View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/18/douglas-thomas-1/
In LA at the Annenberg School for Communication
My name is Douglas Thomas. I'm a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. My research has progressed over the years mostly in the areas of studying the intersections of technology and culture. So I've been very interested in everything from how technology shapes our notions of identity to questions of how it is we do things like play, entertain ourselves and engage with the world differently through those kind of systems. Most recently my research has focused on the intersections of digital media and learning, so I'm very interested in how it is that we're learning in a world that's constantly changing. And my most recent book with John Seely Brown addressed those issues pretty directly called "New Culture of Learning."
From Content to Context
The world has really shifted from a world that's about content to being a world that's about context. And, in some ways, all of the notions of stability around knowledge are starting to break down. So when I ask my students, for example, how they know what they know, it's always a process for them of things like triangulation. They want to have multiple sources. They want to know who's saying what and why, not just what they're saying. And the world I grew up in, if it was in the New York Times or Walter Cronkite said it, I pretty much took it for truth. Today kids, they're not just cynical, they're much more aware of how easy it is to reshape the context around something to give it a totally different meaning. So they've become kind of hyperaware of what it means to live in a world of context. Another great example of that is if you go to YouTube, you can find these wonderful videos where a piece of information that you know to be one way has been completely recontextualized, usually by a kid with a weekend and Adobe Premiere, to do something totally different.
There's a great example of this, a video called "Scary Mary" which is Mary Poppins recut into a trailer as a horror film. Essentially brilliant because you watch and you think it employs all of conventions of a horror film and I'm sure looks like a very scary movie. The same is true the other way. Someone did that with the movie "The Shining" and they turned it into a romantic comedy. So you find the possibilities of taking context and remolding it are incredibly powerful.
Now, when I was growing up, if I wanted to reshape context I could buy a newspaper, I could buy a radio station, I could buy a television station, I could buy some media outlet and that was really the only way to do that. Today with technology, it's all around us and distribution's essentially free which means you can get an audience of millions basically in a weekend and do that act of changing context however you like.
The transformation of culture around learning in the 21st century has been pretty dramatic. And partly what we like to say is that what we're doing in our classrooms today essentially is training our students for jobs of the 19th century. We've just taken 200 years to perfect that. So that idea of mechanistic learning has what's basically held sway in the classroom for the past 200 years. It works extremely well if you have a world that isn't changing very much. If knowledge is very stable, then the idea of transferring knowledge from one person to another, teacher to student, is actually remarkably effective. And in fact the whole model we have is based on a notion of tailorism and efficiency. So if I transfer 80 percent, then you get a B. If I transfer 90 percent, you get an A. If I transfer 70 percent, you get a C. On down the line. That's really what we're measuring: how effectively, how efficiently have I transferred information.
Now, the problem is when you live in a world where that information is changing all the time, eventually the speed of change is going to outstrip our ability to transfer it. Which means how we learn things and knowing where things are and how things mean becomes much more important than simply knowing what something is. So in today's classroom we really need a shift from that notion of knowledge as a stable "what" into much more of a fluid "where" and "how." And by making that transition, I think, we kind of restructure learning not so much around answers, but around questions.
The nice thing about questions is they don't become obsolete very fast, where answers do. If you look at the history of philosophy, we're basically asking some of the same questions we've been asking for 2000 years. Why? Because they're very good questions. They provoke us to think about things in fresh and interesting ways all the time. Where if you look at answers, when the world changes those answers become obsolete. You have to learn them all over again. So I think that that's one of the biggest changes we need to start thinking about, is how do we ask better and better questions. And more importantly, how do we ask our students to ask increasingly better questions.
How do we overcome the postmodern worldview?
This strikes me as a really interesting question. How do you overcome the fragmented worldview and the kind of postmodern condition is what we're talking about. There's the kind of moment, and I think of this and people like Jacques Derrida does work as well, where you recognize the structure of how things operate. That meaning is endlessly deferred. And if you take someone like Derrida seriously, you can never communicate and never know anything because of that slipping of language right through the process of time and endless deferral and so on. And yet we do. So I think that tension is what's so interesting. We're playing with the possibility and impossibility of stability. So to say that knowledge is completely unstable and always slipping and sliding is both true and something of an overstatement. It does stabilize around these kind of nodal points. And it gives meaning in a way which I think is profound and important, but I think we also have to recognize in this age, more increasingly temporary. Knowledge isn't as resilient anymore.
