'21st-century statecraft' at home & school

Live on the Web, I was just listening to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton's call for 21st-century statecraft (as well as the need to protect free expression online) and couldn't help but think about how much we need to respect, teach, and model good citizenship at home and school (here and in every country) – using the media kids use and love – in order to realize Secretary Clinton's vision for Internet freedom. She spoke of the need to "create norms of behavior among states." Absolutely, but we need to start here at home, promoting and modeling norms of good behavior online and in homes and classrooms using the social (behavioral) media and technologies where so much kid behavior occurs now. I just reviewed a major study, the Kaiser Family Foundation's, about how much youth are using media, and while some are appalled at the time spent with media, are they thinking about how so much of that usage is outside of school, because we block social media and cellphones from school – leaving young people completely on their own to work out social norms? What a missed opportunity! Secretary Clinton also called on us to focus on the needs of youth. Doing so must include understanding how they use media, not just how much. Let's begin now consciously to model and teach the good digital as well as real-world citizenship and "statecraft" that will be protections to free speech, our countries, and most especially our children – at school, in virtual worlds, and all the other places where they spend time. [See also "Digital risk, digital citizenship" and "From users to citizens."]

The media shift & the TX textbook revolution

Not everybody's idea of a national news story, but an example of the media sea change we're experiencing: "In a historic shift," Texas – the US's second-biggest textbook "customer" with a multi-billion-dollar textbook budget and highly centralized curriculum development and textbook purchasing that has been in place since 1918 – is broadening its definition of "book," the Texas Tribune reported recently. Part of the definition now seems to be "a living reservoir of content, freely edited and updated by educators and beamed to the classrooms, homes and handhelds of students statewide," and some of the budget will go to laptops and e-readers. Leading up to this development, the Tribune cites three fundamental shifts of power and money: "from the State Board of Education to the Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency; from three major textbook conglomerates to a broad array of computer hardware and digital content providers; and from the state to school districts." The bottom line: School districts in Texas will actually be getting some of the state budget to make their own decisions on content, curriculum, and delivery tools, it appears. One of the top three textbook adoption states (the others being California and Florida) is acting like one-size-fits-all doesn't fit well with the way children learn, socialize, or use technology (see "Online Safety 3.0" for the Net-safety piece of that). For a bit more context: "Most states allow local school districts to buy their own instructional materials, in print or otherwise," according to the Tribune; but 22, the so-called adoption states, don't. Texas, Florida, and California together have more students than the other 19 combined, but "none has held the reigns of curriculum and money so tightly as Texas," the Tribune reports. As for book-content delivery devices – "e-readers" like Amazon's Kindle – sales are growing. According to The Economist, there are about 5 million out in the world right now, and "double that amount will be sold in 2010, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm. Apple, with its record of improving upon existing technologies and triggering mass adoption, is expected to shake up the business by launching a tablet-style computer which would make an ideal e-reader in 2010." The article's a little old, but some more great background on textbooks can be found at Edutopia.

Quest Atlantis, VWs & academic situational awareness

In a virtual world, science students can be scientists. In Quest Atlantis, students explore scientific problems or quests, so that – in addition to learning scientific content on quests – they find themselves in situations where they have to put that new knowledge to actual use. In other words they're being scientists, not just learning science. What a "science class"! Prof. Sasha Barab, one of the creators of the Quest Atlantis educational virtual world at the University of Indiana School of Education, calls this "transformational play," reports Cindy Richards at the MacArthur Foundation's "Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning." Maybe also transformational learning? [BTW, I love the term "situational awareness," feeling it has so many applications - social, academic, developmental (parenting) - online and offline. Online – like digital citizenship and media literacy – it's protective as well as promotive of academic success. Just as in Quest Atlantis, you learn what it's like actually to be a scientist or environmentalist, in social network sites you can learn what's it's like to be a good friend online and offline – what words, photo-tagging, or behavior has the potential to support or hurt others. We think about situational awareness a lot at our house. For example, some language that's common in Xbox Live is not at all appropriate in other situations, including at ice hockey practice! Developing the awareness that can make that distinction has a lot of athletic and social benefits!]

WoW: The guild effect for teachers

There are lots of good reasons why an assistant superintendent of schools would start a guild in World of Warcraft (WoW) – all laid out in a fascinating profile of the Cognitive Dissonance Guild and its educator members in The Journal this month. But the reason why Catherine Parsons, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and pupil personnel services for Pine Plains Central School District, N.Y., started the guild was "to uncover education's brass ring: student engagement." A lot of teachers' professional development happens in the guild as well (the name reflects the seeming disconnect between several pairs: public perceptions of videogames on the one hand and on the other hand: 1) what videogames can teach teachers about learning; 2) what massively multiplayer online games can teach teachers about education worldwide when they're all playing a game together; 3) the members' professional development and networking; and 4) traditional or formal learning.

But the members simply aren't feeling any such cognitive dissonance, and their ranks are growing. The guild now has 100 active members around the world – all in the field of education. Here are some things they've learned about learning in WoW: The game "draws on multiple skills across multiple disciplines," higher-order thinking, and problem-solving. Players have to be able to read, communicate, and use analytical and statistical skills (e.g., a statistical comparison of one weapon vs. another). They learn economic concepts such as supply and demand and budgeting. Parsons told The Journal that the four wars going on in WoW pattern conflicts in world history. So players learn concepts involved in social studies and history and "writing and lore." She says players even use a form of statistical analysis in building their characters - what sort of talents to use, what weapons to use. She said 13-, 14-, and 15-year-old students whom teachers can't get to do "those kinds of computations" in class have no problem doing them in World of Warcraft. Tech coordinator Lucas Gillispie, who runs the WoW in School site, "took inspiration from observing that a particular herb [in the game] that allowed his avatar to go invisible was always growing in a thick clump of weeds." He thought of a lesson plan for comparing WoW ecology to real-world ecology.

My own first piece about the guild effect – in terms of online/offline well-being and safety – is here. See also "The power of play" and "Play, Part 2."

States' report card for school innovation

The US states' report card for innovation in education wasn't all bad news: For example, "Massachusetts, Colorado, and Rhode Island got gold stars for their policies to promote extended learning time in schools." But all of those states got Ds for tech innovation. The report – "Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation" – was not pretty, with "most states earning Cs, Ds, or even Fs in such key areas as technology, high school quality, and removal of ineffective teachers," Education Week reports. Sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Center for American Progress, and the American Enterprise Institute, the report used "state data and existing and original research to assign letter grades to states." Technology grades were based on criteria such as teachers' technology proficiency, student access to tech, whether there are online schools in the state, and whether the state assesses return on investments in technology. Six states got As for technology: Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Virginia, and West Virginia. Twelve states got Bs; 14 Cs; 18 Ds (including the District of Columbia), and one – Nevada – got an F for tech innovation. A key critic of the report was the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, which said its recommendations fit with "the factory model of education." The full report can be downloaded from the US Chamber site in PDF format, and the Tech section starts on p. 46.

