The use of social networking is increasing in all areas of society but, although students have been active in social networking for almost a decade now, during this time, schools and teachers have largely ignored their students’ clear desire for peer interaction and communication outside the classroom.

Even though the time has passed when students entering secondary education do not remember life before social networking, many schools continue to ban, block and firewall its use, failing to grasp the important role that social media plays, not only in the private lives of their students, but also in the wider school community.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this alienation has resulted in what many teachers describe as sporadic and unspectacular engagement with technology, thus proving in the eyes of many sceptics that social networking is unfit for academic purposes.

However, as an increasing number of schools and faculties are beginning to open accounts in social networking sites – principally in Facebook and Twitter – to take advantage of the benefits of the networked and transparent transfer of information, and as students continue unrelenting in their use and enjoyment of social networking sites, a greater understanding by both parties of the educational potential of these services is beginning to emerge.

Students have discovered that learning is no longer bound to the confines of the school building and schools are beginning to realise that teaching students how to use these technologies effectively for academic purposes is essential if they want their students to engage in the use of social networking appropriately, less sporadically and more spectacularly.

The rising importance and availability of online social networks and their popularity among young people are undeniable facts. The use of the internet is becoming an ever more integral part of young people’s lives and, as a result, they are communicating with each other on an unprecedented scale.

In my view, teaching and learning need to reflect these social changes and conform to the needs and expectations of today’s young people. Using ICT with a focus on the C for Communication allows us to bring the learning online and to blend the use of traditional tools such as textbooks or dictionaries with more up-to-date, relevant and authentic multimedia materials from the web. Technology itself may not be a motivating factor, but familiarity with the technology certainly is.

Online social networks provide teachers and students with a platform in which they can interact beyond the constraints of the school walls, and with which the teacher can provide personalised feedback, peer review, assessment and support beyond that which is possible with the already existing virtual learning environments, which, in my experience, quickly become repositories of institutionally approved teaching materials and effectively discourage cooperation and interaction among students, fostering instead less meaningful, transactional interaction such as the setting or handing in of student work or the communication of assessment grades.

However, there remain many preconceptions regarding the use of online social networking in education and there is a distinct lack of an alternative, more positive discourse highlighting the many benefits modern means of communication can bring to education.

Thus, those of us considering the use of social networking tools are often discouraged by sensationalist horror stories in the media. Sadly, the teacher-got-the-sack-because-of-Facebook headline is all too common and, as a consequence, most schools and teachers have decided that online social networking sites are simply not worth the trouble.

Am I saying that it is ok to be friends with pupils on Facebook? Let’s answer that clearly: no, it isn’t. Your private life should remain private. Being friends with pupils on Facebook is not ok as it exposes you and your pupils to unacceptable risks.

That is not to say, however, that we shouldn’t use social networks to enhance teaching and learning – by establishing school or departmental pages, for example – or, indeed, that we should tarnish all the internet’s potential for social interaction with the same brush.

The vast majority of teachers using online social networking tools manage to do so perfectly appropriately, pedagogically soundly and safely, improving learning outcomes as a result. Sadly, they seldom hit the headlines for these reasons.

Furthermore, traditionalist approaches to institutionalised education have continued to assume that knowledge can only be obtained within the school’s walls. Modern technology has shattered this notion and has presented us with a different paradigm: the information is everywhere and it’s freely available.

Handling all this information has suddenly become one of the most precious skills we can hope to pass on to our students. How teachers and schools react and adapt to this new paradigm will bear direct consequences in the future success of their pupils, for remembering facts and figures may not be as important to them in their lives as being able to successfully acquire, manipulate and exploit information. I don’t buy into the skills vs. knowledge argument. It’s not one or the other: it’s both.

The adoption of social networking could conceivably provide the school community with a low-cost / high-value platform in which teachers and learners can 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. A social network expands the learning environment to wherever the learner happens to be and acting as a bridge between school and home, between formal and informal learning.

With this in mind, an obvious symbiotic relationship between social media and learning begins to become apparent. It then becomes relatively easy to imagine the transfer of this kind of communication, collaboration and cooperation to the school context, where students and teachers can share information transparently using social media and networking sites to filter internet content and where teachers can direct students – or vice versa – to relevant, commonly interesting material.

Personal experience supported by well-established learning theory has shown me that learning from one another is one the deepest forms of learning our students ever experience. When social networking is effectively implemented, it allows our students to continue learning from one another, under our guidance, beyond the school’s walls.

