The Long Form

Would You Buy a Used Car from this App?

2012-05-18T13:26:00.002-07:00

With Facebook's IPO already in the wild (and apparently not doing that well), I am prompted to look at how its heavily-analyzed and second-guessed business plan might fit into the social history of homo sapiens.

I will admit to a little Facebook participation, though, as you might infer from the title of this blog, I’m not much of a fan of “sound-byte” platforms which celebrate the short quip over the thoughtful analysis. I square that circle by using Facebook primarily as a method of keeping up with my family, and a short list of friends I like and respect.
Recently, I noted an article posted by one of those friends, about the “un-friending” trend on Facebook (and Facebook’s attempts to stem that tide through redesign), with some interest. There’s a lot happening in Facebook of which I don’t approve, and I must say I’ve un-friended a number of folks in that category. I view this trend as a good thing, in general.
But this essay isn’t about that.
When I clicked the Facebook link to the “un-friending trend” article, I was immediately prompted to add a Facebook app which posts back what I’ve read. The article itself was actually hosted on VentureBeat, a technology blog with heavy social networking ties. The app seemed to be branded by The Washington Post (their icon was there), but I could find no other evidence of any association between VentureBeat and The Washington Post. But no matter. What got my attention was the app. If I agreed to its use, it would automatically post back to Facebook the simple fact that I had opened the article. Not that I liked it, not that I agreed with it, not that I thought it was good, not that I even read it…just that I clicked through to it.
This, of course, is the trend. Facebook wants you to post your location when you’re sitting in a restaurant. It wants you to post your purchase when you go shopping. The underlying assumption is that simple consumption is worth celebrating, worth noting, worth passing as data to someone else…without even the pretense of having actually approved of the restaurant or purchase. The result is a white noise of meaningless data crowding into the same space as the “likes” and forwards.
There are so many things wrong with this idea that it’s difficult to find where to start. Data does not constitute information. Information does not constitute ideas. Of course, ideas require information, which require data, but the direction of flow here is absolutely critical. Facebook, and just about any smart phone app you can think of that requires access to your GPS, is really only interested in data. It wants you to display where you are, what you’re doing. If you choose to enhance that with what you think about where you are, and what you’re doing, then that’s up to you, and Facebook certainly supports it. But, increasingly and predictably, social networking is being driven not by ideas, or even information…but by plain data.
Here’s how this is supposed to work. I read something. I’m excited about its ideas. I submit my analysis to a friend who already respects my opinions, and based on that respect, the friend reads the same article. She may or may not be as excited as I was, but she will place what she thinks of the article in the context of how she views me, and my ability to think critically about what I’ve read. In short, she will have taken the time to read the article based on the fact that I read and recommended it. '
This process reflects the notion that, to select and process information, we need context, and we need help. None of us are stand-alone data processors. We depend on people who know more than we do on a particular subject to help us wade through the data. That’s the true value of a social context for ideas.
In contrast, automated “I ate at this restaurant” and “I read [i.e. clicked through to] this article” has absolutely no help. It’s all just data, and we’re still on our own deciding if the article is worth the read. Even the person who generated that “read” data didn’t know what the quality was before the Facebook notice appeared. The Internet has done a bang-up job of delivering almost any information to almost anyone. That does not make us all experts. That does not make us all able to negotiate all that information without help.
All too often, the folks I have decided to un-friend are exactly the ones who send on without thinking the latest political rant, the latest insensitive joke, the latest spin on a celebrity gossip tidbit. Facebook, and those apps on your iPhone, are one step beyond that. I can quickly figure out the folks who mindlessly forward without a critical look, un-friend them, and stop the stream. But if it's an app, I know nothing about the article, and nothing about the person who supposedly read it, ‘cept that she clicked something Facebook tricked her into clicking. (Who would guess that “cancel” would take you to the article without the post-back?)
Yes, we need to teach our students how to think critically, how to evaluation ideas and information meaningfully and dependably. Fifty years ago that meant evaluating the people we depended on for ideas. I am absolutely still convinced that the idea of the “expert” is still important, and there’s no way we can negotiate our way through all the data thrown at us without them.
But one thing’s for certain. A Facebook app will never be one. And with a new, incredible pressure on Facebook to pull data from, and push advertisements to, the massive collection of users it serves, this is going to get worse.
And especially watch out for apps selling used cars..

If it’s “Viral,” Will You Get Sick?

2012-04-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

I’m currently a little enamored with the TED Talk video format. The videos got their start documenting talks at two annual conferences on “Technology, Entertainment, Design.” TED charges presenters to provide inspirational and game-changing ideas in 18 minutes or less. Not all of the presenters (and the videos preserving their talks) have something to offer, and there are even a few wildly misguided ones. But I’ve seen a slew of really inspiring ones – at least a couple which I would place in the epiphany category. Recently TED has moved to supporting short educational lessons on specific ideas, produced by exemplary teachers in partnership with innovative animators. It was in pursuit of some of these new videos that I happened to catch Kevin Allocca, a YouTube “trends manager,” in a TED Talk titled “Why videos go viral.”

As TED Talks go, it was pretty lightweight, getting some entertainment punch from such viral videos as “Friday” and “Nyan Cat.” Allocca states that three things can cause a video to go viral:

· Tastemakers. If someone already has a huge presence in pop culture, their endorsement (or indictment, really doesn’t matter which) will propel a video into the spotlight.

· Communities of Participation. A large number of comments, satires, and parodies will add to the buzz.

· Unexpectedness.No one will get excited about a video that portrays a predictable sequence of events. Videos which surprise and twist have a better chance.

       Allocca, of course, is doing a TED Talk because of a larger point – that viral videos (and the processes which produce them) represent broadly democratic participation in popular culture, empowering the creativity and ownership of people who might be, otherwise, simple consumers.
       Well, maybe.
       Interestingly, there is one thing missing from Allocca’s list: content! As the several examples he uses very ably illustrate, viral videos do not necessarily have great ideas (or, perhaps, any ideas at all) as a part of what makes them so popular. As a matter of fact, if you look at the list above, only the third point has really anything to do with content, a point further reinforced by the fact that most videos go viral months, sometimes years, after their first posting on YouTube. Viral videos are clearly, in themselves, not fulfilling any particular content or informational need.
This is the Pandora’s Box of broad participation in social media – it is heavily slanted towards popular culture and mass entertainment, a place where interesting or high-quality content isn’t a sufficient condition for broad attention. It’s not even a necessary one.

There are educators who think that the forces of social networking have broad implications for learning and instruction. (Yes, I’m one.) And the recent funding of greatly expanded wifi connectivity in many schools (and, with it, the possible support of personal, student-owned devices in classrooms) seems to be, at least in part, poised to leverage this potential. In this blog, I've written pretty extensively about how student ownership and collaborative knowledge construction can be greatly improved through online interactive project-based learning. However, a lot of teachers will be quite worried about this, for a few very good reasons. After all, a step into the world of social networking might very well be a step into the world in which content-free “viral” entertainment rules. This observation can even be heard by the better of our own students, a fact I witnessed at a recent student focus group meeting.

   The word “viral” used to have a negative connotation, and the other declensions of its noun form, “virus,” still do. Take “virulent,” whose first two definitions are “…actively poisonous; intensely noxious..,.” and “…highly infective; malignant or deadly…” Maybe the new use of the word “viral” still should have a connection to its old meeting. The fear isn't just what social media produces, but what it displaces – if socially-produced content is given a presence, does it take the place of something much more valuable?
  Of course, there are lots of examples of “viral” videos with actual content (some TED Talks amongst them, and Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” being another I can think of quickly). Crowdsourcing media production, and learning, has potential value, but it is the presence of a guiding editorial force which makes TED so much better than most of the YouTube fodder. So the trick will be to leverage the best of participatory culture and media in an environment which includes knowledgeable, experienced guiding forces.
        Seems a little like a classroom, doesn’t it?
We have been here before. This isn’t really a substantial shift from the first use of Internet access in instruction over 15 years ago. Then, as now, It will become an educational wasteland, if teachers fail to participate in it themselves, and fail to help facilitate its effective use. The solution then, and now, isn’t just to turn off the computers. Nor is it to pretend that social media production constitutes, in itself, a lesson plan. (I can still remember teachers coming to the computer lab, handing a general research topic to their students, and then sitting in a corner reading the newspaper for the entire class period. The results were a waste of time and technology. That is my biggest fear!)

Like the treatment of an enormous number of virus-inducing diseases, the best way to avoid getting sick is to have been slightly infected already – the guiding principle behind most vaccines. It’s tricky – there are teachers out there who have actually become fully infected. (I know a half-dozen who spend more time on Facebook pursuing entertainment than they do reading, and the 10-hour version of “Nyan Cat” has had over 12,000,000 views. Ten hours? A-choo!!)
We should recognize the bulk of viral videos for their banality. But with the addition of the goals and experiences of content-driven education, we should be prepared to embrace the participatory nature of social media production. If you want to be an effective teacher in the coming changing classroom landscape, some exposure to the “virus” will go a long way towards making it work for learning.

Dancin' With Myself

2012-03-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if any of you have been following particularly closely, but my blog entries seem to regularly wander into 80′s pop music. I’ve cited Devo, Re-Flex, Talking Heads, and here I am with a line from Billy Idol. But as always, this isn’t about music. In this case, it’s about writing, something one wouldn’t normally associate with the bad British rocker with the bleach-blond tangle and the Elvis-like snarl.

In the early days of social networking, most online participants were pretty self-consciously anonymous. This tendency was equal parts self-protection and self-indulgence.

