Autumn Leaves, Rhubarb, and Student Attention Span

         On most topics, Rose, a former next door neighbor of mine, was sweet and wonderful, a feisty, diminutive old lady who would leave a grocery bag full of rhubarb hanging from our back fence every week or so throughout June and much of July. (Rose and her husband had a massive bed of the stuff – they didn’t even like it much, so we got it all, and bunches of tomatoes and squash to boot.)

        But every fall, leaves brought out a very different side of Rose. Our massive oak and maple trees would provide a multi-colored blanket neatly covering several back yards. Ours were not the only large trees in the neighborhood, but Rose’s property was different, she had only one small ornamental tree within reach of her back porch. More than once we woke up to the sound of Rose raking up those big yellow maple leaves, and throwing big piles of them over our fence. She was quite happy to tell us exactly what she thought of those leaf-spewing behemoths, and tried hard to convince us that we should cut them down.

        My wife and I, of course, were quite proud of those trees, and couldn’t imagine anything crazier than killing off two living things much older than we were, which contributed shade, nesting sites, not to mention carbon-dioxide scrubbing and water retention. It was the height of silliness. Also, being the “young moderns” we considered ourselves to be, we knew the law: leaves are the responsibility of the person who owns the property on which they fall, regardless of how, and from whence, they came. We did occasionally help her rake, but we were certainly not swayed.

        My wife and I have moved, and aged, and Rose and her dear husband are no longer “with us.” After spending the last three weekends cleaning up yard trash and dealing with other people’s leaves, I’m just a little more sympathetic with her problem. But I’m trying to hold onto my previous slant, even as I hang up the rakes and break out the ibuprofen.

       A cover article on this Sunday’s New York Times (Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction, Sunday, Nov. 21, 2010) is yet another story on tech-savvy young people whose lives are seemingly one text and hyperlink away from academic inattention and failure. “Several recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families…Research also shows that students often juggle homework and entertainment…using the Internet, watching TV, or using some other form of media either ‘most’ (31%) or ‘some’ (25%) of the time that they are doing homework…” (p. 20, print version). I guess it isn’t terribly surprising that many teachers are just a bit reluctant to open the floodgates – to provide flexible use of student computers in the classroom, or worse, allow students to use their cell phones and other personal gadgets. It would be a little like giving every student their own TV on which they could watch anything, right there in the classroom. Only, of course, this is worse, since current tools also provide them with a means to engage with anyone, anywhere, on anything. And they do…

        The article is also about a school embracing the idea that engaging students means leveraging the same technologies they use. But the end of the article describes an English teacher there who has finally resorted to having students read aloud in class. This upside-down approach (read in class, engage outside of class) is this teacher’s attempt to counter her inability to induce students to read at all. Although I’m not quite Rose in this instance (I actually use the same tools the students in the story use), there are times when I find myself shaking my fist at the “stand of tall trees next door,” just like the English teacher in the story does at these tools. Pursuits which require extended time and attention, and products which reflect the results of same, seem to be disappearing, and there are lots of folks who point to the tools themselves – “slates,” smart phones, social networking sites, even just plain old hyperlinked Web delivery – as the culprits.

        Are we, like Rose, just old geezers whining about change and inconvenience? There are a few things missing from this discussion, and I’ll mention two here.

Chickens vs. Eggs

        There is a good explanation for why young people have sorted these technologies out as entertainment platforms, even as much of the rest of the world plunges into their use for productivity, commerce, and learning. Most kids, of course, in the absence of other forces, will naturally look for the entertainment value in anything. After all, if they didn’t, they’d be adults. Teachers, for a variety of reasons (some good, some perhaps less so), have not exactly rushed headlong towards embracing these tools for their own personal use. As a result, they can’t model effective use of these tools for their students, and, more importantly, have little interest in requiring such use out of their students. It’s not surprising then that, if given access, students use the technology in school for what they always use it for elsewhere.

        Although there are implications for us here, this, of course, does not directly address what we should do to change things, or why…

Who’s Distracted, Really?

       Interestingly, in the same edition of the Times, in her Magazine weekly column, “The Medium,” Virginia Heffernan makes the case that, in fact, the whole issue of short attention span and distraction is a myth. She contends that we, as humans, attend to that which we view as important. The ability to stay focused on something doesn’t exist in a cultural (or, by extension, a technological) context. It’s much more deeply embedded than that. Hence, if people (or students) are distracted, it’s for good reasons, or reasons of boredom.