This is why it remains perplexing to me that schools have generally reacted by blocking social networking sites and social media, effectively abandoning children to learn about their use on their own, without our guidance and without appropriate models of good practice.

Schools ought to separate the notion of safety from that of appropriate behaviour, allowing them to tackle these issues independently so that the pedagogical potential of social networking can be explored in depth.

What do you think?

Many thanks to Talie for the photograph

Wilshaw correctly identifies that mobile phones are causing disruption in the classroom. However, he seems to have failed to consider a number of relevant factors that are key to understanding to what degree mobile devices can be disruptive and whether they can be harnessed to enhance teaching and learning.

In my experience, disruption in lessons is caused by poor behaviour. Mobile phones have joined forces with paper planes, excessive chatter and illicit text messaging, which, lest we forget, went on long before mobile phones and social networks were ever conceived, as the comic strip below cleverly points out:

Poor behaviour can be dealt with according to your school’s guidelines and policies. Banning mobile phones seems to me a little shortsighted, as it does not tackle the root cause of poor behaviour.

If, as a teacher, you don’t feel supported by your schools’ policies and guidelines, then I suggest that’s a different problem altogether, which has nothing to do with mobile phones. Or paper planes, for that matter.

Secondly, Wilshaw assumes disruption is a wholly negative concept. Whenever new technologies have creeped into the classroom, they have collided with more traditional approaches to education, creating ripples that reveal a system’s potential for improvement.

Take the internet for example. Perhaps unsurprisingly, schools’ instinctive first reaction to it was the Ban and Block reflex. A few years of disruption down the line, however, most schools and teachers understand that the internet has disrupted education for the better, providing a world of timely information and allowing us to depart from the convention that pupils must be at school in order for them to learn or be taught or for teachers to be able to assess their progress.

Mobile devices are the next logical step. Perhaps the fact that pupils never forget to bring their phones to lessons but often forget their text books is a signal to us all that teaching in the 2010s is a very different business to teaching in the 1960s. A signal that we would be ill-advised to disregard so out of hand.

Wilshaw and his government backers seem to be determined to turn back the clock, looking at the past as a model for the future. Instead I would propose that we need schools that aren’t bound by the rules of the past, but rather schools that are transformed by the possibilities of the future.

On the one hand, I understand Wilshaw was a political appointment, and in politics short-term is what matters. Pandering to millions of Daily Mail Tory voting readers with entrenched views is more important in this context than proper long-term scrutiny, informed argument and judicious evaluation.

On the other hand, however, I would have expected better from a man in his position, regardless of his political persuasion. It would appear Michael Gove has finally found somebody to whom he can pass on the bogey-man baton.

What do you think?

Many thanks to Shuichiro for the potograpgh.

The charismatic subject – These teachers are born, not made. They do things their own way and don’t play by the rules. They are institutional rebels who rely on their natural ability to lead and engage their pupils. They only put together a lesson plan if there is an inspection, and that if they can be bothered. Think Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society effortless inspiring his students to a love of poetry.

The competent crafts person – These teachers are made, not born. These teachers beaver away in the staff-room behind piles of  exercise books worried about the latest assessment for learning initiative. Their lessons are strictly timed and defined by carefully devised lesson plans. They read books on classroom management techniques and worry about whether their subject knowledge is good enough to teach at A-Level.

The reflective practitioner – These teachers are neither made nor born, they become. They question assumptions and established practices. They don’t treat pedagogical theories as gospel and understand that they and their students, who happen to be people as well, are in it together. They reflect and adapt their practice as necessary, even if school policy is yet to catch up.

Although categorisations such as these inevitably are generalisations, that is not to say they should be ignored. They are certainly thought-provoking: If charismatic teachers are born, does professional development not play a role? Are über-competent teachers so engrossed in becoming masters of their craft that they ignore the needs of their pupils?

The answer is, of course, no. Why can we not be charismatic, competent and reflexive all at once?

If I were to have to choose one of these categories for myself, I would definitely pick the third one. I would like to be a reflective practitioner.

But how does a reflective practitioner reflect? I find that I am relying more and more on blogging and micro-blogging – mainly on Twitter – to reflect on my own teaching practice. That doesn’t mean I eschew face-to-face exchanges of views and late-night pillow consultations. I just find that, especially by blogging, I can be more open – as well as truthful to myself – and lay bare my ignorance in the hope a kind reader might entertain a discussion that would help to fill the numerous gaps in my knowledge and understanding of the issues in which I take an interest.

