Digital Immigrant? Say it ain't so!

When personal computers came along I got a personal computer. Never let it be said that I allowed myself to be left behind! And I used it, oh boy did I use it. I did spread sheets, I learned how to email, word process, calculate, research - way before Google, edit photos, etc. I was there, I was with it. I was connected! But was I? Not really. The influx of new tools, sites, soft ware, hard ware, social networks, and other forms of connectivity came so fast that I couldn't or did not want or need to keep up. That was another time and another career. My career in education has brought about a new focus for me, a focus on finding the tools that I need to stay connected with learning - and not just for my students, but for me. I have become a learning junkie. I want all the new stuff and I want to connect in all of the new ways. In effect, that makes me a better teacher. A digital immigrant? I guess that I am, but I am working at it.

One of the questions that I have had for the last few years at ISB, as the tech department has continued to supply us with more and more laptop carts, is this: Why don't we require each student, from middle school on, to own their own laptop computer? In Marc Prensky's "Adopt and Adapt: Shaping Tech for the Classroom 21st-century schools need 21st-century technology" he seems to agree with me. "The missing technological element is true one-to-one computing, in which each student has a device he or she can work on, keep, customize, and take home. For true technological advance to occur, the computers must be personal to each learner. When used properly and well for education, these computers become extensions of the students' personal self and brain". It is refreshing to see more and more of my students carrying and using their own computers - a sort of external hard drive for their brains!

I know enough now that I know when to guide, when to lead, and when to get out of the way. So many of my students are way ahead of me in so many ways that I use them as a resource for technology and also as tour guides or navigators or even lifeguards to save me if I get in over my head! These digital natives are my resource for terminology, navigation, investigation, interpretation, and sometimes even application of the many destinations in the ether. Certainly Prensky agrees with this, "First, consult the students. They are far ahead of their educators in terms of taking advantage of digital technology and using it to their advantage. We cannot, no matter how hard we try or how smart we are (or think we are), invent the future education of our children for them. The only way to move forward effectively is to combine what they know about technology with what we know and require about education."

The old paradigm for learning, the top down, crack open their heads and pour in what teachers accept as necessary knowledge, is a thing of the past. And it is becoming the distant past. The more we cling to that paradigm the more of a disservice we do to our students. As Prensky says, ". . . let's not just adopt technology into our schools. Let's adapt it, push it, pull it, iterate with it, experiment with it, test it, and redo it, until we reach the point where we and our kids truly feel we've done our very best. Then, let's push it and pull it some more. And let's do it quickly, so the 22nd century doesn't catch us by surprise with too much of our work undone"! I agree.

Project Based Project

In my business classes in the past I have tried to incorporate a number of activities in which students learn through doing - Project based learning! When I found that we would be doing project based learning project as the culminating assessment for our "Information Literacy and Ourselves as Learners" course I decided to try to create something that would or could become a part of a major unit that I teach, either in business or psychology. I want to keep my business classes exciting and keep students connected so I decided to focus on that. Here is what I have come up with - I will give it a good tweeking over the rest of this school year and the coming summer and put into action next school year:
Project Based Learning Project for Upper Level Secondary Business and Marketing: Marketing UnitAny marketing program is, or should be, based on research and focused on the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion) and the 5 factors of the marketing environment (economic, global, social, competitive, and technological). In addition the research should culminate in a determination of a “Target Market” or which segment of a population is most likely to find the greatest use for your product or service. This is best accomplished through a segmentation of the overall marketplace. The market segments include: geographic, demographic, psychographic, benefit, and volume segments. You and your team of 3-4 students are an advertising firm (create a name for yourselves like “Global Marketing Specialists, Inc., or “Abercrombie, Fitch, and Associates” and you will embark on a marketing project in which you will be given a general description of a new product or service that has not yet reached the marketplace. Your goal is to define the product through an investigation of the 5 marketing segments and based on product development, total product offer, branding, target market, pricing strategy, location for production, marketing, and distribution, and types of promotions you will use to market your product. You will be “selling” your ideas to the company in hope that they will hire your firm to represent them.:1. Each team will create a blog page on which you will use as a tool to track your progress and to display much of your work on this project.2. Survey a representative sample of a population to determine the viability of your product and service and to gain insight as to target market and the needs and wants of potential customers. The survey will be conducted electronically using your blog page. Prepare the survey, post it to a blog page that your team has created, and via email, face book, my space, or any social network invite at least 50 people (per team) to take your survey. Be sure to vary your sample by attempting to survey people from various age groups, socioeconomic class, etc.3. After determining a target market for your product or service, create an image (brand name, package style, logo, jingle, etc). Post this image on your blog and try to get some feedback from your survey sample.4. Determine where you will produce, distribute, and sell your product. Post this to your blog page.5. Now comes the really fun part: Once you have determined the viability of your product or service, created an image through branding and packaging, determined your target market and your pricing strategy, you can now begin to design several promotions. First of all, using http://www.glogster.com/create an interactive brand association poster. As you know, this is an advertisement that associates your brand with a favorable image, a popular personality, a geographic location, or a competitor. Be sure to have at least 4 interaction opportunities on your poster. For an example of an interactive brand association poster go to: http://jgarstka109.glogster.com/brandassociation/6. The next project for you and your team is to create and video an advertisement for your product or service. This advertisement must be either 30 seconds or 1 minute in length(if it is going to be used on television it must fit into their advertising time format). Once you have successfully created your video advertisement the next step is to upload it to You Tube! This can be accomplished by going to http://www.youtube.com/and clicking on the upload tab in the top right corner. Once this has been accomplished you will need to embed the video into your blog page.7. The final piece to this project is for your team to present your program to the board of directors of the company you hope to represent (your teacher and the rest of the class will play the role of the board of directors). Using power point, glogster, you tube, and any other electronic tool, your team will make a 10 minute presentation to the board.Ps. We will use Twitter to communicate with our teams in real time. You will be instructed on how to set up your own teams Twitter to follow!