Filters for classroom management?

No. Really not a good use for filters, writes instructional technologist Bud Hunt at St. Vrain Valley School District in northern Colorado, where they've been filtering less since the beginning of the school year. Hunt's thoughtful response to requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom is that "we will no longer use the Web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem." Hunt later adds that the best filters in a classroom are the people in it. I do agree. Here's why – but don't miss Bud's complete response to technological-classroom-management requests, linked to above. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with filtering, just with uncritical use of it, or any technology. [See also "Filtering critics, issues in 3 countries."]

*Good* news involving swine flu

There just may be an upside to the swine flu: It may be the cause of more educators becoming comfortable with using interactive technology (aka social media) in the classroom. With the message that its wiki-like online collaboration tool, Office Live Workspace, can help keep classes on track if schools close for flu outbreaks, Microsoft "has launched a how-to Web site that walks teachers through the steps of setting up accounts for their classes on ... the free Web service," the Associated Press reports. Pretty much like Wikispaces.com, Google Sites, and Wetpaint's Wikis in Education, the service can be used by teachers to post assignments and handouts so that students can work on the assignments individually or collaboratively from home. According to eSchoolNews, Microsoft and other companies, such as Pearson Education, are responding to a call by Education Secretary Arne Duncan "to help keep home-bound students sick with the H1N1 flu virus connected to school."

From 'digital disconnect' to mobile learning

The real disconnect is not the one between parents and kids (that I wrote about last week). "It's the gap between how students learn and how they live! They really want to end that divide," according to Project Tomorrow, the Irvine, Calif.-based nonprofit organization that runs the annual nationwide Speak Up study.

And the disconnect is "alive and well ... and growing," was the finding of the latest Speak Up, which surveyed 281,500 students, 29,644 teachers, 3,114 administrators, 21,309 parents, and 4,379 schools in 868 districts in all 50 states and some in other English-speaking countries. "Students say they 'step back in time' when they enter the school building each morning - despite overwhelming agreement among parents, teachers and principals that the effective implementation of technology in schools is crucial to student success," Project Tomorrow says in its release of last fall's survey.

Cellphones everywhere
The Speak Up study found that about 77% of students in grades 9-12 have mobile phones (55% have access to laptops), indicating that leveraging that installed base by teaching with cellphones would be economical in terms of both time and money.

"Cell phones can be powerful computers. They can do just about everything laptops can do for a fraction of the price. And many students are bringing them to school anyway," says University of Michigan education professor Elliot Soloway.

Still, barriers to adoption remain, including adult biases against technology for "serious" use; a diversity of cellphone products in the marketplace; phones' physical features (screen size, battery life, etc.); and schools' fears about student distraction and lack of responsibility toward the equipment, according to the 2009 Joan Ganz Cooney Center study "Pockets of Potential" (here's my post on the report).

Responsible use the norm
About that last and crucial barrier, though, school districts that do incorporate cellphones and other handheld devices into classroom work find that student engagement and responsible use are actually the norm.

North Carolina math teacher Suzette Kliwer said her students are so eager to use phones in an educational setting that irresponsible use of them has not been a problem. She was one of several educators presenting their districts' experience in a recent Project Tomorrow Webinar on mobile learning. Jeff Billings, an Arizona school district's director of technology, echoed that: "When you engage students and put a pro who can guide them on the instruction piece, good things happen," he said.

How they're teaching with phones
"The mobile device is a case of digital tools at your disposal. It can provide an ultra-portable portfolio" of teacher's and students' work, said David Whyley of Learning2Go, the UK's four-year-old "largest collaborative mobile learning project," focusing on the British equivalent of grades K-6.

A recent story in USATODAY tells how Ohio students in grades 3-5 work with handheld devices. Using educational apps created by GoKnow!, a company co-founded by University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway, they take and draw pictures, keep journals, write essays, work in spelling, and do math. "Students took the phones on a museum field trip where they took photos, uploaded them to a server where the teacher could view the assignment and wrote blurbs about what they saw," the article says.

Tech coordinator and middle school teacher Samantha Morra in New Jersey put together a program for classroom iPod Touches with which students store, produce, organize, share, and access media such as podcasts and videos, access sources on the Web, take quizzes, work with flashcards, and discuss and collaborate in different configurations of users: one on one with their teacher, in small groups, and as a class. "Students devour engaging, customized curricula when it’s delivered on the iPod. Phones are a familiar and essential part of their lives now, Morra emailed me.

How can ed add value to tech?
Which points to a question I think we all need to be asking: "It is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?" That's from Ira Socol at Michigan State University, a comment he wrote in Saskatchewan tech educator Dean Shareski's blog, IdeasandThoughts.org. Think about how education has added value to the book! (See "School & social media: Uber big picture.")

Here's how students themselves told Project Tomorrow they want to use mobile devices to support learning: for communications (email teachers and classmates and access personal Web sites); collaborations (projects and calendars); creativity (create/share documents, videos, educational games); and productivity (research, downloads, and to get alerts and reminders).

Why mobile learning?
In its "Pockets of Potential" review of mobile learning projects in eight countries (schools in some countries are way ahead of this whole discussion), the Cooney Center lists "5 key opportunities in mobile learning." It...

1. Encourages “anywhere, anytime” learning - learning in a real-world context and bridging home, school and other environments.
2. Reaches underserved children - low-cost devices and tech many children already have, especially in disadvantaged communities & developing countries.
3. Improves 21st-century social interactions - fostering constructive and constructivist (collaborative) use
4. Fits with diverse learning environments - highly accessible communication and content-delivery devices
5. Enables personalized learning experiences for diverse student populations and learning styles.

Back in 2006, kicking off the multiyear, MacArthur Foundation-funded, $50 million Digital Youth Project, media professor Henry Jenkins wrote, "Educators must work together to ensure that every American young person has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant, can articulate their understanding of how media shapes perceptions, and has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that should shape their practices as media makers and participants in online communities." (my post on Jenkins's paper back then).

Related links

CellphonesinLearning.com, a site by author and learning technologies doctoral student Liz Kolb at the University of Michigan – her book is Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education

mLearnopedia.com, created by mobile learning consultant Judy Brown, formerly of the University of Wisconsin

Project K-Nect - a Qualcomm-funded program being implemented in some North Carolina public schools as "a supplemental resource for secondary at-risk students to focus on increasing their math skills through the use of smartphones" (here's the students' blog)

"Where phones in class are ok" at Inside Higher Ed

"Learning curve: Cellphone as teacher" in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"WCSA Mobile Learning K-12," a presentation by Judy Brown in SlideShare

For an online-safety perspective on the gap between young people's formal and informal learning with digital meeting, see "Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth."

