Fostering a Self-Sustaining Professional Learning Community in Online Professional Development

by Rebecca C. Itow

Since 2011, I have been studying ways to help teachers adopt and adapt new practices that value learners’ experience and expertise as they explore new concepts. Often, this necessitates that teachers find ways to reconcile their experience and existing beliefs about knowledge & learning with the underlying assumptions of the new practices so that they can be worked into curricular designs. In Spring 2013, an opportunity arose to redesign the English Language Arts (ELA) courses of a university-run online high school. While the high school was ranked the #2 online high school in the United States, they wanted to update their pedagogy both to attend to the push to foster connected learning in participatory spaces and address accreditors’ concerns about their use of a correspondence model. Dan Hickey suggested I take on this task, enabling me to aid the school in redesigning their courses and to realize the potential of the research I had been doing for the last two years.

Join this discussion on Grading 2.0

Over at the HASTAC forum, a conversation has begun around the role of assessment in 21st-century classrooms.

The hosts of this discussion, HASTAC scholars John Jones, Dixie Ching, andMatt Straus, explain the impetus for this conversation as follows:

As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators have begun to ask if the current framework for assessing student work, standardized testing, and grading is incompatible with the way these students should be learning and the skills they need to acquire to compete in the information age. Many would agree that its time to expand the current notion of assessment and create new metrics, rubrics, and methods of measurement in order to ensure that all elements of the learning process are keeping pace with the ever-evolving world in which we live. This new framework for assessment might build off of currently accepted strategies and pedagogy, but also take into account new ideas about what learners should know to be successful and confident in all of their endeavors.

Topics within this forum conversation include:

• Technology & Assessment ("How can educators leverage the affordances of digital media to create more time-efficient, intelligent, and effective assessment models?");
• Assignments & Pedagogy ("How can we develop assignments, projects, classroom experiences, and syllabi that reflect these changes in technology and skills?");
• Can everything be graded? ("How important is creativity, and how do we deal with subjective concepts in an objective way, in evaluation?"); and
• Assessing the assessment strategies ("How do we evaluate the new assessment models that we create?").

The conversation has only just started, but it's already generated hundreds of visits and a dozen or so solid, interesting comments. If you're into technology, assessment and participatory culture, you should take a look. It's worth the gander.

Here's the link again: Grading 2.0: Assessment in the Digital Age.

Q & A with Henry Jenkins' New Media Literacies Seminar

New media scholar Henry Jenkins is teaching a graduate seminar on new media literacies at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. The participants had raised the issues of assessment and evaluation, especially related to educational applications of new media. Henry invited Dan Hickey to skype into their class to field questions about this topic. They perused some of the previous posts here at re-mediating assessment and proceeded to ask some great questions. Over the next few weeks, Dan and other members of the participatory assessment team will respond to these and seek input and feedback from others.

The first question was one they should have answered months ago:

Your blog post on what is not participatory assessment critiqued prevailing assessment and testing practices. So what is participatory assessment?

The answer to this question has both theoretical and practical elements. Theoretically, participatory assessment is about reframing all assessment and testing practices as different forms of communal participation, embracing the views of knowledgeable activity outlined by media scholars like Henry Jenkins, linguists like Jim Gee, and cognitive scientists like Jim Greeno. We will elaborate on that in subsequent posts, hopefully in response to questions about this post. But this first post will focus more on the practical answer.

Our work in participatory assessment takes inspiration from the definition of participatory culture in the 2006 white paper by Project New Media Literacies:

not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued.

As Henry, Mimi Ito, and others have pointed out, such cultures define the friendship-driven and interest-driven digital social networks that most of our youth are now immersed in. This culture fosters tremendous levels of individual and communal engagement and learning. Schools have long dreamed of attaining such levels but have never even come close. Of course, creating (or even allowing) such a culture in compulsory school settings requires new kinds of collaborative activities for students. Students like those in Henry’s class, and students in our Learning Sciences graduate program are at the forefront of creating such activities. Participatory assessment is about creating guidelines to help students and teachers use those activities to foster both conventional and new literacy practices. Importantly, these guidelines are also intended to produce more conventional evidence of the impact of these practices on understanding and achievement that will always be necessary in any formal educational context. Such evidence will also always be necessary if there is to be any sort of credentialing offered for learning that takes place in less formal contexts.

