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Filed by Barbara Ray

We’re pleased to share this interview with educator and critic Howard Rheingold, just published on Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning.

Photo/ WR Emmons

This is the first in a series of conversations with thought leaders on digital media and learning, then and now. In conversation with journalist Heather Chaplin, leaders reflect on how the field of digital media and learning has changed over time, and where it’s headed.

All of the Q&A’s will be published weekly on Spotlight for the remainder of 2013, and are being collected for an e-book that will be published by the MacArthur Foundation at the end of the year. All of these conversations willl be archived here. We hope you’ll check back frequently.  Follow @spotlightdml on Twitter to get the latest.

By Heather Chaplin

Critic and educator Howard Rheingold is author of Virtual Reality, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs, and Net Smart. As he puts it he’s been “on the web since the beginning, and long before.” He was among the first to see the potential of computers, and then the Internet for forming powerful new communities. Rheingold has taught at University of California Berkeley, Stanford University and online at Rheingold U, an online learning community.

This is the first in a series of conversations with thought leaders on digital media and learning, then and now. In conversation with journalist Heather Chaplin, leaders reflect on how the field of digital media and learning has changed over time, and where it’s headed. The conversations are being collected for an e-book that will be published by the MacArthur Foundation at the end of 2013. Interviews have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Spotlight: What’s your background with digital media and learning (DML)?

Howard Rheingold: I started about 20 years ago. About nine years ago, I started teaching at a university, but it didn’t seem to me the school was addressing the issues raised by the use of social media—issues of identity and presentation of self, community, collective action, the public sphere, social capital. These things are really about people’s day-to-day experiences, especially students. It only made sense to me to start studying it, and it only made sense if we were studying it, to use it. So from the beginning I used digital media in and out of the classroom.

Spotlight: You’ve been interested in new kinds of online learning since before you started teaching university, though.

HR: I got interested as early as 1987—that was before the Internet. I was using a modem! “The Virtual Community” was about the kinds of informal peer-to-peer learning that was becoming possible. If you know what other people in your virtual community are interested in, and you find something that would be of interest to them, it doesn’t cost you much in terms of time or energy to send it their way. And if you’re doing it for 10, or maybe 100 people, and they’re doing it for you, you really start to get a huge benefit of targeted attention.

Also, my daughter is a millennial—she’s 28 now—and she really came of age as the Web was coming of age. I became interested as a parent not just in terms of wanting her to develop important skills but also in terms of wanting her to learn critical thinking about things like “search.” “Search” is really about figuring out the difference between good information and bad information online.

Spotlight: I’ve heard you use the word “peeragogy.” Can you talk about that?

HR: When I started teaching I was really curious how my students would react to doing things in a new way—I asked them to do things like carry on class discussions through an online forum, write blogs, and do collective document creation on Wiki. This led me to think about radically redesigning what I call my peeragogy,” which is student-centered and based on collaboration and inquiry. Of course, I later realized this was not something new brought about by technology, but actually went back at least to John Dewey. 

Spotlight: So how does new technology play into these ideas?

HR: The technology affords an environment in which students take on more of the power and responsibility for their own learning. It’s important to remember, of course, that this is scary for teachers. I think it’s scary to admit you don’t know everything and to be open to learning. But now, my students regularly divide into teams and co-teach with me, and, increasingly, we’re doing more collaborative projects based on the student’s own interests.

Spotlight: You teach at the university level. Do you think some of these things are applicable for younger people?

HR: I’m writing a blog post now for DML Central about a second-grade teacher whose students are learning how to blog and how to leave comments for blogs. She has open and moderated comments and has parents and grandparents participate. You have to do it in a thoughtful manner, but it’s incredibly empowering. Not only is it important preparation for the kind of lives they’re going to live but also it gives kids a sense of agency. If you write a paper and only the teacher sees it, that’s one thing, but when you write a blog for all the people in the world to see it, I think that’s far more empowering—and better preparation for the kind of world they’re going to live in. I mean pretty soon eight- and nine-year-olds will have their own phones and be on Facebook and certainly have a digital footprint.

Spotlight: What do you mean when you say it has to be done thoughtfully?

HR: Well, I always preface these discussions with a disclaimer that there is a lot of magical thinking out there about technology and education. I am not one of those people who thinks you’re going to solve the problems of our education system by throwing technology at it. But I am a big fan of those educators who have learned that you can use these tools, together with critical thinking, as a means of empowering students to take on their own learning.

Spotlight: What do you mean by magical thinking?

HR: Like I said, I go back a long way. In the early 1980s, there was this idea that “oh, if we can only put personal computers in classroom, that’s going to solve all our problems of kids being disengaged.” But back then, the computers weren’t very powerful—there wasn’t much software, there wasn’t the Internet, and there wasn’t any teacher training. So these things ended being used as doorstops. And now, we have all this hoopla about MOOCs—which certainly have their value, but they’ve just been way overhyped. Basically, there’s a hype-and-bust cycle that goes back to the personal computer. Look at all the marvelous things technology is going to do! And then it doesn’t happen.

