Next-Gen Ed —Part I: Some Revolution Required
An origin story for re-thinking the informatics of education and , with Ultra Media and the Magic of MIXONIUM.
This article is the first in a four-part series on a new vision for education in America. The vision has four sections:
Part I: Some Revolution Required
Part II: Learning Circles
Part III: A Design Curriculum Framework
Part IV: Place of School: Omni*Campus
About 25 years ago when Marshall Monroe, founder of MIXONIUM, was a Creative Executive and Principle Technical Staff at Disney, they had the bright idea of entering the market for education content and curriculum. Help kids learn. Use all the cool stuff the Disney creative brain trust knew how to do. Apply emerging technology. Communicate better. Enlist great artistry and theatrics. Make a profit. Make the world better. Seemed like a good opportunity. The plan was explored and abandoned, but what happened through that process was, …wait for it …an education…
Contemplating the future of education is an amazing paradox. On one hand it is simple — find better ways to …educate. But on the other hand, there is such a massive legacy of layered (better said, “sedimentary”) theory, practice, administration, agenda, muscle memory, orthodoxy, and commercial “incumbancy” that the conversations about the topic get snarled and stymied quite readily.
New models, frameworks, and ideas seem to spawn frequently and then die hard against the institutions, labor unions, faculty senates, and societal expectations for what education “means.” At Disney, the thought process was to simply do what everyone else was doing, but do it better. Textbooks that were more compelling and clear. Programs that could be accessed from remote locations. Technology used in clever ways to distribute information and “courseware.” …Applied Creativity helping people learn a little better.
The problem was, the institutions of education in the U.S. at the time (this was the early 1990’s) were so large and calcified that they had insulated themselves from the idea that there was any need to improve at all. There was, in effect, a monopoly controlling the market.
Fast forward to today, and we see the painful arc that has taken place inside this monopoly over the last quarter century, bringing us to 2018. “Online learning” has been tried as an “extension” of the institutional programs, and proven largely unrewarding. We’ve had students and parents frantically watching the spinning ball of a cursor as they try to log in to sign up for classes, complete registration or just to get a parking pass. Servers crashing. Endless faculty lecture head-shots droning on and on …and on. Close-up videos of bad teacher handwriting. You get the picture. And we have the “death by LMS” arcane workflows of trying to figure out when the homework is actually due.
Wondering if the U.S. is doing just fine in this area? The statistics are overwhelming — in every area of STEM, the U.S. doesn’t even rank in the top 10 of national academic performance. Statistics are all consistent in this regard. And if an anecdote would help, consider drones. We use them at MIXONIUM for a range of production activities, with commercial and government clients. Drones are way cool. Advanced technology put to good use. Now, how many of the best drones are designed or made in the U.S.? You guessed it …none. Robots? All the companies we buy robots from are either European or Chinese. Not good.
We’re not saying all tech has moved overseas, but the trend of U.S. atrophy when it comes to academic preeminence is unsettling. Something is wrong, and “online learning” in its current implementation is not delivering.
Emulate-o-vation & PRB
One of the key principles Marshall Monroe has for innovation and emerging technology is that in many, many cases a new technology is received with great enthusiasm, however the masses that embrace it see it as only a way to do what they used to do, with a different apparatus. This is instead of seeing that a new technology can enable an entirely new workflow, value proposition or lifestyle. Humans, as creatures of habit, suffer from what we call a “Presumptive Reality Bias,” or PRB. An example of this is the idea of streaming video. See, digital networks allow for realtime complex calculations, interactivity, and two-way communications. In the case of streaming video, we forego all the powerful capabilities of digital networks and we dumb them down so they emulate what we used to know as …analog linear tv. Or we add a tiny layer of functionality like a “program guide,” channel selector, or “recommendation engine,” as the digital affordance. In reality, the potential for digital content is much richer, as in the case of realtime 3D games, augmented reality, and collaborative environments. But only a small subset of a population embraces the quantum potential of a technology, at first. In this process a technology with grand transformation potential can be reduced to slow motion incrementalism.
Many inventions have faced this pitfall of adoption, like the way new digital technology is being used to make new, technology-enriched cars. We apply the gadgetry to our presumed need for physical transportation, when instead we should be focused on how the technology can help us drive …less. The same technology that can give us a big screen on the car console can also help us not need to drive to the store at all… And it will — but more on that later…
In the case of education, Presumed Reality Bias (PRB) has choked how digital technologies can enhance education. This is because education institutions see digital technology as allowing them to preserve their presumed reality of the “sage on the stage” weekly lecture, but to do it with a new apparatus. The new structural opportunities have been overlooked.