        For the short term, engagement can be enhanced by a gadget or sexy delivery method, but such engagement will have a very short shelf life, and will not produce the same results that true engagement in the underlying content or goals would. That is, we should not expect a technology tool itself to tip the balance towards engaged learning. But that works both ways – we also cannot indict our technology tools for distracting students from the interest and engagement of an assignment either. Yes, their capabilities can be distracting, but following a distraction implies more than an avenue of escape – it also implies the need to escape in the first place.

        And that is the key to how to dig ourselves out of this conundrum. Technology tools have the ability to support our students in doing things they can’t do without them – connect, create, share, and construct in completely new ways. That is the reason why these tools are so powerful in the workplace, and, not incidentally, why kids find them so entertaining. But we cannot simply decide to credit, or blame, these tools for providing engagement or distraction. The topic, activity, and our personal involvement in it as educators and advocates must provide that. The real proof of engagement comes from making an assignment one that a student is interested in doing.

So, yes, these “trees” will produce an obligation on our part to clean up after their excesses. They will not take care of themselves, nor will they induce our students into doing so. But we will not be served by simply “cutting them down,” either. If we do so, we may have produced a leaf-less fall, but the rest of the seasons will be blanched and dry.

        Here's to you, Rose. You’re still wrong, but I do miss those rhubarb pies.

Implied Pedagogy Part 2: To a hammer...

Scenario One:

It wasn’t all that long ago that I finally got around to getting a [new cool tool]. It really was a revelation. I purchased it to replace something I’d been using for quite awhile, but the expanded capabilities it represented had a profound influence on me in two ways: it greatly increased and made more powerful the main purpose of the original technology. But, more importantly, it began to reveal a myriad of ways in which its capabilities could be used for behaviors and experiences of which I hadn’t even thought…

Scenario Two:

It wasn’t all that long ago that I finally got around to getting a [new cool tool]. It was a little constricting when compared to what I normally used, but I was willing to forgive those limitations due to some important advantages. But, over time, I found it was slowly impacting my behavior in two ways. I was using the new device much more often – it was beginning to completely replace my normal device. But even more important, I was tending to abandon my attention to and interest in the sorts of things my previous device easily supported, but it didn’t. It was, in fact, affecting how much I attended to things I knew to be important…

        The “new cool tool” in each of the above scenarios is, in fact, the same device – a smart phone. The difference in outcomes, of course, is in what other technology the device tended to replace. In the first instance, it replaced an ordinary cell phone. In the second case, it was displacing a computer.

       An ordinary phone is actually quite powerful, allowing its user to connect, in real time, to almost anyone with a similar device anywhere in the world. But a smart phone brings with it a huge collection of bonus capabilities. Connections to other people can be through voice, text, image, even video, and delivered in real time or in formats consumable at any other time. Besides connections to people, it provides access to masses of information, delivered in easily consumable and easy-to-manage pieces through simple and intuitive applications. All of this from a device that fits into your pocket, and works almost anywhere in the world.
       Of course, with the exception of the “fits into your pocket” part, a computer can do all of that as well. What a computer lacks in portability and ease of use, it gains in quality of delivery, increased versatility, more powerful user interfaces, and simple real estate. That “real estate” isn’t just the size of the screen (though that’s very important as well). It’s the scope and size of the things a computer can access. A smart phone’s apps generally reside on the device, helping to slice up the outside world into pieces the small screen and limited processing power can digest. A computer’s very complex and versatile operating system (and equally powerful browser) provides the ability for it to support and deliver a mass of capabilities living elsewhere on the so-called cloud – from office tools to content and learning management – without any help from an installed application, and any need to reduce its size and complexity. The “easily consumable and easy-to-manage pieces” of smart phone information is, in fact, a restriction, which profoundly impacts the behaviors and expectations of its users, and the possible outcomes from its use.

        We’re ready to look at what all this looks like to the learner, educator, and education technology coordinator. A regular theme of mine is that the selection of a technology can have profound implications for how we teach (pedagogy), as well as why we teach (hoped-for outcomes). Previously we looked at human behaviors (“doing vs. watching”), and compared devices to those behaviors. Since a smart phone tends to replace technologies we already use, we need to measure how it changes existing behaviors: how it impacts the manner in which a student interacts with the learning process, and how it impacts the scope and sequence of a teacher’s instructional practice. This discussion could also be applied to any device running a cell phone operating system, including personal digital assistants (PDA’s – iPods are an example), and “slate” devices such as the iPad.

