21st Century Learning? Get over it! It’s Already 2012!

@Stephen_Hurley proposed that the writers at VoicEd.ca write exploring 21^st century learning and its meaning.  Here are some of my initial thoughts.  They’re a bit jumbled.  Feel free to deconstruct or ask for clarification:

I think the idea/term, 21^st century learning is a fairly empty catch phrase used to sell a variety of programs or to rally for change in the education system.  People may do this with the best intentions, and may affect positive change; others might not be so pure.  To do this, they temporarily define the term and apply it to their ideas/programs.  They are free to do this, because the term/concept is an empty shell, free to be inhabited; it is a cart waiting for a horse and a bandwagon waiting for us to jump on, it seems to be an attempt to throw the baby out with the bath water…

I have been perplexed that the phrase is as persistent and wide spread as it seems to be.  Perhaps it is because the idea is free to be adapted, but I have been surprised that a group of educators, focused on innovation and reform as a positive utility, would adopt a single concept so completely and project its reign for a 100 years…what will we have in 2099, 21^st century learning as we have it now?

It’s possible that there is something unique in our technological landscape and this pedagogy, but I’m less sure of this then most.  Perhaps “more is different” as Clay Shirky suggests, but perhaps it’s not.  When members of the Oldowan Culture were breaking rocks into tools 2.6 million years ago, they sat in groups.  They helped each other, they collaborated and improved, they gave feedback and shared, they did everything we are asking of our students in their learning and are calling new and innovative under 21^st century learning.  Class discussions are asymmetrical, like conversations on SM, and require the same social skills.  When a student is sneaking a peek at answers in their desk and making sure the teacher isn’t going to catch them, they are multitasking.  Is there any skill required in 21^st century learning, besides button pushing, that hasn’t existed, as a skill, in the last 5 centuries?

I am further perplexed by our current push to leave the past behind us and innovate.  The present was built on the skills of the past.  We inhabit a world of social media and communication revolution that was constructed from the education system we are so quickly trying to abandon.  I was a product of that learning environment, as were most of us here, yet here we are adapting, using, creating and all without the benefits of a school system designed to include 21^st century learning skills – one wonders how we do it?  If people need radically different education to navigate this world, then surely we can’t hope to do so.  Further, with our rapidly changing media landscape, why do the skills 21^st “centuriests” are now focused on, have a better chance to prepare students for that unknown future?  Won’t they be outdated as students mature?  It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s line “if it works, it’s obsolete.”

Valuing innovation and innovators is a cultural choice and not a universal truth.  Some prefer stability, familiarity, tradition, etc.  Can we in multi-cultural Canadaretool our education system with this cultural tenant so entrenched in the idea of 21^st century learning?  Each change in the process seems to create new problems as it solves old ones; it seems to be a zero sum gain/game.  Is each innovation in pedagogy an improvement or just a change?

Instead of focusing our discussion about 21 century learning, it seems to me that we should be focusing on effective learning and teaching.  There are fun, engaging, activities to be created and done with the tools we now have available, but 21^st learning seems merely to be “an improved means to an unimproved end.”  The goals for our teaching and student learning, the skills we wish to engender, are the same skills that led to success in the past.  Let’s not focus on the century, that seems like focusing on the technology at the expense of focusing on the learning.  Let’s stop talking about learning in the 21^st century and just talk about the skills students need in order to be successful and the many approaches, even traditional approaches, to engender them.  Let’s drop dropping catch phrases to blur our conversations and drop making false dichotomies between the past and the present…

 

“Will I ever get to be a real little boy (on SM)?”

When I was 11, I met my grade 5 teacher at the grocery store.  It was a very exciting moment.  I felt 3 things: 1) I felt lucky and excited to see her; she was a favourite of mine and I struggled to be a favourite of hers. 2) Very awkward—without our familiar context, I didn’t know how to act or what to say to her.  3) Unsettling—I had to deal with the fact that my teacher was a real person who didn’t live at the school or cease to exist when I left.  This might not be universal.  If you live in a small town you might see your teacher outside of school so much that it is no longer exciting or surprising.  If you live in too large a city, you might never see your teacher in “real” life.  However, for some of us, particularly those of us who idealized our teachers (I certainly was one), seeing them as real people can be uncomfortable—it can challenge our perfect notion of them among other things.

With teacher’s increasing use of technology, my students are bumping into me more and more in the real world—how should we handle it?

At the faculty I was advised, if we were ever going to do something embarrassing or “inappropriate” for a professional, then we should make sure we do it hundreds of kilometres away from where we work(we all were, it wasn’t personal).  Well, that isn’t possible with social media; there is no hundreds of kilometres away.

