Not really surprised because the approach taken by Varsity Monitor is similar to that seen in many schools up and down the country. Social media usage is a “problem” that must be dealt with. Schools often lack positive and organic policies governing, not just the abuse, as it is often solely the case, but the use of social media. Thus schools monitor social media but seldom teach children how to use them appropriately.

Both research and my own personal experience have shown me that students’ attitudes towards social media are overwhelmingly positive and that, when effectively utilised, social media allow our students to continue learning beyond the constraints of the school’s walls, expanding the learning environment to wherever the learner happens to be, acting as a bridge between school and home and between formal and informal learning.

The real problem schools face is that they are unable to model appropriate behaviour, so children only have each other as models. The reason why no appropriate models are available is because adults themselves are not very good role models in the use of social media. Adults partake in social media only sporadically or not at all. Or even worse, the very adults that children look up to as their role models are often just as likely to use social media as inappropriately as the children in their charge.

Most adults involved in education simply lack the experience and skills to be appropriate role models in the use of social media.

But social media is not going anywhere. It has come to form part of the very fabric of our society, a society where the weather man wants you to follow him on Twitter, the Queen wants you to like her on Facebook and where prospective employers look you up on the internet before they look at your CV.

This is why I would like to see a greater and more constructive involvement of schools in the digital lives of their students. A greater concerted effort to get it right. I would like to see schools that understand the inherent advantages of using social media and that educate children about the benefits as well as the dangers. I would like to see schools that prepare their pupils for life in the real world.

We can monitor all we like, but it is education that children really need.

Photo by Henning Mühlinghaus

A yes, however, is a game-changer. Every yes carries a risk but it also brings with it hopeful promises and potential rewards. Every yes is a new possibility, a different future. A single yes can keep us going in the face of constant refusal and feeds our ingenuity. A yes fosters a sense of belonging to the school that employs us. Just one yes is all it takes.

Every school needs more yeses and fewer noes. So challenge yourself to say yes more often. Change course, say yes.

The ZPD is defined as the greater range of tasks that a child can complete with the guidance and assistance of others – be they adults or other children – as opposed to the tasks a child can complete independently.

Thus, according to socio-constructivist views, close contact between the learner and those within the ZPD helps individuals make sense of what is being learnt and stretches the learning beyond what any single student would have been able to construct in isolation.

The penny is dropping

When Vygotsky first fleshed out the socio-constructivist narrative in the early 20th century, he could not have foreseen how technological advances would enable communication on an unprecedented scale less than a century later. In fact, his theories are given renewed significance by the emergent social networks currently establishing themselves as the preferred means of communication of humankind.

Our education system that has arguably changed little in structure and ethos since it became institutionalised in the XIX century². However, for many in education, the penny is currently in the process of dropping as they begin to realise that social media could provide school communities with a low-cost, high-value platform in which teachers and learners could remain in close contact and interact beyond the constraints of the school walls, and within which the teacher would be able to provide the learner with further personalised feedback and support to that already provided in the physical learning environment.

False dichotomies

It is important to highlight the importance of the physical learning environment at this point, for it is rather easy to get mired in fundamentally silly and ultimately false dichotomies regarding learning environments: I think that a virtual learning environment is not a substitute for its physical counterpart, but rather an extension of it.

Social construction of knowledge theories applied to the 21st century therefore allow us to conceive traditional classroom teaching and the emerging pedagogies as two sides of the same coin. From this perspective, there are not two distinct learning environments, but rather a single multidimensional one that encompasses all aspects of teaching and learning.

What do you think?

Many thanks to sourbrew for the photo.

I’ve been following closely news reports of his murder to keep appraised of the developments in the police investigation, hoping that the perpetrator of this heinous crime might be arrested and brought to justice without delay – if only to provide his family back in India with a reason for their tragic loss, if ever one can be gleaned.

Huw Edwards, news reader at the BBC, highlighted yesterday that Anuj’s father had learnt of the tragedy on Facebook. He raised an eyebrow and the tone of his voice changed slightly, a tad pejoratively, as he pronounced the word Facebook.

At the same time, an article was published in the BBC News website titled Anuj Bidve murder: Police regret Facebook death news. In it the following extract can be read:

Here was a crucial piece of information, efficiently and almost instantly transferred to the right people, to Anuj’s friends and family, by Anuj’s friends and family, yet both the Police and the BBC regretted that his father had not been contacted through the right channels. What are the right channels? A letter? An email? A telephone call?

