The key is in the word ‘communication’ (as if that weren’t already a clue) and to ignore it is to demonstrate that you’ve missed the point about Web 2.0 entirely.

In this day and age, IT (Information Technology) should really be only used to describe the ‘inner’ workings of digital technologies – i.e., stuff that relates to Computer Science, hard coding, software development, hardware development, scripting, and all that. ICT (Information Communication Technology), on the other hand, should be used to refer to the social aspects of digital life, to Web 2.0, and to anything that funnels the flow of communications between people.

Thus, “I am an IT specialist” should be taken to mean “I have a functional knowledge of how the web works and I can write source code and run servers and do other awfully clever, technical things.” Whereas “I am an ICT guru” should mean, “I know how to find, evaluate, and effectively exploit for social ends the tools that other people have built.” Quite a different thing, really.

People tend to use the terms interchangeably, but that single word, ‘communication,’ makes all the difference because there’s quite a distinct skill set involved in successfully engaging with either. Just because you can write javascript doesn’t mean you know how to make the most of participatory culture.

Of course, watching a 13 year-old flitt around MySpace can be intimidating for someone who doesn’t know where to click, but that doesn’t mean that the 13 year-old fully understands all they need to in order to be digitally literate. So, let’s break this down a bit. I’d offer three main strands to digital literacy in the current era:

1. Functional digital literacy. In the age of Web 2.0, that doesn’t mean knowing how to hard code, or how to program, or how to write javascript — I don’t need to know what’s under the bonnet in order to drive the car. Instead, it means knowing how to sign up for a service and what happens after that; it means knowing how to find and add and invite friends; it means knowing how to upload a profile photo, etc., etc. Many kids have this kind of literacy, no doubt — the facility with the technology to know where to click.
2. Network digital literacy. Understanding what it means to be a networked citizen. That means knowing how to manage your profiles and identities online; knowing what happens to the material you upload; knowing about data management and understanding boyd’s four properties of networked publics, i.e., 1) persistence, 2) searchability, 3) replicability, and 4) invisible audiences. It also means risk management and knowing how to read and interpret Terms of Service and Privacy policies. Do most people (young or old) know what it means when Facebook asks for a “transferable, sub-licensable” license to their IP? No.
3. Critical digital literacy. This is perhaps the most crucial of the three, especially if we’re talking about how to use ICT to further cognition and to advance what Pierre Lévy refers to as collective intelligence. Critical digital literacy is about how to find, validate, interpret, communicate, analyse, critique, evaluate, synthesise, transform information and how to then use those skills in the participatory realm. It’s about higher-level thinking and engagement with cultural, social, political and intellectual life. In other words, it’s the big stuff.

What I’m saying is, don’t freak out when you think you’re being left behind because the kids are oh-so-clevva and teched up. Chances are you’ve already got the higher-order, intellectual skills you need to become a fully-rounded digital citizen. This in itself means that your network literacy should come along very quickly. And as for your functional literacy, well, just jump in there and play around a bit — you can’t break it

For the assignment, students were asked to buddy-up and then develop a wikispace around a particular topic. Patricia describes her experiences with using wikis in class,  her students’ attitudes towards using the wiki and the types of skills that they needed to succeed in the task, and what she’d do differently next time. You can also see a previous blog post for more information about Patricia’s assignment.

File size: 16.9 MB
Running time: 21.51

That’s my paper on digital literacy and human flourishing (pdf, 152 KB), btw. You can download it from SlideShare or access it on my papers and presentations page.

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the movie ‘Doubt,’ starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann. The IMDB summary for the film reads,

“Set in 1964, Doubt centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him of abusing a black student. He denies the charges, and much of the play’s quick-fire dialogue tackles themes of religion, morality, and authority.”

Great film, a proper morality play. What I also loved about it was the way it commented on new technologies and the changing times. So I thought I’d do a remix along the lines of a movie trailer, as seems to be all the rage (check out Scary Mary Poppins … it’s a cack!). Here’s the radio edit … I made a dance mix too, but I prefer the shorter version, myself . Hope you like it. I think it’s kinda fun!

