¶18

Significant educational change generally results from complex processes of social construction, yet professional educators and the general public too often do not think about the problems of reforming and improving educational efforts in this way. In recent decades, American educators, especially those ensconced in schools of education, have relied heavily on linear flow models for improving educational practice. Here educators ape the practices of the military, of industry and commerce. Linear flow models, if applicable at all, make most sense in managing large-scale engineering projects or the development of new or improved products for a variety of mass markets. According to the simplest version of this model, researchers discover, be it by serendipity or system, valuable properties or techniques. Developers prepare them for the market, testing and validating them for performance, safety, and cost. Management allocates capital to the innovation and develops both production lines and distribution channels. Aroused by advertising, the public finds itself enjoying the benefits of nylons, scotch tape, and Viagra. Variations on this theme of linear application abound – a causal flow moves from the origination of an idea to its elaboration in a plan, which provides the specifications controlling the work of implementation, with the evaluation of results through market returns or stipulated performance measures following in turn. This model has great simplicity. Innumerable people use it to describe diverse forms of activity in technology, science, medicine, industry, government, war, and education. [Note 17]

¶19

Albeit simple, this model is often unsound. Historians of technology have been finding more intricate models necessary to make sense of the way that 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, more or less parallel ways. Further, the emergence of the telephone as a social system required all sorts of non-technical people to form understandings of how to integrate use of it into the daily conduct of their lives. Some uses worked, others did not. Slowly, from bright schemes and dumb, from many trials and many errors, from innumerable differentiated actions, the telephone developed as a system in use, passing from an odd device to a ubiquitous resource in all aspects of daily life. [Note 18] Virtually every major innovation arises through such many-sided efforts. Confronting such complexities, historians of technology have increasingly displaced 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. Those actions cohere into a significant development because people base them on shared understandings of the potentialities implicit in the historical processes underway. [Note 19]

¶20

In deciding what to do with changing conditions, educators are engaging in the social construction of a new educational system. It is coming about through a diversity of innovations taken here and there by people who share, to varying degrees, a common understanding of what potentialities arise in our world of practice with the new technologies. [Note 20] Social action is far less precise and predictable than programmatic action is, but it is at the same time much more implacable and consequential. Programmatic action depends on explicit instructions. Social action results from the shared comprehension of possibilities, in this case from the potentialities arising through the use of information technology in education. Around the world, people working with the new technologies in education are widely orienting their efforts with reference to a shared, distinctive sense of the pedagogical opportunities that these technologies make feasible. This shared, distinctive sensibility amounts to a powerful basis for sustained social action – constructivist, progressive, inquiry-based, learner-centered, egalitarian and inclusive. . . . We can nurture the implementation of these possibilities through social action by bringing ideas about them to fuller awareness through reflection. [Note 21]

¶21

Bringing ideas about implicit possibilities fully to consciousness helps combat an important drag on social action – cultural lag. A common response to changing conditions, whether in education or other domains, is the passive reaction that arises with the failure to perceive the full scope of the new possibilities inherent in significant technical innovations. 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 actually historically contingent. Passive reactions by educators amount to an inert effort to employ new information technologies to make the existing educational system work better, without significant changes in the structures and functions of the system. Educators thus act as if the given system is timeless and permanent. This course is fraught with ironies. Applying new technologies to current procedures, expecting given arrangements to work better but to remain essentially unchanged, neither introduces transformative improvements intentionally nor ensures continuity and permanence. Instead, by inadvertence, conditions for radical departures are put in place and innovators at the margin of institutional practice begin to have palpable success. Over time, the pressure of their success forces fundamental change from within, without providing a vision of where that change should lead. The human costs can be great. [Note 22] If too susceptible to cultural lag, educators risk being caught unawares in a cascade of unexpected transformations. We can do better in our extended present by recognizing that the task facing us is to reconstruct the whole system in ways that allow educators to use new communications resources to overcome the inherent, structural deficiencies of the current system.

¶22

As educators bring ideas about implicit possibilities fully to consciousness, a second distraction for social action arises, programmatic encapsulation. To grasp the opportunities inherent in changing conditions, educators need to adopt a full, sustained, and active course based on our sense of potentiality for education, but we cannot rely on precisely planning that course. Modernity puts a premium on control and predictability, which can become a compulsion to be unduly specific about the actualization of possibilities. And educational institutions, in which predictability has long since become a fetish, are the most modern of modern institutions, having largely taken their present shape as putatively rational bureaucracies in the sixteenth century. Schools as we know them are one big plan, from the lesson plan expected daily from every teacher, through the curriculum scope and sequence, to the plan that governs every potential innovation. Reconstruction of the whole educational system is a supremely complicated process, one that does not come about by promulgating a neat plan and implementing it straight away. Education, like other domains of complex activity, turns on a myriad of significant variables. A plan cannot take all of these into account. Unexpected interactions begin to drive implementation. Hence, almost invariably educational plans do not work: plans address only a few of the innumerable variables determining results; plans deploy resources that are too limited relative to the scale of intended effects; and plans are subject to rigorous evaluation of results long before the actions they prescribe could take palpable effect. [Note 23]

