Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

UK and Irish schools need to educate, not ban, now

The need for schools in the UK and Ireland to educate children on what self-publishing means rather simply than ban the tools, has never been higher, as Bebo are on the verge of opening up their platform to developers.

By following Facebook's lead in allowing developers to create their own applications to work within the teen social network, Bebo is set to see a similar explosion in the number of users and the amount of use - more, perhaps, than the current 41 minutes of time spent each night by the average UK teen. The ultimate aim, to keep Bebo alive.

But there's a huge difference between Bebo and Facebook that makes this move smell a little fishy: the average age of Bebo's users must be about half that of Facebook.

The move to open up means that the information placed online by teens, both before now and from now on, will become far more spreadable, far quicker. Applications ask for permission before being used but what they do with your information after that point is unpredictable: one case in point, from Facebook, the number of people who appear to be suddenly happily married or, worse, divorced from their better halves [How Facebook ended my marriage].

Potentially, a new application installed on your page could start to replicate your data out of context elsewhere on Bebo, for public consumption, in much the same way as some Facebook apps have done. Adult users of Facebook, 'expert users' like Crampton, even, have already had to learn to navigate this open-ended app-filled social networking world the hard way. How much we are willing to let kids explore this on their own, in the wild, and make their own mistakes the hard way is another matter, when the consequences are arguably greater. How Bebo pitch this to their younger users will be an important factor, too, for educators wanting to plan digital literacy into their work.

So, if you are a teacher in a UK or Irish school, the latter a country where Bebo has 95% penetration in the teen market, don't hang about for Bebo. You need to start thinking about how you are going to educate your students in the art of self-publishing without signing away their content, their private information and their online life. What Bebo want to do is not 'bad' per se, but it's open to misunderstandings and mistakes will be made by young people who don't know how to play the game because they haven't been told how.

Are you going to ban or are you going to educate, Teacher?

Update: Some further points on this from Harry Potter...

How much do schools really value pupils' views?

Time for a story? When I was a school pupil I worked all six years of secondary school on the school magazine, the Pupils' View. The name of the magazine was the title, the mission, the raison d'être of the whole thing. It made life easy. And it made life difficult, too.

When I was editor we sold up to 700 copies of it four times a year at 25pence (50c) in a school with just over 1000 students. As Editor I faced my fair share of tense meetings with the Head Teacher, attempts, in vain, to stop us publishing certain stories which might not fit the PR the school would have liked.

My crowning moments were, at the age of 13, writing a story about the unhealthy options costing half the price of the healthy options in the school canteen - the chief of catering resigned from her post as a result. I also wrote a special edition outing what I saw as a 16 year old, as an abuse of power, when a visiting clergyman suggested that homosexuality was nothing but a disease that could be cured. That hit the national press.

In fairness, despite some stressful and probably unfair moments on both sides, the Head Teacher of the school let us publish and be damned. He's still there. He's a good bean.

What I left Dunoon Grammar School with aged 17 was a sense of what is right and what is wrong, and a faintly arrogant, maybe immature view that the student voice is the most important voice - bar none - in the school.

Lip Service
I just think that most schools, conferences on education, Education Authorities still pay lip service to student voice. Is this ungrounded? No. The vast majority of education authorities the world over still block and filter social media sites like Bebo and YouTube where students can post their views, without making any attempt to educate youngsters on how to express their views. Yet this is the main point of communication for today's teens and tweens. Pupil Councils with hand picked 'good students' held in musty rooms at school are not where the real democracy in today's schools should be taking place.

Yet the UK's Professional Association of Teachers, currently having their national conference, is thumping down the line of "all social networks - especially YouTube - should be banned". The call is coming from its Scottish leader, which makes me wonder if I'm doing my job correctly. It's the same group that called for wifi to be banned. You get the picture. All evil in the world is because of The Devil's Machines.

To say I'm disappointed would be a lie. I'm just amazed at the continued ignorance of large swathes of the profession who concurrently use their influential positions to give misinformed, half-baked analysis of the current situation. I don't see any desire or inclination to spend a little time trying to understand the positive pedagogical changes that these tools can bring.