As a follow-up to my previous post about developing a risk analysis template for Web 2.0 services, I thought it would be useful to share a document (Word, 64 KB) I’ve developed for use with University-level students who are using ‘external’ services (such as WordPress, Wetpaint, Ning, etc.) as part of their course. This document provides what I consider to be essential information about the Terms of Service they are being asked to sign up for, as well as advice on how to manage the service for their class. It covers areas such as

• the nature of the relationship students create when they sign up with a service
• posting of offensive material
• responsibility of work done under individual logons
• copyright, privacy, and IP licensing
• visibility of content
• spam emails and notifications
• turning off cookies and monitoring

If you are going to use an external service with students, I strongly suggest you develop a similar document to suit your own circumstances, that you go through it in class, make sure students understand it, and post it somewhere for students to easily access. It may be useful for school teachers, but I think you’d need to think more closely about the duty of care involved and how you might use such a document with parents or guardians.

Feel free to adapt/modify/reuse/improve/whatever you need for non-commerical purposes:

Information for students on the use of an externally hosted web service provider (Word, 64 KB)

Information for students on the use of an externally hosted web service provider (pdf, 68 KB)

If we accept the educational rationale for staff and students wanting to use externally hosted services in class (as opposed, or in addition, to the dreaded LMS), then we must also find safe, responsible and sustainable ways for them to do so. The issue, then, is not whether or not we should prevent staff and students from using externally hosted web services, but, rather, what procedures, processes, guidelines and recommendations we need to put in places to avoid exposure to unnecessary risk.

Some of the risks you need to consider in any assessment of external services include:

• breaches of privacy, confidentiality and data security
• loss of service and loss of student work
• loss of student work
• breach of confidentiality
• unauthorised access to data and loss of data
• performance problems

This might seem like a whole lot of Terrible, but it’s not, really. If you conduct a proper analysis, you will be able to find ways of managing risk to acceptable levels. After all, that is very idea of risk management: that you manage risk!

Felling overwhelmed? Well, don’t! Thankfully, Meg has done a risk analysis for you and you are free to use it as you wish .  I have based my risk analysis template (Word, 180 KB) on the University of Edinburgh’s excellent Guidelines for Using External Web 2.0 Services and JISC infoNet’s JISC risk management infokit, both of which are released under Creative Commons licences. I’ve beefed things up a bit, so go crazy: download it, adapt it, rework it, improve it, whatever — whatever you do, use it for the greater good of employing Web 2.0 technologies to good pedagogical effect!

Risk analysis template (Word, 180 KB)

Risk analysis template (pdf, 180 KB)

This morning, I attended (and briefly presented at) the start of the Australian National University’s ‘Festival of Teaching.’ The focus of the two-day gathering is explained in the program’s descriptive title: “Linking research and teaching to benefit student learning.”

OK, so the language is typical of inelegant edubabble everywhere, but, that aside, I want to take issue with how the trendy focus on ‘research-led teaching’ and ‘research-based learning’ (the latter of which includes the equally graceless terms ‘inquiry-based learning,’ ‘case-based learning,’ and ‘problem-based learning’) shifts our attention away from the merit of study. Plain, old-fashioned, sit-on-your-backside-and-attend-to-a-topic … study.

Of course, I understand why there’s all this hoo-ha about ‘research-led teaching’ — it’s no doubt a reaction to so-called ‘transmission teaching’ or the ‘banking concept’ of teaching, as Freire would have it. And I certainly understand and commend the pedagogical worth of using research (on this meaning, the collection, collation, interpretation and presentation of data) as a basis for teaching in the university setting. But I fear that, just as in the past we surely over-valued the ‘sit-down, shut up, and learn’ philosophy of education, we may now begin to over-value the role of student ‘research’ in university learning at the undergraduate level.*

For there is a lot to be said for apprehending study on its own terms and not just as a part of a broader research process. I know that, for myself, I cherish the few moments I get in my week to sit down and apply my mind to the close examination of a subject. Quiet study — study for its own sake, meaning for the sake of intellectual cultivation and enrichment — allows room for contemplation and consideration, reflection and reverie. In other words, study is more than an ancilliary of research. We need to slow down the train hurtling down the research-teaching and -learning track and gain a correct balance in our intelligent endeavours.

In my previous post, I called for a properly holistic appreciation of knowing. Here, I would like to suggest that we embrace a similarly holistic approach to the educational enterprise as it is undertaken within the Academy.

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*Notice my deft qualification there?

This has gotten me thinking about types of knowledge and how and why we value them, and how they link to remembering as a form of knowing. So, I’ve done a short analysis of what I think is going on as a way of explaining why this privileging might occur.

Let’s start with three common forms of knowledge — declarative, procedural and conditional — and take them apart a bit.