Curiously, despite the compunction shown by the Police, Anuj’s Father, Subhash, did not appear concerned on interview – which available as a recording here - about how he had learned of his son’s tragic death. Instead he complained that “nobody official from UK government” had contacted him or his family to notify them, despite the fact that the Police was in possession of Anuj’s mobile phone, which contained “his father’s and mama’s number” as well as other information relevant to his identity. “They could have called us and told us this is what happened to Anuj”, Subhash protested.

It is obvious to me that the Police has been wrong-footed on this occasion by the sheer speed and efficiency of social networks in communicating and transferring the correct information to the right people.

What is less obvious to me is why, despite their huge popularity and proven efficiency, social networks continue to be deemed by institutions, such as the Police, and media outlets, such as the BBC, as not the right channels.

What do you think?

When the first pillar boxes were introduced in Britain from mainland Europe in the 1850s, the instinctive reaction of many was one of concern. Concern because now there was a way in which letters could be sent anonymously by slipping them into the now iconic red pillar boxes. The contemporaneous introduction of the Uniform Penny Post, complete with postman deliveries, ensured that receiving mail became a simplified and private business too.

Many worried about the consequences of such postal reforms: The public would begin to send letters anonymously and cheaply and nobody would know who was writing to whom and for what mischievous purpose. This clearly marked the beginning of the end of Victorian moral rectitude and heralded the breakdown of civilised society.

Needless to say, despite the unfounded initial concerns, the ensuing revolution in interpersonal communication heralded, not the collapse of civilisation, but the dawn of a new era of democratised transmission of information.

I cannot help but draw many parallels between this and the adoption of social communication technologies in schools.

What do you think?

Many thanks to wasabicube for his picture.

Many will argue that learning platforms do facilitate teaching and learning. This, in my view, is unquestionable and a positive step in the right direction. But few are able to say hand on heart that the learning platforms they are implementing succeed in engaging their students beyond low-level transactional interactions: here’s my homework, here’s your grade.

In many cases, communication is only allowed to take between teachers and students, but not among students. In fact, the one factor that would ensure student engagement is often blocked out of those platforms which do support it: social networking. Schools remain by and large terrified of allowing their students to communicate among themselves.

The levels of user engagement on which commercial social networking sites like Facebook thrive therefore remains utterly unattainable for school learning platforms that attempt to reproduce faithfully traditional models of teaching and learning. Unfortunately, this pill comes with substantial side-effects: without this coveted student engagement, learning platforms tend to become overpriced and unwieldy repository of word documents and powerpoint presentations.

For these reasons I believe that learning platforms are nothing more than a stopgap solution, a temporary workaround while both students and schools come round to accepting that web-based social networking is here to stay and that we would benefit greatly from exploiting its potential rather than legislating against what is, after all, the means of communications of choice of hundreds of millions of people.

Facebook has recently announced it’s testing a new student groups feature which will allow students from a particular educational institution to use their Facebook accounts to engage in academic business. Given that many schools are currently exploring Facebook as a means to engage their students – mostly via Facebook pages – it does not take a huge leap of the imagination to envisage a few tweaks of the code that would allow courses and resources to be shared productively, with students able to take a more active role in their learning and teachers becoming facilitators-in-chief in such a new, safe and engaging environment.

Fanciful? Perhaps. But so were Twitter departmental accounts and school Facebook pages not that long ago. This may still seem like be a step too far in the minds of many, but the path down which we’re heading ultimately leads to an education system supported and benefitting from web-based social learning platforms. And there is no reason whatsoever why Facebook couldn’t be one.

What do you think?

I understood this as a device to see how the young apprentices were able to adapt to challenging circumstances. Fair enough, I thought. But many of my adult friends found it hilarious to see how the youngsters struggled to complete their tasks wading through fat Yellow Pages without access to the almighty Google on the go.

“Look how they can’t even……” “They’re lost without….” Chortle. Chortle. Fill in the gaps with your favourite generational put down. It appears each generation finds the next’s dependence on the newest technologies something abhorrent which must somehow be cautioned against and avoided at all costs. This is the curse of technology.

Douglas Adams describes this eloquently: “…anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Perhaps we should see how my friends fare if we ban the technologies they are used to…  just for the giggles. See how they communicate without a telephone, or how they take their children to school and get to work without a car or, gasp! entertain themselves in the evenings without television. It would give rise to all sorts of hilarious mishaps. How funny.