And what if it isn’t embarrassing or inappropriate?  What if it is simply adult?  Back a few years, under memo s33 “how do deal with controversial issues in the classroom,” we had a concise guide of how to deal with our personal opinions—hide them!.  With the OCT’s recent(ish) discussion on using social media and other sources we have a directive to be professional and conservative with what we share.  But how far should we take that?

What ever flaws S33 had in what it regarded as controversial, and what ever opinion you have about the recent OCT comments, they have at their base an awareness of a teacher’s influence on their students.  They have an awareness of what sharing a teacher’s opinion might do to student autonomy.  If we share our opinion, students might not be able to critically assess it; they might be overly influenced by it—such is the supposed power of our position.  Much like the reading of Miranda rights in the States, checks must be used to insure we don’t suppress autonomy by our awesome presence!

However with students being able to access my real life–with my presence continuing in their lives outside of the classroom thanks to SM, what do we do?  I have shied away from taking about my religious beliefs, political beliefs, and say, drinking habits, in the classroom for the reasons above – need I exercise the same caution on social media?

In my real life, I want to stand up and be counted for my political and religious beliefs.  I want to share these beliefs because these beliefs make up the real me–it is by my opinions and thoughts that I am knowable.  I want to share, promote, advocate but I haven’t as yet (much) because I am mindful of my students (once the invisible audience, now 22/24 follow me on twitter).  Must I be?  I have seen people like @mbcampbell360 talk at length in twitter about their atheism, political support of the Green party, and liberal use of profanity—but he teachers adults—can I join him?

Do I suffer from a lack of integrity for this hidden side of me like the Zuckerbergs suggest?  Am I being overly cautious?  Like Pinocchio I am asking, “Can I ever be a real boy?” and share my opinions more freely on twitter?  Where would you draw the line?

The process we went through to start blogging

 So the class of 2012’s blogs and Twitter accounts are off and running. I want to take a moment to detail the process I’ve gone through before and with them to get to this point. I think its going to be a long one so I’m just going to write a step-by-step list with little rhetorical flourish.

Edit: I have left it vague; a rough sketch—if you want more detail about a specific step, just let me know…

Prologue:

1. I was part of a committee that was looking at ways to improve gifted education in YRDSB a couple of years ago. Among other things, we explored the integration of technology and social media (shockingly:). I was pushed a little and encouraged to use Twitter with my class as part of the process. I was resistant, but I capitulated. I should not have; I was not ready. I was unprepared, and I don’t think that it was useful or even safe for my students. I continued to learn (by myself) because something in it appealed to me. It was a useful learning experience to me

2. I became certain, and continue to maintain, that a teacher should not explore technology or any technique/content with students. You should explore it first yourself. If you are going to open a door to students, you had better know how, and you had better know what’s on the other side first. I have blogged this sentiment several times on this site.

3. I learned more: I read articles from Techcrunch, GigaOm (specifically @mathewi). I read some Clay Shirky (“Here comes everybody”, “Cognitive Surplus”), I re-read Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman. I read some Danah Boyd.

4. I continued to use Twitter and other social media on my own. I started my own blog and made my own mistakes

5. I had many conversations with my principal and vice-principal as well as board consultants. I developed my own robust permission/consent form/appropriate use of technology

2 years and some experimenting later, I was willing to try it again….the following are steps my class and I went through this year to get ready for January and February’s Journalism/Web 2.0/SM unit/ Public Discourse:

Part 1 – Exploring Media:

1. we define media and explored some McLuhan and Postman. We explore a broad definition of what is media. We learn about how different media influence messages and have their own limitations. We learn about “hot” and “cold” media and the effect the receiver has on the message (but also how the media effects it as well).

2. We explored Neil Postman’s “5 ideas we need to know about technological change.”

3. We use it as a analytical framework for media using tools like: https://tuckerteacher.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/analytic-tool-based-on-postmans-5-ideas/

4. We explore brand creation and its relationship to people’s self fashioning as we explored advertising. I would have liked to spend more time on ad techniques and audience interaction (next time).

5. They work on a series of “Media Koan’s” to get them looking at media differently and critically (you can see some of them here: https://tuckerteacher.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/media-koans/)

Part 2 –The Moodle Years:

1. Our class uses our moodle course quite extensively. From the first week they are building a community of learners and are using digital tools to help each other and extend their learning beyond the classroom. There are many wiki’s, forums, topics, and discussions.

2. They are introduced to Tucker’s rules for using social media https://tuckerteacher.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/tuckers-rules-for-using-social-media/

3. They practice the skills of digital citizenship before they are formally introduced to the topic (at least from me). Before the “blogging unit” the average student has posted well over 100 times on our course.

