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.

With a long weekend coming up in New Zealand here’s a bit of reading that may be of interest to some. The eLearning Guild have released the latest in their series of free e-books, this one titled 144 Tips on Synchronous e-Learning.

As is usual in previous ELG publications, the tips range in length from one-sentence ideas all the way up to multi-page discourses. You will find tips in these categories…

• Blending Synchronous Learning with Other Learning Modalities

• Designers of Synchronous Presentations, Courses, and Webinars
• Managers Who Lead Synchronous Learning Efforts
• Synchronous Speakers and Instructors
• Technical Production, Planning, and Preparation

All of the tips have been submitted by practitioners, and there’s a lot of very useful stuff here - particularly for those who are entering the field, or for those who may be in a position of creating manuals or staff development activities to support those working in your school or institution. There’s quite a bit of advertising included from Adobe about their synchronous eLearning product - but even this is informative and usefully presented.

Sorry - but I just don’t buy it.
Jane pointed me to Chitch.at, described as an educational network where teachers can share real course content, make free class pages, and develop interactive online assignments. Here’s a video which explains more about it.

Now the concept of a ‘lightweight’, flexible way to create, post and share course content sounds appealing - but the underlying design points to a pedagogy that I have problems with. Notice the section that begins… “The Web is great - in theory!”, and goes on to argue that while online environments such as blogs and wikis capture our (and our students’) imaginations, they are difficult to ‘teach’ because we can’t easily assign tasks, collect submissions or effectively grade student work etc. In other words (their words) these social web applications don’t “fit” the traditional classroom.

All of this sounds like a great justification for why we might want an online environment like Chitch.at- but hang on… if these applications are (as they claim) so good at developing critical thinking, engaging student interest and creating a sense of wonder etc, shouldn’t this suggest that we ought to be looking to change the nature of the “traditional classroom”??

The focus here is entirely on a pedagogy of setting tasks for students to complete - presumably tasks that essentially invite students to “guess what’s in the teacher’s head” since the implication is that there’s a specific response on which they’re then graded! A clear case of the pedagogy of assessment driving the pedagogy of instruction.

In 1915 John Dewey wrote in his “Constructivist Pedagogy” that effective learning occurs when…

• Student autonomy and initiative accepted and encouraged

• Teacher asks open-ended questions and allows wait time for responses
• Higher level thinking is encouraged
• Students engage in dialogue with teacher and each other
• Students engaged in experiences that challenge hypotheses
• Class uses raw data primary sources, physical and interactive materials
• Knowledge and ideas emerge only from a situation in which learners have to draw them out of experiences that have meaning and importance to them

In my experience these are exactly the sorts of learning experiences that many of these emerging social web applications enable and encourage. Have we really not learned anything in the past 90-odd years??

Nigel posted this video on my Facebook Funwall recently, and I’ve been pondering its usefulness for education. Four things occur to me:

1. It provides a very useful framework for engaging students with thinking about complex issues and reconciling multiple points of view. I’ve long been a fan of the scenario-planning methodologies, and this framework uses some of this thinking (although I’m guessing is origins are more in the economic modelling and decision making domain).
2. It provides a great vehicle for encouraging group work by providing the four perspectives that could be explored by different groups for instance. it provides an opportunity to us the ideas promoted by DeBono with his thinking hats to encourage students to explore ideas from a perspective that may not be their own, or the one they’d naturally identify with.
3. It provides a good model for how students could present the efforts of their individual or group research into topical issues - both in terms of the framework itself, and in terms of the video as a way of sharing it. I also got to thinking how effective it would be to create the quadrants in a web environment and add hyperlinks from each statement to supporting evidence etc.
4. It’s a ready-made learning object for use with a class thinking about climate change! Students could be encouraged to add their own perspectives to each of the quadrants, debate what the presenter has already added, seek the evidence to support their statements etc.

Some food for thought here, and I’m sure this could be a starting point for lots of teachers to explore other ways of using such a framework for ‘unpacking’ complex issues and working towards identifying solutions or acceptable outcomes - whether these be big issues such as global warming, or deciding on what foods should be served in the school tuck shop etc.

