Beloit has a wireless network now. Buzz and I are sitting with our tibooks in Cafe Bio in Chamberlin Hall at Beloit College getting started on our BioQUEST experience. Buzz, Don, Tom, and I all have asperations to be the "BioQUEST Tibook Mafia". Our activities as mafiosi are off to a good start. Buzz and I got up early and walked downtown to get a bagel. BioQUEST is starting at 12:30, so we've been meeting informally with folks, meeting new people and renewing connections with old friends. I remember John Jungck describing the BioQUEST workshops as "beginning conversations worth continuing". The conversations this morning have already been very rich.
When I was a graduate student, I had a sense that there was going to be a "digital divide" between technology haves and have-nots. Since I've arrived at UMass, I've been focused on issues other than equity: mainly just focusing on our students. One the BioQUESTrians described working with various disenfranchised groups and made me feel inspired to go seek out populations I could help back in Massachusetts -- Holyoke comes to mind. Buzz and I have thinking about the BioGeographyModule and maybe we could tie it into technology equity issues in Holyoke.
One other thing I've wanted to do for a while is organize a course that would travel out west, to look at biology, geology, and history. Here is a 
model for how to do it well.
After lunch, Ethel Stanley introduced BioQUEST and discussed how technology is transforming biology. BioQUEST is becoming increasingly project oriented -- Ethel described how initial collaborations around the Biology Workbench led to a series of grants and on-going projects.
After everyone else had introduced themselves, John Jungck provided a history of himself and BioQUEST and the key ideas that had guided its ontology: a history of educational reform from sputnik and Jerome Bruner's Process of Education to Bio2010: a recent NRC report. Many, many interesting ideas. One idea particularly struck Tom. John pointed out that, although we may be the minority (we who are devoted to learning, rather than teaching), there is a particularly pernicious idea that teaching is not highly valued by faculty. This may be true at research institutions, but most faculty work at teaching institutions where teaching (supposedly) is highly valued.
BioQUEST staff conducted a series of workshops after lunch on some of BioQUEST's resources. I attended two workshops: one on data acquisition and image analysis the other on the Lifelines case studies. Afterwards was a panel discussion. The panel discussion became fairly contentious at points. It wasn't clear to me why it was constructed as a panel discussion -- it seemed to create an 'us-vs-them' atmosphere. While we were waiting for people to come in, Buzz indicated the cover of the title of this year's workshop: Enabling Exploration for Everyone, Everytime, Everywhere. "Why aren't we doing this now?" Buzz said I should propose that we start using a wiki to begin capturing and organizing the ideas that people had. I demurred saying that, given what I knew of how these workshops usually went, that suggesting that the team adjust their game plan was asking for trouble. Buzz went ahead and suggested it anyway and it got shot down almost instantly. The discussion seemed to center on the obstacles that people confront in adapting and using BioQUEST products, which elicted a number of defensive jabs by the panel. They seemed to have some different agenda for us, but were reluctant to share it openly. Maybe they'll tell us tomorrow.
A number of interesting points came out of the discussion. A critical one is the idea that by the time we get students, they are already done for. Later in the evening, Alan Kay would use a statement attributed to Marshall McLuhan "I don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish." At the panel discussion, it was said, "what is mother culture saying to the students about teaching and learning." When I was a graduate student in education, I spent a lot of time being critical of education. I think a fairly good case can be made that our country's model of education is a form of social violence practiced against the young and powerless. All of their contributions to society are devalued and they are incarcerated and required to do busy-work until all of their potential excitement about the world is squeezed out of them.
I spent a lot of time developing a vision for what I thought education ought to look like. My vision was a collaborative one-room school house with mixed-age children from a 10-12 families, as many parents as the families could contribute, and a teacher who would consult with the collaborative to provide guidance and direction. The school would take on community projects and use them as authentic learning opportunities. They might create and publish a flora for a nature preserve and use it to produce a brochure for visitors. They might organize a picnic for the elderly and figure out costs and conduct publicity. They might develop a public service announcement about something they thought was important, creating artwork, scripts, and learning how to operate the cameras at the community access television station. Everything they would do would have real value and all of the people would have a stake in what activities the collaborative took on.
Then I went out and got a job. My job is rearranging deck chairs. I don't know if I'm on the Titanic or not, but it sure feels like it. People say that if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. But what does everything look like when all you have are deck chairs? And how do you stop the Titanic from sinking? That's not really fair, but the point is that when you're within the system, you have very limited potential to transform how it works. I can make whatever pattern with the deck-chairs that I like (as long as the passengers don't complain too loudly -- one guy really doesn't want me to move his. Another guy really wants to just sit on the deck. I'm probably better off not messing with them. I just move the other chairs around), but no matter what I do with the deck chairs, the ship keeps taking on water.
Alan Kay went through a brief history of computing and then did an extended demonstration of squeak. He had a lot of really interesting stuff to say. Here are just a few brief echoes.
One of the biggest problems is what he called a "centralized mindset". This is the illusion that you can get a top-down view of a system and understand how it works. Instead, he had the realization that a more useful view is from within -- from the point of view of the nodes or entities on the inside that can see its neighbors. This was the insight that led him to develop the idea of objects and object-oriented programming. But he applied it more generally to thinking about systems, including education. He described a bunch of the insights that he drew from in developing his vision: Einstein, Bruner, Papert, etc., and developed a synthesis that, for kids anyway, if something isn't so interesting and so fun that you love it and are driven to do it, then it isn't worth learning. For adults, he seemed more generous and said
There comes a point in our lives when you decide you're going to learn something and you just sit down and learn it.
This is very consistent with my own thinking: what do you think is important enough that its worth spending your own time (and not just classtime) doing it?
The squeak demo blew me away. I need to learn more about squeak and croquet. The whole environment is tiny, complete, and completely deconstructable. Students can take it apart and then copy and reuse all of the primitive elements however they want. Most of it uses click, drag, and drop to build scripts and to link parameters and variables. He demonstrated a bunch of of increasingly complex models until he showed that his entire presentation was just one element in a 3-D, immersive, croquet panel that he'd been zoomed in on. Pretty incredible stuff.