Project Tomorrow wasn't the first research group to flag the digital disconnect. As I mentioned last week, Pew/Internet first wrote about in a 2002 report.

This past summer, Tech & Learning published retailer Wirefly's "Top 10 cellphones for students," looking at affordability, popularity and functionality.

Starring students: Real-world projects in virtual world

Wonder how and what students are taught in virtual worlds? Watch this video (13:46) at Teachers TV, a professional development site in the UK (which has similar videos on blogs, cellphones, and podcasting in the classroom here). You'll see how middle-school student Daniel made the case for and, "in a couple of weeks," built an exhibition of the history of steam engines in Second Life, his teacher said, and how a group of students were asked to help turn a crumbling historic jetty on the North Sea coast into a tourism destination by building and restoring it virtually, again in Second Life. "Where else on Earth could you give a bunch of youngsters the space to build Skinningrove Jetty with some stairs going up to it out into the sea?" asks one of the teachers involved. Another said, "We have some students who are very confident working by themselves but they're not so good in a group.... One of the brightest students we have tends to hide his work from the others because he doesn't want them to be copying it, whereas now he's taking more of a sharing role...." Here's more on the Schome Project for 21st-century learning, whose island in the virtual world provides space for these student engineering and building projects.

World of Warcraft, MMORPGs in school

At Peggy Sheehy's middle school in Suffern, N.Y., the introduction of World of Warcraft (WoW) is going like this: first it's the focus of an after-school club, then "others joining us will be implementing it with the 'at-risk' student population [and] the 'gifted' student group," followed by regular classes "for specific content-area projects," Sheehy, a teacher and media specialist, said in an interview at WoW.com. As a high-level player of this multiplayer online game (or MMORPG) and guild founder herself, she's been exploring what can be taught with the multiplayer online game because she has already done a lot of teaching of everything from literature to body image for a health class in and with the virtual world Teen Second Life, and she saw some new opportunities in WoW, for example the opportunity to increase student engagement by teaching within a graphically compelling virtual environment. When that happens, she says, even reading levels go up: "My kids, who are 13 years old, are reading on a sixth-grade or a fourth-grade level in school when tested, but ... if you test them with the same methodology that you would test reading a John Steinbeck novel in school ... on World of Warcraft content, all of a sudden their scores are higher." Here's a site, created by educators (a collaborative Web site called a "wiki," as in Wikipedia.org), that's dedicated to developing lesson plans and other instructional tools incorporating World of Warcraft - so far for teaching math, writing, social interaction, digital citizenship, online safety, and 21st-century skills. [See also "Play, Part 2: Violence in videogames" and "Homeschooling with World of Warcraft", and "Can World of Warcraft make you smarter?" at MSNBC (for more on the body-image project, see Sheehy's answer to Question No. 13 on this page at RezEd.org).]

Great social-media resource in Oz

Looking for nice, clear definitions of social-media tools like blogs and wikis? Check out a new resource in Australia recommended in an educators' bookmarking group I subscribe to: the Technology Guide in the Australian government's Cybersmart site. That's just one piece of a very comprehensive resource that includes online-safety advice and curricula as well. What I like about it is that it also gets at how youth use technology (it doesn't present technology as a problem). There's a "Cybersafety Help" button for Australians in the upper-right-hand corner of every page. Americans seeking such help can go to CyberTipline.com, Canadians to Cybertip.ca, and Britons to CEOP.

Why participatory media need to be in school

Writer, tech consultant, and educator Clay Shirky just gave a talk at the State Dept. explaining the media sea change we're experiencing globally. Keeping participatory media, the most fluent though not necessarily most literate users of which are youth, out of school only solidifies the firewall between formal and informal learning and holds school back from 21st-century relevance. Isn't the idea of adults unidirectionally disseminating to students info that the latter have actually never encountered before beginning to sound quaint? Doesn't helping students make sense of all the info they're gathering and think about the implications of all the info they're sharing, multidirectionally, almost 24/7, sound a little more current? Remember that old term "information superhighway"? Well, even back in Web 1.0, when the Internet was more mass-media-on-screens, it was getting to be like a "highway" for all forms of "transport." It simply can't be called either "technology" or a new medium that's being layered on top of life or school. It's technology + media + communication + producing + consuming + community and so on. It's a planet-size screen displaying, pipeline carrying, and mirror reflecting virtually all of human life. Shirky says the Net has become "the mode of carriage for all other media ... less a source of information and more a site of coordination" because people can now consume, produce and also gather 'round and talk about the info simultaneously.

So the Internet or participatory media simply can't be an add-on to what students are currently learning - just "another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers," as author and professor Howard Rheingold put it, quoted by professor Michael Wesch here. That approach would sell students, the learning process, school, and participatory culture short. They need to learn new media literacy and how to function well and civilly in community (be civically engaged, good citizens) in and with multidirectional, many-to-many social media throughout the curricula, the school day, and all grade levels. Visionaries like Rheingold, Wesch, and Shirky - and some amazing tech educators I feel so lucky to have met - show how important it is for students, as both producers and consumers, to approach participatory media in an ethical, mindful, and literate way. That's what school could do if it stops blocking participatory media: bring the rigor and enrichment of formal learning to the informal-learning that's engaging students and, in the other direction, bring the meaningfulness of informal learning to school. I ran across all three of the above links while doing some research for a talk at Purdue University this week. I hope they'll be as thought-provoking for you as they were for me.

But those are just a couple of reasons. Send yours! (Post here or in the ConnectSafely forum) - you can email me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

School & social media: Uber big picture

When I think about how the book, enabled by Gutenberg's press, was pretty controversial back in the day (15th c.) and probably didn't make it into "school" for a while (though it fueled the Renaissance and the Reformation), maybe I understand why there's resistance to using today's media - called social media - in school. But things are moving a little faster these days, and students are actively using social media anyway outside of school (books were less accessible to students in the 15th and 16th centuries than the participatory Web is today). Social media researchers tell us some amazing informal learning is going on in this out-of-school use (see the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth research findings), but what about the formal learning part - the potential for student engagement in school (and community, government, etc.) if media so compelling to students could be used in schools nationwide - not to mention the potential for schools themselves, and for the advancement of American education as a whole in this shrinking world, where the US ranks 15th in terms of per capita broadband penetration, as the Financial Times reports?

