Toppling Old Empires

Seventy years after Gutenberg invented moveable type, Martin Luther challenged the old order of ceremonial and royal authority when he posted his 95 Theses. It would take another 130 years of conflict, war, and upheaval for a new order of society to emerge with the Treaty of Westphalia.

It would be another 300 years before television would pose a similar challenge to a print-dominated world. Television grew from 9 percent of homes in 1950 to 90 percent by 1960.⁵ In 1960 we saw a political earthquake in the presidential campaign. Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee, had served two terms as vice president, the most influential vice president in history to that point. He also served under one of the most popular presidents in modern history, Dwight Eisenhower. But those credentials were undone in one broadcast.⁶ On September 26, 1960, Nixon and John F. Kennedy spoke on television in the first live broadcast presidential debate. Kennedy understood the medium. He looked into the camera, smiled, and provided summary statements. It also helped that he was young and telegenic. Nixon dismissed the power of the medium and told his aids that substance would win over style. We all know the outcome of that presidential campaign.

Over the next 15 years, American society experienced a dramatic restructuring of social and civic values, the failure of respected institutions (such as the military in Vietnam and the presidency with the Watergate scandal), and a profound culture shift.

By 1992, the Internet was available to anyone with a computer and modem. Internet access grew at a similar rate as television and in 2013 reached 90 percent of U.S. households.⁷ Barack Obama became the first president in the social media age.⁸ His 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries reflected an updated version of the contest between a young, fresh, media-savvy Kennedy and the establishment candidate, Nixon, who played by old rules. Of course, the cultural and civic disruption was no longer only an American experience; it spread globally.

The iPhone issued a challenge to the “old” order just as we are regaining our balance from the overthrow of print and broadcast. When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone 2007, it fundamentally shifted how information would be stored and distributed. It held more computing power than NASA had possessed when it landed a man on the moon in 1969. The growth of cloud computing now frees storage from our phones, computers, and other devices. The continued exponential improvement and miniaturization of processing capabilities makes all these devices more portable and more affordable. In 2013 more than 143 million people in the United States, and 17 percent of the global population, owned smartphones!

The Pattern of Technological Change

What does all of this have to do with education and learning?

First, education as an institution has been able to insulate its power structure and preserve its mindset and traditions from a rapidly changing world. Many parents have seen that most teachers are uncomfortable using new media in the classroom and that our curriculum and tools are decades behind the experience students have the moment they step outside the school and pull out their smartphone.

Second, just because it feels insulated does not mean that its power, influence, and effectiveness is secure. In fact the battles over reform, testing, choice, and charters going on across the country are simply the first challengers coming through the widening breach of irrelevance.

Third, social-mobile media is a tool. A powerful tool but it follows the same principles as a screwdriver, hammer, and other tools; they work best when used as designed. What seems obvious when using a screwdriver or hammer seems lost when we use digital media tools. For example, using a tablet merely as an electronic book misses the point. Why not use it for its interactive capabilities, its social dimension, its ability to cut, paste, reframe, and to link to information?

Taking a closer look at these media-defined dividing lines (eras) will help us better understand why our Gutenberg-designed education system came under challenge in the 1950s and has been continuously assaulted ever since. It will also help define a strategy for change and a method for adapting to future shifts. Maybe it can also help us redefine what success for the future might look like and how to measure it.

It seems clear that the mindset that created our intelligence testing in the early 1900s, and then academic achievement assessments in the 1920s, was designed to work within a Gutenberg context where mastering content was highly valued and useful. Shifting our sights and preparations so we can compete with the other OECD countries on PISA seems like a distraction from the goal of understanding learning within the context of a social-mobile world. The PISA standards were designed in the 1950s and simply reflect a more rigorous, comprehensive, and globally measured assessment. Even if PISA standards are an improvement over the current U.S. assessments, they were still designed with the same Gutenberg mindset.

Why Would I Send My Kid to Your School?

In 2005 I was asked to speak to one of the departments of a small private college. Tuition at the college that time was $30,000 a year. The dean was concerned because recruiting was showing signs of softening. The college had to provide more and deeper scholarships to keep attendance levels from declining. He felt his department was stuck in the wrong kind of thinking about how to improve the college's offerings. Debate centered on offering “more interesting” topics, opposed by those who felt these would only dilute the quality and reputation of the school. There was no interest in considering that a deeper or larger shift might be taking place.

