the zone of privileged development

In the latest issue of Innovate, Stephen Downes uses the Archbishop of Canterbury to pry open Facebook and explain what’s really going on. (Nobody but Downes would have tastes so catholic and insight so witty.) Among other things, the article shows how lively the Innovate journal can be;  Innovate has been around for a few years and its archive is full of fresh thinking and valuable research about tech and teaching – nothing is off-limits. My TESOL instructors fainted at the mention of technology more modern than a cassette deck but Innovate keeps exploring clever stuff such as how cellphones might be used to teach. It’s about time they looked at Facebook and Downes offers perceptive insights.

Facebook is a frenzy, of course, and the attention becomes self-sustaining in different ways; big means money to the business writers; big means yesterday or tainted to the geeks. Downes slows things down and invests some time explaining exactly how the social network functions; he urges anyone designing an educational application to make the same serious effort to understand Facebook. And goes a step further:

“…the nature and popularity of Facebook itself challenges the idea of what an educational application should look like.”

The challenge is usually missed, even by the sharp guys and girls. Andy Carvin at PBS Teachers recently wrote about his own Facebook life and demonstarted genuine familiarity with the network and all the new applications that have been recently added:

…on my Facebook page I use apps that import summaries of my blog posts, my latest videos, text messages I’ve sent using Twitter, and my latest photos from Flickr.

For us Twitter-virgins, that sounds pretty wild.

Carvin covers some of the 4,000 new applications that ride on top of Facebook – it’s these apps, and the fact that membership is now open to everybody and not just university kids, that caused Facebook to become one of the most popular sites on the web. But Carvin complains with among the thousands and thousands of software gizmos, there are no real education apps. He doesn’t want to give up:

“There may be some hope, though. This fall, Stanford is offering a course on Facebook apps…”

Downes may not be among those who are shouting ‘hooray!’ because he believes Facebook is based on a different idea. In describing the social network, he shows clearly that Facebook was originally designed, not to carry content, but to connect college students into networks of friends. The new ‘open-to-everyone’ Facebook is still set up that way: networking first, content second – and second, in this case, can mean very trivial.

This is the point where Downes brings in the good Archbishop, Rowan Williams. Last year Williams was speaking in China about the nature of college life and he made the point that there is, in every society, a group of people who run things. In order to do so, they need to understand a wide set of interests and one of the efficient ways of doing this is to have networks of friends. The powerful need to learn how to make these networks. Williams is trying to be frank about what he calls the “profoundly political element in the university” (something his Chinese audience would know already) but, I think its fair to say, he sugar-coats it in a British mum/Anglican archbishop way; he calls what happens at college a “culture of converstaion” – kinda like university is one long afternoon of tea with the don.

Downes uses Williams’ notion of university life to reveal something cardinal about Facebook: FB is a social network in the same way that a university is a place where certain people learn to network. If that is true then Facebook is not failing to bring educational content to the world; rather, Facebook is succeeding at being the essence of the university: a place where (and here the cliché seems apt) who you know is more important than what you know.

It’s important to follow through, of course, because if you stop at ‘who you know’, it becomes a very cynical view. Downes has always been a believer in the notion that ‘education’ takes place as much outside the classroom as within it – perhaps even more outside. This is especially true, Downes has argued, when we communicate using various technologies, hard and soft. This seems accurate to me; I’ve always learned more arguing with fellow students than listening to lectures. So it might be more accurate to say that who you know is a critically important variable in determining what you know.

What Downes accomplishes in the Innovate article is to properly position Facebook historically and ideologically in the university, a place where privileged people learn to connect. FB was successful within the university setting because it facilitated those connections, facilitated learning how to network. It became a kind of new school for the old boys’ network: the zone of privileged development (with apologies to Vygotsky).

Downes’ subtle probe of Facebook brings a couple of questions to mind:

1. What happens now that FB has grown beyond the zone of privilieged development? It began life as a kind of training school for no-risk networking but it’s now out here in the real world with us non-Eloi. We don’t have plans to run the world but we still want to network – at least we want to make friends and do interesting things. Perhaps being friends with other Morlocks is inherently dull and the ‘browse and snooze’ factor will fade Facebook’s glossy lustre. Or, conversely, perhaps low-power networking has its own virtues and vitalities. I think the issue for Facebook’s future is not what apps are most popular but what networks are most interesting. And why. More research required.

2. For those of us interested in using Facebook to support a learning environment, the key question is this: How can we fuse interesting content into the networking process? If FB is a ‘zone of privileged development’, then I am far more interested in the possible development than in the much ballyhooed privilege. A few demos of Facebook-life that make interesting content shine because real people are turning the crank seems to me to fit the notion of development and provide the antidote to ‘browse and snooze’.

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