About 2020
This post also appeared on Substack.
We can agree that 2020 was a not too great year, COVID-19 added to other disasters and President Trump refusing to accept election defeat. A fast look at news media around the world is enough to confirm that there was no lack of disasters, catastrophes and crises. How easy if is to forget that something else also was true: Many things to celebrate, stuff that went well despite COVID. For me personally one of those was the way the New York Times stood up to President Trump with clear and institutionally important reporting. In an age of fake news, it is easy to forget that not all news are fake — that around the world there are media institutions doing great journalism. Crisis? Yes. But not everywhere and not all the time.
So how about education? I teach journalism. Linking news and education comes naturally, in other words. There were high and low points in education, as well.
In March 2020 I closed the door to my university office not knowing that it would be months before I again opened it. In our digitalized world I did not have to. Whatever book I wanted I could easily search up online. My library of PDFs is quite large, covering all the research journals that I read. And if I did not have something, I could find it just as easily from my home office as from my university office. Did I miss talking with my colleagues? Of course, but who are my colleagues these days? Most of the colleagues I interact with on a daily basis are not “local”. Our academic world is globalized and digitalized already. Some are at my uniuversity, some at other universities in my country while most of them reside at universities in other countries — quite a few of them. We interact via email and messenger services.
Then there is something called “Zoom”. Whenever I could avoid a meeting at work by going online to join via Zoom, I did. It saved a lot of time. I did not miss a thing.
Except for the students.
When returning to campus in August 2020, I thought the COVID-worst was over. I had been off teaching for months, and now I was looking forward. I have a good relationship with my students, whether they be BA students, MA or PhD-candidates. The subjects I teach tend to cover several disciplines so the students I engage with come from different academic environments. We spend a great deal of time just covering the missing links between our areas of specialized interest and getting to know each other´s “prejudgments” and paradigmatic differences. I have found that even BA students in their beginning semesters are capable of that and interested in it. You just have to approach it in a way that they can relate to.
I was looking forward, but the one thing I was not prepared for was the residual effects of a spring semester largely spent at home, in isolation, doing readings and lectures online. I had thought most students at my own university had been taken quite well care of during the spring semester. Now I understood that there was more to that story. I sensed an underlying feeling that many of them seemed to share: An uncertainty regarding how much they could say and in what manner to say it — the fact was that in general students were relieved to be back on campus. Why? Because the lectures delivered online during the spring, were as a rule not adequate. Because the social life that a campus everyday life provides, simply was gone. Loneliness was a fact. For many it was a surprising fact, in the sense that they had not been prepared for their own vulnerability.
And now it all came out. We talked and discussed. Few wanted to criticize their lecturers, but most had quite frank opinions about the “home schooling” experience in their previous semester.
Much of the time some students still preferred to work from home. If they had COVID symptoms, they also had to. I found myself juggling several microphones up there on the lectern. I had to mind cameras catching my lectures for the students at home. I could neither be entirely in the lecture room, nor entirely Zoom. A weird in-between is what it amounted to. If I strayed too far, the camera would not cartch me and students at home would loose sound. Then they sent me an sms, asking me to move back down in the front of the camera and stay put there. A few weeks later we were closed down again.
I began the farm semester on campus. I kept teaching on campus long enough to understand aspects of online learning that I had not given too adequate though before. As we entered into the stage of case studies, paper writing and exam preparations, I found myself back in the university’s media center, doing”green screen” recordings. Posting those online, I also learned new things about our Learning Management System — LMS – that I had never considered before. I was caught. In technology.
That was just a few weeks ago. I then thought we would be able to commence a more normal semester in January 2021. Now I am not so sure.
What I am as a teacher, depends on where
I come from a family of educators and I have been one all my adult life. Every week for many years I have found myself in front of students, in small lecture rooms and large lecture halls. I have taught in three languages, in 7-8 countries, at all levels of higher education. I have taught as far north as Iceland and as far south as Uganda. My subject matter is largely the same, but students groups have varied a great deal, as have the locations of my teaching. Up in Northern Ethiopia, the lights go out at least once every double lecture, as a general rule. And the Internet is very slow. Down in Uganda students dress up for class in ways my students at home would never do. If it rains, some of them need 3-4 hours to reach the university. They might not show, but it is not because they take it lightly.