How far do you go? How much do you care?
Which brings me to the kind of citizen art I would love to see adorning our schools but which, after a week of news like the stuff above, I think wouldn't make it to any school common area soon. Post-it notes displayed in 'To Do' fashion [above], with an open invitation to passers-by to leave their 'To Dos' [below]. It's the kind of thing which is unpredictable, unmonitorable, unchangeable (until it's too late). It's a risk, which is often the way people see my desire for insertion of more social media to organisations and the education system.

What would the kids in your school say? Is it publishable? Or would you be damned?

Update: Where does the line get drawn for engendering citizenship?

Enquire Blog: Supporting young people by young people

Enquire is a group set up to help parents and young people who need some extra support in school. I met one of their staff, Katy, on the train a year ago and, since then, she's been a major force in setting up a blog to get information direct to the young people who need it. Importantly, it's written by both Enquire staff and the young people they work with. Katy's also been along to TeachMeet06 and engaged with other teacher bloggers.

A couple of months ago there was a post about what blogging this way might bring to the young people. I didn't reply straight away, I didn't want to. I wanted to see where the blog would go without too much interference. The answer is strength to strength, as current posts show some really useful information being made available for parents, teachers and learners all of the country. But even more interesting is the insight to the ups and downs of the young people's lives, unedited, unabridged yet in a relatively safe online environment. Have a look and see if you can help the young people answer their question about whether blogging like this is worth it.

Batteries not required - WiTricity

Flicking through the Guardian on the X6 this morning I see that we are getting closer to having WiTricity, wireless electricity to keep all your gadgets going without cables. I'd love it for all those conferences I go to where I'm not near the power, although I can't wait to hear the same people who though wifi was dangerous having a go at this one!

Why question Wifi? A rundown of literature

Last night's Panorama was yet another example, on top of last week's Scientology outbursts, of how the Beeb is heading into increasingly tabloidese investigations, as calls were made to halt wifi installations in schools and "think twice about what we're doing to our children" (that was a paraphrase, but I'm sure someone suitably haughty and patronising would have said that last night).


I've been running through my 700 odd feeds from experts, geeks and educationalists to see what's being said out there on the matter. Resoundingly the word on the street is: "Don't be silly".

• Keith points to a JANET factsheet that, sensibly, recommends staying more than 20 cm away from your wireless router to keep safe. The guy in the programme was literally on top of it last night to get a reading.
• Rachel Clarke wonders why we are not challenging the device that emits 100,000 times more electromagnetic radiation: the lightbulb.
• James Randerson in Comment is Free completely takes apart the Panorama evidence with some sound figures of his own.
• Jack in the Technology pages of the Guardian also provides some coverage of what the papers say, and covers some of the evidence his paper has been pulling together for years on the subject.
• The BBC seems to be backing out of the Panorama story with some facts.

What the Panorama programme last night (you can watch it again on the web) will have managed to do is spread worry and concern that parents, teachers and those who take or have taken responsibility for installing wifi networks are taking on board. It means that projects such as MiWiFi in East Lothian may end up with sticks thrown into the spokes. It means that we have to take some of the more balanced evidence I've put together here and present it to people who don't read blogs or who don't do their own research into the matter.

Thanks, Aunty :-(

(The pic is of a Nazbaztag, a wifi rabbit that sings songs sent to you by your friends over the interweb. Thanks, Andreas, for the pic)

Net censorship - it's missing out the UK and USA

 Doug Dickinson points to the Open Net Initiative's report on internet censorship around the world and its debilitating effect on democracy, especially the ability of people to express themselves or dissent.

The survey found evidence of filtering in the following countries:
Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma/Myanmar, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen. (from the BBC)

My big question: where are the UK and the USA?

I know that we are not on the same scale as Iran and our censorship hardly has the same consequences, however we do have censorship in our public institutions, including schools, which prohibits public servants and children from publishing their point of view or having it read within public service institutions.