What my friends don’t realise is that, just like cars or the telephone, the internet isn’t going anywhere – it’s here to stay – and they’ll just have to live with it.

Just a thought.

What do you think?

Many thanks to Roony for the Mummy photo.

Only two or three years ago I would have thought it impossible for schools to be opening Twitter and Facebook accounts to interact with the wider school community – including their pupils, of course. Such was the negative feeling among teachers that I would have been derided and lampooned  -and indeed I often was-  for having the deluded audacity to suggest that social networking could be harnessed by schools to be potentially beneficial to both teaching and learning.

Two or three years down the line, there are more and more schools and teachers using Twitter accounts and Facebook pages who are being bold and and have taken the plunge. For example, where I work, in the private sector, it is becoming ever rarer to find a school that does not have a Twitter account, a Facebook page or both.

I would be disingenuous if I proclaimed that today’s prevalent means of communication -social networking- is well established even in those schools experimenting with its potential. There is still a vast majority of teachers who remain deeply suspicious or, worse, simply uninterested in the way their students communicate.

We could be forgiven for assuming that nothing much has changed. Oh but it has. It’s much harder to lampoon twittering teachers now even the Head Teacher tweets. The old rhetoric of sexual predation that used to surround the use of  social media seems utterly unreasonable now the Maths department challenges their pupils to solve problems collaboratively via their Facebook page and the Physics department gets their students to film experiments that are then published on Youtube.

Even those teachers who remain suspicious of the potential of new technologies are beginning to tweet their condemnation of social media and blog about the unsuitability of social networking, mostly blissfully unaware of the irony.

Times are indeed changing. Although there will still be those who firmly believe in the good old ways, they now coexist with those who are beginning to realise that technology is more than just a tool and offers us a way, not to enhance, but to transform the way we teach and learn.

There is plenty to look forward to, for it won’t always be dark at six.

What do you think?

Many thanks to JC Norte for his wonderful photograph.

And it has nothing to do with luddite colleagues, old-fashioned pedagogical views, unsympathetic management teams or misinformed parents, which are the usual reasons I always hear from those frustrated by seeming lack of progress in this respect. It’s all to do the very nature of what we espouse: technology itself.

The pace at which technology is moving forward is technology’s worst enemy when it comes to its adoption in schools. No sooner schools realise the learning potential of VHS video players, DVDs come out, leaving all those VHS tapes gathering dust in a cupboard. Once schools finally buy their first computers, complete with floppy disks drives, CD-ROMs become ubiquitous.

This is why many schools have hybrid VHS/DVD players and computers with both floppy disk and CD ROM drives. In many classrooms I’ve visited you can still watch a VHS video one minute, a DVD the next and then stream a video on demand from the school’s network or the internet. In the very same classroom you may be presented with the options of saving a document in a floppy disk, burning it onto a CD ROM, saving it on a portable flash drive or sending it directly to the cloud.

Schools are forever catching up… and the whole business is very, very expensive – both in terms of effort and money. No wonder then teachers and schools in general prefer the safe ground provided by the old instead of the shaky and insecure ground on which new technologies stand.

Now that some schools are taking the very brave step of rolling out tablets to all their pupils, it may be that touch-screen technology has already had its day. As Steve Wheeler points out, the future of computing is voice control, as anyone with an iPhone 4s is finding out.

So schools are doomed to only being able to embrace yesterday’s technology, because when they finally come round to doing the embracing… it’s too late.

Just a thought.

What do you think?

I bet you a large proportion of hands will stay down as more and more students rely on social networking almost exclusively for their communication. I bet you this proportion will only increase in the coming years.

Students simply don’t need their own email account any more. With the arrival of Open Authorisation, they don’t even need email to sign up to web services, they simply sign up to them using their social networking accounts.

Is this kind of social communication the future of communication? Will this generation of children embrace the likes of Facebook or Google + as their preferred means of communication in all spheres of their lives – for work as well as leisure?

In my experience, for most children, email is quickly going the way of CDs: it’s simply surplus to their requirements, it’s obsolete.

I wonder then, is it not our responsibility as teachers to teach our students to be proficient, not just in the use of the tools of the past, but  also the tools of the future?

Just a thought.

What do you think?

Picture by Kenn Wilson