Today I presented CORE’s ten trends for 2010 to an audience of around 400 delegates at the Learning@School conference in Rotorua. The ten trends are a collection of themes and issues that have been identified by CORE staff as trends in education that we imagine will impact on the work of teachers and leaders in early childhood centres, schools, and tertiary institutions in NZ in the coming year. While our focus is on the bigger picture of education, there is a focus on trends associated with the use of ICTs in education, reflecting the fact that we are living in a world where nearly everything we do has a digital dimension.

The researchers at Intuitive Media have produced some thought provoking stuff over recent years, and their latest report on ‘children, TV and the internet’ is no exception. Surveying a sample of 4347 children, aged 6-14 who are users of their SuperClubsPLUS & GoldStarCafe projects, the researchers asked a range of questions about children’s use of TV and the internet.

The result is presented as a series of graphs summarising the key findings, and providing much food for thought in terms of the way in which attitudes about and behaviours towards the use of this media may be changing.

For those in my generation, TV was very much a passive media (one could argue the same for our reading of the newspaper, listening to the radio and the first generation of use of the internet!) The introduction of video recorders altered our behaviour a little by allowing us to ‘time-shift’ the broadcast to suit a time when we could watch our favourite programme, or to re-watch our favourite rugby game.

The result of the MyTV survey reveals that these behaviours are continuing to change, and that younger learners want to be more actively involved in what they are watching on TV – not just in terms of  when and where they want, but they also want to “be part” of it. The results of the survey confirm the trend that children today want to be contributors and participants – more than just consumers.

As educators we need to take note of this, and consider what this suggests for our adoption of digital media into schools and classrooms.

The report is available here (PDF download)

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

My colleague Malcolm Moss in the UK sent me a link this morning to an fascinating concept video on the future of digital magazines. As we become increasingly familiar with the functionality of the touch-screen on the iPhone and familiar with devices like the Kindle, this video provides some interesting perspectives on where the development of where the whole concept of layout and design might head with these devices in the future.

The basic concept being explored is how we can take the established behaviours exhibited by those who simply pick up a magazine to browse and cater for them in an e-book world. The illustrations of how this thinking is evolving and what the solutions in the future are well worth viewing in this video clip.

A comment that appeared on Twitter today led me to an article on AJC titled Cursive may be a fading skill, but so what? The article interested me in view of a number of places I’ve been recently where concerns are being expressed about the standards of literacy (or lack of them) among today’s learners – with the ability to write by hand being considered a lost art in an age of text messaging and the word processor, and where what used to be called “penmanship” is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.

Referred to in the article are a number of the arguments used by those wanting to retain an emphasis on hand-writing:

It [hand-writing] doesn’t get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach. (ie it’s technology’s fault!)

…cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”

…cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.

In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don’t have electricity?

The article actually reports a range of perspectives, providing responses for those who are lamenting the lack of time devoted to learning hand-writing in schools:

The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.

and..

Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we’re going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication.

So – what’s the verdict? Should we see more time devoted to learning that cursive script as I did when I was a student, or should we accept that digital technologies enable us to record and communicate our ideas just as effectively as hand-written tombs, and, being digital, enable us to share, use and re-use what we have written in a number of contexts.

Footnote: if I do have one concern in this area it’s reference to the idea that it is text messaging and Twitter that is replacing hand-writing. There’s a subtle second issue hidden in this debate, and that is around the ability to create quality, in-depth written prose – something more than 140 characters. Word processors, wikis and blogs provide useful vehicles for this type of writing, while IM and Twitter, in my view, simply replace the “notes-to-self” stuff we write in our diaries, or the “message-at-the-speed-of-thought” often fired across board tables on a scrap of paper. It pays to be discriminating in terms of what we are promoting I guess.

Just received a link to this post from Jedd and felt compelled to reference it here…

It comes at a very useful time as I spent part of today discussing the whole notion of literacy and technology with a colleague in Wellington (on Skype) ahead of a conference there in a few weeks.

The post is about Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University who collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions from 2001 to 2006.

