Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Young and addicted to social networks: and they've never written so much

Clive Thompson in Wired has summed up some definitive research that backs up what many of us have been saying from our guts for years: kids have never been reading and writing so much, and with the proliferation of social networks and mobile messaging this stat will only increase with time:

Andrea Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

"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.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

Not only that but the writing is of an excellent technical standard, with status updates training our youngsters in the kind of "haiku-like concision" that their verbose parents could only dream of.

It's the kind of research that would have proven handy 18 months or so ago, when I had helped colleagues design some of the most forward-thinking literacy policies in the world, where text messages, computer games and blogs were deemed suitable 'texts' to study alongside the great classics. I got a bit of a hard time for condoning this at the time, and still get a rocky ride in believing that iPhones and iPod Touches could be amongst the digital toolkits in which our most reluctant readers might find the reading bug.

But it still felt right, and feels more right than ever now. Go read, digest and share.

Pic by Mads Berg in Wired.

Why we might not want Twitter to grow (when we want something done)

A while back Charlie Beckett wrote from the BBC's Beeb Camp about how Twitter, though still a minority sport, still mattered as it was more creative than the other main ways (email, SMS) people got in touch within the mass medium of television. There are fewer people on Twitter (though this is growing healthily, especially in the UK) and this, in turn, means that there is a better quality of dialogue between "the programme" (or the journalists/presenters/interviewers/interviewees), the audience, and between the members of the audience:

So expert Twittering journalist and Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru Murthy can appeal for question suggestions via Twitter without getting swamped by replies. If it gets any bigger then it becomes email. Channel 4 has enjoyed some stimulating uses of Twitter to help audiences get more involved in live surgical operations, as well as to comment on the taste of the channel's home (re)designexperts.

Playing along on Twitter, having a conversation with friends as well as strangers who are sharing a common moment, is becoming a common activity amongst Twitters of an evening, using Twitter search or, for example, 4iP's own Hashdash. We've even done some work with the Channel 4 On Demands (4oD) back catalogue, taking 10,000 hours of television archive and making it accessible through a Facebook Connect platform, Test Tube Telly. Go and have a play, see what you're friend are watching and share your thoughts on it all. However, Charlie's point about Krishnan, that "if it gets any bigger then it becomes email", shouldn't be an 'if'. It will happen.

Ray Kurzweil's anatomy of exponential growth tells us it will become bigger, a lot bigger (until 2020, at least), and therefore it almost certainly becomes another form of email: something to avoid on holiday, something to ignore wherever possible. The same thought came to me recently as I was having a bit of bother getting my new home fitted out with a telephone and broadband line. Being a new house, we had been warned by the building site manager that British Telecom would not want to send out an engineer because, from their call centre, the home would appear connected when, in fact, it wasn't. Insist on the engineer, he said.

An engineer was en route until the very last evening before he was due to appear. That evening I wasn't at home, invited instead to an the weirdest dinner I've ever had (a perfume dinner) and ended up sat alongside JP Rangaswami, Confused of Culcutta, one of my blog heros and, as chance would have it, Managing Director of BT Design at British Telecom. He assured me it was easily sorted and that, if I had any problems, I would just have to send a tweet to @btcare and he and his colleagues would sort it out.

I did have problems. @btcare and @jobsworth did sort it out. Really quickly. Really nicely.

I was a happy surfer but started wondering what would happen, when, inevitably, Twitter became THE place EVERYONE started to get their telecoms problems sorted. And it wouldn't just stop there - it would be the place to have your gas line reconnected, get your oven repaired... Would I have to find a new geekerati way to get my stuff sorted out, or simply join the masses in the Twitter queue listening to the Twitter Muzak equivalent of Beethoven's Ninth before I got seen to?

Originally posted at 38minutes.

Twitter for learning in extremis: Surgery Live and, erm, Big Brother

Adam Gee, Channel 4's Cross-Platform Commissioner for Factual, last week helped bring together one of the most bizarre, insightful and exhilarating learning experiences I think I've ever taken part in on television: watch a surgeon perform his art/science live on television and ask him questions direct through Twitter.

Open heart surgery, awake brain surgery (i.e. patient awake as well as surgeon and us the trusty viewers), keyhole surgery, tumour removal – alive&direct thanks to Windfall Films in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust. Wild enough in itself I hear you say but that is not all, oh no, that is not all…

We will not hold up the cup and the milk and the cake and the fish on a rake, but as the Cat in the Hat said, we know some new tricks and your mother will not mind (unless she’s etherised upon a table, as that other cat-lover said). The plan is to tip our hat (red and white striped topper or whatever) to that increasingly common behaviour of Twittering whilst watching TV and encourage people to tweet away during the live operations, sharing their thoughts and asking questions. The big difference here is that this is live TV and you can make an impact with your tweet on the TV editorial. The best questions tweeted will be fed through to the presenter, arch-Twitterer Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, who will swiftly pose them to the surgeon at work. So a matter of seconds between tweet and the question being uttered on live TV.

