Category Archives: New Media

Why “Teach” Social Media

This post is in response to Maryam Kaymanesh in the VCU thoughtvectors MOOC who is thinking about why high school students should be taught how to use social media for a future job. I wouldn’t have seen the post but Tom Woodward tagged me in his reply to her and I got a ping to alert me to the reference. Why mention this? Because it gets at the heart of why we need to “teach” social media: it IS the way we communicate these days, and we have always taught students how to use contemporary media.

When I started teaching high school English in the late 1980s, my curriculum included formal letter writing and research skills using paper databases like the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. I think we understand better why we need to teach students the research skills, but it’s 21st century writing that we grapple with as teachers roll their eyes when kids use emoticons or Internet slang in their research papers. Case in point: check out the Wikipedia entry on LOL. The authors spend a lot of time quoting the critics of the use of these abbreviations as inappropriate in formal writing. But they certainly have a place in the fast-paced, shortened world of Twitter and texting. So, lesson one for all 21st century writers is how to distinguish between the wide variety of writing outlets and the kind of writing they demand.

The other challenge for contemporary media users is how to use social media to portray yourself publicly. The Washington Post article When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web is one I still share with the adults I work with as it asks the hard questions about sharing on social media. In the six years since that article was published, stories continue to come out of grownups, including veteran teachers, doing dumb things in public using Twitter or Facebook. This incredibly kind interview demonstrates clearly that it isn’t just high school students who need a lesson or two:

But, despite the possible pitfalls, social media is also where we go to connect with others. Whatever your passion or area of study, social media can help you connect with others in the field. I require the students in my educational administration course to get involved in social media professionally by discovering the important voices and publications in education. Who are the bloggers and tweeters and googlers that you should be reading regularly? And, how can you become one of those voices? What can you contribute to the conversation?

There are also important questions for businesses to ask as they move into this hyper connected world. As someone who runs an organization that uses social media to both communicate and connect, I think about how to use it all the time. What do we want to do with it beyond just simple marketing? How can we become a portal to help curate the web for our followers? It is very much a similar kind of question to that for individuals: just how do we portray our company in social media? I can pretty much guarantee that unless your future job is hermit, you will, either as an employee or employer, ask these kinds of questions. 

And, while I can craft a persona for myself and my business, I can’t control the message completely since everyone has a voice. Reactions to a story are part of the story. The Today Show had a clip about getting good customer service and spent a good bit of time offering consumers tips for how to get noticed by a company by using Twitter or Facebook. Companies must be monitoring these outlets to be able to respond and react quickly before something goes viral. 

I’ll end with a recent example from my field of the complexities of being part of this new world. A brutally honest blog post about terrible experiences at a conference in 2013 appeared just as folks were gearing up for the 2014 version. The post, which has been removed by the author but is easy enough to find in an archive, was prompted by the #YesAllWomen campaign. It garnered a strong response from some in the field but others pushed back suggesting that this is a complex issue that requires more than a visceral, black and white response. Some spent time just trying to figure out who she was talking about. A second bog post tried to sort out the writer’s reactions to these different responses while the organization in question crafted its own response.

There are lots of lessons in this one event, not the least of which is that deleting stuff on the web doesn’t always mean it goes away. I’m not sure we can “teach” our students or ourselves exactly how to live in this social mediated world, but these kinds of case studies can help us grapple with the issues in powerful ways. If schools choose instead to ban and ignore, they miss the opportunity to truly prepare their students to live empowered lives in this world.

 

More On Moby Dick

Joyce Valenza posted a link to Jen Hunter’s insightful review of Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the English Classroom. Hunter is a student in Joyce’s social media course at Rutgers and the review is part of a larger website related to the reading of the book. Go read it now and be prepared to buy the book when you’re done. I did.

I am looking forward to reading the book even though I can’t imagine reading Moby Dick with any students, much less the challenging population described in the book. It almost makes me want to head back to the high school classroom, a place I haven’t been since the beginning of my career in the ice age before digital media:

Edited by new media literacy scholar, Henry Jenkins, and Melville scholar Wyn Kelley, the book describes how the two came to collaborate with Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, who had been teaching young men in a juvenile detention center not only to read Moby-Dick, but also to care about it and make sense of it in the context of their own lives through a stage production called Moby-Dick: Then and Now. This collaboration sparked a study in which NML strategies were applied in English classrooms to teach Moby-Dick, and more importantly, to empower students to claim ownership of their authority and participate in the wider conversations happening around them.