Far from finding that technology is having a negative impact on literacy she found the opposite, stating that young people today write far more than any generation before them.The post quotes:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

Read the rest yourself here.

I’m now back in NZ, getting used to the time zone differences

Over recent months I’ve read an increasing number of stories, articles and comments on the future of newspapers that I’ve been storing away to make comment on, as I see the whole debate as being indicative of the paradigm shift in the “knowledge economy” we’re all a part of. As a blogger this thinking has been percolating in my mind for some years now as i think about how I access the news, how I filter it, engage with it and report it.

The interactive map above is part of a recent initiative of the Independent newspaper in the UK, titled “what’s next for newspapers?” Prompted by the impact of the global recession on the newspaper industry, the Independent is using the opportunity to prompt a richer debate about impact of digital technologies on the newspaper industry, the implications of these changes for the newspaper industry, for journalism, and for society. The team at the Independent say that…

The aim with interactive collaborative maps of this kind is to weave together all of the salient issues, positions and arguments dispersed through the community into a single rich, transparent structure – in which each idea and argument is expressed just once – so that it’s possible to explore all perspectives quickly and gain a good sense of the scope and perceived merits of the different arguments

I see a great topic here for high school media studies students, or social studies classes for that matter. And it’s great to see the Independent actively using the debategraph tool as a means of engaging people in this debate – I’m a fan of this tool as I love the way it dynamically represents the changing perspectives in the debate, and enables large scale participation.

The Independent article refers to the thoughts of Clay Shirky, who’s post on Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable got me thinking about this a lot more just a few weeks ago. Shirky traverses the issues of ownership, control, quality, economics and impact of digital technologies in his article – focusing in on his argument that…

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Not everyone agree that newspapers are under threat, however.  John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited in Australia claims that the future of newspapers is bright. He is critical of the traditional ‘knowing a little about a lot‘ approach of newspapers to reporting the news, and sees the future involving teams of highly educated people with specialist knowledge providing more in depth news and analysis. He is not a fan at all of the notion of “citizen journalists” and dismisses claims often made by bloggers that theirs is a fresh, more democratic medium, by saying “Amateur journalism trivialises and corrupts serious debate“.

If you’re looking for some perspectives and themes to fire up your students’ thinking, then I’d recommend Ryan Scholin’s post on 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers (it would also pay to read his original post from 2007 to get an idea of what has changed.)

I’d love to hear stories of classes that participate in this debate, and the usefulness of the debategraph map as a focus for this.

I’m not usually into product endorsement, but over the past week or so I’ve been exploring using my new LiveScribe pen, and have fallen in love! Since spending a day working with my Australian colleague Julia Atkin and observing her using one of these devices I knew I had to try one, so when Julia offered to bring me back one from Australia a few week’s later I couldn’t refuse!

The Livescribe Pulse Digital Smartpen records your notes two ways: it creates digital copies of everything you write by hand while recording audio at the same time. not only that, but you can easily listen to what was being said at the exact moment you were writing a particular word or phrase by clicking the smart pen on the word on the page and listening to the playback – a fantastic tool for meetings or for recording research notes. No more listening through hours of taped interviews to find the point that matches something in my notes again!

Once synched with my computer I can download the pages and the audio files and store them away for future. Being someone with rather scruffy handwriting I was sceptical when I read that the software had a search function – supposedly enabling you to search your handwritten notes to find keywords or phrases – but I was proved wrong. despite the untidy script, the search came up with all the instances of several names and words I typed in!

I guess the reason I like this device so much is that it “fits” with my existing behaviours. I have for years carried around spiral notebooks and recorded notes at meetings etc. I happen to like the tactile use of a pen on paper, and the freedom to doodle and create diagrams and mind maps with the same creative ‘feel’ that a pen or pencil provides. This enables me to carry on doing what I’ve always done, with the added advantage of being able to record and download what I’m doing – and once it is on my laptop, I can then email material to my colleagues as happened this afternoon after a meeting involving a colleague who joined us on a skype call.

Since I purchased my pen I’ve noticed they are now available in Whitcoulls stores here in New Zealand (but at over $NZ150 more than what mine cost in Australia!) along with all the accessories such as packs of the spiral notebooks with the special micro-dotted paper that enables the spatial recognition to digitally replicate the notes.