Spotlight: What is the biggest hype right now? What do you find yourself worrying about?

HR: I think we’re going to automate our way out of teachers with MOOCs. The upside is if you’re a student somewhere where you can’t really afford to go to a decent brick-and-mortar school, but you’re very, very smart, you can take courses on artificial intelligence from Stanford and MIT. These are tremendous opportunities. The thing is, these courses only work with subjects in which there are definite answers. Two plus two is four. Yes. But what were the causes of the First World War? That’s a more complex question. So the magical thinking is “okay, computers are going to be able to grade and let students pace themselves. We can put our lectures on video and do away with the classroom.” I think that’s wrong. I think it offers an additional pathway for people who don’t have access to good classrooms, but it doesn’t solve the problem of disengaged students.

But all of this really goes back to what the classroom is actually for—the secret, or maybe not so secret, agenda, which is that the classroom is really for teaching compliance. That was useful when societies were transforming from agrarian to industrial, but it’s less than useful in a world where you’re going to need to be thinking critically about the information you find.

Spotlight: Considering that, are you surprised by how big DML has gotten?

HR: Well, I guess I’d say I’m pleasantly surprised. It’s been coming for a while, you know. In terms of where it’s going, maybe the next step is not turning more responsibility over to the computer but rather to the students. What about eliminating the teacher entirely? Could a group of people who are knowledgeable about online media learn something together? I started teaching courses online at Rheingold U a couple of years ago and that quickly became an exercise in co-learning. I certainly facilitate the formation of learning communities, and I lecture and do a lot of things traditional teachers do, but what’s different is that in cooperative learning we are all responsible for each other. It seemed to me that this was a natural next step.

Spotlight: Does this get to the Peeragogy Handbook?

HR: Yes. I went to UC Berkeley recently to give the Regent’s Lecture, and I proposed that we actually did something, so we invited people from all around the world to help us create a handbook for self-learners, which became the Peeragogy Handbook.  So now, for people with access to digital media and networks who want to learn about a subject, they can find and qualify resources, learn how to organize those resources into a syllabus, create learning activities, and think about how to assess and divide the labor of facilitating. I think that’s looking into the future.

Spotlight: So you see peeragogy being the future of education?

HR: No, I’m not projecting this as the future of education. I think independent and interdependent learners are necessarily going to be a minority in a world in which schooling is about compliance. But there are more and more of them. If you want to learn something these days, there’s probably a teenager who has posted a tutorial online. I’m interested in the self-empowerment enabled by access to all this knowledge and all these tools. Certainly teaching is an art and a craft and an expertise. But I think we’re going to see a larger percentage of the population use available technologies to take learning into their own hands.

Spotlight: So what happens to the people who aren’t so good at being self-directed?

HR: They’re in trouble.

Spotlight: Do you think it’s part of the DML community’s job to help figure out a way to reach those people who aren’t self-directed? I mean we’re talking about a huge swath of the population getting left behind. What should the DML community be doing?

HR: It’s important that it’s called “digital media and learning,” as opposed to “digital media and education.” Education is a public institution and it’s a political football. By it’s nature, it’s conservative. It’s about compliance—sit still, be quiet, follow orders. That’s a social issue. I don’t think technology is a solution to a social problem.  Many people don’t want their kids to think for themselves. At the same time, learning is what people do. Educational institutions used to have a monopoly on that. Now, there’s the Internet. There’s a lot of knowledge out there and there are tools for finding it that were never available before. So I think encouraging learning from the bottom up will ultimately help transform educational institutions. Don’t ask me what’s the solution to the political problems of the education system.

Spotlight: Who are you watching right now? Whose work is interesting to you?

HR: I’ve always been a follower of Cathy Davidson. She does great stuff. Also a lot of my interest in all this has been supported by the work of Mimi Ito. I’ve followed her for more than 10 years. I have a personal learning network, which was one of the things I learned about when I started teaching on social media—so I got to know the work of people like Sherry Turkle and Dean Shareski.

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Filed by Sarah Jackson

After six years of publishing, Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning will cease blogging regularly as of today, and will halt all publication in 2013 in preparation for new work on connected learning.

When Spotlight launched in October of 2006, it was the MacArthur Foundation’s “first foray into blogging,” as then-president Jonathan Fanton wrote. At the time, there was not much of a model for how a powerful institution could use new media tools to invite discussion and create conversation.

That, thankfully, has changed quite a bit in the years we’ve been covering digital media and learning. Many major foundations and policy organizations have blogs today and have become more savvy about how to use social media to make their work more accessible and to open public dialogue about social and cultural change. [See the Gates Foundation’s Impatient Optimists for a great example.]