       To make our analysis somewhat better embedded in our instructional interests, we’ll select an arbitrary assignment, a critical analysis of an online resource, a YouTube video.
       Since an ordinary cell phone wouldn’t actually support such an activity, replacing it with a smart phone (or similar device) would immediately open up a new world of possibilities – students would be able to view the video, read comments made about it, and access support materials relating to the content of the video, alone, and on their own time. In addition, the smart phone would provide a platform through which students could text remarks about the video directly to their peers, as well as the teacher. They could even contribute these remarks to a thread hosted online through any of a dozen social networking platforms, thereby making the assignment more collaborative. This is the “…myriad of ways in which the technology could be used for [new] behaviors and experiences…”
       Now, let’s see what happens to this activity when the smart phone is used to replace a computer. As you might guess, since the computer can, in fact, do everything the smart phone can do and more, the impact in this case is restrictive. Watching a video on a very small screen limits the detail and impact that a computer screen or larger display might deliver (though an iPad-like device would improve that). Computer-savvy students would surely miss the ability to read comments and reference materials in real time as the video played. But the most important restriction would be in the mode and manner in which the student actually did his analysis. With no traditional keyboard and no access to true word processing, the writing process native to a smart device is “Twitter-friendly,” encouraging small amounts of text with no formatting. Writing a several-page analysis of the video on a smart phone (even an iPad) would be unthinkable. The process of collaborating between peers would be similarly limited.
       Of course, our mistake is in assuming that “…the smart phone is used to replace a computer.” It can’t, so, for this assignment, we would be wrong in selecting this technology. But the larger problem is well illustrated by Scenario Two above. When we purchase a device, or acquire a technology for classroom use, we spend hours trying to figure out how to induce it to do what we can already do elsewhere. In this case, the device really isn’t up to the task, and our increased use results in a change in the way in which we consume information, and even more important, how we communicate information to others. It’s the old adage, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” To a smart phone, everything looks like a Tweet.
       In the world of consumer technologies, this is unfortunate, but otherwise probably not that interesting. For a social studies teacher teaching the subtleties of human thinking, or a language arts teacher teaching the entire range of human expression, the presence and overuse of this technology gives them yet another barrier to their instructional goals. There are dozens of appropriate applications for such devices, and the fact that they are becoming ubiquitous is an exciting prospect for teachers who want to encourage their students to be connected and interactive with the world of peers, experts and information, at any time and from anywhere. If the devices are supplied by students, super, you’ve leveraged new capabilities you didn’t have before. But more likely the school will have to supply them. I’m already hearing from school tech coordinators that they intend to stop buying computers and focus on iPads. Before running into the arms of a very seductive new technology, one should look long and hard at the sorts of things you want your students to do and learn, and pick the tool best suited for as many of them as you can.
       It may very well be that these technologies will expand and improve, changing this discussion. But we already have devices which cover our needs as educators to support large, in-depth, complex and subtle learning activities for our students. The impact of the presence of small, low-power devices on educational practice will be positive depending on how, for what – and most importantly, in place of what – we choose to use them. Our enthusiasm for them should not decide for us what and how we want our students to learn.

Doers and Watchers: A Tool's Implied Pedagogy

Are you a doer, or a watcher?

A doer creates what a watcher consumes. We all are both at various times of any day, but one could argue that, in a specific context, most people are primarily one or the other. Since there are a lot more television watchers than actors, the presumption is there are a lot more watchers in that context.

Are your students doers, or watchers?

      This question is a great deal different from the previous one, influenced by what we might infer from the word "student." Here's what Dictionary.com says about that word:

stu-dent. [stood-nt, styood-] - noun

1. a person formally engaged in learning, esp. one enrolled in a school or college; pupil: a student at Yale.
2. any person who studies, investigates, or examines thoughtfully: a student of human nature.

The first definition points to a state of being (formal or informal), the second to a behavior. But even the first uses the word "engaged," implying that being a student is, primarily, an activity requiring one's conscious participation.
              That’s actually different than one might guess, since most people (even many teachers) presume that a teacher is the doer, and students watch. That’s the traditional “lecture” instructional paradigm. But current research on learning indicates that knowledge is constructed by a student, rather than induced by a teacher. Research in effective technology use and integration into instruction goes further, pointing to student-directed work in knowledge construction, especially in the case of higher-order learning: "depth of knowledge 4," or "synthesis" or “evaluation” from Bloom's Taxonomy (see LoTi, ACOT2).
From this perspective, the act of teaching is the act of providing the tools, materials and environment whereby students can successfully engage, interactively participate in, and direct the learning process.
       So, we're back to the question.