Because successful engagement with participatory cultures depends as much on ethical participation (knowing how) as it does on information proficiency (knowing what), At the most basic practical level participatory assessment is intended to foster both types of know-how. More specifically, participatory assessment involves creating and refining informal discourse guidelines that students and teachers use to foster productive communal participation in collaborative educational activities, and then in the artifacts that are produced in those activities. Our basic idea is that before we assess whether or not individual students understand X (whatever we are trying to teach them), they must first be invited to collectively “try on” the identities of the knowledge practices associated with X. We do this by giving ample opportunities to “try out” discourse about X, by aggressively focusing classroom discourse towards communal engagement in X, and discouraging a premature focus on individual students’ understanding of X (or even their ability to articulate the concept of X). Premature focus on individual understanding leaves the students who are struggling (or have perhaps not even been trying) self-conscious and resistant to engagement. This will make them resist talking about X. Even more problematically, they will resist even listening to their classmates talk about X. Whatever the reason the individual is not engaging, educators must help all students engage with increased meangingfulness.
To do participatory assessment for activity A, we first define the relevant big ideas (RBIs) of the activity (i.e., X, Y, and perhaps, Z). We then create two simple sets of Discourse Guidelines to ensure that all students enlist (i.e., use) X, Y, and Z in the discourse that defines the enactment of that activity. Event reflections encourage classrooms to reflect on and critique their particular enactment of the activity. These are informal prompts that are seamlessly embedded in the activities. A paper we just wrote for the recent meeting of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction in Amsterdam discussed examples from our implementation of Reading in a Participatory Culture developed by Project New Media Literacies. That activity Remixing and Appropriation used new media contexts to conventional literary notions like genre and allusion. One of the Event Reflection prompts was

How is the way we are doing this activity helping reveal the role of genre in the practice of appropriation?

Given that the students had just begun to see how this notion related to this practice, the students struggled to make sense of such questions. But it set the classroom up to better appreciate how genre was just as crucial to Melville’s appropriation of the Old Testament in Moby-Dick as it was to the music video "Ahab" by nerdcore pioneer MC Lars. The questions are also worded to introduce important nuances that will help foster more sophisticated discourse (such as the subtle distinction between a concept like genre and a practice like appropriation)
Crucially, the event guidelines were aligned to slightly more formal Activity Reflections. These come at the end of the activity, and ask students to reflect on and critique the way the particular activities were designed, in light of the RBIs:

How did the way that the designers at Project New Media Literacies made this activity help reveal the role of genre in the practice of appropriation?

Note that the focus of the reflection and critique has shifted from the highly contextualized enactment of the activity, the more fixed design of the activity. But we are still resisting the quite natural tendency to begin asking ourselves whether each student can articulate the role of genre in appropriation. Rather than ramping up individual accountability, we first ramp up the level of communal discourse by moving from the rather routine conceptual engagement in the question above, and into the more sophisticated consequential and critical engagement. While these are not the exact questions we used, these capture the idea nicely:

Consequential Reflection: How did the decision to focus on both genre and appropriation impact the way this activity was designed?

Critical Reflection: Can you think of a different or better activity than Moby-Dick or Ahab to illustrate genre and appropriation?

We are still struggling to clarify the nature of these prompts, but have found a lot of inspiration in the work of our IU Learning Sciences colleagues Melissa Gresalfi and Sasha Barab, who have been writing about consequential engagement relative to educational video games.

The discourse fostered by these reflections should leave even the most ill-prepared (or recalcitrant) participant ready to meaningfully reflect on their own understanding of the RBIs. And yet, we still resist directly interrogating that understanding, in order to continue fostering discourse. Before jumping to assess the individual, we first focus on the artifacts that the individual is producing in the activity. This is done with Reflective Rubrics that ask the students to elaborate on how the artifact they are creating in the activity (or activities) reflects consequential and critical engagement with the RBI. As will be elaborated in a subsequent post, these are aligned to formal Assessment Rubrics of the sort that teachers would use to formally assess and (typically) grade the artifacts.

Ultimately, participatory assessment is not about the specific reflections or rubrics, but the alignment across these increasingly formal assessments. By asking increasingly sophisticated versions of the same questions, we can set remarkably high standards for the level of classroom discourse and the quality of student artifacts. In contrast to conventional ways of thinking about how assessment drive curriculum, former doctoral student Steven Zuiker help us realize that we have to thing impact of these practices using the anthropological notion of prolepsis. It helps us realize that anticipation of the more formal assessments motivates communal engagement in the less formal reflective process. By carefully refining the prompts and rubrics over time, we can attain such high standards for both that any sort of conventional assessment of individual understanding or measure of aggregated achievement just seems…well…. ridiculously trivial.
So the relevant big idea here is that we should first focus away from individual understanding and achievement if we want to confidently attain it with the kinds of participatory collaborative activities that so many of us are busily trying to bring into classrooms.

