The Danger of the Internet's Hive Mentality

[Demetri Orlando]

Dear Colleagues,

The article, Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age, by Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) bears reading by all of us “internet boosters.” He makes great points about the need for individual learning (as opposed to collaborative learning), memorization, and books. He concludes with an apt warning about the nature of the “hive mind” leaving us open to manipulation. We should heed his message, and indeed, I think we already do, as independent schools continue to hold up the ideals of a liberal arts education. I don’t think this is an either/or argument; in fact, I think we need all of the above (individual and collaborative learning, internet facility and perseverance through long books). 

I think this article gets at why some of our faculty are reluctant adopters of certain technology. In his conclusion, Larry has done a good job expressing the danger of shallow thinking. We need to discuss how we continue to instill deep and critical thinking in our students while our students are playing with tools that make it all too easy to flit and flutter across the internet and produce "learning artifacts" that may look flashy, but hold little depth. Do your teachers' rubrics for PowerPoint presentations include categories for demonstrating depth of knowledge and skill at thinking on one's feet?

I don't think that we internet boosters (on this network) are advocating a shift in pedagogy to put collaborative learning at the core, but I would advocate to put project-based learning at the core, because I think that within PBL we encourage deep, thoughtful, and critical learning experiences that have the potential to give students a love of learning, with collaborative and individual pursuit of knowledge. Basically, I agree with Larry, and share some of his pessimism about the future [witness the current state of politics in this country], so it's all the more important that we continue the good work we all do to hold up the ideals of independent, critical, reflective, and human-connected thought.

I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this...

Thanks,
Demetri

ps. full disclosure: I have a tangential relationship with Larry as a panelist for his new site: www.WatchKnow.org

[Peter Gow]

I wrote down a few of my somewhat darker thoughts on this issue a few weeks back at http://www.admirablefaculties.org/2010/03/playing-fields-of-eton-an... .

I think that problems and projects are the key to helping kids think big and think innovatively, and the messier the problems and the more complex the projects, the more exciting and vital the possibilities.

I'll leave it at that for now, but this is a point really worth making. Exceptionally well-schooled minds have been behind many of the world's woes for a long time, and exceptionally well-schooled minds have also spoken out on behalf of better things for just as long. There are many other factors at work, but it would be a good thing if the essence of education were to favor the better things, and for that we need to provide educational environments and experiences that do indeed focus on "human-connected thought."

[Derrel Fincher]

Sanger wrote, "It might now sound as if I am attacking a strawman..." He is. He is not the first to do so, nor will he be the last.

In one of his arguments, he tried to separate learning from memorization but still confuses the two as he makes the case for "facts." He uses every skeptic's favorite question of asking whether you would like to be treated by a doctor who did not... (fill in your own example here). He uses "memorization" in his example. What he overlooks is that professionals are in their professions by choice and, as such, use whatever they need to do to acquire knowledge and contribute to knowledge in their profession. Furthermore, the professions develop practices that help neophytes acquire the tools of the profession, whether they are tailors or doctors. One tool may be as simple as a mnemonic so that new med students can more easily recall the bones of the hand until they know the bones of the hand. I really do not care if my doctor does not know that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066, but apparently Sanger demands that of his doctor.

He also dismisses the "click-to-facts" approach, believing that proponents maintain that the click substitutes for learning. Here, he is wrong. Clicking is not the end, it is the beginning. Clicking is not random as facts delivered in a classroom often seem to the learner. Instead, the fact is needed at that moment for a very specific reason and the clicker has chosen to find that fact. That is the beginning of learning, not the end. It is the seemingly random facts delivered in the classroom that have the same staying power as the nonsense syllables in Ebbinghaus's work.

Sure, some people will go overboard with any change, such as the superintendent who got rid of the books in his library and replaced them with a few Kindles, but we should not view the future through extremes.

Miniver Cheevey, Clifford Stoll, and now Larry Sanger?

[Larry Sanger]

Demetri, thanks for the thoughtful response to my essay.

I agree with you that there is no either-or choice between "Cartesian learning" and "social learning" (to use phrases I discussed in my essay), but some of the comments we hear from some ed-tech Internet boosters seem to imply that most or all of learning should eventually take place in online groups. That is the sort of boosterism that I was criticizing, in my second section anyway. Of course I agree that there needs to be some mixture of individual and group learning, as there always has been. But judging from the tools available at present--maybe such fantastic future tools will be available in the future that would make me change my mind--I really don't see that what the Internet affords makes social learning much more attractive than it was pre-Internet.

