edublogs

danah boyd on handheld social networking

"New technology is the devil incarnate. We should go back to the good old days"
"New technology is the panacea we've been looking for."

The reality is much more nuanced than that. It's not about the good or the bad (it's not about pedagogy vs technology, the unfortunately entitled panel session I'll be on later).

danah boyd is talking about teaching young people to think, by taking a look through the viewfinder of social networks and the mobile devices we are already and will increasingly use to access, connect and share on.

It's about teaching young people to think. The reason we taught literature, film, mathematics in the past was to provide a reason for people to think. The introduction of technology alone will not necessarily help young people think. Worse still, technology is seen as a means of unleashing new cash, in a cynical way ("we have all Macs")

We don't just teach algebra to teach algebra. We teach it to help understand the world around us. When we think about teaching (with) technology we have to think about how it fits into this world around us.

That's hard.

Technology is fundamentally taking apart the world around us. Technology opens up the potential to access much stuff around the world, with the teacher and their rear view mirror allowing the context and meaning of that to be brought to light.

The contexts of social networks
Social networking sites have three core structures that make them work:
1. Profile
When we enter a room we tend to take some thought about decorating ourselves: what we wear, do we put on that tie...? Online we are an IP address, a rather undecoratable unappealing code. Therefore, where we create a SNS profile we're taking some care to create a presentation of ourselves within a space. Bedroom culture is the same, but on social networks it's amplified.

2. Friending
There are three clusters of behaviour: 30-40 friends, worried about their nearest and dearest. 300 friends are all the people they met at school, at church at the youth group. Very few teenagers collect Friends (politicians, music), reaching into the hundreds of thousands of friends. Mostly they're boys, collecting "hot girls". They're creating that list that, apparently, lots of boys used to make on paper.

But whether someone is your friend or just your Friend becomes socially awkward. In girl culture girls grew out of the habit of exchanging friendship bracelets to work the equivalent online.

3. The Wall
Comments, testimonials, the wall... in the early days of SNSes, people spoke in the third person about their friends (and still do on LinkedIn, inhabited by older professionals). Later, it began to be used as a space for conversation that complimented other places where conversation was going on (IM, chat).

Looking at it as a stream of text one could be mistaken as meaningless "how are you", "fine", "you?", "OK"...
What's going on is "public social grooming": it's a way to upkeep your social status as friend which, after all, is only a check box at the beginning of the online Friendship.

Why are young people spending so much time on MySpace?
We used to have permission from our parents to roam really far. Nowadays, the circle of navigation has been greatly reduced to the garden, out of public view. We've also tended to programme the lives of our young people more than we ever did, meaning we leave less time than ever for them to socialise.

Other characteristics of online interaction

• Persistence
• Replicability
• Unexpected scalability and visibility
• Invisible audiences
• Searchability. collapsed contexts (type of audience, rules of engagement, social scripts)
• Convergence of public and private

danah reckons than social network structures will go mobile soon, within two years. I would bank on them coming a lot sooner than that, given that many of those with the better phones can already and do already interact on their various SNSes through mobile. In the UK, 3G is cheaper and more ubiquitous than most places on the planet, so we can expect it sooner here.

Location-awareness is increasing, making the network part of social networking even stronger.

Knowledge is online, and when we don't know it first time around we access just in time when we're mobile.

Notes of her talk, as usual, riddled with errors and unreliability.

Dutch mobiles in primary school: turn that phone on!

In the pilot from Leiden Uni in Holland 4th gen phones were used to stimulate teacher and student reflection: VOD (video), POD (mp3-based) and Photo cams. The Homo Zappiens ideas from Wim Veen formed the basis for the study.

1st Assignment
Students and teachers were asked: What possibilities have you got for using cell phone in education?

2nd Assigment
Primary kids making a mobile phone cam alphabet, shooting objects which begin with each letter of the alphabet on the phone. These were collected in a VLE (could have been a blog or public webspace, of course, although here permission was asked from parents only to use the images internally) and then exploited as posters, for example.

Does using a mobile have an effect on thinking and reflection? The theory says yes: reinterpretation of experiences to come to a higher level of professional development (Dewey, Jay and Johnson)

The visual aspect of the phone (video and pics) helped students realise better where they could make improvements. When they couldn't believe or understand something the image, moving or still, could be brought up immediately from the pocket. But the filming and sharing of images did have to be stimulated - it didn't come naturally to teachers or students within the school environment.

And what about the money question? Well, the very pragmatic Dutch have no issues letting the parents and students pick up the tab of this apparently enhancing education experience. Is that such a bad thing?

