AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Hi, Bob

I’ve been tardy in acknowledging a lovely gift from Bob Carlton, a blog reader, church leader (and possible seminarian), and entrepreneur in technological and educational products. If I were to say that Bob sent a compilation CD of songs that he chose for Lenten listening, someone might think he violated copyright law; but no one could complain if I say that emailed me with a list of songs that seemed especially fitting for the season. Some I knew — who, with my taste, would not have heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Into the Fire”? — and some I recognized as I listened to them (The Blind Boys, Ben Harper, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, Rufus Wainwright). And David Sedaris’s report from Paris on learning French as a second language at Eastertime. But other songs were very new to me, and the compilation works beautifully together.

As I listened and thought about Bob, I thought about some of his earlier work in educational technology. Bob was involved with a couple of my least favorite programs (WebCT and the accursed BlackBoard) and was working the money-making side of the street. That’s OK with me; I’m not against folks earning a living. My argument with MegaCorp educational enterprises rests on the premise that they’re rushing to make the money that they can by providing “solutions” that prematurely constrict the commerical imagination relative to educational technology.

That’s not a fatal problem, of course; so long as tech/ed people like Liz, Alex, Anne, Sebastien Paquet, Sebatian Fielder, Jim McGee and countless others (and teachers like Trevor and me who have glimmers of intuition about possible aternatives), innovation will break through. If a company really got the cluetrainical gonzo marketing point, though, they’d see that perpetuating familiar models of “courseware” and even of commodified education offers only a short-term answer. They’d recognize that the digital transition will soon transform familiar products and practises, and would be funding experiments like Liz and Alex’s and the Disseminary. With a relatively low investment in experiments by educators who aren’t themselves R & D employees of the company, an alert entrepreneurial ed-tech company could observe what works and what doesn’t could indeed advance the rate of the transition and begin (ahead of competitors) to figure out how to make money under the transformed conditions.

Again, I’m not knocking Bob, who has generously offered his epxerience and insight to Trevor and me as we stagger along in our grandiose pedagogical experiment. thinking about his carreer, though, I wished that one of his former employers or clients were offering material support for the ventures that so excite me (and stand to benefit them, if they could see it).

[Postscript: After I finished typing, Bob sent a message reminding me that “on Monday, 24 March 1980, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez, was celebrating mass in the Chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia when he was killed by a professional assassin. . . .” One of the many websites that report on Romero’s life reports that he said, “Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.”]