¶23

As a human experience, education is both an intensely personal process that unfolds over twenty years or more of an individual's life and a ubiquitous social operation that involves billions of persons the world around. It is too complicated for educators to plan a reconstructed system conceptually or implement it predictably. We can, however, shape an emerging system over time, effectively constituting key features of it through a process of social construction, if we develop a concerted sense of shared directions.

¶24

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 can 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 we stand and what we can do. 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, José Ortega y Gasset, would put it. [Note 24] 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 embryonic to the mature. This probe may prove apposite to the degree that educators, on reflection, hold a similar, shared understanding of the educational situation. [Note 25] And then the probe can take on some power if it helps educators act with greater awareness of the common potentialities inherent in our situation as we adopt diverse programs and actions. [Note 26]

¶25

What educational options do the new technologies significantly empower, and how do they do that, and why do they have those empowering effects? What sorts of pedagogical options do educators sense the innovations in digital technology are empowering? Life poses such questions to us. Educators respond with a widespread, shared understanding that new technologies empower a significant transformation of the educational system, enabling it to become constructivist, progressive, inquiry-based, learner-centered, egalitarian, inclusive, and much more effective. Engagement with the new technologies engenders among educators a basic understanding 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.

¶26

Social construction is a meaningful form of practical action, particularly with respect to complex historical developments such as the uses of new media in education. Social construction takes place in various domains as diverse individuals orient their activities with reference to shared ideas about what is feasible and desirable. Action in the midst of real circumstances always consists in small, concrete repetitions or innovations, not grand departures. How then does a significant historical change occur? It occurs when a myriad of small innovations in the midst of real circumstances gain a cumulative impact because each orients towards a common transformative possibility. Individual actions then aggregate into a grand departure, a social construction of a new reality. A willingness to engage in social construction brings educators to a third topic, that concerning the stakes of educational leadership.

¶27

Educators must develop a shared vision. Without an orienting vision that points to a significant departure, social construction reproduces given arrangements in successive generations. Without vision, social action consists in small historical repetitions. Their aggregate the amounts merely to an extension of the status quo. To force change through social construction, people often concentrate on a binary opposition between given actualities and new possibilities. This opposition frees people from the weight of historical inertia. As diverse people in diverse circumstances choose to act in pursuit of a clear-cut departure from the norm, they reinforce each other and enable themselves to develop more and better, concrete innovations in specific situations. Revolutions are clearest as they take place simplistically on the level of guiding principles. Continuity asserts itself as people engage the obdurate details of life. [Note 27] The social construction of historical change comes about as many people in many situations develop similar understandings of the potentialities inherent in an historical situation. Development of the telephone system exemplified this process. Efforts to reduce the harm to health from smoking or poor diet do too. Even the simple but excruciatingly complicated process of replacing Anglo-American weights and measures with the metric system provide an example, one that may prove to be an historic failure, so complicated is the change. In social construction, people act on a shared understanding, enabling them to work, independently yet in concert, towards distant and demanding purposes. In this way, powerful goal-directed actions emerge in history. [Note 28] This is the practical value of thought for action – clarity of vision allows people to adapt coherent, distributed innovations spontaneously to the complexity of divergent circumstances.

¶28

We need to form an orienting vision and through it to engage the issue of educational leadership. With the educational uses of new technologies, whose vision is gaining historic significance? Can educators shape the emerging system? Or does historic power lie elsewhere? Educators are developing a vision of new pedagogical possibilities as we work to integrate digital technologies into the educational process. This vision becomes evident in a rather sharp, binary opposition between traditional education and the new system under social construction. Can educators as a social group make it into the orienting vision effective in the social construction of a new pedagogical system? That is the core question. If educators lack sufficient social power to exercise historically significant leadership, there is little point to an agenda of practical action. The educators' agenda may be there. As diverse educators act in diverse ways on the basis of a shared sense of new potential, we begin to change the character of our general practice. Thus as a distinctive group, we have an historical mission at the current juncture, but do we have sufficient public power to pursue it with historical effect and cultural meaning? If not, despite our best efforts, we are recapitulating the status quo or serving as agents implementing a social vision of possibilities derived from the experience of other, more powerful groups.