Mobile tech and safety

Stephen Carrick-Davies, Chief Executive of ChildNet International is keen to promote the positive that handheld and connected technologies can offer but also spends the lion's share of its time responding to tens of thousands of questions from young people and parents about what info they give away online.

"If you took away my mobile phone you would take away part of me"

The argument about 'duty of care' is not the only one nowadays. Duty of care is about understanding why this technology is important and how to keep it safe without taking it away. You don't need to know how the combustion engine works to know that your kid has to wear a seatbelt.

The issues
Commerce: Invasion of privacy; Blur between advertising and information
Content: Inaccurate or extreme; self-created media
Contact: Unwanted contact, bullying, predators.

Social media is presenting some challenges because young people are not reporting inappropriate communication for fear of having their Bebo page confiscated or being seen as "being at fault" themselves.

Stephen has just said that he would like to get in touch and help out organisations and schools which want to engage with safety with children as young as nine years old. That's exactly what we are doing in East Lothian. And just as the chair has said happened to him when he last talked to Primary parents about safety, I have been disappointed at how few parents show up to sessions about the online safety of their kids. Can't wait to wag chins with Stephen on how we can make things better.

Andrew Watt on eLearning schools - the greatest challenge of the 21st Century?

Andrew Watt, one colleague who I always seem to meet in rushed conferences, is explaining his views on eLearning to a packed Robert Burns Room (yes, nice choice if seminar room for him ;-) I'm over the moon to be able to get to know him better through his talk.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth (Diogenes Laertius)
What has changed in eLearning since the beginning of time? Costs have lowered and the eskills of our kids have risen. There is an urgent need to radically reform in schools. It's not a superb sign of things to come when a child thinks the reason for learning is to "get a '5' in his tests".

There are four strands which are preventing teachers from taking a leap into this radical future:

• Content
  • Is something taught in schools simply because it's always been? How many times have any of us solved a quadratic equation for real in our adult lives? (Andrew is a maths teacher himself)
  • Does it meet the needs of the 21st century?
  • Can it meet the expectations of our 21st century learners? For example, are we going to simply repackage our Scottish Curriculum with the four labels of A Curriculum for Excellence or are we going to redesign the whole way we work?
• Assessment
  • Why assess only once a year at the nicest time of year to be outside and playing?
  • Why must we wait until a particular age to assess?
  • Why must we look at the sum of student knowledge in a two-hour stressful condition?
    All of these were suitable in the 19th Century, but with handheld devices and more ubiquitous computing assessment can happen in 'messy' ways and show that kids are able to reflect and think, not just regurgitate.
• Pedagogy
  • Are our teaching methods designed for 1970s applicable in the following century?
  • If our majority of teachers were trained in the 1970s-1980s their teacher trainers were trained in the 50s and 60s!
  • How do we change the teacher from "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side"? Why are we wasting time presenting information when kids can take their time - and go faster - finding the same information on the web.
• Infrastructure
  • Are we using buildings in the right way?
  • Are we using appropriate software tools to supplement teaching, and take the mundane procedures away from the teacher?
  • Have we got powerful enough network capability?
  • Why use handhelds to store info on hard disks when everything can be published online?

But, there's a BUT. Public attitudes and perceptions, educational perceptions even, believe "if it was good enough for me..."

But it's not good enough for them.

Andrew's asked more questions than he's answered, which is a great thing for getting us thinking. What would you say in response to some of those more tricky questions?

Pic credit.

Tablet un-PC

Simple, Safe, Innovative, Intuitive, Powerful
Clever, Fun, Memorable, Cool, Better

Which words were spoken by the teachers and which ones were spoken by the kids when presented with the possibility of using a Tablet PC to teach and learn?

This was the intro to a hugely entertaining talk from Geraldine --- from Fleet (though I don't know which one). Too entertaining to blog ;-)

Quite a lot of what she was showing example-wise were things that could be done on a traditional computer but the tactile element has made things easier. She also found a practical reason for tablet pc-ing textbooks - so that lads (and possibly some lassies, too) can graffiti books without any hassles later ;-) This actually has a great use, because kids can also write notes down the sides of pages, removing the need to copy things out (incorrectly).

I'd be keen to know what the differences are for a council in buying Tablets instead of traditional laptops. If we're talking relative peanuts then it seems like a great tool for both teacher and student. Why? Because the tactile element of writing and drawing on your computer seems less like work than sitting down at a rigid box. Need to find out more...