       The former was a natural reaction — if you had no idea who anyone really was online (and a lot of people were pretending to be someone else for very suspicious reasons), the best defense was to not be yourself, either. The latter, of course, was a way of getting something for nothing — if you couldn’t be yourself, it was fun and exciting to re-create yourself as someone else — older, smarter, better-educated, even a completely different nationality or even gender. In a real sense, it was “dancing with yourself” – you were creating a personna with which you could play. It was a perfect reflection of the overwhelming majority of the social-networkers back then — tweens, teens, and young adults, who were, in fact, trying to create themselves in real life at the same time. But it was a great deal more self-serving, a little less purposeful, and a whole lot more self-indulgent.
       There’s nothing really wrong with all that. But the overwhelming majority of “dancing” we do in our professional and educational lives is with someone else. That is, we select a partner, and we coordinate our moves and steps to fit what that partner is good at, or interested in. We certainly have our own flair, abilities, and personna, but that doesn’t solely define the purpose, or even the character, of the dance.
       Writing is like that — when we write, we certainly want to be creative, skilled, individual, maybe even flashy. But in so-called real life, we’re most likely writing for a purpose, and that purpose requires that we attend to someone else — our audience. If we’re writing an advertisement, we have to know who might want the product, and leverage their other interests to create this new one. If we’re a newspaper reporter, we should know the reading habits and abilities of the audience of our report. If we’re simply applying for a job and writing a resumé, we’ll have no chance of winning the job unless we incorporate our future employer’s interests into our story. We do this by opening up, watching, listening — stepping out of ourselves enough to become aware of the person we hope is watching us, to learn what they’re like, what they want, what they hold as important.
       As teachers, we have to be aware that writing online brings with it some challenges. Our students have their own habits — habits they developed long before we (or any other adult, for that matter) decided to watch. They will tend to be brief, and will feel justified in purposeful misspellings and Internet slang. But even more important, when writing online, they’ll naturally stop caring about audience, since the audience can be, well, anyone and everyone. The results at best self-indulgent, disconnected, and at worst, embarrassingly inept and even, perhaps, insulting. If you don’t know your partner, you’ll be constantly in danger of stepping on toes.
       This is not to mean that online writing in a social context has no purpose, or can only produce terrible results. All writing (on or off line) takes place in a social context, but good writing is self-aware, consciously recognizing that context, and leveraging it for increased effectiveness. Like all things in education, there has to be a “smart person” in the room, guiding and critiquing the student to focus outside of himself. With such guidance, the student will improve, as will the massive amounts of content almost all young people produce online every day.
       Dancing with someone else is almost always a lot more enjoyable, as well as being much more valuable. Besides, I really can’t say I ever liked that Elvis-like snarl….

Will the Real KySTE Please Stand Up?

2012-02-22T13:41:00.000-08:00

[Editor's Note: This posting was in anticipation of a "President's Talk" at KySTE 2012, the March conference of the Kentucky Society for Technology in Education.]

       I couldn’t resist a little research. The quiz show “To Tell the Truth,” from whence the title of this entry comes, had a simple format – three contestants attempt to convince a panel of celebrities that each has a single, specific profession, usually a very odd or interesting one. Only one, of course, is the real deal, the other two being impostors, making up what they didn’t actually know about their “chosen profession” in an attempt to throw off the panel, who would then attempt to guess which was the real professional. The quiz show was immensely popular, and has the distinction of having at least one original episode produced in all of the last 6 decades (according to Wikipedia). It ran for an astounding 24 full seasons.
And while I was on it, in preparation for our annual conference, I decided to do a little research on KySTE. KySTE isn’t quite as old as “To Tell the Truth,” but, as an organization, it is nearing the end of its second decade. One thing that KySTE has not done well is document itself, kept good historical records. I had a few names, and they produced a few more. As folks responded to my queries, I began to get a sense of this organization’s historical roots.
        Like a lot of Kentucky education initiatives, the original Kentucky Association of Technology Coordinators (KATC, the precursor to KySTE) owes a lot to the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), passed in 1991. That act, amongst other things, established the Kentucky Education Technology System (KETS). KERA noted the importance of education technology, and the Kentucky Department of Education was charged with KETS’ implementation. KDE had focus groups in the early days of KETS, bringing together education technology professionals from across the state. KATC was formed, according to some of the early players, at the encouragement of Lydia Wells Sledge from KDE, as a response to, and watchdog of, this process.
        KERA also divided the state into 8 regions, and established the Regional Service Centers to help support school districts in their ability to implement KERA, and the reforms it instituted. The 8 Regional KETS Engineers (KDE employees) met with their regional district constituencies, a structure and habit which outlived the Regional Service Centers themselves, and served as the basis for the 7 regional technology organizations (plus Jefferson County Schools, large enough to be its own “region”) which still exist today.
       Hence, the historical origins of KATC (and hence KySTE) was as a service to district tech coordinators, in coordination with regional structures serving the same population at the regional level, as they attempted to implement and make sense of the goals of KETS – specifically the systems (email, student records, etc.) and infrastructure (wiring, Internet access, etc.) that KETS specified.
       But that isn’t the whole story.
span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;">

The Mission of KySTE... (Kentucky Society for Technology in Education) is to empower the educational community in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to infuse technology as an integral part of the educational process through advocacy and leadership, promoting educational excellence and supporting technology-based innovation.

According to some of the earlier players, the seeds for a larger vision for KATC existed right from the start. In the mid-2000’s, two years of bylaws work, a name change, a mission statement, and affiliate status with the International Association for Technology in Education (ISTE) culminated in the formalization of a very much expanded vision. The mission statement itself (see at right) implies that technology is a change agent for how the broader business of education is done. As a direct result of this vision, KySTE’s membership, and the attendance at its yearly conferences, has grown exponentially, through the addition of a lot of other education professionals – most notably classroom teachers – who share in this vision, and implement it with students through their own practice. KySTE seems poised, as is education technology in general, to move into the mainstream, to have a seat at the table of all meaningful discussions of education reform and change. This shift can also be seen at the regional level in some of the regional organizations’ meetings, and in the work of many district technology leaders. But, of course, any expansion of work and vision brings the possibility of historical connections becoming lost or frayed.
In its very recent history, KySTE has taken two huge steps in attempting to widen its role. It has applied for true 501(c)(3) status, which allows it to receive tax-deductible donations and award grants. And, in anticipation of that status, it has begun to implement fundraising and vendor partnerships which will make such work possible. KySTE is poised to move to the next level. But what level might that be? And what, exactly, should KySTE become? There are three possible answers to that question.

An extension of the original KATC. One of the major strengths of KySTE is its continued connection to regional groups with a clearly-defined and familiar membership base, drawn primarily from district technology leadership. Through these regions, KySTE has been able to successfully balance a state-level presence with a connection to real practitioners in the field. Of course, a lot of KySTE’s new constituency does not participate in these regional organizations, because, in fact, many are in the classroom when the regional groups meet. In addition, as standard systems (email, student records) have been adopted, and many previous district-supplied capabilities (such as online content management) move to the cloud, many of the huge issues facing the early KATC members have largely disappeared.
A true education professional organization. The Kentucky Council of Teachers of English (KCTE) is an example of an organization which serves to support and advocate for a defined part of education: English/Language Arts. It is member-driven, and serves that membership through trainings and conferences. It partners with the Kentucky Department of Education to institute standards and reform relative to that defined part. Although education technology is certainly a “defined part of education,” “education technology professionals” might very well include everyone, making it difficult to define an exact constituency.
A service organization. The implication of true 501(c)(3) non-profit status is that of a charitable organization like The United Way. Such organizations have governing boards, but exist primarily to service a general population (rather than a specific defined constituency or membership), through services addressing an identified general population need.

Of course, these three visions of KySTE are not mutually exclusive, but a primary focus on one would substantially impact how it might implement its vision. With one grant already “in the wild,” KySTE’s grants and member services arm, branded as KySTE Outreach, is already in the business of attempting to implement KySTE’s vision.

Let’s assume, for the sake of illustration, that KySTE wanted to implement a new grant program. Who should it serve? At what should it be aimed? Here’s what this might look like using each of the three models above…

KySTE’s first grant program (still in effect) offered funds to support training through the regional tech organizations, for use as each saw fit. The audience was clearly district tech leadership as reflected by the regional group membership, with no attention to membership in KySTE itself. That more closely matches the first vision above.
A grant for which only members could apply, regardless of regional affiliation (or professional status), and aimed at the defined mission statement of the organization, would reflect this second vision.
A grant available to any educator or educational leader in Kentucky, regardless of KySTE membership, would fit the third vision.

...and that’s before we even get around to discussing the specific goals of the grant!.
KySTE is poised for great things. What sorts of great things will be determined by the membership and leadership of this organization. It won’t be enough to depend on history. It will depend primarily on hard work – on being willing to show up, to collaborate, to provide direction for change. Like any great organization, the vision of KySTE, the next level it will achieve, will be determined by who shows up and rolls up their sleeves.
In "To Tell the Truth," the goal of the panel membership was to successfully pick the professional from several impostors. In contrast, the KySTE membership has the luxury of defining the profession itself. So when they ask, “Will the real KySTE please stand up,” will it be you?
[The conversation about KySTE’s history, vision, and future, continues at KySTE 2012. Look for the KySTE President’s Talk, “Will the Real KySTE Please Stand up?” Friday, March 9, 9:15 a.m. For a timeline of KySTE History, see our History page.]

Mobile Computing and the Polyester Leisure Suit

2012-02-05T13:25:00.000-08:00

In a recent posting on EDTECH, the international discussion list part of the Humanities Network (H-Net) at Michigan State for which I was a moderator, several participants voiced the opinion that mobile devices such as the iPad and smart phone are substantially changing the way we do things. That is, anytime, anywhere access to information and processing power are a game changer, a paradigm shift our students have already made. As educators in the 21^st Century, we would be foolish not to attend to these devices and their implications for learning.

Maybe all of these folks who’ve drunk the iPhone/iPad Kool-Aid are on to something – maybe a piece of hardware really can have a substantial impact on human history and behavior. I was reminded of an old BBC program which aired in this country on PBS channels 40 years ago called “Connections” – a quirky British historian names James Burke, decked out in the ubiquitous 1970’s polyester leisure suit, traced how significant technological advances proved to be pivotal in historical events, such as the stirrup’s role in the rise of horse-borne combat and the Byzantine Empire. Of course, I had no idea whether these “connections” were being portrayed accurately. I was very much enamored with the idea of technology-driven change, caring somewhat less about the facts.

In the context of the broad brush of human history, one can often easily identify some big technology game-changers. Some of them, like the piano and the telephone, were (at least from my perspective) almost entirely positive in their impact. Others, like personal transportation (and its dependence on the internal combustion engine), were a bit more of a mixed bag. But for the Twentieth Century, that list must surely include the computer, and, probably even more so, the Internet – the two providing a one-two punch impacting everything from creativity to warfare.

So does mobile computing fit into such a grand category? Needless to say, we don’t have the benefit of historical perspective, since portable devices which support information access and multiple communications capabilities are a distinctly new phenomenon. One could argue that the so-called Arab Spring as a huge historical event owes a substantial debt to mobile computing. But one could also argue that that impact is really just an extension of connected computing – that the game-change was already in place before folks began carrying that power into the streets of Cairo or Tripoli in their jeans pockets.

But when we look at the classroom, the argument gets even more difficult. Historically, universal education is a little more than a century old, and that change has been completely tied to that distinctly human cultural unit, the classroom. The classroom is a closed space with its own information ecology, its own community and social structure, and its own workflow. There is no question that the Internet has had a huge impact on information access in the classroom, but at this point in history, the classroom as a closed space in which education takes place remains virtually unchanged. In fact, most education technology approaches (the “flipped” classroom, the “intelligent” classroom are two) are quite comfortable there, since they reinforce the closed space nature of instructional practice in the classroom.

