The fire hose and the teacup

Karl Gude, an information graphics instructor at the Michigan State University School of Journalism, used the idea of the fire hose and the teacup during his Lansing TEDx presentation to visualize for the audience just how fast information is coming at us right now. Of course, in his video demonstration, the teacup was destroyed by the force of the water coming out of the fire hose. Connected networks, social networks, 24-hour news networks, and the expected need to be always "on" to be a successful and productive employee, feed the fire hose and press us to multitask or else. Or else what? Or else you will be left behind as a non-productive, expendable, line item that doesn't answer email at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night.

But is this really the environment we want for our higher education institutions and the intellectual growth they provide? I am not saying that all the information streams are bad. Nor do they provide useless content and information. This is the world we live in. Open. Social. Information. I use YouTube as one of my research resources for this blog. I am an avid Twitter user as part of my Personal Learning Network. I spend time on Facebook keeping up with the lives of friends and co-workers and long before any of the aforementioned social networking sites were even a thought in the mind of their creators, I was trolling and posting online message board forums to inform and feed my passion for college and professional sports. As a resource for fast information, these tools can be wonderful.

However, as I reflect on the thoughts of Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg in The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age and some of the ideas of John Seely Brown during his HASTAC and New Media Consortium presentations (watched on YouTube), I am suspect of their idea that knowledge creation in higher education classrooms (virtual or otherwise) should be student generated; a sort of death to the syllabus. While by profession, I am a educational technologist, and it is my job to find the best technological fit for pedagogical applications, I am also cautiously optimistic about user generated content because I've seen the extremes since the first time I signed up for an account on the Freep forums. Virtual worlds, Web 2.0, and gaming have a place in higher education, however I do not think they are the game changers of technological inclusion of intellectual discourse.

Intellectual property law on user generated content in peer-to-peer networks and social networking is an evolving business. However, academic freedom is the stalwart in higher education institutions. Does policy concerning the academic freedom of faculty extend to Twitter? Professor Jo Ann Oravec, from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater, expresses three concerns in this regard: surveillance of everyday interaction, privacy of critique of students work, confusion about whether tweeting (and other social networking activities) are "publication" and "speech" (Oravec, 2009 Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning). Currently, the answer about these concerns is most likely, "it depends."

Who owns it?

In this digital age of bites and bytes enveloping our social status and personal presentation to the world at large with a simple Google search string, the question at the top of the list of many is: who owns it? It is defined by the personal content about our lives, as much as the content that we contribute online as part of our professional and academic persona's. Does it become open source unless we deem it not to be? If we collaborate with peers, which peer stamps it with their copyright or does the right to claim it as original work belong to the whole? Twenty-first century learning experiences and careers are ripe with examples of questions of ownership: Facebook privacy policies, tweets from Twitter, comments on blogs or newspaper articles, message board posts, wikis, and last but not least, ownership of online course content whether locked behind server authentication or published for the browser world to see.

Cathy Davidson and David Goldberg, in their book The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, discuss the collaborative and collective learning outside of the classroom and how it juxtaposes the majority of learning in the classroom which still resembles learning before the first personal computer existed. It is the minority of early adopters of new learning methodologies that include collaboration, online learning, and peer-to-peer instruction. Few students experience learning in the classroom as they do everyday outside the classroom with their laptop, smartphone, or iPad in hand. Davidson and Goldberg also make the point that invading the personal spaces of students that they have on Facebook is not the goal. Creating learning spaces online where students feel just a comfortable to share and learn in an academic realm of teaching and learning is the challenge (and struggle).

But again, who owns it? Does the student own the work and the right to it once it is posted behind the authentication of Blackboard? Do the privacy policies of the institution trump the policies of the course management system? Or does everyone own a piece of the pie? How does "growing up digital" change the way we look at privacy rights as the generation known as the Millennial's, and those that come after, grow up with the details of their lives online? Policies covering digital ownership exist for the RIA (Recording Industry of America) and they have pursued those legal battles openly, but in a world of voluntary peer-to-peer sharing and learning collaboration, policy outside of Creative Commons is assumed.

As part of EAD882 at the College of Education at Michigan State University, this blog will explore the idea of growing up digital, what it means to education from K-20, and the policy that shapes the digital age. I will also explore the idea that education must "Adapt or Decline" as stated by Anya Kamenetz in her March 2010 Inside Higher Ed opinion piece. Have policies such as NCLB pigeon-holed the K-12 system into teaching for the test and left no room for creativity, exploration or adaption to different learning styles? If change at traditional higher education institutions really happens "one death at a time", will change come too late as the proportion of non-traditional students grows to record populations and they flock to institutions that are willing to provide a non-traditional education? I will explore these questions over the next 16 weeks.