The section of the review that struck me was the notion that incorporating popular culture to help students grapple with traditional literature is somehow a lowering of expectations for those students:

Without ever saying it explicitly, the text seems to imply that while students can learn to read, find relevancy in, and enjoy Moby-Dick, educators need to reframe their expectations of their students, which might be interpreted as lower expectations as opposed to simply different expectations.

Hunter goes on to discuss how Jenkins’ addresses this concern:

Jenkins defends the use of popular culture in the classroom when he says, “It should not be seen as a means of entertaining students or holding their attention, but rather as a means of respecting their existing expertise and helping them to acquire core skills they will need to meaningfully participate in this new and emerging media landscape” (location 1071). While all of the authors advocate for the development of the kinds of skills that educators may associate with traditional literacy and scholarly inquiry, they suggest that there needs to be a gradual building to that level, particularly for at-risk youth.

Respect for our students’ experiences when they are different from our own is a powerful concept. I am, in no way, lowering expectations for contemporary students when I suggest that not every child needs to grapple with Shakespeare in the original. Or, as Jenkins and his colleagues demonstrate, plunge into Moby Dick without some kind of preparation. I may question if getting through Melville is a good use of time but if it really does provide the students with a confidence and sense of authority, then the time will be well spent.

The book is one my Kindle and may rise to the top of the TBR list. I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

 

Teach Balance Rather Than Zero Tolerance

I ran across a new movement, advertised via social media, advocating “unplugging” during certain times of the day. Evidently, more and more people are choosing to disconnect for specified periods of time to see what it’s like to go without and then musing about it on the web, once they’ve reestablished connection. Most, amazingly enough, found productive things to do and were able to resist the urge to tell everyone else via the network.

I was reminded of two things: the “turn off the tv week” that I used to sponsor in the late great days before the Internet and the actions many schools are starting to take towards social media. These disconnect movements–whether done in the name of personal challenge, family togetherness or student safety–all seem to suggest that there is something suspect about our relationship to social media just as, in earlier generations, we worried about our television viewing. So I find it particularly ironic that the Good 30-Day Challenge folks who are unplugging at 8 PM do allow you to use your computer as a television.

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Denver Bound

I’m leaving for ISTE2010 on Friday evening and am looking forward to being back in Denver again. I was there for the American Educational Research Association conference in late April where I presented my dissertation research. I had reserved a day to explore the city and had a great time. Downtown Denver is user friendly with pedestrian access being a high priority. I was able to easily make it from the Capitol to the ballfield on my feet and it was nice to know that the 16th Street Mall bus was waiting to return me to my hotel when I finally got tired.

One resource that I really appreciated was the Denver Story Trek. This website features free audio files related to the history of Denver. There are informational casts but also oral history features and I was able to easily download them to my iPod so I carried them with me as I explored. I got through most of my trek. I couldn’t help but think what a great project this would be for kids to do about their own communities.

My favorite spot had to be the Tattered Cover Bookstore near the end of the 16th Street Mall. The latte was hot and strong and steamy and the sofa was comfortable. I’m looking forward to browsing and reading for at least a little while to escape from the craziness of the conference.

Here’s a mosaic of some of my pictures from the trip:
denvermosaic021. On the 16th Street Mall, 2. Daniels and Fisher Tower, 3. Gold Dome, 4. The Old Prospector, 5. Decorations Along the Street, 6. St. Cajetan’s, 7. The Molly Brown House, 8. 123/365 Along the Street, 9. 120/365 for 2010 The Big Blue Bear, 10. Historic Buildings Along Larimer St., 11. Big Sweep, 12. Capital Hill Books, 13. The View from the State House, 14. Union Station, 15. Tattered Cover, 16. Fence in Ninth Street Park, 17. Ninth Street Park, 18. Yes, I took a picture of a squirrel…, 19. St. Cajetan’s, 20. Golda Meir House, 21. The Molly Brown House, 22. Ninth Street Park, 23. Ninth Street Park, 24. Ninth Street Park, 25. Pioneer Fountain

Ed Tech Themes and Issues in a Nutshell

I’m teaching an online course this summer for budding school administrators. They’ve been discussing issues related to using “Web 2.0” kinds of technologies for the past two weeks and this week, I took a moment to summarize some of the themes and issues that emerged. I thought it might be of interest to a wider audience, so here’s the posting with some changes to protect the innocent.

After reading your blog entries and Web 2.0 papers and listening to your elevator speeches, I was struck by several ideas that seemed to cut across all the conversations we had last week. The three themes are lack of time for learning and implementing technology; inadequate, unequal funding for education; and a disconnect between educational goals and assessment. I think the first two are perennial problems in education while the third is a contemporary issue.