I'm bringing sexyback: some thoughts on formative assessment

Immersed as I am lately in the world of participatory assessment, I go through cycles of forgetting and then remembering and then forgetting again that not everybody in educational research thinks assessment is sexy.

I was reminded of this again recently while reading Lorrie Shepard's excellent 2005 paper, "Formative Assessment: Caveat Emptor." The piece argues that the notion of "formative assessment" has been twisted in unfortunate ways as a result of the excessive hammering kids get from high-stakes standardized tests.

I helpfully plugged the entire paper into the wordle machine for you and got this:


In theory, then, assessment should be easy to understand: All of the most frequently used words in Shepard's paper are fairly common and comprehensible. In practice, though, assessment research is complicated by the impulse to put a fine point on things. Here's a sample paragraph from Shepard's piece, which starts out okay but descends into chaos before the end:

“Everyone knows that formative assessment improves learning,” said one anonymous test maker, hence the rush to provide and advertise “formative assessment” products. But are these claims genuine? Dylan Wiliam (personal communication, 2005) has suggested that prevalent interim and benchmark assessments are better thought of as “early-warning summative” assessments rather than as true formative assessments. Commercial item banks may come closer to meeting the timing requirements for effective formative assessment, but they typically lack sufficient ties to curriculum and instruction to make it possible to provide feedback that leads to improvement.

I'm not saying the language is unnecessary; I'm not saying that assessment types are putting too fine a point on things. What I will argue here is that assessment research has, for lots of good and not-so-good reasons, been divorced so thoroughly from other aspects of educational research that it's decontextualized itself right into asexuality. It's like that guy in the corner booth at the bar on Friday night who wants to talk about Marxism when everybody else just wants to make sure everybody gets the same amount of beer before closing time.

Think about that guy for a second. Let's call him Jeff. Jeff has been single for a long time now, and he's spent a lot of that time reading. Maybe he's grown nostalgic for the early days before his girlfriend cheated on him and then moved in with some guy she met in her Econ class. His friends miss those days, too, mainly because he was so much goddamn fun back then. They're nice enough; they want to take him out and help him snap out of it. But the minute the beers come he's back on the Marxism soapbox again and NOBODY. FREAKING. CARES. It's Friday night, late July, and everybody just wants to get stupid drunk. They drop him some hints. Sully slaps him on the back and asks him to tell that one joke he told last week.

"In a minute," Jeff says. "I'm explaining where Marxism went wrong."

Eventually his friends will tell him to either cut it out or go home. If he wants to keep hanging out with these guys, he'll shut up. Or maybe he'll tell that one joke he executes so well. If the girls around him laugh, he might tell another one. Girls like funny guys, he'll suddenly remember. They don't necessarily like Marxists.

All of this is what we might call "formative assessment." This guy wants to be accepted by his friends, which means he needs to pay attention to his behavior. He learns (or re-learns) how to act at the bar on Friday night by paying attention to the feedback he gets from his friends, from other people at the bar, from his memories of having a social life all those years ago.

If we wanted to, we could spend some time talking about better ways to help Jeff learn the social skills he needs. For example, his friends could have sat him down before they went out and explained that his primary goal was to be the funniest guy in the room. "Because girls like funny guys," his buddy Rufus might remind him. They might also set deadlines: By 11:30 you better have told at least three jokes. Then, over the course of the evening, they could check in with him and get a joke-count.

The point is that everybody's on board with the evening's goals. Everybody--Jeff, his friends--wants Jeff to have a good time, and they want to have a good time with him.

Haha! I tricked you into caring about formative assessment.

This is what assessment is, even if it doesn't always feel that way to students, teachers, or researchers. There is an end goal, an objective, and formative assessment is a way of getting everyone on board with this goal and keeping them on board. When it works right, everybody involved actually wants to achieve the objective and the assessment is valuable because it helps them get where they want to go.

