The newly elected National Party in New Zealand has wasted no time in announcing it’s Literacy and Numeracy Crusade as its primary focus for the education sector. They argue “… children will be building the economy and communities we will be living in tomorrow. We must do far better to equip them for the more challenging times ahead, and to ensure they have the basic skills to secure their own and their families’ futures.”

Sadly, the view of what these ‘basic skills’ are appears limited to the traditional 3Rs, and will be addressed through a rigorous regime of standardised testing.

The new government argues that “that the first task of our education system should be to ensure that every child from every background can read, write, and do maths at a level that allows them to participate in a modern economy.”

Quite a different view of the skills required to participate in a modern economy put forward in this latest Education Sector report titled Measuring skills for the 21st Century. The report is a response to the fact that leaders in government, business, and higher education are calling for today’s students to show a mastery of broader and more sophisticated skills like evaluating and analyzing information and thinking creatively about how to solve real-world problems. But standing in the way of incorporating such skills into teaching and learning are widespread concerns about whether or not they can be measured.

In this report, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva argues that they can indeed be measured accurately and can serve as common metrics of student achievement. Silva examines a number of new assessment models that do this and that demonstrate the potential to measure complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student’s mastery of basic skills and knowledge. These emergent models, she concludes, are critical to meeting our educational goals—to ensure that teachers and students can monitor and improve the learning process—and our accountability goals—to ensure that schools are giving all students what they need to succeed.

Starting today there is a week-long online discussion about assessment and 21st century skills which you can sign up for in the Education sector’s discussion room led by Elena Silva, Eva Baker, a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation.

For comparison, here’s the approach that we can expect to see introduced into NZ schools in the near future:

I’ve been reflecting a bit since the ULearn conference about the extensive use that was made of the various ‘back-chat’ channels during sessions at the conference, particularly the use of Twitter. I’ve been a Twitter user since it was first released, and have enjoyed building a list of those I follow consisting mainly of a number of NZ and overseas teachers, principals and luminaries within the field of education. Occassionally the updates on who has eaten at what restaurant become a little tiresome, but generally the exchange of quick-fire thoughts and questions relating to what others may be working on or thinking at the time, along with links being shared and commented on provides me with a sense of being “connected” to a wider group of people with interests that complement and feed my own.

I found the prospect of using Twitter as a ‘back-chat’ channel at the ULearn conference very interesting. it had been used at the 2007 conference by a handful of early adopters, but this year, with the provision of a more powerful wireless network throughout the venues, the uptake was huge - so much so that the usage of Twitter by delgates on the first day rocketed ULearn to the number one position on Twitscoop.

Beyond the euphoria of being able to do this, however, comes the question “how does this actually add to or enhance the conference experience?” Obviously it may provide non-conference attendees with the opportunity to ‘participate’ in what is going on through the running commentary of their twitter friends, plus it may provide an opportunity for delegates to exchange ideas and questions that occur to them while they’re listening to a speaker. Of course, such use assumes a certain level of intelligence and digital literacy on the part of the users.

Sadly, this was lacking in much of what I saw being exchanged in the many of the messages. This is not to say that what some individuals chose to share may not have had some validity for them, but one would have to question the usefulness of simply sharing a stream of consciousness of unformed (and un-informed?) thoughts as a presentation was being made - particularly where the thoughts being expressed are negative.

What was more significant to me was the way in which one person’s thinking appeared to ‘flavour’ the contributions of others, resulting in a lot of ‘imitative’ comments - what I’ve referred to in my title as Digital Lemmings! I spoke to one of the delegates that I’d seen active in the Twitter exchange - someone I have regard and respect for as a digital innovator and thinker. This person was relatively new to Twitter and the whole back-channel idea, but had decided to ‘give it a go’ in the context of the conference. He spoke with me about how even he’d found himself being dragged into the ’spiral’ of negative comment at one stage, and had to consciously direct his thoughts in positive directions.

In his book “The Wisdom of the Crowds“, James Surowiecki argues why many are smarter than a few - but he does point to a number of failures of crowd intelligence which I believe I saw emerging in the Twitter back-channels. These include the fact that the crowds themselves can be too homogeneous, too imitative and too emotional.

The irony for me was that, as the messages I’m alluding to were being posted, the speakers on stage were making some extremely valid points about the nature of public sharing, and how, in the digital world, what we share becomes a record that cannot be erased - thus requiring some different ways of thinking about what is and isn’t appropriate for sharing in public online forums.

Perhaps we’ve still got a way to go to fully appreciate and understand the affordances of these technologies, and the literacies that are going to be important for us to focus on and develop in our students - and for ourselves.