There is never enough time in school and yet every year more stuff gets added and nothing gets taken away. Is it any wonder that teachers seem reluctant to add yet more things to their classrooms? Especially when adding technology can bring additional challenges in terms of classroom management and technical glitches. Whenever I hear someone talking about how China or Japan has yet again “beaten” our kids on some international test, I always take a moment to remind them that teachers in those countries only teach half the day with the other half reserved for planning and professional development. Can you imagine? It would seem like a paradise to US teachers who have just grown used to the idea that they do that kind of work outside of the school day, often for no additional pay. So much about school needs to be rethought but the agrarian calendar under which we now labor is looking more and more outdated when web-based resources offer opportunities for teaching and learning all the time.

Inadequate, unequal funding has always been a problem. Most of you seemed to think that your school district was doing better in this area in terms of commitment to technology funding. But as someone pointed out, supporting technology funding in a time when teachers are losing their jobs gets difficult especially since there seems to be a shared sense that many teachers aren’t using the available technology to its maximum capabilities (or even at all!). In your elevator speeches, several of you questioned how the state can help with this…certainly, Virginia’s online testing initiative has been one way to get hardware into schools that might not otherwise be able to afford it. Virginia has been at the forefront of educational technology planning, something I wrote about in the VSTE Journal several years ago. I analyzed the trends seen in the planning since it began in the 1980s.

Finally, many of you pointed out the disconnect between notions of 21st century skills and our state assessment program. In a comment to one of your papers, I traced the development of content-based assessment to A Nation At Risk, the landmark report that came out in 1982. The report was mostly concerned with what kids didn’t KNOW, and now 30 years later, we have based our system on teaching and testing content. Yet, business and educational leaders are suggesting that process skills are lacking. Yes, students might know facts, but they seem unable to problem solve or think creatively and in a world in which assembly line jobs are getting scarce, being able to think on your feet is essential. Our students are leaving the classroom for a world that is much different in terms of working. Since this is getting long, I’ll end with a video clip…this is from True Stories, David Byrne’s film about a fictional Texas town. About two minutes into the clip, the owner of the town’s big business explains his vision of the future. He ends with a pretty profound comment about the nature of work and play in the future. It makes me think…am I working or playing right now?

A Birthday Reflection

I turn 48 years old today. When I was born, the Vietnam War was just heating up, the Summer of Love was still five years away, and Kennedy was in the middle of those glorious thousand days that came to be known as Camelot. I am on the far edge of the Boomers and can even claim Generation X status when I get annoyed at what I think is the sometimes smug Boomer culture. All that Boomer optimism had faded by the time I came into the world and those of us in the 13th generation grew up in a much more cynical age. I have a good friend who is on the other end of the Boomers and when we play the Boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit she knows all the answers to questions about Howdy Doody and the Beatles. I get the ones about Watergate and the war.

There have been some positives over the past five decades…such as a focus on environmental conservation. But it doesn’t always feel like things have gotten much better. I lived just 30 miles from Three Mile Island when it melted down and am now sick over the oil gushing into the Gulf. Earth Day began when I was seven because things had gotten so bad that rivers were on fire and whole communities were being poisoned. Now, we regularly see bald eagles flying over head. But we still haven’t figured out how human beings can live without destroying everything else.

And, then there’s education: A Nation at Risk was written in 1982 and I am watching its influence play out now, nearly 30 years later. That report was all about what students didn’t know and that’s what we are busy trying to test now. There was little concern for what they could do or whether they could think and how schools could foster more critical, creative problem solvers. I wonder how long it will take to see any influence from current reform efforts as the slow educational pendulum continues its eternal swinging?

Technology was not absent from my classroom when I started teaching in 1988. They were very old school: film strips, film reels, an overhead projector and an oft-used record and cassette player. I did have a computer in my room…an early macintosh that was used with a laser printer to desktop publish the school newspaper. It was hidden away in the back room. There was no Internet, just the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, most of which we did not have access to. Yet, we learned together with the materials we had. Much of the technologies supported my presentations as a teacher. But they also provided creative outlets for my students. My students used the analog video camera to make public service advertisements. After cleaning the strips in chlorine, they used pens to draw their own film strips. We listened to music as part of our poetry unit and watched the movie versions of Shakespeare’s work which added an interactive element to what was often a text-only approach to literature. I didn’t really think about it as “technology,” the way we talk about digital technologies today, but was glad to have choices related to how I could present and have students interact with information.