Books and literature were made so meaningful to me in AP English - in school - way back before social media. Now social media, e.g., Teen Second Life, can help schools help make literature more meaningful to students. I watched a presentation by New York educator Peggy Sheehy at NECC (the National Educational Computing Conference) last summer, showing how the courtroom scene in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was acted out by students (playing judge, jury members, DA, court reporter, etc.) in a virtual world. She said they mined that book, read every word, so they could play their roles intelligently. Here's what an educator in Connecticut writes about what's happening at Peggy's school. Other prime examples are what Global Kids is doing for students in and after school in New York City and what Digitales' digital storytelling workshops are doing for students in schools around the country (e.g., this one). The work of these educators and the visionary administrators and superintendents behind them is key to school's relevance to students as well as to American education's competitiveness in the developed world (see Appendix B of the New York-based Joan Ganz Cooney Center's study "Pockets of Potential" for classroom mobile social-media projects in 7 other countries).

But that's not all. These educators know how to increase the value of social media for youth by making new media as meaningful and enriching for them as my AP English teachers made books for me. That's a lifelong gift to students as well as to a society that can't afford to lose the engagement of its youth. Renewed relevance is also a gift to schools, of course.

Team of Rivals author Doris Kearns Goodwin tells us Abraham Lincoln was desperate to get his hands on books - any book. Today's youth probably have a comparable level of interest in all forms of social media: virtual worlds, social sites and technologies, online games, vertical-interest online communities, and all of the above on phones as well as on the Web. That presents schools with an opportunity as much as a challenge. Maybe parents, law enforcement, and policymakers can help schools shift the focus more toward the opportunity side so that school can seem less like the "prison house" referred to by British educator John Gibson (see the BBC). New media are a little scary to anyone who doesn't understand them. But then there's the promise they hold. In a way, we're back at the beginning of the Renaissance.

Schools as 'prison houses': Misunderstanding media

I'm not sure what the game of "conkers" is like but, at the gut level, UK Independent Schools Association chair John Gibson certainly resonates, probably with most parents, when he says that playing outside "as a child and taking part in activities such as putting an oily chain back on a bike, or playing conkers, exposes children to emotions such as disappointment which prepare them for adulthood," as the BBC reports. He told the Association's annual conference that "many children are living in a 'prison-like environment' surrounded by technology," according to the BBC. Part of that makes some sense - and echoes UK clinical psychologist Tanya Byron's suggestion that "kids are being raised in captivity" (see this) - but what Gibson says about technology is way too simplistic, if not incorrectly dismissive. He said, "When your life is lived through images constructed by a technical genius from Silicon Valley played on a high definition screen I just feel it will be more difficult to experience those important rehearsals for adult life." Equating virtual worlds, et al as images on a HD screen reflects a basic misunderstanding of social media as mere technology, an add-on to "real life," while social media are people's real-life producing and socializing 1) appearing on a screen and 2) extended onto the Web - not much like TV! The very "prison houses" of school and home Gibson refers to (and made so because of the fearful adult society Byron refers to) are what have made social media so compelling to youth!

Gibson told his audience, heads of independent schools in England and Wales, that they should offer children a diversity and excellence of experience to challenge the culture of technology in which they live outside school. Absolutely. But maybe word it a bit differently: to enrich, rather than "challenge," the cultures and interest groups they're participating in with the help of technology. Seems to me that, if schools could use social technologies to help teach social media literacy and citizenship, they will contribute to and enrich children's positive participation in participatory culture and society (moving full-steam ahead right now, largely without our education system). Just as school has helped make the use of books and other conventional media meaningful for youth for centuries, it can do so now with new media. [Meanwhile, the debate about whether the evolving Internet is hurting our children continues - see "Social networking infantilizing kids' brains?"]

Why technopanics are bad

Remember the predator panic? It's not over, of course - presentations with titles like "Facebook, the Sex Offenders' Catalog" and "MySpace the Predator's New Playground" (actual titles) are still being given at a time when we need to empower young social media users and their parents, not scare them to death (for more on this, see "A new online safety: The means, not the end").

Now we really need to prevent a sexting panic from developing. I really believe teens themselves will help us end the trend if they're given the facts about current child-porn laws (see "Tips to Prevent Sexting"), which hopefully will undergo revisions, where minors and adolescent behavior are concerned and criminal intent is not (see what's happening in Vermont along these lines).

"But why are technopanics bad, if there's a chance they'll scare people into safe behavior?" you might ask. For one thing because the Internet is ubiquitous, here to stay, a tool of participatory culture and democracy, and youth are its most active, fluent users - its drivers, in many ways. Young people aren't scared of technology. They know all the workarounds if we get scared and try to ban the Net from their lives. They can easily go "underground" (away from home, at friends' houses, public hot spots, using friends' very mobile connected devices, from smartphones to music and game players), which can actually put them at greater risk, because when they're in stealth mode, we're no longer in the equation, and they need us as backup in their online as well as offline lives.

And there are macro-level, national and global, reasons why panics are bad. Here's a list, a draft for which your comments and additions are welcome. Technopanics are bad because they...

Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.

Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship throughout the curriculum.

Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people's constructive use.

Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstringing some of the most spirited and innovative educators.

Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks - including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and "perpetrator" and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there was no criminal intent (e.g., see this).

Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools (for an international view, see Joan Ganz Cooney Center/Sesame Workshop's "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning").

Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.

Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.

Widen the participation gap for youth - technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.

What am I missing? Please add to or comment the list - via the ConnectSafely forum, commenting here, or email to anne(at)netfamilynews.org. We are literally all in this together, don't you think?!

Related links

Prof. Henry Jenkins: "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," Fall 2006

"Living and Learning with New Media," a summary of findings (qualitative and quantitative) form the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Youth Project, by Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson, Fall 2008.

"Critical Information Studies for a Participatory Culture," Dr. Jenkins's list of factors that block the full achievement of a more participatory society, 4/10/09 post on his blog

The skills of new media literacy

For a bit of history, see my first item on this, "'Predator panic'," in 2006 and "The latest technopanic" last August (before "sexting" was a word), linking to Alice Marwick's definitive paper on moral panics.

"Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," the 12/31/08 report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and my post about it

"Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context"

Social media to be required in UK schools?

UK kids may soon be taking a big leap ahead in media-literacy training. A proposed overhaul to Britain's elementary school curriculum - the biggest in a decade - was just leaked, The Guardian reports. The draft does include "traditional areas of learning, including phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic" but also requires British students to be "familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication." It divides the curriculum into six core learning areas instead of 13 subjects - a little closer, it seems to me, to what education reformer Sir Ken Robinson proposes .The plans, reportedly written by "Sir Jim Rose, the former [UK regulatory body] Ofsted chief who was appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, and are due to be published next month. Could this have anything to do with Birmingham University's plan to offer a master's in social media, as The Telegraph reports (probably not, but the timing's telling).