What does it mean to read in a digital age? There seems to be quite a bit of comment on this issue appearing in the media at the moment. A week ago the New York Times published a list of resources relating to how reading may be changing on the Internet which I’ve been browsing with interest. Meanwhile, the The Atlantic Monthly asks what the Internet is doing to our brains in an article titled Is Google Making Us Stupid?

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Looks like we’ve hit the jackpot - day two at the multiple literacies working group and the sign at the door has been changed - although it is still taped over the top of the LCD screen Pity we may have to tell them that the next time we meet it may be to talk about 21st Century Literacy.

I’m sitting all day today in a working group convened by the Ministry of Education focusing on Multiple Literacies - with the sign to the left having been generously posted by the venue hosts to identify the room we’re using. Amidst the exciting discussions we’re having about what sorts of literacy development is required for 21st Century learners, the sign serves as a useful reminder that we mustn’t forget the conventions of traditional writing!!!!! (The thing that makes the sign doubly amusing is that it is printed on paper and taped to the front of an LCD screen which is normally used to display notices like this
Literacy has in the past been ‘centred on language’ but with the introduction and use of new technologies and visual texts into school literacies and home literacies, we now encounter, use and interpret multiple kinds of literacies which are embedded in multimodal texts. The focus of this group is on the notion of multiple literacies (or mulit-literacies), a term chosen by the
The New London Group who recognise that literacy pedagogy is changing rapidly in our global world.
The term ‘multiliteracies’ is thus being considered by this group to describe what constitutes literacy in today’s world. Over these two days the group is working to develop the detail around a literacy acquisition framework (LAF) which will eventually be published and distributed to schools to assist teachers in their literacy teaching endeavours.

There’s certainly a lot to consider here, with the ever expanding opportunities for the expression and communication of ideas and information offered through digital technologies, and the consequent changes in communication behaviours. Earlier in the week my friend Tony sent me a link to an online article titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? - with the subtitle, What the Internet is doing to our brains? It’s an intriguing article that explores the ways in which our reading behaviours are being shaped by our use of the Web - suggesting that we have lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print, preferring instead to quickly scan short passages of text from many sources online. While the article is more a blend of anecdote and references to other writers, it does point to some important areas for further research to inform our understandings of literacy and how we engage with print and other modes of communication in the digital age.

The buzz about the release of Amazon’s new wireless reading device called Kindle has been keeping the blogosphere busy recently. As with most emerging technologies there are both the supporters and detractors of this new gadget (see, for example, The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) by Google employee Mark Pilgrim, and make sure you browse the comments!).

I found George Siemen’s reference to it in a recent blog post titled reading and books informative in this regard. George linked the news about Kindle with reference to the recently released NEA report from the US which paints a rather gloomy picture of the state of reading among young people in the US, concluding that they are reading less, and are reading less well.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach makes a similar link in her recent post titled the future of reading on the TechLearn blog. Sheryl appears optimistic about the adoption of this technology, arguing that it’s a changing world, and that if we want to remain relevant in the lives of our learners then we will need to use strategies and materials that fit their learning styles, not our own. Her post is well worth a read, as she shares her personal story of being one who does not enjoy reading books!

The NEA report goes on to say that…

The declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications - Advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages. Deficient readers run higher risks of failure in all three areas.

Such statistics provide ready made ammunition for the technology sceptics and doom-sayers. So where should the real debates focus? Certainly not on the merits or otherwise of the aesthetics of the device, nor even on whether it provides colour or not (the current B/W device is bound to be a decision based on storage capacity etc). To me the development of these wireless reading devices and e-paper etc are further signs of a move towards the ubiquity of access to information, and the promise of the Universal Library, available to all, as described in the New Yorker article on Future Reading in which the author explores the evolution of digitalization of print, and the efforts of companies like Google and Microsoft (and now Amazon?) to dominate the field. :

The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we’ll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously.

The New Yorker article explores some of the challenges to accessing information in print form versus the transition of many to the audio and film worlds of expression. We’re certainly in for some interesting times over the next few years as this scenario plays out, and the real future of reading is revealed!

Today I browsed a fascinating report from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) in the US, which reports on the results of a survey of more than 1,458,000 students at nearly 1,200 different four-year
colleges and universities on the issue of student engagement which aims to improve undergraduate education, inform state accountability and accreditation efforts, and facilitate national and sector benchmarking efforts, among others. Titled Experiences That Matter: Enhancing Student Learning and Success, the survey focuses on engagement of learners in the post-secondary (tertiary) sector in the US.

The report focuses on three themes; Enriching High-Impact Experiences, Factors That Support Student Success and Another Look at Gender. I found it interesting to read about what the report calls “Deep Approaches to Learning”, described below:

In contrast to surface-level learning, deep-level processing emphasizes both acquiring information and understanding the underlying meaning of the information. Deep approaches to learning are important because students who use these approaches tend to earn higher grades, and retain, integrate and transfer information at higher rates.