So what would happen if mobile devices were the huge game changer their advocates are promoting? The difference between your parent’s laptop and your iPhone is not about “apps” (another word for software). It’s also not about the human-computer interface, since that will most certainly continue to change (from touch screen to voice recognition to gesture recognition). It’s mostly about mobility. But in a closed classroom, mobility has limited meaning. It might very well be that the classroom as a closed space is destined for the dustbin of history, but a lot of social change will have to happen before that. Almost everything else we’re doing in education (notably high-stakes testing and accountability) is dependent on the classroom and school remaining intact.

So why the buzz? There are three reasons why personal devices are very interesting to policy people and other onlookers …

As a substitute for school-provided 1-1 computing. Many districts are exploring whether student-supplied devices might help them reach the utopia of every student being able to access and create information from their own device. Under this scenario, the decision to use personal devices is driven by simple economics (the district wants 1-1 computing, but can’t afford to purchase every student a device).
As a way of leveraging existing student access behaviors and habits. As mentioned above, many of the advocates of personal devices in the classroom are noting that students are already using such devices for learning. They speculate that these behaviors might be leveraged in the classroom.
As a way to blur the space-time boundaries of the classroom. Advocates of access/use patterns such as “hybrid instruction” have, as their goal, the ability of students to access and create content online, beyond school class time. Personal devices can help that happen.

You might have noticed that only the third option reflects the fact that a personal device is mobile, thereby implying the greatest change in school/classroom structure. But what’s interesting is, if students are, in fact, allowed to bring their personal devices into school and use them, the results might very well be the same in any case -- the classroom will be "disrupted," regardless of the teacher's or policy-maker's intent.

So is this a James Burke moment? Are we going to look back at this decade and say it was the beginning of the end of the traditional classroom? As I state above, my contention is that connectivity (not device) is the “stirrup” of this trend, but the smart money is to prepare teachers for #3, regardless of what else happens. That is, the classroom teacher must be willing to allow their traditional classroom structure to be disrupted, and, in many cases, learn a completely new teaching role which better utilizes the coming changes.

But then, I never actually owned a polyester leisure suit…

Footprints In the CyberSnow

2012-01-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

        Watching the changing face of professional electronic discourse is a little like following footprints through a popular snow-covered woods. The trails are sometimes single file, sometimes a wide swath. Individual lines of footprints join and veer off the main trails, seemingly at random, without a clear sense of consensus and direction. You might join the common trail for a sense of belonging, or if its direction coincides with your own. But you will veer off in a new direction if both wane.
       That was me this past week, when I resigned as the lead moderator for the international discussion list EDTECH. EDTECH began 22 years ago as a project of Michigan State University doctoral student Vickie Banks Gaynor. I joined it as a member in 1997, becoming a moderator three years later. For more than a decade, my and the EDTECH members’ footprints had a common direction, and I reveled in it.
        The new, hot discussion platform in the 80’s was an email-based distributed discussion system called LISTSERV. (Nope, I’m not shouting – its name, and the name of the EDTECH discussion list itself, were traditionally typed in all caps.) At that time, LISTSERV was freeware (it's now commercial), and was often integrated with the groupware program BitNet. Discussion postings were delivered to members through email by LISTSERV, and also in threaded form on BitNet in what looked very much like an Internet bulletin board or forum. A few years after its inception, EDTECH was absorbed by Michigan State’s humanities discussion system, H-Net, an affiliation it retains to this day. The original BitNet feed still exists, though most such feeds were purchased by Google and added to Google Groups quite a while ago.
        EDTECH was by no means my first LISTSERV. Nearly ten years before joining EDTECH I’d discovered a discussion hosted by graduate students at Indiana University called “The Dead Teacher’s Society.” Unlike EDTECH, it was an un-moderated list. Between LISTSERV, Bitnet, and UseNet, there were thousands of un-moderated discussion feeds. At that time, the idea that postings could be delivered instantly in multiple directions to thousands of participants instantly was pretty revolutionary…and scary.

Flame War: ...a series of flame posts or messages in a thread that are considered derogatory in nature or are completely off-topic. Often these flames are posted for the sole purpose of offending or upsetting other users. The flame becomes a flame war when other users respond to the thread with their own flame message. (http://www.webopedia.com/)

       Such unmonitored (and largely “off the social mainstream grid”) platforms produced lots of off-center feeds, such as sexual fetishes and political extremes. Even for serious mainstream topics, un-moderated lists followed a cycle of initiation, enthusiastic growth, mature discussion, deterioration through “flame wars”/spamming/off-topic contributions, and eventual decline and extinction as the original and more serious participants grew disillusioned and abandoned the list. The trail would go from thousands of footprints, to a very few, stomping through the drifts, before evaporating altogether. The Dead Teacher’s Society was still relatively active when I joined it (and I was completely enamored with the concept), but it quickly became a megaphone for a few self-promoting individualists and an occasional flame war.
        In contrast, EDTECH was moderated – postings were screened and distributed only by the list’s moderators. This had one disadvantage: every post had to be touched by a list moderator before it was distributed through email or appeared in the BitNet feed (which slowed things down); and one advantage: the quality of the postings was consistently high, very professionally focused, and often quite scholarly. Missing were the “me too” and off-topic fluff of ordinary social interaction, the flame wars, bad language, self-promotion and commercial advertising. That’s why it enjoyed such a long and glorious history, with hundreds of postings daily in its heyday.
        BitNet and LISTSERV were powerful stuff. BitNet subjects were “feeds,” being fed directly by participants, and through the email contributions of the LISTSERV. Since it was threaded, you could search/display by subject thread, or by author, or do open text searches. Its tools would be quite familiar to anyone using Twitter today, with the possible exception of the lack of Twitter’s point-and-click ease of use. LISTSERV/list archives/Google Group feeds remain a very powerful technology. That’s not why I left EDTECH. Like everything else in life, I left it because nearly everybody else had as well. A year or two ago, the trail I was following there had dropped to a very few footprints. EDTECH’s volume has fallen from hundreds of postings a day to hundreds of postings a month (or less).
        Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter are certainly GUI-er, but their main advantage these days isn’t “how,” but “who.” Almost anyone of consequence is Tweeting. The online discussions of 20 years ago are now Twitter feeds and hash-tag threads. But even more importantly, since mainstream society has embraced it, the wretched excesses of BitNet and UseNet are largely missing, or at least hidden, for the average user of Twitter and Facebook. The early discussion platforms like BitNet were dominated by libertarian, geeky college students. It’s really quite remarkable what can happen when those students’ parents suddenly show up and start participating. My Facebook news feed has gone from a minefield of “F-bombs,” to PG, in a little over a year.
        I must say – at the risk of sounding like one of the die-hard EDTECH participants – I’m not really excited about the switch. LISTSERV had no restriction on posting length. It also enjoyed a more traditional “question and answer” back-and-forth pattern of participation, which in Twitter has been replaced by short declamatory sentences with a self-promotion feel. Because of this, I had arrogantly predicted that Twitter would be gone in two years; that was over three years ago. I obviously did not anticipate the masses of people and activity – social and professional alike – that would flock to this new platform. But they did. And if one is to be in the conversation, it behooves one to join it, or at least feed it.
        But whether by un-moderated excesses or simple popularity, all things tend to cycle. Twitter will, itself, become yesterday’s news and disappear, just as BitNet and UseNet have. (Interestingly, the KERA list of the University of Kentucky – KYDTC and others – are keeping LISTSERV alive in Kentucky, at least for now.) So my prediction above is probably not wrong, it’s just off in its timing. No platform is forever. But, for me, it is time for me to move on, and join the currently better-used path. I’ll miss EDTECH, but being as most of the better players in it are gone, I won’t miss it that much. We’ll see if the structural limitations of Twitter can still support the sort of professional discourse which is my habit and passion. After all, online professional discussion isn’t about platforms, it’s about ideas and knowledge construction, the one thing that SHOULD transcend the changeover in platform popularity.

        Goodbye, EDTECH. It’s time to try another trail of footprints.

The Case for the Private Cloud

2011-10-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

What is a cloud?
       "Geek-speakers" really struggle to keep the vocabulary fresh, the edge bleeding (if you will). This time, the metaphor is a little short of perfect. In science, a cloud is a visible mass of lighter-than-air water droplets. In technology, a cloud is a collection of computer applications delivered over a network as services. So a cloud is a network, and visible water droplets are software applications. It's a stretch. Some of the wretched excesses of that fluffy dark thing hanging over your afternoon golf game might be, metaphorically, more accurate than we'd like. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
       Of course, 40 years ago, virtually all applications were delivered over networks, since the computers were room-sized. You connected using a dumb terminal (little more than a display and a keyboard -- see at left) to a mainframe computer somewhere else, to run a program. But sitting neatly between mainframe computing and cloud computing is the age of the microcomputer (still underway, in point of fact), which had, at its beginning, two relevant characteristics: 1) it was mostly about purchasing and managing objects (hardware, software, peripherals), and 2) networks were useful, but not necessary, to do work. (Remember sharing your Internet connection with your telephone? OK, probably not, but I do! The handset modem at right was how I connected to the university mainframe at my first teaching position.) These days, connecting things together has become the driving force in computing. We can blame the "mother of all networks," the Internet, for bringing us back around full circle. Since the geek-speakers have the memory of a gnat, it's all new, and it needs a new word. It's a cloud.
        But, of course, that isn't to imply that nothing is actually new. Before the Internet, networks were small, for lots of reasons (some were good reasons, and we'll look at that in a bit). So, the new part of the "cloud" concept is that applications can be really made available globally, over the entire Internet, to anyone. From a business perspective, the result has the same impact as Napster had on the music industry, the e-book has on print -- it's no longer about delivering or selling objects, it's about delivering or selling capabilities. From a software perspective, that means we use Office 360 or Google Docs to word process, rather than purchasing a stand-alone copy of some software to run on our very own computer.

Why should I care?

