Smelly Knowledge

I just finished reading (again!) But Not The Hippopotamus by Sandra Boynton to my one-year-old son (he’s at the point where he gets ecstatic about reading the same book over and over — Where’s Maisy? by Lucy Cousins is another one he loves again and again and again). To sum up the book, a hog, a frog, a cat, two rats, and assorted other animals are all doing fun activities which strangely rhyme with their names. Everyone, except, of course, the hippopotamus. The hippopotamus feels left out, but predictably they invite her to participate:

Then the animal pack/comes scurrying back,/saying, Hey! Come join the lot of us!
And she just doesn’t know–/should she stay? Should she go?
But YES the hippopotamus!
But not the armadillo.

What about that armadillo? As my job entails much thinking about learners “with special needs” or “with disabilities,” I can’t help but keep first the hippo and then the armadillo at the forefront of my mind when reading this book. Technology, beyond the basic accessibility affordances computers and other technology devices provide, has great potential for expanding inclusion. Online communities, producing for an audience, authentic learning tasks, folksonomies, multiple modes of media, all have potential for allowing learners previously unable to reach their full potential to do so. However, a paradox exists: whenever you increase the potential for an individual to succeed, you create barriers for others to do so. We have reached a condition in which Zeno’s paradox takes hold.

Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise states that the fast runner Achilles will never be able to catch up with the tortoise in a race — when the tortoise is given a head start — because when Achilles reaches where the tortoise was, the tortoise will have moved already. Such, it seems, is the way with technology. The technology catches up and helps to support certain cohorts of learners; other cohorts are still not supported, or an entirely new class of learners all of a sudden are left out because the new technology puts them at a disadvantage.

I’m not, of course, saying that we should throw out all new technologies. The web2.0 set actually speaks very well to my own style of learning. Instead, I think we should be open the idea that we need to recognize the possibility of new possibilities in learners even if it lies in old technologies.