The Wolverhampton Handheld Learning Project

David Whyley is a Head Teacher who has heard the messages and has adopted the attitude I talked about before (I think, actually, he has helped shape them). He's the eLearning consultant in Wolverhampton where they have been using PDAs and other handheld devices for years.

Park your device for a while and think
Before implementing work out what learning looks like. The Wolverhampton vision saw mobile, multimedia, connected learners, learning without boundaries. They had a choice to use paper or palm, bridging learning between school and home. They wanted to raise attainment and aspirations of demotivated learners.

Admirable.

But the word project has been dropped now. Because using handheld devices has "completely changed the way [teachers] teach... [they] treat the youngsters as equal partners in learning". Kids with devices will have to have the devices "prised out of their hands", because the PDA was the only computer some of these kids had. "If the secondary school I was going to didn't have PDAs I would look around for one that did". That's no longer a project - it can't be. A long-term terrier-like attitude and determinism are required to scale this so that kids will have access throughout their education and teachers will have sufficient training to change their teaching.

By giving this device to kids their confidence went through the roof - they had been trusted with it and they reciprocated by wanting to be in lessons learning. Kids are able to show what they have learned (they're constantly producing learning products on them) and choose what they will learn. As Joe said, a young lad who managed to get his '5' in his SAT exams thanks to some extra optional study with the device and a maths programme on it:

"You don't have to, but I chose to"

Learning is what you do in school and fun happens outside. Discuss

Learning is what you do in school and fun happens outside.

A quote from an eight year old cited by by Martin Ripley at the beginning of his openner this morning. It's tragic. Martin's not going to talk so much about the technical innovations we heard about yesterday. None of what he had yesterday running through (some of) our minds: "how many schools does this actually concern at the moment?"

The problem with effecting change lies, in a large part, in the messages given by politics and politicians. In England they've just banned course work. Apparently the kids could cheat, so rather than finding out what is wrong with a curriculum where kids don't have to think but remember to make the grade, they just threw the whole thing out.

Do we really want the Secretary to find out about handheld learning? What is his/her policy on handheld mobile learning?

The press take the depreciation model of evaluating learning through the screen. Toxic Childhood type arguments polarise the issues, see black and white with no grey, see anything coming through the screen as something from which children should be protected rather than something which they should learn to exploit. (Take a look at the forthcoming Connected No. 16 magazine to see my reply). These arguments tend to be the ones that are being heard by parents and politicians, so what can we do to articulate our arguments better?

One thing is to look at innovation and teaching and work out what is going to bring the biggest return. Martin reckons we need systemic and radical innovation, technology enabled, and not the isolated innovation we see at the moment. It needs to be personalised where learners access information and thinking on their own terms, not those of the teacher, the school (the curriculum?).

Head Teachers should not be asked about their strategic plans for ICT in their schools - if innovation is radical and proactive (or reactive in the moments after others' innovation) it cannot be planned. Innovators must be head teachers themselves, lead from the front, with the risk-taking they are going through being rewarded, not chastised.

Technologists, Martin argues, have not delivered a message of how their technology can improve education. It's been educators who have driven educational use of technology. Just taking a look at the apparent lack of understanding of learning from yesterday's panel would seem to back that up.

There's nothing new in this and I think Martin is preaching to the choir a little bit. The people who really need to hear this are Head Teachers and Heads of Education. In East Lothian I think the attitudes suggested by Martin do exist or are being adopted at a rapid pace with a lot of thinking through the whys and hows, too. And they are being shouted out. But there are pockets of indifference and there are swathes of ignorance across the country/continent/planet* (delete as applicable).

So I guess the question is: what are you going to do today to help get that thinking happening in your immediate circle? If it's not you, it won't be anyone else...

Exclusive! Sony360

See my previous post to make sense of this. I’ve just had a Shiraz with the Sony MD Ray Maguire. He’s actually got a lot of what modern education is about and, if not, is prepared to listen. What happened on stage was something a fair number of people in the public had picked up on but not something he had intended at all.

Ray actually shares a lot of the values I hold for teaching and learning. He was able to listen, taken on board and moderate what I was suggesting learning was about: collaboration, students creating products/content which they share and which they rip, remix and learn from. He sees his tools as helping that process along, and I think they already do – big time.

But what came across from his contributions to the industry panel and what he has just chatted through with us are chalk and cheese, 360 degrees different (oops, sorry, wrong company).

He did infer that knowledge transmission is a central part of education, something perhaps his company could help provide. He also sees Sony doing this in a fun way – the Sony entertainment business is all about fun. It did take some explaining, though, to push home the idea that content and filling learners with knowledge ‘stuff’ is not the lion’s share of learning. This is where he met us in the middle and shared our passions for collaboration, students creating products/content which they share and which they rip, remix and learn from.