It is therefore dispiriting to find myself often defending this most reflective of activities from those who assert that only they who enjoy the sound of their own voices indulge in the ego trip that is blogging. Absolutely nothing further from the truth. In my experience, the teacher-bloggers I have met in person tend to be sensitive, thoughtful and considerate people who are committed to their profession, life-long learning and reflective practice.

In a recent blog post, Martin Weller wrote: “In terms of intellectual fulfillment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. [...] Blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate.”

I couldn’t agree more.

What do you think?

Many thanks to Mr Strangestain for the photograph

A thread I started on Twitter on this topic confirmed that, sadly, I am not only foreign educator working in the UK who feels other people’s perception of our competence is linked to factors beyond our control, such as our country of origin.

I certainly don’t wish to portray myself or anyone else as the victim of discrimination or injustice. On the contrary, I am fully aware that I am just as guilty of prejudice and bias as the next person. Which is what really concerns me.

The irrationality behind such prejudice and bias and how it determines why new ideas are adopted or discarded by us all is probably behind many of the decisions we make – if not all.

I have often joked that one of the best ways to get school leadership to adopt your idea is to craftily make it look as if it was their own. It turns out my instinct may well be right after all.

Dan Ariely explains, below, how we instinctively place more importance on our own ideas than on those of others. It’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the Not Invented Here Bias.

The Not Invented Here Bias suggests that your idea could be rejected simply on the grounds that it is yours, not on its actual merit. However, crucially, the bias also suggests that you may doggedly defend your own ideas over other people’s, regardless of how much better than yours they may be.

This raises the question: you may feel hard done by other people’s rejection of the innovative idea you are proposing, but how do you react to the innovative ideas of others?

This brings me back to the universality of irrationality. The sublimely funny League of Gentlemen seized upon this notion in this sketch, ridiculing us all and our reaction to innovation and the ideas of others.

It is therefore very tempting to conclude that your origin, your gender, your age, your experience or your sexuality are the most important factors that led to the rejection of your idea.

However, perhaps unsurprisingly after all, the real reason why they rejected your idea may have just been that it wasn’t theirs.

What do you think?

Many thanks to Fernando Arconanda for his photo

In each of these cases, achieving a successful outcome – becoming an accomplished writer, a gifted polyglot or a talented racing driver – is not dependent on the intimate knowledge of the processes involved and it can demonstrably be achieved with only a basic understanding thereof.

Indeed, it does not necessarily follow that a car mechanic should be a good driver or that a maxillofacial surgeon would boast an uncanny ability to pick up new languages.

Computer programming behaves in a similar way. In order to master the use of a computer, some basic understanding of programming will undoubtedly be helpful, but it will not guarantee a successful outcome.

This begs the question: what outcome do we wish to achieve when we suggest programming should be taught in schools? Many have suggested that schools ought to view programming as the new latin so that the UK can become a competitor against the likes of Silicon Valley.

I’m not convinced that a focus on learning to code will result in a generation of students raring up to start up the next Google right here on our shores.

Now, it’s time to acknowledge that I am not an ICT specialist and that I approach this topic from the perspective of a foreign languages teacher and, as such, my understanding of teaching and learning in schools is biased by my experience.

In languages teaching, there was for a time a focus on grammar teaching above all else. It was thought that explicit grammar teaching and learning was the elementary first step for any self-respecting budding linguist. This view is still held by many.

In practice, languages teachers soon realised that an in-depth understanding of grammar was not a means to an end, but rather part of the end in itself: a better understanding of the grammar resulted from learning the language and not vice-versa.

This – now deemed old-fashioned – approach to grammar teaching as the basis for language learning often resulted in generations of students who could conjugate verbs with ease but could not produce a single functioning utterance in the target language to save their lives.

Having learnt from the lessons of the past, today foreign languages teaching focuses on the use and the production of language, and although it is accepted that grammar is still important – rightly so – grammar learning is more likely to take place implicitly rather than explicitly.

This is why native English speakers can speak and write perfectly fluently – and even win the Noble Prize for literature – with only a notional understanding of what phrasal verbs are or indeed do.

Programming is, after all, often referred to as a language and, as such, I think there are plenty of parallels and lessons to be learnt from your languages department’s humble attempts to get it right.

Just a thought. What do you think?

Many thanks to GaH for his photo.