I wrote for Connected Magazine on this low level censorship last month and have seen some changes in attitude in some areas of Scotland. However, there are still too many places which think that it's acceptable to block sites such as Flickr on the basis of child protection, while allowing similar Google sites. Is it because the image is linked to directly in Flickr? I doubt it. For me, the reasoning lies more in the fact that their charges, the kids, can write to the photos, under them and on them. They can publish their own in the same place. They don't want that, or rather the responsibility the institution might bear of kids doing that.

I'd like to see a continued evolution of thinking regarding blocking and filtering in schools, not with safety but rather with democracy and civil liberties in mind. The safety angle is, for me, on a technocratic tactical level. Where the digital literacy programmes of an organisation are weak the amount of command and control exercised is inversely related. And you know what they say about control; it has an inverse relationship to trust.

Best comment ever - could have been about teachers in the live web

Must have been so nice to be a journalist or commentator in the old days. Just lock what you say in print and damn the masses. Times have changed. You can lock the doors, but then there’ll just be you.

Suw's best comment ever strikes true for journalists and teachers alike. Close your eyes, turn your back and switch of the computer at your peril or you'll miss out on the amazing collaboration and joy of learning together that's out there.

ICT Coordinator: doing your job?

I'm preparing to speak on Thursday to the next batch of school leaders at the second keynote of a series at the National College for School Leadership, and have found a few recent words from the Becta "Safeguarding Children Online" handbook for leaders, which should reassure these decision-makers that blogging, podcasting, vodcasting and social networking are both Good Things and possible provided we're all doing our minimum best. Question is - are you?

The stats would suggest that many Local Authorities are not doing what they should be: 46% divulge 'personal information' online; 57% of regular users have come into contact with pornography; 31% have received unwanted sexual comments, 33% nasty comments online or by text message.

The key groups to target are the eldest kids in primary school and the older kids in secondary (a case of feeling brazened 'old-timers' perhaps?).

If there are three elements of e-safety inspection and standards - education and training; infrastructure and technology; policies and practices - it is the first that often gets missed out as the other two (in the form of "don't dos" and "don't bring it to schools") get the heavy-handed treatment. It's not working.

Importantly, on page 23, the need for education and training in digital literacy of both learners and the teachers supervising them is highlighted.

The point will hopefully be further rammed home with the imminent publication of the final draft of the report from the Home Office's first Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet. Far from saying that social networking and mobile devices should be banned or blocked, a quote from page 13 of the draft, leaked out to the public domain in December, says:

"Education and media literacy is a critical part of keeping children and young people safe online and empowering them to manage their online experience. Responsible use and keeping safe online are now advocated as essential elements of a broad curriculum."

If Digital Literacy isn't written into your school plan for the next year the chances are you are already falling foul of these sound recommendations. If you're banning social networking sites and social media such as blogs, podcasts, vodcasts and photo sharing sites then you're hardly a whisker away from the same thing.

If you're an ICT decision-maker in a UK school - or anywhere else, for that matter - answering the questions in this booklet and putting the recommendations into action might be the best singular thing you do this year to make social technology and mobile learning a reality in your corner of the country.

Update: My brother Neil has written a good piece on his personal blog about why codes of conduct, safety measures and new agreements for social media are not really always necessary. When you read all the links I've mentioned in this post you'll see his point - they sum up what, for most of us, is common sense. Unfortunately, education does seem to have its fair share of folk who just don't get common sense, so making it explicit is still a must in our realm, methinks.

Update 2: Jane Nicholls, in the comments, has realised the hard way how much work is required to lay the ground with this "common sense":

I spent so much time convincing teachers of the educational merits of Web 2 tools and too little time laying the ground work. I like the example of teaching kids how to drive. Cars are great for getting from A to B but there is so much more to driving than just moving a car around.

Computing Studies and Social Media: finding new ground

I've just ended the week in the most comforting way I know (other than with a fine Bordeaux) - in the company of teachers passionate about teaching, technology and finding untapped potential in the two. Mark Tennant helped group a good number of Computing Studies teachers from across East Lothian at its farthest Eastern point, Dunbar.

