View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/18/douglas-thomas-2/
In LA at the Annenberg School for Communication
When I was in New York, I was talking to a bunch of K-12 teachers and I was really struck by the fact that the only ones that seemed happy were Kindergarten teachers, first grade teachers and second grade teachers. And I finally asked people why that was. I just assumed maybe they were working with kids at that age where they're still joyful. They said "no, standardized testing starts in third grade and it's ruining teachers' lives because that becomes all they do is teach to the test." By definition, what standardized testing can't measure is difference, it can't measure innovation, it can't measure thinking outside of the box.
Learning by Doing
I think that the notion of learning by doing is a very rich concept and if you really, really want to understand learning by doing, go watch a child. That's how they learn. They don't learn by memorization. And one of the great examples we've talked about a lot, especially since the book but it's in there somewhat, is if you look at the world of Harry Potter and you talk to a kid who's read Harry Potter and grew up with it, they can tell you zoology, chemistry, kinship networks, spell names, talk discussions of citizenship, ethics, love, romance, all of those things. And you say 'how did you learn this? When did you memorize those things?' They didn't have to memorize those things. They were passionate enough that they learned them because they cared. And they were curious and they wanted to know more. And if you really want somebody to learn, find their passion. And then try to stop them from learning and you can't do it. If somebody cares about something they will learn everything they can about it. You don't need memorization. You only need memorization for things that people don't care about. And only in the U.S. school system, and maybe the school system more generally, is the answer "oh, if you don't care, we'll make you memorize it" rather than "we'll find a way that you do care."
And probably the thing lacking most in our educational system, and I think this is true K-12 as well as university, the think that's lacking is imagination. And imagination is nothing more and nothing less than asking the question "what if?"
The Art of Asking the Right Questions
It's not enough just to say anymore "I say this is the way it is and I have a certain rank and status and I'm a professor at USC therefore it's true." That we now have a much greater pool of resources to ask those questions "why is it true? How does it mean? Why does it mean?" not just "What does it mean?" And I think that good education is about transforming our mission from getting the right answer to asking the right question. And I think too, even for my students graduating, I think how great would it be when you're on a job interview and your potential employer asks you "why should I hire you?" and you say "because I'm a person who can ask the right question at the right time." Who doesn't want to hire that person? That's a 21st century skill.
And knowing the answer pales in comparison because anybody can find the answer if you've got the right question. We've got the infinite resources now of the Internet, of Google, whatever, to get our answers. Answers have become in some way trivial. But knowing the right question and knowing the right time to ask it, that's incredibly powerful. And that's the kind of thing that in a knowledge economy and network society really shapes what's possible. And they're the questions of the imagination. They're the "what if?" questions. And if you can become an expert at asking "what if?" at the right time and in the right way, you can be invaluable and I don't care what your organization is, what your business is, what your mission is. Those are the things that are going to determine what the 21st century looks like.
A New Way of World Shaping
One of the things we're moving from is a system of expertise and institutional warrants which have really held sway for a long time. That is used to mean much more that you were a professor at a major university that gave you a kind of credibility that I think we're seeing, if not completely dismantled, certainly chipped-away at. And somebody with a blog that has millions of readers is going to have, at least in the public consciousness, a much greater influence than someone who writes a book published by a university press that's read by 100 or 150 people. And, yes, they will be an expert but they'll be an expert that's becoming increasingly irrelevant to the public discussion and the world-shaping that's possible in the 21st century. And again, 100 years ago world-shaping was something that was done by a select few people in positions of power with enormous amounts of resources. And today, world-shaping can happen overnight with a YouTube video or with a post someplace or, even if you think of political candidates now, the idea of fact-checking being outsourced to this notion of sort of citizen journalism. That if you tell a lie, somebody out there is going to know and probably have video footage or pictures that are going to disprove it.
It's too early to tell whether it's for the best or for the worst but it certainly is different. And again, going back to that small network of journalists versus the large network of the public, whether we're talking about philosophy or science or history or journalism that the more insular you become, the more closed-off you become, the more tightly-coupled your network is to each other rather than the world, the more you risk irrelevancy or obsolescence. And again, I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think it makes certain things possible, it makes other things more difficult.
What Motivates People to Participate Online?
There's two answers to the question about why people are getting together these kind of things, especially these large scale kind of things. I think one of them is back to that notion of passion that's it's connecting to something people care about and not just the thing that they care about but they're connecting to the other people that care about it with them. So there's that sense, they're in it for the passion, they're in it because it just sounds cool, it's an interesting thing to do, it's something they're curious about, they just want to know and that's enough. They don't have to have an endpoint. The means, the curiosity can be enough. I think that there's the whole idea of the hacker mentality is never about the end, it's always about the means. It's always about what is it we can know that we don't know. What is it that's behind that door that we can't open. And usually what's behind that door you can't open is another door. But that doesn't matter, the point is there's something here we want to know, we want to get through, we want to get past. We have our curiosity and we demand that it be dealt with, that it be met, that it be answered. And that's essentially learning. That's how we learn in this world. We learn about the things that we're curious about.
I think the other thing that's going on is something we talked about in another essay, years ago now, called "The Play of Imagination" is that what we're starting to see is the birth and growth of what we call "networks of imagination." That they have a strong lure for us because they give us a sense of presence of being with others and they're usually happening in real-time and they're usually happening around solving problems that can't be solved on an individual basis. So they necessitate collaboration and they necessitate group work in order to get to the answer that people want. And there is an inherent pleasure in overcoming an obstacle as a group.
What is the Biggest Challenge for Collaboration?
