Should the web be allowed in class?

I was reading about how Ottawa profs fight to put an end to distracted learning:

The University of Ottawa is considering a proposal which would give its professors the power to ban laptops and other electronic devices in the classroom. 

Professors say everything from texting to time on Facebook is allowing their students to do everything but learn. 

"They are distracted and we are competing with that for their attention," says University of Ottawa professor Marcel Turcotte who voted in favour of the policy. 

"You see one student who is really not listening, would be watching the video and then it's kind of contagious," says Turcotte. 

But many students say they learn better with a laptop and the vice president of the university's student federation says it's an important tool. 

"If you're going to be misbehaving during class, eventually you're going to be asked to leave and I can't see why they can't do that for laptops," says Liz Kessler of the University of Ottawa Students Federation. 

Turcotte says he wants to do an experiment with his students, not ban the electronics outright. He wants to challenge students to leave the electronics outside the lecture hall and take a quiz, Turcotte is confident he would see higher test scores. 

Turcotte says the cost of "disctracted learning" is hefty when considering some students are losing out on a pricey education. 

The University of Ottawa will vote on giving the powers to professors in May.

One of the best responses I've seen to the question "Should the web be allowed in class?" came from Scott Berkun:

First, there is a strong academic argument that lectures are an inappropriate teaching method much of the time – it’s just that it’s the only method many professors know or are willing to try. Bligh’s What’s The Use of Lectures? clearly documents the research supporting this claim, and it’s bizarre so few people have ever heard of this book. It is a must-read for any TA or Professor or Academic department head, as it swiftly summarizes the limitations of lecturing and explores the alternatives, all based on well documented studies and research. It’s a well written but academic summation of lectures and their alternatives. 

Second, most people who lecture are awful – the bar is low – and in the case of professors, they are lecturing to people who are captives. The feedback loop in most universities is weak regarding presentation skills, and sometimes regarding teaching skills altogether. Many professors in many universities have never been trained to teach, yet have an arrogance about how good they are, and faith in untested theories about how it is supposed to be done. Theories based heavily on their own experiences as students. People who lecture professionally are nowhere near as good at lecturing as they think they are, and never put themselves in a situation where it’s possible to discover that gap. 

Third, before anyone makes claims about “this generation” the question remains: among the teachers in any school, in any era, some will do a better job of keeping students attention than others – how do these teachers do it? And can they teach those skills / attitudes / behaviors to the other teachers? Even if students have brain implants straight into the Matrix, some teachers will do better than others and that’s the framework any teacher should be starting from. 

Fundamentally this problem is ageless. The web is not going away in the same way, despite teachers wishes, daydreamable windows, chewing gum, and passing notes, persisted. It has always been very hard to keep the attention of any group of people, at any age, at any time. And the people who have tended to be successful in overcoming these challenges are the ones who either 1) develop true teaching and persuasive skills, or 2) partner with their students in finding a mutually beneficial solution, rather than stumbling backwards into inflicting a fantasy of obedience on them.

Whether we like it or not, technology is acting as a disruptive force on the status quo of education. We can pout about it and try and ban technology as an act of "distraction" or we can wake up and embrace it. 

Throwing a temper tantrum and banning technology might be the best way to ensure schools remain irrelevant for most children.

The lizard brain, ninjas and pedagogy

Change is never easy.

One of the scariest things that comes with change is rationalizing the past. Everyone has an ego, and quite often we have to reason with our ego, so we don't crumble.

Here's what I mean.

If you've done something like teach or parent in a certain way for a very long time, it may be a very difficult thing to admit that perhaps you've been doing things wrong - or at least not as good as you thought you were. For every year of experience, your ego will take this more and more personally.

Inevitably, many of us then become defensive. Like a wounded animal whose been cornered by a fierce predator, we bunker down and resolve ourselves to a kind of pre-historic, fight or flight mentality.

Some like Seth Godin call this the lizard brain while others still like Steven Pressfield call it the resistance.

Godin explains:

The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise... The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive...the lizard hates change and achievement and risk...The amygdala isn't going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it.

When we are challenged by others to change something we do or believe in, the lizard brain barks. And if that something is near and dear to us, like our parenting practices or teaching pedagogy - the resistance can be fierce.

Don't get me wrong, the lizard brain brain's fight or flight mentality can sometimes be a very good thing. In his book Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Berkun writes:

Even if you could completely shut off these fear-response systems.. it would be a bad idea for two reasons. First, having the old parts of our brains in control of our fear responses is a good thing. If a legion of escaped half-lion, half-ninja warriors were to fall through the ceiling and surround you - with the sole mission of converting your fine flesh into thin sandwich-ready slices - do you want the burden of consciously deciding how fast to increase your heart, or which muscles to fire first to get your legs moving so you can run away? Your conscious mind cannot work fast enough to do these things in the small amount of time you'd have to survive. It's good that fear responses are controlled by the subconscious parts of your minds, since those are the only parts with fast enough wires to do anything useful when real danger happens.

The lizard brain serves a purpose when we are in big-time trouble; however, for the most part, our lives are pretty darn safe, and quite often, the lizard brain ends up holding us back.

Rather than seeing change as an indictment on what you've done in the past, see change as an opportunity to do today what others won't, so tomorrow you can accomplish what others can't.

As a parent or teacher, my ego takes pride in the fact that I am always doing my best with the information I have today. If I gain some kind of new information that rattles my cage, and throws my parenting or pedagogy for a loop, then I have to ask myself, Am I ignoring this information at my own peril? at my daughter's peril? at my students' peril?