What remains is that intangible phenomenon that is so hard to articulate in words but is still so prevalent: We are learners, and we are learners at institutions that somehow are quite different yet also very similar. Buildings may differ, archtectural traditions too. Yet, that sense of what it is to be a learner somehow is common accross such cleavages.
I knew that also as a student myself. As a student, I traveled far. My graduate studies were done half way around the world. As a consequence I have networks of colleagues and peers that began on that one university campus where we met, later to expand to those university campuses where we each and all took root. We meet at conferences. We pass on emails. We stay in touch and for long stretches of time we do not. But we have a history of having worked hard, together, for a long time. That sort of stuff sticks. Our worlds may differ, but key aspects of our identity as educators are deeply embedded in experiences and lessons learned many years ago, and far away.
Accordingly, I keep asking myself how the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to affect young learners today who will experience a traverse from campus to online learning in various c combinations, have more restrictions on travel than what previous generations had, and at the same time enjoy a completely different online reality where meeting other learners is way easier, and yet in some ways too easy; not offering the resistance that physical travel and the sense-making of new places require.
I do not know the details of my thinking on these matters.
That is one reason for signing up to Substack, hoping to engage in dialog with other and like-minded people.
It’s the technology, stupid!
It is a well known story how former President Bill Clinton once came to the awareness that he needed to rethink his strategy and focus if he were to wind a second term. As far as I can remember that story, he hung a note on this office wall with the following message: “It’s the economy, stupid!”.
It seemed to work for him. After eight years in office he had balanced the books from his predecessor.
In my own day as an educator, I think there might be a parable in play: For about ten years I have rund a research center/network dedicated to the exploration of online learning and the so-called “digital transformation” of education and education institutions. In that capacity I have spent several years in Silicon Valley, at good universities there, meeting with resourceful academics and entrepreneurs — inviting quite a lot of them “back home” to engage with us at my own university. I have read books; lots of them. And if one item were to be singled out from all this it would be the following claim concerning education:
“It’s the technology, stupid”.
Well, yes. It IS the technology. In several manners of speaking, it is now and it has been forever. It will be in the future. In the future technology will likely be even more important than it ever has been, in the past. One does not need to have one or several PhDs to understand how fundamentally digital technology has changed education and learning.
However, there is still the question of how we understand and critique that phenomenon. Has Google changed education more than Gutenberg did? It is an apt question.
The specter of technology in education is another of the key themes that I will want to explore here on Substack. Of course we need to mind technology. The more important question is how technology minds education and learning? Does it? It depeneds on how we understand technology — what aspects of it we are thinking of.
Communication is a wonderful thing!
In a book from the 1980´s communications scholar James Carey wrote that “communication is a wonderful thing!”. He was quoting authors from the an intellectual tradition often referred to as American Pragmatics. What that amounts to, here, is simply the emphasis on language and language in use. What Carey had in mind was that a word like “communication” has so many different meanings — from community and communion to communism and commune. All Latin, to begin with. All reflecting some notion or other of “sharing” — of commonality, of linkage. Carey was concerned with how the new discipline at that time of “media studies” had defined its basic tenets and agendas: One can of course study the effects of media. If there is no effect, there certainly is no research funding and possibly no institutional place for media studies at universities. But that is to paint a too broad stroke on a too large canvas. Carey went on to remind us readers that communication understood as “culture” is an invitation to explore the nuances and intricacies of everyday life, of lived life, of articulated life – in short what Max Weber would have included in his reference to “understanding” as method.
The meaning of it, in other words. Also the meaning of technology. Meaning is always contextual.
In concluding this beginning reflection, I think that there is something here: If learning is an aspect of communication and communication and aspect of culture, it would be stupid to not address the issue of technology. If, on the other hand, the idea is to understand learning as a phenomenon and make sense of education after COVID-19 as an aspect of culture — then our main focus is perhaps on the hermeneutics of technology, institutions, everyday life, the choice of students, the spectrum of education in a world where globalization and digitalisation challenges us to perhaps think up new models, new approaches to mobility, and new methods of coming to terms possibilities and limitations.
One of the first lectures I remember as a young Fulbright student in the United States was given by a Hungarian immigrant sociologist. He talked about The Learning Society.
So let’s talk more about our learning society.