Rethinking Educational Dynamics in the Digital Age: Engaging with Todd Richmond

Via Axel Bruns, via Howard Rheingold, comes this post from DIY Media Weblog, which reports on a recent attempt by Todd Richmond to model the changing roles of producer-consumer and teacher-student in the digital economy.

Richmond is Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television, and a Fellow at USC's Annenberg Center and its Center for Creative Technologies. The DIY Media post highlighted a recent presentation of his on October 19, at an Annenberg seminar.

Richmond's presentation highlighted the phenomenon of convergence, and its implications for the future of education, comparing "the future technology-triggered transformation of educational institutions" to "the 'perfect storm' that hit the music industry when several different factors intersected to disrupt the existing institutions for making, distributing, and monetizing music". It's a familiar argument -- and, to a degree, a self-interested one. After all, we're all in the business these days of promoting our own "disruptiveness".

Ah well, he evidently hit a nerve with one reader:

Perhaps Merlot and Jorum are already opening the champagne...? If only! I've argued consistently in this blog that the very idea of learning objects is virtually worthless, without a conception of the meaning and value of educational context. Context is all in teaching and learning, context precisely defines what is understood and valued as "knowledge" by educational participants (or to use an uglier term, the "stakeholders"). It is always going to be easier to transfer learning designs than learning objects (however "granular") within and across different educational contexts. The idea of the "killer osmosis tutorial" is a phantom, although recent UK work on threshold concepts in education holds promise.

I was more interested in the pictorial models Richmond produced to convey his sense of the changing roles of educator and student. Yet, to me, these too seemed lacking in certain key respects. Prima facie, I dispute the pedagogical analogy that his proferred models appear to draw between educator/producer, and student/consumer. Students are "knowledge producers", too -- and were such long before the digital revolution. The educational dynamic in the Western tradition has never been a simplistic process of one-way transmission (what of Socratic dialogue?). And what of the context (social, geographical, cultural, economic) in which the interaction takes place?

I don't subscribe to a purely utopian vision of disruptive technologies, that is, Richmond's "perfect storm." Arguably, it is the digital age itself, with its associated "knowledge management systems", "digital repositories", "virtual learning environments" et. al. that commodifes and objectifies knowledge like never before, and which continually creates new skills barriers and monetary barriers to educational participation.

To me at least, the notion of interacting phenomena implies complexity. It implies unexpected consequences arising from a set of interacting variables, unfolding over time. Time is a crucial element for the development of an educational dynamic -- a dynamic that is not static, but which necessarily contains the potential for flux and change. A dynamic that contains the potential for development -- the teacher's development, as well as the learners'. I'd have liked to see this aspect acknowledged and developed.

An approach more deeply informed by educational theory and the dynamics of knowledge construction in organisations, such as Activity Theory, would have the capability to deliver far more powerful descriptive and predictive educational models for the digital age.