        Well, the Internet did happen for some very good reasons. When the tools of productivity move online, it makes information sharing, collaborating and group learning a lot easier, hence "cloud computing" is often associated with social networking and online learning management. From blogs to Facebook, people aren't just writing online, they're connecting, sharing, and constructing together. That's probably the most obvious advantage.
        Another is very much in evidence in the age of smart phones. Since the computing work is actually done "on the cloud" (that is, somewhere else), the device used to access such a service can actually be quite cheap and simple. It takes a reasonably powerful computer to run Microsoft Office 2010. In contrast, you can word-process "on the cloud" from your smart phone.
        Then there's software cost. As Google and others have shown, there really is no need to sell such services, so a lot of companies provide their services for "free," making a profit through selling ad space, or other marketing tools such as data harvested from the users of the service. The software isn't really free -- it's just being underwritten by thousands of advertisers. To further sweeten the pot, upgrades and bug fixes don't have dissemination issues. There's nothing to download since the software lives one place -- no one even notices the fix is in.

OK, well, so what's a "Private Cloud?"

        A "private cloud" is essentially the same idea as a public cloud, except that the folks using the service are part of a closed collection of people. Unlike the private networks of 40 years ago, "closed" doesn't mean disconnected. The convergence of the Internet and the private network means that we can define "closed" or "private" virtually, through a central list of access credentials, without giving up the "anytime, any place" of public, Internet-based computing. Although a private cloud usually lives physically inside a district wide area network, it's still available to that same collection of people, no matter whether they're sitting in their home school, or half a world away.

Why a Private Cloud?

       Private clouds exist for a variety of reasons, but privacy, as you might guess, is a big one. Private clouds are used by private companies or organizations with resource and business interests to protect, or organizations serving a unique population such as children.
        An organization wanting to run a private cloud has to contract with (i.e. pay for) a service, or purchase hardware to run them within their own network. It usually needs paying someone to maintain the services, and support the people who use them. Some of those costs would exist anyway (after all, supporting teachers in the use of any tool, private or public, requires staff time), but running online software yourself does add something to the equation. To reduce costs, many private clouds run open source services or other free software. The private services my district uses include Moodle (online learning management), Mahara (social networking and ePortfolios), SharePoint (professional workflow), Wordpress (blogging and interactive writing), and Umbraco (public website support).
        On the public cloud, we could have replaced Moodle with Edmodo, Mahara with Facebook, SharePoint with Google Docs, and Umbraco with any of a bunch of free or inexpensive web hosting services. Some of the reasons we've resisted would have been familiar with the old mainframe folks -- privacy, central management, support, consistency of service, and network security. But since we're in the business of supporting teachers and student learning, I'll use that perspective to flesh out some of these, and other, advantages.
        It is amazing how many thorny questions teachers ask us about the public cloud which don't even need to get asked when the cloud is private, like...

“Who is that…really?” In a private cloud, you know who everybody is, since the account was created and assigned to a specific person inside the organization. At any time, if you stop being confident that you know who an account represents, anyone with rights to your network can turn off the account. That greatly simplifies privacy and enforcement. Public cloud tools are based on a personal account model, making the question above (and the enforcement problems it implies) much more difficult.
“Did you see THAT?” Inappropriate stuff online is always a problem, and a public cloud tool will always struggle with the problem of inappropriate content. In addition, most public cloud tools carry ads, and ads mean that your students are being targeted for commercial purposes. Often the things being sold aren’t appropriate for their age. A private cloud has none of these problems.
“Can I use this for free for the life of my instructional needs? …this year? …this week?” Ning (social network tool), Jaycut (video editing), Glogster (collaboration tool), even the New York Times started out being free public cloud tools, and are now charging for their services. This is a tried-and-true business model, which works fine in the private sector where all of the players are private citizens. But for teachers serving public school students, waking up one morning and finding your tool has suddenly changed to a pay-for-services model means a change of instructional practice, often even lost activities and resources representing a time investment. On a private cloud, teachers don't have to worry about things suddenly disappearing or costing money.
“Should I ‘friend’ my students?” Most teachers are strongly advised against “friending” students on Facebook, for good reasons. Some states have even attempted to outlaw it! In contrast, on the private cloud, where all the people are known, the answer is clearly yes — it’s like asking “Should I speak to my students?”
“I can’t find…” Most teachers are not sophisticated computer users, hence a lot of technical support can be just helping someone retrieve an accidentally-deleted or overwritten file, or locating something that got lost or corrupted. On the public cloud (especially the free one), you’re pretty much on your own — if you accidentally delete something, or misplace it, there usually is no tech support safety net.
“May I do this?” The public cloud must, by Federal law, restrict who can use it, and how. Because of that, most tools with social networking components require specific parent permissions for students under 13 (Edmodo sets that age at 18). Hence, a teacher of young students has to specifically acquire and manage parent permissions to use such tools, or run the risk of breaking the law (or, even worse, the wishes of a student’s very concerned parents, the reason the laws exist in the first place). In contrast, the private cloud is covered by a school’s Acceptable Use Policy contract.
“CAN I do this?” There is really no substitute for asking this question of the people who install, implement, and support the cloud tools you use. You will find that, even without the power of the public cloud, the answer is usually “Yes!” In addition, with a private cloud, decisions about changes and upgrades are made with you, the teacher, in mind — no business model, no board of directors, no collection of advertisers, no shareholders, no IT staff with their own schedule and interests. In my district, many of the decisions about our cloud tools are actually made by interested teachers in regularly-scheduled focus group meetings.

This does not mean that the public cloud doesn’t have anything to offer teachers and their student learning goals. With massive budgets and huge IT staff, many big public cloud players have the ability to innovate and expand. For some teachers, a private cloud will never be quite as snappy, attractive, and extensive as the tools they find and use “out there.” But before they do, we tell them to read the list of questions above, and make sure they understand them all. But even more importantly, we ask then to ask themselves what they want their students to do and learn. In almost all cases, the private cloud has answers that work.
Metaphorically, a cloud is ill-defined, hard to contain and predict, and often all wet. Bringing your cloud "indoors" requires effort and some expense, but it makes it a lot easier for most teachers and students to use it comfortably.

Are you (dis)connected?

2011-05-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Making connections is all the buzz -- connecting students to authentic learning, experts, even each other. At this point in history, the technology tools and contexts in which to “connect” are overwhelming in number, and begging for attention. Today, “connect” doesn’t force technology use, but it almost certainly can’t avoid it. And many celebrators of the concept of connection and collaboration are almost indistinguishable from celebrators of the tools they use for such. That is, “Connect!” and “Use this tool!” are, in many advocates’ minds, interchangeable ideas. That has actually produced a couple of interesting disconnects in technology use in education.

The Promise and Practice of Web 2.0: It’s a scary world out there.

I had just poked into a district office, and the discussion there was about Facebook. It’s a well-worn trail, and in this context the remarks are almost invariably negative, with most of those present saying they never went there, and never would. At the other extreme are the dozens of my professional acquaintances and colleagues who use it to support their professional interests. On their "walls," I am as likely to read about what school they visited or what instructional idea they’ve tried, as I am to hear about their son/daughter’s exploits on the track or court, or the last restaurant they visited. All is thrown in together in a pile.

Although the world beyond PK-12 education is pretty much firmly entrenched in the idea of online connections in support of professional interests, in the face of Federal child safety legislation and most end user license agreements of known Web 2.0 tools (including Facebook), most teachers are still trying to figure out whether these tools are even legal to use in the classroom, much less safe, or even more important, instructionally valuable. Both the advocates and the detractors of Facebook, like the blind men and the elephant, are grabbing onto different parts of the elephant and declaring its basic character.

Both are right, and both are wrong. But neither note that we’re trying to evaluate the usefulness of the whole elephant at once by looking at a single aspect of it. Yes, “it” is important, and yes, “it” is unsafe and frivolous...if we’re just talking about Facebook. Of course, what we should be talking about is learning. It’s a disconnect, and neither side has done a particularly good job of addressing why it is one.

The Promise and Practice of Technology in Instruction: Who’s paradigm shift is it anyway?

Everybody has their pet phrase. “Knowledge construction.” “Collaborative learning.” “Project-based learning.” “Discovery learning.” “Authentic learning.” Almost everybody agrees that the old traditional instructional paradigm of teacher-driven lecture and summative assessment is, if not actually dead, at least seriously outflanked. The charge against it is being led by something as simply-defined as the Kahn Academy (a website dedicated to tutorial videos on school subjects), or as currently trendy and complex as the idea of use of student-owned smart phones and other personal devices in the classroom.

That, of course, is the implied shift associated with connected technology use. In fact, most teachers view educational technology in terms of “Smart” classroom tools, large digital display, “clickers,” media delivery systems, and laptop carts, all of which are aimed at preserving the teacher’s tenuous grasp on their primacy as a content presenter. To make matters worse, many teachers observe, and recent studies are beginning to show, that direct student control over information delivery (phones, computers, whatever) doesn’t always lead to higher learning outcomes. Students usually lack the personal goals and motivation to attend to that which will improve their learning, if given the choice, so they fall back on their social-driven habits.

It is clear that the promise and practice of technology-driven shift represents another serious disconnect.

These disconnects are symptoms of how technology’s role in the classroom tends to get trivialized and distracted by the popularity of a specific platform or tool. A good illustration is the battle over texted communications. Tech advocates and observers are quick to point out that kids text, and they view email as “old people’s communications.” That’s one piece of the elephant. And, for kids, almost all student texts are social. On other side of the elephant, if you go into an actual adult workplace, texting is one of many communications platforms one will have to use to do work, and email often figures prominently in that list.

But the debate misses the point. Are we supposed to be teaching our students to text, or to communicate? The discussion about paradigm shift shouldn’t be about tool selection, it should be about content and practice. That is our job as educators.

By the time our students leave us, all of the tools will have changed anyway. But that doesn't remove us from our responsibilities relative to the technologies. We need to actually, meaningfully engage in the behaviors the shift implies. Don't get tied up in the tools, but don't skip them either. They aren't the paradigm, but they do deliver it. It's a delicate balance, but implementing connections in the 21st Century classroom requires that we do so.

If not you, who? If not now, when?

2011-03-31T12:15:00.000-07:00

It's here -- a standard, in amongst all the other writing standards, that specifically addresses what it means to be a writer in the 21^st Century...

Writing Standards K-5 - Grade 5 Students: Standard 6.
With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others..

This standard is one of the new Common Core State Standards adapted by the Kentucky Department of Education, now in training for implementation in the fall. It makes succinct what our students already know: that writing for most purposes involves collaboration and connection. And the way in which students connect, collaborate – even write – is online.
It’s in the Standards, so will it be in instruction? The process of “deconstructing” the standards in preparation for designing lessons is fully underway, and this standard (as of April 1, 2011) has yet even get that far (see KDE's list). But does it need to be? Is the fact that it’s a separate standard mean that, in fact, it needs separate “air time?” In an ideal world, no, if, in fact, it was already uniformly distributed throughout the other standards, and a teacher's practice. That is as it should be. In the world of higher education and professional work, most writing is connected. Nearly all readers are interactively connected to the writing they consume. Even further, a lot of writings (from textbooks to encyclopedias) are now produced collaboratively online, with many authors, and constantly negotiated content changes and additions. The implication is, in the post-secondary world, writing without interactive connection is rare, and so addressing it separately would be like addressing auto repair without electronic diagnostics.