There's a great novel by William Gibson called "Pattern Recognition" and he talks about that as pattern recognition is all we have in a world where knowledge is no longer stable. I think the word he uses is "volatile." Knowledge has become volatile. And I think that's a beautiful way of thinking about it. Knowledge is also kind of fragile. And that has its own kind of poetic intonation, I think, as well. So really what we're wrestling with is a question of what happens when our foundations of knowledge start to become less and less certain. This is the question between modernity and postmodernity, right? Is how can I know for sure? How can I be certain about anything? And we're becoming comfortable with the idea that maybe we can't. And in 1979 when Lyotard would write "Postmodern Condition," that was revolutionary. Today, that's an assumption.
The Role of the Educational Institutions
One of the things that was really important to us, a discovery we hit on very early, was in the work of Michael Polanyi. The notion that every piece of knowledge functions as both explicit and tacit. And for most of the life of the educational institution, the tacit has been ignored and the explicit has held sway. That is, the thing that you know, you can talk about, you can transfer, you can transmit. The denotative aspect of what we know. And our belief is that in the 21st century the tacit is becoming increasingly important. You've always had both but the balance between the two has somewhat shifted. So that again brings us back to that notion of context and the sense that the university or the classroom can become the place in which the context has a very rich meaning. If you look at Stanford's teaching 160,000 students online, in order to do that they essentially have to strip away the tacit dimension. All they can deliver is the explicit. So they've found a way to scale-up, you know, an industrialized notion of knowledge. And they can give it to 100,000 people, a quarter-million people, whatever, but each one of those people has to take it and put it in their own context. And I think unless you're with someone face-to-face or in an environment where you're sharing not just the information but everything around the information, you miss that contextual element.
So I know there's a lot of hue and cry right now and a lot of fear about the fate of the university. And I think that as long as we understand that we're in the business of contextualizing knowledge and not simply transmitting it, I think we'll always have a place. That's a problem we haven't been able to crack, I think, with scale. I think there's always going to have to be a notion that we need each other in order to learn with each other and not just from each other. So that gives me great hope in a lot of ways as well for the future of education if we can get to that recognition that learning is not a technology problem, it's a people problem. You go all the way back to Heidegger and the question concerning technology and, right, that's the beautiful opening of that essay is the essence of technology is in no way anything technological, it's people. It's humans. It's communication. And that's the thing we have to remember.
I think too about the difference between us sitting here and talking versus doing this on Skype. The words would be the same. The content would be identical. But the experience would be radically different. And I think that's something we haven't quite understood or been able to map out yet.
Between Freedom and Constraints
So the way that we look at the modern classroom is a pretty good example of understanding how today needs to be different from the way we've done things in the past. The nice thing about it is you don't need to change classrooms, you don't need to change teachers or students or chairs or buildings or bricks and mortar or anything like that, you just need to change a little bit about the way you think. And one of the things we talk about in the book a lot is the idea that all learning comes from a clash between freedom and constraint. And that those are the most productive kind of frictions you can have. And classrooms are an ideal setting for those because a classroom is essentially a constraint. You say, okay we have this topic, we have this time period, we have this book, whatever it is that is your subject matter, that becomes your constraint. So how do you allow people the freedom within that? To be creative, inventive, to engage their passion, to make it relevant to their lives.
And that becomes the area of play. And play is a concept that's very important to our book and our work. And I rather like the definition that I came up with of play, which is 'play is an emergent property of the application of rules or constraints to the imagination.' Because imagination run wild isn't very useful. It can be, but generally not. But once you say 'here are some constraints, now operate within that,' that's where you get creativity, passion, imagination, all of that kind of stuff that we want to champion as part of the classroom. So there's nothing wrong with saying you've only got an hour-and-a-half and you've got to do something with microbiology and it's got to involve this microscope and these slides. Now, do whatever it is you want to do and explore and play and have fun. So this is the concept they come up with of the idea of a 'bounded learning environment.' That the boundaries give you constraints but the inside has to be allowed to evolve as it needs to. And the metaphor we use for this the petri dish. Which is a great example because a petri dish, the glass part has to keep the outside out. But in order for it to be valid, the inside, the medium has to be allowed to grow however it grows. If you control that too much then you don't get a valid result. So that balance between keeping the outside out and letting the inside grow and play and do what it needs to do, I think is a great metaphor for what learning should look like in the 21st century.
