Bridging the Divide Between Amateurs and Professionals

Benjamin Spock

For a while now, I've been writing about home education, online resources, and creative learning experiences. However, a few weeks ago, I saw a post in a Google+ forum that unnerved me—I haven't written anything on this blog since then.

Was the post hostile? offensive? obnoxious? No, it was polite and vaguely solicitous, written by a professional educator who mentioned she had a PhD as she wrote about her desire to instruct home educators. Although she had no experience with homeschooling, she was about to start homeschooling her daughter, and she was enthusiastic about the idea of helping other homeschoolers learn how to become better teachers.

I like to think I would have been open and receptive to this woman's kind and charitable intentions on a better day, but my immediate, less admirable reaction was anger and annoyance. "What makes her think she can start dishing out advice to home educators when she has no experience with homeschooling?" I thought to myself. I then became painfully aware of the hypocrisy in that question, because for quite some time I had been imagining that I (an amateur, home educator) might have something worthwhile to add to the ongoing conversation among professional educators about how to make teaching more effective.

Ye Without Training, Proceed No Further

Disheartened, I began to scrutinize everything I'd said or written about education while wondering how a professional educator might view my attempts to contribute. During this period of intense self-doubt, I began to question the entire premise of this blog and my tentative plans for working in partnership with faculty and students to create effective online content.

I was disillusioned even more when I read a post by respected author and consultant Tony Bates, who questioned the effectiveness of faculty who have received no training in teaching methods ("Online Learning, Faculty Development and Academic Freedom"). He writes:

" . . . [W]e don’t allow pilots to fly commercial aircraft without training, we place very high standards on doctors before they are allowed to practice medicine, and we wouldn’t tolerate engineers building roads, tunnels or bridges without very high levels of training. Then why is it OK for faculty to spend 40% or more of their time doing something for which they have had no or minimal training, and which for most students is the most important thing they are paying tuition fees for?" 

Now, of course, I don't imagine Dr. Bates was aiming his question directly at me—most likely, he wasn't thinking about home educators at all—but as I read his words I started to construct a rebuttal. I recalled the talented professors I've known who had become insightful instructors without explicit teacher training; the trained, certified teachers I've met who were uninspiring; and all the non-professional educators (like me) who have no formal training but who somehow do a decent job of nurturing learning in others.

Enter, the Power of Participation

All of these thoughts about what it means to be "qualified" were on my mind as I spent the past few months exploring articles and TED Talks about "cognitive surplus" (to use Clay Shirky's term) and the power of online participation. Initially, my focus was on preparing for upcoming classes (Thriving in the Digital Age), so I hadn't planned to connect what I was learning about collective intelligence to my concerns about being an amateur in a professional field (i.e., education). Fortunately, as I continued to read and browse, the connections were impossible to ignore.

One of the major concerns addressed by Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson and others, is whether amateur participation is a good thing. "Won't all those lesser contributions to online content," the reasoning goes, "merely add to the already overwhelming volume of information without improving the overall quality?" Put another way, aren't we amateurs just adding to the noise and making it harder for people to find the truly useful content?

It's a valid question. What makes Jane Average think her blog is worth reading? Why should people regard a news report tweeted by the guy next door as noteworthy? Or, getting back to my original quandary: What makes a home educator think her experiences and curated content might be valuable to those who already have years of training and experience as professional educators?

Shirky et al argue that the benefits of expanded participation more than make up for the "noise." So, even if my naive reflections and nascent thoughts about education aren't revolutionary, perhaps what I share will help someone else make an important connection. As Matt Ridley explains in his TED Talk ("When Ideas Have Sex"):

"What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. [. . .] It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. [. . .] Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation."

In Conclusion

I began this post with a photo of Dr. Spock intentionally, because he was a professional who advised parents to trust themselves. His book, Baby and Child Care, came out at a time when people seemed to have stopped believing in their own ability to be good parents.

"Before [Dr. Spock] came along, advice to parents was very didactic. He opened the whole area of empowered parenting. He gave parents choices and encouraged them to think things out for themselves" (T. Berry Brazelton, quoted in the New York Times).

Giving people choices and encouraging them to think for themselves is what I believe education is all about, too.

I don't care whether you're an amateur or a professional. If you're passionate about learning and helping others to learn, then we already have something in common. Let's exchange ideas and work towards making the world a better place. If any of my writings are useful to you as we learn and grow together, I hope you'll let me know.

Thank you.

Teens Reflect on Pros and Cons of Social Media Use

Recently, I asked a group of homeschooled teens to complete a questionnaire about how much time they spend using social media (texting, instant messaging, emailing, posting on Facebook, talking on Skype, gaming, and watching videos). Unlike the stereotypical teens I hear so much about, this group of adolescents did not seem particularly attached to their devices—I rarely saw them with a phone in their hands, for example—so I suspected they were less apt to engage in technologically-mediated conversations than their schooled peers. However, what I learned about their use and perception of social media surprised me.

Are You Drinking Water From a Firehose, or Casting a Line Into a Stream?

As part of my research for a high school course on "Thriving in the Digital Age" (course website), I have been reading Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold. In Chapter 2, he writes, "The real-time Web is not a queue . . . but rather a stream. Don't even try to keep up. Learn to sample." He goes on to describe techniques for sampling, by "tuning your antennae for the right signals" and "bringing the right information to you."

I felt a sense of relief as I read this. For weeks, I had been struggling to assess the overwhelming variety of Web 2.0 social media tools. Naively, I was trying to review every tool and learn everything there was to know, and I felt like I was drowning in a sea of information. "So," I thought to myself, "this is why people frequently compare using social media to drinking water from a fire hose." I needed a new approach, and Rheingold's mention of a stream opened my eyes to a different (though still watery) metaphor.

 I began to picture a beautiful stream, beckoning to me, inviting me to cast a line into the water. I thought about my husband, an avid fly fisherman, and how relaxing it is to watch him practice his art. The graceful motions inspire feelings of patience, serenity, inner calm and, on a lucky day, the thrill of the catch. It's not at all like the image of a fire hose, which I associate with scary, high adrenaline experiences: buildings in flames, mobs out of control, intense pressure and violent release. I would prefer my experiences in the online world to be more like catching fish than catching hell. I'm looking for quality, not quantity.

Rheingold writes about the importance of mindfulness when we use technology. To avoid unnecessary distractions, it helps to decide in advance what we hope to achieve in a given day, or year, or lifetime. Sure, those pictures of kittens are really adorable, but how much time do we want to devote to them? When, where, and how do we want to focus our attention? Ideally, online tools should help us to filter, organize, and limit the content that fills up our screens and lives. Used wisely, they can be as useful to us as the right fishing lure is to a fisherman.

An article from Steffan Antonas, "Drinking from the Social Media Firehouse—Six Lessons Learned," offers sage advice on how to use social media in a sane and meaningful way. He reminds us that "Social media interactions are meaningful only if you’re sharing remarkable ideas, being memorable, helping people achieve their goals, connecting to people and (most importantly) converting those connections into real offline relationships."

Obviously, we have to be selective about what we consume and create. The question is: do we want to be the ones doing the selecting, casting our lines strategically, or are we content to wait and see what hits us in the face at random? When I take time to learn how to tailor an RSS feed, set up a dashboard, or use tags and keywords to filter news reports, I feel it's time well spent. Like an experienced fisherman selecting the right lure, I can increase my chances of hooking something of interest while allowing everything else to flow past. Of course, I won't catch everything, but that doesn't need to be the goal for the experience to be rewarding.