That’s the world our students already live in, and is most certainly the one they’ll join when they leave us. Although my “research” is anecdotal and incomplete, I’m thinking it isn’t the world most of our teachers live in. That means, if left to their own devices, chances are that most teachers won’t view this standard as that important. Many may not even know what it means. With that knowledge, the standard probably needs to be specifically addressed, and that is the intent of the Common Core Standards as written. But when, and by whom?

As a tech integration specialist, I’m pretty used to being invited to the party late. A professional development class is being designed, or a unit is being built, and someone has the idea that, maybe, it should have a technology component. (After all, a lot of folks are talking about technology, so we probably ought to include something!) So I'm called. But when that happens, inevitably, I walk into a room in which the big decisions about content and pedagogy have already been made. The results are a lot of clever graphs and images.

In the digital age, is it really possible to start a discussion about pedagogy without technology? For this argument, I’m setting aside the revolution implied by a lot of technology tool use – knowledge construction, project-based instruction, student-driven learning, the trifecta generally associated with online and connected learning. Let’s just stick with Standard 6 above. We’ll take something really easy – a personal narrative about some incident in a student's life. Traditionally, a teacher would establish a rubric, pass out instructions, collect the results of the assignment, and grade them. If the lesson needs more "real life" connections, that might change the assigned writing topic. And the impact of my coming into the party late might be that the students are asked to read the instructions online, type them up in Word with some nice added clipart, and upload the results into a learning management system. Good, we’ve got technology in.

Did we cover the standard? Did the student “publish?” Did they “interact with others?” Did they “collaborate?” Obviously not. To truly reflect the standard, we could redesign the lesson, and have students publish their writings as blog entries, providing for online peer comments and suggestions, and then have that feed a collaborative rewriting process through a wiki. This approach (very different from my “upload Word document” example) actually addresses the intent of the standard. But the changes have a profound impact on the original lesson performance expectation, the rubric, work completion, and grading, so adding this standard would require major changes to the original lesson design. The point, of course, is that it is not possible to begin the lesson planning process without having already selected the technologies, and incorporated their implications into how students write, learn, and are graded.

It’s a standard, but the standard simply asks the same question the students themselves are asking their teachers: If not you, who? If not now, when?

Through Bein' Cool: Devo and Motivation

2011-01-10T11:56:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's Devo, the rock group out of Akron, Ohio, famous for "Whip It" and red flower pots for hats. They released an almost intentionally dorky tune (with a matching low-budget video) on their "New Traditionalists" album called "Through Bein' Cool," with advice to all of the strange and misfit teens of the time...

"...If you live in a small town
You might meet a dozen or two
Young alien types who step out
And dare to declare
We're through bein' cool..."

The band was actually pretty serious about the issue of conformity. Their name, Devo, was an intentional play on "de-evolution." It reflected their concern that humanity had actually begun to regress, citing the intense herd mentality of American society (and teens!) as evidence.

Devo's interest in the effects of conformity were more artistic and satiric, but there is plenty of research out there showing that, in fact, a lack of personal expression and autonomy actually contributes to a variety of physical and psychological problems. Huffington Post blogger and self-styled "work-life balance/stress management trainer" Joe Robinson cites dozens of articles in his blog entry "Don't Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Problem With Being Cool" (Oct. 13, 2010)...

"...Being cool is supposed to make us irresistibly confident in our up-to-the-minute blase-ness, but it actually feeds insecurity with the false belief that popularity or a certain image is needed for validation. The research shows that real self-worth comes from internal goals that satisfy values and needs that are actually your own, such as autonomy and growth, the polar opposite of the external approval circuit..."

A lot of the "research" underlying these ideas comes from the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, an unlikely pair of social scientists from the University of Rochester, described in some detail in Daniel Pink's new book on motivation in business, Drive. The underlying assumption in business is that the motivation to succeed originates from external sources -- pay bonuses and high salaries, or, alternatively, the threat of sanctions or other deterents. In education, we've built an entire superstructure around this concept, from high-stakes testing and school assessment processes, to teacher merit pay and other performance incentives. None of it, say Deci, Ryan and Pink, works. As a matter of fact, this sort of approach is actually counter-productive, reducing creativity, productivity, and personal satisfaction and happiness.

I truly celebrate the anytime, any place nature of digital social connections, and they have great implications for how and why we learn. But two recent events have caused me to, once again, ponder whether the tech-focused among us really have a handle on things, or are we just trying to be cool like our kids.

Teachers Weigh In

"...If we were to offer something significant for a prize, incentive, reward, benefit, etc., what would you like? We are thinking something in the category of a tool or resource that would help your organization be more effective..." ...was a posting to a discussion list of a professional organization to which I belong. When cooler heads finally prevailed, the resultant discussion was quite interesting and revealing. But that had to wait for the chorus of "A new iPad!!!" postings to die down.

A Student's Spin.
A student taking my online course on open-source web applications -- a pretty powerful and tech-savvy junior who has produced marketable software of his own, and participated in our superintendant's student advisery council on technology in the classroom.-- has often mentioned his lack of interest in the use of smart/personal devices like phones and PDAs. "Real learning" he states "takes place with paper and pencil tasks...games and online activities are just a distraction."

The Results?

       Needless to say, these anecdotes have no obvious connection, and they, even together, prove absolutely nothing of substance about learning and motivation. Despite my high school student's observations, I will, as I mentioned, continue to be an advocate for inexpensive and ubiquitous computing devices, and the connections they bring us. Besides, I suspect that our young spokesman probably will be using such tools to learn and work when he's no longer in high school (if he's not already using them now).
       But the contrast to be gained from their juxtaposition, still, could not be more striking. What the adult members of the discussion list (educators, all) were saying was that a very popular device was a great "...prize, incentive, reward, benefit..." In fact, that's not what research, and our example student, are saying. People (including students) owning the learning process, and owning its results, is how that works. If we want to engage and motivate our students, then we can't assume that access to cool devices will do that for us, and "access to tools" does not, in itself, translate into student ownership of the learning process. It must be a pre-existing lesson design piece, a specific pedagogical decision which does not depend on the physical details of the lesson. It can, in fact, be a part of a paper and pencil lesson.
       Students are kids. They're heavily invested in "being cool," and a lot of that motivation is driving their own use patterns for computers, smart phones, and other such devices. That is exactly what caused my student's observation that interactive games and other computer experiences were a waste of time -- what he saw was students taking those opportunities and abusing them to pursue what was interesting to them. Those use patterns are heavily influenced by their own herd mentality, their own sense of "cool." If a teacher selects a tool, or an online experience, for how much s/he perceives it fits the students' interests (instead of selecting it for how it supports an otherwise strong lesson), that is the results. We have a lot to learn from our students, but, as teachers, we'll always get into trouble simply trying to be like them, trying to motivate them by giving them what we think they think is cool.

To leverage the true power of online computing and other technology tools, we need to put the flower pots on our heads, and join Devo. Learning is way too important to simply be driven by our desire to fit in -- with each other or our students. It must be driven by our students' desire to learn, to advance, to succeed. And Deci and Ryan tells us that's got to come from within.

"...Time to clean some house,
Be a man, or a mouse....
Put the tape on erase,
Rearrange a face,
We always liked Picasso anyway.
We're through bein' cool..."

Autumn Leaves, Rhubarb, and Student Attention Span

2010-11-21T11:29:00.000-08:00

On most topics, Rose, a former next door neighbor of mine, was sweet and wonderful, a feisty, diminutive old lady who would leave a grocery bag full of rhubarb hanging from our back fence every week or so throughout June and much of July. (Rose and her husband had a massive bed of the stuff – they didn’t even like it much, so we got it all, and bunches of tomatoes and squash to boot.)

But every fall, leaves brought out a very different side of Rose. Our massive oak and maple trees would provide a multi-colored blanket neatly covering several back yards. Ours were not the only large trees in the neighborhood, but Rose’s property was different, she had only one small ornamental tree within reach of her back porch. More than once we woke up to the sound of Rose raking up those big yellow maple leaves, and throwing big piles of them over our fence. She was quite happy to tell us exactly what she thought of those leaf-spewing behemoths, and tried hard to convince us that we should cut them down.

My wife and I, of course, were quite proud of those trees, and couldn’t imagine anything crazier than killing off two living things much older than we were, which contributed shade, nesting sites, not to mention carbon-dioxide scrubbing and water retention. It was the height of silliness. Also, being the “young moderns” we considered ourselves to be, we knew the law: leaves are the responsibility of the person who owns the property on which they fall, regardless of how, and from whence, they came. We did occasionally help her rake, but we were certainly not swayed.

My wife and I have moved, and aged, and Rose and her dear husband are no longer “with us.” After spending the last three weekends cleaning up yard trash and dealing with other people’s leaves, I’m just a little more sympathetic with her problem. But I’m trying to hold onto my previous slant, even as I hang up the rakes and break out the ibuprofen.

A cover article on this Sunday’s New York Times (Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010) is yet another story on tech-savvy young people whose lives are seemingly one text and hyperlink away from academic inattention and failure. “Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families…Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment…using the Internet, watching TV, or using some other form of media either ‘most’ (31%) or ‘some’ (25%) of the time that they are doing homework…” (p. 20, print version). I guess it isn’t terribly surprising that many teachers are just a bit reluctant to open the floodgates – to provide flexible use of student computers in the classroom, or worse, allow students to use their cell phones and other personal gadgets. It would be a little like giving every student their own TV on which they could watch anything, right there in the classroom. Only, of course, this is worse, since current tools also provide them with a means to engage with anyone, anywhere, on anything. And they do…

The article is also about a school embracing the idea that engaging students means leveraging the same technologies they use. But the end of the article describes an English teacher there who has finally resorted to having students read aloud in class. This upside-down approach (read in class, engage outside of class) is this teacher’s attempt to counter her inability to induce students to read at all. Although I’m not quite Rose in this instance (I actually use the same tools the students in the story use), there are times when I find myself shaking my fist at the “stand of tall trees next door,” just like the English teacher in the story does at these tools. Pursuits which require extended time and attention, and products which reflect the results of same, seem to be disappearing, and there are lots of folks who point to the tools themselves – “slates,” smart phones, social networking sites, even just plain old hyperlinked Web delivery – as the culprits.