There were, of course, thousands of questions put through to the programme, helping the Surgery Live hashtag #slive hit the 3rd, then 2nd then 1st position on Twitter's trending, but there was also a great deal of conversation about the live operation between complete strangers who had found each other through the commonality of the hashtag, and their shared experience of learning what goes on inside our hearts/brains/stomachs.

In more formal education circles there have been attempts this year to engage audiences across education districts in, for example, live dissections of animals, where students are encouraged to put forward their questions. I think the Channel 4 Twitter experiment reveals some different behaviours that can only be encouraged in these more formal learning situations:

1. Twitter offers a certain degree of anonymity, which can be incredibly helpful in illiciting honest, high value questions from an audience (think other Channel 4 examples like Sexperience and Embarrassing Teenage Bodies, and my forthcoming You Booze You Lose). Where people know who you are, it can be inhibiting ("is my question stupid?", "should I know the answer to this?", "oh, I'll just wikipedia it afterwards"...)

2. The restrictions in place around a 140 character question or message mean that people cut to the chase and avoid the redundant language that clutters thinking in classrooms (and blog posts, VLEs, bulletin boards...). This is something found by the UT Dallas experiment highlighted in Derek Wenmoth this week.

3. Twitter helps you bump into people outside your learning/social circle, which in turn helps you emphathise, and see an issue from someone else's (very different) perspective. The one challenge with any Virtual Learning Environment in a school or country is that you are, more or less, sharing like thought with like thought, shaped by the culture and curriculum around it. When you take the questioning and answering global, you have an almost infinite number of conflicting perspectives to challenge your thinking.

At 4iP my colleague Lucy Würstlin took Twitter to a more entertainment-based medium (Big Brother) with her new product, Hashdash. The Hashdash Big Brother 10 launch night might have seemed pure entertainment, but it indeed helped a number of new Twitterers find their voice by educating the masses in Twitter etiquette, how to use hashdashes to have your message seen by more people with the same passion (in this case, #BB10).

Of course, at 4iP we have bigger plans afoot for this baby to help more people learn how the anonymity of Twitter can improve their learning (and their entertainment) with each other.

How to help people better use the net - go to them, let them copy, open up

Tanya Byron reckons we're guilty of Ephebiphobia, the fear of young people, as we incarcerate our young people in their bedroom prisons and replace the dangers of the street corner with risk-taking on unbridled access to the net. Worse still, the challenges raised by the continued lack of interest we take in our children's use of the net are coming back fast to create broader challenges for society.

The reaction to this might be 'teach the kids and teach the parents'. But we're now in an era where it's not so much about signposting where to go on the web, but teaching society how to navigate the net without even a map.

For years now, parents (and by default most educators and decision-makers) underestimate what young people do online. While most adults think youngsters spend somewhere in the region of 18.8 hours per month online, the reality is that UK kids are averaging 43.5 hours a month. Only four of those hours are spent using the net in schools, the rest is mostly unaccounted for on mobile phones and at home in those bedroom prisons. What's going on in those remaining 24.7 hours each month is unknown. The people with the media literacy challenge are not just young people - it's adults, too, who lack the basic alphabet of understanding that's needed to bottom out responsible, creative, enjoyable and engaging use of the web by us all.

Gen-Y doesn't exist
We know from research, anecdote and a cursory glance across Bebo or Facebook profiles (I've probably viewed close to 15,000 in my previous work with Learning and Teaching Scotland) that we are wrong to annoint youngsters with some sort of technological superiority through lables such as the "Google Generation", "Gen Y" or, my pet armageddon, "Digital Natives".

Firstly, we know that while young people are taught how to swim in the safe goldfish bowl of school and private intranets, often by educators who themselves have a filmsy idea of how to operate in that arena, they are completely incapable of operating safely and responsibly in the oceans of the web. If young people are to learn how to upload and download information responsibly then they must be allowed to play with their technologies with the lifeguard of the educator to drag them back to safety when they start to falter. Filtering these technologies serves only to compound the ability of the educator to work with the youngster on media literacy, and harms us all in a wider sense.

Secondly, we romanticise the technological creativity of our youngsters online. While large numbers now upload material online (close to 78% of teens according to most recent research) most of this material is photographic - i.e. mobile snaps from nights out. Creating and publishing original narrative, original code or Facebook apps or even mashed up video or code is not currently a regular pass-time of you average British kid, though we are beginning to see valiant efforts to make this process of creation-publication the norm in our schooling.

