Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Learning

Tweeting for Teachers: Improving CPD through social media [Pearson & NoTosh report]

It's six months since Tom Barrett came on board with me on Ship NoTosh, and in that time we've done a hugely varied amount of work, much of it under wraps due to the nature of our clients, and some of it high profile.

In the latter camp, we were delighted last week to launch Tweeting for Teachers, a report (that covers a lot more than Twitter) showing policymakers and school leaders some simple recommendations that will help more teachers than ever uncover the potential for turbo-boosting their own professional development through the use of social media and offline unconference events, such as TeachMeet and its younger cousin EdCamp. From the NoTosh blog:

Tweeting for Teachers – key recommendations

School leaders should:

1. learn about and engage with the social platforms that their teachers, parents and pupils are using every day;
2. use a social media tool as part of their communications with the school community;
3. validate and support their staff in using social media tools for ongoing professional development;
4. turn online activity into offline actions, in order to harness the benefits of face to-face interaction alongside those of online interaction;
5. implement robust systems for evaluating the impact of CPD on teacher effectiveness and student outcomes.

National and local policymakers should:

1. publish guidelines and support for teachers and leaders to help them use social media in schools;
2. consider how they will begin to unfilter social media sites for use in schools;
3. recognise and celebrate self-directed professional learning by teachers using online tools, and the role of social media in this learning;
4. create a common online space where the whole education community can find each other;
5. ensure that all Initial Teacher Training courses demonstrate a strong focus on the use of social media tools for ongoing professional development.

NoTosh undertook a significant piece of working in bringing together case studies of teachers and heads who are effectively using social media to take control of their own professional development, and making these accessible through film as well as integration to the report.

The report is one seeking feedback for constant improvement – starting with the 500 tweets during the one hour launch event – and films will continue to be shot and uploaded to the report over the next weeks and months.

 

We also undertook case studies of how businesses are using social media for professional development, and what education could learn from this. Finally, we developed recommendations for how teachers, heads and policymakers could further exploit the potential of social media to help teachers develop in a cost-effective way.

  

There are plenty more videos that I may well find the time to go through on the blog, but you can dive in yourself over on Vimeo now and come back over the next few weeks as more education and business video case studies are added. You can read the report on the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning site, and read more about our role in building it on the NoTosh blog.

Culture Popped: what can pop culture teach museums, the arts and education about engagement?

Culture Popped: Digital media in the cultural & museum sector

View more webinars from Ewan McIntosh.

Success with digital media for museums, education and cultural organisations isn't about scrambling to sign up to the latest fads, those teasmades of technology, and more about attitudes of organisations and the individuals within them. What are the handles we can grab hold of to begin or better develop our journeys into digital media use in the world of exhibition, performances or engagement of new audiences?

A couple of weeks ago I opened the Digital Futures conference, part of a project exploring how social media interfaces with museums, galleries and other cultural heritage organisations, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, National Museums Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland.

The presentation is now up on Slideshare, and above.

It tries to make a few points, some more successfully than others, no doubt. Key amongst them:

• how to institutions do better what is now so easy for everyman to do?
• is there anything to be learned from the world of startups where coming up with a compelling problem that needs solved?
• what are the problems museums manage to solve? Do they need to think in that way at all?
• what potential is there for cultural organisations to open themselves up to new audiences by tackling the same content and ideas in alternative ways and on different platforms?

Thinking our way out of over-engineering solutions

Free and unregulated cycle schemes sound like an impossible nightmare that we could never really make happen: someone will steal the bikes, they'll end up all over the country. Institutions therefore rally around and make it their business, quite literally, to provide secured bicycles for rental so that people cycle more.

It all seems so logical, but it's the kind of (successful but expensive) thinking from an old model of paternalistic "what can your country do for you", while some of the most exciting ideas, web platforms, institutions and technologies in the past five years have been all about "here's a platform, now what can you do for your country/peer group/friends".

I wanted to explore what a new business model around the old problem of bike sharing schemes might look like.

The $10,000 bike, versus the $150 bike

London's "free" bike scheme cost the locals and sponsors Barclays £25m for a programme that will run for x years. The cost per bicycle is therefore £4166. It's been a hugely successful scheme, with its millionth ride clocked up in just 10 weeks, and hardly any have been stolen (the bikes are a good bit heavier than Paris', where nearly 70% have been stolen or vandalised and required replacing).

But £4166 seems a lot for one bike, with Mayor Boris' £25m giving him only 6000 or so bikes. How much more powerful could things be if we did away with the expensive secutiy measures, expensive (heavy and cumbersome) bikes, big IT that supports such a project (and breaks down) and replaced them with the cheapest bike we can find, no security measures and a good dose of trust in our citizens, providing 163,000 bikes instead?

It wouldn't work here [insert any Western country].

Paris shows us that vandalism and theft of their cute with-basket model was a costly mistake. London has "beaten" its Gaullic neighbour with its highly secure and tech-ed up solution. Countless others, including some who've already tried totally unregulated free cycle schemes, have floundered, seeing all their bikes stolen in months.