The biggest collaborative challenge is taking collaboration seriously because I don't think people really understand what collaboration is. I think they think of collaboration as only the collection of the parts and never the idea that collaboration, when done well, always exceeds the sum of its parts. The idea that collaboration is about people being the best that they can be in the context that matters the most to them, rather than being what other people need them to be or everybody being perceived as being equal. I think that we don't have a good understanding of collaboration as a system as people being complements for one another. We think of people all being in the same role trying to do everything rather than understanding what people are best at and allowing them to excel in their own excellence.
There is no hero. There is no individual that is excelling. It's everybody doing their part in order to make the thing happen and there's something really powerful and beautiful about that idea of collaboration that's collective, that is about the group succeeding, not the individual. Everybody's sharing the benefit of a group outcome. And this is one of the things that has always bothered me in learning environments about group work is that we give people challenges for groups and then we assess and reward them based on being individuals. So even their contribution to the group is particularized and compartmentalized and "oh, well, John did all the work and Martin only did 10 percent and so on. . ." But, you know what, if Martin's 10 percent was the glue that held everybody else together, that's really a very important 10 percent and should be valued accordingly. So there's that sense in which, and we see this with standardized testing too, this pressure for every student to be like every other student. As that everybody takes the same tests and everybody's evaluated the same way on the material. And the fact of the matter is some people are stronger at certain things and that should be nurtured and other people are stronger in other things and that should be nurtured. So we're doing a disservice to our students by assuming that every student is like every other student. The same is true we do that with teachers too, we assume every teacher should be like every other teacher and what we do is we end up minimizing, perhaps, the bad at the expense of completely obliterating all that could be excellent or that could be that source of imagination. And without that I think that we constantly strive for mediocracy and I think that, again, you could get by with that in the last millenium, I don't think you can in the 21st century.
What is the Mission for 21st Century Educators?
Part of our mission as 21st century educators is not only to educate people in terms of content but to help them fulfill themselves and all of their potential and all of their humanity and understand who they are in a 21st century world, what they can contribute to it and how they can make themselves better as a result.
How is this Connected to Online Gaming?
I think that gaming and play are something we need to take seriously as part of the structure of education for a lot of reasons but one of which is that play is oftentimes about the necessity and acceptance of failure. And failure is actually seen as experience, as learning, as those kind of things. If you give somebody a game where every choice they make is correct, or right, it's the worst game in the world because everything you do is fine and it's not a game, right? So the place you learn is when you fail and you find obstacles and they get harder and harder and harder and you have to overcome them. So there's something inherently pleasurable for us about failing, failing, failing and succeeding. And that's essentially how we learn things. We learn things by doing math problems wrong, wrong, wrong and then right. And that's good, we get a shot of dopamine, all that kind of stuff too. So the idea of letting 20,000 people fail and only one of them needs to be right. That's really powerful.
Open source works that way too. You put out a problem and everybody tries to answer it and only one person needs to be right. As opposed to the more cathedral model of software development, for example, where everything needs to be right and everybody needs to be right every time. If you put those two models against each other in competition, guess which one's going to win every single time. And it doesn't matter, you can expand the number of people trying in the open source model and that just makes it more likely you'll succeed. If you expand the number of people working the cathedral model, that's more room for error. So those two models trade-off in a really interesting way and the reason that open source I think wasn't as viable for a long time in the 20th century is because we didn't have the network or the infrastructure in order to facilitate that communication.
Is Technology Taking Over?
I know that there's a lot of people that are upset about the idea that kids today multitask too much, that they can't focus on singular things, the idea that there's a loss of meaning in today's world and I think that this is a narrative that's been repeated with every generation, with every technology. And on one side there's a dystopian view that we're losing something inherently important, the end of civilization as we know it, blah, blah, blah. The other side is saying "no, no, no, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread, this will save the world." I think of the utopians in the early days of the Internet saying it was going to bring us world peace. That didn't turn out so well either. The truth of the matter is with every technology going all the way back to Plato talking about writing is that we've had some good and some bad but mostly we're in the middle.
And I think for as much as things are changing, and there's no question that they're changing, something inherently human about us being with each other which hasn't changed. And I think in the grand scheme of things that's going to come down to 95 percent of what's meaningful to us in our lives is our relationships to other people. So we're really arguing about the utopian and dystopian effects of that last 5 percent or last small percent. Any, yes, those changes are real and they affect us and they change the medium and they change some of the things we talk about they change our lives in profound ways but the end of the day we're still people and we're still wrestling with those questions that we've been asking for thousands of years about who we are, why we're here, what things mean, the essence of core things like love. But I still believe that the core of who we are is fundamentally unchanged from the time that people were writing about this in the earliest days as long as we've had recorded history. The stories that we tell are the same. The epics we tell are the same. The archetypes are the same. The narratives are the same. The things we care about are the same. Just maybe they're sped up a little bit and maybe they're coming through a different channel.
But I always do think back to Plato and the hysteria about writing is the death of memory and it seems absurd now for us to think about that. We cannot imagine a society without writing. We cannot imagine what it's like to live in an oral society. It's fundamentally changed us but I think in probably positive ways. If he were still alive he may disagree, who knows? So I'm always very suspicious when I hear anybody proclaiming either the great benefits of the future and technology or the downfall of civilization as we know it. I think it's always somewhere in the middle but I think what's interesting is our compulsion to repeat those dystopian and utopian narratives because they happen with every single technology that comes along. Your parent's generation were saying the same things about us and their parents were saying the same things about them. And Rock-n-Roll was going to destroy Western civilizations as were comic books. We've had all these arguments, nothing new about any of them. It's kids today. Yeah, you're just getting old, you are and I am too and I'm horrified at the things I see and hear my students talking about sometimes. And yet I realize my parents were equally horrified we me as well. I really don't fear for the kids today. The kids are all right.
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.