I presented a similar historical matrix to the one I'll be providing later in the chapter. They all felt it was interesting, compelling, and worthy of consideration. That wasn't the response I was hoping for. I could feel the dean's dilemma. I reached into my backpack and pulled out my fourth-generation Classic model iPod. It was about the size of a deck of cards, with an LCD readout on the upper third and Apple's patented click wheel. I held it up and asked how many owned an iPod. Only one person in the room owned any kind of MP3 player.

“What is this thing I'm holding in my hand?” I got a few answers like “music player” or “a hard drive.”

“What does it do?” I got a few more answers like “plays music, plays audio books, creates libraries of content,” and “personalizes your listening.”

“Why is this significant?” Now the room was almost mute.

So I gave them my finale. “This device is my on-demand content provider. I can listen to what I want, when I want, where I want as often as I want. I can download books, lectures, sermons, podcasts, and music. I can theoretically get the best content in the world on any subject I may be interested in. For the past 40 minutes you've shared with me that your primary value as professors and as a college is the quality of your teaching, your content. If I can now get the best content in the world and listen to it on my terms, then why would I pay $30,000 a year to send my child here? What is your value proposition in a content-abundant world?

Remember, this was back in 2005. Those devices were relatively new and for some in the room completely new. I had challenged some sacred assumptions about the purpose of their institution, their value to society and their personal worth. They didn't like it and they expressed that opinion. I told them that the value of learning has irreversibly shifted away from acquiring content to the experience or context.

This story simply illustrates the challenge we all face in the process of becoming experts within a system of knowledge or practice. Our success is built on mastering the disciplines of that particular domain—and mindset. We're trapped in Einstein's observation that, “No problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it.” Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, put it this way. “Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those that he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.⁹“ Do you think this statement might apply as much to education as it does to science? We all—scientists and teachers—seem to be trapped within the silos of our disciplines and the dominant media environment that shaped us.

The System's Logic Drives Behavior

Education is currently trying to define twenty-first-century skills. When you look at many of those skills they follow a Google worldview logic. We are almost 20 percent into the century and the Google worldview and logic are already shifting to a new worldview and logic. It is the worldview of a social-mobile culture and is rapidly building to a new inflection point with embedded sensor technology and the Internet of Things.

The value of the Learning Matrix is that it provides a framework for understanding the invisible internal logic that drives organizational, institutional, or even national culture. The movie The Matrix carries a parallel message. Neo is a programmer by day, a puzzle master within the system. At night he is a hacker attempting to find answers to deeper doubts and questions about his boring and unfulfilling life. His hacking leads him to Morpheus, the one who may have the answers to his questions. But he is also considered enemy number one by the ruling system. The story is Neo's journey to break out of the system by discovering the hidden logic (the Architect) that runs it. In doing so, Neo exposes the artificial constraints on those who are content to comply. The system attacks and has power as long as Neo's mind remains a part of the system. Neo only breaks out by overcoming a series of these assaults until in the final scene his mind exerts its will over the system by saying “No” to a final attack. He withstands this final barrage and in that moment sees the source code, the internal logic. He is no longer governed by what drives the system but now has mastery over it. Neo restores the proper order, humanizing the machine.

It's a universal story. The things we create to serve us can become the enslaving monsters that rule and destroy us. The Education Machine has become that enslaving monster because we accept it's internal logic without question and we feed it what it wants. The Learning Matrix puts the monster back into its cage. It is a tool to serve us, not a master to be served.

The Tipping Point for Education

I believe we stand at a tipping point with education. The Gutenberg legacy is incapable of advancing the mission to produce twenty-first-century-ready students. The costs are unsustainable in light of what technology can accomplish. We continue to repackage reform and try it again while expecting different results. We are now starting to go backward. We have an increasing number of at-risk kids.

Candi Dearing, principal at Sarasota Middle School, shared a story of what occurred during her time at Celebration High School in Celebration, Florida. Celebration is a master-planned community originally built by the Disney Development Company. Imagine driving into a small community that looks like the movie set in The Truman Show. This small town of under 4,000 attracted affluent families with a median annual income of around $95,000.

The community invested several million dollars and two years investigating what a world-class education might look like. The team had traveled the world to see what was possible in creating the best learning experience possible. In partnership with Disney the school would have access to top chefs, scientists, and designers to teach and provide learning experiences that no other school could offer. The community, including Disney, was excited. But when the proposal was shared with the parents they reacted against it.

Why?

One stand-out comment from a parent went like this, “This is not how I got into Harvard and you are not going to try this experiment on my child!” When you consider the fact that Celebration is a recreation of the ideal Middle American suburb, then you realize that parents did not move to Celebration in order to be different. They moved there to relive and recreate a time and an experience from the past.