But then Mountain View, California, sees its streets relatively free of the automobile (we are in the land of the automobile, after all). Most people opt to take one of the free red-yellow-blue-and-green bikes their main employer leaves unlocked, lying around. Why is Google able to do what entire Governments seem unable to achieve?

Is it cultural? It's partly that, but Google have done something that Governments are notoriously poor at: it's generated the culture it wanted, a culture of mutual respect, a culture of the gift economy, both through its business model, large free lunches and orange juices for visitors, staff and the visitors' taxi drivers, but also through its bike sharing scheme. We'll gift you this bike - and keep replacing them - but in return we ask you not to take us for a metaphorical ride.

And it works. It works, I think, because these bikes are everywhere and they're fun. They've been gifted by a neighbour of yours in the city, not provided for you.

So, if we were to take the Paris or London models, what is the answer to stopping people stealing bikes and having them appear all around the country? I'd argue that if Governments want people to take the bike and not the car, that's no bad thing. In fact, if we can harness thiefs as the distribution network for one bike per citizen, then I'd see more cash heading into the core solution to the problem: more bikes for people who don't yet bike.

As in Mountain View, there comes a point where the proliferation of an idea or an object turns it from scarce valued thing into a commodity. It lets everyone know where the bike came from - it's been beautifully painted in the company colours. Let's get our nations cycling to work (and cycling for play) by making cycling a cheap commodity. We used to give £250 for every child that was born. What would happen if we give a £100 bike for every adult who wants one?

More importantly, though, how could we harness the Google lesson I think I've spotted, in making public services gifted to people, rather than provided for them? What would the social fall-out be in terms of changing this language? What would the advantages be?

Nick Hood suggests that one of the education assumptions we have in the Western world is that education is a right; he asks "what would happen if we said that education was a privilege" or, in Google words, a gift?

 

Related articles

• In praise of Boris's bikes | Editorial (guardian.co.uk)
• Cycling surges in the land of the automobile (bbc.co.uk)

[Book Review]: Yes We Did, Rahaf Harfoush

Rahaf Harfoush's "front row seat" on the Obama campaign's social media tactics and strategy, along with skills honed in the researching of Tapscott's Wikinomics, make her timeline of digital prowess and must-read for anyone in the marketing, comms, community-building or campaigning line of work. For the rest, it's a fascinating look into the actual role of technology in the famous election campaign, and how "tech toys" were really about inspiring offline community-building and fundraising.

Some would say the book is too simplistic, but I think it's just simple: describing social media tactics for what they are, as simple, reflective and responsive actions rather than a grand strategy only gurus can prepare. If the book reads itself quickly, it's thanks to a clear, consistent design (from Scott Thomas, Obama's design lead, talking here about that experience at Behance's 99%) and a writing style that breaks everything down to its simplest components. This makes it great for those not running large marketing, comms or media budgets, but for those of us who seek to make small iterative steps in the longer term.

She takes us through

• how simple thoughts on branding, and providing branding elements for fans to use, was a solid grounding from which to build online services;
• how social networking elements went to existing groups and networks rather than trying to recreate everything from scratch;
• the power of email, potentially the central tool in the campaign;
• the emerging potential of text messaging to influence and cajole;
• how blogs were used to give a voice to many people in the campaign, not just to broadcast about me, me, me...
• some of the techniques to make the most of video (i.e. produce lots of it, regularly);
• how analytics proved a vital element in understanding how to communicate with the audience.

Harfoush spoke last week at Lift in Geneva on the power of social networking in the campaign (I spoke there two years ago on the power of social networking for learning communities) but, as Kevin Anderson points out in the first comment on Stephanie Booth's liveblog of the talk, it wasn't the newer, more social technologies that wielded the greatest impact on the political journey - it was email. Once again, it is the lowest common denominator technology that makes the biggest impact, something both Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody and Esther Dyson have picked up on, the latter putting it as:

sometimes we call intuitive what is really just familiar.

You can follow Rahaf on Twitter, see her speak at Alan November's BLC2010 conference this summer, or buy her book at the Store.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rahaf Harfoush on the Lessons Learned From The Social Obama Campaign (engagedlearning.net)
• Obama's social media campaign: Proof by the millions (marsdd.com)
• Lift10 Politics: The Technological and Social Trends Impacting Politics (Rahaf Harfoush) (climbtothestars.org)

Finding a shareable vision II: "Get Our Kids Into College"

Continuing on from the stimulus of an English chef who knows his vision - to eradicate obesity - and wants us to "pass it on", I saw this piece on a US school making a huge difference to its learners' potential futures:

"I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," King said. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college."

While I don't think anyone in his school would argue that they are not also about producing "rounded individuals", "a caring environment" and all the other edu-fluff that we see in mission statements from schools and curricula, this school CEO in Chicago, working with an all-male, all-black school population in a deprived area, knows exactly what vision he wants achieved.

The next action for every member of that school community - teachers, parents, students even - is clear: get our kids into college.

You might not agree with it being the core aim, and we don't know what the next step of each individual might be (exam-bashing? constant revision? inquiry-led learning? who knows...), but at least the vision is clear and tangible. At least people know what to do, in concert with each other. What's your vision going to be?

Personal projects are often worth more than professional ones. What's stopping you?

