Pedagogy of Abundance

For much of human history, education has operated according to an ‘economics of scarcity’. What does this mean? According to Martin Weller from the Open University (UK), in his 2011 article titled “A pedagogy of abundance” (available on JSTOR), I would summarize the underlying factors as:

·      Expertise in a subject area is scarce

·      Access to the experts is limited

·      Materials for content knowledge are physical and not easily distributed

 

But thanks to today’s digital technology that allows myriad interconnections in the blink of an eye, we are in a situation where ‘knowledge’ is abundant. There’s so much of it now that the bigger problem is separating the valuable nuggets from the false, nonsensical, and misleading. We want our students to be life-long learners. Their digital worlds are steeped in having access to an abundance of content knowledge. (Whether they can learn from it is a different issue.) How can we help them live and learn in this milieu of abundance?

 

Of the three aforementioned factors, one has clearly been overturned. Materials for content knowledge are abundant and easily distributed. It’s very easy to copy 1’s and 0’s thanks to the underlying digital format, and to push this through the internet infrastructure at close to the speed of light. As to access to experts, technically this should be easier with modern telecommunications and crowdsourcing from online communities, but finding what you need might require wading through a marsh of gobbledygook. And it’s only getting worse. Disinformation is much easier to spread than verified correct information. It used to be the case that if I was looking up data (usually a physical constant), that the first term on a web search engine would give me the correct information. Now that’s no longer the case, as my students discover to their chagrin.

 

Expertise in a subject area, I would argue, remains scarce. Of course this depends on the level of knowledge you want to access. College-level chemistry? I’d say that knowledge is relatively scarce. On the occasions that I happen to wander into a Q&A website, often superficial knowledge is repeated and proliferates. I started looking because I regularly assign pre-class questions to students. They no longer look in a textbook but do a quick web search, and then parrot those answers back to me, some of which are just plain wrong. Others are misleading. Some turn out to be correct, but it is increasingly more miss than hit.

 

While I’ve ditched the textbook in P-Chem (and I’m liking it), I have yet to do so in G-Chem. But I have been thinking about restructuring my G-Chem course to get students to look up and use more data from the internet and how to suss out more reliable sources. This is partly because students no longer own their chemistry textbooks but rent them digitally for a semester. This is both cheaper and requires carrying a heavy book. In Weller’s article, he suggests principles of leveraging a ‘network’ of learning. Here’s my summary.

·      We encounter abundant and varied content that is easy to share.

·      Organizing groups or communities of learning is both easier and more fluid.

·      User-generated content can be constantly corrected and updated by the community.

·      Today’s student must learn to be adept at navigating an ever-changing knowledge environment.

Learning challenging content such as chemistry beyond a superficial understanding doesn’t get any easier, even with all this. I think that’s why I have job security – at least while such expertise is recognized and valued. A day may come when folks may “gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (to quote the Bible). In some quarters, that day is already here.

 

Weller makes two comments at the end of his article: “How can [educators] best take advantage of abundance in their own teaching practice, and secondly how do we best equip learners to make use of it?” Weller also makes the cautionary note: “Abundance does not apply to all aspects of learning, indeed the opposite may be true, for example an individual’s attention is time-limited. The abundance of content puts increasing pressure on this scarce resource, and so finding effective ways of dealing with this may be the key element in any pedagogy.” That’s one challenge I’ve been pondering. When I try new activities in class, I sometimes overestimate the ability of students to cut through the noise and focus on the key important things. But that’s what experts do while novices flail. A data-rich open-source version of G-Chem will certainly have its challenges. But in the long-term, this approach may be more important and applicable for life-long learning.