Social Networks

When I was doing a search to find out about the vast array of social networking tools and sites available I came upon the following information. I was only aware of about half of these and am only using a couple of them. Ever heard of friendster? Or yelp? Or Outside.in? I hadn't but I have been getting a number of invitations from Linkedin so I accepted and now I am linked in and there is one more place for me to make connections! - check out these:

Creating social groups is one of the original practices on the Internet. Extending back to the 1970's, people have consistently used online tools to expand, extend, re-invent, and build social groups. Today, social networking has become a major activity online, and many of the functionalities and traditions from decades ago have become cast in different interfaces that include features such as profiles, friend and relationship links, instant messaging, blogs, bookmark-sharing, Web-based discussions, and Web-based email.
· MySpace: a massive social network based on user profiles as well as many other tools to build relationships, communication, and interaction.
· Friendster: a pioneering social network recognized as the first (Web-based) social networking site.
· Classmates: originated as a way for high-school classmates to keep in touch.
· Facebook: originated as a way for college students to get to know each other.
· Linkedin: a professionally-oriented network used to build business and professional contacts or to get in touch with past colleagues and friends.
· yelp.com: a network of people reviewing local restaurants, shopping, nightlife, businesses, and other places. Friend relationships, favorites, and profiles support a range of member-to-member interaction.
· Meetup.com: a social network that aims to connect people through in-person, local meetings on a variety of interest topics.
· outside.in: tracks news, views, and conversations in towns and neighborhoods; individual profiles
· Orkut: a social network affiliated with Google.
· Tribe.net: a social network oriented to metropolitan areas.
· Yahoo Members: a network of members of Yahoo.
· Applications that foster social interaction:
o Blogging: Creating diary-like commentary on life, passing events, people, and ideas has found a form in blogs. Social networks emerge as groups of bloggers work and comment on blogs or make hypertext links from blog to blog. Many social networks that are based on user profiles also include blogs as part of the services they offer to users.
o Bookmarking: Information-sharing can be among a group of people using social networking sites. Altough sharing interesting sites online has been an activity for several decades, these social networking sites oriented to tagging or bookmarking bring it to a more visible, organized, and efficient level.
o Personal Ads: With social networks come social attractions, so it follows that many networks develop specifically for dating. Extending the ancient concept of "computer dating" beyond just matching characteristics like age and preferences for long walks on the beach, personal ad services today provide matching based on personality testing, some of which is based on research.

Social networks are created as we find new niches that need to be filled. What is next? One can only imagine, but in imagining - therein may lie an entrepreneurial opportunity!

Connectivism: Being Connected in the Ether is Replacing the Classroom as the Source for Learning

Connectivism: Being Connected in the Ether is Replacing the Classroom as the Source for Learning
In his essay “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age”, George Siemens states, “Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Learning now occurs in a variety of ways – through communities of practice, personal networks, and through completion of work-related tasks.” Information, though at times vague, ambiguous, opinionated, biased, or just plain false, is ubiquitous. At every turn we find new ideas, the reporting of incidents and opinions, a twist on an old theme, artistic expression, emotional outpouring, new data, old data, and all because we are so connected. Learning is not always deliberate. Sometimes it is accidental or incidental. We are no longer (at least rarely) looking in paper books for information. Instead we are finding it through intentional searches of the oceans of digital data or happening upon it as we float about in social networks, peruse our feeds of personal interest data, or bump up against it as we cruise the information depths (that surfing analogy no longer works as the data pool has become too vast and too deep – we are now becoming experienced submariners in our information quest). As Seimens says, “Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).
Siemens, in quoting Rocha, “Learning, as a self-organizing process requires that the system (personal or organizational learning systems) “be informationally open, that is, for it to be able to classify its own interaction with an environment, it must be able to change its structure…” brings focus to how critical the malleability of our learning processes must be in the ever changing landscape of our connected lives. We have so many resources available at our finger tip (the one attached to the mouse) that we must spend some time interpreting, verifying, analyzing, and applying the data in order to make truth of all that we find, “The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy” (Wiley and Edwards, quoted in Siemens).
For organizations the expansive universe of information available creates special challenges of connectivity. Siemens focuses on the heart of the problem in stating:
Information flow within an organization is an important element in organizational effectiveness. In a knowledge economy, the flow of information is the equivalent of the oil pipe in an industrial economy. Creating, preserving, and utilizing information flow should be a key organizational activity. Knowledge flow can be likened to a river that meanders through the ecology of an organization. In certain areas, the river pools and in other areas it ebbs. The health of the learning ecology of the organization depends on effective nurturing of information flow.
Siemens concludes appropriately,” Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.” The ocean of knowledge is getting deeper and wider, but the ships we use to sail on it and in it are getting better too, as is the equipment with which we navigate. Now we just need to be sure to stay abreast of the changing sailing techniques. It has become evident, and sometimes painfully so, that we are not turning to the salty old dogs for tutorials, but instead we look to the Ishmaels of the digital sea as our models.