Are your students doers, or watchers?

...and the answer should be that, if they're truly students, they must be doers. That isn't to say that watching must never happen in the classroom, but if it does, it should be aimed at lower-order goals, or as a preparation for doing.

Are your educational technology purchase decisions aimed at doing, or watching?

       Every education technology purchase carries with it an implied pedagogy, and sorting that out has never become more complicated than in the digital age. Fifty years ago, when television first became one of the available technologies for the classroom, the implied pedagogy was “watching,” and many teachers were upset that we'd be turning an entire generation of students into passive consumers. But no consistent and measurable negative impact was ever found. One might speculate that, since the primary instructional paradigm at the time was lecture, TV just replaced one "watching" context with another. The “TV in the classroom” controversy simply ran out of steam.

       But that's quite different from today. Students at MIT -- one of the best universities in the country (and, not incidentally, one of the most digital) -- spend, on average, over 50 hours a week engaged in digital media (see Digital Nation, a PBS FrontLine special). This media is interactive: email, Skype, Facebook, texting, Twitter, etc. Clearly, when such students are left to their own devices (pun intended), they are usually doers. So when we try to work out how best to allocate limited educational resources and tech purchase budgets, we’re not doing it in the same context as the teachers of 50 years ago. The selection of education technologies today is taking place against a backdrop of interactive "doing" by almost every young person, as soon as their school day ends. The expectation for engagement, and the social and intellectual presence of a student in such engagement, makes the selection of any classroom technology very different from fifty years ago. We're no longer competing with the lecture, we're competing with Facebook.

       We’ll now look at the underlying implication for "watching" vs. "doing" for several popular categories of instructional technology, to see what they’re implied pedagogy actually is.

Classroom Response Systems.

       "Clickers" are all the rage. They make assessment fun. They give instant feedback, which can provide direction to instruction. They are very engaging for students (at least for now, while they're still new).
       For our discussion, they're a really great metaphor for making succinct what we mean by students' "doing" the business of learning. Assessments, whether delivered by paper or classroom response systems, do ask students to do something. But it is impossible to avoid the implications of response systems -- students do not inherently build knowledge interactively through any assessment tool. They do not control the process, and usually interact with the content in a teacher-directed manner.

"Smart" Classroom Tools
       These tools are associated with digital projection systems and interactive whiteboards, as well as hand-held devices such as the Smart Slate. These systems differ a great deal from classroom response systems in that their effectiveness is in direct student manipulation. Like classroom response systems, these tools can be very effective in producing engaging and interactive activities for students in a classroom setting.
       However, once again, all students in the class will usually be doing the same thing. As a matter of fact, even when students are interacting directly with the technology, the number doing so will be small (usually one, often zero when a teacher uses it exclusively as a presentation tool), and all others will be truly watching.

       Before you conclude that I am against such technologies, let me qualify. As any student of Norman Webb and Benjamin Bloom will tell you, there are important learning goals associated with each of the levels they describe, even the lowest ones, with activities (some of which are just watching) appropriate for each. In addition, a great teacher can very effectively use any tool to encourage a wide array of instructional approaches, just as they can turn an ordinary chalkboard into a student-driven knowledge construction tool. But in current instructional practice, higher-order thinking and learning are usually the neglected goals. Not incidentally, they’re also the ones which benefit the most from student-directed, socially engaging learning activities. So we need to make sure that we deliberately provide technologies which inherintly support these higher goals (and, not incidentally, reflect the practices students are using outside of school). The implied pedagogy of the above tools means that they will not, in themselves, satisfy the needs and goals of higher order learning goals.

       In the 21^st Century, where information and interactivity is delivered in large part over digital networks, that usually means an individual computing device. There are dozens of ways a classroom can provide such devices to students: PDAs/iPods, iPads and eReaders, netbooks/laptops, classroom workstations/terminals, even smart phones. All have advantages and disadvantages (a topic for a future blog entry).

       So when you map out how your classroom, your school, or your district supports and purchases technologies, ask yourself…

Are at least some your educational technology purchase decisions aimed at "doing?"

Beyond Facebook: Social Networking and Learning

Facebook!