However, most don't come close to the kind of creativity illustrated by a young Mark Zuckerberg, pictured, who avoided his near flunk at Harvard art class with some online creativity, a story recounted by Jeff in WWGD. With a few days to go until his final exam, for which he hadn't done any work (well, he was creating his $15b company), he created a site with copies of the artwork that was likely to appear in the final exam, put in some comment boxes under each one, and let his fellow students know that he had created a collaborative study guide. All they had to do was fill in the blanks. Not only did a cheeky Zuckerberg pass with flying colours, but his classmates also did better than normal thanks to their formative assessment that Zuckerberg offered them.

But here's the tough question Jarvis doesn't ask: how many youngsters actually do that, or even think of it as a possibility? Today's literacy benchmark is copy and paste. A media literacy strategy, instead of talking about how we block copying and pasting, and enforce filtering, rating, copyright and IPR restrictions, could begin the hard work of illustrating how copy, paste, open sourcing and creative commons-ing can lead to much better content and information for all.

The challenges of attracting attention to these challenges with a public that's hard to get
The biggest challenge for a 'strategy' like this is that it's incredibly hard to a) attract young audiences b) keep them and c) turn that into some form of value. Channel 4's arguably one of the best broadcasters in the world at doing this, and with 4iP and Channel 4 Education's work online, we're attempting to work out how we replicate television's success at 'reach' to this group online, on mobile and in socially connected games.

Matt Locke and I have been playing around with Dave McClure's Metrics for Pirates in our work with independent companies to push them to think about those questions: how are you going to attract people, how are you going to keep them, and how are you going to turn that into some sort of value? Matt came up with a strong reduction of this, and I made it look less pretty but more utilitarian by insisting on a timescale for each metric. Take those three questions and apply them to what we know about online community uptake (that 90% lurk, 9% will follow regularly and 1% might contribute something) and we end up with a roll-your-own site metrics table:

To help see it in action I made one up for YouTube, had they approached 4iP a few years back for funding. It shows how a site that "gets people to upload videos" has added a lot of small ingredients to the recipe to take people on that more-complex-than-it-looks journey to uploading a vid. It still takes great ideas and a strong awareness of the potential of different technologies and techniques (RSS, Ajax, email, marketing, business development, cloud computing) to be able to fill it in and act on it, and this is where we might just see some problems in our institutions and schools. The knowledge and understanding just isn't there in enough quantities to high enough a level.

Our well-meaning institutions are another obstacle in the process
One could even go as far as saying that it would be counter-intuitive, professionally suicidal even, for institutions to seize this opportunity to engage with young people - any people - in this kind of open, copiable, distributable, redistributable, changeable, alterable way. Jeff Jarvis is right:

"Industries and institutions, in their most messianic moments, tend to view the internet in their own image: Retailers thin of the internet as a store... Marketers see it as their means to deliver a brand message. Media companies see it as a medium, assuming that online is about content and distribution...
"The internet explodes [this notion that industries and institutions have some point of control over people]. It abhors centralization. It loves sea level and tears down barriers to entry. It despises secrecy and rewards openness. It favors collaboration over ownership. The once-powerful approach the internet with dread when they realize they cannot control it."

As a starting point, therefore, media literacy begins with much more communication between young people and adults when we're taking decisions on how we proceed. There are three main areas that need tackled first:

1. Filtering needs to be a joint-decision activity
Who defines 'safe' in the large grey area where user's own discrepency is accepted as the main tool of judgement? Who decides what 'Bad Content' might be (a phrase used in the context of a presentation at the EU Media Literacy conference)? Who decides if content is culturally acceptable or not within a geographical area, and why should I as a Brit have to have an internet that is culturally adapted to the country in which I find myself, while I and my judgements remain coloured by being British? Filtering is the poor cousin of film classification, something invented as a solution for atoms crossing borders, not digits.

While filtering illegal content is a no-brainer, we need to assume the rest is whitelisted and have conversations about those where we're less sure. Blocking the unpopular but legitimately published free speech of bloggers, for example, is plainly wrong and not an option any more.

Neither is it an option to create 'safe havens' where we expect people to come along and get 'safe' stuff. Glow, a national intranet for schools, thus far comes over as this, although the desire for it to 'leak' out onto the web is becoming clearer. But I feel it needs to take a leaf out of the book of, say,

Battlefront, an education project designed to encourage more young people to campaign on important issues. It consists of broadcast and social media 'authored' elements on the web, rooted in getting people to think about campaigning, but gets huge amounts of traffic from being distributed around the web, in as many parts of it as possible. Traditional education would have you "Come to school", broadcaster's to "their channel" - it's got to be the opposite, modeling good online behaviour by providing different contexts for the same material, different discussions, setting off new trails amongst users.