It's interesting that you say that my essay captures why faculty are reluctant to adopt the latest Internet technologies. If that's the case, isn't it interesting that I should come to the views I hold only after a fair bit of experience playing with (and even inventing) those technologies?

As to the project method, I admit I'm a little out of my depth, but for what it's worth: an awful lot of my schooling in the 1970s and 1980s was in the form of projects. I almost always found them to be boring, and distinctly remember being frustrated, even then as a school kid, that I wasn't learning much. And I don't think I did. I learned the most from the classes in which I had to work hard and concentrate, whether reading difficult literature or working through math & science problems. And I learned the very most, and remembered the most, when I read in-depth, summarized what I read, and then wrote about it. Many projects (as I did them in the 70s and 80s, at least) teach surface details and ancillary matters, while deep intellectual cogitation, sitting with your head in your hands over a desk (or, why not, thinking hard with others) is the best way to learn about anything (at higher levels anyway). Indeed it's the *only* effective way to learn the necessary finer points of many subjects.

Of course, I am rather painfully aware that many people in the field of education, in the U.S., don't have learning--the accumulation of important knowledge and understanding of the world, belittled as the getting of "mere facts"--as their foremost aim.

I would like to respond to Derrel Fincher, but I hardly know where to begin. I would say things like the following: I admitted that I might be attacking a strawman in the *third* part of my essay, in which I said that some internet commentators seem to imply that we replace the reading of difficult books with the "construction of knowledge" in Internet communities. But Fincher goes on to talk about the *first* part of my essay. There, I'm not aware of any potential strawmen. As to what he says about the first part, which is all he comments about--the business about memorizing facts--I really haven't got a clue what he is going on about. I'm not sure he has read that section of the paper, or at least not very carefully, because I don't recognize a single claim of mine in the various things he comments on. For instance, I don't know what "the 'click-to-facts' approach" means, so I don't know if I even dismissed it in my essay or not. I certainly did *not* say that there is no value in looking stuff up on the Internet. (If I did think that, one would well wonder why I have spent a fair number of years starting four different online encyclopedia projects.) What I said was a *criticism* of a now-common view, that we can in effect learn less because we can easily find answers online. Some people certainly seem to say or imply this--Dalrymple and Tapscott are examples. I wasn't defending any such view as that we should learn facts by memorizing them by rote, and my criticisms of the views of Dalrymple & Tapscott don't rest on any such commitment. Maybe Fincher can write back to clarify which specific claims of mine he believes himself to be criticizing.

By the way, I regularly disburse panelist permissions in the WatchKnow system to professional education technology people, so if you're interested, sign up with your school system email and say a bit about your responsibilities and/or educational background. We have a number of teachers working on the system and one of them should let you in in a timely fashion.

[Fred Bartels]

Larry,

I'm sure you are aware of the work of Seymour Papert. Here is a quote from an essay he wrote titled Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning

Two big lessons I have learned from computer games are opposites of the messages of the ads I was quoting. The first, which I have already noted, is echoed by kids who talk about "hard fun" and they don't mean it's fun in spite of being hard. They mean it's fun because it's hard. Listening to this and watching kids work at mastering games confirms what I know from my own experience: learning is essentially hard; it happens best when one is deeply engaged in hard and challenging activities. The game-designer community has understood (to its great profit) that this is not a cause for worry. The fact is that kids prefer things that are hard, as long as they are also interesting. The preoccupation in America with "Making It Easy" is self-defeating and cause for serious worry about the deterioration of the learning environment.

You and Papert seem to agree that learning is essentially hard. Do you agree with him that learning can be fun because it's hard?

Fred

[Larry Sanger]

I totally agree that learning should be made as fun as possible, but I don't think it's exactly the difficulty of learning that makes it fun. Without reading the paper (I'll have to have a look), I'd say that sounds interesting because it's counterintuitive, but it doesn't sound very plausible. Why do we like learning? We like learning for at least two reasons, related to knowing-that and knowing-how: the world is an interesting place, so there are many interesting things to learn about it; and it can be really addictive fun to improve our skills. But both kinds of learning can be very hard--finally grasping something very interesting but difficult, and developing skills of all sorts (including academic and artistic sorts taught in schools), can be very difficult. It isn't the difficulty that makes it fun, though difficulty is probably closely related. It is (at least in some cases) more satisfying finally to master some field of knowledge if it is difficult to master; and it is morefun to improve your skills a lot, but also more difficult.

