In 1971, Ivan Illich wrote that “[m]ost learning is … the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting” (1971, p. 44).

Since we have been asked to write about our vision of the most important ways that multimedia records of teaching (MRTs) can contribute to the improvement of education in the coming decade, I decided to return to Illich because his books have continued to guide me to become a better learner, teacher, researcher, colleague, video ethnographer, designer of video analysis “tools for conviviality” (1973), and most importantly, a better person. Illich reminds me to be my best self.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the rainy Vancouver day in 1972 when I received the marked-up, yet unpublished manuscript that Illich was passing to friends of friends of friends to read and send back with commentary. He created the term “learning webs”— which he called “networks” to reference services to educational objects, skill exchanges for learners, peer matching, and reference services to educators—and, in the act of passing his manuscript to readers using the tools available at the time, was 1) engaging others in issues, 2) sharing knowledge, and 3) providing access to resources. Indeed, he proposed these three principles as the basis for a good educational system (p. 78). And, indeed, we are using these same principles right now by adding our ideas to this website to build “public knowledge,” as our colleague John Willinsky (2005) might say.

Thank you, Lee and friends, for asking me to be part of this online learning web.

My interest in video technologies went hand-in-hand with my involvement with Illich’s theories. In the ferment and excitement of the 1970s, many young people took up video cameras to lay the foundations for an alternative to public broadcasting media. The idea behind my video portraits of people interviewed on the street and in what we called “encounter groups” was for people to reflect on their own thinking, and in many cases to view and discuss themselves in social settings. Years later, while conducting my doctoral studies at MIT, I was able to return to Illich and my early filmmaking experiences to focus on how to create a multimedia platform using computers and laserdisc technologies, which I called Learning Constellations (1989), to enable readers and viewers to video, annotate, cluster, create keyword tags, and search through databases of digital video to, as Illich would say, use “convivial tools” to access, engage, and share a video archive that was shot at the Hennigan School for research on learning and teaching. 

What I learned over these years using and designing multimedia and trying to adhere to Illich’s principles is that learning and teaching is about the relationship we form with each other within a culture, a society, and our world when we access and ensure access to resources that allow knowledge to be continually constructed by learners of any age, gender, race, socio-economic background, or geographical location. Moreover, we learning and teaching are not separate or isolated endeavors, but rather partners within the same process. This includes whenever we “teach” ourselves (or learn) or others something new through engagement with the natural and created world around us.

What an enormous challenge we face, now that we have the potential to not only use multimedia but also to be interconnected through emerging technologies to the extent that resources and access allows. We can no longer think of the future of learning and teaching within one country. To solve urgent global, ecological, and political problems, we are compelled to engage in issues, share knowledge, and provide access to learning resources globally. And we now have tools for not only connecting with each other, but also recording and keeping records of the growth of these learning cultures so that we can continually see (and read), interpret, and make meaning of what worked and what did not, under what circumstances and within which cultural, national, or ethnic perspective. Moreover, we can not only share our own and other’s perspectives—what I have often referred to as the Points of View-ing theory—but we can now layer these cultural “webs of signification,” (Geertz, 1973; quoting Max Weber) with our tools to build conclusions and meanings that include all stakeholders. For research purposes, sharing perspectives on issues is the basis of reaching configurational validity (Goldman-Segall, 1995); for educational purposes sharing perspectives on content with multimedia records of teaching and learning is one good route to more vivid and valued “pedagogical content knowledge” (Shulman, 1986).

My vision for MRTs is to use them to create a historical record of the growth of convivial educational communities where teachers and learners engage with each other and within their local and global communities in collaborative investigation to address issues that are or will become meaningful to them. In my own research practice, I was very fortunate to have worked with teachers, school administrators, and students at the Bayside Middle School from 1992-1995 on a project I initiated called The Global Forest. For two years we collaboratively investigated an endangered rainforest called Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Since I have previously written about it in Points of Viewing Children’s Thinking: A Digital Ethnographer’s Journey, I’ll simply add that when learners, teachers, and researchers work collaboratively to investigate a topic such as an endangered rainforest from every curricular area, share the experience of visiting logging sites and rainforests, and also use advanced video technologies to record, edit, and share these records using multimedia, a learning culture is created and archived. The visual records of the growth of cultures of teaching and learning and the written documents that describe them make possible the spawning of other cultures, much as we see occurring in social networking environments. This is the future of MRT, and for what we could call MRLs—“multimedia records of learning.”