2. Parents need to understand better what's going on
I'd disagree with some speakers' assertion that "most learning goes on in schools", at least in relation to learning about internet use. On average only 60 minutes per week per pupil is spent on the net in school, compared to 1340 minutes per week at home.

Yet, only a third of parents in UK befriend their offspring (and what about the 'real' profiles where youngsters go and live their 'real' lives away from the old folks?). While 80% of parents feel sure they know what their offspring are doing online, only 30% of the offspring think so. We see a gross lack of communication between students and teachers, even when they are fighting the same cause. British parents in particular are poor at understanding what they're children do online - this means parents and educators need to speak more with the youngsters in their lives.

We also need to make sure that we don't demonise anonymity on the web. For public service media, the type that makes people's lives better and draws them from one-way web to the read-write web, anonymity is often the prerequisite for stimulating and sincere discussions.

Take a look, for example, at Embarrassing Teenage Bodies where anonymity offers the chance to discuss those 'embarrassing' but pervasive issues of growing up. Or Sexperience, where people of all ages, shapes, sizes and cultures are able to anonymously tackle the myriad of issues around seual health, wellbeing and enjoyment.

On the flip-side, anonymity doesn't work for Landshare, where we want people to trade their unused land with people who can cultivate it - we need to know who people are and if they're bona fide for the safety of those involved: anonymity needs handled with due diligence.

3. Talking helps you know, but using helps you understand
We all need to get more involved in not just the theory of how these things work but in the practice too - being in and creating media opportunities in the places where we seek participation from the public or our students.

One of the biggest media literacy and digital divide challenges, now that most of the UK is online or can get online, is making enough interesting stuff for non-net-users to want to get online. That means content that empowers them more than not using it, maybe in the form of some of MySociety's projects (TheyWorkForYou or the travel maps)

To take that point of empowerment further, and to conclude, there has to be a realisation that while artists and creators of content used to have value in owning their IPR in a world of atoms, in a world of digits this ownership if IPR comes only with costs. In a digital world if you own the only version of something then, for a while, your IPR has value but, eventually, will be commodotised as me-toos appear - not direct copies, but similar and maybe even better.

If you let people copy and distribute your stuff then you're able, eventually, to reduce your overhead on marketing and distribution - your fans and copiers are doing this for you. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is twofold:

1. Get over the idea that your creation is the last stop of the creative bus:
People will change your message, distort it, make it worse, make it better, create something you hadn't intended - your original will always be your original, their altered version always their altered version. The important thing here is that it's as easy as clicking a link or running a Google search to find the original source and to let the user/participant make their own mind up as to which message they are more engaged with.

2. Find alternative means of being recompensed for your initial efforts
Have your original stuff carry ads or sponsorship, give away poor versions for free but top quality versions for money as eBook fans and TV companies on YouTube and social networks already do, find the George Lucas approach to making your stuff, and make your money on something else.

Pic 1: Smoking and texting

Pic 2: Zuckerberg

Clay Shirky in London: Group action just got easier

People sometimes ask why one might 'waste' one's time sitting on Advisory Boards, especially those of conferences. One reason I like it is that you can suggest that you'd like to hear someone like, say, Clay Shirky and, six months later, you've got him. Clay speaks today at Online Information Conference in London.

As well as formal groups around certain types of photography on Flickr (like this HDR group for beginners) there are the more impromptu adhoc communities that form around just one photo. It means that whereas destination sites' half-lives were relatively short, the half-life of a "insta-community" photograph like this becomes very much longer. Flickr, in this case, is an organisation that has created more by doing less - less intervention, less 'management' of community, less structure around debate.

How much does the individual have to give up to get to the action. Sharing is easiest, collaboration is harder and collective action hardest.

Sharing
Bronze Beta is the bulletin board for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an old skool site/forum based around Buffy. It has one page, and a form in which you put your latest views on Buffy. When the TV co wanted to disband it, or rebrand it the community cried out. "No! Don't give us features. Don't make it different. Above all, don't close it down." The conversations there continue today, well beyond the last episode of Buffy was made.

10 years ago, as Clay helped newspapers move out of Wapping into the new glitz of Canary Wharf, he was concerned with which content management system to get them. Had he told them (had he known) that weblogs being written by geeks in the Valley were going to be harbouring more content than any newspaper could manage, no-one would have believed him.

What makes Bronze Beta work is that it's got a featureless front end, but a very highly developed and complex set of rules of engagement. Fewer features make it easier for the users to share.

Collaboration
The Wikipedia page on Doctor Who has been edited almost 9000 times by over 3000 people. It would be logical (but wrong) to assume that the average is 2.67 edits per person. However, 2200 people only made one edit once, and then moved on. They are not "part of" a community. User Khaosworks, on the other hand, has edited that page nearly 1000 times all on his own. In fact, every article that this user has touched has been on Doctor Who.

