edublogs

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.

Obama's filtering frustrations... you are not alone

When bureaucracies kick in the real world stops. Obama started work for proper last week and hit the same problems that teachers, administrators and civil servants hit every day: the technology with which he and his advisers are so fluent, the technology that helped them win the election is blocked and filtered.

What does it mean? According to a fascinating piece in the Washington Post, no Facebook to communicate with citizens including his supporters (apparently 80% of the country at the moment), no outside email accounts or address books to maintain contact.

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs...

By late evening, the vaunted new White House Web site did not offer any updated posts about President Obama's busy first day on the job, which included an inaugural prayer service, an open house with the public, and meetings with his economic and national security teams.

Nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver. "The President has not yet issued any executive orders," it stated hours after Obama issued executive orders to tighten ethics rules, enhance Freedom of Information Act rules and freeze the salaries of White House officials who earn more than $100,000.

Officials also hit that well-trodden path of many a creative educator:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

Jeff Jarvis makes a separate but related point, based on discussions he had two years ago as Britain's opposition party prepared digitally for an eventual (and as yet unheld) election: if you're going to win democracy with technology, you've got to continue governing with technology.

It leaves an interesting question for Obama in office, but also a question that filters down through the country's schools, hospitals and bureaucracies: if the White House and Downing Street increasingly rely upon social, mobile and gaming tools to survive and carry out their business to their best abilities, when will the obligation hit our other public institutions?

Obama is now the first ever President to have a computer in the Oval Office, in the form of the 'BarackBerry'. He's doing what millions of teachers and students are obliged to do - use mobile devices to circumvent the slow-moving load of bureaucracy.

Is it not time that this question is asked loud and clear and repeatedly by the lobby of millions of vocal teachers already thriving on the web: when can all our public institutions join the free world?

Follow Rich's pain and heroics on the Vendée Globe Twitter

 While still at Learning and Teaching Scotland I had hoped the national schools intranet, Glow, might help highlight an amazing story of heroism, and encourage Scotland's young people to follow, question and work around the adventures of solo skipper Rich Wilson as he battles alone around the world in his yacht in the Vendée Globe race. Alas, nothing seems to have arisen from the potential.

However, the social web being as simple to use as it is, even when you're balancing a sat phone to send text messages as you nurse a broken rib, Rich, on the recommendation of superb Boston-based teacher and BLC-buddy Lorraine Leo, has taken the initiative with his SitesAlive colleagues and is now Tweeting very regularly as he sails alone through the dark waters of the Southern seas this Christmas. His latest messages read:

Had an albatross crash land on the boat. Not sure which of us was more surprised. It struggled a bit to take off, but it finally flew away. about 1 hour ago from mobile web

Have 35-40 kt winds for foreseeable future. Making good time if boat & skipper can sustain tension of rocketing down waves. 10:33 PM Dec 21st from web

Harrowing sea conditions. With just mainsail, boat is less stable directionally than if we had a jib up front. 6:53 PM Dec 21st from web

Hammered yet again, big seas, breaking, barograph descended, then steadied as front came through with gradual windshift, not sudden. 6:51 PM Dec 21st from web

Had albatross around the boat today. They are amazingly large and also serene birds. 4:15 AM Dec 20th from web

Past the Heard Islands. Saw Iridium satellite fly fast overhead tonight among the bright stars, with its solar panels reflecting sunlight. 4:11 AM Dec 20th from web

Had a nice chat with Jonny Malbon on the Iridium last night. Good to talk, especially with what happened to Yann yesterday. 12:30 AM Dec 20th from web

Off the Kerguelen Plateau at last, seas much smoother. 8:22 PM Dec 19th from mobile web

I am devastated to hear of Yann Elies broken leg. He's a great sailor and a kind man. 2:47 AM Dec 19th from web

Contact with the 'outside world' during this time must mean so much, so I'd like to encourage you all to wish him well, add him as a contact for the duration of the final half of this race and be amazed at what a former maths teacher, close to retirement, is able to achieve.

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.

