: “It is one thing to know that people are not passive recipients of life forces. But it is another thing to identify [people's multiplicity of] initiatives, and to contribute to a context that is favorable to their endurance…. [I]t is another thing to identify initiatives that might provide a point of entry to the sort of rich story development that brings with it more positive identity conclusions and new options for action in the world” (White 2011, 29).
  • This fieldbook of tools and processes to help readers in all fields develop as researchers, writers, and agents of change.
    • In short, our sources concern what we might call social competencies, more than digital.

    Third, some possible extensions and challenges ahead, including that of more systematic, albeit still exploratory, research.

    CCT (2013) lists many possible extensions of CEs, from forming a group that pursues the case beyond the limited duration of the CE, through accommodating participants that have different levels of preparation in the topics or in the processes of interaction, to undertaking exploratory research on CEs. On this last item, the obvious next steps would be to secure informed consent of a representative sample of CE participants, use a standard protocol to conduct short interviews about interviewees' experience in CEs and their experience, if any, in a recent MOOC, and undertake qualitative analysis of interview transcripts to identify vocabulary and themes that flesh out or complicate from the provisional terms and themes above.

    We submitted a proposal to undertake just such exploratory research to the MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) in 2013. MRI, formed to address the gap in research “evaluating MOOCs and how they impact teaching, learning, and education in general” (MRI 2013), had called for submissions that addressed, among other questions:
  • “What models of MOOCs exist beyond large centralized providers?”
  • “What institutional, pedagogical, learning design, technological, and business models are currently employed and which have the most potential to have a positive effect for our learner population?”

    • The reviewers were reasonably justified in noting that our proposal was not based on the existing MOOC research literature. We had hoped, however, given the professed interest of MRI in alternatives to the dominant models and in designs for learning, that CEs would intrigue reviewers and allow them to endorse our explicitly exploratory proposal. That was not the case. Later, when we examined the funded projects that were concerned with interactions conducive of learning, we noted that the proposals took the “massive” in MOOCs as given. This meant that their analyses could be quantitative, using, for example, social network analysis to map peer-to-peer interactivity. Our approach was, in contrast, to start small, “scaling up to 'moocl,' not dropping down from a MOOC,” as the proposal title indicated (Taylor et al. 2013). The research currents into which our approach might flow is more qualitative, focusing on identifying and cultivating qualities that enable MOOC and open online learning participants to connect and build interactions with others (Milligan et al. 2013).

    We have continued to address the challenge of drawing in more participants, in part so that CEs might be scaled up to multiple learning communities around any given case, but also to have enough participants for a meaningful sample to be interviewed for research (at some time when we can secure the necessary time and resources). We have encountered two conundrums related to this challenge. Both follow from the obvious medium in which to publicize CEs being the c-MOOCs that we have been participating in. When our posts mention CEs and their rationale, those taking note have tended to be active c-MOOC participants. When these people register to join a CE, however, it turns out that other matters, including their active asynchronous exchanges, often get in the way of following through with the live sessions and having the full experience of a month-long learning experience. The first conundrum then is the difficulty in using asynchronous exchanges to wean others away from active asynchronous exchanges that might seem not to be very deep or substantial.

    Reciprocally, the time we might spend cultivating or deepening a new connection that emerged from such an exchange is time not available for participation in the wider c-MOOC communities.

    A way out of this conundrum would be to forge a partnership with organizers of a c-MOOC so that CEs get built into the connecting, as against the didactic, side of the design of their MOOCs. Giving CEs a central role in the MOOC would increase the numbers of participants who gave themselves a chance to experience CEs, which would surely be more persuasive—and generative of responses to be studied—than our prospectus or any other writing about the CEs. Without going into the ups and downs of our partnership-seeking efforts, we have been finding that MOOC designers focus on putting technologies in place within which participant-initiated interactions may then happen—or not. Of course, without people dedicated to making the technical arrangements, there would not be suitable c-MOOCs in which to participate and with which we might seek to partner. The second conundrum, then, is that we are running both with and against the direction of MOOC development, which, to use the terms of Table 1, starts from COMPUTERS in education even as it begins to move towards—or rediscover the need for— computers in EDUCATION.

    It remains to be seen whether we can overcome the two conundrums and, eventually, complete research that affirms the potential we see for CEs to have a positive effect on the MOOC or open, online learner population.

    Reflection

    With Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and Google regularly in the top ten corporations worldwide in terms of market capitalization, no one should be surprised to find the education sector a place where computers and digital technologies get promoted. However, to note this is to open up issues about the wider context in which U.S. education is embedded. The political, economic and cultural dynamics in which we have to operate are apparent when we look at discussion of public education, which is said to be failing for reasons such as the following (with corresponding corporate interests pointed to in parentheses):
  • Students are not held to acceptable standards. (The solution involves textbooks and tests that happen to be produced by large publishing companies with political connections; Metcalf 2002.)
  • Schools kill creativity, as Ken Robinson has told 25 million visitors to one of his TED videos. (TED, with its origins in Silicon Valley continues to inform and entertain viewers with a vision of accelerating technological change.)
  • Public schools and teachers unions resist change, so school funds need to be diverted to subsidize charter schools, which may be free from serving the full range of children. (Charter schools are often promoted and further subsidized by foundations that also promote technological responses to social problems, such as the Broad and the Gates Foundations.)
  • Science teachers need to know more science to teach well. (This view underpins funding available from the National Science Foundation for scientist involvement in educational improvement, but see Bower 2005 for a scientist's critical assessment of his initial assumptions.)

    • And so on. Against the backdrop of the intertwined and powerful social dynamics implied in these quick examples, the two initiatives we have introduced in this article cannot expect to achieve, recalling this think-piece's epigram, Fløistad's “real renewal.” They can, however, be read, as Hallnäs and Redström suggest, as invitations to innovators in e-education to build reflection into their design work so as to open up “time presence” for “slowness, reflection and togetherness.”

    Acknowledgements

    Contributions of the participants of the 2001 courses, 2013-14 Collaborative Explorations, and anonymous reviewers have helped in the preparation of this think-piece.

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