Part 3- The ISU

1. As part of the gifted program at our school, students participate in an independent study unit loosely based on Bloom’s Taxonomy (not that I’m the biggest fan, but it serves-with a few changes)

   1. Students select a topic that has a controversial element and begin researching and learning at school and at home. We teach a parallel curriculum of research skills and note taking that I would like to make more robust next year.

   2. Students demonstrate understanding of their topic in a interview

   3. Analysis (we think it should be 3^rd before application-even if this violates Bloom’s). This year we skipped this because of time but it involves laying out, in an organization web, all the facts relevant to a topic (well within reason)

2. students brush up over the winter holidays and first week back in Januray to hopefully have a good grasp of their topic before the blogging starts

Part 4.. “Corporations are people,” and “The news about the news”

Since there is so much talk about “free” services out there, I try to break down that barrier so they can see these business for what they are-businesses

1. We talk about the driving ethics of business- for profit, branding and niche marketing. We look at Unilever and its strategies for the Dove and Axe brands.

2. We look at types of news and the purpose of news from different stakeholder’s perspectives.

3. We analysis the problem of corporate media control and SM as a possible counter force.

Part 5 – What is the internet really like?

Running parallel to parts 2-5 above, we start our social media/journalism/web 2.0/public discourse unit (some of the below items run concurrently)…

1. We pre-teach vocabulary and concepts

2. We discuss business models of “free” services like Zynga

3. We discuss in detail issues of privacy. (for example: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2011/PDF2011.html (“networked privacy”) , http://www.guardian.co.uk/tedx/cory-doctorow-privacy?CMP=twt_gu , http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/digital-culture/trending-tech/free-sucks-i-want-my-privacy-back/article2128006/ , I discuss elements of: Why Privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=enBy by Daniel J. Solove, with them as well

4. We explore the concepts digital footprint and digital citizenship. We host discussions on our moodle and bring in an array of sources.

5. We discuss related internet issues that the students find and bring back to a moodle hosted discussions

6. We discuss the effects of networks and being part of a community (and the production of hyper-local news

7. We talk about the “Who owns the digital you” series by Tim Chambers

8. We talk about how Twitter and SM are publishing and broadcasting networks and how they are different from a conversation. We learn about the implications of Danah Boyd’s work: 4 ideas of the internet persistent, replicable, searchable, scalable (“Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi); the dangers of the invisible audience; and http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-facebook-and-googles-concept-of-real-names-is-revolutionary/243171/

9. We have discussions about some of the following (dependend on time or where we menader arround:

   1. real name policies: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F , http://gigaom.com/2011/10/18/for-twitter-free-speech-is-what-matters-not-real-names/ , http://gigaom.com/2011/06/20/anonymity-has-real-value-both-in-comments-and-elsewhere/ , “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html , http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-facebook-and-googles-concept-of-real-names-is-revolutionary/243171/ (again) , and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/27/randi-zuckerberg-anonymity-online_n_910892.html

   2. other issues as discovered by their earlier serachs and conversations

10. Other safety

    1. http://canadasafetycouncil.org/child-safety/online-safety-rules-kids (especially the 3^rd in the list)

    2. And corollary issues like: http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/08/11/if-you-dont-like-it-dont-use-it-its-that-simple-orly/

Part 6 –Their turn?

1. I introduce them to the complexities of Twitter and some of the issues: reinforce the 4 Danah boyd principles and the invisible audience, Spambots, etiquette, offensive content, and how to use twitter well. We gather and look at sources for twitter and blogging. We talk about the different uses of twitter and the like. We primarily use twitter to build an audience and advertise blog posts to drive traffic to our discussions

2. Students decide which strategy they want to use for entering public discourse from here: https://tuckerteacher.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/7-archetypes-for-entering-public-disources-through-social-media/ They are also free to make their own moodle course and mimic the process if they feel they are not ready (given the time spend on caution, I don’t feel I can make it mandatory…this year 2 students chose this option…we made them teachers of their own moodle course and they use that as a website to host their classmates or others they invite into discussions on their topic).

3. Students make their first 10 tweets, and I review them carefully. We discuss clarity, long term consequences, digital citizenship issues. Once their first 10 are vetted, they are approved to tweet at will!

4. Finally, the part that the public sees: Students begin to build their own posts or comment on the posts of others depending on their chosen strategy, tweet to drive traffic to their posts, build audiences, engage in discussions, and learn….