Are we, like Rose, just old geezers whining about change and inconvenience? There are a few things missing from this discussion, and I’ll mention two here.

Chickens vs. Eggs

There is a good explanation for why young people have sorted these technologies out as entertainment platforms, even as much of the rest of the world plunges into their use for productivity, commerce, and learning. Most kids, of course, in the absence of other forces, will naturally look for the entertainment value in anything. After all, if they didn’t, they’d be adults. Teachers, for a variety of reasons (some good, some perhaps less so), have not exactly rushed headlong towards embracing these tools for their own personal use. As a result, they can’t model effective use of these tools for their students, and, more importantly, have little interest in requiring such use out of their students. It’s not surprising then that, if given access, students use the technology in school for what they always use it for elsewhere.

Although there are implications for us here, this, of course, does not directly address what we should do to change things, or why…

Who’s Distracted, Really?

Interestingly, in the same edition of the Times, in her Magazine weekly column, “The Medium,” Virginia Heffernan makes the case that, in fact, the whole issue of short attention span and distraction is a myth. She contends that we, as humans, attend to that which we view as important. The ability to stay focused on something doesn’t exist in a cultural (or, by extension, a technological) context. It’s much more deeply embedded than that. Hence, if people (or students) are distracted, it’s for good reasons, or reasons of boredom.

For the short term, engagement can be enhanced by a gadget or sexy delivery method, but such engagement will have a very short shelf life, and will not produce the same results that true engagement in the underlying content or goals would. That is, we should not expect a technology tool itself to tip the balance towards engaged learning. But that works both ways – we also cannot indict our technology tools for distracting students from the interest and engagement of an assignment either. Yes, their capabilities can be distracting, but following a distraction implies more than an avenue of escape – it also implies the need to escape in the first place.

And that is the key to how to dig ourselves out of this conundrum. Technology tools have the ability to support our students in doing things they can’t do without them – connect, create, share, and construct in completely new ways. That is the reason why these tools are so powerful in the workplace, and, not incidentally, why kids find them so entertaining. But we cannot simply decide to credit, or blame, these tools for providing engagement or distraction. The topic, activity, and our personal involvement in it as educators and advocates must provide that. The real proof of engagement comes from making an assignment one that a student is interested in doing.

So, yes, these “trees” will produce an obligation on our part to clean up after their excesses. They will not take care of themselves, nor will they induce our students into doing so. But we will not be served by simply “cutting them down,” either. If we do so, we may have produced a leaf-less fall, but the rest of the seasons will be blanched and dry.

Here's to you, Rose. You’re still wrong, but I do miss those rhubarb pies.

Implied Pedagogy Part 2: To a hammer...

2010-11-12T11:27:00.000-08:00

Scenario One:

It wasn’t all that long ago that I finally got around to getting a [new cool tool]. It really was a revelation. I purchased it to replace something I’d been using for quite awhile, but the expanded capabilities it represented had a profound influence on me in two ways: it greatly increased and made more powerful the main purpose of the original technology. But, more importantly, it began to reveal a myriad of ways in which its capabilities could be used for behaviors and experiences of which I hadn’t even thought…

Scenario Two:

It wasn’t all that long ago that I finally got around to getting a [new cool tool]. It was a little constricting when compared to what I normally used, but I was willing to forgive those limitations due to some important advantages. But, over time, I found it was slowly impacting my behavior in two ways. I was using the new device much more often – it was beginning to completely replace my normal device. But even more important, I was tending to abandon my attention to and interest in the sorts of things my previous device easily supported, but it didn’t. It was, in fact, affecting how much I attended to things I knew to be important…

The “new cool tool” in each of the above scenarios is, in fact, the same device – a smart phone. The difference in outcomes, of course, is in what other technology the device tended to replace. In the first instance, it replaced an ordinary cell phone. In the second case, it was displacing a computer.

An ordinary phone is actually quite powerful, allowing its user to connect, in real time, to almost anyone with a similar device anywhere in the world. But a smart phone brings with it a huge collection of bonus capabilities. Connections to other people can be through voice, text, image, even video, and delivered in real time or in formats consumable at any other time. Besides connections to people, it provides access to masses of information, delivered in easily consumable and easy-to-manage pieces through simple and intuitive applications. All of this from a device that fits into your pocket, and works almost anywhere in the world.
Of course, with the exception of the “fits into your pocket” part, a computer can do all of that as well. What a computer lacks in portability and ease of use, it gains in quality of delivery, increased versatility, more powerful user interfaces, and simple real estate. That “real estate” isn’t just the size of the screen (though that’s very important as well). It’s the scope and size of the things a computer can access. A smart phone’s apps generally reside on the device, helping to slice up the outside world into pieces the small screen and limited processing power can digest. A computer’s very complex and versatile operating system (and equally powerful browser) provides the ability for it to support and deliver a mass of capabilities living elsewhere on the so-called cloud – from office tools to content and learning management – without any help from an installed application, and any need to reduce its size and complexity. The “easily consumable and easy-to-manage pieces” of smart phone information is, in fact, a restriction, which profoundly impacts the behaviors and expectations of its users, and the possible outcomes from its use.

We’re ready to look at what all this looks like to the learner, educator, and education technology coordinator. A regular theme of mine is that the selection of a technology can have profound implications for how we teach (pedagogy), as well as why we teach (hoped-for outcomes). Previously we looked at human behaviors (“doing vs. watching”), and compared devices to those behaviors. Since a smart phone tends to replace technologies we already use, we need to measure how it changes existing behaviors: how it impacts the manner in which a student interacts with the learning process, and how it impacts the scope and sequence of a teacher’s instructional practice. This discussion could also be applied to any device running a cell phone operating system, including personal digital assistants (PDA’s – iPods are an example), and “slate” devices such as the iPad.

       To make our analysis somewhat better embedded in our instructional interests, we’ll select an arbitrary assignment, a critical analysis of an online resource, a YouTube video.
       Since an ordinary cell phone wouldn’t actually support such an activity, replacing it with a smart phone (or similar device) would immediately open up a new world of possibilities – students would be able to view the video, read comments made about it, and access support materials relating to the content of the video, alone, and on their own time. In addition, the smart phone would provide a platform through which students could text remarks about the video directly to their peers, as well as the teacher. They could even contribute these remarks to a thread hosted online through any of a dozen social networking platforms, thereby making the assignment more collaborative. This is the “…myriad of ways in which the technology could be used for [new] behaviors and experiences…”
       Now, let’s see what happens to this activity when the smart phone is used to replace a computer. As you might guess, since the computer can, in fact, do everything the smart phone can do and more, the impact in this case is restrictive. Watching a video on a very small screen limits the detail and impact that a computer screen or larger display might deliver (though an iPad-like device would improve that). Computer-savvy students would surely miss the ability to read comments and reference materials in real time as the video played. But the most important restriction would be in the mode and manner in which the student actually did his analysis. With no traditional keyboard and no access to true word processing, the writing process native to a smart device is “Twitter-friendly,” encouraging small amounts of text with no formatting. Writing a several-page analysis of the video on a smart phone (even an iPad) would be unthinkable. The process of collaborating between peers would be similarly limited.
       Of course, our mistake is in assuming that “…the smart phone is used to replace a computer.” It can’t, so, for this assignment, we would be wrong in selecting this technology. But the larger problem is well illustrated by Scenario Two above. When we purchase a device, or acquire a technology for classroom use, we spend hours trying to figure out how to induce it to do what we can already do elsewhere. In this case, the device really isn’t up to the task, and our increased use results in a change in the way in which we consume information, and even more important, how we communicate information to others. It’s the old adage, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” To a smart phone, everything looks like a Tweet.
       In the world of consumer technologies, this is unfortunate, but otherwise probably not that interesting. For a social studies teacher teaching the subtleties of human thinking, or a language arts teacher teaching the entire range of human expression, the presence and overuse of this technology gives them yet another barrier to their instructional goals. There are dozens of appropriate applications for such devices, and the fact that they are becoming ubiquitous is an exciting prospect for teachers who want to encourage their students to be connected and interactive with the world of peers, experts and information, at any time and from anywhere. If the devices are supplied by students, super, you’ve leveraged new capabilities you didn’t have before. But more likely the school will have to supply them. I’m already hearing from school tech coordinators that they intend to stop buying computers and focus on iPads. Before running into the arms of a very seductive new technology, one should look long and hard at the sorts of things you want your students to do and learn, and pick the tool best suited for as many of them as you can.
       It may very well be that these technologies will expand and improve, changing this discussion. But we already have devices which cover our needs as educators to support large, in-depth, complex and subtle learning activities for our students. The impact of the presence of small, low-power devices on educational practice will be positive depending on how, for what – and most importantly, in place of what – we choose to use them. Our enthusiasm for them should not decide for us what and how we want our students to learn.

Doers and Watchers: A Tool's Implied Pedagogy

2010-11-01T11:17:00.000-07:00

Are you a doer, or a watcher?

A doer creates what a watcher consumes. We all are both at various times of any day, but one could argue that, in a specific context, most people are primarily one or the other. Since there are a lot more television watchers than actors, the presumption is there are a lot more watchers in that context.

Are your students doers, or watchers?

This question is a great deal different from the previous one, influenced by what we might infer from the word "student." Here's what Dictionary.com says about that word:

stu-dent. [stood-nt, styood-] - noun
a person formally engaged in learning, esp. one enrolled in a school or college; pupil: a student at Yale.
any person who studies, investigates, or examines thoughtfully: a student of human nature.

The first definition points to a state of being (formal or informal), the second to a behavior. But even the first uses the word "engaged," implying that being a student is, primarily, an activity requiring one's conscious participation.
That’s actually different than one might guess, since most people (even many teachers) presume that a teacher is the doer, and students watch. That’s the traditional “lecture” instructional paradigm. But current research on learning indicates that knowledge is constructed by a student, rather than induced by a teacher. Research in effective technology use and integration into instruction goes further, pointing to student-directed work in knowledge construction, especially in the case of higher-order learning: "depth of knowledge 4," or "synthesis" or “evaluation” from Bloom's Taxonomy (see LoTi, ACOT2).
From this perspective, the act of teaching is the act of providing the tools, materials and environment whereby students can successfully engage, interactively participate in, and direct the learning process.
So, we're back to the question.

Are your students doers, or watchers?

...and the answer should be that, if they're truly students, they must be doers. That isn't to say that watching must never happen in the classroom, but if it does, it should be aimed at lower-order goals, or as a preparation for doing.

Are your educational technology purchase decisions aimed at doing, or watching?