James Morrison has published the latest edition of Innovate (vol.3, issue 5) online, and it begins with some really interesting perspectives on the Net Generation to follow on from the last issue. Here’s an overview of what’s available courtesy of Morrison’s mailing list:

We open the June/July issue of Innovate with two articles that resume the discussion of the Net Generation from our previous issue - but with very different assessments of the educational playing field. In addressing the needs of this population, Donald Philip proposes a model of education that acknowledges the sociocultural changes wrought by new technological tools, taps into the virtualization of knowledge arising from such tools, and fashions learning environments based on small, flexible groups that resemble the small teams currently used by institutions in the business world. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=368 )

However, Sarah Lohnes and Charles Kinzer caution that our assumptions about the Net Generation may often be based on generalizations that do not sufficiently address contextual differences from one population to the next. Their ethnographic study found that while liberal arts students relied extensively on technology in their everyday lives, they remained resistant to in-class technology use and instead endorsed a traditional
model of education based on interpersonal contact with the instructor. (See
http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=431 )

While debates about the Net Generation will continue, instructors are also addressing these questions through innovative forms of pedagogical practice. Helen Sword and Michelle Leggott discuss how their students used online tools to preserve literary texts from university archives while also exploring the potential of such tools to support new, collaborative forms of creative expression in cyberspace. (See
http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=389 )

Edward Gehringer, Luke Ehresman, Susan G. Conger, and Prasad Wagle offer an account of how a custom-designed software product was used in computer science courses to support the construction of peer-reviewed learning objects by the students themselves, which can in turn be assessed, modified, or supplemented by future students in the same course, thereby allowing students to take ownership of their learning to an entirely new level. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=365 )

Bill Gibbs and Erik Larson illustrate the use of a videoconferencing system to deliver highly detailed forms of instruction in courses focusing on multimedia design and software design for online and hybrid courses. (See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=388 )

Meanwhile, future innovations in pedagogy and instructional design will continue to rely upon effective, well-planned faculty development and teacher training programs. In his account of faculty development efforts at Bronx Community College, Howard Wach outlines how these efforts evolved through three major formats - two-hour technology workshops, semester-long workshops, and a one-week summer program - and he describes the respective challenges and advantages afforded by each format.
(See http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=424 )

We close this issue with an article by Kathleen Roney and MaryAnn Davies, who describe how they employed a Web-based communications tool to promote standards-based instruction, foster reflective practice and focused mentoring, and facilitate the development of electronic portfolios to help teacher education interns bridge the gap between their training and their classroom practice. (See
http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=294 )

Finally, please do not forget the Innovate-Live Seminar Series beginning Tuesday, June 5 through Friday, June 8, 2007. The seminar program and registration (free) is available at our Innovate-Live portal at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/

Love them or hate them, the use of wikis is certainly gaining momentum in education circles. Take for instance the WikiEducator project initiated by the Commonwealth of Learning,or the Wikipedia version of Wikiversity, not to mention the myriad of educational wikis appearing that have been created within the variety of Wiki software that is available online.

A discussion with my wife over breakfast this morning reminded me of how much we still have to learn and understand about wiki use in education. My wife related to me how the tutors in a course that she is currently studying have told her class that they are not allowed to use wikipedia or Google when completing assignments (something to do with the authority of the information!) I needn’t describe my reaction - needless to say it included references to “luddite”, and “digital neanderthal”
No-one (certainly not I) will argue that the content of Wikipedia is 100% accurate (although there is some evidence that it may be just as accurate as other “reliable sources”) - but that’s not really the issue. The fact is that we have a new tool available to us that we have yet to fully understand in terms of the way it is challenging our traditional understandings of things such as the accuracy of information, and the way it is changing the way we can think about (and act on) the development and sharing of information/content.

With this in mind I was interested to come across this article on Wiki Pedagogy by Ren??e Fountain. There’s a heap of information in here to provide you with everything you need to know about wikis and their use in education. Fountain explores both the form and function of wikis, before venturing to describe their pedagogical potential. He offers the following justifications for the use of wikis in education:

• Wikis maximize interplay

• Wikis are democratic
• Wikis work in real time
• Wiki technology is text-based
• Wikis permit public document construction, that is, distributed authorship
• Wikis complicate the evaluation of writing
• Wikis promote negotiation
• Wikis permit collaborative document editing, or open editing
• Wikis permit the public to publish - public as publisher
• Wikis make feedback intensely public and potentially durable
• Wikis work on volunteer collaboration
• Wikis endorse particular ways of writing
• Wikis enable complete anonymity.

Fountain has done a great job of bringing this all together - a great read that you’ll want to bookmark and refer to again!

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=268691876&size=l

Following on from my last post on School2.0 etc, I read with interest Stephen Downes post titled To The School or Classroom 2.0 Advocates in which he responds to some questions from Christian Long.