        That's pretty much all you need to do to get someone's attention these days. Between business and public organizations staking out Facebook spaces for interactive and promotional purposes, and just about everybody's family gathering there, it's become the “new Google” – a place you can search and find almost anything.
        The enthusiasm has generated a great deal of interest in educational circles as well, since the platform at least implies a user-driven (i.e. student-driven) learning paradigm, with further implications for collaboration and group knowledge construction. As a result, a lot of districts are examining whether it is really appropriate to block Facebook within a school district's wide area network. The pivotal word, as always, is “implies.” How does one best leverage this sort of thing for instructional purposes? Some of the ways are obvious. If you establish groups of “friended” students, then they can discuss, work, and share in the pursuit of any learning projects.
        Of course, “how” also implies “where” – that is, should we be using Facebook itself to translate “implies” to “supports?” There are severe challenges associated with using an extremely popular platform like Facebook for school-based instructional purposes. Since students (and teachers, for that matter) are already using it for personal purposes, there are massive numbers of distractions. And, of course, there's a lot of content which won't be appropriate for students (an issue which doesn't have a consistent and uniform standard across K-12). There's another problem as well. Facebook, as an extension of other social networking tools kids leverage (texting, instant messaging, Twitter, forums and bulletin boards), has its own learned pattern of common usage, including Internet slang, and inappropriate language and images. These behaviors spread virally through social networking platforms. Using the platforms for education requires that teachers and technology coordinators counter these patterns, since they'll work against the educational goals of a teacher. In the face of this battle, many teachers will be overwhelmed, and will abandon social networking as an instructional tool.
        Of course, the viral nature in which use patterns and behaviors disseminate through social network-like systems can be leveraged to promote appropriate use. But a new study (mentioned by educational technology observer Ian Jukes on his 21^st Century Fluency Project blog) shows that, in fact, “viral” spreading of behaviors is a much more powerful resource when the community in which social networking is taking place is, in fact, a “clustered network,” a network in which all of the players know each other: “…social behaviors may spread more quickly in a clustered network…[since] the redundancy created by multiple ties between individuals close to each other in the network will reinforce the diffusion of the behavior.”
        Such attention to connections is implied by the idea of “learning communities,” another concept associated with the same underlying ideas as social networks. As many professional development programs have discovered (both within and outside of education), online learning communities designed to support a specific audience with a specific professional goal have a much better chance if they are built on the foundation of an existing learning community, usually with ties to face-to-face interaction such as you find within school faculties, content area groups, or other face-to-face meeting groups. Those are the “clustered networks” mentioned by the research.
       The implication is that, for students to learn through social networking, they'll need to be in a closed environment which leverages other, pre-existing networks. In a school, a classroom may or may not represent such a network (my own research has shown that not all classmates feel connected to each other), but that is only one of several “clusters” a school might deliver, or create. With such multiple connections, behavior change, appropriate use, as well as community building and collaboration, have a great deal better chance of happening. There are dozens of tools districts can use as closed and connected network platforms. In Fayette County, we're using an open source tool, Mahara, to support pre-existing “clusters,” teach appropriate use of social networking in general, and support knowledge construction in a variety of ways, including the sharing of e-portfolios. Already, students, through their connections and teacher leadership, have stepped up to share and encourage each other's appropriate use.
        The promise of this way of connecting and learning need not be associated with a single platform such as Facebook. As a matter of fact, the possibility of student-driven learning and behavior change may very well be hamstrung by the use of an environment with so much competing baggage. But that doesn't diminish the power of the underlying paradigm.

Social networking!

If you build it...will they come?