One of the strategies for achieving this that is discussed in the introduction by NSSE director George D. Kuh is the idea of “High Impact activities“, which he describes as…

High impact activities put students in circumstances that essentially demand they interact with faculty and peers about substantive matters.

Basically, what I took from my scan of the report is if you want engaged learners then provide them with meaningful learning activities that require them to be a participant in the learning activity, and in relating to and with other learners (as opposed to simply being a passive recipient of transmitted information). Nothing new here for those who have been following the developments in pedagogical practice over the past couple of decades - although seems there’s still a large gap between espoused theory and theory in practice in this regard from what the report suggests.

This is not to make light of the issue of engagement however. The findings of NZ’s own Council of Educational Research recently published the results of their longitudinal research project started in 1993 of a group of 500 students which provides some very useful insights into the sorts of factors that may act as indicators of student engagement through their learning life. Titled Growing Independence - A Summary of Key Findings from the Competent Learners at 14 Project, the report highlights in the section about student engagement in school and learning that engagement is as much to do with factors in school as it does with factors outside of school as revealed in the following findings:

• Students at 14 who are engaged in school and learning are likely to be in positive learning environments where there is good feedback from teachers, relevant teaching, challenging work and a focus on learning at the students’ pace.
• There are connections over time between what is happening at school and what is happening at home. For example, those who show signs of disengagement with school are also likely to experience family pressure, engage in risky behaviour, and not have interests that engage them outside of school.

Still on the topic of engagement, I was amused to read an article titled “Digital Distraction” by Terence Day which begins with the question Are laptop bans the answer to the misuse of computers in the classroom? Day discusses the issue reported in many US universites and colleges of tutors and professors banning laptops from classes because they distract students and prevent them from paying attention to what the teacher is saying. Thankfully he doesn’t end there - but goes on to look at the alternative, arguing that students need to be actively engaged in their learning. He quotes Teresa Dawson, director of the Learning and Teaching Centre at the University of Victoria, who suggests faculty employ such active-learning approaches as shared exercises, problem-based learning and the new clicker technologies that allow simultaneous class response to questions.

Where have these people been? Come on now - we’re in the 21st century, it isn’t the technology’s fault that students are becoming disengaged (well, not entirely). Long before computers, engagement has always been about participation, collaboration, rich tasks, inquiry, authentic experiences etc - ask John Dewey! However, it isn’t simply a case of assuming that the use of technology will automatically lead to higher levels of engagement as Samuel Freedman’s article in the New York Times titled New Class(room) War: Teacher vs. Technology (November 7, 2007) points out. Freedman reports on the concerns of a growing number of US college educators who see technology as a distraction in class, with students engaging in all sorts of off-task behaviours (sending personal messages etc) during class time. He does, in my view, pose a perspective worth pondering in terms of how this might be countered. It’s all too easy, as Freedman points out, to simply argue that this is a consequence of lessons being too boring. He writes…

“I’m so tired of that excuse,” said Professor Bugeja [director of the journalism school at Iowa State University], may he live a long and fruitful life. “The idea that subject matter is boring is truly relative. Boring as opposed to what? Buying shoes on eBay? The fact is, we’re not here to entertain. We’re here to stimulate the life of the mind.”

“Education requires contemplation,” he continued. “It requires critical thinking. What we may be doing now is training a generation of air-traffic controllers rather than scholars.”

Now there’s a perspective worth reflecting on!

So what is this: Neomillennials - a new term for a new year?

This morning I listened to a podcast by Jarrret Cummings of Educause in which he interviews Chris Dede, the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, on some of the ideas behind his upcoming keynote address at the 2007 ELI Annual Meeting. Dede’s topic will be “Emerging Educational Technologies and Neomillennial Learning Styles.”

In this discussion, Dede explains the concept and key characteristics of “neomillennials.” He also highlights the transformative effect of emerging immersive learning environments on higher education pedagogy and discusses the importance of faculty development in relation to these developments.

My initial scepticism turned to genuine interest as I listened to the podcast. Dede presents a compelling case for his notion of neomillennials, arguing that the thing that distinguishes this group is the way they use media in their lives, and the way that this influences and changes their preferences, their strengths and their styles in terms of learning - and because it is media-based, it is not dependent on age. This is good news for me, as a classic “baby Boomer”, I’ve often struggled with the ageist typecast of the notion of the digital immigrantand digital natives.