There was a mini-burst of innovation with the MOOC fad, with tens of thousands of students signing up for free classes, only to drop them the next day. Context, gestalt, social connectivity, and interlocking course systems were lacking. Khan Academy strove to solve this interlinking problem, but has done so with sadly low quality in the media productions. And with Khan, the interlinking has become like an impenetrable crystalline structure that divorces the content from real life practical use.
Add to these technology adoption challenges the ideological polarization of modern educational institutions. The latter is an unfortunate legacy of the 1960’s college campus rebellion against traditional values. Faculty populations have evolved today to be overwhelmingly uniform in partisan bias, such that traditional institutional universities have become insular and ultra-expensive enclaves of self-referential political monoculture*. How ironic that these institutions founded to explore new ideas have embraced only one ideology. This is not a political commentary — it is an assertion that diverse thought is healthier for triggering new ideas and adaptation — especially in disruptive times. America’s Universities have skipped this core requirement for graduation…
Furthermore, the institutional luxury of tenure and isolationist “resort” campus culture has allowed schools to embrace obsolete methods and fail to keep up with industry. The ideologically homogeneous faculties in many cases have no idea what is actually happening out in the real world of engaged commercial productivity.
In this context, the students are the losers as they are programmed with prejudice and obsolete models rather than ignited with open-minded discourse and cutting-edge questions.
Now consider the contrast — that while online learning stagnated and remained in the “DOS” and PDB phase of its “command line” adoption existence, the free enterprise market for fast, agile, mobile rich media exploded with commercial success stories like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Minecraft, Discord, and now SketchFab.
In 2021 we stand at a pier looking out on what feels like a vast ocean of opportunity. Kids, adolescents, college students, and adults are utterly fluent in consuming, and producing, agile rich media. Twenty years ago, who would have thought millions of kids would be producing their own videos and publishing them multiple times a day without even really thinking about it. Technology has given us augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, streaming media, mobile devices, 4G, LTE, and 5G. We have displays that are 4K, UHD. We have podcasts, iTunes, app stores, 1TB SSDs, and cloud drives.
The digital web is filled with knowledge of seemingly every sort. There is not a shortage of information. We tried to think of a subject we could not learn from the internet if we were willing to do some digging and curation. Can’t think of one.
The hay bale that broke the camel’s back.
The tech quantum leap potential is all ready to go. There is consumer frustration with the monoculture and institutional nature of universities (to say nothing of price). But absent other factors the monopolized U.S. education system could remain immune to modernization. Except for one huge new motivating factor,…and it is …globalization.
National Competitiveness Requires a National Educated Workforce
Today families, young people, professionals, and even adults near retirement are finding that in order to get jobs, they need to have skills and education that they are not getting from universities. Taking time out to drive across town, or to fly across the country, to listen to a lecture is becoming not only problematic and inconvenient, but it is increasingly patently absurd. With jobs and technology changes there is a great need for re-training and adaptation, but globalization ups the ante on this situation. It is tangible reality every day as competition gets tougher. And it’s not just local competition. Companies today have to compete with international competitors on a nearly realtime basis, and commerce is not forgiving when it comes to capacity, capability, and merit.
The same technologies that can make education better are forcing its hand because they make commerce faster and more virtual.
The statistics are clear: the U.S. is not faring well in this globally competitive education landscape. Slow adoption, Presumed Reality Bias and ideological rigor mortis have become like a dam about to burst. Parents of young children are fighting for school choice as a way to introduce competition to the monopoly of K-12. Homeschoolers who abandon the institutions all together out-perform their peers in science fairs, chess matches, and spelling bees. And everyone, …everyone has discovered the power of just looking up a video on YouTube when they need to learn something.
So we are left to ponder — what is the right path for education in this environment? How does the U.S. re-establish preeminence in education? We believe the answer lies in a new informatic and pedagogical architecture — one that strikes a new balance of priorities for the modern learner. It is a structure that destroys many sacred cows of what we have thought about education for the last 150 years. We call this new approach Learning Circles.
Part II of this series, Next Gen Ed — Part II: Learning Circles with MIXONIUM, will address the structure of the innovation we see, and we could not be more excited about how we can impact the future with concepts you’ll discover there. And to be clear, these are ideas in application today and showing incredible results in K-12, University, and Professional Development Training areas…
- Ref: Sampling 8,688 “tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report,” Brooklyn College’s Mitchell Langbert found that 78 percent of the academic departments in the sample have no Republicans employed.
All contents ©2021 Marshall Monroe MAGIC & MIXONIUM GHI.