The digital media and learning field has grown immensely since 2006 as well. In fact, it wasn’t a field at all when we started, but a set of questions and ideas about how new media may be changing how young people learn, play, and participate in the world around them.

In 2012, acceptance that new media is changing learning, as well as everything else about our lives, is part of mainstream policy dialogues about education reform. Digital media and learning is now regularly covered by publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Education Week and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and on more content-specific blogs such as MindShift, EdSurge, Hack Education, Mashable, and Edutopia.

Spotlight began as a community site with many voices. In our early years, we featured writing by those who would become leading voices in this burgeoning field, including danah boyd, Jim Gee, Henry Jenkins, and Mimi Ito.

With leadership from Barbara Ray, we shifted to become more of a news source, connecting and synthesizing new research from the academe, as well as curating the growing number of articles in the press and blogosphere on how young people are using technology to learn.

As our editorial model shifted, so did our coverage. We expanded to include more in-depth, original reporting. We covered libraries’ role in promoting 21st-century skills; Ito’s research on hanging out, messing around, and geeking out; virtual worlds and augmented reality; the role of digital media in transforming students’ writing and writing itself; how to help students judge the credibility of online content; mobile learning; the future of assessment; remix and copyright—the list goes on and on.

We covered game-based learning, including the work of Katie Salen and her colleagues who started NYC’s Quest to Learn School and the follow-up, Chicago Quest. We followed winners in the first four years of the Digital Media and Learning Competition, including the most recent debate on badges for lifelong learning.

We reported on the digital divide, transliteracy, Scratch, the importance of teaching kids to code, Mozilla’s Hackasaurus project, the maker movement, iCivics, and the National Writing Project’s innovative Digital Is site.

We produced an original video series on how teens use digital media in their day-to-day lives. We partnered with teen video producers from YOUmedia, the Chicago Public Library’s digital space for teens.

We visited classrooms for case studies and interviewed thought leaders such as Cathy Davidson, Anil Dash, John Seely Brown, and Games for Change leaders Asi Burak and Michelle Byrd.

Under the guidance of media maven Christine Cupaiuolo, we widened our blog coverage and began to write the favored PLAYBACK that recapped the news of the week and drew connections across topics. Many readers came to rely on these posts as their go-to guide in this ever-changing arena. We established a presence on Twitter and started “The Week in Digital Media in Learning,” Spotlight’s weekly newsletter.

Some of my favorite pieces have been our work covering the ever-resourceful and revolutionary librarian community who, from the beginning, have been on the front lines of the fight for media literacy in schools. They are visionaries in how collaborative technology can change pedagogy. Other favorites include my work covering how early childhood educators are using new media, and Christine’s coverage of gender, stereotypes, and STEM learning.

We’re proud of the contribution our writing and reporting has made to this field.  We hope you will continue to use our work as resource. Going forward, we will work with the MacArthur Foundation to archive the information on Spotlight, and to ensure substantive objective reporting on innovation in connected learning continues in other online publications.

So while Spotlight is ending daily publication today, over the next year we’ll continue to publish reflective pieces. We’ll be talking to leaders in the field about what we know and what’s to come in digital media and learning. As we bring six years of conversation to a close, we want to hear from you. What have you learned? What questions about digital media and learning remain unanswered?

For all of us, this has been an incredible opportunity to learn from this rich community of researchers, policy makers and, most importantly, educators—in formal school settings and higher education institutions and also in informal settings like museums, libraries and after-school spaces.

As the show of support during the Chicago teachers strike taught us, educators are the ones whose voices need to be amplified. And it is their leadership, pedagogy, and vision for the role technology can play in learning that we’ll all be looking to in the future.

So, over and out. We’ll see you in the blogosphere.

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Filed by Kelsey Herron

This is the reality for 38 sixth graders attending the new PlayMaker School, a school within a school designed by the nonprofit organization GameDesk in Los Angeles. Learning is based around a gaming curriculum that includes adventure quests as well as the development of apps and other media.

“We call it play making research,” Lucien Vattel, CEO of GameDesk, told The Epoch Times’ Kelly Ni. By that he means, “one part core research institute one part game development company.”

GameDesk has been dedicated to reconfiguring traditional learning models through gamification, or the use of game design elements in non-game contexts. The nonprofit evolved out of seven years of research at the University of Southern California Integrated Media Systems Center. Though GameDesk has been testing game software and curriculums in area schools and community centers, PlayMaker is its first attempt at opening a new school.

The PlayMaker curriculum aligns with state and national standards in education and assessment. With a focus on closing the achievement gap and using innovative, interactive technology to engage students in STEM learning, the school encourages students to create meaningful relationships with various disciplines through creative, hands-on experiences. Its website states that all traditional subjects, grade levels, and classroom spaces have been modified to foster “immersive and play-oriented experiences resulting in tangible products and transferable knowledge.”

