3.1 - Teaching Like It’s 1992

Hi, welcome. Here we are for Week 3 of "The History and Future of Higher Education." And this week's lesson is called, "Teaching Like It's 1992." We can't use the "Black or White" video by Michael Jackson, because of copyright reasons. So we're trying to reenact it today. I'm trying to get you back into the mindset of 1992, a full year before the internet went public. That's what we'll be talking about today.

My students coming to Duke University right now were probably born in about 1995, 1996. So they were actually born after April 22nd, 1993: the faithful day when the Internet went public and was suddenly and commercially available. So today I want to talk about the so much of what we do in our lives, so much of the way we learn informally has changed since then, but higher education isn't. And once again, the lesson of history in this course is that, we are interested in the way that history helps us understand how we make the present in order that we can change the future; and make sure education is responsive to the world that we live in; and that we and our children are going to be inheriting.

So, 1992. You've already seen my reprise of the "Black or White" video by Michael Jackson. It was one of the top ten songs of 1992 in the United States. Some other groups from that time were Boyz II Men-- I think, probably most of the people in Boyz II Men are no longer a boy group, but middle-aged men-- TLC, Kriss Kross, Sir Mix-a-Lot; most of those groups no longer exist. At the same time, it was fun to go back and look at the Top 10 list for popular music in 1992, because also Madonna, Red Hot Chili Peppers. That's what Marx called "uneven development". Some things change in history; some things stay the same. Some things have incremental change; some things have dramatic change. You may remember that the child actor-- who was only five or six at the time-- Macaulay Culkin, was in the "Black or White" video. He's now 32 years old. Michael Jackson, of course, is no longer alive, and yet some things are still very much the same. This is important, because the view of history in this class is not that history is linear progress, but that, in fact, things constantly are changing, and one change makes for another change. What I've finally said, though, is that many of our institutions of education still look pretty much like 1992. We haven't taken in the key fact that life has changed, and informal learning has changed.

You remember back to the lessons about the precursors of contemporary education, you remember we talked about Immanuel Kant. And Kant's idea was that we don't see the world, we actually see the world through the filter of our own perceptions-- and I would add sociology-- the class we were born in; and the country we were born in; the assumptions we were born in; the family we were born in; and all the values we bring to the world we live in. That's important, because education is one of those things that helps to focus and filter the world we live in. If we're still teaching in a world that exists as if the internet still doesn't exist, that means we're filtering the world through a previous world that really doesn't exist anymore.

That's what we'll be talking about this week. We'll be looking at educational policy of the late 20th century and how it persists into the present. We'll be looking at the changing world of the internet, and social media, and all the different ways that we learn today. We'll be looking at such things as connected learning, and the ways that learning now isn't just about what I master, but the way what I master can connect to what you are learning. We will be looking at what we call real-time, anytime, anyplace learning; such as the way you're taking this MOOC. I have no idea who you are out there-- although I hope to learn more and more about you in our forums. But you can tune into this class any time you want: some of you will be doing it late at night, some in the morning, some of you will be tuning in at work, some of you may actually, we have lots of evidence of this, be tuning in during your actual class times. In fact, a major, very famous university this year, trying to make a more efficient scheduling system, and got this hue and cry from its students, because the students were double dipping. They wanted to take their big lecture classes at the same time they took engaged seminars, literally at the same time period. And they didn't want an efficient system that prevented overlaps, because they were basically blowing off their lecture classes and taking seminars in the same time slot. Efficiency for them was double-booking. They didn't want that prevented by their school's new information system.

That's the world we live in: it's a multitasking, double-dipping world, where we do lots of things together. If we don't know something, my students always say, "Google it." And that's the world we live in, where we're constantly learning how to do things. I like to joke that, in 1992 if I hurt my elbow, I would go to my doctor and find out why my elbow was hurting so much. Now I go to ihurtmyelbow.com, and find out what everybody else who's hurt themselves says about the best way to treat it; what I might do. And, if I'm going to go to my doctor, I now go armed with lots of information. In fact, last year, the AMA did a study and found out that 75 percent of American doctors say that they now ask their patients what they've learned online before they begin their treatment. And in most cases, they find out that what they learned online is helpful to their own prescription and advice that they give their patients.

That's fascinating, right? We now live in a world where expertise is not the only thing that matters. Sometimes the good advice of strangers supplied on the internet is what can save the day for us. And yet we still learn in educational system that's hierarchical, that's top down and that emphasizes individual learning from an individual instructor. That's fascinating. The studies we've done so far, even at these MOOCs, is that students are learning as much from the forums as they're learning from these online program. And I want that; we really, really hope that you will learn from each other, as well as from what you're learning in this class. This is not just a history class; it's an idea and an activist class. We're hoping you'll take the ideas that we're throwing out in this class and use them and talk about them with other people. Talk about them with your kids, talk about them with your parents if you are a kid. And think about this new way that we're learning together, online as opposed to formal education.

I learned how to moonwalk from a wonderful "How to Moonwalk" video. There's probably hundreds of "How to Moonwalk" videos, but there's one brilliant one that's had over 9 million hits. It's by a DJ from Montreal named Andre Lumiere-- I'm assuming that's a pseudonym but I don't know-- but what I love about the his video of the moonwalk is he begins by telling us what we think is the right way to do the moonwalk. And he actually demonstrates how we think the moonwalk works. Before you've ever done it, he says, "You think you do it like this," and he does this clunky kind of movement, and then he says, "That's completely wrong. Don't do that. Do this." And then he teaches you how to do the moonwalk correctly. And actually it's very easy to learn it; I learned it in a few weeks. This belongs to our hash tag life on learning, because what Andre Lumiere does in this "How to Moonwalk Video" is he takes us back to our preconceptions, our ideas, of what we think works. He demonstrates that, and we see how ludicrous it is. And then he says, "That's completely wrong. Don't do that. Try this." And then he walks us through the method that actually does make us create the illusion of walking forwards backwards, and moon walking.

That's a wonderful metaphor for the lesson of lifelong unlearning we're doing in this class: that we've inherited institutions that make us think this is the way we're supposed to learn; that make us think this is the way we're supposed to test; that make us think this is the way we're supposed to think that we have standards, by how well we do on standardized formal multiple choice testing-- which, as we learned in the last lesson, was developed in 1914 and then adopted by the scholastic aptitude tests in 1926. All of that apparatus makes us think we should learn a certain way. Let me quote Andre Lumiere, "That's how we think we do it. It's completely wrong. Don't do that." Let's learn together for the world we live in now; not for the industrial age; not for the last information age; to develop the metrics, the standards, the mechanisms, the apparatus of learning that we've inherited. We can do this. We can do this. We can all learn to moonwalk. Stay tuned.