This blows up the assumption of an 'average user'. Trying to plan this kind of interaction and collaboration in advance is near impossible to sell to a boss: there's going to be this tiny, unscalable group of users who'll just come to it, unpaid, who you don't know yet, who'll create the product. It really is a case of "in collaboration we trust". We trust it because the long tail type graph of collaboration that Clay refers to is more or less a signature of online collaboration.

Collective action
Getting people to do something is the most difficult thing to do. People tend to do it themselves, of their own accord, when the motivation to do so is more tangible. Cue the HSBC fiasco of last year, when a bank changed its mind on giving students free overdraft and thought instead of charging them £140 for the priviledge. HSBC were banking on the fact that it is tricky to move money from one account to another. They were also banking on the fact that it's hard for students, during a summer holiday, to coordinate action.

Cue Facebook.

When one student set up his Facebook group to campaign against this change, when one student made that effort, it became much easier for people to become activists, just by clicking "Join Group". 4500 members later, with a threat of the whole bunch marching onto the Canary Wharf headquarters, the bank relented.

Thinking is for Doing
Brains are not there to think in abstracts, but to help us do something. Publishing is for acting. Publishing is for doing. It's not just a source of information or a destination site. It's a place where action begins. It's not the Daily Telegraph telling people that HSBC changed the deal. It's Facebook offering a platform to provide that information and then do something about it.

Flashmobs, whose means of collective action I discussed in my recent Cisco paper, are yet another example of technology acting as an enabler to bring people together to act - against dictatorship, for example.

Broadcasters' challenge is technological and economical
The technology that allows us to broadcast has been limited in allowing us to create groups and community. Networks have been limited at doing what broadcasters have done, which is separate out the producer and viewer and participant of content. The internet has given birth to this many-to-many communication, but broadcasters have perhaps been stuck in the mentality of Guttenburg economics: we have to lay out some cash up front before we know if something is going to be successful, therefore the publisher only picks the things that (s)he thinks will make back that upfront. The costs are high and upfront so the risk is mitigated by the filter being placed on the side of the publisher.

When you're not a publisher relying on cash to sell your product or your news, then you can afford to report on what you want, and the readership can simply "put up or shut up". So when a young blogger in Thailand reports on the military coup, before going back to the trivia that she enjoys normally writing about, she receives, as if she were a broadcaster, complaints that her coverage is not in depth enough. She retorts; she's not a pubisher, she doesn't need to please the audience, the audience can come or go and get what they're given. This is a liberation from the shackles of Guttenburg economics that new technologies afford us. It's why blogging is not journalism; a journalist is professionally obliged to stick with the story.

Pro-active protest
Social media has now allowed people to take the initiative in saving their favourite TV shows before the TV show even airs. They have, in fact, created their own crowdsourced marketing department, emailing and advising the TV show on what they have to do to get more people to watch it and make the show such a success it can't be dropped.

The old separations are dead
I got this one quite quickly when I started working for Channel 4 and had to engage with taxi drivers who picked me up on account:

Taxi Driver: So you work for Channel 4?

Me: Yes

TD: What programmes do you make then?

Me: We don't actually make programmes. Other people do that. We just pay them to. But actually, I don't make TV anyway.

TD: What do you do then?

Me: I make websites and cool stuff for mobile phones and games consoles.

TD: Like the ones I see advertised on the TV shows?

Me: No, they're just going to be out there. You'll find them if they're meant for you.

TD: Oh... What's Channel 4 doing that for?

Me: Well, the boundaries matter less nowadays... (at this point, I gain 20 minutes of peace in the taxi.)

All the walls have fallen around the world of information. There are horizons but no barriers. What's the next good thing to do? The answer is likely to be: explore. Try several things at once. If someone has a million pound idea for exploiting the social web, then send them out for a long walk and lock the door behind them. Get them to come up with ten of £100,000 ideas or 100s of £10,000 ideas. 

The convening power of traditional media

That, my dears, is a big part of what 4iP is about. 4iP has the potential to be the convener of great ideas, and convene groups that ought to be talking to one another.

With 38minutes we're starting to do just that, having convened a space but given it over entirely to those who want to meet to talk about where they take their design, gaming, coding or new media business in this new(ish) age of t'interweb. Where previously these groups didn't talk, in less than two months we've convened nearly 500 of Scotland and Northern Ireland's top talent from four large sectors who until now rarely spoke about collaborating on projects. But it's happening thanks to the love, sweat, tears and effort of those 500 people, not really 4iP. Just having that shared situational awareness of who's doing what and how you might be able to help make it better is worth its weight in gold.