Look, not all change is good. Change for the sake of change is no better than tradition for the sake of tradition. Change may seem scary. But blindly following the status quo that has no relationship with reality may be even scarier.

Always be mindful of change and tradition. And if the lizard brain barks, be conscious of it - unless there are ninjas threatening your very existence, it's presence needs to be tamed.

The Folly of Chasing perfect

I want to make the case that perfect is not only unattainable, but it is not even a desirable outcome because it is ultimately a sabateur of learning.

As a classroom teacher, I can attest to the debilitating effects of success. Someone who has a healthy and resilient attitude towards failure can learn a lot from their mistakes, while sometimes, ironically, it is our successes that can be paralyzing. I say paralyzing because if the point of school or work is to show how good you are, and you achieve that success, why would you risk making changes to your winning recipe?

The truth is successful people know that yesterday's solutions rarely solve tomorrow's problems; because of this, successful people are always creating and recreating themeselves. But does this creating and recreating mean that these successful people are striving for perfection?

Perfection is a dangerous thing to pursue. There is a big difference between focusing on improvement and growth rather than focusing on showing off or not looking dumb.

In Linchpin, Seth Godin examines how the pursuit of perfect is too often bastardized into mistake avoidance:

How many of your coworkers spend all day in search of perfect? 

Or, more accurately, spend all day trying to avoid making a mistake? 

These are very different things. Defect-free is what people are often in search of. Meeting spec. Blameless.

We've been trained since first grade to avoid mistakes. The goal of any test, after all, is to get 100 percent. No mistakes. Get nothing wrong and you get an A, right?

 Read someone's resume, and discover twenty years of extraordinary exploites and one typo. Which are you going to mention first?

We hire for perfect, we manage for perfect, we measure for perfect, and we reward for perfect.

So why are we surprised  that people spend their precious minutes of self-directed, focused work time trying to achieve perfect?

The problem is simple: Art is never defect-free. Things that are remarkable never meet spec, because that would make them standardized, not worth talking about.

Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker offers his thoughts on avoiding perfection when he practices his public speaking skills:

And when I say I practice, I mean I stand up at my desk, imagine an audience around me, and present exactly as if it were the real thing. If I plan to do something in the presentation, I practice it. But I don't practice to make perfect, and I don't memorize. If I did either, I'd sound like a robot, or worse, like a person trying very hard to say things in an exact, specific, and entirely unnatural style, which people can spot a mile away. My intent is simply to know my material so well that I'm very comfortable with it. Confidence, not perfection, is the goal.

Even as a professional speaker, Berkun can rationalize how perfection is not only something unworthy of striving for, but it isn't even desirable. Godin might say Berkun's artfulness could be found in his ability to inspire wisdom by weaving a witty tale . And yet, there would be something wholly and entirely inaccurate with saying Burken's speaking skills are 'perfect'.

Let me be clear, I'm not calling him perfect or imperfect - I don't mean to judge at all - rather, I am saying the term perfect is a fraudulant fabrication that serves no purpose when describing someone's knowledge, skills or attitudes.

Focusing on perfection cheapens learning and forces us to think in linear terms. As if there were two endpoints - the start and the end - and if we just do our homework, and study for the test, we will one day cross the learning finish line. Thinking in this way takes educational phrases such as "life-long learning" and turns them into punch lines.

If we really believe in "life-long learning" then we have to think of learning as an asymptote rather than something linear. We have to model learning as a journey rather than a destination; however, it's hard to convince kids to focus on their learning rather than their achievement as long as teachers act like giant grade spewing Pez dispensers.

In his book The School Our Children Deserve and article The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement, Alfie Kohn offers this indictment of overemphasizing achievement and 'perfection':

No one succeeds all the time, and no one can learn very effectively without making mistakes and bumping up against his or her limits. It’s important, therefore, to encourage a healthy and resilient attitude toward failure. As a rule, that is exactly what students tend to have if their main goal is to learn: When they do something incorrectly, they see the result as useful information. They figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.


Not so for the kids who believe (often because they have been explicitly told) that the point is to succeed--or even to do better than everyone else. They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it. Even a momentary stumble can seem to cancel out all their past successes. When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.

Consider the student who becomes frantic when he gets a 92 instead of his usual 100. We usually see this as a problem with the individual and conclude that such students are just too hard on themselves. But the "what I’m doing" versus "how well I’m doing" distinction can give us a new lens through which to see what is going on here. It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.

The important point isn’t what level of performance qualifies as failure (a 92 versus a 40, say). It’s the perceived pressure not to fail, which can have a particularly harmful impact on high-achieving and high-ability students. Thus, to reassure such a student that "a 92 is still very good" or that we’re sure he’ll "do better next time" doesn’t just miss the point; it makes things worse by underscoring yet again that the point of school isn’t to explore ideas, it’s to triumph.

The day's of selling perfection through grading as education's snake-oil has run its course. We have to stop selling learning as this thing we can measure on a scale from zero to one-hundred. It's not a letter or a check mark. It can't be bar-graphed or averaged; rather it might be said that proficiency is sitting on top of a mountain while expertise is chasing the horizon.

Because the consequences of overemphasizing achievement and pursuing perfection are too costly to endure, we have to see perfection for what it really is - a fraudulant fabrication that serves no purpose in encouraging students to focus on their learning.