I’m always interested in helping teachers master that difficult balancing act between helping students learn today’s essential skills and teaching new skills required for future success. I found Lessig’s new book REMIX and Lessig’s TED talk pretty illuminating. It offered me a new way to think about the importance of ideas like the Read / Write WEB and why we should promote learning through student generated content – even for our most struggling students.
REMIX describes how participation in society and “culture creation” shifted from active (all of us doing it) to passive (big companies creating it and us watching and listening) many years ago. The original technologies of broadcast made us passive listeners rather than active creators. Now – it has shifted back to active, but our kids also have the tools of the broadcast media companies at their disposal.
Lessig offers John Phillip Souza’s prescient testimony against the dangers of the “talking machine” to explain the dangers of passive culture.
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left.
-John Philip Sousa
Sousa believed that children could develop a deep understanding of artistic work because they were actively engaged in making their own. And as talking machines (and big media) removed the need to sing and share music, people would become less able to interpret what they were hearing.
Today, our kids are creating again, but not always from scratch. They are in fact, turning off the TV in large numbers, and getting online to create and remix swaths of video, music, and other media (their culture.) As they remix, they reinterpret, and perhaps they learn. They offer us a glimpse of where culture creation is going. They are also breaking the law in the process… copyright law.
Why does this matter to us as educators?
We are required to ensure that kids master specific content and skills. But if the underpinnings of the culture and content creation emerging in the 21st century is one that is largely made by us (a difficult idea to really wrap your head around) and not just purchased and passively consumed from large media companies – what skills do our students need? Think about it.
We know that this generation is already forcing a change on many businesses, and creating whole new 21st century jobs etc. Journalists are having to become bloggers, marketing executives are finding that they can’t just tell us what to buy, but are having to become online community facilitators, etc. (“No sage on the stage” doesn’t just apply to teachers anymore). These are signs of the new communication, collaboration, creativity, analysis and information literacy skills .. espoused by ISTE and other groups.
The saving grace here is that many of our kids are leading the way. They are learning some of these skills, essentially unmediated… in spite of schools that ban the practice, and in spite of copyright laws that render them criminals…
For a few other choice examples of remixed content (created by kids but not approved for your students) see lessig’s video talk TED talk.
And for those who are accountability advocates – we can’t ignore this because it feels impossible to measure. If anything, this offers a direction for assessment innovation – assessing performance, innovation, and creative thinking. Until that we can measure these new cultural participatory basic skills, …we will narrow instruction if we only teach to the test. So in the meantime, allow your kids to remix a little after the test is over. (See www.fanfiction.org)
