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The Digital Future Is Already Here
What if we lived in a world where the Jewish people were connected by only one degree of separation? If Netanyahu could follow us on Twitter, and Matisyahu be our friend on Facebook? If our favorite teacher could learn with us live on Skype from Israel, and then we could share what we’ve learned with friends, family and strangers simultaneously through chat?
It may sound like a society of the future, but this is the world our students know and live in –a world they may already take for granted.
We don’t have to guess how strong the influence of the digital world is on us; we can see the statistics. To paint the picture: There are approximately one trillion unique URL websites in Google’s index and two billion searches on Google daily. There are 70 million videos on YouTube, with one video alone tallying more than 112 million views. More than three billion tweets and counting are currently on Twitter and you can watch the numbers grow by the second here. And the most popular social network, Facebook, gets 100 million visitors per day.1
Whether or not one believes that this explosion of communication (and the technology that makes it possible) is the best thing that has ever happened or the worst, what we do know is that the digital era is here to stay; how we will use these new capabilities to achieve our communal goals is the question we will have to answer.
Educators are among those embracing this new world. Almost daily, we read examples of how these technologies are making their way into and beyond the classroom. Twitter and blogs can engage students in out-of-classroom conversations and have sparked greater student interest in and engagement with the subject matter at hand. One teacher found a creative way to teach climate change through a videoconference with his students while he was away in Antarctica.2 A Jewish educator had his students create Facebook profiles of biblical figures to help them better understand who these individuals were as “real” people and their relationships with one another.
One hallmark of this new era is the ability for anyone to be a producer of new content, not only a consumer, thus these technologies transform students from recipients of knowledge to creators of it. The organization ThinkQuest, for example, conducts national competitions in which students of all ages can create websites dealing with a particular educational theme that they have selected. The ability to develop multimedia projects is fast becoming a normative skill for students, arguably more necessary even than a second language. Not only is it common for second graders to engage in interactive educational gaming; a middle school student may be the one who designed the game!
Although educators may have some catching up to do with their fifth graders in how to use technology, for those teachers who are prepared to do so, the list of potential tools and resources is lengthening rapidly. As we argue at greater length below, technology need not push teachers aside or replace them – instead, when used smartly and creatively, it enables teachers to be more relevant than ever. Indeed, for students growing up in the digital world of the 21st century, teaching without technology is likely to be as ineffectual and discomforting as teaching without printed text would have been in the 20th century.
In the face of this reality, it is not surprising that we are beginning to see technology being put to work to prepare educators for the world they are entering and the students they are teaching. A new program called SimSchool is a simulated classroom where the gamer (real-life teacher) has to engage the virtual students. The game was developed because fewer than half of all new teachers remain in the field after three years. “It’s like life,” said a researcher on the project, which aims to prepare the teacher by incorporating real-life situations virtually.3
The true import of these examples of the use of technology in education today is not that they are novel or especially creative. It is that they represent only the most visible edge of a wave that has already washed over our lives and transformed them irrevocably. The tools described above are part of a larger change in the ways that we do many things in our lives, all of us, whether we are aware of this or not. Almost without thinking, when we want to know something, whether a phone number or the answer to a Jewish question, we are more likely to turn to Google than to the Yellow Pages or the local rabbi.4
Learning is increasingly a “real time, on demand” activity today, and that’s the way that many of us like it. We want to understand better those things that are relevant and interesting to us, not be told why something we have never encountered or experienced should be relevant or interesting. Technology has the ability to make more of the world tangible and present to us, more likely to pique our desire to know more and understand better. And, technology can also satisfy that desire, and do so with a speed and abundance that we now assume, and no longer marvel at.
Technology: Sustaining and Disruptive Innovation
In his classic work, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard professor Clayton Christensen distinguishes between two types of innovation: sustaining and disruptive.5 Sustaining innovations are those that incrementally improve an existing product or service, thereby reinforcing its position in the marketplace. Sustaining innovations produce value by enhancing performance and enabling us to do important tasks increasingly better. Disruptive innovations, in contrast, change the nature of the game altogether. They enable us to do new things, or to do familiar things in radically new ways. Disruptive innovations often meet needs that were previously unrecognized or serve populations never before seen as relevant. When disruptive innovations are successful, they frequently displace or marginalize older approaches and technologies (think word processing replacing typewriters, or digital cameras replacing film).
New technologies are often at the heart of innovations, both sustaining and disruptive. The innovation is not the technology itself; it is how the technology is put to use to solve a particular problem or achieve a specific purpose. Part of the challenge in maximizing the impact of any new technology is to recognize and take advantage of both its sustaining and its disruptive potential – to employ that technology both to do what we have already been doing better and to do new things or involve new people in ways that were heretofore not possible.