Activities at the PlayMaker school run the gamut, including everything from historical time travel, to creative spaces that feature science graffiti and a light convection sandbox. Each student is provided with a personalized curriculum, or “Adventure Map,” to help navigate through a sequence of PlayMaker modules. Once a module is completed, students can move on to a different section of their curriculum, and, in turn, see how each of the modules are thematically connected.

The map also acts as an assessment tool for teachers, parents and the students themselves. At the end of the school year, students should be able to see a visual path of where they’ve been, the choices they’ve made, and the competencies they’ve gained.

All of the activities at the PlayMaker School embody the school’s four main educational tenets:

• Learning through play: students interact in a challenging, playful environment while role-playing and furthering their knowledge of developing systems
• Learning through making: students engage in hands-on building, deconstructing, and tinkering to learn about systems, ecologies, and practical applications of their knowledge
• Learning through discovery and inquiry: students are asked to investigate and create meaning around unfamiliar concepts
• Learning through interest-driven curriculum: students are encouraged to pursue learning through their own interests and discover their unique talents

According to a recent paper [pdf] by researchers at MIT’s Education Arcade, games can be used as authoring platforms, models of points of view, and research assignments – just to name a few uses.

In addition, researchers at Columbia University Teachers College stated in a 2011 paper, “Gamification in Education: What, How, Why Bother?” that game-based learning can also help students develop cognitive, social, and emotional learning skills. 

Given all we’re discovering about gaming, it’s no surprise that more “gamified” schools have been popping up across the country (see our previous coverage of Quest to Learn and Chicago Quest schools). According to Vattel, games are the “most engaging model that we have,” providing that their content is created to teach students and is not designed solely for entertainment.

“Games are highly visual, they are systematic, and they allow trial and error. They are a culturally engaging artifact for processing information and making decisions,” Vattel told The Epoch Times.

All educators have to do now is show how an eagerness for and engagement with gaming can change education in the long run.

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Filed by Kelsey Herron

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Michigan published a study earlier this month that found the infamous “information overload” to be less of a reality than previously imagined.

“Contrary to many experts’ warnings that the ‘always-on’ media environment has ‘overwhelmed’ audiences and [is] creating a society of antisocial Facebook-addicts more interested in hashtags than hugs, the study found that participants said they felt ‘empowered’ and ‘enthusiastic’ about the volume of information at their fingertips, not overloaded,” wrote the Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker.

Photo/ Jorge Franganillo

Researchers surveyed 77 adults in seven focus groups around the United States to better gauge the perceptions of information overload. The study, published in “The Information Society: An International Journal,” identified three primary themes:

• Most people felt excited and enabled by the amount of accessibly information – not “overloaded.”
• Social networking has allowed for a continuation of the two-step flow of communication, a theory that states that ideas stem from mass media and carry on to “opinion leaders” before reaching the general population.
• While those surveyed were critical of biased pundits, they did not report siloing themselves with like-minded people or avoiding disagreeable sources.

Interestingly, researchers found that social networking sites were viewed more critically by interviewees, who said that they were disenchanted more with the quality of information, not the quantity.

“Social media garnered little love among the interviewees, who ranged from twenty-somethings to people over 60,” wrote Bosker. The study’s authors also found that this “distaste” for social media suggests that people may be “annoyed by what they perceive as the minutia of people’s lives fed to them through Facebook and Twitter.”

These interviewees aren’t exactly alone, either. Earlier this month, Intel released its annual survey on mobile etiquette and digital sharing. Nearly half of all teens and adults surveyed said they are overloaded by the amount of information people share online. The online poll included responses from 7,087 adults and 1,787 teens from eight different countries.

Technology expert Clay Johnson says that “information overload” should be viewed more like “information obesity.” In other words, the issue is with the types of media we’re consuming, not the amount.

Johnson penned “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption,” published earlier this year, and recently appeared in a BigThink video encouraging online users to take more responsibility for the quality of what they consume.

“We have to have a conscious level of consumption when it comes to our information intake,” said Johnson. “Your information diet is an ethical choice.”

Johnson likens the production of information to America’s system of industrialized agriculture, and he states that users need to recognize their role in the push-pull dichotomy of supply vs. demand when it comes to the kind of information news organizations are choosing to provide. This is an integral point, and one not often made, because the idea that we, as the consumers, dictate what information news providers will publish renders us somewhat helpless to what Johnson refers to as “the tyranny of the majority.”

However, according to the Northwestern/University of Michigan study at least, the majority of new media adopters surveyed reported a “near-unanimous enthusiasm” for the amount of information currently at their fingertips. While this latest finding may be surprising, Bosker points out a few caveats worth noting—the first being that the research is based on interviews conducted in 2009.  As Bosker notes, three years is “eons ago, in tech-world,” and before the launch of major players like Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram.