The excitement today, I think, is what students can do with the technology. Creating film strips and analog videos seem like cave writing in comparison to digital videos and interactive web sites. My worry? That all this great technology is still mostly being used to enhance teacher presentations and kids don’t get much chance to do their own creation and interaction. I was glad to see that several of my pre-service teachers this semester adopted Google Maps for their lesson projects and allowed students to do the creation. You could argue that it’s not that innovative since teachers have been doing map work with students forever. But what a step away from the flat views with their colored pencil hatch marks. Add markers, draw lines, zoom in and out, check out the terrain, the possibilities are endless.

I’m a huge fan of Google Maps as a great example of the interactivity that I think is really the innovative part of digital technologies. I used it recently to plan and execute my recent walking tour of Denver. I created the map on my laptop, pulled audio from the Denver Story Trek website, and then moved everything to my phone. (Don’t get me started on my phone…I really am in love with my Droid.)


View Denver in a larger map

It’s been an interesting time to be alive. Technologically, watching the world move from analog to digital must be a similar experience to the generation that went from horse-drawn wagons to automobiles. I’ve seen great cultural shifts as well particularly in terms of individual rights. The landmark civil rights legislation was signed when I was a toddler. And while it didn’t pass, the Equal Rights Amendment was part of the milieu as I came to adulthood in the 70s. I’ve grown up surrounded by conversations about race, gender, and sexual orientation and while we are a long way from answers in any of those areas, we’re moving in a positive direction I think as we learn to think of each other as individuals first and then members of particular groups second. We’re complex beings whose identities are woven from disparate threads.

I’ll close with the weirdest thing about being this age: the President of the United States is my age! And, I graduated from William and Mary with John Stewart. My generation is moving in to the leadership, joining but also changing the establishment while the next generation breathes down our necks.

Post Pencil?

Sharon has been writing eloquently about Sherry Turkle’s book Simulation and Its Discontents, which I also read as part of the “choose your own reading” part of the course. Go read Sharon’s posts, particularly the one about socks, and then come back…no, really, go…

Turkle’s book is a microcosmic look at experience of the analog to digital transition. I am part of the generation that is living through that transition. Like Turkle’s engineers and architects, I face the fundamental question: As technology replaces so much of what we do “by hand,” what analog practices do we want to keep around? I know that some of my colleagues would probably say none, having developed digital lives for themselves.

But, as I face the transition, I find that there are certain things I like to do with a pencil in my hand and the digital alternative is simply not as satisfying. The main one: my to do list. I use it, in conjunction with a print calendar, to map out my months, weeks, and days. It’s the way I’ve always done it and I have yet to find an online alternative that satisfies me. I begin my day by jotting down what I want to accomplish and still get a thrill when I can draw a line through it at day’s end.

I also prefer using a pencil and paper for brainstorming and drafting. Like Turkle’s folks, I sometimes feel as though word processed text looks too complete and the highlighting and commenting tools do not provide the same level of contact with the text in order to complete detailed editing. Of course, my advisor and I used these tools to pass drafts of my dissertation back and forth but my own work on the draft often include lots of handwritten work from outlines, to diagrams, to chunks of text. My spiral bound notebook is included in the archives of the project because much of the thinking about themes was concocted in its pages. At some point, I tried using a digital graphic organizer but somehow the technology got in the way. I wanted to scribble, to draw wavy arrows, to circle words, to jot pictures, to create messiness, and the software seemed to demand neatness and order. I wasn’t creating for someone else but instead trying to dig into my own thinking and the pencil was more inviting than the mouse as the tool to facilitate that process.

While these activities seem mundane compared to Turkle’s folks who are grappling with the meaning of simulations for their very work, they illustrate in a very practical way the decisions we make each day about our use of technology. I think it’s important to consider these decisions and provide opportunities for kids to understand them as well, lest they become like the younger designers who see no value in the old ways and rely, sometimes too completely, on the simulation.

140? We Used to Do it in 8!

I had a funny, when-I-was-their-age moment. I had found my way to this Teachers Network website and saw this headline: IF U CN RD THS U CN LRN TO RITE, which linked to an article about adding a twist to the typical “what I did this summer” essay by having students start with texting their responses. For some reason, I flashed to an old, rainy day worksheet I used to have that gave a list of vanity license plates that the kids had to decipher. Maybe they represent the original text messaging, and a little googling showed that having students create personalized license plates for themselves or other characters was a popular lesson plan. Everything old is new again, this time around with a few more characters allowed.

In Just 45 Minutes…

I head to campus to begin another semester.  I am teaching a course called Designs for Technology Enhanced Learning.  I have taught some version of this course to pre-service teachers for the past five years.  It began as a one-credit class that focused on technical skills, but as the students have become more familiar with the tools, the course has morphed into a two-credit class that focuses more on how to use the tools in the classroom.  I am more excited about teaching the course this semester because I really feel like I have hit my stride with it.

