edublogs

5/5: Having a bash - social media gets social

This is the final element of five parts in a personal learning log review of 2007. It might be of  help to you, might not be. Bear with me, and normal service will be resumed...

In 2006 I had started to organise TeachMeets and various other informal unconferences for teachers and techies to talk about teaching, learning and technology, preferably with large doses of beer, bordeaux and blogs. I eventually got around to learning some of the things to do, and not to do, and the events continue to provide a safe haven for some of the most inspirational teachers to inspire and be inspired. In 2007 this continued apace:

January 7th and March 3rd: The inaugural BarCampScotland, which I helped create, was announced and ended up being a resounding success, with 150-odd attendees from across the tech and education industry meeting on common social media ground. December 15th, and the second BarCampScotland is announced for February 2nd 2008.

January 19th, and Edinburgh Coffee Morning began, every Friday from that point at 8am in Centotre. Since then, these coffee morning boys (and the occasional woman) have become great friends and allies as we try to get more social media projects undertaken in Scotland. It continues to be a source of inspiration, finds, community-building and trading of work.

On February 4th we talked about Glow, life, love, blogging and education in a Stormhoek-fuelled haze as Hugh MacLeod paid some Scottish edubloggers a visit in their local.

On April 30th I announced the third edition of TeachMeet to be taking place in Edinburgh on May 23rd: we had a great time and learned loads.

By June 23rd we were ready for some more learning and drinky-poos, hence the inaugural Beer 2.0. Such as success it was, we did Beer 2.0.1 the following week.

August 9th marked the first steps towards TeachMeet07, the fourth edition to be held at Glasgow's Science Centre on September 19th, and gnerously sponsored for the first time, by Channel 4, whose In The Wild event brought the discussion of young people's media habits to a wider audience still.

Almost simultaneously, we had calls and requests for England and Wales' first TeachMeet, at BETT on January 11th 2008.

This will also be the first job to get through on the return to work this January, and I hope to be able to see you in London on January 11th. I wonder what the main innovations will be in 2008. Maybe I'll try to predict something which eventually becomes true, or gets lost until next year's roundup. That, however, is at least one more year to put down to experience...

Related posts:
1/5: Hit or miss? Spotting innovation that's worth spotting
2/5: The changing ways of the public sector
3/5: eduBuzz: East Lothian online publishing increases 5000%
4/5: Building a business
5/5: Having a bash - social media gets social

blog.ac.uk Adoption Strategy

As I sit here printing out menus (download the .doc and just imagine you're eating it) for our wedding (and I've not even started on the name cards yet for the tables) I've managed to get some constructive work done on the Adoption Strategy for Social Software, taking the discussions from the conference and adding them to Suw Charman's starter for ten. I've not had time to get through the last few parts - not sure at which stage they would best fit in, but do feel free to help out by adding your own experiences and thoughts (including the things that didn't work out in your area).

Self as creator vs Self as worker

Is learning work? Is teaching work? There is a tension here in what we believe our schools would like us to be and what we would like to imagine ourselves to be. I had this out last night with a relative. Is going on a school trip work? Is having fun while learning not a job? But it relates directly to the teacher's perceived role in the social software space. "What is my role?", many educators today have asked. "What should we be blogging on? How to we get students to write, get them to be safe, get them to create accessible websites?"

But if, as we have been suggesting all day, we are looking to give learners the opportunity to direct their learning then what is the role of the teacher? Well, in order to teach you have to be the person you want your students to be. I was thinking the same thing this past month or so looking at Curriculum for Excellence. Turn these words on teachers and does the image fit:
'successful learners', 'effective contributors', 'confident individuals', 'responsible citizens'?

Being a responsible citizen means that we have to be honest with ourselves - and presumably those around us. If we want kids to keep learning logs, then we have to do the same. If we want them to enjoy learning then we have to enjoy the teaching, too.

Stephen Downes concludes: how I became (blog) literate

Stephen Downes, even with jetlag, is a charming presenter. We also have a lot in common, although my hair in no match for his. Stephen, like me, spent time (far too much time perhaps) writing in the student newspaper. Like me, Stephen learned how to type and listen at the same time in the student newspaper (I learned on the Pink sports report, which is no longer produced, sadly). And like me, Stephen became literate accidentally, through writing for pleasure.

What do we do when we read and listen? We fill in the blanks, listening out for what we get and inferring the rest. Literacy, Stephen argues using Thomas Kuhn, is filling in those blanks, knowing what to fill them in with. There must be a link here between literacy and culture, in order to know with what we fill these gaps.

