The App Generation (20 page)

Building on our several years of research, we have in fact initiated efforts to help strengthen the ethical muscles of those involved in the digital world (which includes just about everyone). One such effort, in collaboration with Project New Media Literacies, involved the creation of an ethics casebook, called
Our Space,
for use in secondary schools. Another, in collaboration with Common Sense Media, entails the creation of a guide to digital citizenship for use in both middle and secondary schools.
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In such efforts, we make no claims that we have clear-cut answers to vexing issues of privacy or intellectual property or
the meaning of membership in a virtual community. The issues are too novel and the terrain changes too quickly. Instead, our efforts involve the posing of enigmatic problems and the engagement of young people in discussions of what they might do in particular situations and what the consequences might be. So, for example, young people discuss what to do when a girl posts damaging information about her family on her Facebook page, or a boy circulates lyrics written by someone else without any attribution; or when someone transmits a photo of an athlete engaged in impermissible behavior on the night before a big game. Guidance for the discussion typically includes citing of existing laws and regulations, generally accepted practices, and possible penalties as well as promising models. Often teachers, parents, and other elders benefit as much from these discussions as do the young persons for whom they have ostensibly been designed.
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Importantly, we have here an area of contemporary life in which individuals of different ages, backgrounds, and sensibilities can educate one another about possible best practices.

Which leaves for consideration what may well be the most important issue: how the digital media are affecting and may continue to affect education. We begin with a vital implication that has yet to be fully acknowledged: education is no longer restricted to K–12 or even K-through-graduate-school.
It is lifelong! Education (and, it must be added, miseducation) begins as early as the time when toddlers can play with phones, tablets, or remote control devices, and it continues as long as individuals wish to be involved actively in the world. (Acknowledging this reality, Howard has lobbied to change the name of the school at which he teaches from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to the Harvard Graduate School of Lifelong Learning.)

Digital devices make possible a degree of individuation and pluralization that would have been virtually (excuse the pun!) inconceivable in earlier epochs.
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We live in an era when individuals can study, or attempt to acquire a skill, when they want to, at a pace of their own selection, alone or with others, with or without badges or other forms of certification—no two persons have to be educated or to educate themselves in a single mandated way. One-size-fits-all curricula and pedagogy deserve to be anachronistic, if not indictable offenses. The possibility of entering and mastering important topics and skills in multiple ways is also enabled by the digital media. There are now many ways—involving many media and varying in degrees of proactivity—in which to learn to play chess or the piano, to speak French or read Chinese characters, or to gain knowledge of economics, statistics, history, or philosophy. Furthermore, in our era, digital devices also enable a degree of collaboration with those far away, as well as those nearby, which would not have been possible or even conceivable in earlier eras. This is all to the good!

But less palatable aspects of learning also mark a digital era.
One is the threat to residential learning at college. To be sure, residential learning is expensive, and its dividends are not always immediately demonstrable. Why pay thousands of dollars and move to another city, if one can sit at home and master a well-designed MOOC (massive open online course)?

But there are many reasons for cohorts of learners—whether in liberal arts colleges or in professional schools dedicated to law or medicine or nursing or engineering—to spend time together, in the company of well-trained and informed teachers and mentors. So much of what is important in work is not easily, or not usually, put into words; it is best picked up by being around those who carry out key practices in well-worked-out ways every day. Sixty years ago, philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that one could read about science for one's whole life in a far corner of the world; but this literary immersion would not compare with spending a few weeks in a well-run scientific laboratory in the developed world.
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We might well ponder whether we would want to have surgery performed or our bridges built or our case presented to a jury by an individual who may have received a high score on a certification exam but has never stood shoulder to shoulder with peers and mentors in an actual work setting.

Should an app mentality be imposed on lifelong education, an even greater danger lurks. All over the world, prodded by a consensus among Anglo-American policymakers, there is a belief that there is one body of knowledge that deserves to be mastered (typically, the STEM tetrad of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—itself an “app quartet”); a best
way to present it; and a best way to measure it (typically by a multiple-choice machine-administered and machine-scored examination issued by the Educational Testing Service). And there is as well the dream (or is it a nightmare?) that one can array all students, all teachers, indeed all nations, in terms of their performances on these allegedly fair and comprehensive instruments. Almost none of the highly creative individuals of the past that Howard has studied—among them painter Pablo Picasso, poet T. S. Eliot, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, leader Mahatma Gandhi—would have stood out on such measures.
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And among contemporary artists, it can be said that Princeton University would have been poorer without painter Frank Stella, just as Harvard University would have been the loser had cellist Yo-Yo Ma or poet John Ashbery or actor John Lithgow not elected to study there. (We hope that they also appreciated their broad liberal arts education.)

We have no doubt that, on the part of some, the motivation to carry out “objective education with objective measurements” is laudable. And we have no doubt that some individuals have misused a system in which more subjective or idiosyncratic or hyper-pluralistic approaches were sanctioned. But we are equally convinced that education is too important, and too subtle, to be outsourced to the Educational Testing Service, or to what Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg wryly terms the GERM approach of Anglo-American education:
G
lobal
E
ducational
R
eform
M
ovement.
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Using approaches to health care as a model, Howard has commented, “When it comes to health care, there's a lot to be said for the ‘checklist
approach' favored by surgeon Atul Gawande. But when it comes to education, this sector remains in many ways an art, and one does well to follow the advice of surgeon Jerome Groopman—listen, listen hard, and then listen even harder.”
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Contemplating the current Anglo-American intoxication with objective measurement of certain performances and a concomitant insensitivity to differences in human gifts and human aspirations, we have been concerned about an approach to education that is overly reliant on apps.