Cross-posted at 38minutes

UK Government Research: Web 2.0 does improve learning

New research from Scotland and the UK Government shows that Web 2.0 and gaming can and do make a difference to educational attainment and student experience.

Since the birth of most "web 2.0" technology in the past six years I've been there gathering and even doing some of the research into whether it offers up any improvements on pedagogy and/or student experience in the classroom. It's not stopped healthy questioning of the validity of data, normally in midflow during a keynote, but there has always been a layer of distrust in stats and research that has not been peer reviewed, to the extent that there has been a great excuse for the lack of change by haughty educators and States that don't want to make the effort.

So I'm delighted that colleague Derek Robertson and University of Dundee researcher David Miller have, through their large-scale study, found that playing 20 minutes of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training every day is much more likely to improve attainment and speed of calculation in mathematics (up to 50% faster than the control group). Their results are to be peer-reviewed, hence the frustrating but necessary wait for the graphs, stats and data.

Furthermore, Becta's research into Web 2.0's impact in the classsroom, for which I presented the opening keynote at the expert seminar earlier this year, has just been completely published, and shows

• Web 2.0 helps to encourage student engagement and increase participation – particularly among quieter pupils, who can use it to work collaboratively online, without the anxiety of having to raise questions in front of peers in class – or by enabling expression through less traditional media such as video.
• Teachers have reported that the use of social networking technology can encourage online discussion amongst students outside school.
• Web 2.0 can be available anytime, anywhere, which encourages some individuals to extend their learning through further investigation into topics that interest them.
• Pupils feel a sense of ownership and engagement when they publish their work online and this can encourage attention to detail and an overall improved quality of work. Some teachers reported using publication of work to encourage peer assessment.

You can read the full research report online, which includes some input from myself and colleague Matt Locke at Channel 4. The recommendations state that all teachers need to be given more significant time to do more complex work with Web 2.0 in their classrooms, directing students learning in these tools. It also, thankfully, helps us see realistically what students do with technology.

Above all comes the caveat that we must not over romanticise what young people are capable of doing with technology without the structure of learning and teachers acting as guides on the side.

Fascinating stuff on which to start building more daring policies. Essential reading for all those who lament the lack of interest in new technologies from "those up top".
Pic from David Muir, his blog is here.

Ben Saunders' Purple Haze a real inspiration to young people

In my final few hours in the tent, waiting for the helicopter and staring into the abyss of self-pity, I had a wonderfully apt text message on my satphone from a dear friend, Oli Barrett. “Stories about journeys”, he wrote, “are always better than ones about arrivals.” So this, then, is a story about a journey but not an arrival. At least not where I expected to end up, anway.

Ben Saunders came up against it in his high-speed attempt to cross to the North Pole. His journey, though, has not been in vain, not from his perspective of having tried to do something no-one had done quite as quickly yet, and not from the perspective of some students who picked up his trail after reading about the race against the clock on this blog.

Lorraine Leo, who I bumped into on a cruise around Boston Harbour last year, has been using real-life adventurers in her classroom for years, namely Skipper Rich Wilson, the solo global sailor. Having left a comment on Ben's blog, and emailed several others from students, each with their own inspired takeaway, Ben responded within ten minutes to them, with his own personal message of thanks.

The thing is, from both perspectives - Ben's, alone somewhere on the ice, and the students, inspired and amazed by this one man's nerve - the exchange was a winner. And nothing like this could have happened without the whole combination of technologies bringing text (the blog), photography (Flickr) and video.

School Of Everything moves to next level

I was delighted to hear from Jemima that friends and colleagues at School of Everything secured some proper funding to get their plans off to a larger scale, thanks to Esther Dyson, Rocco Pellegrinelli and JP Rangaswami, with more from the Young Foundation and Channel 4 Education (disclosure: I'm on the Education Advisory Board of C4).

Last month I met up with Andy (far left) and Dougald (far right) in a happy-go-lucky eatery off Leicester Square to chat about the project, and reassure them that they were doing something that a) was what education was about, b) was of worth and c) would work with enough people on board. I also shared some of the things we reckon helped to get eduBuzz, the learning/social platform project I helped kick off in East Lothian, off the ground and into that nice parabolic curve of success.

School of Everything is everything that large, national, organised projects can't be (sorry: been reading Shirky, and can't shake his 'tude). It helps those who have something to teach find someone who wants to learn, and those who want to learn find someone to teach them it. Actually, it's exactly what Glow could do tomorrow if we had the time to put it into action or paid School of Everything to do it for us. (Note to self: have a word). It does all this without organising people into groups, without making you go down one route (teacher) without being another (learner). It accepts that teachers and learners often want to teach and learn lots of diverse things (Yoga, French, Magic, Corporate Accounting). They make their money by taking a slice of any online payments that are made for tuition, although many of the site's current 1000 users (including me) teach some stuff for free.