“While information overload might not have weighed on users’ minds in 2009, news consumers might give a very different answer if asked the same question today,” she wrote.

Also, 11 of the 77 people surveyed did report feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information accessible online.  However, Northwestern University sociologist Eszter Hargittai, lead author on the study, said that this sentiment was most common in those who had “low Internet skills” and had not yet mastered navigating search engines and social networking sites.

Thus, their findings reinforce the role of skill level when it comes to attitudes toward new digital media platforms.

Plus, Read more about Hargittai’s work on young adult’s digital literacy skills and how they evaluate web content. She has found that students often have difficulty determining the credibility of search results when assigned information-seeking tasks. In one study, students most often said that they had chosen a website because—and only because—it was the first search result atop Google’s results page.

By Heather Chaplin

In 2012, the digital divide is complicated.

What does it mean that 65 percent of Americans have broadband access at home, or that 83 percent of Americans own a cellphone?

Do numbers like these mean we can all sleep well at night, secure in the knowledge that new technologies mean more equal opportunities for all? Or could the rise of digital technology actually exacerbate the problems of income and opportunity inequalities? And while we’re at it, do those numbers about broadband and mobile phone penetration even say what we think they say?

Let’s start with the numbers. First of all, 65 percent is hardly universal; it drops to 40 percent in households with incomes under $20,000. Only half of all Hispanic households have broadband, and in African-American households, the number is only 41 percent, according to the FCC.

The mobile phone statistics – from the Pew Internet and American Life Project – aren’t quite what they seem, either. It doesn’t differentiate between a mobile phone and a smartphone, which is where so many of the exciting digital learning opportunities exist.

According to industry analyst Tomi Ahonen, the penetration rate per capita for smartphones in the United States is only 35 percent. (The United States is tied for 16th place internationally with Greece, Ireland and Portugal; Singapore wins with a 90 percent penetration per capita rate.)

Lynn Schofield Clark, an associate professor at the University of Denver and author of the forthcoming book “The Parent App: Understanding Parents in a Digital Age,” has been studying technology use among high school students in urban Denver. She said these surveys are often misleading because the upper-middle-class kid who has a laptop, iPad and smartphone, and the lower-income kid who gets 45 minutes of free time on a computer at school will both answer “yes” to the question, Do you have access to the Internet?”

Similarly, she said, phones are often shared in immigrant families, so a “yes” to the question of,  “Do you have a mobile phone?” may not actually mean what it seems to mean.

But issues of the digital divide circa 2012 go much deeper than just penetration rates.

“One of the things I find most frustrating is the assumption that technology will radically override inequality and structural problems of everyday life,” danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, said. “Everything I’ve ever seen suggests that the new tools of technology when left alone and not properly contextualized reinforce and magnify existing inequalities.”

In other words, even if every kid in the world had a computer and a smartphone, not every kid in the world would come away with the same skill sets and modes of thinking. Researchers are beginning to realize that what you do with technology is more important than just having access to it. And that, obviously, is a much harder problem to solve.

Annette Lareau, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of the landmark book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” In her book, Lareau did not look specifically at computer use, but the frame she created in understanding different parenting styles among different socio-economic groups is useful—particularly for dissecting what happens after access. 

“All parents want their kids to be healthy and happy,” Lareau said, “but they have different cultural logics.”

Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation,” and the lower-income style “the accomplishment of natural growth.”

“Middle class parents see their kids as a project,” she said. “They are constantly and relentlessly developing their kids’ talents and skills. They put them in organized activities, spend time reasoning with them, answer questions with questions and will intervene with institutions if they don’t think their kids are being treated fairly.”

In poorer families, on the other hand, “resources go into feeding and clothing the kids,” Lareau said. “Low-income parents see adulthood as a time of trouble, so they try to protect their kids from what lies ahead. The kids play, watch TV, hang out with cousins; they relax. Even if there are organized activities, parents’ focus will be on keeping them safe. For middle-class kids, there’s a lot more emphasis on individual development. ”

With all the emphasis on informal learning in the digital media and learning community, it’s also worth noting that Lareau found that lower-income families depended far more than middle-class families on schools to educate their kids. Lareau said there was a “summer gap,” wherein middle-class kids’ learning outpaced their lower-income counterparts. 

Through her research in Denver, Schofield Clark is looking specifically at computer use among kids of varying economic status. “There is a clear distinction between upper class families and less advantaged families in how they think about technology and how they incorporate it into their lives,” she said.

Translating Lareau’s “concerted cultivation” into the digital arena, Schofield Clark talks about an “ethic of expressive empowerment” among parents higher up the socio-economic ladder. “Upper-middle-class parents value their kids using technology to express themselves,” she said.