He did reinforce the idea that teachers, one day, might be made obsolete by machines which are faster, better, more in tune with learners’ needs than teachers of today might be. This because of the exponential speed, memory and RAM capabilities of modern computer tech, again, something with which I have reconciled.

But, for me, this is still pie in the sky. It’s the reason I don’t work for Sony. It’s the reason I still see my place as helping teachers understand technologies in a frustratingly retrospective fashion, because machines will never be able to replace teachers or, more importantly, parents.

To get all Darwin on you, I do believe in the survival of the fittest, but in this race I also believe in the survival of humility, humanity and emotion. I just don’t believe – through ignorance of what is possible, no doubt – that relative handfuls of programmers will convince the masses that an emotional, humility-filled human computer will replace the love for learning and passion of cause of a human being, the teacher.

Then again, no-one would have placed their money on two nerds from Harvard taking over the internet…

btw - graphic from the latest xBox 360 (Microsoft) game.

Kids will teach us everything? Really?

In the industry panel we have a group of mainly non-educationalists, all men and an uncharacteristically quiet David Baugh - the voice of reason in this thing. With the exception of David and the ever-silent man from Samsung the man from Samsung who did speak - once - about how it was all about people, not tools [nice one]) they are trying to get away with telling us that computers will teach computers to teach us in 20 years, not teachers teaching teachers. I hope I got that right, but think I did hear that. Which planet is this guy on? Oh, sorry. He works for Sony...

Also, on the basis of a fleeting visit to his daughter's school, Sony Computer Entertainment MD Ray Maguire tars all educationalists as founts of knowledge whose only interest is to transmit stuff into the heads of the drones in front of them. Has he been in a half decent school in the last 15 years? Derek reckons it was a slip of the tongue - I'm not so sure MDs make that many huge slips of the tongue.

Kids might know the nuts and bolts of the handheld tools they possess, but they do not know how to educate themselves about the world around them by using them. That much is apparent when one does take a look at a technology poor school and how its students (don't) use their technology. This is where teachers come in.

We can learn what these tools can do - without necessarily having to be able to do it all the time by ourselves. We can then use our teaching professionalism to discern what handheld and social media carries worth educationally and we can guide our kids to making the most of those opportunities. User-generated content will be a major focus of learning - it already is when we take a look at the amount of podcasts, digital videos and written blog work which is already published around the world. Do we need industry leaders to tell us this or did we already know? But this user-generated content produced with the guidance of a teacher is very different from the content produced by learners, alone, with only a computer for guidance.

Computers teaching the teachers... that wasn't on my horizon this afternoon ;-) Is it ever going to be on yours?

Update: Sony Man Ray Maguire is now looking like he can't get out of the room fast enough - as David predicted his previous statement came back to bite him in the behind. No, Sony and businesses will not provide content for our children to devour. Children will create the content of the future and, with teachers who understand the principles of constructivism, their content will tower above anything else that the Sonys of this world will ever produce. And Sony won't be teaching the teachers...

Would love a chat with Ray but he seems to have scampered off home.

M-Learning gets Tribal

Tribal is a startup that has at least woken me up after a couple of dreary presentations on how blogs and YouTube are "soooo powerful". At least these guys are honest: the batteries on mobile devices do run down, connecting them together can be a pain.

But, they say, this merely makes us more imaginative in how we exploit the tools. I agree. When I was at MGS I had so few tools I had to be imaginative to get anything out of them - or curl up and let the lack of motivation beat me, and the kids, to a pulp.

They've got me hooked in right from the start: our perception of knowledge is not so much about transmission of knowledge than creation of it. We can find out information in so many outlets now that finding it is really not where the learning is going to come. It's how we exploit it, remix it and share it again that counts.

Tribal have enjoyed helping educators and learners to find what 'shards' fit best together for them. (I like this idea of shards coming together to make a whole, different shards for different people). Tey ahve created tools and resources that use the learner's own phone, combining paper resources and text message feedback, for example. I'm going to find their free mobile phone trial of the road theory test particularly useful on my own mobile - though I'm not sure if I'm meant to use it while driving.

I also like mediaBoard, a mobile multimedia take on the discussion forum. I'd love to get this for the MFLE. Annelie - c'est possible?

Teachers as creators of mobile media
I like these guys better and better. They've also made some great authoring tools for teachers which will allow them not only to spend their cash on Tribal products but also to make up their own. These guys have got both ends of the personalisation agenda tied up!