This post summarises some of the tools we looked at in this 'splurge' session. In May we have two more sessions together to look at how the Computing Studies curriculum and/or pedagogy might be adapted to take advantage of the exciting tools, the web as a platform for learning and the opportunity to teach children digital literacy skills. After meeting this group I am convinced that they are best placed to help both teachers and students understand the issues at stake, and not run away scared.

Taking digital images as a self-publishing starting point
It's the easiest thing to visualise and examine some of the new web's principles by using image sharing and online manipulation.

• Bubbleshare
  • Easiest to share images / sequences
  • Good for storytelling, giving instructions, doing step-by-steps
• Flickr
  • More 'adult' interface
  • Good for step-by-steps with more interlinking between photos using 'notes' (good for recipe instructions), hyperlinking between photographs or to other areas of the web (like Wikipedia definitions). Notes also useful for creating a descriptive presentation.
  • Most widely used for education - so good for making serendipitous links about Vikings or joining educational photo groups.
  • Photo groups allow you to find stimulus for classroom activities e.g.: Five Frame Stories or Six Word Stories, Lego Vignettes
• Phixr
  • Registration-free, email-free online photo editing.
  • Avoids the need for expensive software.
  • Opens up digital editing as homework.
• Splashr
  • Allows exciting presentations to made from Flickr photos, tagged with the same thing
  • Helps students understand the importance of good folksonomy versus forced taxonomy.

Podcasting for audio learning logs
Kids generally hate talking about themselves and what they do in front of others. Recording it to microphone is less daunting, more anonymous, and helps get over the nerves to talk about learning. If the kids doesn't feel they've done their best, they can delete and edit, representing themselves and their work in the best possible light.

• Allows continuous, purposeful creation of multimedia products. Podcasts might just be done for the heck of it, or to sum up a period of learning, like they do in Sandaig.
• Possible to do at home or in school using free audio creation apps (Audacity and the LAME Mp3 encoder) or online video editing apps (like Jumpcut)
• Encourages Assessment for Learning principles (peer assessment, two stars and a wish, self-assessment, confirmation of learning and next steps) and Curriculum for Excellence aims (publishing their discoveries makes them effective contributors, shows their success at learning and helps them realise their role in helping others)
• East Lothian teachers and students can publish audio or video for free as a podcast on eduBuzz.

Collaborating on the exciting - and the mundane
Everyone in Computing Studies has to learn how to use a spreadsheet and a word processing document. In the last month I've used Google Docs more for writing documents than Microsoft Word. It's easy to collaborate, is exportable, allows chat to take place while collaborating... It's free and it works.

Both the Word Processing and Spreadsheet functions can be used in their own right to learn about the apps, but also provide a superb collaboration planning tool for when students come around to planning multimedia projects and presentations. There's never enough time in class to do this properly and Google Docs allow us to do this from day-to-day in the classroom without losing information on Sick Boy's server space.

There's also Open Source desktop publishing with Scribus, for Mac and Windows.

Blogs to hold it all together
Teachers and students stand to gain if they can harness the positive force behind being Googleable and having a site that is useful or interesting for others. Pupils running their own blogs might be rewarded each term for having the most unique users, the most comments, the most read post, the best blogroll of useful study links...

Teachers benefit from having their own blog when they are able to provide useful insights to their subject that perhaps don't 'fit' into the curriculum, where they can provide good study links and provide a model of being a learner themselves, even if that just means posting links to videos that really make you think. Teachers also stand to benefit for future employment if we can find them easily and then see from their blog that they are not egotists ;-), that they regularly and publicly reflect on their practice and on how to do better at their jobs - and encourage others, including pupils, to help them do better.

A blog, being a website that is so easily and quickly updated, so easily categorisable, can help order the chaotic thoughts and experiences we all have while learning. It can become the revision guide and, best of all, it's the kids who will have written it.