But as Shepard's piece points out, too often the insanity of NCLB substitutes test scores for real, intrinsic motivation. Too often and too easily, students learn skills it takes to attain high test scores without actually learning anything. Though "(the) idea of being able to do well on a test without really understanding the concepts is difficult to grasp," Shepard writes, she gives as evidence a 1984 study performed by M.L. Koczor, which focused on two groups of children learning about Roman numerals:

One group learned and practiced translating Roman to Arabic numerals. The other group learned and practiced Arabic to Roman translations. At the end of the study each group was randomly subdivided again (now there were four groups). Half of the subjects in each original group got assessments in the same format as they had practiced. The other half got the reverse. Within each instructional group, the drop off in performance, when participants got the assessment that was not what they had practiced, was dramatic. Moreover, the amount of drop-off depended on whether participants were low, middle, or high achieving. For low-achieving students, the loss was more than a standard deviation. Students who were drilled on one way of translation appeared to know the material, but only so long as they were not asked to translate in the other direction.

Because NCLB and other insane policies that mandate high-stakes testing for accountability have pushed assessment out of its natural home--as Jim Gee explains it, "in human action"--assessment researchers have themselves been backed into a separate corner of the room.

This is not okay. It doesn't help anybody to take the sexy out of assessment by tossing it into a corner. What we need, more than anything, is to push assessment back where it belongs: inside of the participation structures that support authentic learning.

Participatory assessment is, at its core, about social justice, about narrowing the participation gap that keeps our society stratified by race and class, about motivating learners to achieve real goals and overcome real obstacles to their own learning. Participatory assessment, if we do it right, can make almost anything possible for almost anyone.

making universities relevant: the naked teaching approach

I feel sorry for college deans, I really do*. They face the herculean task of proving that the brick-and-mortar college experience offers something worth going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt for, a task made even more difficult by the realities of a recession that's left nearly a quarter of Americans either unemployed or underemployed.

Then there's the added challenge of proving colleges have anything other than paper credentials to offer in a culture where information is free and expert status is easily attainable. Only in a participatory culture, for example, would it be possible for time-efficiency guru Timothy Ferriss to offer a set of instructions on "How to Become a Top Expert in 4 Weeks." "It's time to obliterate the cult of the expert," Ferriss writes in his mega-bestseller, The Four-Hour Workweek. He argues that the key is to accumulate what he calls "credibility indicators." It is possible, he writes,

to know all there is to know about a subject--medicine, for example--but if you don't have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen.... Becoming a recognized expert isn't difficult, so I want to remove that barrier now. I am not recommending pretending to be something you're not... In modern PR terms, proof of expertise in most fields is shown with group affiliations, client lists, writing credentials, and media mentions, not IQ points or Ph.D.s.

Ferriss then offers five tips for becoming a "recognized expert" in your chosen field. None of them include earning the credential through formal education.

Just like that, we've gone from the position that expertise takes a decade, at minimum, to develop, to the argument that a person can become an expert in just four weeks.

In the face of this qualitative shift in how we orient to expertise, colleges--the educational institutions that have made their bones on offering a sure path to credentialing--are struggling to remain viable. One strategy--and the one chosen by José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts--is to offer "naked teaching." Bowen's approach, as described in a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is to actually remove networked technologies from the classroom. The article makes it clear that Bowen is not anti-technology; he just thinks technologies are being misused by faculty who overrely on PowerPoint and technology-supported lecturing techniques. He favors using technologies like podcasting for delivering lecture materials outside of the classroom, then using the class itself to foster group discussion and debates.

To support this approach, all faculty were recently given laptops and support for creating podcasts and videos.

According to the Chronicle piece, the group that's most upset about the shift away from the traditional lecture format is...students. According to Kevin Heffernan, an associate professor in the school's division of cinema and television, students

are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test. Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive. The only way we're going to stop that is by radically refiguring the classroom in precisely the way José wants to do it.

For all the griping we do about No Child Left Behind, test-centered accountability practices, and high-stakes assessment practices, the roaring success of decontextualized accountability structures is their astounding ability to keep formal education relevant. "Success" at the primary and secondary level means high achievement on high-stakes tests; and, achievement depends on the learner's ability to internalize the value systems and learning approaches implicit in the approach of this kind of testing structure. Do well on a series of state-mandated tests and you'll probably also do well on the SAT; do well on the SAT and you're well positioned for the lecture-style, knowledge-transfer and, in general, highly decontextualized experience of most undergraduate-level classes. We gravitate toward the kind of experience that make us feel successful, which means the testing factory churns out its own customer base.