Social-media use in US schools: Study

Looking at the findings of social-media researchers, it's clear there's a growing gap between how kids consume information in school and the collaborative, media-rich way they gather and share information everywhere else. Given this, Lightspeed/NetTrekker sponsored some research to take a measure of where schools are with adoption of Web 2.0 tech such as online games, wikis, blogs, and virtual worlds (AKA virtual learning environments). The study found what we'd expect of user-driven media: In schools, too, adoption of these learning tools is from the ground up. Teachers are driving it, and their three top reasons are: to address students’ individual learning needs, engage students, and increase the accessibility of what they're teaching to their digital-native students. The study also found that, in 83% of school districts, very few or no teachers use online social networking for instruction; 40% of districts don't even allow use of social networking (I'm wondering why not Ning-style social sites that teachers create and control themselves?!); but almost half of districts have plans to allow teachers to share their content with Web 2.0 tools such as wikis (like using new-media tools to teach in old-media, top-down fashion, but it's a start). [The study's executive summary can be requested on this page.]

Cellphones in the classroom

The cellphone industry says that, in promoting mobile learning, it's making a similar pitch as that of computer makers to educators since the 1980s, the New York Times reports. "The only difference now between smartphones and laptops, they say, is that cellphones are smaller, cheaper and more coveted by students." Cellphones are now computers. Mobile carriers point to an industry-funded "study of four North Carolina schools in low-income neighborhoods, where 9th- and 10th-grade math students were given high-end cellphones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software and special programs meant to help them with their algebra studies. The students used the phones for a variety of tasks, including recording themselves solving problems and posting the videos to a private social networking site, where classmates could watch. The study found that students with the phones performed 25% better on the end-of-the-year algebra exam than did students without the devices in similar classes." A huge factor, according to the teacher who administered the program, was her students' excitement about having the phones, which "made them collaborate and focus on their studies, even outside of school hours" - though it was tough for her to spend her evening hours monitoring the students' text messaging for program violations. See also "Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'" about a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.]

Mobile devices 'key to 21st-century learning'

Kids' use of games, cellphones, and smartphones (next-generation, Web-browsing, media-sharing phones), "if carefully managed, could significantly boost their learning," Education Week reports, citing a just-released, 52-page study by a research center based at the Sesame Workshop (formerly Sesame Street) in New York. "Mobile devices are part of the fabric of children's lives today: They are here to stay,” said Michael H. Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, in a statement about the report. "It is no longer a question of whether we should use these devices to support learning, but how and when to use them." Among the report's recommendations are "investments in research and development aimed at understanding the impact of mobile technologies on children’s learning and development, including brain and behavioral functioning" and "a digital teacher corps that would train other teachers and after-school caregivers to use digital media to promote 21st-century literacy." Here's the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's blog, with links to the executive summary and full report in pdf format.

Digital backchannel for the classroom

I love it! A teacher subverting the formal classroom experience and making the informal result a learning experience! He's doing so by turning the classroom "backchannel" into a teaching tool (the backchannel is that age-old back-o'-the-classroom multi-directional chat the digital version of which looks like an instant-messaging window on the screen). Author and college instructor Ira Socol uses Today'sMeet (a software tool created by his son), which bring the backchannel forward - public - for all to see, he says in his blog. He checks it every few minutes to see if he needs to "adjust" the class discussion. "In a big class it gave me real access to far more students than I can possibly get by watching for raised hands. And it let me - and the class - hear from many who never raise their hands. Honestly, I could even judge, much more clearly than usual, what was connecting and what was missing. As an instructor - I loved it." Here's the coolest part (for reflexive critics who might wonder, "Why add another distraction from the lecture to all that those multitasking students have on their plates?"): The backchannel tech "began to overwhelm Facebook and email use in the room [amazing in itself]. The distraction technology became engagement technology [emphasis mine]." Atlanta-area high school teacher Vicki Davis, who I follow in Twitter, blogged about Socol's blog post, with photos. She picked up on 2 big pluses: The first in Socol's words, quoted in her post: "the ways this kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who'd rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it." The second plus is hers: "It is also important to point out that archived backchannels give students the ability to take group notes and have the information later."

Early view of ed's future

Speaking as a parent and online-kids advocate, not an educator: Increasingly, education will have both online and offline components as it does now, only the online pieces will get more and more fluid, media-rich, and supportive of the P2P (person-to-person) offline part. In fact, online tools - such as Howard Rheingold's "collaboratory" - will make the classroom part more meaningful to teacher and students. School will actually become relevant to today's fluent young information "hunter-gatherers," as MIT professor Henry Jenkins describes them. Author and (Stanford and U. of Cal. Berkeley) professor Howard Rheingold has just launched his Social Media Classroom, a free, easy-to-use "browser-based environment" for digital and real-life collaboration that includes learning tools such as a wiki (for collective writing/editing), blog with commenting, forum (boards or many-to-many discussion), chat, microblog (like Twitter), RSS (newsfeed/online distribution), social bookmarks (collective bookmarking), photos, video, etc. All it needs is virtual-world avatars (like those in Lively or Second Life)! As the winner of a MacArthur Foundation HASTAC award, the Classroom's designed "to supplement, not replace, existing course and learning management systems" and - more importantly, I think, to help teachers go beyond teaching digital tools and skills to teaching history, literature, citizenship with the tools in a way that makes learning these subjects more immersive and compelling (because of the role-playing and collaboration the tools allow). Whew! That was a mouthful, but there is probably no more exciting prospect for education. Now we need to just move it all into a virtual world (or at least turn the chat feature into avatar chat in rooms as customizable as real-world classrooms). [Here is Rheingold's own video introduction of the Social Media Classroom, and here's info on the HASTAC competition (the acronym stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).]

Time for social networking in school?

TechNewsWorld suggests it's time to end the stark dichotomy of second-nature social networking at home vs. a complete ban on social networking at school - even in an academic context. Though not so much in the classroom, "some school districts are going beyond e-mail technology and using collaboration software and online services to share information, host Web conferences and assign tasks and projects," and teachers are social networking with each other for professional purposes. Certainly we don't have to be all literalist about social networking and allow the negative, narrowly defined presentation of it in the news media to be what we picture of social networking at school. There are all kinds of forms social networking can take, from wikis to collaborative video producing to podcasting to class blogging to transworld collaboration in a global classroom! The TechNewsWorld article includes an annotated list of social-networking tools for the education market that might interest parents as well as teachers - for example, Blackboard's Sync, Cramster.com for the college market, ePals for K-12, Jooners, and Wimba Pronto.

