Part of Federman’s talk gives a very brief history of media, including how the first mass media was media for Catholic Mass.  Media for Mass led to media for the masses.  He goes from their to Gutenberg’s press through a series of steps to bring us to the Internet.

A key point was the evolution of the movement of people and ideas.  Reframing his ideas got me thinking that the next societal revolution may be moving interactive facsimiles of ourselves around the world.  If that’s right, the consequences for how we live our lives and how we learn are profound.

And I think it needs to be right.

I’ve pondered for a long time how folks who think of themselves as the most scientifically literate in the world justify their typically huge ecological footprints.  An experience at the year’s Geological Society of America annual conference highlighted the issue for me.  It was in Houston in October.  The temperatures were in the high 80s.  Jim Hansen, the eminent climate researcher, was a keynote speaker.  The auditorium was filled with scientists who had flown from all over the world to participate in this meeting.  The auditorium was also probably about 65 degrees F.

Hansen’s legacy can probably justifiy his world travel.  That is, his work helps us understand better what to do because it is both well done and widely known.  For most of the other thousands of people at this meeting (myself definitely included), I have to wonder about the balance of costs and benefits.  I like to think my work is about helping to build understanding of the social and natural world so that we can live purposeful, useful lives that make the world a better place.

Fundamental to that, I strongly believe, is using less stuff and especially burning less stuff.  If we’re routinely hopping on jets that burn scores of tons of fuel to get us to our professional meetings to work in hotels and conference centers that are absurdly oppositional to the climate of their region, are we offsetting that by giving and going to presentations and chatting with our colleagues in the bar?

So, how does that relate to the title of this post?  Well, conferences really are often great places for professional development.  You get to talk with the people in the world who are experts in your field and that likely makes you better in your field.  But I think the cost is too high.  It’s not sustainable.

As technologies like Second Life, iChat, and Skype mature, we become able to interact with our colleagues at a distance.  With Skype, iChat and and other sorts of conferencing software you can, right now, host conference sessions and do them very well.  The most valued things that go on at conferences is often the hallway and cocktail lounge one on one and small group interactions.  Second Life can simulate that reasonably well and gets better at it all the time.

If we think about how the economy has evolved, the winners have typically been those who can move things that people care about.  Moving agriculture products to market; moving materials to and from manufacturing facilities; moving people to wherever it is they wish to go and moving  ideas about has driven much productivity in our history.  We moved from moving people and things as key in the last century to moving information in the new millenium.

Now we’re on the cusp of being able to move representatives of ourselves to anywhere in the world (with highspeed Internet access) and to control the actions of those representatives as they interact with people and their facsimiles.  Now, that’s not energy neutral.  Server farms are huge energy consumers, but sending those virtual representatives around the world surely takes far, far less energy than moving the real people around.

So, buy some stock in Second Life… and think about what it means for how people learn and teach in a time when our students have always had Google and IM at their disposal.

I’m now reflecting on it a little over a year after The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back.

Our affair started with a little innocent fooling around while I was in college.  Take an education class or two, teach a lesson here and there.  Then it intensified with student teaching.  As a physics teacher I got to play with toys in front of an audience!  And the audience, at least some of it, really seemed to like it!  And some times I got that special rush that comes with seeing the light bulb come on.

That feeling, the feeling of kids “getting it,” is what I imagine a hit of heroin might be like.  The shiver that ran down my spine; that look of appreciation and understanding; and especially when a kid could do something worthwhile that he or she couldn’t do before.

It turns out I was being deceived and deceiving myself at almost every turn.  In my last few years as a professor, I routinely had course evaluations telling me that mine was the best class they’d ever taken.  But I also routinely had students weeping in my office, unfairly dealing with my love’s capricious heart; unfairly dealing with the reality that, on its face, teaching is simply a bad idea; and unfairly dealing with the fickleness of who evaluates you.

It seems that at the ends of the continuum, the system works pretty well.  In the early grades, I learned to read and write and add and subtract.   In graduate school, I learned to analyze and craft an argument (and, I think, to read and write much better).  In between the ends I learned a great deal, but most of that learning came by doing and you don’t really do things that matter in classroom settings.

You mostly sit still.

Thus, most of us leave formal schooling knowing how to sit still, and to read and write and there isn’t much else that most of us know.  We’ve all been taught about geometry, evolution and the Civil War.  We’ve been taught many of these things many, many times.  But if you scratch through the surface understandings, you won’t find much underneath.  In spite of being taught the so-called scientific method over and over and over again, few adults think scientifically.  In spite of being taught over and over again about diet and exercise most of us are fat.

I’d learned in graduate school to look critically at the system and at the individuals within it.  For most of my twenty years in teaching, I’d not only been passionate about teaching, but also about the study of teaching and learning.  That study led me to understand that global warming had led glacial change to exceed academic change and, therefore, it was time for me to change direction.

I’d worked for most of my twenty years in the profession trying to make schools better.   Joining the faculty at a new charter school, I wished to make better schools.  I had an epiphany there that led me to want to make something better than schools.  And that epiphany ended my twenty-year romance with teaching.

And left me feeling alone in my new paradigm.

Standing there, in a room with 25 teenagers, trying to get them to think about why convection matters,*  it hit me that teaching is a fundamentally bad idea.  I don’t mean (just) a bad idea for me.  I mean a bad idea.

Put aside for a moment what you know about schools and focus on how you came to understand the things you understand most deeply and remember too what you know about kids.  Now, imagine someone suggesting the following:

Hey!  I’ve got a great idea!  Why don’t we put 25 teenagers in room together for an hour and have them listen to a single adult tell them about the Magna Carta!  And then, have them move down the hall and listen to someone else tell them about parabolas!  And then how heating causes expansion!  Isn’t that a great idea!  We could have them do something like this hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, year after year!  We could put 2000 fifteen to eighteen year-olds in a building!

Clearly, that’s just not a good idea.  I think I realized that when I was a teenager, but had managed to suppress that realization until I was faced with the realities of school in a new way.  I’m convinced that we’ll look back in another 20 or 30 years and be shocked that we did this to damn near everybody, much as we look back now on the horrors of segregation in America 30 and more years ago.

So, the affair is over and I’m trying to figure out how to move on.  I still have the things I learned from years of studying the system.  The creative destruction of my conceptual framework is both creative and destructive.  I’m saddened by my loss, but hopeful about the future.

I raise my question about what to do next in a way clearly derived from the way the system has made me think – an SAT analogy question:

Typewriters are to computers as schools are to: ________________.

I have ideas about how to complete the analogy, but I can’t do it alone.  I need partners in my paradigm.  Who will join me?

*Yes, convection really matters.