All that said, I think there is quite a bit of knowledge, especially in the earlier grades, that is totally easy and totally fascinating, and many skills that aren't so hard to develop (it all comes naturally) but it's fun to develop them. I guess that's the real advantage to being a kid, it might explain why many kids are more cheerful than the adults around them. So many sources of easy pleasure!

[Demetri Orlando]

Indeed, poorly designed/executed projects would be as shallow as the experience of direct instruction tied to standardized testing that is learning only for the sake of the test. As has been mentioned elsewhere, it gets at why the teacher is so important in this equation. A master teacher could engage students with either approach. I suppose this also points out the value of having multiple approaches to pedagogy, that keep classroom life interesting and involving. I'm not talking about the "projects" we may have experienced in grade school or graduate school that involved building dioramas or working on a "team" to make a PowerPoint presentation. I'm talking about the kind of problems described by Ted McCain in Teaching For Tomorrow where the paths to solutions are not neatly defined in a rubric or checklist. Have you seen the College & Work Readiness Assessment? It attempt to measure real-world problem solving. [for an example problem from the CWRA, see page 4 of this file.]

As you describe, I had similar deep learning experiences sitting solitary with head-in-hands over biology and history books for tedious hours and yes, I appreciate having passing familiarity with a broad range of disciplines. Being able to persevere through texts and think critically about them is necessary for intellectual learning (vs. other intelligences). The thing that bothers me is that so many of my school-based experiences were geared towards doing well on tests (AP), and had almost no relevance to my own life. Project-based-learning would not be a cure-all, but I think its judicious use within the curriculum could help alleviate some of the disconnect between school and real world problem-solving.

Thanks for participating in this discussion and raising such important issues!

[Derrel Fincher]

Uhh… He's standing right behind me, isn't he? :-) I will attempt to clarify a bit, although I may be unsuccessful.

First, I do want to make clear that "click-to-facts" is a term I heard elsewhere, which the quote marks were meant to convey, but it seemed I was quoting from the article. That was sloppy writing on my part. (Whether the rest of my writing is sloppy is left up to the reader to decide.) "Click-to-facts" is just a shorthand for looking up facts as needed rather than attempting to pre-commit facts to memory through rote memorization on the theory that they might be needed some day.

However, you did make three points:

"First is the idea that the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary. Second is the celebration of the virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning. And third is the insistence that lengthy, complex books, which constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual, are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group."

After reading your article, I interpreted these as meaning a classic liberal education is the best education and all of these new inventions and ideas about the resources and connections available are useful but shouldn't change anything. Or maybe it was the statement, "Indeed, the single best method of getting a basic education is to read increasingly difficult and important books," that gave me that idea. Correct me if I fundamentally misinterpreted your point.

As for the statement, "But I believe that it is a profound mistake to think that the tools of the Internet can replace the effortful, careful development of the individual mind — the sort of development that is fostered by a solid liberal arts education," I do not interpret the writings of those you cited to espouse that view. Perhaps there is a difference of opinion about how we believe they would define "effortful, careful development of the mind."

First point: "First is the idea that the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary. […] To possess a substantial understanding of a field requires not just memorizing the facts and figures that are used by everyone in the field but also practicing, using, and internalizing those basics. To return to my "glib" argument, surely the only way to begin to know something is to have memorized it." This seems to be a false dichotomy between knowing facts and looking them up as professionals in every field both know facts and look them up. Supporting this argument is the reductio ad absurdum physician example in the footnotes, but are there articles by respected writers who seriously put forth the notion that physicians just need to look up facts rather than knowing them?

Maybe we are not using a mutual definition for the term memorize but we can probably agree that it is definitely not a synonym for knowledge. However, my argument is against senseless rote memorization. Most memorization as applied in education is senseless rote memorization meaning that what is memorized makes no sense to the memorizer. Yet in order to understand content, facts are essential. Educators have struggled with how to help students learn facts in a way that helps the students recall those facts later. The rise of cooperative (not to be confused with collaborative) learning through the works of Johnson & Johnson and Slavin was one approach. Much of their work was on how to have children cooperate so that they could each individually acquire facts. In effect, their work attempts to overcome the shortcomings of remembering and forgetting of nonsense as revealed in Ebbinghaus's work by trying to "denonsensify" facts and increase the students' interest in learning these facts. The contributions of Johnson & Johnson and Slavin to education were invaluable at the time and still hold much value today. However, their work did not delve into complex nor long-term sense-making for students although their work was strongly social.