        Ray Kinsella heard and repeated it (through the person of Kevin Costner in the movie "Field of Dreams"): "If you build it, he will come." He built it, and, sure enough, Shoeless Joe Jackson and a dozen other deceased baseball players showed up to play ball there. The implication is that all it takes is to construct something, and magical things will suddenly happen. With the beginning of another fiscal school year, dozens of teachers and administrators are gearing up to chase the same dream. All they need is "Smart" boards for all their math teachers, two new mobile laptop "labs" for the Language Arts teachers, digital camcorders for Social Studies...and student learning will increase.
       Sometimes it even works. You build a new park, and crime in the surrounding neighborhood drops. You purchase new team uniforms, and the team starts winning. But, statistically, a drop in crime, or a winning season -- all other things being equal -- are no more likely with new things as with old. A team wins because it plays better than its opponents. New uniforms may encourage a team to try harder, but it's their play that'll make them a winner. Besides, any effect realized by the purchase of new things wears off quickly with time. Change simply isn't that easy.
        Beginning with the Apple Classroom of Tomorrow research over 25 years ago, education technology has been pushed as a vehicle, a metaphor for education reform and improvement. After all, online computers can do some very amazing things: they can extend a content discussion between students (and anyone else) across space and time. Real time conferencing tools can bring experts, artists, community members into the classroom, without anyone getting into a car. Students can turn a test into a learning device through machine-delivered instant feedback and hyperlinked support resources. Teachers can incorporate anonymous student responses to questions into an interactive lesson in real time, and in the process, generate data to guide instruction on the fly. It all seems like a no-brainer, like all we need to do it build it, and "he will come" -- the scores will magically rise.
        In fact, our classrooms these days already have a lot of these instructional tools -- almost all have digital displays, teachers invariably have a computer on which they can create materials and resources, and students have access to all kinds of hardware, including digital camcorders and cameras, online information resources, and classroom- and online-delivered interactive assessment tools. "Smart classroom" tools are becoming more common as well. We have, in many cases, already built it. And sometimes it helps. But for most, many of the same challenges remain: students still are disengaged, test scores fail to rise, and classrooms remain dysfunctional and disrupted. What's happening?.More importantly, why should we bother?

        At a recent visit to a district with a heavy commitment to 1-1 computing (all students are issued laptops as they enter high school), the chief information officer advised those present that test scores should not be the reason to commit to such a program. Such a program is important because it prepares students for the environments they will encounter in the world beyond high school. It is about relevance and student engagement, delivering experiences which engage students "where they are." These are all extremely valid points.

       What caught my eye during the presentation was the word "engagement," and its implications for student motivation and commitment. If the promise of technology tools is that students are better engaged and motivated, then increased scores should, in fact, be the result. But "engagement" and "relevance" aren't just tied to tools. They're tied to behaviors. The presence of powerful tools does not correct the disconnect between how students learn outside of school, and how they learn at school. Only teachers can do that. Those "new uniforms" can provide some interest, but that interest simply will not last. Chances are, if a teacher is using the new tools to implement the same lockstep, teacher-driven, low level pedagogical practices they used before the tools arrived, the results will be no increase in engagement, motivation, and test scores. If, alternatively, a teacher truly embraces the ability of these tools to promote and support student-driven and connected learning, extending the classroom across space, time, and knowledge levels, the results can be magical.
       Yes, it is critical that we place the tools students are already using outside of school in their hands while we have them. But as schools chase tech dollars, if they propose nothing else, the results will most likely be disappointing -- either they won't get their money, or the money won't do what they hoped it would. Teachers can't simply "build it," they much change their practice to better realize the promise of powerful tools. Technology implies change, but it isn't change in itself. We can only improve our effectiveness as educators if we change what we, and our students, do, in the classroom and beyond.

It's a Mash-Up, Google/Amazon/Netflix World -- Data-Driven Instruction

         Something very odd happened when I finally got around to updating my Facebook profile: suddenly the ads appearing at the right hand side of my wall were, shall we say, just a little bit more targeted. The mention of my love of sailing produced ads for tee-shirts with sailing themes. My use of the word "education" produced a slew of ads promoting degrees and lesson plans. And, of course, the politics -- the suggestions for interested "likes" and connections were selected through Facebook's best prediction of what I already believed and thought. The same has been true of my perusals through the pages of Amazon.com, where "suggestions" are obviously coming from data gathered from the very few things I've purchased, and the dozens of things I've examined. (I'm one of those who uses user reviews there to help evaluate things I really have no interest in buying.) Netflix is also trying to do that as well, though it's even further off the mark.
        I admit to the traditional conspiratorial take on such processes, but I also know that, since I am aware that's how such things work, I can avoid the problem by simply avoiding the services. After all, since I use them to gather data, it is probably unfair to assume that these services don't have a right to gather data from me. I also have never purchased a tee-shirt suggested by Facebook, so I do not feel a loss of control simply by the ad's presence.
        But there are implications there for how we do the business of education. After all, as education professionals in the world of "data-driven instruction," high-stakes student (and teacher performance) assessment, so-called classroom performance systems, and lots of other data-gathering tools, we are, in fact, encouraging our teachers to produce and analyze such data about their students, and then using that data to drive our interaction with them. Is that a bad thing? No, as long as we know its limits. And, even more important, as long as we know the implications such data-driven activities have for the nature of learning, interacting, and being human.
        A brief article in this week's New York Times Magazine (Sept. 19, 2010), written by Microsoft engineer Jaron Lanier, helped bring this home for me just a bit. In celebrating the personal way in which his father taught in public schools, he decried how information access seems to be doing damage to the way in which students invent themselves...

