12: In recent decades, American educators, especially those ensconced in schools of education, have relied heavily on linear flow models for improving educational practice. Such models make most sense in managing large-scale civil engineering projects or developing new or improved products for a variety of mass markets. By serendipity or system, researchers discover valuable properties or techniques. Developers prepare them for the market, ensuring that they are tested and validated for performance, safety, and cost. Management allocates capital to the innovation and develops production lines and distribution channels. Aroused by advertising, the public finds itself enjoying the benefits of nylons, scotch tape, and Prozac. Variations on this theme of linear application abound -- a causal flow moves from the origination of an idea to its elaboration in a plan that provides the specifications for implementation, which in turn is followed by the evaluation of results through market returns or stipulated performance measures. This model has great simplicity, and people use it to describe diverse forms of activity in technology, science, medicine, industry, government, war, and education.
13: Albeit simple, this model is not always sound. Historians of technology have been finding that more intricate models are necessary to make sense of the way in which complex technical systems develop. Contemporary telecommunications has not arisen through a simple linear flow from Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the telephone. As a technical system, the telephone required many different people, working at different times and places through different organizations, to solve many different technical problems. It resulted through a distributed accomplishment by diverse people and groups who understood the technical potentials of an emergent telephone system in similar, parallel ways. Further, the emergence of the telephone as a social system required all sorts of people to form understandings of how to integrate its use into their daily lives. Some uses worked, others did not. Slowly, from many trials and differentiated actions, the telephone developed from an odd device to a ubiquitous resource in all aspects of everyday life.[Note 5] Virtually every major innovation arises through such many-sided efforts. Confronting these complexities, historians of technology are increasingly displacing the model of linear flow with one of social construction, using the latter to show how major developments arise from independent actions by numerous people, with those actions cohering into a significant development because they are based on shared understandings of the potentialities implicit in the historical processes underway.[Note 6]
14: In deciding what to do with changing conditions, educators will engage in the social construction of a new educational system, one that will come about through diverse innovations undertaken here and there by people and groups that share, to varying degrees, a common understanding of what potentialities arise in their world of practice with the new technologies.[Note 7] This proposition may sound amorphous, but it will, if we stick with it, lead to a clear sense of what is to be done. Let us remember Aristotle's wise caution to seek "precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the phenomena admits."[Note 8] The class of things in question here is the shared comprehension of possibilities arising through the use of information technology in education. We aim to grasp those possibilities in thought and action. In preparation, let us first discard two frequent misunderstandings.
15: Passive reaction is a common response to changing conditions, whether in education or other domains; it arises when one fails to perceive any new possibilities arising with the changes. The classic instance of this reaction was the way in which early printers crafted books that looked exactly like illuminated manuscripts. Passive reactions attach a timeless necessity to arrangements that are historically contingent. Passive reaction by educators takes the form of inert efforts to employ new information technologies to make the existing educational system work better, without significantly changing the structural features of that system. This course is fraught with ironies. Applying new technologies to current procedures, expecting them to work better but to remain essentially unchanged, does not lead to significant improvements. Rather, it forces fundamental change from within, without providing a vision of where that change should lead. In this way, educators risk being caught unawares in a cascade of unexpected innovation. We can do better in our extended present by recognizing that the task facing educators is to reconstruct the whole system in ways that will allow it to use new communications resources to overcome the inherent, structural deficiencies of the current system.
16: To grasp the opportunities inherent in changing conditions, educators need to adopt an active course based on their sense of potentiality for education, but they cannot overly plan that course. The second misunderstanding lies in a compulsion to be unduly specific about the possibilities. As we have implied above, reconstructing the whole educational system is a supremely complicated process, one that will not come about by promulgating a neat plan and implementing it straight away. As a human experience, education is both an intensely personal process that unfolds over 20 years or more of an individual's life and a ubiquitous social operation that involves billions of persons the world around. It is so impossibly complicated that educators cannot conceptually plan or predictably implement a reconstructed system. They can, however, shape an emerging system over time, effectively constituting its key features through a process of social construction, if they develop a concerted sense of directions. Coherent historical change wells up from many different acts that move parallel in time, spontaneously coordinating around an understanding of possibilities, at once emergent yet shared. Educators will best define the pedagogical opportunities arising with changing conditions by concerting independent actions, by developing shared understandings and purposes, by crafting a new common sense of where they stand and what they can do.
17: This essay is an attempt to articulate from the field what such an emergent common sense might be. It is an act of reflection on practice, an "interpretation from within," as the great Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset, would put it.[Note 9] It states an understanding of the educational situation. It does not adduce arguments that this understanding is either the one true understanding or the only good and upstanding way to see things. It is a probe; it puts forth a proposition for test -- here is the basic understanding of the current juncture, an understanding that many educators share in a form that ranges from the tacit to the explicit, from the inchoate to the mature. This probe can prove correct to the degree that other educators, on reflection, find that they hold a similar understanding of the educational situation.[Note 10] And then the probe can take on some power if it helps educators act with greater awareness of shared potentialities as they adopt diverse programs and actions.[ Note 11]
18: Here we seek, through interpretation, an emergent sense of shared direction by concentrating on two topics. So far, we have been asking what educational options the innovations in digital technologies significantly empower, how they do that, and why they have those empowering effects. In response to the first question, we are suggesting that among educators, a widespread, shared understanding is emerging that these innovations are empowering a significant transformation of the educational system. Educators who engage with the new technologies understand that the fundamental problem to be addressed through education, the range of resources useful in addressing it, and the characteristic results of addressing it well are all open to historic transformation.
19: We are ready now, as a second topic, to seek a clear agenda of educational work and innovation that these new options are enabling educators to pursue effectively. The first topic has concerned how educators perceive the effect of technological innovation on the practical limits of change. The second concerns how new ranges of possibility lead educators to form a renewed and altered spectrum of public and professional imperatives for action. In the pages that follow, we offer an interpretative response to these questions. As educators perceive digital technologies to empower new options, what agenda for sustained effort do they think will make these options produce results of significant human value?
20: Throughout this discussion, we will be concentrating on a rather sharp, binary opposition between traditional education and the new system under social construction, without giving extended attention to the particular steps in the middle by which circumstances metamorphose from one to the other. Action in the midst of real circumstances always consists of small, concrete repetitions or innovations, not grand departures. How, then, does significant historical change occur? It occurs through the cumulative impact of small innovations in the midst of real circumstances, which, when oriented to a transformative possibility, can amount in the aggregate to the grand departure. Without an orienting vision, the likelihood is much higher that actions will consist primarily in the small historical repetitions that in the aggregate merely extend the status quo. Seeking change, we therefore concentrate on binary opposition to free ourselves from the weight of historical inertia, enabling us to develop more and better concrete innovations in specific situations.
21: Revolutions take place simplistically on the level of guiding principles. Continuity asserts itself as people immerse themselves in the obdurate details of life.[Note 12] The social construction of historical change comes about in a middle ground as many people in many situations develop similar understandings of the potentialities inherent in a historical situation. Acting on that understanding, they independently work in concert toward distant and demanding purposes. In this way, powerful goal-directed actions emerge in history. As new communications technologies take hold in practice, educators sense that new developments become feasible through them. As diverse educators act in diverse ways on the basis of this shared sense of new potential, they begin to change the character of general practice. Can these changes aggregate into an emerging new form of education?
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