That brings me to my point -- it is much better to just know facts than to memorize them. Facts become internalized when they are logically connected to our body of knowledge. Few of those facts we were "supposed" to have learned in school stuck unless they connected. When I say "click-to-facts" is a beginning, it means that we click to a fact when we need that fact—we have a connection ready to be made. That does not mean it will stick, but it increases the probability that we will know it and be able to effectively use it to build our knowledge. Facts are best acquired in context and through authentic application. Much of the problem in education is that we artificially separate content from authentic application.

Returning to your doctor example, I want doctors who have used and internalized the necessary knowledge for their profession. I also want ones who are expert enough to know what they do not know and know how to look it up.

Second point: "Second is the celebration of the virtues of collaborative learning as superior to outmoded individual learning. [….] These four activities — reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculation — should make up the vast bulk of a liberal education. Social learning could not replace these individual, "Cartesian" activities without jettisoning liberal education itself." I am sure that "vast bulk" refers to a proportion quite a bit higher than fifty percent but I believe you draw another false dichotomy here. As you point out, writing and reading are solitary, and they are just as solitary if they are done online or on paper. Apparently, in a liberal education the internal struggle to understand stays solitary, while discussing it with others may somehow be unworthy. Yet collaborative learning has always been going on among the learned and the rise of online collaborative tools enable more effective use of such collaboration. While the four activities above are necessary, is the vision of a person closeted in a room struggling with a weighty tome until "Eureka!" escapes from his lips really where we want to be? I do think you posit somewhat of a straw man in the statement, "…whether the mere existence of such learning resources somehow establishes the conclusion that social learning is superior…" The implicit assumption is that supporters of such learning resources envision everything as social and discard reading, writing, critical thinking, and calculation. Instead, Shirkey in his article just notes, " Getting networked society right will mean producing the work whose themes best resonate on the net, just as getting the printing press right meant perfecting printed forms." Times change. Communication changes. Knowledge changes.

Collaborative learning is essential, although doing it effectively can be difficult. Kenneth Bruffee, in his book Collaborative Learning: higher education, interdependence, and the authority of knowledge, discusses how to structure effective collaborative learning situations with students. While he has targeted higher education, capable elementary teachers would be able to adapt his suggestions for their class.

Third point: "And third is the insistence that lengthy, complex books, which constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual, are inferior to knowledge co-constructed by members of a group. […] But when it comes to getting a solid intellectual grounding — a foundational, liberal education — nothing is less dispensable than getting acquainted with many books created by the "complex, dense" minds of deep-thinking individuals." In this section you did have your self-proclaimed straw-man of co-constructed student knowledge being viewed as superior to books but using War and Peace as an example detracts from your argument as, Shirkey notes, it has been falling out of favor for decades. Just one look at the book would suggest to many that their time would be more profitably spent on other reading. Only an elitist could argue that our lives are deficient for not having read War and Peace.

Carl Berieter, drawing on his own research as well as the works of Karl Popper and others, argued in Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age that the goal of knowledge should be co-constructed conceptual artifacts. Your article espouses an approach that would essentially prohibit students from engaging in such creation as it dismisses the social intercourse necessary for this to happen. Bereiter made many other points in the book, and it is well worth the read. His is truly a "complex, dense" mind.

And that brings me back to publishing. Books, journals, and articles are all part of a conversation. It's a long, slow conversation, but it is a conversation. Whether it is researchers publishing papers or attending conferences, or author's fans corresponding with the author, the act is social.

I think we can agree that unless people--groups or individuals--can position their thoughts and beliefs in relation to the broader history of humanity and human knowledge, their ideas are no more valid than the ideas of the self-proclaimed prophet in the park. (But we cannot convince the ignorant of that just as we cannot convince the prophet in the park of his need to learn.) Our disagreement comes in the roles that social interactions and the new access to information should play in getting people to the point that they can position their thoughts. Seldom did those "complex, dense" minds you cited operate individually. They may have been deep-thinking, but most did not operate in an asocial vacuum. Their social experiences, their co-construction of knowledge, found their way into their writing.

[Demetri Orlando]

Great to see such a thoughtful discussion unfolding here! Thanks for taking the time to write this.

I was struck by a recent article in Education Week discussing online learning -- in its Dos & Don'ts section, it admonishes "DON'T: Include large blocks of uninterrupted text for students to read on their own." I don't think the authors of this article necessarily intend to recommend that we reduce the amount of complex reading that students should be doing, [rather they are speaking about the instructional design of e-learning environments, and the importance of scaffolding the reading experience] but there is an implied outcome from this statement which seems relevant here.

[Derrel Fincher]

The Times has an interesting take on our ability to concentrate.