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen...What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don't learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good (p.35).

But then, that's what we're encouraging our teachers to do with them, and what they're watching us do to them as they negotiate the world we (and the commercial interests we endorse and embrace) present them online.
        It is not my intent to make this yet another call for the teaching of critical thinking (though it is that), or an indictment of our over-indulgence in data-driven assessment cycles (though it is that, as well). What we should do, as teachers, is to take a very long look at the technology tools we choose, and the way in which we choose to use them, to see what sorts of pedagogical and learning level implications they carry.
        A simple online computer does not, in itself, come with much implied pedagogy. But Google, of course, does -- it assumes that the user's interests, needs, and understandings can be well predicted by algorithms written by (as Lanier calls them) geeks pushing key words and concepts around. The kinds of questions Google answers can only be basic and informational, the lowest sorts of learning goals on Bloom's ("taxonomy of learning") or Webb's ("depth of knowledge") scales. At the secondary or post-secondary level, even at an information level, Google won't be able to reach out to the best minds on many topics, even if the student asks a well-founded question of it. But unless the results of this work is used to encourage a student to start with a blank screen, it is unlikely that the results will be reflective of much of a change in the student.
       Probably the hottest types of educational technologies these days are so-called smart classroom tools. These tools are becoming quite clever in their presentation, the types and quality of the questions they present to students, and the speed in which the answers are processed and presented back to teachers. But what pedagogy do they most often imply? What opportunities do such tools present to allow students to invent themselves?
        That is not to say that the questions a classroom performance system asks of a student are not worth asking, or the answers worth knowing. There are lots of pedagogical goals which are excellently served by such systems. But Arthur C. Clarke once stated that "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!" This rather callous assessment of bad instruction might be revised somewhat...any pedagogical/learning goal which could be best delivered by a machine, should be. Most of the questions a teacher-driven performance system asks could be asked and taught quite successfully in the absence of the teacher. If, however, our instructional goal is for a student to process and present information, opinions, and products drawn onto a blank slate, then a teacher is required, and different tools should be selected.
        This sort of examination of goals and implied pedagogy has, as its core, huge implications for instructional delivery and selection of appropriate tools. It also has huge implications for the current structure of instructional delivery. If we are selecting tools to place them in the hands of teachers to support the ways in which they already teach, then we're missing out on huge opportunities to improve efficiency, and better manage the advantages a teacher brings to a student. If we are selecting tools which simply support a student's ability to mash-up learning fragments rearranged for teacher consumption, then we have squandered an enormous opportunity for students to create, and in creating, re-define themselves.

Digital Natives: Implications for Pedagogy

      There are two subthreads to the whole "Digital Native vs. Digital Immigrant" discussion (see articles by Marc Prensky), with neither having a clear answer. It is clear that our children are very different from us -- at least statistically. (My daughter, previously the anti-computer college student, was quite different from me, the avid digital user. That's atypical. But, then, nobody is actually "average!")

1) Do we have an obligation to teach to these new implied student learning styles?
              From an article written by Prensky ("Do They Really Think Differently?", On the Horizon, Vol. 9, #6 [Dec. 2001]) ..."Children raised with the computer 'think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential'" (p. 4). Does this imply that, in fact, our instructional practice needs to reflect this learning style? What implications do such an approach have for our pedagogy?...our instructional goals?...our interests in differentiated instruction?
        Online instruction, as it is often practiced, can be very much more linear than face-to-face learning experiences. It is sequenced over time, and it's sequenced in terms of instructional goals, whereas face-to-face classes do not require a fixed sequence, making it possible for the instructor to re-direct or branch at will. Although the inclusion of visual and aural content online might help, it doesn't help with linearity. (Many observers note that video and sound content is very much more linear, since scanning, skimming, and jumping around in it is more difficult!) How does asynchronous online instruction successfully address this difference in learning styles?
       Of course, the implications of these remarks is that delivered instruction is consumed instruction. That is true in face-to-face classes, but is almost invariably not true online. There, students can easily follow hyperlinks, provide for multiple browser windows, even include paper-based resources, while still fully participating in the online experience. A spontaneous question can be instantly answered or asked, even in the absence of experts. This is Prensky's "parallel cognitive structure." It also reflects that, in the world of the digital native, access is instantaneous, providing deep implications for what it means to know something. Although a digital native may not be able to recall information quickly, s/he can find it almost instantaneously, if provided the connection. Of course, "accessed" isn't equivalent to "informed." Addressing that problem points to another difference in teaching digital natives, which I address below.