While Bowen's experiment (one that he's been moving toward for years; see this 2006 piece in the National Teaching and Learning Forum) may garner attention for an apparent anti-technology stance, the impetus behind his "naked teaching" approach is an effort to reshape the role of institutions of higher education. In truth, learning can happen anywhere, and Bowen's embrace of this truth through his embrace of technologies for supporting out-of-class information transfer seems like a low-risk and high-yield slant on the role of the university.

If learning can happen anywhere, then the physical community of learners gathered together within four walls, engaged in the act of collaborative knowledge-building: That's the rare commodity. In a world where everyone can be an expert, the promise of credentials become just another strategy for bringing that community together.



*jk I really don't.

Five tips for seeding and feeding your educational community

Dan Hickey's recent post on seeding, feeding, and weeding educators' networks got me thinking, for lots of reasons--not least of which being that I will most likely be one of the research assistants he explains will “work with lead educators to identify interesting and engaging online activities for their students.”

This got me a-planning. I started thinking about how I would seed, feed, and weed a social network if (when) given the chance to do so. As David Armano, the author of "Debunking Social Media Myths, the article that suggests the seeding, feeding, and weeding metaphor, points out, building a social media network is more difficult than people think—this is not a “if we build it, they will come” sort of thing. Designing, promoting, and growing a community takes a lot of work. People will, given the right motives, participate in the community for love and for free, but you have to start out on the right foot. This means offering them the right motivations for giving up time they would otherwise be spending on something else.

A caveat
First, know that I am a True Believer. I have deep faith in the transformative potential of participatory media, not because I see it as a panacea to all of our problems but because participatory media supports disruption of the status quo. A public that primarily consumes media primarily gets the world the media producers decide they want to offer. A public that produces and circulates media expressions gets to help decide what world it wants.

Social media, because of its disruptive and transformative potential, is both essential and nigh on impossible to get into the classroom. This is precisely why it needs to happen, and the sooner it happens, the better.

But integrating participatory media and the participatory practices they support into the field of education is not a simple matter. Too often people push for introduction of new technologies or practices (blogging, wikis, chatrooms and forums) without considering the dispositions required to use them in participatory ways. A blog can easily be used as an online paper submission tool; leveraging its neatest affordances--access to a broad, engaged public, joining a web of interconnected arguments and ideas, offering entrance into a community of bloggers--takes more effort and different, often more time-consuming, approaches.

Additionally, while social networks for educators hold a great deal of promise for supporting the spread of educational practices, designing, building, and supporting a vibrant community of educators requires thinking beyond the chosen technology itself.

Five Tips for Seeding and Feeding your Community
With these points in mind, I offer my first shot at strategies for seeding and beginning to feed a participatory educational community. (Weeding, the best part of the endeavor, comes later, once my tactics have proven to work.)

1. Think beyond the classroom setting.
In the recently published National Writing Project book, Teaching the New Writing, the editors point out that for teachers to integrate new media technologies into their classrooms, they "need to be given time to investigate and use technology themselves, personally and professionally, so that they can themselves assess the ways that these tools can enhance a given curricular unit."

The emerging new media landscape offers more than just teaching tools--it offers a new way of thinking about communication, expression, and circulation of ideas. We would do well to remember this as we devise strategies for getting teachers involved in educational communities online. After all, asking a teacher who's never engaged with social media to use it in the classroom is like asking a teacher who's never used the quadratic equation to teach Algebra.

Anyone who knows me knows what a fan of blogging I am. I proselytize, prod, and shame people into blogging--though, again, not because I think blogging is the best new practice or even necessarily the most enjoyable one. Blogging is just one type of practice among a constellation of tools and practices being adopted by cutting edge educators, scholars, and Big Thinkers across all disciplines. Blogging was, for me, a way in to these practices and tools, and I do think blogging is one of the most accessible new practice for teacherly / writerly types. The immediacy and publicness of a blogpost is a nice preparation for increased engagement with what Clay Shirky calls the “publish, then filter” model of participatory media. This is a chaotic, disconcerting, and confusing model in comparison to the traditional “filter, then publish” model, but getting in synch with this key element of participatory culture is absolutely essential for engaging with features like hyperlinking, directing traffic, and identifying and writing for a public. In a larger sense, connecting with the publish, then filter approach prepares participants to join the larger social networking community.

2. Cover all your bases--and stop thinking locally
One of the neatest things about an increasingly networked global community is that we're no longer limited to the experts or expertises of the people who are within our physical reach. Increasingly, we can tap into the knowledge and interests of like-minded folks as we work to seed a new community.