For me, Dede takes the whole area of thinking about the impact of media on learning a step further than what has been popularised so far. He focuses on learners’ use of a wide range of media - not just the net, and argues that we need to be especially looking at the emergence of interactive media that fosters immersive, collaborative simulation (including things such as MySpace, MMOGs etc).

I particularly like his argument that we need to be focusing on a change of pedagogy in order to realise the potential of these technologies for learning (particularly in formal learning contexts) - his metaphor of “technology is not like fire” will resonate with many.

I don’t want to spoil the message -listen to it yourself. While it is presented as a message targeted at the tertiary (higher ed) sector, the main points of the message apply to our endeavours at all levels of the education system.

A useful resource from UNESCO called Using ICT to Develop Literacy is now available as a PDF download from their website. It’s an easy read - concise and useful, focusing on five key ways in which ICT can support literacy

1. Enhancing Learning

2. Broadening Access to Literacy Education
3. Creating Local Content
4. Professional Development of Teachers
5. Cultivating a Literacy-Conducive Environment

There is a useful discussion at the beginning of the document on how literacy is defined:

“The word ???literacy??? is often used today as a substitute for the word ???ability??? or ???competency???. For example, ???computer literacy??? is the ability to use computers, and access and create information through a computer. Such uses should not be confused with the term ???literacy??? as we use it here, i.e. the skills related to reading, writing and communicating in the written form.

Examples of other uses of the word ???literacy??? include:

• Information literacy: The skills required to organize and search for information, while also analyzing that information.

• Critical literacy: the ability to engage in critical thinking, and judge the intention, content and possible effects of written material.
• Mobile literacy: The ability to use mobile technology, such as a mobile phone and its non-voice features.
• Media literacy and research literacy: The ability to be a discerning reader and the ability to find various types of information.
• Cultural literacy: the ability to understand cultural, social and ideological values in a given context.
• Legal literacy: the knowledge of basic legal rights and how to protect those rights.
• Visual literacy: the interpretation of images, signs, pictures and non-verbal (body) language. “

The resource also contains a range of informative case studies and illustrations from a variety of cultural contexts.

One of the focus areas, professional development, is a particular interest of mine, and on that subject, here are a couple of other links that I found over the weekend:

???Cultivating Digital Educators??? - a paper by two school teachers from the US in which they share their experiences and ideas about how to transform a traditional school environment into one where teachers effectively use technology for collaboration, curriculum development, instructional delivery, and student engagement. Their presentation is available as an 18min movie download and is worth viewing.

Beyond Spray and Pray PD - an article by Wesley Fryer in TechLearn nothing new here at all, in fact, everything he reveals in this latest ‘epiphany’ is what has underpinned the ICT PD cluster schools programme in New Zealand for the past six years - but always good to have this affirmed!

I’ve been participating in an online course over the past few weeks with a group of teachers who are sharing experiences and exploring ideas around the use of new technologies in education. This week we’re looking in particular at the impact of Web2.0, or social networking tools, and how they may be shaping the expectations and learning behaviours of students.

With that in mind I was very interested when Clarence pointed me to a paper by Henry Jenkins titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century which explores the notion of media literacy through a lens of identifying what skills and abilities (competencies) learners will require to participate in real spaces and with real ideas, allowing them to interact with others globally for authentic purposes.

Clarence points out that the majority of the paper is spent in exploring the 11 skills Jenkins says that are needed to fully take control of participating in this culture:

1. “Play??? the capacity to experiment with one???s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

2. Performance??? the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
3. Simulation??? the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
4. Appropriation??? the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
5. Multitasking??? the ability to scan one???s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
6. Distributed Cognition??? the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
7. Collective Intelligence??? the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
8. Judgment??? the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
9. Transmedia Navigation??? the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
10. Networking??? the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information
11. Negotiation??? the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.”

Seems tome that there’s a lot to consider here in relation to the Key Competencies contained in the draft NZ Curriculum that are currently out for discussion.

Clarence’s entry provides a more complete discussion around the intent of the paper - however, I was interested to read the first comment that had been made on this blog which contained the following statement:

As Jenkins tells us, we need to look beyond our kids having access to tools (blogs, wikis, etc.) and we need to learn how to use them effectively in our classrooms to support their learning.

While I may be taking the comment out of context, it reminded me that there’s still a lot of discussion to be had around whether or not it is appropriate for our priority to be on learning how to use [web2.0 technologies] effectively in the classroom.The idea of schools/systems appropriating these tools and environments doesn’t sit immedately well with me. The are fundamentaly designed for personal use, whose outworking is in social networks, not ‘managed’ learning situations, with formal structures and ‘rules’. I’m not saying that there’s no place for the useof these tools within formal education settings - I’ve blogged about examples that I consider good practice in the past - rather, I think we need to be thinking well beyond how they might be incorporated into classroom settings.