Control appears to be the central cultural reference when we talk about social software in education (for once I stopped typing and may have got the wrong end of the stick - Stephen will correct me). Throughout the sessions today control was a hot topic and a tension. There is hierarchy and control built into every structure of the modern world, particularly in education, so there is a tension between working within the current system and working with what works. Barbara Ganley this morning said at one point that she had almost started to give up hope with this tension forever coming round to haunt her - "we can't do anything and we can do everything".

Change is not going to be us. The revolution is not going to be us. (Ben Hammersley would disagree). We will be the writers of the end of a generation as our students take on the change and revolution. So what is education doing to prepare the ground for these revolutionaries? We teach them to use spreadsheets, databases, what hyperlinks are and how to operate their mobile phone. We make them aware of content that is out there.

Of course, we teach ourselves things all the time and have to relearn things. When we see something we don't understand there's a gap in our learning - and when it's a gap we can't fill we see danger. And social software represents a gap. And it's a gap people find hard to fill. And so they see danger.

How private's private?

Should the use of communication tools in education take place in sterile, safe environments, or is this just setting kids up for an unrealistic expectation of what the real online world is like? What's the balance in achieving a "duty of care"? Is our duty of care to lock things down, keep it safe and not take responsibility outside school, or is our duty of care to look after children wherever they are and whenever they are there? If we do lock things down it appears to me that there are two things going on:

1. The kids have an unrealistic idea of what the real online world is like
2. The teachers believe that they can leave the kids loose online because it's 'safe'.

Update: I like David's point about riding bikes. I think my own view is that, too. Yanish has also pointed out that we would normally spend time riding along with our children on the road until they can do it alone - and even then there might be accidents. But I don't know how many teachers feel capable or enthusiastic behind accompanying their students on the web in this way.

Student engagement in social software outside school context

Student engagement in social software outside the school context is / will be different to the interactions within school. Take, for example, the average MySpace or Beboer. Look at the people they are friends with through their profile. Don't they look alike, like the same things? In school, though, in a classroom there is far less choice as to whom you connect to, so groups perhaps reflect more diverse types of person. But is it education's job to wade in here and try to help students better decide how they use their social space, what information to share, how to use it to learn?

It would seem logical to involve students' MySpace or Bebo - their 'real life' online space. If we don't, and therefore devalue their private online space by insisting on sole use of the institutional online space (school-run blog or wikis for example) for 'serious' school work, will kids not do what kids do, and use their own space to do what they want anyway? And will what they produce on the 'serious' learning space not be false, of a lesser quality, because it's not at all integrated into their own private life?

So how could we get students' online spaces to be more integrated, whether they are official (in school) or personal (on MySpace or Bebo)? One solution, suggested by Ian Usher, IT coordinator from Buckinghamshire, is just to get people to know how to tag things. If a student wants something to appear in their personal e-learning portfolio they just have to tag it in a particular way. That way, the students can work on their own personal space almost exclusively (such as MySpace) but contribute simultaneously to their 'serious' area.

My head's throbbing,  but I'm going to add to this as the session goes on...

Getting social - creating an effective adoption strategy

We're just about to start this session, going on until 12.15. If you have a suggestion or success story of implementing social software (blogs, wikis, podcasts) in your area or institution please do share it on the wiki. Also, feel free to Skype in using the Skype button on my blog if you want to join the discussion.

WYSIWYG Teaching

One of the audience Vishay Mar has just coined this phrase, WYSIWYG Teaching, to describe how some teachers view blogs. They think that what they see on the blogs is it, everything, tutti, not realising or appreciating the teaching that has gone on in the classroom behind this and how different this teaching is to the chalk and talk and feeble group work (i.e. not true collaborative work where students are in control) that some teachers still employ

Barbara backs this up by explaining how intense the activity in her classroom is. It seems that the blog allows the thought process time to develop which is denied in the intensity of the classroom. Intensity in the classroom; time to reflect on the blog?

One of the biggest issues is, of course, learners' (and parents') expectations of what learning is about. It is expected to be a "slightly unconfortable and boring process".

How to effect change in teaching and learning

Where many many institutions "wear garlic around their necks and lock the doors" when it comes to using social software what is the role of edubloggers?

Well, it is down to us to provide examples of where things work and why, and when they don't work and why. (We always hear success stories of social software in the classroom - what of all the times it doesn't work out?) We need to provide models and advice, as we are the ones doing it - not the institutions (yet).

This reminds me of a conversation I had at work, where I was told by a very senior manager that it was potentially dangerous to promote blogging when there is no advice. The implication was that we shouldn't recommend something until the Scottish Executive had provided guidance. And he also suggested that there was no place for a (mere) blogger like me to provide that guidance. Was he right or is it really the place of the community to lead this? I know what I believe.