Here’s a basic representation:

In my observation and experience, most Aussies rank ‘knowing how’ at the top of a hierarchy of knowing. This isn’t really surprising, as ‘knowing how’ to do stuff is of great value to us: we see ourselves as practical people, as people who can fix things, as people who are problem-solvers with a can-do attitude. And ‘knowing how‘ to do stuff means all those things I’ve pulled out in the above table: remembering steps, using skills to complete a task, and producing a measurable, observable performance that evaluates circumstances.

A further, more general, explanation could also be that procedural knowledge is perceived by most people as the most imperative and useful for web purposes: “I just need to know how to make it work, before I gather too much information about what it is and the principles that underlie its function, and before I think about why I might want to use it.”

‘Knowing how’ to do stuff is thus seen as a right and good thing, and therefore something that is assigned a price above that given to the declarative and conditional ways of knowing.

But it is the cognitive form of remembering that is of interest to me in this post, because when people ask me about their web travails, “How do I do X?” and I respond, “I don’t remember … I know that you can do it, though, just let me have a quick look,” I’m often challenging their assumptions about the primacy of procedural knowledge. And giving a declarative answer to a procedural question makes many people uncomfortable because, as I’m arguing here, the ‘doing’ of a thing is valued more highly than is either understanding why you might do it, or having facts about it in the first place.

It’s also surely the case that ‘doing stuff’ tends to yield more tangible and measurable products (which are relatively easy to evaluate) than does thinking about stuff or identifying principles (which are harder to evaluate). Which is not to say that ‘knowing how’ is unimportant or irrelevant in. But it is to say that an approach to knowledge that privileges one form of knowing over others prevents us from bringing together all the ways of knowing into an attitude that could, quite frankly, help us learn quicker and more deeply, no matter the context.

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*Here I’m thinking of ‘actions’ along the lines of Aristotle’s praxis.

This week, I attended a very insightful seminar on using wikis in a university course. Patricia Abbot is lecturer and course co-ordinator for Theology, Psychology and Human Experience at the Canberra campus of the Australian Catholic University and, earlier this semester, she decided to use a wiki as an assessment item in her course.

For the assignment, students were asked to buddy-up and then develop a wikispace around a particular topic. Patricia described her experiences with using wikis in class during the seminar, but she also invited a student, Fiona, along to report on the learner’s perspective.

Here are some findings:

Student perspective

• WetPaint was the wiki application used by the class. The application itself worked fine, but students were frustrated by how different web browsers viewed and supported their wikis.
• Most students worked up their content in MS Word and then did a copy-and-paste into the wiki itself. As a consequence, much of students’ document formatting was lost, especially if they’d used Endnote to create footnotes.
• Students met early on, in their pairs, to discuss the wikispace they would build, but then worked on their ‘own’ bits individually.
• Fiona said she enjoyed the task, but felt that teacher expectations needed to be made clearer up front.
• The 1200-word limit set by the teacher for the assignment was almost impossible to keep to.
• Students weren’t sure how to reconcile the informality of a web-based format such as a wiki, with the formality of the essay format, which they were more used to.

Teacher perspective

• Patricia used herself as a benchmark: knowing that she is reluctant to learn a new communication medium, Patricia felt that if she could learn to use a wiki fairly quickly, then just about anyone could. In the end, Patricia felt she misjudged this.
• Some students struggled with the medium, but Patricia felt that they just needed more practice, not that the wiki itself was hard to use.
• Patricia also made the point that we don’t stop having orals, just because some students aren’t good at orals: we expect them to master the medium of the oral presentation, and it’s the same with any other media, including wikis.
• The idea was to have students use the medium as it’s meant to be used: as a collaboration space for students to build their understanding of the topic. But the fact that students did their work separately from each other, in Word, annulled the value of the wiki as a collaborative tool.
• Teachers need to plan for problems.
• Students need explicit learning experiences in how to use the medium for their learning.

Some further points came out of the discussion:

• Perhaps referencing and citation needs to be thought of differently in this context — students were trying to import footnotes from Word, when more creative ways of dealing with formatting and academic rigour could have been found.
• Students probably need more, ongoing support from the teacher in how to use a wiki (or any other new learning technology) than they are currently getting.

I’ll be interviewing Patricia for EdCom in the coming weeks, so look out for a podcast on the topic soon. Patricia has also kindly made her own reflections on the project via a pdf document (PDF, 316 KB).