Another kind of filtering needed too

Apple retail stores aren't the only places employing tech "geniuses." Libraries are too. The Internet has turned out to be a "major tool" not only for patrons but librarians as well, saving space, making library resources accessible at home, and bringing more patrons to the library, Michigan's Saginaw News reports. Research that the Saginaw News cites indicates patrons are figuring out that librarians are better than anyone at information filtering. "With their training, librarians are more adept than the average citizen at using search engines to locate and decipher reliable data. [Librarian Gail] Parsons notes her experience helps her discern valid sources and recognize biases." The need for those filtering skills has never been greater - not only for being good scholars and media consumers but also for safe, productive use of technology (phones, the Web, virtual worlds, videogames, media players, etc.). Parents and educators, too, play vital roles in this filtering education. Media-literacy teaching at home and school can be aimed at critical thinking not only about 1) incoming information but also about 2) incoming communication - from everybody, friends or not. It also needs to move beyond what's coming in to include 3) outgoing behavior and communication from a child, via text, images, voice, and video (see "Good citizens in virtual worlds, too"). About Nos. 2 and 3, children can be taught to ask themselves questions like: What's this person really saying to me - is this a form of manipulation? Am I being fair to this person if I IM this about him - would I want him to say this about me? Should I send a photo around with this person in it if I don't have her permission? Will posting this video of me possibly embarrass me in the future if I can't take it down and someone could copy and repost it anytime?

2 virtual worlds: NECC and Second Life!

Last week I went to my first NECC, the giant National Educational Computing Conference, this year in sticky, toasty San Antonio. We heard at the keynote (appropriately given by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds) that some 18,000, mostly tech educators, were there. I was there to speak on a panel about online safety presented by the California Technology Assistance Project, which had Larry Magid and me speak about our book, MySpace Unraveled, a couple of years ago (more about CTAP in a moment) and to steep myself in tech education for a few days.

NECC was both inspiring and overwhelming. But overwhelming was good because, instead of trying to figure out what on earth to sample of the hundreds of workshops and presentations, I decided to go deep. I went to everything I could find about virtual worlds Second Life and Teen Second Life (besides my online-safety meetings). I'd long wanted to learn more about SL and virtual worlds in general, and what better way?

Which takes me to the inspiring part: what tech educators are doing in Teen Second Life (parents, you've got to see this stuff!). I attended presentations by two rockstars of the ed tech world....

Peggy Sheehy of Suffern Middle School in the New York area and creator of Ramapo Islands, I believe the very first real-life school in Teen SL (here's a video intro to what's happening at Ramapo, including the students' views, in the blog of another genius tech educator and Second Life resident, Kevin Jarrett), and if you prefer text to video, here's a transcript in Sheehy's blog of a mock trial based on Of Mice and Men staged by Suffern students (or rather their avatars) in Teen Second Life. Ramapo is now six islands in Teen SL, used by 1,000 students and 35 teachers.

Westley Field from Sydney, Australia, founder of the very international Skoolaborate.com and Skoolaborate Island in Teen SL (to see what's going on there, check out the first video on this page). So far this new project has 10 schools in 4 countries collaborating.

Just a few positives I witnessed and heard about in my NECC brushes with education in Second Life (watch this space for more on all this): a girl who never participated in class blossoming in virtual-world classes and then later in real life; the same for a boy whose mother wrote a profound thank you note to his teacher; students in multiple countries learning what species are endangered in others and together creating virtual spaces for them with the kind of environments in which they can thrive; students thinking critically together about body image and developing more healthy views of said by creating different avatars representing their evolving views; an entire class reading all of Of Mice and Men, not just the Cliff Notes, so they could play judges, DAs, prosecutors, witnesses, court reporters, jury members, etc. in the mock trial; students who don't want to miss any of it logging in from home when they're sick.

The amazing CTAP

I'm referring specifically to Region IV of a statewide project to help California's educators integrate technology into learning but also deal with students' extracurricular use of tech! I definitely have a bias because, through my friend, ed-tech eyes 'n' ears, and CTAP staffer Anne Bubnic, I have learned a great deal about both technology and education! You'll see at a glance on this CTAP4 page how much they're doing for California educators just in the area of cyber safety, which CTAP intelligently defines as "the safe and responsible use of the Internet and all information and communication technology devices, including mobile phones, digital cameras, and webcams."

This one region of a state project has a huge sphere of influence. Its funding is for assisting California schools, but the Web has a way of ignoring borders and the Web-wide, worldwide resources Anne has pulled together in Region 4's site are valuable to educators at least nationwide. In addition to the site it continuously updates, CTAP also trains teachers, administrators, school safety people, etc. in person and via videoconferencing. Obviously this second part of its work isn't as visible to all, so I'm going to zoom in on that training in a feature very soon.

Why all this about tech education in NetFamilyNews? Parents' certainly aren't the only shoulders on which society places responsibility for young people's constructive use of technology! Most of the negative stuff involving youth on the social Web is not criminal, so law enforcement (where people so often turn) usually can't help. Very often, then, the focus shifts to school policy and discipline. Yet, a lot of the imposter profiles, defaming blog posts, and general online or phone harassment that disrupts learning at school originates at home or somewhere else off school grounds. So it can really help parents to know what teachers and administrators are dealing with where student behavior's concerned, so the two parties can collaborate - with each other as well as the student(s) involved, hopefully - in solving tech-related problems that come up (see also "Why schools, parents need to fight cyberbullying together"). Problems involving the participatory Web require participatory solutions!

Related links

Peggy Sheehy's Suffern Middle School in Second Life

Westley Field's Skoolaborate

Kevin Jarrett's The Story of My Second Life

The official California Technology Assistance Project Web site's page about all the CTAP regions and their projects and Region 4's specifically (I'd like to know what other states have along the lines of CTAP - email me, people! - via anne@netfamilynews.org).

What makes good digital citizens?

The answer at Digizen.org points to the next phase, I think, of all our efforts in online safety: "Digital citizenship isn’t just about recognising and dealing with online hazards. It's about building safe spaces and communities, understanding how to manage personal information, and about being Internet savvy - using your online presence to grow and shape your world in a safe, creative way, and inspiring others to do the same." That helps me think about how to teach children accountability for their behavior online. If they begin to see online environments as communities they're helping to shape so that they have a stake in appearance, atmosphere, and outcomes of activity within them, they'll simply act more accountably. Maybe disinhibition and anonymity become less problematic when users are citizens as much as socializers. Digizen.org, a report from UK-based Childnet International, looks at social networking with this potential in mind. The report examines the risks but also how the social Web is "being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and colleges." The site defines social networking and links to a pdf comparison chart of seven social network sites. An equally important section of the Digizen.org site addresses cyberbullying, with advice on how to "embed anti-bullying work in schools" and some powerful video teaching tools.

Educational social network site?

