Design. Learn. Solve.

Banning social media is a bad call

Last night I found this article. It is about Anthony Orsini, a principal in New Jersey, who is asking parents to ban all social media from their children. In a letter to parents Orsini wrote:

Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.

Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!

It is leadership like this that is misguided and more dangerous than prohibiting the technologies from the students. By banning social media you create a us vs. them scenario that is destined to create a greater rift between students and parents and schools.

Social media is not going away. If schools turn their head to the ubiquity of social media in our students lives not only will we push them away but we will be doing them a disservice as they will not be prepared for a world where connectivity drives all industries.

The only viable approach we can take is to educate our students, faculty and parents on the potential and danger with social technologies. To turn a blind eye to how our students communicate is dangerous but so is to ban all technologies. It is our responsibility to adapt to changes, understand how we can utilize them to best prepare our students while teaching them of the dangers as well.



For good or bad our students have grown up with screens in front of their faces. To remove those from our students and expect them to politely oblige is foolish. Schools must adapt and accept that we must educate rather than ban. Orsini states,

Over 90% of all homework does not require the internet, or even a computer. Do not allow them to have a computer in their room, there is no need.

If schools maintain the approach of avoiding the power of technology we will only push out students away from wanting to learn. The idea of developing curious and inquisitive life long learners will only come if we meet our students half way. Every school must work to understand this and work to develop programs that help understand the potential of new media.

For those looking to explore how to begin to educate your community on proper social media use in and out of the classroom, start by checking out these sites:

Net Family News

Common Sense Media

Safe and Secure

and

Social Media Workshop

Theory

Social Media Revolution

New Media Literacies

Digital Generation Themes

The Digital Generation Themes consist of:

Creativity

Collaboration

Teaching

The Power of Social Media

The networked student

You Tube Activism

Practice

Tools that promote the themes of collaboration, creativity, and teaching.

• Twitter


• Blogging


• YouTube


• Flickr


• FriendFeed (combine all your mediums in one place)


• Diigo


• Yes, even Facebook

Hands-on

In groups of two or three choose one of the tools above and talk about how you could use these in YOUR classroom.

Disrupting Education

Lately a lot of people have been talking about disrupting industries.  If we want to seriously consider how we can disrupt our current educational model, we need to listen.

We need to listen to the likes of Clay Christensen who wrote a book about it, MIT’s New Media Literacies has developed strategy guides to support it, David Wiley and the State of Utah who are opening up classes that will enable it, Mike Wesch who is using new media to reconsider how we address course content, and Bill Farren who is developing an online course around it.

In my last few posts I have been writing about changes that can be made to alter our educational landscape.  At the core of these changes is transitioning to a model based upon participatory learning:



This is an open classroom.  An open classroom is based upon the idea of participatory learning; connections between students and experts around the world as well as dynamic content, that is readily available to all, drives student inquiry.

Access

The power of this participation starts in the access to information.  With resources like iTunesU, Academic Earth, Courseware, Diigo, Google News, blogs via an RSS Reader, and Wikipedia, our students can find more information and sources on a topic than any teacher can provide in a lecture.  This access not only promotes inquiry, as students must find reliable sources and learn digital literacy skills, but it creates the potential to open a class to communities outside the four walls of a classroom.

Connection

We are social beings that want to learn.  When students can connect and participate with others while learning, they become intrinsically motivated.  If learning happens by students working together to draw conclusions or provide feedback, students interest increases.  With technologies like Ning, Skype, Wordpress, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikis, students are able to collaborate with their peers around the world, discuss issues with leading experts in order to develop their own ideas.  When learning can reach beyond the four walls of a classroom and there is meaning to the content as well as the personal connection to the outside world, a school can be transformed into a place where students want to learn.

Meaning

Today’s technology creates opportunities to bring the masses together while making an impact.  In a world where transformative technologies are at tips of our fingers, it is all the more important to make learning meaningful.   When a class can work with a village in Africa to learn how AIDS has been decimating the population, students do not want to simply write an essay about the disease, they want to do something about it.  Our students are constantly connected and we can use these technologies to help make a positive impact.  It is this potential, the ability to bring meaning into learning, that can truly disrupt our current model of education.  When the wold is faced with countless problems, it is the fact that our students can help make a difference that will make learning meaningful.

Getting There

The technology is there, the need is there, what lacks is an understanding from educators.  It is our job, as those who get these ideas, to forget about giving presentations on Twitter.  Rather, talk about making our classrooms meaningful and why our students should connect to the world.  If we want to disrupt education, we must explain why before how.  We must open their eyes to a new approach to teaching, helping them to see this transformation.  The next time you speak to a peer or present to a group, do not focus on the technology, spend your time talking about an issue important to you and how your students can use technology can make a difference.