The New Learning Paradigm

"Living and Learning with New Media" from the MacArthur foundation states, "Youth using new media often learn from their peers, not teachers or adults, and notions of expertise and authority have been turned on their heads." So if students are not learning from us perhaps they are learning in spite of us and we had either get out of the way or climb onto the vehicle students are using to learn, social media, and guide them to the content they need enable them to embrace the exponential growth that is taking place in the digital world and that they will need to compete in an ever changing career market. In addition, the question . . . "what would it mean to enlist help in this endeavor from engaged and diverse publics that are broader than what we traditionally think of as educational and civic institutions?" places the challenge to teachers to explore the digital commons to find the places that students reside and meet them there and help them to find their way through to new and exciting information relevant to their lives. We need to build a bridge that not only fords the "digital divide" that exists between their in school and out of school use of the digital commons, but a bridge that gets a lot of traffic. As teachers we should want our students to be able to make connections between classroom learning and their own lives.
During a week away from school with 30 students in a remote setting in Northern Thailand I had the opportunity to listen to them about the way they are spending their time using digital media out of school and I learned that much of the time they spent "playing" is not neccessarily frivolous. Several student talked about the game "Spore" that they have been playing and how cool they found it. A visit to wikipedia found that "Spore is a multi-genre massive single-player online metaverse video game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the development of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation." Here is a gaming platform that incorporates biology, socialogy, anthropology, earth science, and astronomy, with science fiction and fantasy. I've yet to explore the game myself but I can imagine the applications and implications of using it as part of that bridge accross the digital divide. As "Living and Learning in the New Media" states,"Once teens find a way to be together—online, offline, or both—they integrate new media within the informal hanging-out practices that have characterized their social worlds ever since the postwar emergence of teens as a distinctive youth culture, a culture that continues to be tightly integrated with commercial popular cultural products targeted to teens."

Truth and Bias in Classroom Research

How do we deal with truth and bias in the classroom? These are real challenges and I believe first addressed by educating our students about the origin of truth and how they can be certain of anything - TOK stuff. The tools shared by Chis Betcher will be invaluable in my classroom where we are always searching for information and reflecting about the truth we have found.
Websites like factcheck.org and others may be helpful tools for teachers and students to verify resources. Getting students to keep bias out of their research is also a matter of educating them about the types of biases they may be succeptable to that may be present in others. It really does come down to education and experience.

Personal Learning Networks

In the article World Without Walls: Learning Well with Others: How to teach when learning is everywhere, author Will Richardson says "Our ability to learn whatever we want, whenever we want, from whomever we want is rendering the linear, age-grouped, teacher-guided curriculum less and less relevant. Experts are at our fingertips, through our keyboards or cell phones, if we know how to find and connect to them. Content and information are everywhere, not just in textbooks. And the work we create and publish is assessed by the value it brings to the people who read it, reply to it, and remix it. Much of what our students learn from us is unlearned once they leave us; paper is not the best way to share our work, facts and truths are constantly changing, and working together is becoming the norm, not the exception." From several perspectives these are daunting concepts. The model of teaching that I learned is becoming irrelevant, the kids are networked and we teachers are outside of that web looking in and wondering how to connect with them and get them to connect to the learning you want them to connect to. I also find it quite challenging that there are so many tools out there that I know about but am not proficient in using. Even sending text messages with a mobile phone is not second nature (it is easier for me to talk than to punch letters with my thumbs!). In short I have a lot of work to do to become familiar with all of the tools available so that I can navigate and facilitate this learning.


Richardson concludes with "Anyone with a passion for something can connect to others with that same passion -- and begin to co-create and co-learn the same way many of our students already do. ---I believe that is what educators must do now. We must engage with these new technologies and their potential to expand our own understanding and methods in this vastly different landscape. We must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. And we must be able to model those shifts for our students and counsel them effectively when they run across problems with these tools." Okay, I'm willing, I am paying attention and my eyes are open, show me how.