Part 7 – Their learning log:

1. Students record their activities and their thoughts about them on their learning log (hosted on the class moodle) which I monitor, continuously assess, and eventually evaluate

That is the sketch…I feel I’ve left a lot out….might have to update. But in the meantime please consider following one of my student accounts and commenting on their posts. They can be found here: https://tuckerteacher.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/student-twitter-account-roll/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our bid for Best Buy’s “The Best in Class Fund”

Best Buy has a program of offering grants to schools to be used on digital technology.  Our school went through the process and was awarded $20,000. Many thanks to Stephen Hurley and others for starting and encouraging the thinking and exploration that led us to this point.  We still have other areas we are continuing to focus on based on this article: http://www.designshare.com/index.php/articles/great-learning-street-debate and two posts by Stephen Hurley that I continue to lose the links for.  Hopefully, he (or someone else) will respond below and post the links to his blog posts on “imagination rooms” and “invigorating the front entrance to a school.” Both posts I believe are on hosted on the CEA’s website.   Here is the text from our successful bid.  

Best Buy Essay Contest

Question 1: How do you plan to use the technology with your students to inspire and enhance their education? Please be as detailed as possible (500 words).

We plan to use the technology to enhance our students learning experience at Glen shields in four areas:

1) We plan to invigorate our front lobby as a communal learning and sharing space that promotes student learning and community/parental engagement. Our plan is to create a space that can be used by students, teachers and parents to meet communally to interact and work on their own projects. We envision a space that encourages collaboration and welcomes a school’s diverse set of stakeholders to met and share in learning. We require computers, technology to support video conferencing and video editing, and a television to broadcast announcements for this space.

2) We wish to create an imagination room in a section of our library resource centre. This would offer a student center where they would be free to pursue self-directed and collaborative learning activities with a focus on critical thinking and inquiry through a lens of creativity and innovative exploration. We require computers, tablets and an LCD projector, technology to support video conferencing and video editing, Livescribe pens (allows you to digitally record everything you write and say) and other experiential learning kits (like circuit boards, robotics, etc.) available in this space.

3) We are interested in filling some of our public spaces around the school with social learning centers. Similar to the imagination room, these would be hubs of self-directed social learning and inquiry. We want to include computers and other technology resources dedicated to supporting an interactive and inquiry based learning experience.

4) We’d like to augment the technology already available as part of the classroom program. We require additional LCD projectors, computers to increase the size of our portable laptop/netbook labs, etc.

Together, technology in these 4 areas would allow us to offer diverse learning experiences to our students that would otherwise be impossible. Given the limitations of our current resources, technology has primarily been dedicated to classroom use and the instruction of students. We would like to dedicate this new investment in technology to further promote student learning and experimentation. This would allow us to offer the following experiences more efficiently and effectively to our students: virtual field trips to increase their understanding of the world in which they live, skyped connections to others – to have our students not just learn about others but to learn from others in an innovative and interactive way; work with all stakeholders (parents and students) to create videos to facilitate flipped classrooms; access a school Moodle course to foster an internal learning community and access points to develop learning communities outside the school through the integrated use of social media.

We feel that such opportunities will raise the level of engagement of some of our students experiencing learning challenges and provide valuable outlets for our more independent and creative learners. Independent access to learning tools and social learning contexts will provide a voice in our school community to groups that have been traditionally silenced or lacked voice as they access the rich environment offered by social media through digital technology.

Question 2: Tell us more about the students that would be directly impacted and how they would benefit from the grant. (250 words)

Our school is a microcosm ofCanada. Our school is an incredibly diverse school; this offers the same advantages and challenges of Canada as a whole. We service a community that includes a high number of recent immigrants and ELL learners, a diverse array of socio-economic realities, a large visible minority community, and gifted learners. Many students in this school have only limited access to digital technology, the Internet, social media and independent self-guided learning. Digital technology will help us service the diverse needs of this group. It will allow us to provide both a common experience of base instruction and learning, and it will allow us to focus on each student’s specific needs and interests.

Eventually, I say we need to add ‘forgiving’ to our practise of Digital Citizenship…

 

Eventually, I say we need to add ‘forgiving’ to our meaning of Digital Citizenship…

A couple months ago, I lost my enthusiasm for blogging. At some point during the discussions on twitter, my blog; and other blogs, about my post, “Should Kindergarteners be on Twitter?” I realized I was no longer enjoying it. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I learned some lessons from it, but I still found it hard to move past it and post again (yes I have two posts after it, but they were written and posted as the conversation was continuing about kindergarten). I have many ideas for posts that I’d like to write, and I think about them quite a lot, but I need to get past that discussion first. I hoping this blog will be part of that and a start to push me to write more. I haven’t read through the comments again but I know someday I will…The part that dragged me down the most was, during the discussion I was constantly (or so it seemed) labeled arrogant (something I felt/feel was unwarranted).

