Moving the Needle

I’m teaching Educational Technology this semester (joint undergraduate and graduate section). This last week, we read two chapters from Noss and Hoyle’s 1996 Windows on mathematical meanings: Learning cultures and computers which describe what happened to Logo: From Mindstorms, to the backlash against “curriculum-free” education, to the Pea and Kurland papers. I hadn’t realized until I re-read those chapters and visited the LCSI website just how negative the term “Logo” had become. LCSI, the company Seymour Papert co-founded to create Logo implementations, is now a “global leader in constructivist educational technology” and sells “Microworlds.”  The word “Logo” only appears in the footer of the web page, to explain the “L” in “LCSI.”

Since the session topic was the challenge of educational reform, I also told the story of Media Computation and my recent blog post about teachers unadopting (or maybe “differently adapting”?) aspects of Media Computation. After class, one of the students approached me to ask, “If educational reform is so hard to achieve, why do you do it?” It was a great question that took me a couple days to answer, by realizing that there’s a faulty base assumption behind the question.

Logo is not a failure. It’s an enormous success.  There isn’t an educational technology project in the world that hasn’t been influenced in some way by Seymour and Logo. However Noss and Hoyle are completely correct — Seymour’s vision has not been realized.

There are two ways to think about the purpose of educational research. The first is all-or-nothing — you put together a complete intervention, think through as many aspects of the educational ecosystem that you can, and aim for other classrooms to act just as you envision.  If you’re building a reform intervention, you have to aim for this. Teachers have hard jobs, and classrooms are complicated places. Few would try Media Computation if we didn’t have software and textbooks and syllabi and Powerpoint slides.  The second purpose is moving-the-needle, and that’s a much more important goal.

Education is a worthy domain of research and investigation. The goal of educational researchers is to speak to the community, to add ideas to the conversation, and to change how the community thinks about a problem. To change the conversation, to change practice, and to influence people’s thinking about an educational problem — that’s moving-the-needle.  We publish to try to convince people about the value of our all-or-nothing vision, but our success is about moving-the-needle.

It’s damn hard to hear about teachers I respect giving up on some of the ideas that I hold dear, that I am convinced are better practice and for which we have empirical support. As a member of the research community, I will continue to argue for some of those ideas. (To the faculty who are giving up on having students saving their picture artifacts, in favor of focusing on the code: Think again about what the words “media” and “communication” mean!)  On the other hand, I take pride in evidence that our work is moving the needle.

This week, I spent some time visiting the MediaScheme website at Grinnell. Sam Rebelsky, Janet Davis, and colleagues completely buy into Media Computation and the value for their students. They just won’t give up on Scheme. They are creating their own libraries (to control GIMP from Scheme), writing their own textbook, and even creating their own IDE in order to do Media Computation in Scheme.  From an all-or-nothing perspective, this is a complete rejection of the libraries, textbooks, and IDE that we have created.  From a moving-the-needle perspective, I am completely delighted and flattered that they are making such effort around an idea that we could contribute to the conversation.

So finally, I can answer the student’s question: We do it because we believe we have a vision for improving practice.  We measure to convince others, and if we’re honest, to convince ourselves (or accept that we are wrong). But others are going to take our ideas, agree with some and disagree with others, and adopt what they see are the best ideas and adapt the rest.  Something new will result, hopefully better. It’s not about all-or-nothing. The goal is to be part of that struggle to figure out the best practice, to contribute to the structure of tomorrow’s classrooms and schools.  It’s all about moving the needle.