Google needs to know everything about you. If it didn’t you probably wouldn’t use it as much because search results would not be anywhere near as relevant and, most importantly, it would not be able to target specific advertising to you, which is Google’s main source of income and, arguably, its Achilles’ heel.

In his book The Filter Bubble Eli Pariser offers a bleak vision of how the internet is evolving, with ever greater personalisation which results in bubbles of information that only show us what the web thinks we want to see¹.

This is why, when you search for cheap holidays online, you are then followed all over the internet by ads from companies trying to sell you car hire, affordable hotel rooms and travel insurance.

Pariser’s filter bubble has greater, darker repercussions than just being followed by annoying ads. In order to service this quest for ever greater personalisation, companies have sprung up that buy and sell information about you in automated transactions that take place in less than a second. This way Nike knows when you are most likely to buy some trainers and can bombard you with highly targeted advertising.

I share a certain degree of concern over this capitalisation of private information, but I also acknowledge that we appear to have a natural tendency to create our own bubbles of information without any help from the likes of Google.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, to learn that Anders Breivik, the paranoid schizophrenic who murdered 69 people, mostly teenagers, and injured many more in a quest to save Norway from multiculturalism, had had his extreme views reinforced, not tempered, by his internet viewing habits.

Like all of us, Breivik subconsciously ignored information and websites that did not fit in with his world view and beliefs. He only read blogs and fora which shared his extreme right wing ideologies. Breivik had created a bubble all for himself in which he and those who shared his views were right and everybody else’s were wrong.

You don’t have to be a mass murderer to experience this effect. Anyone who uses Twitter or Facebook, whether they realise it or not, has experienced this echo chamber effect. This is why your views and ideas appear so good and convincing when expressed in the virtual world of online social networks, yet their reception is nowhere near as good when aired in the real world of the work place or the staff room.

I don’t think greater personalisation of the web per se will be as bad as Pariser fears. What’s more, I think a greater degree of personalisation and targeting of information would be beneficial to education.

Imagine a search engine that knows you so well that it knows in what year you are, what subjects you are studying, what topics you are currently studying and which websites might help you with your Geography homework.

Imagine a search engine that worries more about how well you are doing at school than it does about targeting ads to a sixteen year old. A search engine that tailor-makes a bespoke learning bubble just for you, providing you with the right content, in the right context and at the right time.

This is why I remain a little sceptical about Google’s educational credentials, or Facebook’s for that matter. I’ll have much more faith in their good intentions if my students were chased around the internet by links to content that might help them complete their Geography homework, not by ads tying to sell them the latest sport shoes.

What do you think?

Many thanks to Stellajo1976 for his bubbly picture.

Screens allow us to perform tasks that would have been simply inconceivable before¹: One can visit the British Library without ever going to London, see and chat to relatives in a foreign country without having to travel, play with friends when they can’t physically be with us, access news of events anywhere in the world synchronously as the events develop. Screens bring the information to us, which, as I think anyone would agree, is much better than the alternative.

Despite all this, screens tend to receive a very bad press. Baroness Greenfield recently expressed² her concern that spending too long in front of a screen can result in addictive behaviour, “obsessional use” and neurological changes in the brain.

What Baroness Greenfield does not mention is that almost any human activity can result in addictive and obsessive behaviour – from eating chocolate to jogging – and that, whenever we master a new skill or acquire new knowledge, neurological changes take place in our brains: it’s called learning.

Of course addictive behaviour, misuse and abuse are not desirable. We should rightly be concerned with the behaviour. We should not be blaming the technology.

The transformative power of technology has a long history of misunderstanding and misapprehension, almost always resulting in knee-jerk rejection and staunch scepticism.

Courtesy of the Museum of American Heritage

In the early 20th century, early motor cars were often boycotted in rural areas of the USA because they “posed a danger to stock, horse drawn traffic and even crops”³.

Protesters were absolutely right: cars were faster and therefore more dangerous than traditional means of transport, but the benefits that motorised transport brought society massively outweighed any perceived disadvantages.

John Birt, former director general of the BBC, remembers how when he first started considering using the internet as a broadcast medium, the move was met with formidable opposition by the different departments within the BBC⁴ who feared that the new medium would clash with traditional broadcasting.

Again, critics were right: the traditional one-size-fits-all model of broadcasting was abandoned as the BBC embraced the internet and, as a result, the BBC was able to reach new audiences and viewing and listening habits were changed forever, for the better, thanks to innovations like the iPlayer.