I think that comments sometimes become the context your post is evaluated in; you’re known by the company you keep, as it were. Once someone labels you as arrogant or any other label, it pushes others to see you similarly—where they might have given you the benefit of the doubt before, the context of “arrogant’ pushes them to interrupt your writing a similar way. No matter how: I tried to soften my message; I tried to leave parts of it as agree to disagree; I tried to accept part or at least partly accept what others were writing, I could not escape the charge of arrogance once it had been raised. I think that I had a sense of the ‘principle of context’ before I started. One of the reasons I argue / respond to my comments at such length is because I don’t want to leave it to influence others….I want them to consider my points separate from the context (at least initially….after they have formed their initial impression of me or my point, then other comments just serve to give them more to consider rather then a light to understand me by…). I think this is something basic about blogging that we all should understand…

Why does this happen?

I think that people are influenced by the context of text on the Internet more than in face-to-face. Ads, fonts, comments, etc are perhaps used to replace some of the missing information that we’ve evolved to seek out and interpret in face-to-face communication. I’ve heard many times that most of out communication is non-verbal. People point out: tone, pitch, speed, facial expression, body language, social context as aspects of communication that help construct and interpret meaning. On a blog these aspects are largely missing. We get a shadow of the rich communication we are used to. In the absence of these aspects, people are still looking for more information to inform their interpretation or that information is streamed to them unbidden to enhance/obscure the original intent.

Because we are writing for the invisible audience in a de-contextualized, persistent way, messages require more interpretation on the part of the receiver to construct meaning. Because more is required from the receiver, they influence their interpretation of meaning more. Because of this, there is inherently more chance of misunderstanding intent/meaning on the Internet then there is is face-to-face communication.

Given the above premises, what should we do? I would like us to emphasize a new component of digital citizenship (could be just the emphasis that is new). People are good at articulating the need to be polite and thoughtful as part of citizenship; now I am suggestion they also have to push the need to: give the benefit of the doubt; be generous in your interpretation of others; realize your influence on the message you’ve decoded; seek clarification; be empathic; and most importantly, be forgiving.

This will help everyone, including your students. On web 2.0 tools people are learning. Inherent in that statement is that they will make mistakes (me, you, your students). The mistakes can be many and varied. You may be teaching your kids to be careful and thoughtful, but obviously they will make mistakes too. It behooves all of us to make an environment that is tolerant of mistakes, understanding of mistakes, and forgiving of mistakes. This needs to be part of out digital citizenship as well because without it -because social media is persistent and scalable– it is too dangerous an environment to learn in….people will be labeled, judged, regarded on their learning process, not themselves at the ‘end’ of the journey or after they’ve learned more…

Learning to use social media shouldn’t be like learning to ride a bicycle, it should be like learning to drive a car.

 

 Learning to use social media shouldn’t be like learning to ride a bicycle, it should be like learning to drive a car.

Generally, children start to be taught to ride a bike when they are physically able to learn. We start by doing. We don’t worry too much about them going too fast or too far as they are still young and are watched by their parents. They are also small so going too fast is rarely a concern. We don’t worry too much about the rules of the road; those come later. The rules aren’t that important to their learning process because they are, again, not going far, not fast, there’s always a parent around. Often, the rules of the road are immaterial as they are learning on paths, parks or parking lots. Eventually, we teach them all that as they begin to go farther away from a parents gaze. Eventually, we fill them in about the dangers and the we warn them about the rules. Maybe we wait so we don’t dampen their enthusiasm; maybe we don’t want to worry them. In any case, it doesn’t really matter, they have plenty of time to learn the rules as they go. There is little danger in learning to ride a bike this way.

Learning to drive a car is a radically different process. First, we wait until we think they are old enough to handle the responsibility safely. Teens are physically able to drive a car long before we begin to teach them; obviously, we feel the dangers / responsibilities are a more important criteria then mere physical strength. When they are finally viewed as old enough, we still delay their participation in social driving.

First, we teach them the theory. Either by studying a book and taking a test, or by taking classes, or most often by doing both, we are finally ready to take them on guided lessons about driving. Then, at least in Ontario, they go through a 2 year probation period before we give them full access. As a society we take learning to drive very seriously. We are proactive in mitigating the risk. We have professionals who are aware of the dangers, not just the advantages of driving, teach them to be safe. No instructor says, “wow, look what a car can do – explore! Test the limits!”

Even though they grew up in a culture where cars are the norm, even though they are natives in a driving culture and can’t imagine a world without it, we take the time to make sure that they are ready before we let them drive on their own.

I think we should be as responsible and serious about teaching them to use social media; I think pretending its like a bike is irresponsible and harmful.

Should Kindergarteners be using Twitter?

 Last week I offended someone. For those of you who know me, that might not come as a shock, but I’d like you to bare with me. I was reading an article about Twitter in a kindergarten classroom. I re-tweeted it and called it reckless.