The Contrast Between Teaching and Learning
So a number of years ago I had an experience teaching a class about massively multi-player online games. I had about a dozen students in the class. The way the class was structured, three-hour seminar once a week and I had set it up to have an hour-and-a-half to two hours of me lecturing, half hour discussion and then a half hour of them talking about examples from the game, the company had given them copies of the game and time cards. Now the class being on games at an early stage in the development of game studies, I was very worried my colleagues wouldn't take it seriously and a lot of them didn't. So I had loaded up the syllabus with the most heavy-weight reading I could find. I had Heidegger, I had Descartes, I had Donna Haraway, I had a number of other just high-profile, you know mind/body problem, virtual, online kind of issues and some really deep philosophy. And I knew I'd have to do a lot of hand-holding to get them through this. So the first week or so, two weeks, I'm doing my lecture for two hours, doing the half-hour discussion and then the show-and-tell. And about the third week the students started coming in saying 'I know we gotta do the lecture, the discussion and everything, but I've got the coolest thing I just have to show you.' So by about the fifth week, it was about two hours of show-and-tell, 45 minutes of discussion and 15 minutes of me saying 'oh, remember there's important stuff here.'
By the sixth week it was all over. It was three hours of them coming in, telling their stories, playing in the game and so on. And I was going home to my partner at the time and saying 'I have completely lost control of my class. I am now teaching them nothing.' And in a way I was right. I wasn't teaching them anything. I got their midterms back and they were some of the best midterm exams I'd ever read. And here they are talking about the game and talking about, you know, time is the horizon of being and cyborg identity and all these amazing concepts from the readings which I had just been convinced they weren't even doing anymore. So I pulled them aside afterwards and said 'so, you know, how did this happen because we weren't even discussing these things?' And they said 'well we didn't want people just to think we were playing games.' So what had been happening is that they had actually been so intrigued by the games, they were going back and looking at the readings to figure out how they applied. They were teaching themselves Heidegger and Descartes and Haraway and all of these incredible readings because they found a reason for them to be relevant to the experiences they were having. And my lecturing and my discussions were actually getting in the way of their learning.
So it's a great example of the contrast between teaching and learning. Trying to teach, trying to transfer that stuff to them they would have found endlessly boring and probably forgotten it the moment they left the room. But the fact that it was personally relevant to them and was connected to something they were passionate about, gave them a reason not just to learn it but to really dig into it. And to have that ah-ha moment where they were like 'oh, I get what Heidegger is saying, I get what Descartes' saying. Wow, I really have to think about the fact that I'm a character on screen without a body and I'm a mind with a body. What's the difference between those things and how does that work?" You know, it was a lot of mind-blowing conversations. And a lot of conversations they had without me where they would leave class and continue the conversation over dinner or whatever. So I found that my anxiety about being the expert was actually getting in the way of them learning. Now it was important as an educator, I think, to give them those resources, to make them relevant and to try to guide them into using them. But I learned very quickly that if you trust your students and get out of their way, that's the time when real learning can actually start to happen.
Wikipedia
I had this wonderful experience talking to students about context. I'd asked them a bunch of questions about who they trusted and why and they told me that, you know, they like to triangulate, they like to get as many possible views as they can. A piece of news, if they get it from Fox News and MSNBC and CNN and the New York Times and their parents and their friends and Twitter, they probably believe it's true. If they just get it from one source, they're very skeptical. So I learned from them that they don't take anything at face value, it's all contextualized. And then they said to me, 'can we ask you a question?' Sure, I said. 'What is it with you guys (meaning professors) and Wikipedia?' And I tried to explain to them that we live in a generation, professors, where content still is king. So we're evaluating Wikipedia as if it's a content delivery mechanism. But to them it's just another context. So they don't understand why we're so upset. It's no different than Fox News or MSNBC or any other book. They don't take it as gospel, they take it as one of many sources. So they don't understand why we're so upset about it.
And then I had this stark realization which was that I'm also just another context, in the classroom. So the idea that I believe I'm giving them content, that's an old paradigm. I am giving them some content, but it's in the context of the university and all their other classes and their life. And they're very good at positioning things in terms of multiple sources and multiple resources, whereas my generation if the professor said it, you know, you wrote it down and it was true. It wasn't just true for the test. It wasn't just true for the moment. It was knowledge being imparted. They don't have that view anymore.