Photo Credit: Courosa
Alec Courosa is also on Twitter: @courosa

Writing Tool Belt 2.0

This is a cross-posting for a piece I did for edSocialMedia.com

No matter what new tool a carpenter may have at his disposal, he still must master the skills needed to build a house. Those tools may change the way he does his job but he still must learn the basic skills of carpentry.

Learning in the 21st century is no different.  Our students must learn many of the same skills they had to learn prior to the digital age.

No matter the tool, our students must master how to write. But wait, isn’t this a site that supports technology? Yes. While our students must master skills that were taught with pen and paper, if we are to reach our students in 2009 we must update our tool belt.

Writing is essential to a students success. But we are now in an connected world and how we teach our student to write is just as important as what we teach our students to write. I read Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Writing in the 21st Century” and it only validates this fact. She states that,

“we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate”

Today, social media plays a vital role in developing these ideas. Whether you like it or not, how we write is shifting.  The media as well as our students are interacting and writing online.    As more and more people live in an connected world, the way they communicate is evolving.  Pew Research Center states that “1 in 5 online adults 18 to 24 have … used Twitter”.  If we ignore that fact and try to teach in an unconnected world our students will lose interest.

Yancy goes on to say,

“21st century writing marks a new era in literacy, a period we might call the Age of Composition, a period where composers become composer not through direct and formal instruction alone (if at all), but rather through what we might call an extra curricular social co-apprenticeship.”

Writing has never been more important but we must recognize this cultural shift.  Educators must develop a new tool belt that supports the interaction and connectivity that our students now thrive upon.  Our students text, comment, and tweet.  Our job is to use the tools that they are familiar with to create an environment that develops the literacy skills Yancy mentions while building upon our students’ communal interactions via social media.

In our connected world where everyone is just a click away, social media tools like Twitter, Blogs and Facebook will be essential in order to develop the writing skills our students need while keeping it relevant.

Photo Credit: Robyn00

Scholarly Crowdsourcing: Twitter Does History

Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, my alma mater, tried an experiment yesterday that really made me think about how we can use social media in our classes.

Cohen posted on his blog that he was going to conduct an experiment using his blog and Twitter. He would post an artifact and using a Twitter hashtag, #digdil09, and his Twitter account, @dancohen. Cohen wanted to see if his Twitter and blog followers could determine what the object, shown above, was within one hour.

The post was put up at 3:00pm EST on Thursday and within the hour both @grresearch and @opencontent had found the answer.

The hashtag feed was a true example of what history is all about, investigating a problem through discussion. The “mystery”, as Cohen put it, brought random people together virtually in order to solve the question through scholarly discourse using social media.

For me, this experiment again proved that Twitter isn’t just for ego maniacs trying to be more popular than a news organization. Rather, this again proves that it can develop our personal learning network (PLN).

This could be an excellent opportunity for students to learn how to do research by not just simply using Google but through discussion and learning from others. With tools like Twitters and blogs, our students can now crowdsource and take advantage of the greater community of knowledge that is not only in the “blogosphere” but also in the “twittersphere”.

Solving The Time Issue

A few weeks ago I wrote about the issue of time and technology. I had referred to a speech given by Clay Shirky. His argument stated that we have always had the time to investigate technology but we used that time mindlessly watching sitcoms.

The other day I read a post by Antonio Viva titled, Who Has Time for Social Media? Mr. Viva states that for the vast majority of people

social media is either a term they don’t recognize or a fad they tried and just don’t seem to have the time for.

So this brings me to my question.

What will create the shift to where the majority of people see social media and technology not simply as another thing to do but rather as THE thing that brings their lives together?

The shift is beginning to happen, we see Oprah coming to Twitter. Yes, I am following her. The Boston Globe may close. These are both important indicators. They identify the fact that mainstream media is evolving. The ways we get our information is shifting in response. Despite this, many still fight the idea of technology as a “waste of time”.

For technology or social media to take hold, our communities must fully incorporate it. We work and live in communities. If we want to make that shift from seeing technology as just another responsibility, it must become our brand. It must be a ubiquitous part of our community.

When our communities develop strategies that incorporate technology seamlessly into our daily lives, we will find that elusive time that Mr. Viva was looking for.

This takes a very deliberate approach but with the right plan and support, that shift can happen.

Photo Credit: Matt Hamm

Using Video To Communicate To Your Class

Are you looking for a different way to post your assignments?  I wasn’t but I have started playing with an option that I think will be beneficial in the long run.