@ginrob_pt P. Tucker

Rather read about their understanding of SM and privacy-reckless! MT @OISELibrary How a SK class uses Twitter to learn http://bit.ly/qttEum

@happycampergirl was good enough to engage me about it on twitter, and I am hoping she will respond to this post. Since my initial re-tweet, I’ve learned more about her and what she is doing. Not that she needs my approval, but I think she’s doing a good job. She seems to have the current privacy of her students well in hand, and she is using twitter to do really interesting stuff. She has found a way to use it for a very engaging, authentic, ongoing, literacy, learning activity. If you disagree with my objections below, you should check out her blog about it @ http://ow.ly/6xJ7f . If you disagree with my points, you could hardly find a better use for Twitter with kindergarten students; however, if I were a parent of one of those children, I would not have signed the parental consent form; I would not allow my child to participate. By the end of the post, one of 3 things will be apparent: 1) I was reckless to call her reckless; 2) she was somewhat reckless in using twitter; or 3) we both were reckless.

Objection 1: The invisible curriculum.

By using Twitter in the manner described in her blog, this teacher is violating the terms of use set out by Twitter. This, and behaviour like this, has the unfortunate effect of teaching students 2 lessons that we should wish to avoid. First, one is teaching their students that they don’t have to behave ethically by modeling this behaviour. The “terms of use” are an explicit social contract. Twitter is a free service but it is not freely offered. The conditions for use must be followed; Twitter is someone’s intellectual property. You have no right to it unless you follow their conditions. If one wishes them to be different, petition the company or attempt to get an injunction…in either case, in order to fulfill the requirements for ethical behaviour as set out by social contract theory and by our courts, we must abide by their conditions in the meanwhile. Second, students are learning to ignore the “terms of use.” By passing them off as unimportant you are helping to foster a climate where people ignore the fine print. I don’t think this is a safe mentality, nor is it one that will guard their privacy or utility in years to come. If you aren’t worried about you students learning these lessons because they are too young to grasp the concepts; well, I might agre.  This, however, brings me to my second objection (later): if students are too young to grasp the complexities of the digital environment, perhaps they are too young to be using it.

It is startling that people in education want to extend the reach of a company in the market place, even to places it doesn’t dare go on its own. Twitter has rejected young children as a market to deliver to its advertisers; why are teachers trying to do it for them? Has twitter seen a danger we haven’t? Have we even asked?

Objection 2: Do they understand it?

The digital media environment is complex and difficult to understand. It is frustrating, but without a deep understanding, my warnings fail to alarm people; I find those who understand media better are more receptive to my arguments for caution.  Twitter, for example is not a conversation; it is not the same as talking to someone.  Twitter is a publishing and broadcasting system; it is also a business with a complex business strategy.  How can one properly prepare kids to use media, if s/he doesn’t understand media theory?  My objection is: teachers might not know the dangers that are out there (and there are out there); therefore, it is dangerous for them to lead their kids into SM.

I use twitter for limited purposes with my intermediate gifted students in late January or February, depending on when they are ready – when they know enough. I think kindergarten is necessarily too young. 10 % of them still cry on Monday mornings; some believe in Santa Clause (even that Virginia kid); that a bunny hides chocolate eggs for them to find because the world is a wondrous place; at least half of them don’t understand the difference between commercials and TV shows; they certainly don’t understand the techniques or reasons for them. Sadly, I think most teachers don’t understand the digital environment either.

One can’t just read “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky or watch him on Ted.com, though those are a start. He and other technophiles are great and inspiring but not necessarily critical or cautionary. Teachers have to read things like: “Understanding Media,” by Marshal McLuhan; “Amusing ourselves to death,” or “informing Ourselves to Death.” by Neil Postman. Teachers have to analyze media like Twitter using something like this: http://bit.ly/eedUBq . Do you think it is a conversation they are having? Then you haven’t read http://bit.ly/jnbeUU by Danah Boyd, or http://bit.ly/pmqlSh by Alexis Madrigal.  Teachers even need to figured where their students or even themselves reside in Twitter’s business model?

If you do understand all this, do your students? teachers might be able to keep them safe in their class, but by normalizing twitter at such an early age, students/children will not approach it critically the next time. They won’t give it the respect/caution in needs. (“ahhh, no big deal, we used it in kindergarten; I know all about it)…will they use it next year or in two years by themselves? Do their parents now think it is harmless because it was introduced in school?

What’s the rush? There must be other less abstract ways to get your students to relate and talk to others. What advantages does the digital environment offer to kindergarten students that cannot be replicated by other means? What great advantage outweighs the negatives? Eventual participation is not an argument for early exposure. Students will do all manner of things when they grow up: drive, drink, enter committed sexual relationships….is early expose necessary? I think that they are too young.