In fact, we've faced this conundrum of assessment with our own work. In studying GoodWork we have tried to define the features of such work with clarity.
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A group of teacher colleagues in India converted our prose definitions into carefully calibrated ten-point scales of ethical behavior. At first glance, this feat was an achievement that sharpened our thinking. And yet, it seemed to imply a precision in assessing ethics that could not realistically be achieved. Asked what he thought of the scoring system, Howard praised the devisers for their thoughtfulness and their diligence. But he added that perhaps the system promised more than it could deliver. Instead, Howard suggested, “Why not simply indicate where the school is headed in the ethical sphere—an arrow pointing ‘up' means that progress has been made, while one pointed downward suggests the need for more work?”

Leading a series of conversations in which college freshmen reflected on their lives, Howard asked the dozen or so students to indicate their personal goals for the series.
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He was surprised by one of the responses: “I don't want to work on issues
where there are no answers.” Howard made a mental note of this response but at the time said nothing to the student. Later, after the sessions were over, Howard spent some time with the student and learned that he intended to major in biology (he wanted to become a surgeon) but also in philosophy. Since philosophy has traditionally focused on questions for which there are no answers, or at least no glib or definitive ones, Howard asked the student why he had said that he did not want to spend time on questions with no answers. The student said, “I don't like sessions where people just talk around in circles.” But he then admitted, what seemed evident to Howard, that an interest in philosophy is hard to square with a belief that all questions must have neat answers. We suspect that this eighteen-year-old, growing up in an “app world,” was impatient with conversation that did not seem goal directed. And this sentiment, which seems to be widespread, spells trouble for the study of the traditional liberal arts: interests in literature, philosophy, and history are difficult to sustain if you believe that all knowledge is—or should be—susceptible to an algorithmic process culminating in a consensually accepted correct answer or “product.”

In fact, the two strands in the student's psyche epitomize well the enigma entailed in the epigraph to this chapter. On one reading of Whitehead's words, the avid student is well advised to be able to automate as many features of living as possible: whether it entails mastering the human anatomy so that surgery can be performed expertly or avoiding conversations that lead nowhere and seem to be time wasters. And yet,
how can one know in advance
which
circumstance in surgery might require an instant decision involving an obscure bit of anatomical knowledge or
which
stray comment in an evening bull session might cause one to rethink an important life decision “just in time”?

There's a curious disjunction today in the world of those who speak publicly about educational means and goals. On the one hand, particularly among leaders in business, there is much talk about twenty-first-century skills—the “four Cs” of critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and community.
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On the other hand, almost all educators (or, perhaps more accurately, educationists) in positions of authority in the United States call for the kind of constrained curriculum and traditional standard tests that at their best capture skills of a bygone era. Given this disjunction, the status of digital learning in general, and apps in particular, is invoked by both sides in the debate. Those favoring the more open-ended skills focus on the enabling qualities of the digital world, whereas those defending the traditional skills seek to mobilize digital media to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of existing delivery and assessment processes.

Let's dive directly into the world of educational apps. Our survey suggests that the majority—one might even say, the vast majority—of educational apps encourage pursuit of the goals and means of traditional education by digital means. They constitute convenient, neat, sometimes even seductive pathways to accomplish what were already goals in an earlier era: mastering concepts, learning arithmetical operations,
identifying geographical locations or historical figures or key biological or chemical or physical processes. We could dub them “digital textbooks” or “lectures” or “preprogrammed educational conversations.” Decades ago major behaviorist B. F. Skinner called for teaching machines that would automate the traditional classroom, allow students to proceed at their own rate, provide positive feedback on correct answers, and either repeat a missed item or present that item via another pathway.
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Those sympathetic to Skinner's brand of psychology and to its associated educational regimen would easily recognize many apps today and would likely nod in approval at their slick, seductive interfaces.

Just as generals are prone to fight the last war, it is probably not surprising that the first generation of educational apps resemble pre-app education. (In fact, no less an authority than Marshall McLuhan noted that new media always begin by presenting the contents of the previous media.) Yet in our view, this tried-and-true pathway represents a missed opportunity. (And given how slowly change happens in our public education system, it risks becoming codified in the curriculum for many years to come.)

Let's turn the educational challenge on its head. What features are
newly
enabled by the new media, and how can one create and deploy apps that take maximum advantage of these affordances?

As we see it, the new media offer two dramatically fresh opportunities. One is the
chance to initiate and fashion one's own products.
As we transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 and
beyond, there is no reason anymore simply to respond to stimuli fashioned by others, no matter how scintillating and inviting they may be. Rather, any person in possession of a smart device can begin to sketch, publish, take notes, network, create works of reflection, art, science—in short, each person can be his or her own creator of knowledge.

The second opportunity entails
the capacity to make use of diverse forms of understanding, knowing, expressing, and critiquing
—in terms that Howard has made familiar, our multiple forms of intelligence. Until recently, education was strongly constrained to highlight two forms of human intelligence: linguistic and logical-mathematical. (Indeed, until the end of the nineteenth century, linguistic intelligence was prioritized; in the twentieth century, logical-mathematical intelligence gained equal if not greater importance.) The digital media enable a far greater spectrum of intellectual tools. Not only does this opening up of options allow many more forms of expression and understanding. It also exposes young people to different forms and formulations of knowledge. It gives additional forms of expression to all, and most especially to those whose strengths may not lie in the traditional arenas of language and logic—for example, to future architects, musicians, designers, craftspeople, and maybe even creators of innovative new software.