For lower-income families, Schofield Clark refers to an “ethic of respected connectedness,” adding, “There’s a huge emphasis on respecting authority and using technology to connect to each other.”

Among the immigrant families she’s been studying, Schofield Clark sees young people using technology to connect with family members and to keep their families informed about news happening in their countries of origin.

“What’s happening with the disadvantaged families is a reinforcement of learning within their primary communities as they exist today,” Schofield Clark said.

Kids from higher-income families, on the other hand, are constantly expanding out into new networks, which means new opportunities for learning and exposure to new ideas. 

Screenshot/ Computers for Youth.

Ten years ago, Bill Tally, a senior research scientist in the Learning and Teaching Division of the Education Development Center, was doing his dissertation on “what happens after access.” Ten years ago is another universe when it comes to digital technology, but his study of computer use in families in the South Bronx and a middle-class suburb in New Jersey runs parallel with Schofield Clark’s findings and the overall frame established by Annette Lareau.

The very first thing Tally noticed were the differences between the socio-economic groups in “technological capital.” Tally was studying families who were using computers donated by a non-profit organization called Computers for Youth. When a computer broke in lower-income families, the kids of the family would have to call the organization for help. Sometimes resentment over feeling they’d been given second-rate goods kept the families from seeking repairs at all, and the computers would simply fall out of use.

In the New Jersey suburbs, kids could turn to their parents, a sibling, an uncle or a neighbor to fix the computer. Sometimes their parents took the machine into work for repairs.

“How many degrees of separation from a geek are you,” Tally said. “That was how I came to think of it.”

In low-income families, “the media habits in the household were most laissez-faire,” Tally said. Kids used the computers to play games, IM (this was 2002, after all), and browse pop culture sites. They also used the computers to do homework, but this generally meant typing on the machine as if it were a word processor. In immigrant families, said Tally, computers were often placed in the living room and used communally, and kids did things like make fliers for church events.

“In the middle-income community, there was a much bigger range of use,” Tally said. “The kids were engaging in expressive uses of technology. If they took piano or guitar lessons, they were downloading music writing software and recording songs. They made fancy Power Point presentations, and they used “The Sims” not just to create characters but to write stories about their characters and share them.”

Tally echoed Lareau’s observation about middle-class parenting styles. “There’s a powerful parental envelope over what goes on with media in middle-class households,” he said. “They tried to shape their kids interactions by talking to them about it. It’s the same idea as co-watching TV with your kids, but playing out with newer technology.”

In the article “Who’s Responsible for the Digital Divide?” Dmitry Epstein, Erik Nisbet and Tarleton Gillespie say there are two ways public discussion about the digital divide get framed—one frame is about access; the other is about skills. When it’s the former, people tend to blame the government and look to the government to solve the problem. When it’s the latter, the popular thought says the problem and solution lies with people themselves.

“When it’s seen to be a problem of skills, it’s like, ‘That’s your own problem.’ It’s considered an individual issue,” danah boyd said. “But no, that’s the classic American myth that everyone should be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and move on. But that’s not right. These are structural inequalities we’re talking about.”

And structural inequalities are hard to solve, no matter how fast your internet connection is.

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Filed by Kelsey Herron

There’s been a fair amount of buzz about schools going “BYOD” – meaning they are allowing students to bring in their own digital devices to use in the classroom. Some schools believe it to be a less-costly way to provide advanced mobile technology to students, and many teachers, particularly in areas of math and science, have found the BYOD infrastructure useful to their lessons.

Policies encouraging BYOD models help eliminate the struggle between students and teachers over using mobile devices during the school day and the fatigue that teachers encounter after repeatedly admonishing students to “Put your tech away.”

The steady rise of mobile technology in school districts across the country has spurred the development of new BYOD resources and guidelines. The Katy Independent School District, which includes 63,000 students in 56 schools outside Houston, shared its success story with Mind/Shift writer Katrina Schwartz.

In 2009, the district launched a three-year plan to develop a mobile learning strategy. The plan included promoting a “standardized tool box” of web-based tools, as well as digital citizenship guidelines.
“But first,” writes Schwartz, “the school district needed to understand the ins and outs of mobile learning.” She continues:

Lenny Schad, the Chief Information Officer for the district led the effort who has become the go-to guy for educators looking to implement their own mobile learning strategy has one primary piece of advice: Mobile learning is a holistic educational plan, not just introducing technology into existing structures.

“Mobile learning is all about changing instruction. Because if the instruction doesn’t change, allowing the kids to bring their own device will do nothing,” he explained in a recent EdWeb Webinar.

Schad stressed that the teacher’s role in a mobile learning classroom changes significantly. Rather than standing up front or sitting behind a desk and transmitting information, kids are doing a lot of the learning on their own. The teacher’s job is to get up, walk around, monitor the kids’ progress and make sure they’re staying on task.