Yes, @happycampergirl and others are doing great things with Twitter…but there are other great things they could do (I have no doubt). Things that are age appropriate that their students will better understand. Use media that is more immediate, mundane and less abstract. Have them talk and read to each other or the class down the hall. Why, in our multicultural schools, do we have to abstract an opinion from across the world? They are right across the hall. Make a chat room by arranging your desks in a circle. Get them to know each other and share their diverse opinions.

7 Archetypes for entering public disources through social media

 

Here are 7 strategies that students might adopt when engaging in public discourse through social media tools. I have tried to provide a conceptual framework to help them consider their first steps. I wanted to suggest tools that would be more suitable to a strategy then another but ultimately, I think most social media tools are equally applicable to each strategy (give or take). I’d love some feed back on this – is it clear? Is it somewhat helpful or interesting? Is there an 8^th strategy that I have missed?

Archetypes / metaphors

1. Nomad
Description	This strategy is used when you find an organization, blog, group, person or the like that you disagree with. Rather then create a site, organization or movement to oppose their message, a nomad goes into their infrastructure / forums to get his or her message across. You might post your disagreement on their website or the like. You can sustain your participation for as long as you like, and try to influence their opinion over time
Advantages	Requires less time then other strategies, requires less understanding of web 2.0 tools, takes your message directly to those you disagree with and might change their mind. Also, everyone who reads your message will be interested in the topic and likely to engage you in discussion.
Disadvantages	You must be careful – can be considered harassment or trolling if done wrong. You are likely to lose control of your posts, harder to influence target audience because they already have a contrary opinion that is likely based on some understanding. It is also harder to reach larger audience.

 

2. Wanderer
Description	With this strategy, after learning a bit about your issue or topic, you wander about the internet adding comments or arguments to other people’s sites. You try to take advantage of other people’s structures and audiences to spread your point of view. It is like the nomad except that is is less advosarial. You are equally likely to help support people who agree with you as engage in debate those who do not.
Advantages	You don’t have to build content or a site. You don’t have to spend time networking to find an audience. You can recycle your comments as you find new public spaces to comment.
Disadvantages	Must consistently search for content to comment on. Can’t build your own audience or network. Hard to respond to responses to your comments.

 

3. Hunter/Gather
Description	With this strategy, you build a site (blog, wiki, etc) by gathering and reposting the work of others. By aggregating many contributions to one place, you create a specialized area with many voices regarding your topic. It can create a powerful resource to effect public opinion.
Advantages	You learn as you go – adding to your location, also adds to your knowledge. You utilize the expertise of a wide range of people. Content can be added quite quickly.
Disadvantages	Some issues with intellectual property rights – be careful to give credit to others. Might be hard to build an audience – how do you get the word out? You might have a variety of opinions and not a clear message – just a lot of related topics.

 

4. Subsistence Farmer
Description	Similar to the hunter gather strategy except you create the majority of the content yourself. This is a good strategy for people with a lot to say.
Advantages	You have more control over the content and message. Things can be said exactly as you like. You create a stable platform where people can find unique content and opinions. You create a place where like minded individuals gather.
Disadvantages	Takes a long time to write or build enough content to get people interested or to affect their opinions. You have to continue to provide content to keep people interested. It might be hard to gather an audience and network.

 

5. Co-op farmer
Description	This is kind of a combination of the substance farmer and the hunter / Gatherer at first. You provide content and you can collect content from other sources. Eventually, you invite others to contribute original content as well. You may keep some editorial control, but on these kind of sites, people are also looking for freedom to express themselves
Advantages	You aggregate audience with others; this helps you get your message or opinions out to more people.
Disadvantages	With more people, comes more opinions and perhaps conflict. Also, as the host, you might be held responsible, to a varying degree, for the opinions of those who post on your site.

 

6. Small business
Description	This is very like the subsistence farmer except your goal is to inspire or support action, not just to inform people or affect public opinion. You might advocate changing a behavour, a protest movement, or run a charity
Advantages	Sometimes it is easier and more gratifying to see action taken at your suggestion then just trying to educate or influence people’s opinions. With this kind of site, you might more directly see action taken that you have inspired.
Disadvantages	Actions can be dangerous if not done carefully. Consequences are often real and tangible; you might be held accountable. Might be more legal considerations – a charity that handles money has legal obligations and the like.

 

7. Public Company
Description	Like the small business except you seek to gather a crowd of like minded individuals to help you run something a little larger
Advantages	Aggregates peoples effort and people’s talents to create something larger then you could create on your own. You gain access to the networks and audience of others.
Disadvantages	Often hard to get the right people together in the beginning. The bigger something is, the more complicated it will become. More people means more opinions of how things should be done. This type of organization will be hard to control once you start.