History shows again and again that, instead of being embraced for the right reasons, this kind of disruptive innovation with the potential for abrupt but positive and progressive change is almost always rejected for the wrong ones. In my opinion, the same thing is happening to computers and their metonymic surrogates: their screens.

That’s why it remains perplexing to me that we should chastise someone for spending a couple of hours browsing the web by pointing out they’re going to get square eyes, yet two hours reading a printed book is perfectly acceptable, despite the obvious geometrical similarity of the two media.

I, for one, find screens are having a tremendously positive effect in both my private and professional lives. Despite having to deal with screens of one kind or another on a daily basis, I think my brain is coping quite alright and – would you believe – my eyes are still eye-shaped.

So, please, fewer pseudo-intellectual debates about the superiority of paper as a medium for the delivery of information and more objective analysis of the many benefits modern technology has brought and will continue to bring us.

Many thanks Daniel de Oliveira Pereira for his macro of a screen.

Today, we would be hard-pressed to find teachers would disparage the positive impact the application of such technologies has had in the field of languages teaching. Yet the introduction of these technologies was initially met with great scepticism, as they were deemed to be a distraction from real learning.

More recently, advances in computing and almost ubiquitous internet access have heralded the arrival of the next logical stage in the evolution of teaching and learning. New technologies are by conjuring up new and innovative pedagogical practices and questioning traditional teaching and learning paradigms. For example, the application of these technologies allows us to depart from the convention that pupils must be at school in order for them to learn or be taught or for teachers to be able to assess their progress.

Yet, despite the huge pedagogical potential unquestionably present in the effective use of these technologies, many teachers still harbour considerable doubt as to technology’s utility in the teaching and learning context, remaining unconvinced of the benefits the web may be able to bring to their classrooms. It appears that sceptics – as they always have done and always will – attack the adoption of new technologies on the same, familiar grounds: they’re a distraction from real learning.

So, it begs the question: What exactly is real learning? In languages teaching, taking it again as a case in point, the definition of real learning has alternated over the last few decades: first there was a focus on grammatical rigour, then came an emphasis on communicative skills; first there were lists of words to be learnt, then came a focus on the skills needed to put those words together. What is certain, however, is that the essence of what real learning means to many teachers, of any specialism, hasn’t altered considerably: real learning occurs when the teacher is firmly in control¹ and when tried and tested practices are used with which teachers are familiar.

This may go some way toward explaining why many teachers see the implementation of new technologies as a capitulation to what they perceive as a lack of discipline, absence of self-control and preference for immediacy among the current generation of students² , establishing, in my view, a false dichotomy between technology implementation and academic rigour.

Teachers clearly remain split in their acceptance of the different educational paradigm new technologies provide us all. In the meantime, our students – for whom being online and participation in the social media environment are a by-product of living in the developed world³- look on at us in bemusement. We’re not – I think you would agree – providing them with a very edifying spectacle.

So, when does a healthy dose of scepticism become an over-dose?

What do you think? Conversations are always welcome.

Many thanks to Grumpy-Puddin for the fantastic picture

In his view – applied to the teaching profession - being is static and finite, whereas becoming is fluid, infinite and ever-developing. I like to think of being as the end of a journey and of becoming as the journey itself.

Whilst Professor Moore’s remarks were made in the context of describing the dominant discourses within teaching, it struck me that our education system as a whole generally places a huge emphasis on being, promoting an old-fashioned concept of knowledge, that is to say: knowing static and finite facts, rather than on becoming.

Tests, examinations and certifications subconsciously encourage us to be satisfied with what we know and discourage many of us from continuing the journey. We all have had pupils who have asked Do I need to know that? or Will that be in the exam?

David Weinberger, in an article in the New Scientist titled Why untidiness is good for us, picks up on how the web is challenging traditional concepts of knowledge. Weinberger claims that a scalable, hyper-linked knowledge “is fast reshaping itself around its new networked medium” and becoming “truer to the spirit of enquiry”, a spirit that cherishes the end of every journey as the start of a new one.

The new “networked medium”, i.e. the web, thus redefines knowledge as a journey, an infinite progression and an unfinishing as well as unfinishable process. This is the notion we need to cultivate in ourselves and in our students: what to know is second in importance to how to know.

Is this a good thing? “In the internet age [this] is what knowledge looks like, and it is something to regret for a moment, but then embrace and celebrate” asserts Weinberger. Hear, hear.

Thanks to Paul Lowry for his excellent photograph.

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