Every education technology purchase carries with it an implied pedagogy, and sorting that out has never become more complicated than in the digital age. Fifty years ago, when television first became one of the available technologies for the classroom, the implied pedagogy was “watching,” and many teachers were upset that we'd be turning an entire generation of students into passive consumers. But no consistent and measurable negative impact was ever found. One might speculate that, since the primary instructional paradigm at the time was lecture, TV just replaced one "watching" context with another. The “TV in the classroom” controversy simply ran out of steam.

But that's quite different from today. Students at MIT -- one of the best universities in the country (and, not incidentally, one of the most digital) -- spend, on average, over 50 hours a week engaged in digital media (see Digital Nation, a PBS FrontLine special). This media is interactive: email, Skype, Facebook, texting, Twitter, etc. Clearly, when such students are left to their own devices (pun intended), they are usually doers. So when we try to work out how best to allocate limited educational resources and tech purchase budgets, we’re not doing it in the same context as the teachers of 50 years ago. The selection of education technologies today is taking place against a backdrop of interactive "doing" by almost every young person, as soon as their school day ends. The expectation for engagement, and the social and intellectual presence of a student in such engagement, makes the selection of any classroom technology very different from fifty years ago. We're no longer competing with the lecture, we're competing with Facebook.

We’ll now look at the underlying implication for "watching" vs. "doing" for several popular categories of instructional technology, to see what they’re implied pedagogy actually is.

Classroom Response Systems.

"Clickers" are all the rage. They make assessment fun. They give instant feedback, which can provide direction to instruction. They are very engaging for students (at least for now, while they're still new).
For our discussion, they're a really great metaphor for making succinct what we mean by students' "doing" the business of learning. Assessments, whether delivered by paper or classroom response systems, do ask students to do something. But it is impossible to avoid the implications of response systems -- students do not inherently build knowledge interactively through any assessment tool. They do not control the process, and usually interact with the content in a teacher-directed manner.

"Smart" Classroom Tools
These tools are associated with digital projection systems and interactive whiteboards, as well as hand-held devices such as the Smart Slate. These systems differ a great deal from classroom response systems in that their effectiveness is in direct student manipulation. Like classroom response systems, these tools can be very effective in producing engaging and interactive activities for students in a classroom setting.
However, once again, all students in the class will usually be doing the same thing. As a matter of fact, even when students are interacting directly with the technology, the number doing so will be small (usually one, often zero when a teacher uses it exclusively as a presentation tool), and all others will be truly watching.

Before you conclude that I am against such technologies, let me qualify. As any student of Norman Webb and Benjamin Bloom will tell you, there are important learning goals associated with each of the levels they describe, even the lowest ones, with activities (some of which are just watching) appropriate for each. In addition, a great teacher can very effectively use any tool to encourage a wide array of instructional approaches, just as they can turn an ordinary chalkboard into a student-driven knowledge construction tool. But in current instructional practice, higher-order thinking and learning are usually the neglected goals. Not incidentally, they’re also the ones which benefit the most from student-directed, socially engaging learning activities. So we need to make sure that we deliberately provide technologies which inherintly support these higher goals (and, not incidentally, reflect the practices students are using outside of school). The implied pedagogy of the above tools means that they will not, in themselves, satisfy the needs and goals of higher order learning goals.

In the 21^st Century, where information and interactivity is delivered in large part over digital networks, that usually means an individual computing device. There are dozens of ways a classroom can provide such devices to students: PDAs/iPods, iPads and eReaders, netbooks/laptops, classroom workstations/terminals, even smart phones. All have advantages and disadvantages (a topic for a future blog entry).

So when you map out how your classroom, your school, or your district supports and purchases technologies, ask yourself…

Are at least some your educational technology purchase decisions aimed at "doing?"

Beyond Facebook: Social Networking and Learning

2010-10-09T05:53:00.000-07:00

Facebook!

        That's pretty much all you need to do to get someone's attention these days. Between business and public organizations staking out Facebook spaces for interactive and promotional purposes, and just about everybody's family gathering there, it's become the “new Google” – a place you can search and find almost anything.
        The enthusiasm has generated a great deal of interest in educational circles as well, since the platform at least implies a user-driven (i.e. student-driven) learning paradigm, with further implications for collaboration and group knowledge construction. As a result, a lot of districts are examining whether it is really appropriate to block Facebook within a school district's wide area network. The pivotal word, as always, is “implies.” How does one best leverage this sort of thing for instructional purposes? Some of the ways are obvious. If you establish groups of “friended” students, then they can discuss, work, and share in the pursuit of any learning projects.
        Of course, “how” also implies “where” – that is, should we be using Facebook itself to translate “implies” to “supports?” There are severe challenges associated with using an extremely popular platform like Facebook for school-based instructional purposes. Since students (and teachers, for that matter) are already using it for personal purposes, there are massive numbers of distractions. And, of course, there's a lot of content which won't be appropriate for students (an issue which doesn't have a consistent and uniform standard across K-12). There's another problem as well. Facebook, as an extension of other social networking tools kids leverage (texting, instant messaging, Twitter, forums and bulletin boards), has its own learned pattern of common usage, including Internet slang, and inappropriate language and images. These behaviors spread virally through social networking platforms. Using the platforms for education requires that teachers and technology coordinators counter these patterns, since they'll work against the educational goals of a teacher. In the face of this battle, many teachers will be overwhelmed, and will abandon social networking as an instructional tool.
        Of course, the viral nature in which use patterns and behaviors disseminate through social network-like systems can be leveraged to promote appropriate use. But a new study (mentioned by educational technology observer Ian Jukes on his 21^st Century Fluency Project blog) shows that, in fact, “viral” spreading of behaviors is a much more powerful resource when the community in which social networking is taking place is, in fact, a “clustered network,” a network in which all of the players know each other: “…social behaviors may spread more quickly in a clustered network…[since] the redundancy created by multiple ties between individuals close to each other in the network will reinforce the diffusion of the behavior.”
        Such attention to connections is implied by the idea of “learning communities,” another concept associated with the same underlying ideas as social networks. As many professional development programs have discovered (both within and outside of education), online learning communities designed to support a specific audience with a specific professional goal have a much better chance if they are built on the foundation of an existing learning community, usually with ties to face-to-face interaction such as you find within school faculties, content area groups, or other face-to-face meeting groups. Those are the “clustered networks” mentioned by the research.
       The implication is that, for students to learn through social networking, they'll need to be in a closed environment which leverages other, pre-existing networks. In a school, a classroom may or may not represent such a network (my own research has shown that not all classmates feel connected to each other), but that is only one of several “clusters” a school might deliver, or create. With such multiple connections, behavior change, appropriate use, as well as community building and collaboration, have a great deal better chance of happening. There are dozens of tools districts can use as closed and connected network platforms. In Fayette County, we're using an open source tool, Mahara, to support pre-existing “clusters,” teach appropriate use of social networking in general, and support knowledge construction in a variety of ways, including the sharing of e-portfolios. Already, students, through their connections and teacher leadership, have stepped up to share and encourage each other's appropriate use.
        The promise of this way of connecting and learning need not be associated with a single platform such as Facebook. As a matter of fact, the possibility of student-driven learning and behavior change may very well be hamstrung by the use of an environment with so much competing baggage. But that doesn't diminish the power of the underlying paradigm.

Social networking!

If you build it...will they come?

2010-10-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

        Ray Kinsella heard and repeated it (through the person of Kevin Costner in the movie "Field of Dreams"): "If you build it, he will come." He built it, and, sure enough, Shoeless Joe Jackson and a dozen other deceased baseball players showed up to play ball there. The implication is that all it takes is to construct something, and magical things will suddenly happen. With the beginning of another fiscal school year, dozens of teachers and administrators are gearing up to chase the same dream. All they need is "Smart" boards for all their math teachers, two new mobile laptop "labs" for the Language Arts teachers, digital camcorders for Social Studies...and student learning will increase.
       Sometimes it even works. You build a new park, and crime in the surrounding neighborhood drops. You purchase new team uniforms, and the team starts winning. But, statistically, a drop in crime, or a winning season -- all other things being equal -- are no more likely with new things as with old. A team wins because it plays better than its opponents. New uniforms may encourage a team to try harder, but it's their play that'll make them a winner. Besides, any effect realized by the purchase of new things wears off quickly with time. Change simply isn't that easy.
        Beginning with the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow research over 25 years ago, education technology has been pushed as a vehicle, a metaphor for education reform and improvement. After all, online computers can do some very amazing things: they can extend a content discussion between students (and anyone else) across space and time. Real time conferencing tools can bring experts, artists, community members into the classroom, without anyone getting into a car. Students can turn a test into a learning device through machine-delivered instant feedback and hyperlinked support resources. Teachers can incorporate anonymous student responses to questions into an interactive lesson in real time, and in the process, generate data to guide instruction on the fly. It all seems like a no-brainer, like all we need to do it build it, and "he will come" -- the scores will magically rise.
        In fact, our classrooms these days already have a lot of these instructional tools -- almost all have digital displays, teachers invariably have a computer on which they can create materials and resources, and students have access to all kinds of hardware, including digital camcorders and cameras, online information resources, and classroom- and online-delivered interactive assessment tools. "Smart classroom" tools are becoming more common as well. We have, in many cases, already built it. And sometimes it helps. But for most, many of the same challenges remain: students still are disengaged, test scores fail to rise, and classrooms remain dysfunctional and disrupted. What's happening?.More importantly, why should we bother?

At a recent visit to a district with a heavy commitment to 1-1 computing (all students are issued laptops as they enter high school), the chief information officer advised those present that test scores should not be the reason to commit to such a program. Such a program is important because it prepares students for the environments they will encounter in the world beyond high school. It is about relevance and student engagement, delivering experiences which engage students "where they are." These are all extremely valid points.

What caught my eye during the presentation was the word "engagement," and its implications for student motivation and commitment. If the promise of technology tools is that students are better engaged and motivated, then increased scores should, in fact, be the result. But "engagement" and "relevance" aren't just tied to tools. They're tied to behaviors. The presence of powerful tools does not correct the disconnect between how students learn outside of school, and how they learn at school. Only teachers can do that. Those "new uniforms" can provide some interest, but that interest simply will not last. Chances are, if a teacher is using the new tools to implement the same lockstep, teacher-driven, low level pedagogical practices they used before the tools arrived, the results will be no increase in engagement, motivation, and test scores. If, alternatively, a teacher truly embraces the ability of these tools to promote and support student-driven and connected learning, extending the classroom across space, time, and knowledge levels, the results can be magical.
Yes, it is critical that we place the tools students are already using outside of school in their hands while we have them. But as schools chase tech dollars, if they propose nothing else, the results will most likely be disappointing -- either they won't get their money, or the money won't do what they hoped it would. Teachers can't simply "build it," they much change their practice to better realize the promise of powerful tools. Technology implies change, but it isn't change in itself. We can only improve our effectiveness as educators if we change what we, and our students, do, in the classroom and beyond.