Danah Boyd – Crib sheet

Some people have complained that Danah Boyd’s article is a little wordy.  I perpared this short crib sheet to boil down her message (as I saw it).  I think that these characteristics are what creates the advantages and dangers of social media.  To clarify an earlier point, once these are understood, we will know better what we can do, and better of what we should be careful.  These are the charactersitics that governs public discourse and social spaces over the internet:

The Nature of Social Media –Digital Social Spaces

 Citation: Danah Boyd. (2010). “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.” In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture onSocial Network Sites (ed. Zizi Papacharissi), pp. 39-58.

Public spaces have 4 essential characteristics that regulate their uses create their central dynamics:

1. Persistence: online expressions are automatically recorded and archived.

“The persistence of conversations in networked publics is ideal for asynchronous conversations, but it also raises new concerns when it can be consumed outside of its original context.”

2. Replicability: content made out of bits can be duplicated.

“…the content produced in networked publics is easily replicable. Copies are inherent to these systems. In a world of bits, there is no way to differentiate the original bit from its duplicate. And, because bits can be easily modified, content can be transformed in ways that make it hard to tell which is the source and which is the alteration. The replicable nature of content in networked publics means that what is replicated may be altered in ways that people do not easily realize.”

3. Scalability: the potential visibility of content in networked publics is great.

“Scalability in networked publics is about the possibility of tremendous visibility, not the guarantee of it. The property of scalability does not necessarily scale what individuals want to have scaled or what they think should be scaled, but what the collective chooses to amplify.”

4. Searchability: content in networked publics can be accessed through search

“Search has become a commonplace activity among Internet users.

As people use technologies that leave traces, search takes on a new role.” 

Central Dynamics in Networked Publics

 Invisible audiences: not all audiences are visible when a person is contributing online, nor are they necessarily co-present.

• Collapsed contexts: the lack of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries makes it difficult to maintain distinct social contexts.
• The blurring of public and private: without control over context, public and private become meaningless binaries, are scaled in new ways, and are difficult to maintain as distinct.

Mini-Unit –Clay Shirky and Social Surplus

  Here is a package I have used to bridge between units with mixed results.  Still might try it again.  At the very least it gives a good introduction into the writing of Clay Shirky.  It was Shirky’s “Ted talks” (Ted.com) that got me interested in twitter even after my own CRT’s had tried with limited success.  Clay Shirky’s writings are a little optimistic, in my opinion, but are still lively, and brilliant in their observations.  The first one I read, “Here Comes Everybody,” was a terrific exploration of the transformation underway and the underlying dynamics of social media.  The article below lead to another of his books: “Cognitive Surplus,” which takes up where “Here Comes Everybody,” left off.  The two are good companions or stand alone separately and are worth reading for anyone, but also teachers.  I read “Here comes everybody,” in a literature circle with gifted grade 7’s and 8/s and it was well received.  Below is one idea to introduce Clay Shirky and the concept of cognitive surplus:

Name: ____________________________ Date: _____________

Free-Time Survey

 

Estimate your time on the following activities per week (round to the nearest 0.5 hour) during the school year:

Media	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturaday	Sunday
T.V.
Passive Internet
Game consoles
Totals:

 

Now add together your daily totals into a weekly total:

 

Now multiply that by 4.5 for an approximate monthly total:

 

Share your results with a classmate from another group and discuss your uses of your free time. Who has more? What specifically do you like to do? etc?

Now read the attached article:

 

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

By Clay Shirky on

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–“How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.

Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, “Don’t go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don’t go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark.” But it’s something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there’s no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, “This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now.”

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

At least they’re doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, “Isn’t this all just a fad?” You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, “This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before,” and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into. But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing–and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

Your task:

1. Discuss the above article with your class
2. Form a group (your teacher may give you criteria for group formation)
3. Divide a chart paper into 4 sections and brainstorm (round robin) projects you could do to participate or contribute to society under the following headings: School, environment, intellectually, creatively or aesthetically. Try to come up with at least 10 ideas for each section
4. Decide as a group which project you will initially pursue (you might abandon it or complete it and start another project)
5. Write up a plan of your project. Who will do what, how will you communicate to each other, are you working independently towards the same goal In conjunction with each other In competition Make the write up some what visually appealing as it will hang on the walls so others know what you are doing.
6. Spend the next 4 weeks using some of your free time to move the project forward. While your teacher may give you some time to support your efforts, the point of the assignment is that you are capitalizing on your intellectual surplus…giving you lots of class time is counter to this purpose
7. You will be expected to use about 10-20 % of your surplus time (some people may have more time to dedicate to your project than others which is fine, or your group may decide to average (mean medium or mode) your free time and hold each member to the same amount of participation).
8. be prepared to summarize or unveil your projects on ______________________

 

The internet is obviously a valuable resource but do not be bound by it

Questions	Answers
.
Other notes discussed in class .