Where’s the mouse ?
Posted by: mimanifesto on: September 19, 2008
I’ve got my name in TESS again this week – but this time it’s an article I wrote a few weeks ago (so I get paid for it this time !) It’s based on the Clay Shirkey talk about the idea of cognitive surplus. Now TESS in their wisdom have edited it and changed the jist of it a little… you can read the published version here http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6002753
Or…. here is the original, wot I wrote, as they say. I think this version is really what I meant to say in writing the article…
Recently, I watched a video of a talk given by the author Clay Shirky. During the talk, he used the term ‘Cognitive Surplus’ to describe the amount of time we have which is not used up by our work and therefore available for thinking. The argument goes something like this; since the end of the Second World War, more and more people have increased amounts of leisure time and that they are invariably drawn to methods of social invention devised to control how this time is used. The late twentieth century instrument of mass control is of course the television, primarily sit-coms, soap opera and increasingly, reality shows. Shirky argues that this is actually quite an unproductive use of time and when you consider that in the USA during every weekend, 100 million hours are spent watching television adverts you can maybe see his point (this is twice the amount of time it took to create every page in Wikipedia – every weekend!). Even scaled down to UK proportions, it’s still a significant amount of time which could perhaps be better spent, even if perhaps only one percent of this time is shifted away to more productive use. The story used to illustrate this in the video is quite profound. It’s a scenario we can all picture quite easily. A parent sitting with a young child watching a DVD when all of a sudden the child jumps of the sofa and disappears behind the TV set. When the parent goes and investigates, the child is found moving the wires behind the set about as if searching for something. When questioned as to why she asks “Mummy, where’s the mouse?” Surely media that is targeted at us but does not include us should be prompting the question “is this actually worth sitting through?”.
For the first time since the advent of television, this current generation of kids are actually watching less each week than the one before. Maybe they have wised up to this waste of their personal cognitive surplus and made the shift towards more productive activity. What are they doing with this time then? This can be answered with two words; Social networking. Our students increasingly spend more of their time producing, sharing and consuming this games and web 2.0 based content. True creative digital natives indeed. So should we as educators not be harnessing this creativity by adapting our own classroom practices to suit their preferred media instead of stifling it with outdated and increasingly irrelevant pedagogies?
This is why I have such high hopes for GLOW. I’ve been using it in my classroom now for nearly a year and have seen some outstanding gains in attainment from pupils using it (my research has just been published by the GTCS). I’ve tried to adopt an approach to using GLOW which harnesses the power of the new media together with the natural creativity of our young people and it’s already paying off big style. The kids love it. They create, share, collaborate and evaluate their own work and that of their classmates. It might not be the most sophisticated set of ICT tools and won’t satisfy the technophiles but for classroom teachers, it’s a great leap forward into the world our pupils already inhabit. These creative kids are not afraid of getting it wrong. They know that sooner or later, an idea will work and so they persevere. Do we stifle these creative qualities in schools by squashing individuality for the perceived common goal of academic success? (after all, not everybody wants to become a university academic) rather than educating young people for the real world with useful skills such as information retrieval and teamwork rather than the ability to memorise lists of facts and figures?
Our young people are showing us the way forward by more effective use of their cognitive surpluses. We have to follow if we want to engineer an education system which is fit for purpose. Fit for their purpose, in this day and age. After all, their working lives will span the next forty years or so. To put some perspective on this, think about all the things that have been discovered in the last forty years. We are educating them for a world we don’t yet know much about, and they need the skills to enable them to adapt to change. So when we are planning classroom activities, let’s think ‘create’ ‘consume’ ‘share’. Should we not be asking that earlier question again but this time about our own teaching…”where’s the mouse?”
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