Not long ago Dale Ferrario was working at Sun Microsystems and wanting to figure out how to help young people learn about technology in a way that was relevant to them. He asked himself questions like how to combine social networking with learning about technology in a safe online environment. So after 20 years, he quit Sun and started a nonprofit social-networking site called FreshBrain.org, the Saratoga (Calif.) News reports. The site gives 13-to-18-year-olds "the chance to explore and create through activities and projects, such as changing the image of the Mona Lisa by putting a new face on it, creating a video game or social networking to start a small business. Students can learn to create a Web site or design a computer game or mashup. They can learn the inner workings of software programming, graphic design and more. Each of these areas includes contests with prizes such as an iPod and T-Mobile phones.

Second Life at school?

Some high school teachers see virtual worlds more as virtual classrooms. "Second Life pioneer Peggy Sheehy, a New York teacher whose school district owns six islands on a private estate in Second Life, said virtual worlds should be seen as part of the repertoire of tools that can be used to engage this new generation of students," the Houston Chronicle reports. "Over the past two years, Sheehy's students have used Second Life avatars to examine body image issues, build amusement parks and re-enact Civil War battles." Using virtual worlds, students participate more freely because they do so as avatars they create. Students can "speak" (in little bubbles of text) more freely under that veil of anonymity and no one's more popular than anyone else. Of course, like the Internet, virtual worlds for everybody can have "places" inappropriate for students, so to win over a large number of teachers, schools, and districts, there may need to be online "worlds" designed specifically for school. Meanwhile, some researchers see virtual worlds as a way to learn more about how the real world works, as places where social scientists can do a bit of modeling, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

Laptops in school ok?

You've probably heard of school laptop programs, and some schools now expect students at least to have access to computers at home. But do you ever wonder how useful (or not) it is for high school students to take their laptops to school?

Marian Merritt, Symantec's Internet Safety Advocate and mother of an 8th-grader, wondered just that and put some good thinking about it down in her blog the other day. Marian also asked some colleagues, including me, if we'd seen any research on it, so I turned to my friend and tech educator Anne Bubnic with the California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP) for her experience with school laptop programs.

Anne pointed us to some meaty links (below) but, first, here's some of her personal experience with student laptops in school which I think you'll find as interesting as I did:

"I would have to say about laptops that bringing one to a school where the teachers are all on board with a structured method of incorporating them into studies is an entirely different beast than bringing one into a classroom just for note-taking, as Marian describes. A student doing so on her own would have to be a lot more self-disciplined.

"I filmed a group of math students. They talked about how the laptops have helped them become so much better organized. They never lose assignments or papers they are writing. They talked about being better organized again and again. It was amazing how confident that made them feel. They are learning real-world skills that will serve them well in the workplace!

"They record all of their notes on NoteTaker [software]. They record homework assignments and test dates on their electronic calendars. Even their books are electronic! The kids told us that their teachers post all of their homework assignments online and that they often do the homework before it is even due - can you imagine?

"They’ve learned how to juggle their busy sports schedules and social lives and homework in a way that works for them. But even more amazing, they are tackling math that may have not even been taught yet in the classroom! To watch these students using laptops is pure utopia. You wish you could wave a magic wand and every school district in the country would be there!"

Related links

Links from Anne Bubnic: "One of the leading experts is Saul Rockman, who also has served as CTAP's external evaluator for over 5 years," Anne wrote. "You can find some of the Rockman, et al, studies here. And here's more research from respected educator Gary Stager and the Ubiquitous Computing Evaluation Consortium. Apple Computers also has done a number of studies. Here's one on Del Mar Middle School" in Marin County, northern California. "You can also go to the Del Mar Middle School web site and find the latest student survey results," and Anne pointed to a laptop learning site at Ning.com.

Big-picture food for thought from PBS column "I, Cringely": "We've reached the point in our ... cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools. I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn't hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.... Kids can't go to school today without working on computers. But having said that, in the last five years more and more technical resources have been turned to how to keep technology OUT of our schools." See also "Beyond System Reform" in Education Week.

"Starting School Laptop Programs: Lessons Learned" by Andrew Zucker, Ed.D., Senior Research Scientist, The Concord Consortium - a few years old but substantive and on the opposite end of the US from Anne

"Study: Middle school laptop program leads to writing improvements" from the Associated Press, 10/07

"School drop laptop programs, but are they dropping the ball as well?" in Andy Carvin's education blog at PBS.org, looking at a New York Times report last May

"School laptop debate heats up" in eSchool News, 9/06

Online ed for little tykes

PBSKids.com has always meant ad-free entertainment for the littlest surfers. Now the US's Public Broadcasting Service has a new educational service for children 3-6: PBS Kids Play "is a subscription-based service that lets children play animated games with characters like Curious George and learn basic skills in reading, listening comprehension, and problem solving," CNET reports. CNET adds that parents have their own area of the service where they can see how their kids are progressing in terms of national educational standards. See also USATODAY's coverage.

Social networking in the classroom?!

There was a debate going on recently over at The Economist, and the pro-social-networking side won. For parents or anyone interested in social networking's benefits and not just its risks, let me zoom you in on a very meaty discussion, starting with points from the Economist debate's opening arguments, both pro and con (not answers, not just good food for thought): From Prof. Michael Bugeja at Iowa State University: "Facebook or MySpace are programmed for revenue generation, especially the vending of marketing data and the advertising base that can be established because of that data. To do so, those networks rely on technology developed by military (to surveil) and industry (to sell). The fact that both happen simultaneously is no fluke because the programming is designed to amass psychographics on users too busy depicting each other like products to notice the surveillance.... Social networks advertise access to this diverse world while simultaneously confining users to affinity groups so as to sell, sell, sell."

From Ewan McIntosh, Scotland national education technology adviser: "In Scotland, I've been fortunate to work with thousands of school children and hundreds of teachers, creating mini social networks based around a rather traditional 'social object': the classroom. Students have been empowered to publish not just their best work, but the many drafts it takes to get there. They've received feedback from 'real' people outside school and, surprisingly often, the occasional expert has paid a visit.... Importantly, they've received more communication, feedback and interest from the one group they value most: their parents."

US social media researcher danah boyd wrote a blog post about the debate, saying she's frustrated with both the debaters' opening arguments, giving her reasons and making this central point: "In their current incarnation, social network sites ... should not be integrated directly into the classroom. That said, they provide youth with a valuable networked public space to gather with their peers."

I don't think these three experts disagree, actually. My takeaway is that MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc. themselves - with their user-psychographic aggregation and commercial goals and with their users' purely social goals - don't belong in the classroom, but none of the arguments seem to rule out the educational "social networking" US teacher Vicki Davis has adapted for her Flat Classroom Project, which turns classrooms in multiple countries - 3 across the US and 4 classrooms in China, Austria, Australia, and Qatar - into their own learning social network. Don't miss Vicki's detailed description in her comment at the bottom of danah's blog page. Parents and educators alike would find the Flat Classroom Project (the name a take-off from author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat) an inspiration - see this blog post from Vicki's co-founder Julie Lindsay in Qatar, which includes an email exchange with Tom Friedman. For the perspective of young social networkers themselves, see this interesting blog post from UK tech educator Terry Freedman.