Watch out, or you'll be TwitterSnoozed

Ever get fed up of some of those you follow on Twitter going on with their mindless rants on delayed journeys or cups of coffee? Well, you can put them (temporarily) to sleep now with TwitterSnooze. Melikey.

If it all gets to much then you might consider changing status update network altogether, and trying out the frightfully funky Plurk, web-based only as far as I can see but designed for a younger gamer audience than Twitter is attracting. That must be why I like it ;-)

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Qik mobile phone streaming now on Windows

Great news from our dearesst Jackie that Qik is now going to work with my Windows smartphone.

Until now you've needed a really nice Nokia (or other Symbian) to be able to stream to the net directly from your mobile phone. Now, anyone (more or less) can do it... and probably use up their employer's data limit ;-). After streaming, your video is, of course, saved online for archive (like this). A more flexible arrangement, I feel, than the frankly ridiculous-looking hoards holding their mac laptops the wrong way round to capture conferences, workshops and interviews for the likes of UStream.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of filtering - it's not got a future

AB has taken the previous arguments on a stage, by pointing out what those of us with 3G wireless internet have known for a while. Whitelists and blacklists mean very little to someone who's simply bypassing your whole system.

So, maybe the arguments about how a whitelist is formed or what sites should go on it are all futile - Local Authorities, companies and other organisations maybe need to speed up the urgency in the answer to the question of December 25, 2008 (and almost certainly 2009):

when a minority of your students can provide unfiltered access to the web to their mates in our increasingly collaborative classrooms, and their teachers may start doing the same with their own technology, what will be the response?

Mobile phone blocking, à la Russian opera, or an educative approach to making net use worthwhile? What's happening with cell phone and mobile internet usage in Asia will come to these shores soon (and, some would argue, already is) so the urgency can't be underestimated.
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A new way for kids to know their mum is picking on them

My brother and I are frequently updating our friends (and mum) about our movements through Twitter. Often she replies. Her Tweetcloud, a grouping of all the words she uses most commonly in her messages, reveals, though, that one brother (ewanmcintosh) is getting more nags than the other (nmcintosh).

Yet another reason for today's youth to take new technologies at their peril...

Please, turn your mobiles on | BBC Learning column

Mobile phones should be brought out of the school bag, switched on and young people shown how to use them for educational good. This is what I firmly believe - education, not prohibition - and my second BBC Learning column gives reason why:

I remember when the Internet first arrived in schools how sceptical some of my teachers were. I dare some of them said: "It'll never catch on". Well, it did. Big time. It's about time schools sharpened their focus on how they can help students power up their learning with their mobile devices, rather than have them power down at the school door.

Please feel free to jump over to the BBC site to leave a comment on the story, particularly in the light of the passionate commenting and discussion on my previous mobile post, showing the potential for abuse of the technology.

Should we ban phones for the potential of abuse, or educate young people (and maybe ourselves, too) on the potential for expanding learning opportunities? Have your say.

Mobile phones used to record teacher baiting

The main concern with using mobile phones in schools in Scotland and, I guess, elsewhere, is that incidents 'created by students' (by this we would mean baiting of a teacher) might be recorded and published to YouTube. Scott flips the question on its head, and asks in these incidents whether the students, bringing really bad teaching to light publicly, are actually doing a service for education in their communities?

From my point of view there are a few problems with any video or audio. Firstly, we don't know the context before or after it's been shot, so it's impossible to know if we are simply observing a teacher at the peak of an extended period of particularly targeted and poor student behaviour. Likewise, we're unable to know if we are seeing a complete and prolonged breakdown of student-teacher respect and working relationship, a poor level of behaviour which has its roots in ineffective pedagogy. If it's the latter, I still have faith that most school management teams and colleaugues know where those problems lie and make sustained efforts to improve the experience of students in those classes. (I know that there are still too many that don't).

Over and above that, though, we also see disturbing video evidence here of misconduct and a lapse in the duty of care that each teacher has. On a personal note, and possibly a slightly controversial one, were I parent of a child in any of these classes I would be incredibly empowered with the video evidence to create substantial and swift change through the school management team.

What do you think - justifiable or untenable? Would a clip or two like this from your school make you think twice about using mobiles in your own classroom for learning?