Education Guide

Asking how we identify the
future – and how we bring the future into the present form a large part of
current educational discourse – especially those edu_conference keynote
conversations.  

Jensen (Witnessing the Future pdf) cites Serres and Latour and suggests
that “assemblage”, “design”, “finish” and “slickness of advertising” all play a
role in how we identify the future .  

"What are things
contemporary? Consider a late-model car. It is a disparate aggregate of scientific
and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can date it
component by component: this part was invented at the turn of the century,
another ten years ago … Not to mention that the wheel dates back to neolithic
times. The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its
finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it"
(SERRES & LATOUR, 1995, p.45). [1] 

It made me wonder why we
focus so much of our attention on the future, when our educational present
needs so much help.  

Jensen provided an answer
when he identifies the critical shift in the conversation as being the shift
from “"looking into the future to looking at the future, or
how the future is mobilized in real time to marshal resources, coordinate
activities and manage uncertainty" (BROWN & MICHAEL, 2003, p.4).  

So people like us to look at
the future (or at least think we are), because the existence of a
 classroom of the future (or a school of the future) allows resources to
be marshalled.  

Marshalling resources is
high focus activity in education. And it is not just the educational technology
companies that are trying to do this. Monday’s NZ Herald  features a local special education centre that would like to
marshall some resources to keep paying the salaries of two therapists.   

Finding out how to persuade
people they are looking at the future so we can marshall resources would be
useful for lots of people. 

Jensen’s study suggests that
“looking at the future” is all about persuasion and witnessing; and that these
strategies are not as different as you might imagine.  Both are
artificial, constructed situations.

So if you want to marshal
resources in education by marketing yourself as the future you will need to
learn how to play with both. 

When reading
 “Witnessing the Future” I realised that I had never really understood
persuasion – nor did I have any clear measure of how to judge whether
persuasion had taken place. 

In describing “the
procedures and rhetorical strategies” used by a manager to persuade
business journalists that it was “the office of the future”, Jensen argued that
we can tell if “Persuasion has taken place if a second actor follows a first
actor in such a way that the first actor's program is strengthened.”  

So power is understood as a
consequence of an action rather than a cause.

The actions of others make
me powerful.  

I take this to mean that
when I am persuaded to RT a fellow tweetcher – I am enhancing their power. 

Persuasion has occurred
because I have acted in a way that empowers/ strengthens the credibility of a
fellow tweetchers message.  All that “repeating and disseminating” makes
Twitter as much a strategy for persuading other tweetchers as it is a strategy
for informing others. Something already understood by those educators
controlling multiple accounts who regularly re-tweet themselves – an activity I
found bewildering and just a little sad until now.  

So repetition reveals an act
of persuasion; because repetition reinforces the power of the persuader. 
“One hundred million blowflies can’t be wrong” thinking rules Ok. 

NetGen Sceptic’s recent post
describes repetition as a Snark Effect strategy The
Snark Syndrome and the Net Gen Discourse  

In Women and Science: The
Snark Syndrome, Byrne says about women in science:

"By dint of repetition
three times (or thirty), the educational community had internalized an
oversimplified and often unscholarly selection of beliefs and premises which
had descended to the 'everyone knows that…' level of slogan-like
impact."

Thus the Snark Syndrome is the "assertion of an alleged truth or belief
or principle as the basis for policymaking or for educational practice,
although this proves to have no previous credible base in sound empirical
research"

The Snark Effect is the application of the Snark Syndrome to implement specific
educational policies and practices.

The post identifies the
advantages to be gained/ resources that might be marshalled if repetition is
used to persuade educators that the NetGen exists as being related to digital
technology.

“I have lost track of the
number of times I have heard educators repeat the stereotypes about the Net
Generation: short attention span, expert mutitaskers, technologically savvy etc
etc. Countless Michael Wesch-like You Tube videos are circulating urging us to
wake up and change our ways or else risk losing an entire generation of
learners who we are failing to engage. The answer, we are told, is more digital
technology.”

I recognise high levels of
“Snark Syndrome” repetitive NetGen and witnessing the future educational
discourse in Twitter streams, blog posts, newsletters and educational
conference presentations in New Zealand.  And it is working. Resources are
being marshalled through digital technology because of it.

So once we have the
repetition thing going how else do we mobilise the future in real time to
marshal resources? 

 Jensen’s article moves
from repetition to “Tricks of the Witnessing Trade” – many of which will be
familiar to educators who are charged with witnessing digital classrooms
bedecked with wirelessly lap-topped/mobile phoned students.   

Think of strategies of
virtual witnessing, drawing in multiple allies and those courtroom strategies
of highlighting, categorising and undermining.   

The United Spaces manager
persuaded others they were witnessing the future by contrasting what was going
on in the offices with what was happening elsewhere.  He used categories
of social isolation, professional demarcations, stable patterns of work, and
distrust.  The result was visitors “witnessing” the United Spaces offices
as a place of community, boundarilessness, flexibility and trust.  

Interestingly Jensen
identifies that in this case study the most effective strategy in persuading
others (and thus marshalling resources) is to “act like a kite” – 

United
Spaces gains upward drift by blocking and resisting. It works by posing itself
up against something else. Thus United Spaces' source of persuasive power is
that it draws contrasts rather than drawing things together. With its
arrangements of tables and with the rule of sitting at a new place every day,
it has found a way to articulate a number of problems or even absurdities of
"normal work". And like a protest movement, it lifts off the ground
at the moment when it is able to channel diffuse dissatisfaction with the
existing state of affairs into support for a clear rallying point. 

Perhaps our
local special education centre needs to persuade others to witness how it is
“the future” special education facility by adopting repetition and act like a
kite strategies – 

Remembering all the while
that “The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage, by its design, its
finish, sometimes only by the slickness of the advertising surrounding it"
  

Then it may marshall back
some of the resources that went to those “we are the future / we are creating remarkable futures”
independent schools who swallowed up an extra 35 million dollars in funding in
the last budget.

Elgaard Jensen, Torben
(2007). Witnessing the Future [59 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative
Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 8(1), Art. 1,
http://nbnresolving.
de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs070119 .

Source: Artichoke