I rather like Stephen’s responses to Christian’s list of questions. They resonate with my understandings of the whole school/class2.0 discussion. This is emphasised in one point he makes;

I have commented in the past, and I reiterate the point here, that from my perspective the predominate use of the term ‘School 2.0′ has been to promote a view of learning that is traditionalist, rather than oriented to the future, one that seeks to preserve the existing trappings of education, most notably, schools. We hear a lot of language like “the fact is, schools are here to stay,” but there is in my mind no fact of the matter, certainly not in the time-frame of 25-30 years.

I am in total agreement with this sentiment. While I may not necessarily come to the same conclusions as Stephen about what those future educational environments might look like, the point that I’m agreeing with is that so much of the discussion about the future of schools begins from exactly that perspective - that we’ll continue to have schools, and before long, all the other trappings of our existing school system begin appearing as insurmountable barriers to changes in our thinking.

The other thing that I find often find inhibits our thinking about the future of schools and schooling is the extent to which the discussion dwells on the physical structures we call schools, and the systems and processes that we use to operate them, instead of a focusing on the nature of teaching and learning as being the things that need to change most markedly as we look to the future. When you look at things from that perspective then things like buildings, timetables etc can be viewed from the perspective of how well they enable or inhibit effective teaching and learning practices.

With this in mind I was interested to read Phil Brown’s Student Self-Directed Learning blog entry titled What makes a good learner? in which he poses the question then summarises a number of factors suggested in a paper from NREL. It’s my contention that if we begin by looking at the list suggested by Phil, and considering what sorts of environments and support would be required to enable this sort of learning to take place, then our perspective on what the future of schools and schooling might be might be very different.

I’ve just been listening again to Evangeline Stefanakis and Helen Barrett at the CORE Breakfast session, speaking about the use of ePortfolios and the ways in which these can support the goals of personalising learning. While the idea of personalising learning sounds good in principle, there are many ways in which the idea may be manifest in practice. All of these require that we confront our existing ideas and understandings about schools, teaching and classroom practice.

The frame above is from a 9 minute video that comes from the The Consortium for School Networking’s 21th annual conference that kicked off March 28 in San Francisco. It features Chris Dede offering some thoughts on personalising learning and the challenges it brings. Chris interviews two speakers who are working to create personalised learning experiences for students:

• Jean Johnson, the project director of NotSchool.net, and

• Jack Dale, the superintendant of the Fairfax County Public School district where they are implementing an Individualised Learning Plan for every student!

In his introduction Dede compares education with the acts of sleeping, eating and bonding. Sleeping, according to Dede, is a relatively easy task whose outcome depends on relatively few variables. Bonding on the other hand is quite complex. Dede says that too often we treat learning as if it were sleeping, while everything we know about learning suggests that it is more like bonding - or at worst, like eating. But, says Dede, the very best of our education settings has less variety than a bad fast food restaurant!

The clip contributes some useful thoughts to the Personalising Learning discussion - I particularly appreciated the latter part where the panel engage in discussion around some of the issues about implementing a personalised approach within the existing school system. Dede’s final comment is worth noting - he points out that the major issue is with breaking down the social and political barriers - pointing out that technology will only ever take us part of the way towards the personalised learning dream.

A final point - although I was pointed to this clip through a link on personalising learning - the actual title of the session refers to individualised instruction - obviously the nomenclature issue is still to be resolved!

Here’s something that might be of interest to the teachers and principals who’ve been attending the TUANZ workshops, and who may be grappling with the sorts of issues raised in a couple of my recent posts….

Following in the vein of the work of Don Tapscott and, more recently, PEW Internet, comes this report from DEMOS titled “Their Space: Education for a digital generation.” The report draws on qualitative research with children and polling of parents to counter the myths obscuring the true value of digital media.

Approaching technology from the perspective of children, it tells positive stories about how they use online space to build relationships and create original content. It argues that the skills children are developing through these activities, such as creativity, communication and collaboration, are those that will enable them to succeed in a globally networked, knowledge-driven economy.

Full report available as 304Kb pdf download.

Here’s a cool video clip that I came across on Google Video today. The topic is video games in education - it’s 23 minutes long, and is produced by the Orange County District Office of Education in the US. It provides a pretty good overview for educators who haven’t been exposed to thinking about the use of video games in education, or for those who want to understand more about the potential for learning of these games. There are some useful comments in the video by acknowledged experts in the field, including Dr James Gee and Dr Henry Jenkins, Clarke Aldridge & others.