Wes Fryer, over at Moving at the Speed of Creativity, commented on my earlier post, Be Informed As Change Is Afoot, and has written his reflections on Dr. Johari’s lectures posted for free on Stanford's iTunes U. He does a great job of summarizing the major points of the lectures and adds additional resources and reflections based in his own experiences as a former director of distance learning at a major university. I'd like to highlight a few things from his post:
I fervently hope we are not living in a finite golden age of Internet access and publication, when abundant peering connections between tier 1 carriers make it possible for literally thousands of people around the world to access content like my blog for essentially zero additional cost beyond their fees paid for local Internet access. After hearing most of Dr. Johari’s lectures, I’m less certain that the architecture of the Internet and the experiences we have come (most likely) to take for granted in 2007 for our “online experiences” will remain exactly the same moving forward.
I too came away from the lectures thinking that the internet that I rely on as a relatively inexpensive way to learn, create, publish, connect and communicate will not continue to remain as it is today. I naively assumed it to be a constant as we move forward. I want to again encourage educators, as significant stake holders in the future of the internet, in how it continues to build out and empower education, to listen to this well-reasoned lecture series to become better informed of the issues.
I loved Dr. Johari's statement that we should teach every high school student what the internet is. So the question for you to ponder as an educator: "What is the internet?" When challenged to answer the question, I felt that my description was nebulous and vacuous. The internet has become too critical a platform for educators to have so little understanding of it.
But then Wes really knocked me over when he extended the lectures as analogous to educational policy. Brilliant!
End to end design of the Internet has led to the current situation where the network is, by design, “content agnostic.” It strikes me that this design element is one of the characteristics of the web which makes it so inherently disruptive to authoritarian cultures, both in schools and in some countries. ...
This is, according to Dr. Johari, exactly what has made the internet perhaps the greatest catalyst for innovation in our lifetimes: the elegance of open, empowering simplicity--a design characteristic that immediately gave birth to a platform for innovation, one limited by our own imaginations.
As I heard Dr. Johari describe the futility and ridiculousness of someone trying to centrally manage and predict the path of individual packets under our current end-to-end designed Internet, I was struck by a similarity to the accountability movement in U.S schools. In the case of schools, technocratic politicians have ostensibly wanted to “improve schools” by centrally controlling the curriculum via the mandated assessments required for most students to advance on to the next grade and eventually graduate. Just as it is futile to predict the exact path of a TCP packet in the modern/current Internet with 100% accuracy, so too is it futile for a leader to guarantee “educational quality” through these top-down mandates for punitive testing. My own question in response to these ideas was, do we need a framework analogous to “end to end design” for schools which enables creativity and innovation, yet defies managed central control? My instinct says yes. ...
I’ll close with a final question Dr. Johari posed several times in his lectures which really struck a chord with me. “What is the opportunity cost of lost innovation?” This is a question that is relevant not only to discussions about network architectures, but also to education and education policy. What has been the opportunity cost of lost innovation we’ve suffered in the past decade as high-stakes, punitive testing has become the norm rather than an anomaly in our classrooms?
From my vantage point as an educator, with my initial training as a classical pianist and in music composition, this is indeed the critical flaw of NCLB: a federally-mandated programatic and funding emphasis on measuring and labeling basic, minimal achievement levels that stifles innovation and contribution by our brightest and most capable teachers and students. As we distill school down to knowledge-based (read "low level Blooms"), fact-only, recall-oriented, federally-mandated testing of a curriculum of minimum standards, what innovations, solutions, contributions, and high level attainment is lost to humanity as bright minds capable of brilliant contribution are stymied? While we can measure the attainment of minimum standards, we have no metrics to measure the vast impact of lost innovation.
We need a different educational policy, one that serves to create a platform for innovation, that empowers and rewards the highest levels of meaningful and significant contribution.
Source of Quotations: Moving at the Speed of Creativity: Understanding Internet architecture, a need for smarter networks, TCP and UDP differences