I’ve been having fun exploring this great online resource from the North West Learning Grid aimed at encouraging learners to reflect on their current practices in the use of digital media and stimulate discussion and questioning. In each section of the resource the user is asked to respond to a number of questions about their media use, and at the end, they’re provided with feedback that suggests ways in which they could improve their media literacy skills. Users are then provided with a number of learning objects that they can work with to develop these ideas and understandings even further. These include more quizzes, games, and other online activities. I could see a number of ways that this could be used in classrooms – as an individual, group or whole class activity – or as ‘homework’ and an opportunity to engage with parents and caregivers too.

I spent Friday giving a keynote and presenting three workshops at the Adult Literacy Practitioners Association annual conference in Wellington. The keynote was followed the theme of the conference and was titled “Challenges, Change and Trends“, focusing on the impact of ICTs in education, in particular, on the development of literacy(ies). It was great to be among a group of people with whom I’ve had little contact before, people passionate about providing high quality literacy education to those with whom they work – often second chance learners.

Later in the day a member of the group was heard to comment, “I don’t agree with Derek – I think books and libraries will always be important.” I was bemused for two reasons. Firstly because I had been at pains to emphasise that I wasn’t saying that I think books and libraries will be obsolete, rather, that their form and function may change, and that our view of literacy needs to expand to embrace the opportunities and change that are presented by these emerging technologies. Secondly because this response illustrated another point in my talk – that our response to change or the threat of it will often cause us to retreat into a stable state mindset, and often cause us to have selective hearing.

The experience reminded me of the responses to Ewan McIntosh’s article in the Guardian newspaper just over a year ago, titled Beyond the three Rs – Literacy for a 21st century digital native is more about blogs than books, which I had referred to in my talk.  I first read this article on the day it was published and was impressed with Ewan’s explanation and support for the outcomes for Literacy in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. What I wasn’t prepared for was the depth of feeling reflected in the responses that were posted over the following couple of days, including;

“What’s wrong with the ‘old fashioned’ books, poetry and such like? They will be around far after the networking sites and texting have finished.”

and

“Teachers trying to keep the curriculum up with the latest digital communications fad is as sad as balding paunchy dads dancing Nu Rave.”

It sums up for me the need for us to be critically examining the impact – both positive and negative – of the new forms of expression that are emerging through the use of these new technologies, and how we must be adapting our views of literacy and what it means to be literate in the 21st Century.

Jeremy Philip’s recent article in ZDNet titled Encartas demise speaks volumes draws attention to the fact that new technologies are profoundly changing the way we create, share and use information. A recent impact of this, as he reports in this article, is the decision of Microsoft to cease development of it’s Encarta encylopedia, both on disk and online. Philips observes;

“Kids for whom ‘Google’ is a verb, not a trademark, can instantly summon up images, sounds, text and marshal them into an interactive multimedia document of their own, which they can then email to teachers, share with friends, deconstruct and reconstruct at will, without the infuriating shackles of censorship in the form of sanitised content.“

Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen, and we’ll all have an opinion on this. The important thing for all educators is to understand that these sorts of shifts are occurring, and to actively engage in the research and exchange of ideas and experiences that might lead us to an understanding of how to address this in our education system.

While we do have a literacy and numeracy strategy, and a clearly defined set of literacy progressions, we’re still working towards a “multi-literacies” framework in New Zealand (although it seems the work on this has sadly fallen off the radar at the moment with changes in MoE personnel and new government priorities), but I hope the work will continue among practitioners in an open-minded, critically engaged sort of way that will ultimately benefit the young learners in our schools.

Here’s a great example of how technology is enabling us to visualise information in different ways. Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.

I played around by selecting the New Zealand news feed, and cancelling out the World News, Sports and Entertainment feeds to arrive at the representation above – enabling me to narrow down on some patterns in the news specifically related to some areas of interest reported in the NZ scene.

Tools like this are the reason we must continue to engage in exploration of the notion of literacy and what it means to be literate in the 21st century.