Creating an ever-changing school or class webpage
Wikis on Wikispaces or PBWiki are good for creating quick and easy websites in a click, but they're not exciting unless they change a lot - and that means someone has to change it. Using an Ajax-based RSS aggregator such as Netvibes or PageFlakes (the latter works best in East Lothian and is what we use on the eduBuzz Explore page) provides an ever-changing, minimum effort, quite easy on the eye homepage for students. For younger kids and probably teens, too, YourMinis is prettier to look at.

Guidelines and letters for parents
East Lothian is one of the first Local Authorities in the country to have a policy on social media use both for teachers and for learners, together with letters of permission for Under-16s and for Over-16s. All schools in the Authority will use these as standard from the beginning of the school year, with non-returns or negative responses logged on the pupil monitoring system, Phoenix. In the meantime, feel free to use these for ad hoc projects. They are, of course, Creative Commons, so other Local Authorities and teachers may use and adapt these (at their own risk ;-).

CESI: Why should we innovate?

This is a follow-on run-through from the start of the talk I delivered today to the Computer Education Society of Ireland. You can read the beginning, perhaps, before reading the middle.

Stephen Heppell speaks about the innovation cycle: change will always be happening, just a question of jumping on, and jumping off (no-one tells you that part). The successful innovator knows when to jump off and when to keep on just in case. Teachers don’t need to be the ones innovating: students can do that, too. Take a look at this innovative kid, left, talking through her "Private Garden", where the stems move with each incoming and outgoing email, chat, text message, phone call... It's a 21 Century kid doing the innovation, not the teacher, not the school.

Innovation is not something the teacher makes the decision to do, it just happens around us. All the time. Continuously. Not all innovation will lead to better attainment, more fun, more motivation, better learning - some of it is the equivalent of the Pepsi sweetener. Other innovation needs to be drunk by the can - it's not until you've gone through, learnt the hard way and failed a good bit along the way that you and the kids get the benefit.

I use five arguments to justify why there needs to be some evolutionary change in the way we use ICT. We've forgotten the 'C' part (Communication) for too long. The communication doesn't always need to take place through the technology, but can take place Face-to-Face thanks to the technology in a collaborative film-making activity in class, for example, where the communication comes not just from the message in the video but also the collaborative activity (negotiation, role-allocation, instructional language...) taking place in the making of the film. It's difficult to have that level of collaboration between 30 people if one person, the teacher, wants to maintain constant, uncompromising control on each decision, outcome, next step or tangent. The tech is going to change the teach.

1. Audience
I always harp on about this, but if my kids produce some work I'd like to think it was interesting enough to share with at least one other person. Parents, peers, other teachers, other countries, the local community - how are you going to let them know about the work your kids are doing, the processes they've gone through to get there, the failures they've overcome...?

In the 19th Century classroom...
...the average audience for student work is one (two for a conscientious student who bothers to read their own work). Even in whole school display I'm not convinced the whole school becomes avid viewers of their peers' artwork or essays. When I was at Musselburgh I stood in the corridor for weeks at breaks and lunchtimes, looking to see who stopped to observe student work on the walls. I was surprised quite so many did, but they were all from the class to whom the display 'belonged'.

In the 20th Century classroom...
...there have maybe been some missed opportunities for kids to communicate with their local communities. With more abundant projectors than ever before why are two or three of these not pointed window-wards to project that day's best artwork and sculpture from the school? Passers-by in the community could observe the work taking shape and then, at the end of term, see the final products in their full glory. You could even take things to extremes at certain points in the year, doing what they did at Rouen Cathedral with a couple of Monet prints.

In the 21st Century classroom...
...we invite children to redraft work in its entirety in jotters, workbooks and foolscap paper (it's called foolscap for a reason ;-) In three clicks I can publish whatever I want - this text, links and photos, for example - to whoever wants to read it. Because it's a blog people can subscribe to the content so that every time I write something new they get it in their inbox (find out how to do that). That means that I have an instant audience of around 1200 people for everything (and anything) I pop up.

