When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone his famous first words to his assistant were, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” This was hardly an intellectual exchange of ideas but there was much excitement over the fact that you could actually send a message remotely. I was reminded of this moment in communication history by the similar excitement underlying the 140edu conference I attended on July 31st at the 92nd Street Y. Founded by Jeff Pulver, a dot-com success story for his pioneering work in voice over the internet, or VoIP telephony, and his partnership with Vonage, “140edu” refers to the 140 characters in a tweet and edu is, obviously, “education.” So this two-day conference was about becoming a “connected educator” via Twitter and other Web 2.0 platforms for communication. Jeff and Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, organized the first day into about 26 consecutive sessions, ranging from 15-40 minutes, with speakers and panels exploring various aspects of participating in an educational community out there in cyberspace.
In general, the speakers were all devotees of social media, many with the zeal of recent converts. They talked about tweets and blogs and personal learning networks. Screens were dotted with logos for urls that are resources for connecting. They extolled the virtues of the virtual community where an individual’s questions could receive timely responses from “the cloud” in real time. They were also believers in the powers of creative, empowering education for students. They deplored the damage of high-stakes assessment tests on the learning of both teachers and students. They talked about unleashing creativity in students, project-based learning, and they shared some of the amazing work students are doing. There were approximately 300 attendees, scattered through an auditorium with a capacity of 900+. An adjacent room was open for people to network and get coffee, while the auditorium program was streamed live to a large screen. Needless to say, the conference was also streamed live over the 140edu.com website to an additional 100 online attendees. ( I “attended” from home on the second day.) The message was timely and important. The problem? Everyone present “got it.” The speakers were speaking to the choir.
At lunch, I ran into an old colleague, Dr. Sandra Flank, a retired professor of education from Pace University. She echoed what I had been thinking. “Where’s the content?” Veteran educators, like us, know that there is no mystery to educating well. Real learning involves students spending time reading, thinking, writing, speaking, and yes, collaborating with others. Tweets cannot teach chemistry or history. I’ve participated in several “ed chats” made up of people tweeting like mad and soon lost interest. (Maybe I missed something?) I guess we were looking for more specifics about how to get students more involved in their own learning and ways to make school a place that students want to be. All this extra ability to converse with the world can look a little overwhelming. A personal learning network is valuable when you know what you don’t know and what you need to know so you know what questions to ask. But what happens when you don’t know what you don’t know? How do you start building concepts to form the foundation of prior knowledge on which to build future knowledge?
There is no question that social media, like the telephone, can connect people from all parts of the world. It creates communities of like-minded folk who can scan messages quickly, when they have a few minutes of down time and can chime in to different conversations at will. It is like the ideal collegial learning community where the best and the brightest collaborate and the fruits of their work are made available to their students. We have to get past the novelty of our shiny new communication toy to deal with the really hard questions that have dogged education since the time of Socrates. How do you get students motivated to learn specific content? How do you get students to see the value of struggling with ideas, doing real critical thinking, and finding their own voices to express themselves? How do you get teachers to take risks in systems that are looking for formulas? Perhaps the elusive answers to these questions will come from the larger conversations enabled by social media. But that can only happen when we get past the present equivalent of Bell’s first message to Mr. Watson.