“It completely changed the dynamic of the classroom,” Schad said. The students became excited to demonstrate what they had learned or how they worked out a problem. And they didn’t seem to mind school work anymore — Schad said kids played educational games for hours without realizing they were learning.

This concept is applicable to all digital paradigm shifts in the classroom and highlights the new role and importance of educators, rather than simply focusing on the technology itself. The Katy Independent School District implemented the plan incrementally, at first giving out 130 mobile learning devices to fifth graders (with text and phone calling turned off). In 2010 the district supplied 1,700 devices. Initially, middle school students could only use their devices with the teacher’s instruction. However, there were so few problems in the first year that the district became more lax, allowing middle school rules to mirror that of the high schools, where students could have their devices all day.

A recent case study (pdf) on the Katy district found that the BYOD model may have contributed to an increase in math test scores – for some students, performance on math tests jumped from the 70th to 90th percentile. “There wasn’t one teacher who didn’t see improvements in engagement and test scores,” Schad said in the report prepared by Cisco. “We heard so many testimonials from teachers who said, ‘I’ve been teaching for 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this.’”

For the most part, the teachers – and students – in Katy schools have been pleased with the new program. In a recent survey, 77 percent of Katy’s students were bringing their own devices to school, and, out of 1,609 responses from educators, 33 percent said they were already incorporating BYOD into their everyday instruction. Schad said that many teachers who were not yet employing the new model were likely hesitant because not all students have devices – a problem he says can be overcome through student collaboration.

Group work appears to be a key element in successful BYOD classrooms. Not only are teachers in the Katy district incorporating collaboration into their lessons, but tech-savvy teacher Kate Petty, writing at her blog The Tech Classroom, listed it as a first step in using mobile learning devices. Her steps also include implementing a courtesy policy for using smart phones in the classroom and embracing online resources.

“By teaching students how to use the incredible amounts of information available to them accurately and effectively, we will teach our students to analyze, dissect, compile, read critically, etc.,” wrote Petty, “which has been the goal all along.”

Other instructors of BYOD classrooms opened up about their experiences, as well as the sites they use regularly, in an article published in The Journal by Susan Bearden, director of information technology at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy. Princeton University’s Educational Technologies Center blog also tackled the trend in a recent post, and Edudemic compiled a list of 10 BYOD classroom experiments and what educators have learned.

A key factor when shifting to a BYOD classroom model is understanding when mobile devices amplify instruction and when they should be turned off.

“Part of this education we’ve gone through for the past three years is helping our teachers to understand when it’s appropriate to use this [technology] and when it’s not,” said Schad. One way to gain this comprehension is to learn from and share the successful experiences and tactics educators have used along their journeys.

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Filed by Sarah Jackson

Seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders in Chicago and New York spent a week learning the basics of visual design and computer programming. So instead of sitting at home on their couches playing videos games, these students spent it working with professional designers and programmers to understand the basics of design, and how, with a few simple key strokes, they can change the web, their favorite games and maybe even build some of their own.

The camp was created at the non-profit Institute of Play, the same folks behind the Quest to Learn school in New York City and Chicago Quest. Students spent their week experimenting with 3-D graphics and printing, and learning the basics of software coding and creative computing.

“They get to create web pages, not just view them,” said Don Miller, an informal learning developer at Institute of Play. “They get to modify games, or maybe create small ones of their own. And that kind of empowerment breaks down the model of students as consumers and allows them to create some of the digital media that they enjoy.”

Students learned how to make simple web pages and how to work in an open-source environment. They got to play around with iPads, animate simple robots, and show off their creations to family and friends. But the most exciting part, according to Miller, was when instructors taught students how to change one piece of the source code in “Minecraft,” a game many of them know and love, to shift how the game looks and behaves:

Within minutes they were modifying the source code of other files, changing the behavior of the game, and students were going from computer to computer, crowding around each other and kind of seeing what everyone was doing.

Watch the video above for more. The students are so articulate about why this learning is so powerful for them – it helps them understand how to create, how things work, and how to learn through failure. Says one: “We learn it and then we try it out. And if it doesn’t work the first time, we find a way to fix it and we learn it and try it out again.”

What wonderful words of wisdom to bring into the year ahead.

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Filed by Christine Cupaiuolo

Soil clinging to the right middle and rear wheels of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity can be seen in this image taken by the Curiosity’s Navigation Camera after the rover’s third drive on Mars. The drive of about 52 feet (16 meters) during the 22nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Aug. 28), covered more ground than the two previous drives combined. Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Getting on a school schedule can be a tough adjustment for any kid. But what if you’re a kid living on Mars time?