Related link

Here's teacher Sue Waters on why educators need to understand social networking and what about it should be taught in schools: "We need to teach people about SNet-iquette (Social Network ettiquette), and the positive and negative effects of their online 'behaviour' and how they are creating an online 'digital footprint.' I believe educational institutions should be 'leading the way' in educating people about these things. Therefore, by encouraging staff and students to use these sites as educational tools, we are encouraging the conversations necessary for people to work out what is, and what is not, appropriate in an online environment."

'Semi-permeable classrooms'

Educator and blogger David Jakes uses a term from his day as a biology teacher to describe how a classroom can safely be turned into a "learning community" that's neither closed nor completely open to the outside world. "I’m interested in building skills in students that will make them successful when they ultimately join wide-open learning communities. I’m teaching them how to read blog posts, how to collaboratively create content in wikis, how to comment appropriately, how to manage RSS feeds, and how to manage content resources with social bookmarking tools. I'm teaching them how to operate in a community. And I’m teaching them all about safety." I wish all my children's teachers approached technology this way!

Student 'tech sherpas'

Senior Jayson in a Freeport, Me., school district "says he wants teachers to see that technology isn't as hard as they might think." He's a "tech sherpa" for his high school, a group of students that support the district IT department, help teachers with classroom tech, and earn credit in the process, the Christian Science Monitor reports. "This fall the group also launched a weekly live Web-stream show called 'The Tech Curve,' in which students field questions about various Internet teaching tools and the new Mac laptops that the state is issuing to high school teachers (see www.nokomiswarriorbroadcasting.com)." Each year an organization in Olympia, Wash., called Generation YES helps about 200 schools to set up the curricula behind the tech-sherpa program, the Monitor adds. This is the kind of tech-training program that empowers youth as well as educators. The program in Maine is clearly a confidence builder for the "sherpas," who also learn patience and diplomacy in working with adults. "They're relating to people, not just computers," working collaboratively to solve real problems. The school's tech coordinator told the Monitor that "the most valuable assignments he can give are 'authentic' tasks – of real use to the school or the community."

PCs for the world's children

I've pointed before to stories on the "Give 1, Get 1" program for Americans to help get laptops to kids in third-world countries, but this one in the Washington Post goes in-depth and shows the scope of the challenges. One challenge for the MIT people behind Give 1, Get 1 is competition at home. What Intel and Microsoft are doing to seed new markets around the world, though, is a benefit too. "By the end of the year, Intel [for example] will be running laptop pilot programs in schools in 30 countries with an eye to figuring out what kind of software services, Internet connectivity, local educational content and technical support are needed." There are also projects by Microsoft and NComputing (spinning off of eMachines). But the MIT program is focused more on children's education than on markets, its leaders say. What do they see in it for kids? "[Nicholas] Negroponte and [program president Walter] Bender believe that playing with their own laptops will engage children's intellects, spark creativity and provide an outlet for self-expression." Bender told the Post that, like vaccines, laptops aren't a cure. Vaccines allow bodies to manufacture cures; laptops alow brains to engage in education, to manufacture learning. [See also my earlier post on this.]

'Falling rocks [teachers]'

Veteran tech educator David Jakes seems to have struck a chord in his blog post about technophobe teachers labeled as "falling rocks" by colleagues and students in many schools. There are a number of very substantive posts from other educators underneath his article in TechLearning.com. "They’re called rocks because they won’t budge, and you just can’t get them into new things, things like technology…. So," Jakes writes, "the most appropriate thing for people to do is to move on to those who are more open, more willing, more capable." *Wrong*, he says, then explains why. Then he offers five ways to "get these teachers on board. One commenter says there are good teachers who integrate technology and there are bad one who do, and vice versa, which makes a lot of sense. In our family's experience, one really fine language arts teacher didn't teach much with technology but used it as a peripheral tool to enrich communication with students, which they really appreciated. Her bottom line was to respect her students and do whatever it took to support learning and communication that worked for them; it was a very effective strategy.

Teen news editor

His screenname is Gracenotes and, “after his homework is done,” he works on cleaning up breaking news stories on Wikipedia for six hours at a shot, the New York Times reports. We all know how popular Wikipedia has become as a source for term-paper research (the Times article takes you behind the scenes at Wikipedia so you can see how viable this actually is, as long as other sources are in the mix). Wikipedia has also become a very viable news source, the Times article illustrates. It’s like compressed real-time news, a blend of encyclopedic summarizing that keeps up with news as it breaks. Its writers’ sources are usually the wire services (e.g., AP and Reuters) in Yahoo and Google News, and the difference is a “constantly rewritten, constantly updated” summary of a breaking story (as in Wikipedia) vs. “a chronological series of articles, each reflecting new developments” (as with conventional news on paper and the Web). Gracenotes and his fellow editors expand and correct a one-liner “stub” (almost like a headline) that someone posts about a breaking story (such as the Virginia Tech shootings). They almost compete for the greatest accuracy and “N.P.O.V.” (“’neutral point of view,’ one of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars,” the Times reports. Note this comment at the article’s end, something very impressive to a baby-boomer journalist: “The Wikipedians, most of them born in the information age, have tasked themselves with weeding [the current culture of proud] subjectivity not just out of one another’s discourse but also out of their own. They may not be able to do any actual reporting from their bedrooms or dorm rooms or hotel rooms, but they can police bias, and they do it with a passion that’s no less impressive for its occasional excess of piety. Who taught them this? It’s a mystery; but they are teaching it to one another.”

Teens' digital story

Amanda and Nick’s final project as high school seniors in the Chicago area this past spring was a digital storytelling assignment. They were asked to “tell a story in digital video about “what it meant to be an American and to tell the world about that. Move beyond the rhetoric, the politicians and the media. Speak as a kid. What do you have to say to the world?” writes their teacher and Instructional Technology Coordinator David Jakes. He also writes that he was blown away by what they came up with (you can play the piece right in his blog post at TechLearning.com): “So this is the kind of work kids can do. Given the opportunity, and with some guidance and hard work, they rise to the occasion. And when we hear about kids not caring, not wanting to do quality work, just look at this story, because it’s good. Very good. And when kids are characterized as lazy, and only concerned about their cell phone, mp3 player, or text messaging, just look at this story. This isn’t self-absorbed, it’s not spontaneous, it’s thoughtful and reflective. It’s what an 18 year old should be capable of, it’s what we should be teaching kids to do.”