Backing up a step: It helps, in the beginning for sure but even more so as a tiny community grows into a small, then medium-sized, group, to consider all of the knowledge, experience, and expertises you would like to see represented in your educational community. This may include expertise with a variety of social media platforms, experience in subject areas or in fields outside of teaching, and various amounts of experience within the field of education.

3. In covering your bases, make sure there's something for everyone to do.
Especially in the beginning, people participate when they feel like they a.) have something they think is worth saying, b.) feel that their contributions matter to others, and c.) can easily see how and where to contribute. I have been a member of forums where everybody has basically the same background and areas of expertise; these forums usually start out vibrant, then descend into one or two heavily populated discussion groups (usually complaining or commiserating about one issue that gets up in everyone's craw) before petering out.

Now imagine you have two teachers who have decided to introduce a Wikipedia-editing exercise into their classrooms by focusing on the Wikipedia entry for Moby-Dick. Imagine you have a couple of Wikipedians in your network who have extensive experience working with the formatting code required for editing; and you have a scholar who has published a book on Moby-Dick. This community has the potential for a rich dialogue that supports increasing the expertise of everybody involved. Everybody feels valued, everybody feels enriched, and everybody feels interested in contributing and learning.

4. Use the tool yourself, and interact with absolutely everybody.
Caterina Fake, the founder of Flickr, says that she decided to greet the first ten thousand Flickr users personally. Assuming ten thousand users is several thousand more than you want in your community, you might have the time to imitate Fake's example. It also helps to join in on forums and other discussions, especially if one emerges from the users themselves. Students are not the only people who respond well to feeling like someone's listening.

Use the tool. Use the tool. Use the tool. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. You should use it for at least one purpose other than seeding and feeding your community. You should be familiar enough with it to be able to answer most questions and do some troubleshooting when necessary. You should be able to integrate new features when they become available and relevant, and you should offer a means for other users to do the same.


5. Pick a tool that supports the needs of your intended community, and then use the technology's features as they were designed to be used.
Though I put this point last, it's the most important of all. You can't--you cannot--build the right community with the wrong tools. Too often, community designers hone in on a tool they have some familiarity with or, even worse, a tool that they've heard a lot about. This is the wrong tack.

What you need to do is figure out what you want your community to do first, then seek out a tool that supports those practices. If you want your community to refine an already-established set of definitions, approaches, or pedagogical tenets, then what you're looking for is a wiki. If you want the community to discuss key issues that come up in the classroom, you want a forum or chat function. If you want them to share and comment on lesson plans, you need a blog or similar text editing function.

Once you've decided on the functions you want, you need to stick with using them as god intended. Do not use a wiki to post information that doesn't need community input. Don't use a forum as a calendar. And don't use a blog for forum discussions.

It's not easy to start and build a community, offline or online. It takes time and energy and a high resistance to disappointment and exhaustion. But as anybody who's ever tried and failed (or succeeded) to start up a community knows, we wouldn't bother if we didn't think it was worth the effort.

Applying the abundance model to the classroom

In a recent Wired article called "Tech is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity," Chris Anderson considers the difference between a scarcity management model and an abundance model. His point is linked to management of technology resources; he writes that

[i]f you're controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating. There are real costs associated with those half-hour chunks of network time, and the penalty for failing to reach tens of millions of viewers with them is calculated in red ink and lost careers. No wonder TV executives fall back on sitcom formulas and celebrities—they're safe bets in an expensive game.

But if you're tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low. Nobody gets fired when your YouTube video is viewed only by your mom.

Anderson's point is that when resources--in this case, willing content producers with cheap production tools--are abundant, we need to rethink how we structure, market, and make money off of content.

The point, though linked to media marketing models, might easily be applied to the domain of education. The following graphic accompanies Anderson's piece:




Clearly, the abundance model as presented here aligns with the spirit of participatory culture, at its heart an egalitarian, anti-hierarchical movement wherein cultural decisions become crowdsourced. Here's where many school policies confuse scarcity and abundance: They block participatory media (including YouTube, many social networking sites, and sometimes Google and Wikipedia) and evaluate students based on their ability to repeat back to the teacher (or testmaker) the big ideas of the class. Knowledge, in this case, is treated as a scarce resource, when in a participatory culture knowledge is almost the most abundant thing we have.

What would it look like to apply an abundance model to the classroom? What new roles can and should teachers and students play in an egalitarian classrom in which "everything is permitted unless it is forbidden"? What's the difference, practically speaking, between a "command and control" classroom and a class without that type of control?

Important questions to chew on. More soon.