Parents often react to new ideas, such as project-based learning. Their first question might be, “Will these help my child get good test scores?” Parents feel great pressure to keep pace with their kids' education. It is comforting for them to see that school doesn't look all that different from the school they attended. It doesn't take much to push them outside their comfort zone.

We created the Learning Matrix to understand how much the world has changed. We also contrast that with how little the school experience has changed. Perhaps, by looking at some of these inflection points, we can let go of our attachment to the familiar and get to work reframing what learning looks like in a world that is driven by complexity, exponential change, and an increasingly interconnected world.

The Oral World

“The magic of oral culture lies in intimate connection. The dividing lines—between art and religion and science and literature—don't exist in the same way they do in our visually mediated rational world.”¹⁰ In oral culture, learning was experienced through dialogue, discovery, mentoring, and apprenticeship. Elders held a revered position as repositories of tradition, knowledge, and wisdom. People lived in a three-mile-an-hour world and it typically encompassed the distance they could travel in a day. Life and learning held a close link. Walter Ong wrote that speech (in oral culture) owns a unique quality of immediacy and intimacy. It naturally draws you closer. The tradition of mentoring and apprenticeship that oral culture formed defines the highly relational quality of learning. This kind of life-forming, life-affirming experience that some of us had through an extended relationship with a teacher, coach, or an influential adult was once commonplace. In this respect the message and messenger become unified.

Years ago, I drove past the Anatole Hotel in Dallas with my friend Don, who was a master brick mason. Although he had never seen, and knew nothing about, the Anatole, he identified the project's master mason by the way the bricks were laid. That opened a deeper conversation about exactly what it takes to become a master brick mason. Part of the training through Apprenticeship to Journeyman is to learn the technique of your master mason so completely that a master's eye could not see the difference between your work and the signature technique of the master mason. Once you reach the level of master mason, you build on the tradition, improve it, and over time, create your own signature technique. We more clearly see this in the traditions of art or classical music composers like the lineage of Beethoven, Cherny, and Liszt.

The Printed Word and Individual Learning

“The development of the printing press signaled the world's first step into mass communication, arguably the most profound dividing point in history. The general population stood on the same informational foundation as kings and popes.”¹¹ Print separated the message from the messenger. It shifted learning from its immersion in context and life to content and intellectual thought. Print locks ideas onto a page and freezes time. It offers the ability to reexamine, analyze, break apart, and reconstitute ideas. It captures the past and creates a springboard to build forward. It moves our time awareness away from rhythms and cycles and toward a linear mindset that sees time as progressive. Print standardizes thinking so we can “all sing from the same sheet of music.” It shifts the experience from an aural collective intimacy to visual privacy. It birthed the era of the individual, as set apart from his or her kin or tribe.

Walter Ong captured this distinctive shift: “the individual finds it possible to think through a situation more from within his own mind out of his own personal resources and in terms of an objectively analyzed situation, which confronts him. He becomes more original and individual, detribalized.”¹²

Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written in 1831. The story took place 400 years earlier, in the time of Gutenberg's invention. Hugo expressed not only how the Catholic clergy felt over print as the new medium toppling its empire, but also how leaders in a previous order felt when their domain is overtaken. “The book will destroy the Edifice. . . . The press will kill the church.” Print dramatically changed the world and quickly led to one of the most prolific periods of innovation in human history. The inquiring dialectic mind soon converts to the rational analytical mind. Hugo's epitaphs to the institutions of oral culture remind us that the same fate awaits every institutional era. As Hugo wrote in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “It was the cry of the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith, opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome.”

The Broadcast Word Brings Edutainment

I was born in 1955 and was part of the first generation that was raised immersed in broadcast. My first media language is broadcast, my second is print (the language of school), and my third language is digital media. “These kids, raised in the language of television but schooled in the language of print, labored each day in the restrictive world of school. Three o'clock brought relief from the rigors of an oppressive print regime. Television, on the other hand, demanded nothing but instead gave a continuous stream of pictures to entertain and open the world. School had their bodies, but television captured their hearts and minds.”¹³

The broadcast era does not mark a radical shift in the delivery of education. It does mark the time when kids began to mentally check out of school. I don't think it is education's fault altogether. Broadcast's power comes from two factors: centralized control of the means of production and a message that is crafted for the widest possible audience or the lowest common denominator.