I envision this kind of future education culture as a collaborative constructionist environment where teachers and students are research partners, building knowledge together by accessing curricular content and technological resources to reach new insights, new methods, new tools, and new solutions. In this setting, all forms of visual, aural, and intertextual records become layered and searchable archives of knowledge created, shared, and reused in much the same way that Illich’s manuscript was marked up and sent from reader to reader. Except better. These media forms (including text) can be interwoven and used in ways none of us can yet predict. Moreover, the databank of ethnographic accounts of what was happening when the camera was on—although not “the Truth,” because they are always being constructed from a cameraperson’s point of view—can become records that others use to make new meanings from their experiences, interpretations, and conclusions.

Let me propose a fictional case for what could happen in the classroom. A group of teacher/s and young people learn about acceleration by creating a range of objects falling to the ground from high places. In good design experiment practice and problem-based learning, the teachers and learners are engaged in a common activity. During this project, teachers provide and sometimes hold back their professional know-how, content background, and methods of group investigation to think more deeply, as a group, about mathematical and physical behaviors. Teachers and students use the resources available to them, including online wikipedia-type information sources; they build their own wikis or other shared learning environments or, perhaps, design physical structures out of available materials; and, they do what researchers do—ask questions within a community of practice. From time to time, a person in the group who seems to have a handle on the problem may explain it to others, hold a seminar, give a lecture, and propose exercises for others.  In some situations, this person may become the designated “teacher.” But the future teacher I am talking about would see herself or himself as the person who can create a convivial learning environment and be responsible for everyone’s learning, including her or his own. This person would be involved in a discovery of what happens in the acceleration project as well as what makes her or his teaching better by delving, (Roy Pea would say) “diving” (2007), into multimedia databanks to understand how acceleration or any other topic was taught in different, perhaps better, ways.

In short, I believe that with the spread of multimedia records of teaching and learning (MRTLs), will change dramatically over the next twenty years. The use of One Laptop Per Child, first conceived of by Seymour Papert in Mindstorms (1980) and now actualized by Nicholas Negroponte’s commitment to get the laptops made and distributed, engages students and teachers as learning and research partners, teaching each other about computing and about issues meaningful to them. While we have yet to see longitudinal studies about the impact of this approach, there are, within related constructionist learning environments, perhaps hundreds of examples in formal and informal learning settings around the world, doing what Dewey and Montessori proposed many years ago—learning by doing. Are we ready for the next step that our MRTs may help us to create? Will teaching be thought of as shared learning, shared teaching, and shared researching?

The nightmare we face is that governments around the world will shut down open, interactive, and convivial shared online spaces before we have the opportunity to create the kinds of international learning webs that will enable us to collaboratively work together on serious problems facing our planet in the coming decades.

A nightmare for MRTs is that a few people could abuse the privacy of the teachers and learners being videotaped. Another kind of nightmare would be to use our multimedia records to set standards for teaching and learning based on prerecorded standardized video commercial-like excerpts or “trailers,” rather than using the records as opportunities to collaboratively explore and grow our cultures together.

References

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Goldman-Segall, R. (1998). Points of viewing children’s thinking: A digital ethnographer’s journey. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Goldman-Segall, R. (1995). Configurational validity: A proposal for analyzing ethnographic multimedia narratives. Journal for Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 4(2/3), pp. 163-183.

Goldman-Segall, R. & Reicken, T. (1989). Thick descriptions: A tool for designing ethnographic interactive videodisks. SIGCHI Bulletin  21(2), pp. 118–122.

IIlich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Harrrow Books: New York: Harrrow Books.

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. Marion Boyars: New York: Marion Boyars.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Pea, R. (2007). Video workflow in the learning sciences: Prospects of emerging technologies for augmenting work practices. In Goldman, R., Pea, R., Barron, B., and Derry, S. (Eds.) Video research in the Learning Sciences. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Shulman,  L.  (1986).  Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 4-14.

Willinsky, J. (2005). The access principle: the case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.