It's a Mash-Up, Google/Amazon/Netflix World -- Data-Driven Instruction

2010-09-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

       Something very odd happened when I finally got around to updating my Facebook profile: suddenly the ads appearing at the right hand side of my wall were, shall we say, just a little bit more targeted. The mention of my love of sailing produced ads for tee-shirts with sailing themes. My use of the word "education" produced a slew of ads promoting degrees and lesson plans. And, of course, the politics -- the suggestions for interested "likes" and connections were selected through Facebook's best prediction of what I already believed and thought. The same has been true of my perusals through the pages of Amazon.com, where "suggestions" are obviously coming from data gathered from the very few things I've purchased, and the dozens of things I've examined. (I'm one of those who uses user reviews there to help evaluate things I really have no interest in buying.) Netflix is also trying to do that as well, though it's even further off the mark.
        I admit to the traditional conspiratorial take on such processes, but I also know that, since I am aware that's how such things work, I can avoid the problem by simply avoiding the services. After all, since I use them to gather data, it is probably unfair to assume that these services don't have a right to gather data from me. I also have never purchased a tee-shirt suggested by Facebook, so I do not feel a loss of control simply by the ad's presence.
        But there are implications there for how we do the business of education. After all, as education professionals in the world of "data-driven instruction," high-stakes student (and teacher performance) assessment, so-called classroom performance systems, and lots of other data-gathering tools, we are, in fact, encouraging our teachers to produce and analyze such data about their students, and then using that data to drive our interaction with them. Is that a bad thing? No, as long as we know its limits. And, even more important, as long as we know the implications such data-driven activities have for the nature of learning, interacting, and being human.
        A brief article in this week's New York Times Magazine (Sept. 19, 2010), written by Microsoft engineer Jaron Lanier, helped bring this home for me just a bit. In celebrating the personal way in which his father taught in public schools, he decried how information access seems to be doing damage to the way in which students invent themselves...

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen...What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don't learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good (p.35).

But then, that's what we're encouraging our teachers to do with them, and what they're watching us do to them as they negotiate the world we (and the commercial interests we endorse and embrace) present them online.
        It is not my intent to make this yet another call for the teaching of critical thinking (though it is that), or an indictment of our over-indulgence in data-driven assessment cycles (though it is that, as well). What we should do, as teachers, is to take a very long look at the technology tools we choose, and the way in which we choose to use them, to see what sorts of pedagogical and learning level implications they carry.
        A simple online computer does not, in itself, come with much implied pedagogy. But Google, of course, does -- it assumes that the user's interests, needs, and understandings can be well predicted by algorithms written by (as Lanier calls them) geeks pushing key words and concepts around. The kinds of questions Google answers can only be basic and informational, the lowest sorts of learning goals on Bloom's ("taxonomy of learning") or Webb's ("depth of knowledge") scales. At the secondary or post-secondary level, even at an information level, Google won't be able to reach out to the best minds on many topics, even if the student asks a well-founded question of it. But unless the results of this work is used to encourage a student to start with a blank screen, it is unlikely that the results will be reflective of much of a change in the student.
       Probably the hottest types of educational technologies these days are so-called smart classroom tools. These tools are becoming quite clever in their presentation, the types and quality of the questions they present to students, and the speed in which the answers are processed and presented back to teachers. But what pedagogy do they most often imply? What opportunities do such tools present to allow students to invent themselves?
        That is not to say that the questions a classroom performance system asks of a student are not worth asking, or the answers worth knowing. There are lots of pedagogical goals which are excellently served by such systems. But Arthur C. Clarke once stated that "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!" This rather callous assessment of bad instruction might be revised somewhat...any pedagogical/learning goal which could be best delivered by a machine, should be. Most of the questions a teacher-driven performance system asks could be asked and taught quite successfully in the absence of the teacher. If, however, our instructional goal is for a student to process and present information, opinions, and products drawn onto a blank slate, then a teacher is required, and different tools should be selected.
        This sort of examination of goals and implied pedagogy has, as its core, huge implications for instructional delivery and selection of appropriate tools. It also has huge implications for the current structure of instructional delivery. If we are selecting tools to place them in the hands of teachers to support the ways in which they already teach, then we're missing out on huge opportunities to improve efficiency, and better manage the advantages a teacher brings to a student. If we are selecting tools which simply support a student's ability to mash-up learning fragments rearranged for teacher consumption, then we have squandered an enormous opportunity for students to create, and in creating, re-define themselves.

Digital Natives: Implications for Pedagogy

2010-09-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

      There are two subthreads to the whole "Digital Native vs. Digital Immigrant" discussion (see articles by Marc Prensky), with neither having a clear answer. It is clear that our children are very different from us -- at least statistically. (My daughter, previously the anti-computer college student, was quite different from me, the avid digital user. That's atypical. But, then, nobody is actually "average!")

1) Do we have an obligation to teach to these new implied student learning styles?
              From an article written by Prensky ("Do They Really Think Differently?", On the Horizon, Vol. 9, #6 [Dec. 2001]) ..."Children raised with the computer 'think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential'" (p. 4). Does this imply that, in fact, our instructional practice needs to reflect this learning style? What implications do such an approach have for our pedagogy?...our instructional goals?...our interests in differentiated instruction?
        Online instruction, as it is often practiced, can be very much more linear than face-to-face learning experiences. It is sequenced over time, and it's sequenced in terms of instructional goals, whereas face-to-face classes do not require a fixed sequence, making it possible for the instructor to re-direct or branch at will. Although the inclusion of visual and aural content online might help, it doesn't help with linearity. (Many observers note that video and sound content is very much more linear, since scanning, skimming, and jumping around in it is more difficult!) How does asynchronous online instruction successfully address this difference in learning styles?
       Of course, the implications of these remarks is that delivered instruction is consumed instruction. That is true in face-to-face classes, but is almost invariably not true online. There, students can easily follow hyperlinks, provide for multiple browser windows, even include paper-based resources, while still fully participating in the online experience. A spontaneous question can be instantly answered or asked, even in the absence of experts. This is Prensky's "parallel cognitive structure." It also reflects that, in the world of the digital native, access is instantaneous, providing deep implications for what it means to know something. Although a digital native may not be able to recall information quickly, s/he can find it almost instantaneously, if provided the connection. Of course, "accessed" isn't equivalent to "informed." Addressing that problem points to another difference in teaching digital natives, which I address below.

2) Do we have a moral obligation to fit our instructional practice into current socialization patterns, or, do we have a moral obligation to attempt to correct such patterns?
              During the early TV explosion, teachers often felt that their responsibility was to teach to the shortcomings of television-delivered instruction, to correct for their tendency to encourage passive consumption of information and experiences. Do we have a similar obligation now? Should we be consciously attempting to teach linear research and reasoning patterns as an important way in which students can learn and improve...one that's currently missing from their experiences? Or should we simply assume that that isn't possible?
        Linearity, of course, is one issue, and I do feel that we have an obligation to teach the thoroughness and formality that linear instruction implies. But if we always force a linear approach to pedagogy,not only will we confront a serious disconnect between learning styles, we'll also be ignoring the implied power of digital learning, where divergent, self-driven knowledge construction experiences can motivate digital natives, and improve their participation in the learning process.
But there are important shortcomings which the phrase "digital native" might imply, and we have an obligation to address. Current research shows that digital natives may have improved their access to information, but their ability to differentiate between information sources has not met the challenge -- they tend to consume rather than select and evaluate that which they find. Critical thinking is probably one of the most important learning goals implied by the characteristics of a digital native. Access is merely the first step. Without the ability to critically assess and evaluate what you find, your ability to learn, construct, and decide based on that information will be very limited.
        In addition, digital natives tend to be "short form" writers, reflecting not only limits to text messages, tweets, social networking platforms, and small devices, but the general tendency to ignore subtlety and complexity, a natural extension of the difference between being a digital consumer and a digital user. As teachers, we have an obligation to reflect learning style (parallel vs. linear, access vs. memorization). However, we cannot become simple consumers of all of what we observe in our digital native students. Much of the content we must teach is nuanced and complex, so our approach must leverage how our students learn, without forcing that content into the limits of information consumption and short form expression, the unfortunate side effect of their tendency to be digital consumers.

A Personal Philosophy of Education

2010-09-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

The needs and abilities of students have changed radically in the last few decades. In our new service economy, and in many other professional settings, simple content knowledge must make room for knowledge facilitation as extremely important workplace skills. As educators, we have a responsibility to negotiate that shift for ourselves, and apply it to our instructional practice.
Our students are living and negotiating these changes, and hence have experience and expertise in a wide range of communication capabilities that did not even exist fifteen years ago. They are often comfortable negotiating environments that their parents are struggling to learn. However, this is not to presume that, for students, these changes will happen without our participation as educators – for two very important reasons:

“Skillful” does not mean “effective” -- students are having difficulty seeing how the tools they’ve learned can be used productively, to further their own professional and personal goals, and the goals of the contexts in which they find themselves – family, school, workplace, community, and society.
These changes are not taking place uniformly across our society. The students who are easily making the transition to new tools have access to these tools as a natural part of the socio-economic advantage they enjoy. Many other students are at an extreme disadvantage, with no such access. At no time since the advent of universal education in this country has the responsibility of public schools been greater to bridge these gaps, to insure that all students have the access and training they need to succeed in society at large.

My commitment as a public educator has always been to providing instruction that touches the broadest spectrum of students. In this regard, the technological delivery of information, instruction, and (most importantly) communication has an extremely important role to fulfill. It can serve to provide information, ways of connecting, and even whole course access to a broader range of students than can sometimes be served by most schools -- schools that have so many other pressures (staffing, budget, core content, assessment, etc.) to which they must attend. However, as is true of any shift in the delivery of services, to insure that all students can succeed, we must be sure that such a shift does not ignore the personal, motivational, and learning style needs of those students. After hours of taped and transcribed interviews of distance-learning students for a research project, I can speak directly to the pivotal nature of these issues. Our use of new technologies in student communication and instruction must reflect solid research that reflects not only the successes, but also the failures, of the new capabilities we use.
We have entered a new millennium in our society, and that change must be reflected in our commitment and practice as educators. However, as a public educator, I believe in the importance of uniform delivery of access, and am committed to the success of all students, regardless of delivery medium.