The one area where I am a little concerned is with the additional of a online personal learning network component.  This is clearly something that others are thinking about as well since my first look at Twitter this morning led me to Will Richardson’s post on the subject. I am going to have my students join a the VSTE Ning network and participate for the whole semester.  This assignment replaces the blogging they used to do as I grew discouraged with that assignment over time.  It became increasingly quantitative (x number of posts and x number of comments) and few students seemed to ever realize the potential power of blogs to support their own learning and reflection.  The Ning assignment is much more open ended: get involved in the community on a regular basis.  I have invited Sheryl Nussbaum Beach to come in as a guest speaker since she’s my hero when it comes to these communities.  I’m hoping she can provide some motivation for them to get involved AND stay involved even after the course is over.

The other part of this assignment is that I am hoping it will motivate my own learning and involvement in an online community.  I tend to live on the peripherals of these groups.  I was never much of a “joiner” in the real world and that habit has remained in the virtual one as well.   Like Will, I am very much in the midst of examining my own practices and also looking towards life after my degree is completed.  So, while I am nervous about this assignment, I am also excited to have an opportunity to really engage in an authentic activity with my students.  I’m just hoping they will feel the same way!

And now it’s time to get ready…I’m walking to campus this morning to benefit myself and the environment but that means an early start.  Class begins at 11 and if you want a sample of what we’re doing, here’s my agenda.

My “Best of NECC” Post

I know I’m late on this but I spent the weekend getting caught up on my real life and doing some prep for this week.  But, I wanted to highlight some of the things I learned at NECC.  NECC is always overwhelming for me and all the digital stuff (blogs, wikis, flickr, twitter, etc.) really just make it worse.  Too much noise.  So, my strategy this year was to pre-register for sessions and to volunteer, both in an attempt to make NECC smaller and more manageable.  It turned out to be a good strategy…I didn’t have to worry about getting a seat and I had a chance to really connect with new people. I found the poster sessions at which I volunteered on Monday morning terrific. The presenters were all HP grant winners, and their enthusiasm about their students ‘ learning was intoxicating! Real teachers, real students, real stories with some excellent action research to show that their students had not only been engaged but learned something as well.

At the last minute, I ended up doing two hands-on workshops to fill in for another presenter. While it took away from some of my own time at NECC, I found the experience quite enlightening and encouraging. Both the sessions focused on a tool and its connection to content. In my hurry to pull together the sessions, I focused on the tool with less concern about the content. (In my defense, one workshop had participants making videos in just three hours so I was a little worried about getting it done.) What I am pleased about was the excellent feedback I got from the participants. Most were happy with the experience, but several reminded me that there had been content and that was really why they came with their interest in the tool being a secondary concern. Good for them! I certainly agree and was reminded of how easy it is for techies like me to fall into the tool trap, forgetting that we are dealing with educators. If I have a criticism of NECC, it sometimes seems to be more generally focused on technology tools rather than how teachers might make effective use of them in their classrooms.  Maybe that’s the point of a tech conference, but for those of us who have to go back to K-12 teachers, the difference between twitter and plurk are probably not that important.

The best session I attended was the Technology Leadership Forum. Its focus was on emerging technologies but most of the speakers were from school divisions that had adopted the technologies so they could talk about how the tools intersected with teaching and learning. I was particularly intrigued by Camilla Gagliolo’s presentation on using Nintendo DS2s in the elementary school.  I’m not a gamer but may have to invest in one of these as they have curriculum related software and some potentially powerful applications.  (OK, see how easy it is to slip into the tools discussion!)

The keynoter for the forum was Richard Baraniuk, Rice University, talking about The Future of Open Courseware.  This is a topic close to my own heart since I sit on the Board of Directors of the Virginia Open Education Foundation (VOEF), begun by Mark Burnet, who is even more passionate about it than I am.  Rich began Connexions, an open courseware compendium.  It’s an amazing collection of online materials, mostly written in the form of textbooks.  They can, if you like, be printed and bound, for the cost of about $20!  It’s an amazing example of collaboration, and I found myself babbling to him about our Virginia project.   I sat on a Joint Commission on Technology and Science Committee last year where we discussed the possibilities of open source textbooks and this year, the work continues with anyone who is interested encouraged to get involved.

VOEF has established a pilot site where we are collecting resources related to Virginia standards.  If you’re intrigued and would like to get involved, just send me an email and Mark and I would be happy to talk to you.