For education, new communications technologies carry both a sustaining and a disruptive potential. On the one hand, we can use these technologies to enhance many of the things we have always done. Take the now ubiquitous Powerpoint slideshow that accompanies so many oral presentations. Adding visual to aural cues unquestionably helps many learners absorb the material more effectively. There is little question that a Powerpoint, with its potential for presenting many different types of visual material quickly and efficiently, is a vast improvement over blackboards, overhead projections, and other earlier technologies for providing visual accompaniment to presentations.
Many other innovative uses of technology can enhance, reinforce, and extend conventional educational practice, some in far more imaginative ways than a Powerpoint. Much of the effort we see in Jewish education today to incorporate new technologies focuses on these “sustaining” possibilities. Computers, video, the internet, handheld communications devices, and all the ways in which these are used today, from email to podcasting, enable educators to design more engaging curricula, connect with students (and their families) more easily, draw on a wider range of resources, and in general create more interesting, vivid, varied, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for their students.
Pursuing these technology-powered sustaining innovations is not only desirable; it is essential if Jewish education is to thrive in the 21st century. The rule in the marketplace is “innovate, or die.” The marketplace in which Jewish education competes demands no less. The Jewish community has vastly under-invested in what is needed to effectively incorporate new technologies into Jewish educational practice – in the creative work that turns technologies into usable educational products (software, websites, curricula, videos, etc.) and in the training that enables educators to take advantage of these techniques and resources.
This, however, is only half the story. As much as Jewish education needs a steady flow of sustaining innovations that make use of today’s (and tomorrow’s) technologies, it also needs to come to grips with the disruptive force that these new technologies have set loose. Although its effects are manifold, the essence of the disruption wrought by these technologies lies in a single fact: learners can exercise control over their own learning as never before in human history. Empowered by contemporary technologies, learners have unprecedented access to knowledge and almost unfettered ability to communicate with whomever they want, whenever they want, wherever they are, to learn or share whatever they wish. “Education” is no longer controlled by authorities who decide what content can be known and by whom, how, and when it will be transmitted. Learning is democratized, radically.
The innovations that embody this disruptive reality continue to flow into and transform education at an accelerating pace. Search engines, social networks, self-made media, all serve to call into question some of the cardinal “givens” of education, the basic assumptions (such as: teachers have knowledge which they must transmit to students) that have undergirded educational practice. Educational practice, including Jewish educational practice, will have to adjust to these innovations and, more importantly, to the new reality they help to define, or these disruptive innovations will almost surely render traditional education obsolete. Thus, we must not only invest in new products and training, but in redesigning our models, structures and systems for the delivery of Jewish education to embrace the new modes of organizing the learning process that technology makes possible and that today's young people and young families seek and expect.
As the very term implies, “disruption” is rarely perceived as a welcome change. Like Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” disruptive innovation implies loss as well as gain. The spread of disruptive innovations into education means that we can no longer do many things as we have been accustomed to doing them – but also that we can do other things that we have never been able to do before! We may regret the losses (and, as we shall see, in some instances we may need to take mitigating action to diminish their consequences), but when the world has changed, it has changed, and no amount of nostalgia or resistance is likely to reverse time’s arrow. Far better, then, that we embrace the innovation and do all that we can to seize its creative potential.
This is the situation that Jewish education finds itself in today. The transformative effects of new communications technologies are now evident. The world our students know is transparent, and alive. We have all become walking storytellers with the ability to put ourselves, including our Jewish knowledge and experience, into the matrix of burgeoning connection and communication that defines our reality.
The question for Jewish education and Jewish educators is how we enter and operate in this world. How do we respond to the new capabilities, mindsets, and expectations that digital learners bring with them to their encounter with Jewish settings and sources? How do we make use of the technological tools available to us as educators to make these encounters more meaningful and impactful? How do we put in place new practices that take full advantage of the potential inherent in these technologies -- potential both to enhance what we have heretofore done and potential to do Jewish education differently, even radically differently.
We must look, then, in greater depth at just how new technologies have “changed the game.” How have they altered the playing field and the players? What new possibilities do they uncover, both to improve and to transform Jewish education? What do they demand we leave behind, and what dilemmas and worries do they present us with?
Next: Transforming Learning and Teaching
1 Reference to these statistics are found at http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/. Numbers are approximate and have likely become larger than smaller since the publication of the stats.
2 Articles referenced:
1) Students’ summer reading goes online in real time http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/jun/15/students-summer-reading-reports-go-online-in/
2) Tweeting your way to better grades http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2009/06/15/tweeting-your-way-to-better-grades.html
3) Harlem teacher conducts class on global warming from Antarctica http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,444987,00.html
3 News article on SimSchool found here: http://www.star-telegram.com/northeast/story/1470158.html
4 Even just a few years ago, this might not have been true. But with the ubiquity of cell phones and PDAs with internet access, there is little reason to doubt that online querying will rapidly become the unconscious norm for nearly every question, if it is not already.
5 Christensen has himself recently applied these concepts to education and the role of technology in its transformation in a book called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way The World Learns, written with Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn. Their book focuses heavily on how technology makes possible the individualization of learning and why this is critical to successful public school reform in the United States.
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