We don't need to rely on a staff to run our print presses anymore, we can do it with one finger and an internet connection. And we don't need permission - kids are already encyclopedia editors and self-publishers on the net. How many English teachers are there who have published work? Hmmm...

Writing on a blog means that your content is frequently updated which means you have great Googlejuice. The location of today's talk was Coláiste de h-Íde, whose traditional school website has been knocked into second place by RateMyTeacher - RateMyTeacher doesn't even have a 'feed' (wee orange button that replicates the content elsewhere on the web for you, helping others find you) in the same way as a blog does, so the school would find it really easy to create a better web presence just be handing over the school blog to the kids to update daily.

2. Creativity Unleashed
Taking a digital photo is quite creative. Preparing it for publication more so. Publishing the photo and commenting on other photographers' work is highly creative. Publishing the already highly creative work undertaken in schools means that creativity is truly unleashed.

Take the Five Frame Story or Six Word Story based on one photograph. Besides being a creative enterprise, with thought of storylines, aesthetics and meaning, publishing the photos on Flickr adds an additional creative element: students can leave comments on pictures, so each member of the class can write alternative elements to stories under each photo. Not being able to publish pics of kids may not be such an issue if you let them work around that rule: Play Mobil and Lego can take on a life of their own in a photo story.

What about adding some notes to a photo to explain the history of art concepts from that trip to the museum? You can't do that with one printed photo or a textbook.

Comments from these kids as they made a podcast on their city show that simply publishing their work made them work harder and better.

3. Differentiate by raising the bar
Differentiation doesn't mean that you have to produce a million multi-coloured worksheets. Differentiation might involve a new skill (creating a radio show or podcast) which is in itself quite challenging, but which allows the weaker pupil to stretched in that area while practicing, drilling their basics. Meanwhile, more able pupils get the motivation to produce something for a real reason (why not add your city guide podcasts to a real city guide site?).

Making the work of kids digital, even if it is just taking a picture of display work, means that you can also make it portable. Audio, video and visuals can be transferred via Bluetooth to mobile phones - just transferring one example of a 'good talk' or your teacher-made podcast on the life of the Potato Famine to one mobile, you can have a class of thirty spread this video amongst themselves within a 40 minute class. Take the stuff of viral marketing that works so well for Mentos and CocaCola and make it work for learning.

That means, like the PiE Language Project has done, that the teacher acts as guide, encouraging kids to create their products and publish them in a variety of large, medium and small file sizes that can be read on PSPs, DSs, iPods and mobile phones.

What if you're an English language teacher or the project you are working on just involves more words than it does pictures. You could take a leaf out of Adam Sutcliffe's RateMyMates, a weblog where student work is displayed (PowerPoints, text, MP3 audio recordings) and then commented upon by students in the same class and those from other schools, even. Formative assessment in a manageable and fun format, designed with the kids and not the curriculum-makers at heart.

More lengthy text can be seen developing from scratch in the creative writing process blog, Progress Report. From a short first paragraph full of comma splice and cliché, to a finely tuned finished version, built up over six weeks, the student eventually got a huge jump of grades in a seemingly impossibly short period of time. The difference between her and the rest? She blogged her writing bit by bit, and made the process of creative writing more efficient than was being done in the classroom.

It's also just more efficient and, well, greener. Take a look at the amount of paper wasted on producing folios for English language and you see what I mean.

 

4. Authentic Purpose
I feel that publishing for an audience is already an authentic purpose for a task - the need to interest, inform or entertain the public with what you are learning brings with it inherent authenticity. The next time a kid asks "Why do we have to do this?" will you secretly answer "Why do we have to do this?"? If you do, what could you do to make that task more authentic, where you could publish the kids' work to make it worthwhile? Why write a 'pretend' newspaper article when they can make the news for real by publishing it on a blog for real people?

5. It's not about the Tech, it's about the Teach. Yes, but...
...the tech will change the Teach. This leads to its own batch of concerns and desires to learn. That's for the next post... In the meantime, do you see a change in the role of the teacher in all this?