It's all too easy to relegate our personal projects to the bottom of the pile until "the day job" is complete. The result? We nearly always end up having to leave creative, fun, new projects behind in the interest of ticking someone else's boxes, when those same personal projects could be the very innovation that make the difference.

Ji Lee was fed up with his life as an ad exec when he decided to engage the public in parodying that very same world, printing out 50,000 speech bubble stickers and placing them over ads around New York City. Over time, the public took the lead in inventing political or comical speech to make the parody. The ultimate parody in this project is, of course, that ad agencies used them to further promote their products. He spins a good yarn in his 99% video.

A personal project that took Ji Lee's name to the world and helped him find a seat as Director of Google's Creative Labs.

What's your personal project, and what's stopping you just getting on with it?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Finding Inspiration in Cereal (blogs.hbr.org)
• Ji Lee: 10 Levels of Intimacy (joshspear.com)

edu.blogs.com in Wall Street Journal. So what?

A fascinating and personal insight into the Long Tail in action. Earlier this week I appeared alongside illustrious company in the Wall Street Journal. However, I can't even find the referrals from there in the first few pages of my stats, with links from Google search, other educators and, lo-and-behold, Twitter, knocking the American giant of the printing press off into stat result obscurity.

There are, as usual, a lot of people typing the address into their browsers directly, but no discernible difference from normal numbers. Indeed, there's even been a 400 person decline in my subscription numbers since starting work at Channel 4 (evidently there's a great mistrust of thoughts coming from those who turn to the dark side of the media), a figure that's not buoyed by the one-hit clickers of the WSJ readership.

Conclusion? It's more worthwhile cultivating online and offline relationships with people than relying on large institutions' pull of strangers with no tangible digital breadcrumbs of their own. Here endeth the lesson.
Pic from Superamit

Bill Boyd's 'Literacy Adviser' on Mixed Metaphor

  Bill Boyd 
  Originally uploaded by Edublogger

Scotland might not win the World Cup of Football but we must come somewhere up the top for getting our football metaphors into every conversational opportunity.

Bill Boyd is a colleague at Learning and Teaching Scotland who's been working on our Literacy guidelines, some of the first in the world to mention the importance of understanding texts in all their digital forms. He's just started blogging and his latest post encapsulates his sense of humour, and slight affection methinks for the lesser-known Scottish mixed metaphor.

His blog's great fun, and after taking some advice in getting started his Google Juice is running high: Literacy Adviser.

More thoughts on using social media in business

I'm spending a day with some folk from Scottish Enterprise, Scotland's highly successful economic development agency. We're taking a look at how some of the older ideas I've been developing on social media for small, medium and large companies might work north of the Border. I'll be keen to see if we can maybe develop some new innovative ideas on making these tools work harder for Scottish enterprises.

National education agency on YouTube, Blip and GoogleVids

My employer, "the main organisation for the development and support of the Scottish curriculum", has this week launched its own YouTube channel.

OK, it only took a few minutes to do, but the will to do this in the first place, coming from Scotland's national education agency, should be a powerful message to all education authorities around the world: you can and you should be looking at how all technologies might provide an opportunity for learning and teacher development.

We've had GoogleVideo clips since last September, although most of the material is for proof of concept and is from the East Lothian area. We've also just opened a Blip.TV channel which should be more accessible in schools and which, I think, has a nicer interface than anything else - just need to fill that one up a bit. Once again, we're avoiding that big project, big launch thing. We just hope that we can get some even more interesting video out there over the next year - it's not like events such as the Learning Festival don't provide enough ;-) When we've got that we might make a little bit of a song and dance about it (we'll video the song and dance, of course).

The advent of TeacherTube should mean that we get in there, too, and we probably will. But part of me also thinks we should be engaging with 'real' tools first and foremost, not slightly phony 'safe' schooly curricular ones, where the quality of content is just as debatable as on non-schooly versions and doesn't seem to be kid-friendly. Judy's got a resounding silence to people who use it successfully in lessons, and I don't think it's really helping answer the real question: do teachers know how to exploit video online in a safe way? The answer, as Leon Cych hints, is probably not: how many of those kids in the videos have written sign-off from their parents, as East Lothian teachers have now been empowered to do? In the 21st century informal learning, not the formal stuff, will become the way the vast majority of lifelong learners will get their fix. Is creating a new silo of information which is deemed more valuable because of its 'safeness' worthwhile?

Clearly I don't think so, and, for once, we've got a public organisation making a very public statement on its intentions and desires with new technology: use what the kids use, use what engages them, and educate them about it in school.

In the time it takes Local Authorities to get this you can still capture YouTube videos from home to 'takeaway' into school. And innovative teachers like Neil Winton are realising that if you can't beat 'em with cool (and still highly useful and entertaining) school trip blogs, then join 'em in their Bebo pages as they discuss what happened on the trip. The discussion is on the same thing, just in a different place.

Meanwhile, what kind of videos would you find of interest from your (inter)national education provider? More of the same? I'd hope that we might also have some new ideas to bring to you through the box, but maybe the next big idea is from you. And, yes, we will see you on Bebo soon ;-)