Towards a New Learning Theory for Digital Learning Environments
Presentation at Loyola Marymount University’s Inaugural Graduate Student Summit
April 2018
Why did we ever purchase computers and place them along the wall or in the corner of a classroom? Why did we ever ask students to separate from class activities to rotate through their turns at the computer? Why did we ever dictate that students play computer games or answer preset questions built from a narrow data set? And why are we still doing this in classrooms today?
When we approach computers in the classroom this way, there is little integration of what students do at the computer with the rest of the coursework and the thinking, and very little collaboration with the teacher or the other students. With a different approach to educational technology, students could be working towards something greater than themselves or the coursework, something with a passionate purpose derived from student inquiry. Instead of working at the computer and having a “one and done” experience, students could be actively transforming their studies.
I think back to my own experiences as an elementary school student when Apple II computers became the rage in schools. All of a sudden, many classrooms had at least one computer tucked away in the corner. Some lucky teachers might have had a few. Many students reminisce about playing Oregon Trail, where you tried to survive as a pioneer by selecting predetermined answers to predetermined problems, or they wistfully recall Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, where you tried to find a missing person by selecting predetermined answers to predetermined problems. Fewer students seem to remember the drawing program called Apple LOGO that allowed you to learn some basic programming language to make the “turtle” on the screen draw geometric designs. And some students had some time learning how to type or compute basic math with Typing Blaster and Math Blaster, but for most classroom use, this was the extent of our experience. One. And. Done.
Now in 2018, you can more readily find computer labs or maker spaces on campus, and more classrooms than ever have entire class sets of computers or tablets for students to use. Some schools even provide a one-to-one device to student experience that allows students to take their devices with them throughout the day and even to use at home. More students now are involved in computers, computing, computer languages, robotics, engineering, and design than ever before. And my questions still remain: Where is the integration with a larger purpose? How often is that purpose determined by the students? When do students engage in organic collaborative efforts for which they have passion?
As I delved deeper into the literature about educational technology, I found that there was something missing. I kept seeking a post-constructivist approach with a critical theory core. I was also looking for an approach that consciously tried to reconnect the classroom to student culture and student passions. Lastly, I wanted to find an approach that put back together the fragmented school day, something that acknowledged we had artificially separated knowledge and learning into departments and courses and units. I don’t think what I’m looking for exists; and in consultation with the great professors here at LMU in the School of Education, I decided that I’m going to embark upon figuring out a new learning theory for using technology and computers in the classroom.
Research has shown that over the last ten years, more and more students are showing up to the classroom with powerful pocket-sized computing devices that belong to them. And more and more, they are doing things on these devices that adults don’t understand. What is the impact of that shift? What are the implications? And what does it mean that students are showing up to classrooms with experiences and familiarities that are not being leveraged or utilized by a conventional or traditional curriculum? Students are communicating and computing and processing and thinking in ways that would enhance the classroom experience.
When I reread John Dewey’s Democracy and Education from 100 years ago with a modern educational technology lens, while he didn’t know that the Internet was going to exist, his work is pointing at something that we are still not honoring in the classroom. Dewey wanted to merge the personal life with the classroom life. The classroom should not be so separate from what we experience outside of the classroom. And with students walking into classrooms with pocket-sized versions of their personal life, this disparity is even more pronounced. And certainly, we should be asking how is it that school became so politicized and subject to so many controlling external forces? Put your best Frankfurt School, Paulo Freire, Critical Theory thoughts together on that one.
However, here we are, 100 years after John Dewey’s landmark book, and you can see that the need is exponentially greater for us to figure out how to blend the school with life, because students own their devices–they own the thinking that they’re doing on those mini-computers, and they are talking and thinking in ways that many adults do not understand. Drawing on my experiences of 22 years as a high school English Teacher, and I can attest that the students are making a lot of sense, even if you don’t understand it. Our job is to tune into and tap into their meaning-making. Our job is to ask them and engage with them, and then make conscious choices as educators about guiding them towards concepts, content, and skills. Our job is to figure out what they’re saying, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking—and bring that into what we do in the classroom.
I want to focus on how we can use educational technology to serve as the main creation tool in classrooms, the main tool that bridges personal life and classroom life. Maybe we can develop a new learning theory for using computers in the classroom.
The first problem I wanted to untangle was that of computers used in classrooms as a method to transfer a predetermined data set to a student. You sit down at the computer. You run through the problems. You come up with the answers, right or wrong, you get responses from the program about being right or wrong, but you go forward deal with this particular set of data. It’s not always all that engaging or interesting, but certainly there are arguments to make about knowing commonly accepted content to be a participant of the culture. Of course, we bring back our critical thinking to that huge assumption: Whose culture is it? We easily acknowledge that there is a dominant culture, but we also acknowledge that the culture belongs to everybody, and that everybody contributes to making it. And yet, we easily accept that curriculum packages with predetermined data sets are designed correctly so that a student “gets it”. Why do we transfer that power? Why do we outsource knowledge and meaning-making?
This is the problem that I’m dealing with. If you already know what you want the students to know then you’ve completely cut off all kinds of collaboration and creativity and problem solving and critical thinking.
As I look back and wonder how did we even get here, what are these things that we call computers? Well, they weren’t always called computers. They used to be called “teaching machines”. Computers suggest that we are computing, which brings up an interesting problem regarding how students don’t compute with the machine as often as they are taught by the machine. This likely stems from the development of the computer from 1924 when Sidney Pressey invented the teaching machine. It was literally a press-button machine that showed a question and you pushed a button with the answer you thought correct. It was a brilliant machine for drilling and learning by rote memorization. This was the beginning of programmed learning. If you were learning technical skills, such as how to fly a plane or repair an engine, it did a great job of forcing you down a particular path to get the information in your head and hopefully know it well.
But for critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity, I’m sure that programmed learning and teaching machines are not the right approach. We need transformational tools to help students and nurture in them their own ways of thinking and new collaborative practices: new ideas, new problems, and new ways to solve them. Of interest to me, then, is how we still have lingering some old practices of computer use in the classroom that rely on programmed learning and teaching machines. We have not yet fully harnessed the power of the technology that schools already possess and that many students are bringing on their own.
Looking ahead to the final year of my doctoral studies and how I’ll be spending my time, I am going to add what I see missing in addressing how best to use technology in the classroom. I will annotate cornerstone books written by John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Seymour Papert to perform a document analysis and synthesize their work to existing Techno-Constructivist theories and thinking.
The final chapter of my dissertation is about asking for, pushing for, dreaming for new kinds of schools, new kinds of classrooms, new kinds of software, new kinds of hardware, and new ways to think about and create new opportunities for students. My hunch is that mixed reality, sometimes called augmented reality, is probably where we are headed. I do not think that we should only interface with electronics. I think we need to, very deeply and very purposefully, mix up electronics with people. A new learning theory for digital learning environments will very likely redefine classroom spaces and class time, as well as graduation outcomes. The revolution will indeed be live on the Internet but it will also be remixed and recreated by students organically and authentically pursuing their own truth.