Two shows provide a window into what edutainment might look like in a pure broadcast world. The first is Sesame Street, which debuted in 1969 and reached up to 7 million households. The second is Blues Clues, which launched in 1996 and after two years was seen in almost 5 million households. Sesame Street optimized broadcast's ability to entertain. Each show was a fragmented collage of short vignettes. Characters provided the thematic continuity for the show. The show's humor was often nuanced and adult. It also followed a variety show format. Sesame Street made it appealing to adults as well as children. However, it did not have a significant effect on learning until the show shifted away from the fragmented vignette format to a single theme approach in the mid-1990s.

Blues Clues, on the other hand, followed a radically different strategy and proved more effective as a broadcast vehicle for learning. The show had two characters, Blue, the dog, and Steve. It followed a single narrative. The dialogue was slow and demonstrative. But why was it more effective than Sesame Street?

The same episode was shown the entire week, five days in a row. Research found that this format for pre-K kids worked better. In the first viewing a child would catch the theme. Another viewing allowed the child to follow the story, a third showing begins to uncover clues and so forth until the child has absorbed and integrated the lesson.

Digital Connected Learning and the Power of Engagement

One great challenge for schools is that kids live in a media-rich world but go to class, for the most part, in an environment of Gutenberg-bound tools and experience. We could bridge this gap if we better understood the underlying ethos of digital media.

“Digital-connected learning” takes us back to the past and simulates the future. It is the first medium combining text, sound, image and data. It is inherently synthesizing. Digital media possess attributes of oral culture's relational and intimate discovery, print's highly rational and abstract power of analysis along with broadcast's light touch of stimulating streaming novelty. It packages these three experiences within a hyperlinked structure of serendipitous discovery and social interaction. Digital media is multisensory and multimodal. Oral culture produced a holistic and integrated mind. Digital media allows one to connect data and patterns in ways that simulate system's thinking and the development of archetypal patterns and language found in oral culture. The general (global) population can now read, listen or watch the best minds, talent, or moments either one-on-one or one-to-many. Consider, for a moment, the implications to anyone who understands the social impact and has access to an Internet connection.

[Kids] no longer grind out their lessons by rote memorization. They no longer sit passively in front of a television and say, “Huh?” when asked what they learned. Children are absorbed in an interactive-game environment, pursuing treasure hunts of knowledge over the Web.¹⁴

Digital media opens up the world through search. Search then leads to connecting. When connected communication becomes interconnected, it leads to dialogue and sharing and then to cooperation. Cooperation leads to creating together; that grows into collaboration. Collaboration leads to community. Does the experience in most of our classrooms facilitate this progression of learning?

Social-Mobile and Personalized Learning

When I first produced this matrix in 2004, social-mobile learning did not exist. However, the same logic applies. What is inherently different with social-mobile learning is the increasing capability to personalize your experience and become a traceable node within a global network (the quantified self). I share examples in the chapter “What Every Adult Needs to Know About the Future.”

But, let me share one story that illustrates what happens when our familiarity with the past causes us to miss the demands of the present.

While sitting at an outdoor table at a street café, I overheard four mothers at a nearby table discuss their frustration over the difficulty of getting their kids to put away their smartphones and do their homework. When I told them I was writing a book about education, they allowed me into their conversation. They explained that their kids would rather text, listen to music, and browse their phones than read and memorize their homework. They all agreed that taking away the smartphones and restricting use to the weekends was the answer. They asked my opinion.

I asked the mothers how much they used their smartphones. Two women were checking messages on their smartphones while they were talking to one another. I asked, “What if your children's phones were integrated into their learning as one of the key tools? What if social interaction was designed into the lesson as a way of collaborating and testing one another?”

My questions represented a bridge too far. Unfortunately it is a bridge too far for most schools, too. I'm not claiming that smartphones are the answer or that there are not some deep and serious issues regarding their addictive use. My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Stavoe, taught us how to hold a pencil, how to form our letters, and how to write sentences. We also worked to recognize and sound out words and then form them into sentences. These were our primary tools for learning. I heard one educator say that from first grade until third grade we learn to read and then going forward we read to learn. I have yet to see a teacher or a classroom consider a smartphone as a tool for learning and meticulously teach students how to use this tool to that end. Yet it is the most ubiquitous device that students and their teachers live with.

The five time frames in the following matrix offer insight into how and why learning has shifted and will continue to shift. I hope it also makes a clear case that education needs to break loose of its Gutenberg worldview if it hopes to re-engage kids and create future-ready students. The Learning Matrix expands on this exploration in a table format to better draw out the contrasts of each period. It is an abbreviated version with short descriptions as an overview. If you're interested in the long-form table you can download it by going to www.humanizethemachine.school. Go to the Resources section and click on The Learning Matrix (the password is MATRIX).