The other interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it also provides a transparent insight into production of knowledge in a way that something like the Encyclopedia Brittanica never would. So you can look at how information has evolved through Wikipedia through time. You can see all of the changes. And that allows you to say, you know, go look at the page for Christopher Columbus on Wikipedia and see how many times it's been changed. It tells you that that's a deeply contested piece of knowledge in our culture: what his role was in the 'discovery' of America. And you get lots of opinions. So imagine if you could look at all of the correspondence about the publication of an encyclopedia article and you could see all of the revisions of the article and you could see who was invited to respond and who wasn't. You would know who the reviewers were. You would know who was selected, among many people, to write the article. You would know all of the choices, all of the correspondence, the whole history. It would give you a very different insight into that article in an encyclopedia. And we get that with Wikipedia. So there's benefits as well as drawbacks. And, yes, it can be changed multiple times but in a world that's changing all the time, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So I think Wikipedia is this great lightning rod, in some ways, because it points out that fundamental misunderstanding between the two generations: the one that views it as content, the one that views it as context.
Corporations, Gamers and Embracing Change
With corporations, that concept of content and context is radically different too. And we actually looked a management literature going back from the 50s to the present and we saw different stages. So in the 50s and 60s, the idea of change, it was you resist change. How do you build a company that can resist the changes? Because they're not happening very fast, it doesn't impact you very much. If you're a big enough company, you can actually forestall change for a long period of time. So in the next literature that comes along, I guess in the 70s, is managing change. Things are changing, how do we deal with that? So a lot of this is technology coming into the workplace. Okay, we've got new phones, we've got computers, we've got fax machines, how do we deal with that? How do we train employees? How do we make them not scared of the technology? How do we use it to our benefit?
The next model that comes in the 80s and 90s is adapting. How do we adapt to change? Now change is more constant so how do we stay agile? How do we respond in appropriate ways? But it's not until we get to the 21st century that we actually get a philosophy of embracing change. So change is no longer that thing pushing on us that's altering who we are, but it's actually a set of opportunities that we look forward to. We actually learned this from gamers. Because if gamers don't experience enough change, they get bored and quit. So the question of embracing change is not how do we deal with the change that is coming but when we look at the change we say 'what can we do now that we couldn't do before?' So in terms of a corporate model you say 'okay, our competition is out there, our new resources are out there, what does that allow us to do that we couldn't do in the past?' Rather than 'how do we fend off these changes, how do we get rid of these problems, you know, how do we change ourselves in order to manage or adapt to it?'
The example I like to use with this is even something like a change in a program like Microsoft Word. When you download the new version of Word 8.0 or 9.0 or whatever, you can almost collectively hear in an office the groans, right? Everyone says, oh, I just learned how to use the last version, it was perfectly fine. Why do I have to change? I don't like the new menus. Everyone looks at the changes as something that has to be managed or adapted to. Except if you get a gamer they'll say 'all right. What are the new features? What can I do now with this that I couldn't do before? How does this make my life better, easier, faster?' They'll be looking for those kind of things, assuming all the old stuff is still there. It's just gotten bigger, better, faster, so how do I take advantage of that? And that's a generational split.
The Need for New Models
I think what we see is the tail-end of the kind of late industrial capitalism and the birth of a kind of, I don't know what we would call a new form of a kind of post-modern capital, that yeah, there's an era for the last 30 years of the 20th century where we are perfecting the model that is slowly becoming obsolete. And I think that with the birth of the net, we have just an exponential curve of knowledge production. And one of the things that happens with the net is that knowledge production starts to happen around not just the writing of information and dissemination of information but actually around participation. So when I go to Google News, reading Google News changes it. Not writing it. Not even downloading it. Just showing up and participating in the act of reading now transforms the news for the next person that comes along. So information is disseminated on aggregations on millions or billions of microtransactions. It's no longer curated. It's no longer edited in the same kind of way.
So that notion of control over the information economy that was kind of the vision of the last half of the 20th century I think is rendered obsolete, outmoded. Almost that notion of control is undermined by the infrastructure of the technology itself. So as the Internet comes along I think we find ourselves trying to impose that old structure on a new medium which inherently resists it. And I think that, again, we're back to the idea of professors saying 'close your laptops.' It's that battle over control of the medium, not even of the information and the problem is that medium resists and it becomes ubiquitous. And now it's on our cellphones, it's on our televisions, it's everywhere. It's on our cash registers when we go buy groceries at the store. It's become ubiquitous in a way that, again, we as an institution of educators have failed to recognize and have failed to address.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