In the next 12 months the gang hope to scale from 1000 users to 100,000, something they need to do to really get the site to work properly in the first place: we need to see enough learners and teachers wanting to share their skills there to see if the concept will take off. Hopefully the £350,000 in new cash will help employ some bods or thinking power to generate more interest.

In the meantime, if you want to read about one vision of "21st Century learning" (arghh) that really makes the cut, then check out Elevator Pitch's interview and don't forget to join the School of Everything this weekend.

E-Scapes - taking eportfolios to the next (formative) level

Does your technology make learning better? Does it make assessment better? Does it make learning more enjoyable? These are the key questions asked by Professor Richard Kimbell from Goldsmiths when he's looking at technology, and he found a problem with all three in e-portfolios. They need to change.

Currently, performance portfolios are created as an end result of project work. With teachers who are increasingly aware and communicating what will gain a good grade, we end up with a project and therefore a portfolio which are not real, which are fiction, which have no real sense. It is, says Kimbell, one of the reasons girls do better than boys - girls have more patience and creativity for presenting the results in a well-finished manner.

Cue Project E-Scape: this project was about generating real-time performance portfolios and finding new ways of assessing them. Initially, the idea began on paper.

A change in pedagogy
The tasks are real: repackaging lightbulbs to make the packaging reusable and multifunctional. The results: the box should be hexagonal, with a taper for the narrow end of the bulb. If you get enough of them you would end up with a sphere to surround the lightbulb. You can cut the ends to create lettering or animals which are then projected around the wall. Their projects are entitled "Your name in lights" or "Jack-In-A-Box light". You can see an example of project in this video.

Students, in their projects, are handed a script by the teacher, which choreographs their activity but does not dictate it. It's a scaffold for some improv. These students end up working like engineers, with the teacher in a technician role: "you could do it this way, or that way, or this way. It's your call". Teachers hate it, seeing their role reduced in some way from the sage on the stage to very much the guide on the side.

The need to make assessment digital
The project became digital as a result of an argument, an argument between two students about where their project should go. If only the teacher could capture that discussion it would make such a difference to the final assessment, providing a way to fill a gap in the learning process which is rarely assessed, if at all.

E-Portfolios, though, have three core problems. Firstly, they are generally works of fiction, created in a sterile ICT suite or on a laptop in a students' bedroom, not in the workshop or art room where the action (and learning) was happening. Secondly, It's a secondhand activity, digitally constructed as an afterthought to the learning itself. Finally, what kids tell you they're learning is different from what they write down in a portfolio.

So, E-Scapes asked if they could capture, in a portfolio, the learning that was happening in typical, messy, complex classrooms. They answered with handheld learning devices and collaborative co-creation of ideas: ideas are created, swapped around and extended by team-mates. As work is done, step-by-step, the work is uploaded dynamically to the e-portfolio website. Each stage of the learning 'build' can be accessed in a browse mode, or examined in greater detail. It's real-time, so the teacher can see and hear everything, all of the time, act on the spot or react later. You can see more of the process in this video.

How can this be assessed?
One potential methodology is based upon the law of comparative judgement. Think about eye tests, where we are asked which spot is sharper, the one on the left or the one on the right? We've only got two options, so we answer which one is better, without considering or knowing why. Taking this further, the E-Scape team, with their especially hard-to-judge non-identical projects, is to use a comparative pairs methodology (pdf). On a very simplistic level, assessment from seven judges is carried out on pairs of projects at a time, each judge marking 17 pieces of work. The judges decide which one is better, and move onto the next pair for the first round.

In a second round, the 'core' of median performances are taken and worked on further to create a rank order of evenly spaced performances. Using the resulting curve of performance, grade boundaries can be created retrospectively to award a grade, and the margin of error between the highest and lowest opinion of judges can be seen as clear as a whistle. These large margins of error are down to judges disagreeing, so these portfolios need to be pulled out and looked at further. We can also look at the judges and how consensual each one is with the rest of the judging team (the principle of moderation, which Scottish schools already practice). Those who are too harsh or too 'easy' can stimulate discussion as to why a project might be more or less strong. So this formative assessment informs the judges and teachers.

The reliability coefficient of all this? 0.93% It's virtually faultless, and no assessment system anywhere else comes close to getting this realistic in its outcomes. The team are working now on the third phase pairs being selected automagically after each judgement has been made, making sure that the process is as efficient as possible.

