I just learned about Silent Disco. Apparently, these things have been popular since 2008, but I’m late to the party.
Let’s say you are at a dance club, or on some rooftop, or in some abandoned warehouse that nobody knows about in a trendy part of town. Anyway, you’re at a place with dancing.
Everyone wears big goofy headphones to hear the tunes. The cool part is that the headphones usually have a couple of channels, so the dancers can pick what they want to hear. When you dance with somebody, you have to figure out if you are on the same channel or not.
With the headphones on, you’re at a dance club getting your groove on. Slip them off, and you’re at a nice quiet place to have a drink and talk. As long as you avoid crashing into all the weirdos silently dancing. The participants share space and time, but slip in and out of a variety of shared simultaneous experiences in order to maximize the value of their time. If your boyfriend loves dancing and you hate it, great! He can dance his tail off. You can watch sports at the bar in peace. But you are both still going to the same place, at the same time. And the club still gets your money.
This might be some hipster fad. But there’s a point: technology transforms a venue that sells a shared social experience from one experience to many, putting choice in the hands of the customer, and creating rich synergistic experiences. Loved dancing with that person? Great! You can actually have a conversation without screaming.
The dance club used to allow only one form of transmission: ear-splitting sub-woofers demanding that everyone dance to the same beat. Drowning out all other voices. So loud you can’t even think.
Sound familiar? Sounds like a traditional classroom to me. I’m not only criticizing lecture; great faculty have gone way beyond lecture. I think faculty today have done everything possible to update their teaching, so far as the tools we’ve given them allow. I’m focusing on the way most classroom tech insists on a master-servant relationship, like the old dance club. There’s a podium, a big screen, and you can take a break for group work. But it can’t all happen at the same time.
Universities are tackling this challenge a variety of ways, most depending on technology to transform the sociology of learning spaces. Some universities are launching large emporium classes (check out Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium) where students share huge computing spaces and use software to guide them through self-paced classes. These moves are controversial (“…the Wal-Mart of Higher Education”?). Many universities are redesigning classrooms to be more flexible, have multiple technology presentation points, and so on. Controversial or not, I think we are looking at some version of the future.
What if all those headphones in the silent disco adjusted beats and settings to the dancers? What if the headphones remembered you, what you liked, who you danced with? What if those headphones collected data about everything you did and used that information to customize your experience? I’m talking about a confluence of active learning spaces, learning analytics, and the Internet of Things (read the 2012 NMC Horizon Report). Future classrooms could offer simultaneous blends of teaching and learning experiences, customized for the learner.
I read someplace that Silent Discos sometimes use two different live DJs, each spinning on her own channel. Do they compete to get the dancers to switch to their channels? Who generates the most satisfaction for the dancers? Which DJ generates the most revenue for the club? With our hypothetical smart-headphones, the club would know. The day will come when students in the same course can consume material from multiple faculty, group projects, and other learning objects.
When this happens, what incentives will these new systems create? Will faculty compete for their audiences? Will institutions support faculty who get students through a course faster, rather than better?
These transformative technology practices could work like the Silent Disco, giving learners more choices, greater control, and the ability to participate in co-creating learning environments themselves, rather than relying on the dictatorship of the instructor. However, those headphones could also be used to decrease choice, rather than to increase it. To put learners in neat little boxes and seal them up tightly. You will be a teacher. You will be a farmer. You will probably fail and we shouldn’t invest in your retention.
In higher ed leadership, we talk a lot about these opportunities and challenges. We are fond of saying things like, “It is not a technology question.” We mean that somebody smarter than we should figure out the new pedagogical models and best practices before we even talk about what the tech can do. It is important for IT people to say this. Otherwise, we might give the impression that we believe in throwing iPads at problems until the problems go away.
I’ve come to believe, however, that our communities can’t comprehend the intellectual questions until we can comprehend the technology. I don’t think it would have been possible for the world to conceive of the power and danger of the nuclear age until it was upon us. I don’t mean theoretically, I mean until we saw the devastation. I can’t imagine Woodrow Wilson leaning back in his chair figuring that one out ahead of time.
I’m not saying that we should spend all sorts of money and run headlong installing new analytics software, handing out connected devices, and piping in faculty from all over the world to emporia-style courses. Yet.
I’m saying that IT people need to keep showing leadership, rather than waiting for the academic conversations to fully resolve themselves. We need to demonstrate the power of these technologies, carefully. We need to spur conversations before our campuses are left behind. We need to intervene if our campus leaders consider choices that put our institutions into ethical or legal gray zones. In fact, we can go further. We can become futurists.
The experts that predict what will work and what won’t. When to invest and when to run for cover. It’s a far different role for IT than fixing computers and keeping the internet turned on.
Alternatively, we could just ask Sergey. He’s already got the headphones glasses.