2) Do we have a moral obligation to fit our instructional practice into current socialization patterns, or, do we have a moral obligation to attempt to correct such patterns?
              During the early TV explosion, teachers often felt that their responsibility was to teach to the shortcomings of television-delivered instruction, to correct for their tendency to encourage passive consumption of information and experiences. Do we have a similar obligation now? Should we be consciously attempting to teach linear research and reasoning patterns as an important way in which students can learn and improve...one that's currently missing from their experiences? Or should we simply assume that that isn't possible?
        Linearity, of course, is one issue, and I do feel that we have an obligation to teach the thoroughness and formality that linear instruction implies. But if we always force a linear approach to pedagogy,not only will we confront a serious disconnect between learning styles, we'll also be ignoring the implied power of digital learning, where divergent, self-driven knowledge construction experiences can motivate digital natives, and improve their participation in the learning process.
But there are important shortcomings which the phrase "digital native" might imply, and we have an obligation to address. Current research shows that digital natives may have improved their access to information, but their ability to differentiate between information sources has not met the challenge -- they tend to consume rather than select and evaluate that which they find. Critical thinking is probably one of the most important learning goals implied by the characteristics of a digital native. Access is merely the first step. Without the ability to critically assess and evaluate what you find, your ability to learn, construct, and decide based on that information will be very limited.
        In addition, digital natives tend to be "short form" writers, reflecting not only limits to text messages, tweets, social networking platforms, and small devices, but the general tendency to ignore subtlety and complexity, a natural extension of the difference between being a digital consumer and a digital user. As teachers, we have an obligation to reflect learning style (parallel vs. linear, access vs. memorization). However, we cannot become simple consumers of all of what we observe in our digital native students. Much of the content we must teach is nuanced and complex, so our approach must leverage how our students learn, without forcing that content into the limits of information consumption and short form expression, the unfortunate side effect of their tendency to be digital consumers.

A Personal Philosophy of Education

        The needs and abilities of students have changed radically in the last few decades. In our new service economy, and in many other professional settings, simple content knowledge must make room for knowledge facilitation as extremely important workplace skills. As educators, we have a responsibility to negotiate that shift for ourselves, and apply it to our instructional practice.
        Our students are living and negotiating these changes, and hence have experience and expertise in a wide range of communication capabilities that did not even exist fifteen years ago. They are often comfortable negotiating environments that their parents are struggling to learn. However, this is not to presume that, for students, these changes will happen without our participation as educators – for two very important reasons:

1. “Skillful” does not mean “effective” -- students are having difficulty seeing how the tools they’ve learned can be used productively, to further their own professional and personal goals, and the goals of the contexts in which they find themselves – family, school, workplace, community, and society.
2. These changes are not taking place uniformly across our society. The students who are easily making the transition to new tools have access to these tools as a natural part of the socio-economic advantage they enjoy. Many other students are at an extreme disadvantage, with no such access. At no time since the advent of universal education in this country has the responsibility of public schools been greater to bridge these gaps, to insure that all students have the access and training they need to succeed in society at large.

        My commitment as a public educator has always been to providing instruction that touches the broadest spectrum of students. In this regard, the technological delivery of information, instruction, and (most importantly) communication has an extremely important role to fulfill. It can serve to provide information, ways of connecting, and even whole course access to a broader range of students than can sometimes be served by most schools -- schools that have so many other pressures (staffing, budget, core content, assessment, etc.) to which they must attend. However, as is true of any shift in the delivery of services, to insure that all students can succeed, we must be sure that such a shift does not ignore the personal, motivational, and learning style needs of those students. After hours of taped and transcribed interviews of distance-learning students for a research project, I can speak directly to the pivotal nature of these issues. Our use of new technologies in student communication and instruction must reflect solid research that reflects not only the successes, but also the failures, of the new capabilities we use.
        We have entered a new millennium in our society, and that change must be reflected in our commitment and practice as educators. However, as a public educator, I believe in the importance of uniform delivery of access, and am committed to the success of all students, regardless of delivery medium.