I use Moodle for my course management.  It is simple, clean, and effective.  While it has been useful, i figured there should be a better way of posting assignments, giving instructions for a class that I would have to miss, or supplementing the content to be covered in class.

Homework

I have started using YouTube’s quick capture feature to fill this gap.  See my first post below.  Not only can the students comment on the video to ask questions but by keeping the video broadcasts in a central location, it is simple to find assignments or instructions that the teacher wants to send out to the students.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HERTERyPZhU

Lectures

Another use of video I have been thinking about comes from the fact that I teach AP World History.  One of the challenges I face is the fact that I want to do too much in class.  I believe that getting students to practice the art of examining documents or debating theories is much more powerful than listening to a lecture.  The idea is simple, screen cast my lectures and post them on Vimeo the night before class.  Have the students watch the lecture for homework.  Then use class time to create lessons based upon historical discussion or investigation based upon the ideas introduced in the video lecture.

We’ll see how this turns out but as I try to reexamine how my students learn and how to best use my classroom time, it’s worth a try.

The Educational Impact Of Our Inauguration Trip

I write this from Worcester, MA the day after returning from Washington, D.C. and our Inauguration trip. While in Washington, 11 students from Worcester Academy worked three 18 hour days, conducting interviews, producing videos, and writing blog entires examining the Inauguration. While it is obvious that experiencing the Inauguration alone is monumental, it is the work that the students have done and their intrinsic motivation that stands out in my mind.

Ever since this project was developed, the idea behind it was two fold.  My co-director, Pete Smith and I wanted our students to experience the Inauguration but just as important, was the educational potential the trip provided.  This trip was about giving our students the opportunity to document history and express themselves and their perspectives.  Watching my students wake up at 6am and for some to work until 1am the next morning was awe inspiring.  These students put their all into collecting and producing quality content about the Inauguration.  They spent time developing strong articles on real issues surrounding the Inauguration.  They had to develop questions and interview tactics for everyone from Dee Meyers, President Clinton’s Press Secretary and Congressman James McGovern, to high school students.  The challenges they faced are one’s journalists face on a daily basis and the work they created added a valuable perspective. The students recognized that they were not only witnessing history, they were documenting it and people were interested in what they had to say.

The Educational Impact

Our 11 students’ focus and dedication that developed from this trip drives at the idea that the way students learn no longer can fit into a 19th century or even 20th century model.  The value of the students taking ownership of this trip to produce a quality article, image, video, or twitter update (tweet), outweighs any learning they would have gained through a lecture.  Brian, one of the students on the trip, stated the following on his Twitter account:

no it was a lot of work but it was much more fun than the work back here…..soooo maybe it was a vacation?

Today’s students are capable and ready but we must engage them.  We must get them interested in learning.  This trip did that but it does not have to be the exception to the rule.

No matter the topic, whether it is the Inauguration or Geometry, when students can produce and share something of value, their willingness to really invest their time and energy will dramatically increase.  If we really want to find out how you can get your students to want to learn and be engaged, find a way to have them take ownership of the material.

Students today are surrounded by an amazing array of media tools.  These can be used by classes in any discipline to get your students to synthesize learned content and produce a something of value that highlights their understanding.  A student’s education is not about simply learning facts but rather understanding the concepts.  If you want your students to really understand the content, they need to see its worth, they need to produce something of value connected to that content.  Regurgitating information does not work.

While social media was our medium for this, there are many ways and methods for a class to accomplish this concept.  Student driven learning is possible and necessary.  As the technology becomes more ubiquitous, we must prepare our students to understand that the tools they use on a personal level can produce quality content of value.

I witnessed history and I will never forget that but what will always stay with me was the dedication and efforts put forth by our students.  Their work is proof that student driven or project based learning is valuable and worthwhile.  As my memories of the Inauguration fade, it will be the dedication and hard work that our students put into producing their work on this trip that will always stay with me.

Photo Credit: Brandy Agerbeck

A cross-posting from http://wainauguration.org

Our First National News

So the Worcester Academy trip to the Inauguration got its first national mention today on USA Today. It mentions the trip and highlights a video from one of our applicants. Check out the link to read more.

Documenting The Inauguration

My co-woker, Peter Smith, and I will be taking 4 students to Washington, D.C. to document the events surrounding the Presidential Inauguration with a variety of technologies.  We will be using tools like blogs, Twitter, video, podcasts, and Flickr to examine the impact of the election of Barack Obama and understand the personal stories of those in attendance.

To learn more about the trip visit our informational site: http://sites.google.com/a/worcesteracademy.org/inauguration/Home