That’s the situation David and Bryn Oh’s children—ages 8, 10 and 13—faced when they returned to school after spending the month of August living on the schedule of the Mars rover Curiosity. This wasn’t just an average obsession with Curiosity; David Oh is a NASA engineer.

It got a little tricky because the Mars day is not only the reverse of our Earth schedule, but it’s about 40 minutes longer. The family adopted to the new schedule with aplomb, telling NPR’s Melissa Block about the many great activities they’ve taken part in when most of us are in bed. 

“My children have experienced several firsts while we have been on Mars time,” said Bryn Oh. “Included in that is my little one did not know how to ride a two-wheeled bicycle when we started. And he has learned in the middle of the night in empty parking lots. And that’s been a highlight for him, in particular. He’s had a great time biking around at 3:00 in the morning. My children saw their first shooting star. We were able to stay up and watch the Perseid meteor shower. We’ve just had a lot, a lot of fun.”

They also adopted new words, like “sol,” which is the Mars rover team uses to refer to one Martian day.

Braden, the oldest child, has kept a blog about the experience, posting numerous updates and photos. In his first entry, titled “We’re going onto Mars time,” he introduced himself as “Sunspark” and explained the very basic (and extremely cool) reason behind the family’s time switch:

Dad is the “Lead Flight Director” of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). MSL is the next Mars rover, known more commonly as Curiosity. Dad flies it and it will land in August. Once it’s on the surface, the Mars team at JPL (including Dad) are going to switch over to Curiosity’s schedule (Mars time). Mom wanted the whole family to switch over, so that’s what we’re going to do. This is going to be an adventure because our family consists of three kids and two parents.

As the start of school inched closer, the family incrementally adjusted their schedule. Braden’s most recent post brings readers up to speed on the time difference:

The first day of school came round on the 28th, and it’s kind of weird that we’re still almost two hours off of Earth time. We’ve been getting up around 5am and going to bed around 8pm, so we’re very close!

Earlier he predicted the family would be back on Earth time on Sept. 1. Here’s hoping their re-entry is smooth.

Plus: Read the Martian Diaries, updates from NASA employees working on the Curiosity mission. NASA has also put together a classroom section for educators and students. Here’s a section for younger kids.

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Filed by Kelsey Herron

As part of its report on “Educating the Workforce of Tomorrow,” The Atlantic recently featured a look at the “Catch-22 of digital literacy”—a conundrum that’s holding back millions of people from gaining computer skills and digital fluency.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, 66 million Americans lack the basic skills to use computers and the internet.  Referring to this group as “digital outsiders,” Amy Southerland addresses the difficulty in encouraging more of them to acquire basic skills:

Photo/ Juan Cristóbal Cobo

People can’t develop digital skills without access to a computer and a fast Internet connection, but precisely because they lack digital skills, they often don’t understand the potential value of acquiring such skills, or the value of having broadband access.

Furthermore, digital outsiders who are trying to cross the digital divide may find themselves ill equipped to make decisions about the kinds of skills and type of access that would benefit them most. The lack of digital literacy can be self-reinforcing, with no Rosetta stone to unlock the many mysteries of the digital world.

Improving the country’s digital literacy is an integral way for the United States to grow and improve its standing in the labor market. Drawing from an IDC research report, an FCC fact sheet shows that 50 percent of today’s jobs require technology skills; that number will grow to 77 percent in the next decade. The FCC and the U.S. Department of Labor is taking steps to expand online access, including a new initiative that would provide digital literacy training at nearly 2,800 American Job Centers nationwide.

“The centers will also be listed in a national digital literacy database, accessible online and through a toll-free phone call,” said Southerland.

The database will be funded by the nonprofit Connect2Compete. Supported by the FCC and a coalition of more than 40 private and non-profit partners, Connect2Compete will expand a pilot program this fall to make low-cost ($9.95 per month) broadband service and $150 laptop computers available to low-income families with children who are eligible for the free-lunch program, writes Southerland.

Such initiatives have worked in places like the Netherlands, where personal computer use rose faster than in the United States thanks in part to tax breaks for computer purchases and low broadband fees, And they come at a crucial time—according to the FCC, 100 million Americans do not have broadband access at home.

But is low-cost broadband the solution for everyone? Southerland acknowledges that for families with school-age children, people in the workforce and people living in rural areas, it’s likely a necessity. For others, however, free internet access at a local school or library may be sufficient. 

“In fact,” writes Southerland, “it seems to me that an essential aspect of being digitally literate is knowing what kind of digital tools and what level of access you actually need.”

Perhaps some of the most important work the Connect2Compete coalition can take on is in spreading the word about its nationwide digital literacy database. As Southerland points out, the issue isn’t just one of access:

We need tens of millions of digital outsiders to think: “Yes, I really want to have digital skills.” And then we need to meet them where they are and help them leap the digital literacy divide