If you want to take more away from this model, the innovation in teaching, learning and assessment, I cannot recommend highly enough the interim reports on the TERU website: Phase 1 and Phase 2. You might also want to watch this 30 minute programme on new e-assessment ideas, where the E-Scape project is featured, and follow Professor Kimbell in discussion on the assessment element of the project in this programme.

Pic: Moleskin PDA

Community-building - why bottom-up alone doesn't work

For the hard of understanding: this is not, as Stephen seems to think, a defense of some kind of 'web aristocracy', as very recent posts would make clear. It's expanding some metaphors in a bid to find out how even small 'bottom-up' communities thrive, and whether there is always a central 'core' who are pushing and directing things.

It's a myth to believe that purely bottom-up culture will lead to any form of truly successful community. Purely bottom-up communities are, ironically, difficult for newbies to infiltrate and, once in them, hard for anyone to have their voice heard.

Stuart, from the NCSL, left a really worthwhile and considered comment on my last post, where I was considering why people would want to join a state-administered community at all. He points out the vital role of the top-down working in harmony with bottom-up passions:

"Large, nationally-run initiatives are successful too if they influence the culture in a more ambient fashion, if they encourage people to learn from what can be found within them - creative tools and the opportunity to connect with like-minded people - and then they go off and build their own networks, spaces and connections online.

"There's a role for institutions modelling and supporting these tools and behaviours, giving teachers a kind of first class ticket into a network they don't have to build from scratch like lego. Isn't eduBuzz an example of just such an initiative to kick start a networking culture?"

Indeed, eduBuzz was built in both a bottom-up fashion by being invitational (you were invited to sign up and share, not ordered or expected to) and open door (our Board meetings were Open Meetings - anyone could come along, whether part of the Local Authority or not, teacher or parent...). But there was also a degree of top-down management of the community, which I catalogued in last summer's series of talks at BLC07. What kind of actions were top-down? Here are some:

• We provided a portal page, to let people know what the principle aims of the teaching and learning policy were.
• We provided one web address where people could go to learn why they might want to share online, find others doing so in their field or geographical area and start sharing themselves.
• We helped connect people who 'should' have known about each other, but maybe didn't, being teachers with busy schedules and not as much time to read the panoply of blogs, wikis and podcasts coming out of the local teacher population. (I guess this backs up Andrew Keen's point that innovation comes from individuals rather than the digital crowd.)
• The Head of Education (now Director of Children's Services and Education) had created his own blog: the messages from this are often top-down, managerial, decision-making related, but coupled with the bottom-up approach of seeking comment and accord.
• We provided training sessions on digital new media - podcasting, filming, photography, blogging, animation - and used these as a means to encourage people to share the results in the online community.

eduBuzz has experienced a level growth (5000% a lot per year) well above more organic completely bottom-up communities with the same aim (for the previous 18 months the area's online community had stagnated), and was strongly linked to the image, vibe and ethos of a geographical place: East Lothian. It certainly offers all the advantages of being an essentially bottom-up community but with the direction and purpose of top-down.

Stuart's comment makes me think of what Charlie Leadbetter was talking about on Monday night (after I had written my previous post) in his tête-à-tête with Andrew Keen. In a chapter of his new book, We-Think, that wasn't published, he talks about cities, both those designed on a bottom-up settler tribal ethos (e.g. Lagos) and those designed on a purely top-down state-controlled basis (e.g. Shanghai). Neither extreme works particularly well, with one a chaotic, crime-ridden, slow-developing sprawl and the other a successful burgeoning but not particularly human-friendly concrete jungle. You can hear more of Charlie about the role of users and consumers in his TED Talk from 2005.

I'm waiting on my review copy of We-Think to arrive in the post, but I think it may provide some leads on where our various 'state-controlled' online communities might stand in the future, and how much of that leash needs to be slackened to ensure both the unthreatening and helpful intervention from 'them up there', to help those at the bottom get the most out of them and the people in those communities.

And where does this leave my analogy of the bothy as the enviable bottom-up community that we might want to emulate? Well, I guess there is actually a strong element of top-down in bothy culture: historical expectations. The people who use bothies are coming with a particular cultural and historical contextual baggage, expectations of how that bothy is used, how we treat others within it, and how we leave that community when we leave it. Likewise, those who choose to blog and stick with it come having done a little homework (reading others' blogs) and bring a set of expectations from history and culture that, ultimately, are top-down, coming from those who've been 'mastering' the art of writing or speaking through the medium. Blogs, wikis and bothies all have this hidden (or not-so-hidden) aristocratic history woven through them.

It's no mistake that Jimmy Wales has called 'his' wiki's Editors the 'aristocracy' of Wikipedia, with him as the Monarch. But it works. For him. Bottom-up, it seems, always requires a bit of state, monarch or Parliament, to make it work in the long term.

Pic: Shanghai