On the other hand, a colleague in East Lothian provided this succinct view of internet filtering:

My school has an Internet use policy that says that pupils should never be given unsupervised access to the Internet. I expect all education authorities are the same. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but given this I see no need for filtering, or at the very least we should have a filtering system that can easily be switched off by a teacher for a particular IT suite at a particular time.

If our main priority is to cover our backsides against the risk of litigation, then massive, "if in doubt block it" style filtering is an excellent idea. But if our main priority is education, then we should always approach filtering from an "if in doubt, allow access" point of view, with appropriate safeguards in terms of teacher supervision.

Let's face it. No filtering system is 100% effective. The presence of web filtering simply leads teachers to believe that it is safe to let pupils roam the web unsupervised, which is clearly a recipe for disaster.

I think this debate is related to the current Amnesty International campaign: http://irrepressible.info/

Good learning blogging

• Create a strong and flexibile fabric that can adapt to the group
• Do not get seduced by the technology - provide the educational structures to make the tool resilient even when things don't work out the way they should.
• Provide a mother blog, where the teacher can bring in suggested resources, including blogs from previous classes, and aggregate the best work produced by students. The teacher can help carry the experiences of one group to another. Get the students learning from each other. The transparency and connectiveness of a mother blog allows this to happen very easily, giving students the opportunity to make new connections.
• The mother blog becomes a place of quality amid the drafts, trials and efforts of students. It becomes an aspirational place to be.
• Individual blogs provide an opportunity to privately mess around in your own space, making your learning personally relevant finding links to our own previous work. We can learn from ourselves, as well as from others.
• Teacher input: keep to a minimum to avoid the image of teacher as authority. As soon as a teacher gets in on commenting on blog posts the teacher becomes the only one they will listen to. The feedback comes in other ways: email, private conferences, in class.
• Video and auditory sides of blogs are of equal importance to the written word. Podcasting makes an interesting tool for encouraging reflective practice, reading one's own work out.

BG Blogging Speaking

Peter Ford snaps Barbara

Barbara Ganley's approach to speaking is different to most. Peter might use live blogging in his presentations but Barbara uses iMovie to tell a digital story as she opens. Very refreshing.

Memorable moments and  why blogging happens
She's asking us to think about memorable moments from our educations and to relate to how these might affect the fact we are here today at a blog conference. Here are my memories, the first ones that come into my head:

• Nursery School years:
  Eating tomato soup for the first time, sharing the surprise at how tasty it was
• Primary School years:
  Writing a 12-page project on the hydro electric plant, where the turbines were 80 times taller than me (I was a small 11 year old).
• Secondary School years:
  Playing in the school orchestra at the school prizegiving, the first time my friends had heard me play. It was the best concert I had ever played.
• University years:
  writing until 3am every week on a Tuesday night for the Student newspaper, and nearly failing second year because of it.

What do these memories have to do with my blogging today? Everything. There's some degree of discovering something that is pleasurable for me and which I want to share, from tomato soup to shocking stories from campus.

Children are already engaged in the same kind of world, sharing their experiences online instead of or as well as in school books or student (print) newspapers. Yet, as Will pointed out, schools are still

about control, not sharing. We are still about distribution, not aggregation. We are still about closed content rather than open. We are static, not fluid. The idea that each of our students can play a relevant, meaningful, important role in the context of these networks is still so foreign to the people who run schools. And yet, more and more, they are creating their own networks, sharing, aggregating, evolving to the disdain of the traditional model of schooling that is becoming more and more irrelevant.

As Peter has pointed out in several talks: students demand to be connected and to communicate.

For Barbara, five years ago as she started out blogging with her students, it seemed so obvious. Before blogging her students' work was predictable, safe, dull and not preparing them for the world outside. Yet, outside school the students were connecting and interacting with multimedia. Barbara needed to bring this connectivity into the classroom, moving beyond the facile connections between family and friends and providing something where they could really connect to the wider world.

These students watched their skills develop as their work, their thinking was taken seriously. After all, it had a real audience who respected what they wrote. Nobody can complain about the results (in ethos and in grades) - everything improved. Even those who don't like to blog or who don't do it very well get dragged along by the group (the team?). The bloggers are those who are proving to be most successful in the college-wide scheme of things.

From the teaching stage to the learning circle.
This is how Barbara describes her changing role as she blogged with students. But things are changing again. Accountability is the reason Barbara gives for teachers turning away from this medium of social software. Or using new technology to do old things.  Students complain about doing "stupid stuff" with computers, going through the motions. It's the "technology façade".

If you're using these technologies there is no choice but to use connective collaborative teaching. Bloggers give up a whole lot of control, something Don Ledingham was sharing with Head Teachers  in East Lothian just two days ago.

In fact, how much is this just like real life?

More coming soon...